99spring

Our very own Sarita Gupta sits down with Ai-jen Poo of National Domestic Workers Alliance on this weekend's Moyers & Company to discuss workers' rights, the 99% Spring, and the possibility for change through taking action together.

With fists in the air, the students silently marched towards 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue. Many even locking arms as they moved forward together. As we walked through the intersection together, I looked around me at the 300 students marching towards Sallie Mae to demand student loan debt forgiveness only days after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announce it had surpassed one trillion dollars.

The days leading up to this moment were spent at USSA’s 43rd Annual Grassroots Legislative Conference (LegCon) were the same students were attending workshops, Legislative Briefings, Lobby Clinics, and enjoying Awards Dinners. The workshops ranged from “Sallie Mae Sellouts: Taking Back Our Education” to “Radicalism in the Student Movement”, where students learned a history of action by the student movements before ours and how corporations have come to have such a large voice in our democracy. One of the recipients of an award being named after her skipped giving a speech altogether and instead just told the students: “Give ‘em hell.”

For months now, we have been asking Sallie Mae to meet with us to talk about the burden that student debt causes us and our communities. We’ve only heard silence in return.

Now we’re asking Albert Lord, Sallie Mae CEO, to step up and resolve this situation. We need to talk.

Hundreds of students marched to their DC office last October, only to be met by security and police officers. Rather than meet with the students, Sallie Mae employees were escorted out the backdoor by police as they looked at the ground rather than the students drowning in debt.