Strike Debt & the Corinthian resisters
Someone asked me on Facebook yesterday what I’d written on Strike Debt and I posted some links from this site. One of the Strike Debt organizers, Astra Taylor, wrote me to complain how hard that was to read after all the work she and others have done organizing debt resistance at Corinthian College. She’s right, and I’m sorry to have brought all that up again.
I wrote those critiques of the debt buyback program, which seemed politically murky to me. But the Corinthian actions are totally admirable. Corinthian is a chain of crappy for-profit colleges that fleeced students for debt-financed tuition. It’s winding down now, under federal order. A group of 100 students, organized with the help of Strike Debt, is refusing to pay their federal loans, and are petitioning to have them forgiven because their degrees are worthless. They had a meeting with federal officials on Tuesday, who appear to be taking their position seriously, though we know how the bourgeois state sometimes pretends to listen and then does what it wants.
This is both good for the students and a good way to draw attention to these horrendous commercial colleges, which peddle worthless degrees financed with money borrowed from the government. Thanks to Strike Debt and the Corinthian 100 for getting it going, and I’m sorry I took so long to celebrate it.
Astra sent these links for more info:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/31/396585597/activists-stop-paying-their-student-loans
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2015/03/student-debt-strikers-grow-number-power/
http://time.com/money/3766049/corinthian-college-students-loan-debt/
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/why-these-students-are-refusing-pay-their-college-/nkjjY/
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
I know a guy who graduated from a Corinthian college in 2014. He thought that the curriculum and teachers were okay but the problem started when he entered the workforce. A year later, he still cannot find a full-time job in his field that offers around 40 hours per week.