Essential Dissent

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Moderator: Joe Lombardo

Panelists: Sara Flounders, Kevin Zeese, William Camacaro, Bahman Azad

Guest Appearances by: Daniella Rodriguez and Margaret Flowers

From the Organizers: The panel is made up of members of the peace and solidarity delegation that recently returned from Venezuela. They speak on the Bolivarian Revolution, the US attempts to overturn it and the mobilization of the population to defend their process.

The Q&A starts at 01:12:15. As is common when audience questions are not spoken into a microphone, the Q&A audio quality is less than ideal.

https://www.unacpeace.org/

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Panelists: Eli J. Campbell, Daniella Medina, Jill Stein, David Oks

With the objective of sparking public debate before the 2020 presidential election, this panel will consider a direct action solution to the student debt crisis: Activists from four generations will discuss and envision the strategy of an organized student debt boycott, using our collective burden as leverage against the American ruling class, and global capitalism itself.

Every day that we continue to perform the status quo is time that cannot be recovered; the struggle for human survival past this century demands that we act now, and when all else has failed, we must consider revolutionary action.

Throughout history, there have been countless movements of working class people demanding the cancellation of usurious, unpayable debts to the ruling class, often accompanied by general strikes that disrupt everyday life. A movement of American students, graduates, and teachers, engaging in civil disobedience and honoring the ancient tactic of an organized debt strike, could change the power dynamics in the fights for student debt cancellation and universal free higher education, at the national and state levels. A student debt boycott could also help unite the multitude of intersecting movements for social justice in an intergenerational coalition that is not dependent on electoral politics to build power.

For this strategy to be fairly considered, the American public must be made aware of what has been hidden in plain sight: For many years, the largest student loan servicing companies (Navient, Nelnet/Great Lakes, PHEAA) have been legally gambling with federal student loan debt, despite being under contract with the Department of Education.

Just in the decade since 2009, a trillion dollars worth of federal student debt has accumulated; in the same time, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose from roughly 390 to 410 ppm (parts per million), a trend that will define the remainder of our lives. All the while, this immoral and unregulated loan servicing industry has issued billions of dollars in Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) every year, which are sold to investors and traded in speculative financial markets.

Generations of Americans are being stifled by permanent indebtedness and a declining standard of living, but a small number of corporations and their CEOs are making extraordinary profits capitalizing on the high interest rates paid by student borrowers. Obscured by fake economics and bipartisan political corruption, a student loan default crisis looms in the near future, which will inevitably cause the collapse of the SLABS market, decades before these assets will reach their final maturity. In the pursuit of infinite wealth regardless of the human cost, capitalism has burdened students with unpayable debt, but also provided them the means to crash the system and disrupt business as usual. This panel will consider the notion that accelerating the default crisis to put direct financial pressure on the student loan industry may be both justified and necessary in order to force Congress to solve this crisis, liberate 44 million Americans from debt and empower them to transform society, and provide for the future security of American students.

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Frida Berrigan, daughter of civil resisters Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, is an author, columnist, and activist. She spoke at Burning Books on April 11, 2019.

Burning Books is a radical bookstore in Buffalo, NY, specializing in activism, social justice, and liberation struggles. For more information visit burningbooks.com