A Bailout You Can Believe In: The Strike Debt Rolling Jubilee is Here

Carmen’s Team Pick:

“Debt” has been in my vocabulary too long. Let’s get rid of it.

Today is the Launch Party for Strike Debt’s Rolling Jubilee, in which the huddled masses yearning to breathe free finally will be.

Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, abolishes it. Together we can liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal. […]

Jubilee comes from many faith traditions including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A jubilee is an event in which all debts are cancelled and all those in bondage are set free. It worked in Biblical times and it can still work today. For example, a kind of jubilee happened in Iceland after the 2008 economic crisis: instead of bailing out their banks, Iceland canceled a percentage of mortgage debt. What these examples show is that debts are just a promise which can – and should – be renegotiated or cancelled when the circumstances warrant. Strike Debt believes that now is the time for a jubilee for the 99%.

Strike Debt, on offshoot of Occupy, is going all-out with a variety show telethon to prove that solutions to debt exist – if we want them to. Today, they’ll hold their sold-out event and stream it live from Le Poisson Rouge,  collecting donations as they go and working their way toward $3,502,802 in collected funds to abolish collective debt. For every dollar donated, 20 dollars in debt disappears.

Just like that.

You can learn more and contribute here.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!
Related:

Carmen

Carmen spent six years at Autostraddle, ultimately serving as Straddleverse Director, Feminism Editor and Social Media Co-Director. She is now the Consulting Digital Editor at Ms. and writes regularly for DAME, the Women’s Media Center, the National Women’s History Museum and other prominent feminist platforms; her work has also been published in print and online by outlets like BuzzFeed, Bitch, Bust, CityLab, ElixHER, Feministing, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, GrokNation, MEL, Mic and SIGNS, and she is a co-founder of Argot Magazine. You can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr or in the drive-thru line at the nearest In-N-Out.

Carmen has written 919 articles for us.

9 Comments

  1. Thank you for posting about this. Grassroots change FOR REAL. Also, the fact that 62% of bankruptcies are caused by medical debt…this really should make us all take a serious step back and reevaluate our priorities as a nation.

  2. This is a pretty interesting endeavor. Le Poisson Rouge is killin’ it this week. I saw Kaki King there Tuesday and she donated her proceeds to OccupySandy.

  6. Jubilee is probably my favourite Biblical concept. One of my favourites anyway. Pity us Christians are too selfish to actually put that into practice.

    This sounds fab.

  7. I really enjoyed this article. I’d like to see another process that could take a dollar and have a 2000% return.

Comments are closed.