Marking the third anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the group's Strike Debt initiative announced Wednesday it has abolished $3.8 million worth of private student loan debt since January. It said it has been buying the debts for pennies on the dollar from debt collectors, and then simply forgiving that money rather than trying to collect it.
In total, the group spent a little more than $100,000 to purchase the $3.8 million in debt.
While the group is unable to purchase the majority of the country's $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt because it is backed by the federal government, private student debt is fair game.
Related: U.S. government to Corinthian Colleges: Forgive $500 million in student loans
This debt Occupy bought belonged to 2,700 people who had taken out private student loans to attend Everest College, which is run by Corinthian Colleges. Occupy zeroed in on Everest because Corinthian Colleges is one of the country's largest for-profit education companies and has been in serious legal hot water lately.
Following a number of federal investigations, the college told investors this summer that it plans to sell or close its 107 campuses due to financial problems -- potentially leaving its 74,000 students in a lurch.
"Despite Corinthian's dire financial straits, checkered past, and history of lying to and misleading vulnerable students, tens of thousands of people may still be liable for the loans they have incurred while playing by the rules and trying to get an education," a Strike Debt member said in an email.
Then on Tuesday, the company was hit with a lawsuit from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over allegations of predatory lending practices. The lawsuit demanded that Corinthian forgive the more than $500 million in outstanding student loan debt that its students had incurred since 2011. Should the court rule in the CFPB's favor, that means the debt Occupy bought and abolished would have been forgiven anyway.
Related: States, federal government cracking down on for-profit colleges
Corinthian Colleges spokesman Kent Jenkins said the school stands by the "high-quality" education its students have received and disputes the CFPB's allegations. He noted that Corinthian's default rate is lower than other community colleges and its graduation and job placement rates are higher.
Levia Welch, 32, enrolled at Everest College in January of last year. She had been struggling to find a job without a high school diploma or GED, so she signed up for an 8-month career training and GED preparation program at Everest. She took out several loans to pay for the program, and as it came to an end, she says administrators told her she wouldn't be able to get a GED unless she stayed in the program longer -- which meant taking out even more loans.
Related: 40 million Americans now have student loan debt
Eventually she gave up, saying the classes weren't helpful and were just putting her deeper into debt. She dropped out in May with nearly $18,000 in debt, spread out between four or five loans. She paid off one small loan of $636 while she was still in the program, and she has been looking for jobs so that she can pay the rest off. But without a GED, finding an employer to hire her has been tough.
"I just wanted to move forward in life but I didn't get that," she said. "I feel like I'm a victim."
Then, last week, she received a letter from Strike Debt saying it had abolished one of her loans of $669. While this means she still owes more than $16,000 in federal and private loans, the letter was a nice surprise.
Related: Big protests are coming to Hong Kong's financial district
The money Strike Debt uses to buy debts comes from a pool of about $700,000 it has received through fundraising events over the past few years. Before starting on student loan debt, the group abolished more than $15 million worth of emergency room bills for thousands of people.
Because the group realizes that abolishing all of the country's student loan and medical debt would be an impossible task, it is turning its attentions to a new platform called The Debt Collective as a way to bring debtors together so they can negotiate debts with creditors -- or refuse to pay them entirely.
"Debt is the tie that binds the 99%, whether you are a student delinquent on your student loans or a parent struggling to pay healthcare bills," Strike Debt member Ann Larson said in a statement. "Being forced into debt for basic social services is a systemic problem."
"Fox & Friends" host Elisabeth Hasselbeck took to Twitter on Tuesday to compare the controversy over the NFL's handling of domestic abuse cases and the White House's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya.
"Imagine if everyone that asked for transparency in the #nfl @nfl Demanded that same #transparency in our #government #Benghazi," Hasselbeck wrote on Twitter.
Hasselbeck's tweet comes amid calls for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to resign over his response to the domestic abuse cases involving former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, and a day before the House Select Committee on Benghazi’s first open hearing.
Hasselbeck, who left "The View" to join Fox News in 2013, has a personal interest in both. She is married to former NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, now an ESPN analyst.
Goodell's wife, Jane Skinner, was an anchor for Fox News from 1998 to 2010.
Fox News has been criticized for what some call an obsession with placing the blame for Benghazi on the Obama administration. According to a study conducted by liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Fox News' primetime lineup ran 1,098 segments on Benghazi in the first 20 months following the attacks, including 281 segments alleging a "coverup" by the Obama administration.
Later, Hasselbeck responded to one critic who said the insertion of Benghazi was "ridiculous."
Hasselbeck is not the only "Fox & Friends" host to stir controversy while weighing in on the NFL's domestic abuse problem.
Last week, her co-hosts, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy, joked about a lesson to be learned from the video showing Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious in an elevator.
"I think the message is, take the stairs," Kilmeade said during a discussion of the video.
"The message is, when you're in an elevator, there are cameras," co-host Steve Doocy added.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Cuts to the nation's food stamp program enacted this year are only affecting four states, far from the sweeping overhaul that Republicans had pushed, an Associated Press review has found.
As a result, it's unclear whether the law will realize the estimated $8.6 billion in savings over 10 years that the GOP had advertised.
A farm bill signed by President Barack Obama in February attempted to save money by scaling back what lawmakers called a loophole in the food stamp program that entitles low-income families to more food aid if they participate in a federal heating assistance program. States were giving some people as little as $1 a year in heating assistance so they could get more food aid. It's called "heat and eat."
Among the 16 states that allow the practice or some form of it, 12 governors have taken steps to avoid the food stamp cuts.
"Government's role is to help people help themselves, and these steps are necessary to help our most vulnerable residents and families meet their most basic needs," Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said when he announced his state's move earlier this year.
The farm bill was held up for more than two years as conservatives insisted on cutting the nation's food stamp program, which now serves 1 in 7 Americans at a cost of around $80 billion a year. The roughly 1 percent cut was a compromise between Republicans who had hoped for far larger cuts and Democrats who didn't want to see any cuts at all.
The states' workaround — mostly by Democratic governors — has infuriated Republicans who pushed the cuts. In March, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the states' moves "fraud." House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., have asked the Obama administration to "hold states accountable" for dodging the cuts.
The governors say they are following the law while preserving crucial benefits for their neediest citizens.
The new law says that people can't get the higher food benefits unless they receive more than $20 a year in heating assistance, which lawmakers hoped would be too expensive for states to pay. But the governors in 12 states and the mayor of the District of Columbia have said they will find a way. Most will use federal heating assistance dollars. At least one state, California, will use its own money.
As of now, the cuts will only affect Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey and New Hampshire. All but New Hampshire have Republican governors.
There are about 1.8 million households that receive food stamps in those four states, out of almost 23 million households nationwide.
It's unclear how many people will be affected. Officials in Wisconsin, New Jersey and New Hampshire said they don't track that number. Michigan officials say around 20 percent of the state's recipients, or around 170,000 households, participated in the "heat and eat" program and will see cuts.
Bob Wheaton, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Human Services, says the state didn't want to "create a new loophole even beyond the loophole that previously existed" and draw down federal heating benefits for others in the cold-weather state. He said the average decrease will be around $76 a month for a family of four, starting in November. That amount varies by state.
Terry Smith, director of New Hampshire's family assistance programs, said his state's decision "was not to deplete an already tenuous LIHEAP allocation in our state and take needed heat from people."
LIHEAP is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and it is paid to states as federal grants each year. New Hampshire did not give recipients $1 payments but did allow a LIHEAP application to qualify them for higher food benefits. The farm bill's change in policy will discontinue that practice.
The states that are using that federal heating assistance money to avoid the food stamp cuts say they believe they can do it without significantly reducing heating aid to others who need it, even without more money from the federal government. Peter Merrill, the deputy director of MaineHousing, says he estimates that maintaining the food stamp benefits will only reduce federal heating assistance payments to Maine residents by about $4 a year on average.
In Washington state, residents will see food stamp benefits reduced briefly, in November and December, due to a backlog in getting their computer systems running. A spokeswoman for the governor said the state will reinstate the higher heating assistance payments in January, once the backlog clears, and 200,000 households will see their benefits go back up.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans say the states' decisions don't mean the farm bill cuts are obliterated. A GOP memo from the House Agriculture Committee staff notes that some states may reverse their decisions to avoid the cuts, especially as current recipients move off the rolls. And the Congressional Budget Office, which figures out how much bills cost, accounted for some states bowing out when coming up with its $8.6 billion estimate over 10 years. But the CBO hasn't said whether it accounted for high-population states like California, New York and Pennsylvania maintaining the higher food stamp benefits.
Other states that have dodged the cuts are Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Pat Baker of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, an advocacy group that focuses on poverty issues, says the "heat and eat" recipients are often elderly or disabled, sometimes living in apartments where utilities are included but the rent is higher. "This would be a significant loss in nutrition benefits to the lowest-income and neediest residents," she says.
