Strike Debt!

Debt is a tie that binds the 99%.

As individuals, families, and communities, most of us are drowning in debt to Wall Street for the basic things we need to live, like housing, education, and health care. Even those of us who do not have personal debt are affected by predatory lending. Our essential public services are cut because our cities and towns are held hostage by the same big banks that have been bailed out by our government in recent years.

We are not a loan. Strike Debt came from a coalition of Occupy groups looking to build popular resistance to all forms of debt imposed on us by the banks. Debt keeps us isolated, ashamed, and afraid. We are building a movement to challenge this system while creating alternatives and supporting each other. We want an economy where our debts are to our friends, families, and communities — and not to the 1%.

Debt resistance is just the beginning. Join us as we imagine and create a new world based on the common good, not Wall Street profits.

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Current Initiatives

The Rolling Jubilee

We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals' debt—instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.

We kicked off this effort on November 15 with The People's Bailout, a variety show and telethon in NYC. All proceeds will go directly to buying people's debt and cancelling it.

The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual

This manual—written by an anonymous collective of resistors, defaulters, and allies from Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street—aims to provide specific tactics for understanding and fighting against the debt system. You'll find detailed strategies and resources for dealing with credit card, medical, student, housing and municipal debt, tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, and information to help protect yourself from predatory lenders. Recognizing that individually we can only do so much to resist the system of debt, the manual also introduces ideas for those who have made the decision to take collective action.

The Strike Debt Organizing Kit

The information and advice in this kit can be used by Strike Debt affiliates, or by existing groups who would like to affiliate because they have shared goals. It is a living document, which means it will be revised periodically to reflect the experience and input of new affiliates.

Blog

Death By For-Profit Health Care

This report is part of an ongoing effort by a group of health care practitioners, lawyers, researchers, and activists to expose the disastrous impact of medical debta and for-profit health care on families and individuals in the United States. Private health care enriches a few—insurance companies, private equity firms, pharmaceutical companies, debt collectors, and global investors—at the expense of everyone else. Medical debt is a weapon of the class war because when patients cannot afford medical care, they are forced into debt, often with far-ranging and catastrophic consequences. As the rate of uninsured has grown, local governments have looked to state subsidies for private health insurance as a band-aid solution. Massachusetts has implemented such a program, and the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act has expanded this initiative on a national scale. Unfortunately, the ACA will not solve the problem because its primary goal is to expand the market-based system that has already proved to be a miserable failure. Insurance companies profit by denying coverage. As costs rise and benefits shrink, patients will continue to pay the price. We are in a major health care crisis, the consequences of which will be felt for decades to come. The only real solutions are: a grassroots social movement to demand universal health care, an end to the scourge of medical debt, and a national conversation on the meaning of health and wellness.

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