The Debt Collective will hold an April 4th protest at the Department of Education in an effort to press the Biden Administration to keep its campaign promise to cancel student loan debt before federal student loans payments resume in May. Nearly 45 million student borrowers owe $1.8 trillion in student loans and would be relieved if debt cancellation were to occur. Astra Taylor, codirector of the Debt Collective, believes education should be treated as an individual right and not as something to be bought or sold. Braxton Brewington (press secretary for the Debt Collective), says that Biden has not only failed in his campaign promises, but also made it easier to make loans on student borrowers.
TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN:This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
President Biden is under increasing pressure to fulfill his campaign promise to cancel student debt for 45 millions people. A moratorium on federal student loan payments, that’s been in place since the pandemic started, is scheduled to end May 1st. The total student debt owed by borrowers is nearly $1.8 trillion. The Debt Collective plans to take action at the Department of Education on April 4. The group’s message: “Pick up the pen, Joe.” In January, dozens of Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Biden administration urging the White House to release a memo that the Education Department put together looking at President Biden’s legal authority to cancel student loan debt.
We’re joined now by two members of the Debt Collective, a group with its roots in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Braxton Brewington serves as the press secretary for the Debt Collective. And Astra Taylor is the author of the foreword to the collective’s book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. Her latest book, Remake the world: Essays, Reflections and Rebellions.
We are happy to have you back. Democracy Now! Astra, let’s begin with you. Talk about what you’re demanding right now.
ASTRA TAYLOR:We demand President Joe Biden to pick up the pen, and cancel student debt. This is a pledge that he made during the campaign trail. It was due to grassroots pressure over the years. Because debtors raised concern about student debt and because groups such as the Debt Collective have actually set out the policy mechanisms that can cancel federal student debt.
This is one of the campaign promises the president can keep on his feet, regardless of whether Republicans or members in his party impede him. Through the Higher Education Act, he has the authority of canceling student debt. The Higher Education Act already gave the president and education secretary the authority for student debt cancellation. In fact, President Biden, during his career as a senator, voted to authorize the Higher Education Act multiple — to reauthorize it multiple times. So, he, in fact, was part of the constituencies that granted the president — now him — the authority to do this. The Debt Collective already wrote the executive order. And we’re building political pressure to say, “You have to keep this promise, because so much is on the line with so much of your agenda stalled and sabotaged by members of your own party.”
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:Why is this? Even he had a memo from his own administration telling — the Department of Education, telling him that he could move forward. Why hasn’t he done so, in your view?
ASTRA TAYLOR:This is very interesting. The Debt Collective submitted a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act request, to prove that this memo existed, because what the Biden administration was saying, what his press secretary kept saying, is, “Well, we’re waiting on this memo about our legal authority,” which is ridiculous, because the fact is this legal authority — it’s called compromise and settlement; again, it’s part of the Higher Education Act — is the same authority they are using to cancel the interest as part of the COVIDThey extended the payment moratorium they had previously extended to May 1st. They extended the payment moratorium to May 1st only because of grassroots pressure. This was because people were organizing and demanding that they do so. So, they are pretending they don’t have an authority they’re actually using.
Why do they do this? I mean, you know, one can only assume that it’s because of a ideological, you know, belief that we should treat something like education — instead of treating it as a public good, a democratic good, a right, you know, as something that should be treated like a commodity. Biden was part the generation that created the student lending system. As we know, he was a major force in the 2005 bankruptcy “reform” bill that actually stripped protections from student borrowers. You see, people are deeply invested in the system as it is currently. This is on multiple levels: ideologically, economically, and even ideologically. But that’s how so many things work. The answer is to keep organizing, to continue pressing, to keep raising the alarm about the crisis and, you’ll know, forcing them to do the right things, which is to cancel all student debt, not just $10,000 or $50,000.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ:Braxton Brewington: I’d like to ask you about some of these players in the student loan market. There’s SoFi, for instance, which I think spent more than $600 million for the naming rights to the Los Angeles stadium where the Super Bowl was held. And SoFi’s CEO, Anthony Noto, told Yahoo Finance a few months ago, about this moratorium — he says, “It was our largest business, it was our oldest business … that business has been running at about 50% of the pre-COVID volume for the last 20 months.” In other words, SoFi has been losing money, according to their CEOAs a result of the moratorium. Your sense of how these companies — and there are many of them, like SoFi — what they’re doing to the administration, the pressure they’re mounting to get rid of the moratorium?
BRAXTON BREWINGTON: Well, that’s exactly right. What we know is there’s a huge profit motive behind the ideology of keeping 45 million student debtors indebted to either private loan companies, like SoFi, or even to the federal government. We know that Navient and other student loan servicers have spent millions lobbying the Biden administration for student loan payments to be refunded. This despite numerous documented accounts of taking advantage individuals and being predatory. So, along with this gross profit incentive that is behind the incentive to keep individuals and debtors, there’s also this economic incentive.
There are people within the Biden government like the Domestic Policy Council and Susan Rice. These people have an economic ideology that is similar to Astra’s. It is that debtors just knew that payments would restart. They have this idea that maybe the pandemic isn’t so bad and that individuals are able to restart payments. But we know that’s just simply not true. Ninety percent of individuals say that they — of student debtors say they’re not going to be able to restart payments.
The simple answer is cancellation. But the motives go beyond political. While it would seem obvious to cancel student loans, many people believe that this is not the right thing for a president. But the motives extend beyond political. They’re also economic, and there’s a very, very evil profit motive behind it.
AMY GOODMAN:Braxton, I would like to ask about a speech Joe Biden gave about the economy in his time as president-elect. It was November 2020. He suggested that $10,000 in student loan debt be cancelled immediately.
PRESIDENT–ELECT JOE BIDEN:The Democratic House passed legislation that allows for the immediate forgiveness of $10,000 student loans. It’s holding people up. They’re in real trouble. They’re having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying their rent, those kinds of decisions. It should be done immediately.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Braxton Brewington, what’s happening with that?
BRAXTON BREWINGTON:He has not kept that promise. He promised $10,000 to every borrower immediately, and he also said that if you attended a public college or other educational institution, he would pay $10,000. HBCU or minority-serving institution and make under $125,000 a year, that he’d wipe all of that student debt out, as well. So, now we are more than a year into the Biden administration, where he said he would wipe out student debt unilaterally, immediately, and that $10,000 was a minimum — actually, it wasn’t a cap, it was a minimum — and not only has he failed to keep this promise, he has actually become more predatory on student loan borrowers, right? His DOJThis makes it extremely difficult for people to file bankruptcy before the courts. The waiver for public service loan forgiveness has failed hundreds of thousands of people who are currently being denied cancellation of their rightfully owed loans. He has not kept his promise and the Biden administration is being harsh with student debtors.
And only because of the pressure that the Debt Collective and other allies have put on the Biden administration is it why we have a federal student loan moratorium now that’s extending through May. And we’re going to have to keep that pressure up to make sure that he fulfills that promise and goes beyond it to cancel student debt.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Astra Taylor, I’d like to ask you last week, Reuters reportedPresident Biden will request that Congress approve a defense budget exceeding $770 billion for the next fiscal year. That’s more than President Trump requested. How can you reconcile this increase in military spending with all the millions of former students with crippling debt that are still not being addressed long term?
ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, those two things are deeply connected, because when it comes to fulfilling a promise like canceling student debt, the thing we hear is, “Well, how are we going to pay for it?” Right? The point is that we can’t afford not to cancel student debt. The economy will be boosted tremendously by canceling student debt. It will reduce the gap in racial wealth. It will help people get on with their lives, purchase homes, start families, and all that. But there’s always money for the military. There’s never money for working people. We need to stop funding war and instead fund college for all. This will allow us to return to the original model of education as a right and free public education.
This resonates with our call that debtors come to Washington, D.C., April 4th, ahead of the May 1st deadline. We’re having a massive debtors’ assembly and protest. It’s important that people support that. Now is the right time to help someone who has student debt. We must act now. And April 4th is, of course, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. And he called out the triple evils — right? — of racism, economic exploitation and militarism. It resonates with the call for student debt to be cancelled. Student debt is a problem of racial injustice. It can increase economic inequality. And it is connected to militarism, because, again, it’s an indication that we don’t spend on the public goods we need, like education; we spend on war. The military recruits people through student debt, right? It’s a major driver of enlisting in the Army. We must get to the root cause of the problem. However, we can only do this by building power together. And that’s the Debt Collective’s slogan, right? You are not the only one.
AMY GOODMAN:Astra, it’s okay to just leave it at that. Braxton Brewington, Astra Taylor, and members of The Debt Collective.
This concludes our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.
