Occupy Wall Street does something actually useful?

[Krynn72]

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/190...upy-has-brilliant-new-plan-a-peoples-bailout/

It took a while, but a new offshoot group that grew out of Occupy called Strike Debt has a highly specific, highly brilliant plan for how to improve the lot of the 99%: It’s called Rolling Jubilee, and it’s basically a crowd-funding campaign to buy up big swaths of people’s debt and simply cancel it. It’s sort of like the economic equivalent of buying slaves to free them.

Here’s how it works: All kinds of debt, from student loans to credit card to mortgages, are sold by the people who originally made the loans to collectors eager for the chance to take the interest payments on those loans for years to come. Loans get bundled into big groups and sold as securities on the open market. Rolling Jubilee will raise money through crowd-funding and use that money to buy bundled loans like any other institution—but once they own the debt, rather than collecting on it they’ll simply cancel it.

You’ve probably heard of a simliar thing happening when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae buy mortgages from banks or debt collectors buy debt from credit card companies—one day in the mail you get a notice saying, Your debt is now owned by this guy—please keep paying. In this case, however, you’d get a note saying, Your debt is now owned by Strike Debt, and they’ve voided it—your balance is now $0.

Sound too good to be true? Well, there are a couple ways this doesn’t work: First, you can’t ask the Rolling Jubilee to please personally pay off your student loan. The Jubilee will be buying securitized debt bundles just like other institutions, which means they’re not targeting individual loans. Incidentally, the individuals paying these loans have no idea that they’ve been “bundled.” So while you may choose to donate to the Rolling Jubilee there is no guarantee that it’ll personally benefit you.

http://rollingjubilee.org/

Surely there's some kind of major oversight? Seems too easy to actually work, and the repercussions to the value of the dollar could be big. Also, people might be able to take out huge loans, and have a decent chance of it being cancelled, unless this thing checks out each individual loan they're buying and sees someone trying to scam it.

 

[Rorschach120]

"Join us as we imagine and create a new world based on the common good, not Wall Street profits"


Conservatives are going to love this last line. Specifically the "new world" and "common good" parts.

 

[dfc05]

Interesting idea, but the part where they can't go through and vet whose debt they're cancelling and can't cancel student loans is definitely a big turn-off (by the way -- their infographic is has student debt plastered across it, then in the FAQ it says they can't pay off student debts --> huge WTF). It would be nice to help people who are in debt for genuine health needs or who simply don't make enough to afford food/housing/education, but some people actually make decent wages but suck at managing their finances and are less deserving of having their debt canceled. I don't think it's right for those people to be completely buried in debt far beyond what they owe, but I also don't think random crapshoot debt canceling is the fairest way to handle this....

[edit] By the way, I thought this thread would be about their Hurricane Sandy relief efforts, which actually are actually-useful. Just thought I'd throw that out there as I tend to rag on Occupy a lot. I don't dislike them; it's just that their efforts often seem misguided to me. The Sandy help is good though.

[edit again] Reading a little more about this, seems the loans being sold off that cheaply are mostly old loans that the banks have deemed unrecoverable anyways. Some articles I'm seeing seem to lean positive on the feel-good aspects, though mixed on what kind of practical help this provides. There's a NYT article that claims they're specifically buying medical debt, but no one else seems to report this. So I remain skeptical but interested.