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turbinetree

(24,632 posts)
Sat Jun 4, 2022, 12:06 PM Jun 2022

The Fight for Student Debt Relief Started a Decade Ago--at Occupy Wall Street

Biden may cancel billions in student loans. The nation’s first debtors’ union helped make that possible.
HANNAH LEVINTOVA JULY+AUGUST 2022 ISSUE

As a 28-year-old art student, Thomas Gokey convinced the Federal Reserve to give him bags of shredded currency worth $49,983, the exact amount of his ballooning student loan debt. He had a plan to use the minced cash to make a work of art that would both symbolize his loans and help to pay them off: He pulped the scraps, turned the paste into four enormous sheets of paper, and began offering piecemeal sales—$4.22 a square inch.

In 2011, when the artwork was accepted by an annual competition in Michigan—“the American Idol of art,” as he describes it—that had been founded by the son of billionaire heir (and future Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos, Gokey saw another shot at paying off the debt. Up until then, he hadn’t found a lot of buyers willing to purchase bits of his loans, but he did start having conversations with people about their own debt, and about debt’s role in society. He’d also read anthropologist David Graeber’s new opus on the topic; Gokey found it “a secret decoder ring” unveiling how debt enshrines divides of gender, race, and class.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/biden-student-debt-cancellation-occupy-wall-street-collective/

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The Fight for Student Debt Relief Started a Decade Ago--at Occupy Wall Street (Original Post) turbinetree Jun 2022 OP
We keep hearing that. CentralMass Jun 2022 #1
Wow. Fascinating article. K&R for visibility. crickets Jun 2022 #2
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