Mar 28, 2015.
Public Banking Institute founder Ellen Brown was recently a guest on the Global Research News Hour podcast, where she discussed “The Student Debt Time Bomb.” As producers of the podcast point out, at “the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014, student loan debt stood at a colossal $1.16 trillion dollars. According to CNN, this debt applies to 40 million Americans.”
When the big banks pushed through the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Act, student debt was disallowed from bankruptcy discharge. Now, fifty percent of those loans will never be paid off, and Brown articulates how the burden of this debt is depoliticizing and demoralizing. She also points out the parallels between the bundling of student debt and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. She also discusses movements like Rolling Jubilee and other efforts to buy off or forgive debt–and the limits of those movements.
You can listen to the show here.