Student Loan Countdown:Beyoncé "Countdown" Parody

"went off to school to get my education

little did i know debt was part of the equation

could of dropped out but that's a bad situation

if you don't pay up they'll garnish your wages"

"sallie mae and the government make bank

if i default

but i can't find a job

so that's not my fault"

"me and my boo yeah we wanna get married

my debt is a load that we both gotta carry

didn't know my interest rate would be 12%

payments just high as New York City rent"

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How to Film a Demonstration: A Tutorial

"An introductory tutorial for aspiring citizen journalists to consider before next entering the field. You are needed more than ever, to bring the people direct truth, taking out the middle man in the archaic mainstream media. Each camera is a new set of eyes we all share in near real time - no one can take this from us, so it is imperative we refine and develop new skills
and strategies to capture the missteps of power. "

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EDU Debtors Union: "Walk Away From Student Debt"

"Come together! And refuse to participate in a system

 that is making it impossible to get out of debt."

EDU Debtors Union

The Debtor & The Union: Life After Education by Monica Johnson

"Presently, EDU Debtors Union is a proposition
and a website focused on this question:
“Who are student debtors and do they want to create a union?”

"Further, what would that union do?
How might it benefit and support debtors?
What are the goals of that union?"

Arise, Students of California ! by Ralph Nader

"Students of California, arise, you have nothing to lose but a crushing debt!"

"The corporate state of California, ever ready to seize its ideological and commercial hour during a recession, has a chokehold on California’s public universities. With its tax-coddled plutocracy and a nod to further corporatization, the state government has taken the lid off tuition increases big time."

"Before and right after World War II the idea of a public university included a then-called “educational fee” close to zero, from city college of New York to UC Berkeley. Old timers now look back at those days as economic life-savers toward a degree and a productive life for them and the American economy."

"No more. Those gates of opportunity are crumbling at an accelerating pace. More street protests by students are focusing on relentless tuition hikes and years of repaying student debt loans while the rich get richer and the tax cuts for the rich are extended. As Mike Konzcal writes, “One of the Occupy movements’ major objectives is combating the privatization of public higher education and its replacement with a debt-fueled economy of indenture.”"

"But the students have a very powerful unused tool of direct democracy – they can qualify an initiative on the ballot that would set tuition at affordable levels or even become like some leading European countries where free schooling extends through the university years."

"There are other states where students can establish a legal protection for publically accessible universities by enacting statewide initiatives. All these tools of democracy should be obvious to any high school student were functional civics and democratic practices taught with the same fervor devoted to computer training."

"So let’s see if California’s deteriorating public university systems can be rescued by their undergraduate and graduate students who place the priority of accessible, adequate public higher education where it belongs for the longer run."

Occupy Student Debt #1

"We are the 99%! We could not all be mythical bootstraps college students. Tuition costs have risen 600% between 1980 and 2010. Wages, of course, did not keep up. The predatory for-profit student loan industry has lobbied Congress to strip away necessary consumer protections, allowing our debt to snowball out of control."

Insolvent Workers of the World: Interview with Andrew Ross

"Spontaneous political events are always “possible,” it’s just not easy to predict when and where they will get traction. I myself have been in the US for 30 years and have never seen anything like the momentum or sense of destiny that this movement now has. Those 30 years have belonged to Wall Street, the next 30 years could and should belong to us if Occupy maintains its energy and creativity."

"There are many tributaries that have flowed into the Occupy river – the global justice movement being the most important. On the labor side, I think the capacity of the urban unions to embrace the academic labor movement has been a significant backdrop. As for the new elements, surely the burgeoning consciousness about debt is a primary factor. Responding to debt bondage has been a way of life in the global South countries for the last 30 years. In the last few years, the consequences of living in a debt trap has hit the countries of the North. It’s an example of the chickens coming home to roost, as Malcolm X once put it."

"For example, some of the city’s high schools have replaced their representative forms of student government with the horizontal mode of the GA. It’s proven to be an infectious set of cultural norms. And, since any group can generate its own GA (there are many throughout New York City), it is an organizational structure that encourages and generates autonomy. So, too, the face-to-face nature of this form of decision-making complements the widespread use of social media to disseminate information. In fact, I’d say that the balance between the face-to-face meetings and use of social media is a key element."

"From the outset, the agony of student debt has been a constant refrain at OWS and other Occupy locations... The central recognition was that U.S. colleges and universities are increasingly dependent on the debt bondage of the people they are supposed to serve. So we crafted a campaign that resonated with our political principles (the act of refusal, the threat of a debt strike, and the justice of a debt jubilee) that was designed to give debtors an opportunity to act collectively rather than suffer the torment and humiliation of debt and default in private."

"Our campaign is framed as an action initiative, not a set of demands, since we share the Occupy ethos that demands cannot be adequately addressed by the current political system, not when it is under the baleful influence of corporate dollars."

"Actions taken to re-appropriate wealth and power are not only empowering in themselves, they are also constituent, as you put it, of a new kind of political culture. Most Occupy participants will testify about their feelings of personal transformation–the language is often one of radical innocence, a manifest symptom of the birth of a new “structure of feeling” as Raymond Williams once put it. For sure, the political class will try to co-opt some of this, and, unlike some folks, I don’t see that as an unwelcome response–you cannot erect a nonporous boundary between a movement and the political establishment."

Chile: Student Protests Spread Throughout Region

"José Barrera, a civil engineering student at the Catholic University, said that what is happening in Chile "is an example of what education is like when it's privatised, when it is no longer defended as a right of everyone.""

"An education law enacted by the 1973-1990 dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet set off a process of decentralisation and privatisation that gave private schools free rein to pursue profit and use entrance exams to select their students. The Chilean system is not just divided into paid private education and tuition-free public education, but is split into three: municipal schools run by local governments, which are publicly funded and free, state-subsidised private schools, and private schools that charge tuition. Within the sphere of state-subsidised private education, students get free tuition at some schools, while at others families pay monthly fees, an arrangement known as "shared financing.""

"The protest movement is calling for an end to the freedom of private schools receiving state subsidies to levy fees at will. Instead of the current system, under which administrators of these institutions rack up profits, the demonstrators want school fees to be invested in under-funded public schools."

"They also want public primary and secondary schools to be directly managed by the Education Ministry, instead of by local governments, because the decentralisation accentuated the inequality in education quality between rich and poor districts."

"Countries that see the Chilean model as an example, and that are moving towards privatisation, have to realise how harmful this kind of system can be for education in general," he argued."

"Capitalism is profits, business, buying and selling, and that is not what educators are about," said Garrido. He added that the movement in which teachers and students have come together is demanding a "social transformation.""

"[T]he student protests have become a broader social movement that will continue to fight for structural changes above and beyond the educational system, such as reforms to the free-market, neoliberal economic system inherited from the dictatorship."

"We need a more democratic country, where the voices of society are really heard. It can't just be the same old political class reaching decisions between four walls."

Students as the New Public Intellectuals by Henry Giroux

"Finding our way to a more humane future demands a new politics, a new set of values, and a renewed sense of the fragile nature of democracy. In part, this means educating a new generation of intellectuals who not only defend higher education as a democratic public sphere, but also frame their own agency as intellectuals willing to connect their research, teaching, knowledge, and service with broader democratic concerns over equality, justice, and an alternative vision of what the university might be and what society could become. Under the present circumstances, it is time to remind ourselves that academe may be one of the few public spheres available that can provide the educational conditions for students, faculty, administrators, and community members to embrace pedagogy as a space of dialogue and unmitigated questioning, imagine different futures, become border-crossers, and embrace a language of critique and possibility that makes visible the urgency of a politics necessary to address important social issues and contribute to the quality of public life and the common good. "

"The corporate state cannot fight any longer with ideas because their visions, ideologies and survival of the fittest ethic are bankrupt, fast losing any semblance of legitimacy. Students all over the country are changing the language of politics while reclaiming pedagogy as central to any viable notion of agency, resistance and collective struggle. In short, they have become the new public intellectuals, using their bodies, social media, new digital technologies, and any other viable educational tool to raise new questions, point to new possibilities, and register their criticisms of the various antidemocratic elements of casino capitalism and the emerging punishing state."

"At a time when higher education is increasingly being dominated by a reductive corporate logic and technocratic rationality unable to differentiate training from a critical education, we need a chorus of new voices to emphasize that the humanities, in particular, and the university, in general, should play a central role in keeping critical thought alive while fighting back all attempts to foreclose and pre-empt the further unraveling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and prevent that questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished. Corporations and the warfare state should not dictate the needs of public and higher education, or, for that matter, any other democratic public sphere.

"Inhabiting the role of public intellectuals, students can take on the difficult but urgent task of reclaiming the ideal and the practice of what it means to reclaim higher education in general and the humanities, more specifically, as a site of possibility that embraces the idea of democracy not merely as a mode of governance but, most importantly- as journalist Bill Moyers points out - as a means of dignifying people so they can become fully free to claim their moral and political agency."

Debt and Suicide Video by Bjones Dapusha

Simon Szreter hits out at UK higher education policies

"Szreter is recollecting a time in the early 1990s when he was conducting research on how the UK's long-term economic performance is shaped by factors such as the education of its workforce. While "fishing around" for measures of investment in education, he stumbled across data showing that there had been "an enormous disinvestment" in state schools, with tens of thousands of teachers laid off during the 1980s."

"I wasn't aware that this had happened," he says. "Then I looked at the private schools and that's when I got … angry about this, because I realised that actually the private schools had been going in the opposite direction. By the time Labour took power in '97, it was true that private schools had almost exactly twice the numbers of teachers per pupil in their staff rooms as state schools had. They always had an advantage, but this advantage had now doubled. That's never been revisited," he adds."

"It is over a decade since the research, but that it galvanised Szreter to dig deeper into the education system is unmistakable. In the years since, he has, among other things, made his way to a professorship and founded the History and Policy website, an initiative designed to inject greater historical insight into policymaking, but it is his forays into education activism that have set him apart."

"Despite a postwar austerity far harsher than the one we face today – and a level of national debt over twice as high – the nation found the resources to massively expand and publicly fund its secondary schools and their teaching staff."

"Since the financial crisis of 2008, he has become noticeably more outspoken, accusing the coalition of "paying for the profligacy of the banks" while systematically undermining higher education by radically withdrawing public funds, and of "cutting at both ends" the state primary and secondary education sector by abolishing the EMA [education maintenance allowance] for 16- to 18-year-olds and closing Sure Start for infants."

"The big story," he insists, "is undoubtedly higher education and further education". The raising of university fees may be a clear focal point for protest, but what seems to exercise him most is what underlies it: the long-term shift from financing higher education directly out of general taxation towards raising funds via "risky" private finance. "There have been 20 years in which governments have very happily expanded the higher education and further education sector rapidly … but they have put nothing like commensurate resources into the system," he says. The corresponding "managerial revolution", which encouraged universities to be more corporate and show they are offering value for money, has starved it of essential resources, he argues."

"But it is the over-reliance by successive governments on structuring student loans through "complex financial instruments" that could prove most devastating for the future of higher education, he says, and it is this that people need to pay attention to. Talking about the fallout of the financial crisis, he says emphatically: "We are not even over this [crisis] and the government is already quite happily talking about packaging up our younger generation's futures into a set of complicated loan instruments that it will place with the very sector of the economy that's caused all this."

"Ever the historian, he points to the fact that in the past, momentous progressive changes to the education system – such as the provision of universal secondary education – were brought about despite ideological objections or cost."

Debt on Arrival by Zombie Debt

=

Debt on Arrival PDF at rjhu.wordpress.com

“Zombie” mob speaks out about student debt

 

"Zombie Debt, a collective of undergraduate and graduate students, marched into Levering Food Court [at Johns Hopkins] yesterday to speak about student debt following a mini-lecture in the Gilman Atrium."

"The movement, known as "Lunch of the Living Debt," featured individuals with zombie-painted faces who carried signs that read, "They owe us," and other slogans. Several members spoke into a megaphone to Levering Food Court, while others handed out fliers and walked around with boom boxes playing songs like "Thriller" by Michael Jackson."

"Today the University treats our needs with hostility," Hoffman said. "We are met with brute force . . . We are taught to think critically, but not about debt." Much like other Occupy protests, parts of her speech were punctuated with yelled responses from other members of Zombie Debt."

"Zombie Debt also feels that the University does not admit enough low-income students, and that those that are admitted only go into more debt."

"The old-fashioned image of the industrious everyman working his way through school is nonsense," they said. "Even work-studies are displaced by unpaid internships – indentured labor, measured in academic credits and subsidized by personal credit."

Seattle's Garfield High School Student Walkout and March Against Budget Cuts

"Seattle Public Schools have seen the loss of librarians, much-needed family service counselors and college admissions counselors, the reduction of the arts to “art on a cart” and school principals and staff making difficult decisions on the number of teachers they can budget for. School facilities are in poor condition and many buildings are not safe in terms of earthquake code."

"The students of Garfield High School issued a statement on their Facebook page. It goes as follows:

"We are Washington State Public Schools students tired of the constant cuts to our education. We are the people who have been affected most by these cuts, and we are showing that we care. For too long, this stat…e’s budget has been balanced on the backs of its students. Apparently, our representatives in Olympia have forgotten that the Washington Constitution says that funding education is this state’s “paramount duty”. This is a student voice reminding our legislature of that fact. And also of this one: We are this country’s future. We will vote. And we will hold them accountable." 

"We have two primary goals we hope to accomplish:
-We want to stop the constant cuts to education that have hurt our school and other schools in the state.
-We want to insert a student voice into the political discourse in issues regarding education."

Occupy the Tax Man

Are student debt strikes coming? with Thom Hartmann and Sarah Jaffe

"Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet, joins Thom Hartmann. For the first time ever - outstanding student loan debt this year will top one trillion dollars. And with tuition for college soaring - and prospects for jobs after college plummeting - the situation for students across America looks grim. But now - with the Occupy Wall Street movement in full swing - student debtors are feeling empowered - and are striking back against the big banks that got bailed out three years ago but are unwilling to help their debt-saddled customers now."

Occupy Wall Street and the cultural politics of the class struggle by Kristin Lawler

"You can learn a lot about a movement by listening to its opponents... As the movement spreads like wildfire, so does elite fear. Both concession and repression are testament to the way that formally, elite/mass power relations have been reshaped radically in just a few short months. Both signal raw movement power."

"And although there’s certainly a segment of the movement that’s agitating for the kind of Keynesian policies that would relieve the widespread stress and scarcity under which so many Americans live today and allow for a relatively comfortable life of quiet desperation, the truth is, it’s more than hard work and fair pay that the Occupy movement may ultimately be demanding."

"The OWS protests began with a critique of economic and political inequality (which has, nearly everyone now agrees, become ridiculous) and of the simple injustice (“banks got bailed out, we got sold out”) of the “99%” being made to bear the downside of the ever more highly leveraged risks taken by finance capital. But protest discourse very quickly saw the terms “unfairness” and “injustice” replaced with “austerity,” a change that explicitly links the movement with anti-austerity struggles around the world and throughout American history... Perhaps this anti-austerity history helps to explain why the “jobs and fairness” line doesn’t inspire quite the way that the more revolutionary “another world is possible” strain of movement discourse does."

"And like its predecessors a generation ago, this OWS statement rejects the elite discourse of scarcity that says there just isn’t enough for people to enjoy their beaches without oil spills, their mountains without clear-cutting, and their time without the stress of an increasingly heavy daily grind. It’s a vision of human entitlement to a good life on earth rather than a vision of a fairly paid and thus happy worker. It’s a vision of real democracy, not just a better market."

"Here then, is what movement opponents call “class warfare”—the creation of a counterculturally oriented space and the utopian vision that it inspires. An Occupation is a place where people (uselessly and inefficiently) converse, enjoy one another’s company, make their voices heard, eat food, play and listen to music, connect, engage in the experimental practice of radical democracy, and generally contribute nothing whatsoever to the production of profit."

"Mounting a lived critique of austerity— of capital’s relentless instrumentalization of time and space and of the myth of material scarcity that says it’s simply not realistic to expect from advanced industrial society the decent standard of living that it makes technologically possible with a minimum of toil— the protesters are indeed slackers. They are also class warriors, struggling against the capitalist imperative (which struck back, hard, beginning in the early 1970s) that everything and everyone be a tool for making profit and for the human one—for the freedom to constitute time on one’s own terms, for friendship and laughter and conviviality and “useless” thinking and pleasure."

"When the right attacks OWS as a bunch of countercultural slackers and as the vanguard of class warfare, they very presciently apprehend the significance of a moment in which the capitalist work ethic and the artificially perpetuated scarcity it’s predicated on are being roundly rejected. One in which the utopian demand for cultural freedom joins the labor movement’s push for a more robust share of the spoils of capitalism."

WNYC: OWS and Student Loans

Brian Lehrer of WNYC interviews Anya Kamenetz, senior writer for Fast Company Magazine and author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education and Generation Debt and Robert Applebaum, founder of ForgiveStudentLoanDebt.com.

NYT: Official Calls for Urgency on College Costs

“Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” Mr. Duncan said. “That belief is even stronger among young adults — three-fourths of whom believe that graduates today have more debt than they can manage.”

"College seniors with loans now graduate with an average debt load of more than $25,000. With outstanding student debt nearing $1 trillion — and exceeding credit-card debt — it makes sense that, as Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, put it, college costs are in the spotlight as never before."

"Just before Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street spawned the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which asks for zero interest on student debt, federally financed public higher education and the forgiveness of all existing debt. At Occupystudentdebtcampaign.com, the campaign asks donors to sign a Pledge of Refusal, which promises that when a million signatures have been gathered, all will cease to make their debt payments."

“It’s basically a strike threat, but it gives debtors, many of whom have gray hair at this point, a way to act collectively, rather than suffer the agony and isolation of their debt,” said Andrew Ross, a New York University professor who is one of the organizers of the campaign. “We think education is a right and a public good, and we think federal funding is the only way the United States can join the list of other countries that offer free public education.”

It’s not my future at risk, it’s everybody’s by Darren Patrick

"Today I signed the pledge to refuse student debt repayments i.e. to participate in a debt strike. I have been very hesitant to sign onto this new campaign, which calls for a mass withholding of payments when 1,000,000 people have signed. It also calls for mass expressions of support from faculty and non-debtors. There are existing campaigns, such as the campaign to forgive student loan debt, which deal with many of the same issues in less radical terms. I still support the latter movements, but I also see the discourse promoted by the debt strike campaign as vital to moving beyond President Obama’s inadequate action toward a more radical agenda against long term debt slavery and austerity."

"So why did I sign the pledge and why might you sign it?

1. It focuses on the existing crisis

2. Even if the pledge does not reach 1,000,000 signatories, it creates a political space for organizing which combats the isolation, shame, and embarrassment that is often associated with being a student loan debtor. We live in a society that individualizes problems that must be addressed through collective action. This is a strategy which is meant to silence us and it must be resisted.

3. We have nothing to lose by signing the pledge and everything to gain. Signing the pledge encourages cooperation, expansion of support, and knowledge of options and alternatives. Additionally, it helps me to confront the reality that, whether or not I sign, there is a strong chance that I will be at risk of default at some point in my life.

4. Like the broader #OWS movement, the #OccupyStudentDebt movement is not a singular solution (there is no “one demand”), it is part of a radical struggle against widespread injustice in a particular form. It articulates our struggle with the struggle of people facing austerity at the hands of ‘their’ governments. It is not the ‘laziness’ of the Greek worker or the ‘complacency’ of the Italian student which is to blame for the crisis. Debt is a strategy for accumulation by the rich, whether that debt is 'sovereign' or 'student'.

We must reject the notion that profit should be individual and loss, suffering, and pain collective. We deserve more and we must fight for more. Yes, we need the efforts of more ‘moderate’ organizations and efforts to continue. This is not an either/or moment, it is both / and.

The point is to shift my consciousness and to envision the world differently. Some have already been driven to suicide because of debt. Refuse this grave injustice."