accomplishment of getting hospitals to forgive millions of dollars in emergency fees. Their current mission is to help people out with their student loans. The group’s Strike Debt initiative announced on Wednesday that it has cleared $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 forgiving that money rather than collecting it. The group can’t buy into the country’s $1.2 trillion in student loans because it is backed by the government, but it can tackle private student debt. In total, the group spent about $100,000 to purchase the $3.8 million in debt belonging to 2,700 people. The funds were taken from a pool of about $700,000 raised through events in the last few years. The loans had been taken to attend Everest College, which is run by Corinthian Colleges, one of the country’s largest for-profit education companies that has been in legal trouble lately. Following a number of federal investigations, the college group told investors this summer that it plans to sell or close its 107 campuses due to financial problems, potentially leaving its 74,000 students. “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. This week, 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. If the lawsuit ends in CFPB’s favor, the debt Occupy bought and eliminated would be forgiven anyway. Kent Jenkins, spokesman for Corinthian Colleges, said the school stands by their “high-quality” education. He said that their graduation and job rates are higher than other community colleges. Of course, it is impossible to get rid of the whole country’s student loans and medical debt so Strike Debt will focus on The Debt Collective, a new platform that will bring debtors together to negotiate debt with creditors. “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.”
Rich Man, Poor Man The United States added more than 2.3 million jobs in 2013, the most in any year since 2005. Despite this, income levels and poverty rates did not improve in most of the United States last year, according to recently released figures from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
In News 8.6% of workers were unemployed, the sixth highest rate nationally, while 19.4% of households relied on food stamps, the second highest rate.
Where Rude Drivers Rule The only thing that makes rude driving behaviors worse than rude table manners is that it can be extremely dangerous as well. Weaving in and out of traffic on a busy highway, speeding, not signaling before turning, and blasting your horn are all characteristics of offensive road behavior.
driving behaviors. According to the survey, if you like respectful roadways, stay away from the following states: Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware and Vermont. Massachusetts, Wyoming, New York, and District of Columbia came in at the top five, with Idaho leading the nation with the country’s rudest drivers. Are they drunk on potatoes? Readers also ranked the rudest behaviors. 47% said the rudest habit is when drivers talk on their cell phones while driving, 37% ranked tailgating as the rudest, 35% said not signaling is the worst behavior, 28% feel weaving in and out of lanes earns the rudest title, and 26% say driving too fast is the worst.
Home Depot Credit Cards Hacked While many American households continue to struggle to make ends meet, those in the richest states continued to earn far more than households in the poorest states. Maryland was the wealthiest state in the U.S. again last year, with a median income of $72,483. Mississippi, in turn, was yet again America’s poorest state, with a median income of just $37,963. States with relatively low median incomes typically had poverty rates that were much higher than the national rate. In fact, all but one of the nation’s 10 poorest states also had the 10 highest poverty rates. Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, had a poverty rate of 24% last year, the highest in the nation. By comparison, when surveyed, 15.8% of Americans said they lived below the poverty line at some point in the last 12 months. So what are the nation’s richest states? Connecticut is the United States’ fifth richest state. The median household income is $67,098 and only 10.7% live below the poverty line, the nation’s fourth lowest. Hawaii came in fourth; New Jersey, with a median household income of $70,165, came in third; Alaska came in second; and Maryland, with a median household income of $72,483, came in as the richest state in the nation. Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia, and Arkansas were among the poorest states in the nation. Mississippi, with a median household income of $37,963, is the poorest state in the United States. No state had a higher poverty rate than Mississippi, where more than 24% of people lived below the poverty line. Last year,
Insure.com surveyed 2,000 licensed drivers nationwide to determine which cities are the guiltiest of these offensive
You may want to use cash when shopping at Home Depot. On Thursday, Home Depot Inc. announced that some 56 million payment cards were likely compromised in a cyber-attack at its stores, suggesting the hacking attack at
T H E J E W I S H H O M E n S E P T E M B E R 2 3 , 2014
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