Union Perspectives

Can the Bernie Sanders supporters multitask and hit the 1 percent on many fronts at once? Like wage inequality and single payer healthcare, labor rights, climate change and school debt. Let’s take the criminal interests being charged on student debt. There are 5 million student debt holders. What if they took the skills and knowledge they have and used it in the Sanders’ campaign to build a list of student debt holders, and then using this list to demand the right to bargain with the Department of Education and the banks to reduce or eliminate this debt, or they could just refuse to pay any more on the debts. There are groups out there trying to achieve the same thing, but it doesn’t appear their tactics are working. So maybe it’s time these institutions felt the Bern. Those fighting against student debt could look at what the group leading the FightFor$15 has done and follow their lead or look to how 2,000 doctors have come together to fight for single-payer healthcare under Sanders....

Wage inequality, which has led to flat family incomes and has led to $115 billion in federal loans for college. These college loans equal $7 million in student loan defaults and this in turn had led to a new industry which feeds off student loan debt. The companies are debt collectors who make calls for government contracted debt collectors. The companies making these calls are just one part of a system feeding on federal student loans. There are also debt services, refinance lender firms that help former students avoid defaulting on their loans and for profit schools that makes money as borrowers try to repay more than $1.2 trillion in government backed education debts. The beneficiaries of the loan programs are for the most part not the students, they are companies like debt services like Affiliated Computer Services Inc. Now part of Xerox Corporation and Education Management Corporation, which operates for for-profit colleges and whose largest shareholder is Goldman Sachs Group In...