Debt Collective 🟥

Black Anti-Fascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond The US state is now occupying the city of Minneapolis after murdering Renée Good and Alex Pretti. It is terrifying migrant communities and assaulting residents in the name of anti-Blackness…

Friday, Feb 27th, the @debtcollective.bsky.social is co-hosting Black Anti-Fascism: Lessons from the Past for the Current Moment & Beyond. #BlackHistoryMonth #BHM2026

Remember last year when the Trump admin said they were considering selling a chunk of the federal student loan portfolio to private actors?

They just officially stated that they haven't taken "any final actions or made final decisions regarding selling" the portfolio.

All of our expenses are too high. Rent, health care, student loans, utilities, childcare and other expenses.

The cost of everything is rising but our pay isn't. Our household debt balances are growing but our salaries are not.

This can't last. We need a complete economic shift.

For Many Cash-Strapped Americans, ‘Basic Living Has Become a Burden’

NYT: Maribel, 66, cleans plane cabins at the airport in Charlotte, NC. She earns $16.50/hr, not enough to cover her expenses—about half goes to rent. With a pile of medical bills and no cushion for a financial emergency, “I have to keep working,” she said.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/u...

We need tuition-free college.

And we need quality union jobs with good pay and benefits that don't require a college degree.

And we need a free, universal health care system that isn't tied to you having a job to get quality care in the first place.

Everyone deserves a home.

Everyone deserves a meal.

Everyone deserves medicine.

Everyone deserves education.

Everyone deserves dignity, security and equality.

There is no reason that a single person in the United States should have medical debt when there billionaires exist — some who may soon be trillionaires.

Tenants Have More Economic Power Than They Think Just as workers can withhold labor to halt production, tenants can withhold rent to challenge corporate landlords. In Los Angeles, a coalition of tenants and debtors is proving that housing is a site ...

New: Housing is shelter—not a financial playground for Wall Street speculators.

Tenants must leverage our power in concert. Just as workers can withhold labor to halt production, tenants can withhold rent to challenge corporate landlords.
jacobin.com/2026/02/tena...

Imagine if we invested in education, of children and adults, like we do military power, surveillance, and various forms of internal coercion. Imagine if we were enlightened enough to not make education and the cultivation of humanity require crushing debt for students and penury for educators.

Millions of student loan borrowers aren't repaying their loans — and defaults are up New data offers further confirmation of a crisis in the U.S. student loan portfolio, in which too many borrowers are not repaying their student loans.

Good. Student loans should never be repaid. That money is much better spent going to housing, health care, child care, groceries and saving for retirement.

Millions of student loan borrowers aren't repaying their loans — and defaults are up
www.npr.org/2026/02/10/n...

When the Student Loan Ombuds for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) wrote her legally mandated annual report, Trump leadership scrubbed it for being too critical.

"I was told by leadership it would not be published and would need to be rewritten."

Here's a crash course syllabus for folks who want to learn more about Puerto Rico's history, sovereignty, infrastructure, resistance, debt crisis and more.
puertoricosyllabus.com

Must-read! Heading into a meeting but here’s where the plot thickened for me….

If you can, chip in $5 so we can keep hiring “disgruntled” experts like Barnard.

We need all the inside information we can get to help us fight back against these fascist assholes.
debtcollective.org/donate

Trump’s CFPB tried to call her character into question, calling her a “disgruntled” employee for doing her job of shedding light on the billionaire-backed corruption schemes crushing student debtors.

This is a loss for the CFPB — but it’s a gain for us.

Barnard now leads our monthly Default Office Hours, where we discuss options for defaulted debtors, including rehabilitation, consolidation, cancellation, and financial hardship exemptions.

Join us there, student debtors.

The Student Loan Report the Trump Administration Didn’t Want Published - The American Prospect Read the CFPB report the Trump administration cut and scrubbed, which includes information on a higher-education surveillance pricing scheme.

You can now read the original report after press got a hold of it.
prospect.org/2026/01/16/s...

Today, we hired the author of that report.

Her name is Julia Barnard, and she’s now leading our higher education team to keep pushing back on the Trump administration’s dangerous agenda.

Her whistle-blowing report would have gone to every single member of Congress, additional government agencies and advocacy organizations like ours — except it never did.

The Trump administration buried her report and pushed her out the door to stop her from telling the truth.

She also showed that student debtors are set to default at a record rate, and included options for debtors to get out of default without having to pay a dime.

She revealed that colleges and universities are artificially raising the cost of higher education through a shady price-fixing scheme designed by private equity companies.

Earlier this year, the Student Loan Ombudsman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) wrote her annual report on student loans.

It was deeply critical of Trump admin policies.

So they fired her.

Well, we just hired her.

For the conservatives comparing this to DOGE, this will probably be less like getting rid of the people in charge of weather forecasting and more like saying “let’s not pay McKinsey $2M to tell us to buy trashcans”

Sometimes the best approach is to find an in-person action near you and approach an organizer to ask how you can get involved — regular people are building new infrastructures of solidarity every day, and none of us can do it alone.

You can also find and join a rapid response network near you. If you’re not sure where to start, try searching online by typing in your location alongside phrases like ‘rapid response’ or ‘ICE watch’. If you don’t find anything immediately, don’t be discouraged!

In moments like these, our strength lies in mobilizing to care for each other, as Minneapolis residents have modeled for us. There are many ways to support your communities, from attending an observation training to reading up on migrant justice and border abolition.

Folks forced to stay home from work/close businesses to protect themselves from ICE are falling behind on bills, leading to default + eviction. Meanwhile, funds slashed from Medicaid are diverted to ICE agents—offered $60k in student debt relief in exchange for their crimes.

The unfounded killings of Good and Pretti tell us that there is no way to be a perfect citizen in a fascist state, just as there is no way to be a perfect debtor or tenant or health care patient when every aspect of our lives is financialized.

The brutality of ICE reveals the banality of imperial violence waged by the United States upon the rest of the world — only now, this violence has returned home to target white Americans too.

Created in the year after 9/11, the domestic policing carried out by ICE is inextricable from the militarized forces that protect American interests overseas, from the Israeli Defense Forces to NATO.