 connection. There is a connection and we'll be talking about that. We are thrilled to have two prominent guests with us, Marianne Williamson, author, spiritual leader, former presidential candidate who rocked the stage during that campaign. Also Braxton Brewington who is the press secretary for the debt collective which is a union fighting for the cancellation of all student debt held by the federal government and most of it is held by the federal government. So we know that Marianne is on a tight schedule so we're going to turn the floor over to Marianne to talk about student debt and militarism and her reflections on the Biden presidency on anything she wants to talk about really. Marianne, welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's great to see you and to see some new friends and some old friends who are here tonight. I think the conversation that everybody is having is the interconnectivity between and among so many of the stresses on the average person today. Whether it has to do with toxins in our food or whether it has to do with the difficulty of getting healthcare, whether it has to do with the high price of pharmaceutical drugs, whether it has to do with the inability to get an education, whether it has to do with the fact that people have to work more than one job just to be able to survive whether it has to do with the college loans or whether it has to do with runaway militarism or whether it has to do with violence on our streets and the high rates of poverty. People understand that all of these are tentacles that come from one source and that source of course has to do with this chokehold that a corporatist mentality and matrix of corporate aristocratic powers has on our democracy whether it has to do with big pharmaceutical companies or big insurance companies, big oil, big agriculture, big chemical companies, big tech companies, gun manufacturers or military industrial complex and defense contractors. We spend all of our time kind of playing walk-a-mole like where can we fight it off here? Where can we fight it off there? But I think people are beginning to understand two very important things. Number one, this common source of the fact that short-term profits for all of those multinational corporate interests is now the bottom line. It is now served even at the expense of, not only instead of, but even at the expense of the health and the safety and the well-being of the American people and the planet on which we live. The second thing takes it even to a darker place and that is how much our own government works at the behest of those corporate forces. The undue influence of corporate money on our political system has turned our Congress and in too many cases even the White House into a system of legalized bribery to the extent that at this point looking to the government to save us is kind of like we're begging. You know, the woman before we got on was talking about how she writes to her congressman. He doesn't even bother to answer. So I think that we're living at a time of, you know, there's one of my favorite books, there's a book called Letters to a Young Poet by the poet Rilke and he says sometimes you don't have an answer, an immediate answer, but you live the question. Americans are very good with the to-do list where people who have proven historically just tell us what to do about a problem and we'll fix it. You know, like you could look at World War II, you could look at the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army and liken them to a tumor. They were malignant tumors that could be and were by a former generation brilliantly removed surgically. The problems we have today are more like a cancer that has metastasized and it's wrapped around some healthy organs. So it's not as simple as, well, this is, we do this and then we do this and then we do this and we do this. We could say, yeah, well, we got to get the money out of politics and then we look and we see that the Supreme Court has completely has already been, for all intents and purposes, at least for the time being, so taken over by the corporatist forces that we're not going to be able to override Citizens United anytime soon and on and on and on. But I think that what organizations like yours, Medea and Marcy and all of you who are working with Code Pink, have been doing for years and are doing now is awakening people. And I think that everybody on this call and I think millions of people around this country, more and more and more, are awakening to the severity of the problems that confront us. This is not just one thing or two things or three things. We can absorb it. We can fix it. There'll be a piece of legislation here, a piece of legislation there. We're going to have to have a whole new level of thinking, a whole new level of courage and some real thinking outside the box to be able to, not to, it's more than pushing back against the forces of corporatism and unfettered capitalism. It is truly forging a new way because the question is no longer do the Republicans fix it or do the Democrats fix it. They are more similar than they are different in the ways that we're talking about here tonight. This is the two-party corporatist, two-party duopoly is itself a problem. We're Americans though. I have a lot of faith in us. It wasn't reasonable to assume that abolition could succeed, but it ultimately did. It wasn't reasonable to assume women could gain suffrage, but ultimately they did. It wasn't reasonable to assume that segregation could be dismantled, but it ultimately was. I think this is going to be a year of such a rising of consciousness and activism on the part of the American people that we're going to turn the ship around. We have to or we will lose our democracy and we could lose a lot more than that. Thank you eloquently put, Marianne. Medea wants to say a few words about you and share your background, which we are so proud of what you've done. Medea, take it away. Well, I think everybody knows you as the presidential candidate, but I've known you for decades as the spiritual leader and somebody who's written 14 books and each book that you write is just beautiful. Before you ran for president and I hear you talk, I would just sit with my mouth open like, how does she just say all this stuff? So brilliant and those spirits go and so deep. I thought it was such an amazing opportunity for the people of this country to hear you. I know you have now millions and millions of followers after that run. We do hear rumors about you maybe even running against Biden. I don't know if people got a chance to see a political article that came out about that, but I know you used your soapbox in an incredible way to educate people about what's wrong with this system. Is there any truth to that rumor and how do you feel about your last run? I think it would just be nice to hear your reflections. Well, those are two very separate questions. In terms of the first question, the media likes to concentrate on the horse race, who might run? And I think for those of us who care about the things we talk about on a panel like tonight, it's not about who, it's about what. The what is what's important and the what is the voice standing in the electoral space that really speaks for the yearnings and the hopes and the well-being of the American people and of the planet and of people around the world who are impacted by American policy. So I think I have the same level of commitment to that what that everybody else here does. What part I might play in that I'm not clear about, but that I am willing and desirous of playing whatever role would be best I am clear about and I to you also and to Marcy you know we've all been at this for a long time and I don't think by the way you know that article was contextualized as in challenging Biden. I think it's very important we need to challenge the duopoly. So I think that whether I do run again while it's an open question in my mind in my heart, whether I would run you know you asked me how my experience was running for president and and I've said this a few times before. I learned how corrupt the system is and I learned how wonderful people are. You know the American people are not the problem. I mean if you look at poll after poll and you look where people actually sit in this country, we're a little left of center. The problem is not the will of the American people. If our Congress is doing the will of the American people, we wouldn't be in the shape that we're in. So when you talk about primary in Biden, I mean that that's that's the level of their imagination and I'm not sure you know even if I were to run I don't know if you should run as a Democrat where we are very clear now after what they did to Bernie in both 2016 to 2020 and I have my own experience of it. You're not letting a progressive get anywhere near the platform of being the candidate. On the other hand, we know the problems that can exist with a I don't want to call it third party. I think we need another party. Once again, I think the hostage taking by the duopoly at this point is a problem. So even if I do run I don't know what that would look like but I don't know. I'm sure that everybody here is holding the same question in their heart. How can I best serve at this time? Well I know we're going to get with Braxton into the nitty gritty of the issue about the student debt but I wonder if you could say something about this example because it is an example of grassroots pressure and how it forces Biden to do something like he has to. No it doesn't. That's yeah that's the problem we have today. Look at something like Black Lives Matter. It was the largest protest movement in history of the United States and it did not lead to one fundamental legislative change. At this point that's really the conundrum we're in. Our Congress and White House work so much at the behest of these corporate forces that it doesn't matter what we do. That's why these really have to be nonviolent revolutionary times. You talk about yeah there's a lot of pressure. You know to me the student loan debt is emblematic of something larger than just the student loan debt. I don't think there's ever been a generation of Americans where the government itself did so much to thwart the dreams of our youth. What the hell. If you look at how a family runs you raise your children you want to set your children up to win. I feel like the way we look at American children now the way we look at American youth now they just want to rise up how can we just and our government act like how can I put my leg out in front of you so that you're going to trip. All these kids want to do is get out there start businesses create be productive and we're just sitting on top of them. This is such a perversion of moral values and but I am overthinking if we just elect the Democrat that's going to fix it. You know somebody said to me Peter Hager who was on the generational change podcast he said something the other day that I thought was really interesting. He said as it turns out Trump was not the wake-up call. Biden is the wake-up call because we're realizing even if you do elect the Democrat you're still not getting your your minimum wage lifted. You're still not getting any kind of cut or even serious conversation about militarism in in our society and they think we're so dumb that you know I mean that you look at the Afghanistan the end of the Afghanistan war but then the budget didn't go down the budget went up even with the Democratic president. We're not talking about a cancellation of the college loan debt even with a Democratic president. You know he could if he wished to expand Medicare tonight if he wished to he could free Julian Assange tonight if he wished to he could work seriously for that $15 an hour minimum wage if he wished to he could cancel the the debt etc. I'm over just hoping that if we elect the Democrat it's going to change. We have to realize that the system is so saturated by the undue influence of these corporate forces. We need to have a nonviolent revolutionary spirit at this point. Thank you Marianne. Thank you. We have a couple of questions in the chat. Honey do you want to read one or two? Oh sure. Do you want me to do that honey? Is that what you're saying? Oh no no I'm not sure. Yeah I can hear you. So Marianne tell us a little bit about how we can revitalize the anti-nuclear movement. Oh you know it's so interesting that you say that when I was young and look at someone like Medea I mean we've been at this she and I've known each other for so many years. When we were young we used to walk down the street with these huge banners that said ban the bomb. Today out of exhaustion and out of ignorance which is too often willful ignorance people aren't even trying. We have over 7,000 nuclear bombs that we know of in this country. We have ordered from the Air Force. The Air Force has ordered 100 B-21 Raiders each at $560 million and one of the things that's quite unique about the B-21 Raiders is that they drop not only conventional bombs but also nuclear bombs. So we have to open our eyes here to what we're saying here. We're ordering at $560 million each, 100 airplanes that drop nuclear bombs. Now surely this is not for national security. You drop five of those and it's over for human civilization as we know it. You drop 10 of those it's over for the species on this planet. So at this point the nuclear industry is such a multi-trillion dollar business and it's sort of behind the curtain. We're not even talking about it. So it's not even just as Marcie was saying well we're getting active about this or that. Like you said we're not even active on it. This is how sick the whole thing has gotten. This is how corrupt the whole thing has gotten and I would prefer that we really allow ourselves to take it in. Now I am not someone who's coming from a place of let's all then get nihilistic cynical and depressed about it. And that goes back to the spiritual. I do believe that the moral arc of the universe so long bends towards justice. I do believe in miracles. I do believe that we've faced tough times before and we can face them again. But with everybody talking about the existential threat to the species that is posed by big oil and environmental destructiveness let's be very clear runaway U.S. militarism is also an existential threat conceivably possibly even to our species. And once again I want to throw out this huge kudos to Medea Benjamin who has been on this when it was a popular thing to say and when it wasn't a popular thing to say and her optimism. I was always like there in the day I say in the worst news in the world with that big smile on her face. But it's true. And so I think the answer to your question is that we all have to wake up and speak up. You know I feel that we have in this country and I felt this when I was running for president. The American people are not stupid. You have a political system that talks to them like they're stupid but people are not stupid. And I think just as there are political forces such as our former president who harnessed the worst aspects of the American character for his political purposes we have to harness the best aspects of the American character for political purposes. And you know some of us I'm sure on this in this group tonight our parents and even if we're not parents we have younger people in our in our families our homes and we know what it's like to to say certain things will not happen in this house. We won't allow it we won't stand for and that's how we have to get we have to get that fierce aspect of character this has to stop. And when enough of us get there you say how do we do it that we support each other in that enough with coddling our neuroses and our pathologies and our victimization. We have to forgive each other we have to realize we're not going to all agree with each other but we can talk in honorable ways to each other and we have to create a politics of hope and nobility and intelligence. But let me tell you something when we do harness a politics of hope and nobility and intelligence we will in a very kind way take no shit any further no more it's got to stop. That's right Marianne can you talk a little bit about your book about miracles and how that might relate to motivating people to have hope and to continue and to be relentless in this pursuit of peace? Well you know there are universal spiritual themes that are at the heart of all the great religions of the world and all the great spiritual philosophies of the world and they all rest on the same core principle and that is the expansion of the human heart. And when the human heart expands the human brain performs intelligently and in a life sustaining way. What has happened as a product of the industrial revolution and the entire explosion of a very materialistic, western materialism in the 20th century industrial revolution etc. There has been this dangerous, perilous disconnection of head and heart. In the 20th century we became so mesmerized by things of the external world and the 20th century was dominated by a a Newtonian physics where the world was looked at as just a big machine and if you had a problem you just tweaked the pieces of the machine. Well it's true that the scientific method western materialism etc. did solve a lot of humanities problems in the 20th century but it also caused a lot of new ones. As we enter the 21st century we are embracing a far more integrative, holistic, whole person perspective where we realize that our disconnection from love is what is at the root cause of our disconnection from nature, our disconnection from each other, our disconnection from the young. We have we have leaked our reverence and our devotion, our sense of ethics, our sense of mercy, our sense of justice, our sense of love. As Gandhi said the problem with the world is that humanity is going insane, humanity is not in its right mind. Now what all of the great whether it is the Moses standing at the Red Sea in the parting of the Red Sea, whether it is Jesus and the healing the sick, all of the great religious systems speak of the fact that when love is expanded the time-space continuum as we know it is transcended that we are not locked within this box of material reality quite the way we think it is when our minds expand to a more noble and loving perspective. Different synapses start to work. You start to find yourself in relationship to people in collaboration with whom you have exponentially more powerful effect on the world around you. Look at the human body. Every cell is led through a kind of natural intelligence to collaborate with other cells to serve the healthy functioning of the organ and the organism of which they are part. Every once in a while for reasons that scientists understand to some extent to other extents do not understand a cell as it were goes insane. It disconnects from that natural intelligence and it goes off to do its own thing. That's cancer. That's a malignancy and that's what has happened to human consciousness. It is a malignancy of consciousness. We have forgotten we're here to collaborate with each other. We're here to work together to serve something bigger than who we are individually. A cancer cell is a cell that says no I don't want to serve the healthy functioning of the lungs I want to go off and do my own thing and it surrounds itself with other six cells. That's called the tumor. And the same thing happens in civilization. So we have to go back to the healed perspective that you see in nature where every part of the ecosystem is here to work with other cells in the ecosystem to serve something bigger than ourselves. And when we have that nature is intelligent nature the body has an immune system. The body can take an amazing amount of assault and injury as long as the immune system is healthy. The psyche can take an amazing amount of heartbreak and trauma as long as the psychic immune system is healthy. And this is what civilization is. We have to be the immune cells now. As we do we find ourselves I felt it when I saw you the other night Medea. You know it's like you and I you and I always have been kind of saluting across the airwaves right. Hi we like pass each other in the hall as it were you know I know you're out there you know I'm out there but then what's happening now is a lot of people are meeting new people or getting together with other people and we're coming together and we're all being sort of inwardly guided to things that we can do this coming year. And yes that's what miracles are all about. It's about new synapses in the brain, new possibilities in the society that will occur because we devote ourselves to something bigger than ourselves. Well that was very inspirational and something that we can all take with us as we leave. I mean I think I think what you're saying is so profound and it's all about building coalitions and working together and we can't do that's what cells on the body do. Yes so thank you so much for joining us Mary. I mean you know you have another appointment you're very busy. If there's anything else you want to say and leave us with you said a lot but if there's anything you want to say in terms of going forward please go forward. I would like to thank you and also let's share our faith with each other. Winston Churchill once said that you can always count on Americans to do the right thing after we have exhausted every other option. We have been known historically for waking up late but the historical pattern would also show that while Americans often wake up late when we do wake up we slam it like nobody's business and I think we're going to slam it like nobody's business and we have to support each other knowing that each of us has a role to play and I I think we will. I think we will. I think we will. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Good night everybody. Let's all love you Mary Anne. Thank you Mary Anne. Thank you Mary Anne. That was fantastic Mary Anne. We love you Mary Anne. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'll see you next time. Thank you. I'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Marcy before we introduce Braxton I just wanted to say something that's a personal link that I feel about the militarism and the the the college education issue which is the first time that Code Pink went to Iraq and that was before the U.S. invasion and now we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of that invasion and the first people we met were a group of women highly educated women in fact one of them was studying for her Ph.D. in literature and asked me who of the black women poets I in the U.S. I like the most and then she gave out all kinds of names of Nikki Ginnovani and Alice Walker and all kinds of people I'd never heard of she was learning that for free in Saddam Hussein who was a dictator but his universities and they had free university from kindergarten to Ph.D.'s medical school whatever it was and it wasn't just free they got a stipend and Iraq was seen throughout the Middle East as the place where people would go for their the best education and now today of course it's a total disaster but I want to put that as forward as an intro to the intro that we're doing just to think about what we have done to other countries that actually put education high up on your list of what governments should fund thanks thank you for sharing that I didn't realize that that's a story they don't tell us right on corporate media all right well uh I'm very proud to turn turn to Braxton Brewington now and honey is going to introduce him and we're going to get into the nitty gritty on student debt absolutely thank you thank you Marcy and thank you media um our next guest on quote big congress as Marcy already mentioned is Braxton Brewington who's the press secretary of the debt collective which is a student debt union urging President Biden to sign an executive order canceling student loan debt held by the federal government um Braxton worked as a communications lead for the democratic parties of Georgia and North Carolina and served as a field organizer for US senator Cory Booker's presidential campaign uh he was also a democracy fellow with common cause where he worked to galvanize students to become civically engaged by registering them to vote on campus and organize marches to the poll and lobby congress welcome Braxton take it away please awesome thank you so much for having me and thank you all um everyone for your activism I don't know how I'm supposed to go after those profound words by Marianne but I will do my best to try to hone in on the student debt crisis um so again my name is Braxton I am an organizer with the debt collective the debt collective um has its roots in Occupy Wall Street I think I saw Astro Taylor in the chat she's our co-founder um so the debt collective has its roots in Occupy Wall Street and we are a debtors union we're the nation's first debtors union so what that means is like a labor union right where workers join together to demand better working conditions higher pay um you know improved sense of um morale among the workers we believe that debtors can do the same we believe debtors can band together and use the collective power of our financial debts which we actually see as assets right we see our debts as assets we believe we can come together and demand write downs to demand outright cancellation to demand transformations to the economy right so we want to eliminate student loan debt medical debt we want housing for all we're demanding and into payday loans and all of these carceral debt all of these types of debt but also we want to transform the economy so that people don't have to borrow to make ends meet in the first place so we believe that a debtors union and the power of debtors coming together as that's exactly what we can do um so we're the nation's first debtors union you can join for as low as zero dollars a month you're a debtors union so you can join but we can also contribute what you can and together we believe you know the there's power in our numbers there's this capitalist saying that we quote all the time that says if you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars that the bank owns you but if you own if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars you own the bank and so we believe collectively we own the bank with our financial leverage so I don't want to be long I'm just going to talk a little bit about student loan debt and sort of where we are in our crisis today I'm sure it's been in the news quite a bit so we are demanding the the abolition of multiple types of debt but right now we're definitely focused on student loan debt we've been running this campaign for a few years now so about 95 percent of student debt is held by the federal government so the rest are private loans those can sometimes get a bit tricky but what's sort of amazing about this type of this debt type is that the creditor is not JP Morgan or um you know some other private company it's the federal government and so our idea is to pressure the federal government as the creditor and the owner of this debt to abolish all of this debt so the debt collective years ago found the sort of obscure line in the higher education act of 1965 which legally states that the secretary of education along with the president can abolish student debt it means that they can compromise wave or release any right claim or lean something something some other words in a higher education act but it's legalese or if you can issue student loans you can erase student loans and so for the past few years you know we started a campaign to abolish debt for for-profit colleges some of the um the worst you know sort of scum of the higher education commodified um complex that we have but now we're what we understand is that all of it is illegitimate all student loan debt is illegitimate and should be erased so biden and trump had this power obama had this power but biden is the current president we're calling on him to cancel all federal student debt with a stroke of a pin so he can do that immediately with his student debt uh with an executive order and he actually ran on this he ran on his campaign by canceling an immediate minimum of ten thousand dollars for every single borrower and then he promised more he said if you went to an hbcu and make under 125 thousand dollars your debt would be completely gone he said if you went to a public college and make under 125 that he would erase your debt as well and so on and so on there's some more other provisions for different types of people but so this isn't this isn't some radical issue as some right-wing pundits would would would have it right this is a incredibly sensible policy one that would boost the economy narrow the racial wealth gap it would provide covid relief to folks who need it and we're calling on a jubilee right there's those uh there's a saying that astros says all the time that debt cancellation has been around as long as debt so um this isn't some radical policy this is actually exactly what we need for our economy for 45 million borrowers who have 1.8 trillion dollars two trillion with a t trillion dollars in student loan debt for having the audacity of going to college so um you know there's a couple of um ties here to the military but i first want to just emphasize who student debt impacts i think there's some myths and um commonness conceptions that individuals who would benefit from student debt cancellation are mostly wealthy white harvard graduates um and that is just exactly not the truth um so what we know is that rich people don't have student debt right they're rich so they don't have student debt um i think if we just think about it for one moment we realize that actually makes a lot of sense um student debt is already means tested if you have student debt that means you had to borrow money from either the government or a private lender because you couldn't afford to pay for college up front and so really what this is is is a is punishment for being poor right you are not being rewarded for having enough wealth to pay for your college up front and so all of this debt is illegitimate and the people who are bearing the brunt of this crisis in particular are women black women in particular black and brown households seniors older borrowers are bearing this brunt hispanic borrowers um in particular right working class individuals are the people that are bearing the brunt they black women in particular and lots of black americans who are not being paid equitably in the workforce right we were we were told that the reason the way that you can escape racism in the labor market is if you just simply attain more education right and now that gap has lark that racial gap in educational attainment has largely closed but what we're seeing is black and brown americans but you know disproportionately are burdened with student debts there's so many individuals who are actually members of the debt collective and who we see online or meet at events who say i've actually paid back what i owe and i still owe more than what i took out right these loans are so predatory be serious the interest rates are incredibly high so that's just a bit about you know who is really impacted by student loan debt and we just always really reject this notion that there are somehow rich people who have student loan debt and for the magical person who is rich and has student loan debt that no one has been able to find you know our solution for that is really we should just tax the rich um so you know that can really catch folks on the back end just to make sure that everyone is you know paying their fair share just to connect this to militarism um you know i was just talking with actually with my dad about you know martin luther king and sort of the triple evils of our entire planet racism poverty and militarism and we were just having a conversation about militarism and the military united states military is probably has a deep fascination with student loan debt in fact just a couple of years ago about four years ago the military failed to meet their the u.s. military failed to meet their recruitment goal they simply could not get enough individuals to um enroll enlist in the military the next year they more than surpassed their goal and this isn't some conspiracy theory this is straight from you know majors and generals of mouths at the u.s. military that they say we shifted our strategy and we focused on individuals who had student loan debt that was their way of meeting their recruitment goal they focused on individuals who they dangle this you know what should be a public good what should be a right higher education or any education at all they dangle that in front of individuals and take advantage of them and you know instead of fighting the a war that we should be fighting like climate change they um you know have these individuals fighting wars overseas um and so you know there's just so much evil here both with student debt and a connection with militarism and i'm glad to sort of draw this link um they they really use student debt as a way to trap mostly low income people disproportionately black people disproportionately people in the u.s south into enlisting in the military then they tell them that there are programs where they'll pay off their student debt and oftentimes the programs simply don't work so they tell them to enroll in public service loan forgiveness which is a program that has a 99 percent rate of individuals being denied right these programs don't work and so there's a lot of traps here there's a debt trap there is a moral trap there are several traps here that mostly um you know non-white non-wealthy individuals are being trapped into and so the debt collective is here to you know along with other activist organizations and some Congress to say we reject this trap and we need a jubilee and so we're calling when you're writing to cancel all student debt we think it might take legislation to cancel private student loans that's a huge chunk of student loans as well but again a majority is held by the federal government so debtcollective.org is you know where you can join the union and that's where we do a lot of our organizing um we're also on social media but um this is really a time where we need folks to take action to call the White House to email the White House to sign to send the executive order that we've already written for the Biden administration to the White House through I saw a TikTok today where an individual started a one signature challenge they printed out our executive order and signed Joe Biden's signature um herself which I thought was amazing um if anyone's use Joe Biden please ask for his autograph so um that's what we're up to I'd love to you know take any questions or I haven't seen the chat but debtcollective.org slash look of a pain is is where you can see that executive order thank you so much Braxton Burrington it's wonderful to have you and Astra the director of a debt debtors collective debt collective with us tonight um can you tell us uh what's going on right now now Biden has said he's going to pause it I think until May and in essence with these pauses is he canceling some of the interest yeah so March 27th 2020 is when then President Trump issued a pause on federal student loans that pause has continued into the Biden administration through May 1st of this year so over two years we'll have passed where federal student loans will have been the payments have been paused and interest has been paused another thing to to sort of emphasize there's some folks who say you know Biden doesn't really have the legal authority to cancel student debt which we know he absolutely does but it's interesting to make that claim when Biden is one currently cancelling some student debt right now but also has the broad authority to seemingly unlimited amount of time to pause payments and to pause interest what we know is say for example you are in a 10-year public service loan forgiveness program and you were in your eighth year in 2020 right all every single month where you've had to pay zero dollars a month counts as a payment so some individuals are actually getting you know a couple of free months or three years worth of student debt cancellation which is sort of another you know a little tidbit that we like to talk about when we say cancellation is exactly what's happening right now just not at the scale that we needed to so what we've learned is is Biden is really movable here on this issue you know not movable enough or we would have gotten him to sign an executive order on his first day or his at least first 100 days but we've been able to pressure him into extending the moratorium not once but twice this last time in their press release they use the word final three times one time it was in all capital it was in all capital letters right they said final final final the payments won't be extended anymore and turns out the word final doesn't mean final it means whatever is politically attainable at the time so we believe you know with this extension that we have 90 extra 90 extra more days to get organized and to pressure not just an extension to the moratorium but cancellation and there's some individuals that call for 10k 50k 75 we are saying all of it every single penny every dime every dollar should be eliminated and Biden can do this and it's not a one-time limit right he can cancel student debt at the end of every semester until the until the house and senate pass legislation to have free college so that this never happens again so we're pressuring the Biden administration there was you know some chatter just days before they extended the pause a couple of weeks ago they were steadfast in not extending the pause they said that the pandemic was fine I know they said that the pandemic was fine they said that borrowers knew what they were getting into and just a couple of days later after a few tweets and a few news articles all of a sudden borrowers aren't financially ready and need a couple more months and it's I just think it's important for us to remember what that moment felt like and to use that energy to you know continue to push for cancellation because if 45 million borrowers in their communities have all of their federal student debt cancelled that is going to do wonders I just can't tell you how often we hear from mothers from you know parents from young people and the old people who say that this debt is crushing that this debt is is is such a burden that they are considering hurting themselves that they are considering selling their home right there's such a backwards incentivization in terms of paying off your student loans people are so desperate to get this debt off of their shoulders and so what we're calling for is you know the sensible solution which is providing the cancel all of it so that's really where we are right now may day would would be the day that loans possibly turn back on which obviously has a lot of hiring there with the labor movement but we need to pressure biden to cancel student debt before may right we need to do it immediately so that when may comes along um borrowers and families don't have to make these daunting financial decisions like rationing medication and you know selling their homes and all of these other types of things so that's really where we're at right now I said no I'm just gonna say there's so many okay you go ahead so right you go there's so many great questions that are coming up and I just two things that you brought up that is very critical and important is that you mentioned something about 90 over 90 percent of people who apply for public service are rejected can you elaborate on that a little bit as well and also talk about some of these for-profit colleges who are that are closing for example like why you take Everest yield that are trade schools that are leaving borrowers with thousands of dollars worth of student debts how effective is the borrowers defense program that is being offered to students and is there a particular budget that is being set aside to combat these schools that have given students loans but are closed and students cannot attend or they're not even accredited so because student loans are so incredibly difficult to pay back the government actually sort of incentivizes people to not pay they are a bevy of forgiveness programs public service loan forgiveness is one right for say your teacher working public service program for 10 years and then you ideally are supposed to be eligible for debt cancellation there's income driven repayment plans usually 20 to 25 years where individuals are supposed to pay usually about 10 percent or something less of their income per month for about 20 years there's a bunch of different forgiveness programs public service loan forgiveness is one of them that was implemented I believe in 2007 and it's simply you know 10 years after 2017 it's five years after that and essentially everyone is being denied that's in part due to a disastrous a catastrophic trump administration denying individuals but a lot of it has to do with the student loan services who are contracted by the federal government who literally give false information to individuals right it's as simple as if you miss a payment you don't qualify if you don't upload the correct documents you miss your qualification right there's individuals who have paid for seven eight nine years and then just find out that it's all null and void so it's a it's a failed program bar were defense to repayment or bdr bd whatever you want to call it bar were defense to repayment is for individuals who have been scammed or defrauded from attending usually a usually a for-profit college but not just a for-profit college if you aren't an individual who believes that the definition is a bit broad so I can't give a clear definition now but if you believe you were scammed or defrauded by a university or specifically a for-profit college say they told you that you were 100% going to get a job two years after school or you were promised a certain income um anything really you have the right according to the higher education act of 1965 you have the right to file a borrower defense to repayment application it is a document I wish I had it at my hands it's on the department of education's website it maybe takes about 30 minutes to fill this out but what we're seeing is that people are getting their debt discharged because they are using this right this right was not used until the debt collective found this sort of obscure line in the higher education act and politicized it so if you know before 2015 if you had just asserted this right they would have looked at you cross-eyed and and not said anything but it was the debt collective that you know actually created our own application using this legal tool and submitted tens of thousands of applications to the department of education this is when Obama was president and so now what we're seeing the Obama administration kick the can down the road I think assuming that there would be a Hillary Clinton administration the Trump administration was the Trump administration and so now we're at the Biden administration where they're processing all of these claims and so now billions of we're seeing billions of dollars of relief from individuals who have filled out those applications so we're desperately asking people if this applies to you if you were scammed or in any way taken advantage of or we're simply told something incorrect you should absolutely fill out a borrower defense to borrower defense to repayment application well the debt collective is so ingenious and strategic and you know I thank you for your leadership Braxton and for all who are involved in this union it's amazing and I know that you had a lawyer write this executive order for Biden so it doesn't even have to do that work anything you want to share with us before we go into the action on your strategy in organizing yeah so I'd like to you know actually zoom out of student debt just a tad you know we really believe that withholding financial payments possibly along with you know working with labor movements and other forms of political politicization can really start to leverage and we can get cancellation from a lot of these bodies student debt works in a sort of different way where the federal government doesn't actually need our payments to function and so withholding payments is on its own may not be our number one solution in terms of forcing Biden to cancel student debt it's our our student debt payments don't keep the lights on at the Department of Education they don't really need our money but they do need our cooperation and so if you can we are really encouraging folks to find a way to get to zero dollars a month worth of repayment to student debt right in terms of other debt types we believe there's lots of fun ways that we can start to shine a light on the phony morality of debt and I want to take a moment just to sort of explain the rolling jubilee which is sort of a body of work and entity that the debt collective just revived that we'd shut down a few years ago basically what we do is we purchase and erase debt that is that exists on the secondary debt market so there's a shading network of buyers and sellers that buy and sell your debt that goes into collection for pennies on the dollar and there are companies small and large that literally profit when our pain and so what the debt collective has done just recently we spent $98,000 and bought over $3 million worth of private probation debt for over 20,000 individuals mostly living in the south in states like Florida and Mississippi we sent letters to all of these individuals and said jubilant greetings your debt has been cancelled right we bought and instead of harassing you and calling you to get these payments that you probably can't afford we're abolishing it and hope you can live a better life than you then you had before with this debt sort of anchoring you down and so that's just some other work that the debt collective does that maybe we could do in the future and that might require a couple more donations but other than that we really see this as a time to strengthen public pressure on Joe Biden specifically Joe Biden can cancel medical debt as well it's just some negotiations with companies that would take something as small as you know a couple billion dollars just just probably a small percent of our military budget you know we can cancel medical debt we can cancel student loan debt there's other types of debts that we can cancel because americans are more fossil debt than we've ever been in before so what I'm saying is all of this work can only be done if people debtors and allies come together to demand a transformation to our economy and the debt collective is the only debtors union out there but you know there's also some labor unions that can sort of operate as debtors unions as well so we would just encourage folks to join the debt collective to get involved and there may or may not be a branch in your local area if not you should start a branch but you know if you're it's a great idea braxton yeah join the debt collective and join the branch and there's probably some debt in your municipal debt or or criminal legal debt or other types of debt in your local community that could probably negotiate and write down and really improve people's lives well thank you so much let's all unmute and thank braxton and please stay with us because we're going to be contacting the white house in just a minute to follow up on braxton's call to action so everybody unmute and let's thank braxton wow thank you