Tubularsock

Friday night Nov. 16th at the first anniversary of their eviction from Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street held a concert at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge nightclub.

The celebrity’s and local artists that performed donated their time and the performance was held as a “bailout for the 99 percent”. Nice.

Here is the concept:

Thousands of people are loosing their homes because of medical debt so Strike Debt (an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street Movement) are taking the money they acquire from these concerts and have begun erasing people’s medical debt by infiltrating the debt-collection industry. Sweet!

According to Fabien Tepper’s article in Yes! Magazine :

“The tactic is to buy private debt the same way collection companies do—on the debt market, at tiny fractions of its original worth—and then cancel it in hopes of freeing debtors from their piled-up medical bills. It is hoped that the action will bring debt servitude to the forefront of our national conversation.”

The concert raised more that $293,000.00 and because they will be buying discounted  debt they will be able to buy up 5.9 Million Dollars of debt! They will be able to bail-out nearly 4000 families.

It is interesting to note that 62% of all bankruptcies are directly caused by medical debt.

The Strike Debt movement emphasizes that they are NOT doing “charity” or “forgiveness” of debt but rather “solidarity and mutual aid.” Yates McKee, a Strike Debt organizer says, “We’re calling for this to be a political act of economic non-compliance, we are intentionally withdrawing our consent from this system.”

As Tubularsock sees it  ………… it is creative steps like this that will began to shift the system and Tubularsock hopes this is just the beginning.