Occupy Wall St's Rolling Jubilee!

This is such a brilliant idea. Occupy Wall St's Jubilee idea is to use donated funds to buy up poorly performing debts - which can be done for pennies in the dollar. Then they just forgive the debt. They call it a Rolling Jubilee (http://rollingjubilee.org/).

In America Banks sell debts which are bought up by debt collectors who then extort money from the debtor. A little bit of money goes a long way. With $50k they can buy $1 million worth of debt and forgive it. 

As well as the website there is a YouTube video:

One of the organisers, David Rees, also has his own blog How to Sharpen Pencils, and he describes how in the test run they used $500 to buy up $14,000 worth of debt, and just forgave it. There is a fund-raising event on 15 Nov which will be streamed on rollingjubilee.org.

The industrialised world is heavily over-burdened with debt. It is sucking the life out of our economies. We desperately need a debt forgiveness program - a Modern Debt Jubilee. I have been advocating Steve Keen's version of this, but it assumes that the government will face up to the private debt problem. The fact is that if we wait for the UK government to do something about private debt we'll probably die waiting. The government is deep in denial about private debt and have no policy to deal with it. So we need to help ourselves and this Rolling Jubilee idea is an excellent approach to it.

If you are American I urge you to donate money to this project. It doesn't have to be a huge amount, a lot of little amounts will do the job. $1 of debt costs around 4c to buy. So $1 buys ~ $28 of debt.

I will help promote & donate money to a UK version of this if someone will organise it.