This time, it’s different.

Since the beginning of the Rolling Jubilee campaign, we’ve wanted to buy and abolish student debt. But most student loans are guaranteed by the federal government, and so they are not available for purchase.

As part of our effort to buy private, unsecured student loans, we talked to Doug St. Peters, the Vice President of Portfolio Management at Sallie Mae, who packages that company’s debt into securities and sells your loans on the secondary market. He confirmed that Sallie Mae does sell its private loans to two large debt buying companies.

He would not name names, and he refused to sell us any of these portfolios when he learned that we intended to abolish the debt.

According to St. Peters, private Sallie Mae loans are sold for as little as 15 cents on the dollar. We repeat: a Vice President at Sallie Mae confirmed that they sell private loans for 15 cents on the dollar.

One goal of the Rolling Jubilee campaign has been to educate ourselves and others about how little our debts are actually worth to the creditors who control our lives. If you have a private Sallie Mae loan, you should know that it may be sold at pennies on the dollar, even as the lender and debt collectors demand full payment, plus interest, from you.

Though we were not able to purchase Sallie Mae loans, we have had some success with other portfolios, and we think those who have been petitioning us to buy student debt will be pleased with the results. We will share all of the details on September 17.

This will not be our last debt buy announcement. We are committed to spending all the funds donated to Rolling Jubilee to purchase and abolish debt. But we are also joining with others to develop long-term plans. Buying and abolishing debt is a powerful but limited tactic, and collective action is needed to address the systemic economic problems that force people into debt for basic needs like education.

Join the Movement

On September 17 we will launch a campaign to amplify ongoing protests against the privatization of our colleges and universities. Our latest debt buy is also an opportunity to promote the common-sense solutions that are being ignored by elected officials from, such as making all 2- and 4-year public colleges tuition free.

We encourage students around the country to join us on the week of September 17 by holding a rally or a debt assembly on your campus. You can learn more about how to host an assembly here. You can also read about a debt assembly held earlier this year by students at Southern Illinois University here.

As always, to our friends and families, we owe you everything. To the financial establishment of the world, we owe you nothing.

Originally published by Strike Debt


- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/september-17-rolling-jubilee-will-buy-back-%E2%80%93-and-abolish-%E2%80%93-student-debt#sthash.eanot7TC.dpuf

by Lori Rotenberk (A re-post from Grist, A Beacon in the Smog; a wonderful newsletter you should subscribe to)

Last week, watching kids frolic at a playground from the window of his home office, Liam Heneghan tweeted:

A professor of environmental science at Chicago’s DePaul University, Heneghan recently started teaching a seminar called the Ecology of Childhood. Working from a list of the 100 most popular children’s books, including classics like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?, Heneghan explains that although they weren’t written with ecology in mind, the books are goldmines for environmental meanderings. More, they offer “the most gentle and loving way” to teach kids about the havoc humans are wreaking on nature.

While environmental literature began surfacing first in the 1960s and again the ’80s, titles are becoming more abundant under topics such as climate change. They don’t, however, “offer the subtlety and beauty” found in those written for the purpose of story.

What is happening environmentally is “hugely and profoundly depressing,” Heneghan says. “It’s not going to be productive to depress children with the full magnitude of the disasters we have inflicted on the world.”

Heneghan, born in Dublin, is much a child himself. He has a penchant for tooting on his tin whistle in a local cemetery, “playing for the dead,” and using his beard as a pencil holder in the classroom. He’s penned essays about the ecological lessons of Winnie-the-Pooh and killing animals in the name of science. He is currently authoring a book on environmental education for children, called Beasts at Bedtime.

Oddly creative, Heneghan’s studies range from things “unseen” such as soil mites, to better ways of disposing of human poop than mingling it with water systems. “The bear, you might recall, shits on the forest floor,” he says.

In his seminar, Heneghan uses long beloved children’s books such asCharlotte’s Web, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and Where the Wild Things Are as foundations for students in both environmental studies and in the School of Education.

Just as important as the content is the presentation, he says. “The last thing you want to do is turn something precious and carefree into a pedagogical exercise. The idea would not be, ‘Let’s close the book and talk about nutrient cycling.’ We can’t be profoundly gloomy.”

Instead, Heneghan says we must help children fall in love with nature. It helps, he says, to find a way back in our own minds to the gorgeous habitats our imaginations invented as youngsters. Then simply pass that appreciation on to children through play and hikes and all things nature – and a classic story or two.

Timothy Morton, an environmental philosopher who teaches at Rice University and author of Ecology Without Nature says, “We need more Liams,” as society is going through a massive shift in how humans relate to non-humans, from climate to microbes. “Some deep thinking is needed to get us over the speed bumps,” Morton says.

While pointing out that he’s not the first person to realize the environmental themes running through early children’s books, Heneghan says that there’s increasing interest in developing environmental curriculum for young children. The right books, he adds, are right under our noses.

Here are some of his favorites:

·       The Hobbit

·       The Rainbow Fish

·       The Giving Tree

·       Corduroy    

·       Bridge to Terabithia

·       Charlotte’s Web

·       Grimm’s Fairy Tales

·       Where the Wild Things Are

·       The Giver

·       The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Lori Rotenberk is a Chicago-based journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Chicago Wilderness Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is also also wild about nature. Follow her on Twitter.

Here's what the environmental philosopher Tim Morton (whose books are profiled elsewhere in this blog), says about Liam...

FRIDAY, AUGUST 8, 2014

We Need More Liams Good for Liam Heneghan.

When interviewed I also said that I was sure that Liam wasn't teaching these sorts of books because they were simplistic. Rather, he's teaching them because unlike self-censored “adult” literature, they contain all kinds of ecological awareness. That kind of awareness translates into sentimental kitsch in most “adult” eyes.

Yet in an ecological age, when there is no one proper scale from which to examine or judge things, all art falls into the uncanny valley of kitsch...as I'm arguing in Dark Ecology. 

Posted by Timothy Morton at 1:35 PM 

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2014/08/we-need-more-liams.html?

Liam Heneghan blogs at: 10thingswrongwithenvironmentalthought.blogspot.com/

George Monbiot, The Guardian, Tuesday 5 August 2014 16.05 EDT

To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe.What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Read more of this powerful essay by George Monbiot at the Guardian