While many in our community post about how Caitlyn Jenner is so
courageous for transitioning, they are somehow blinded to seeing the
real heroes before them. Real courage is being the lone voice in
a room full of fake allies and still speaking up. Real courage is
putting your immigration status and life on the line to fight for your
immigrant trans sisters. Real courage is crashing a party at the White
House to demand liberation for your people.
I get that the point of the “germany is ashamed, America is not” rhetoric is contrast between an acknowledged genocide and an unacknowledged one, but it’s not fair to uphold germany as a good and just country that has learned from their “mistakes”
germany remains a ticking time bomb for jewish families, and families of color, as well, jewish or not. data shows a dramatic rise in antisemitic crime from 2013-2014. terrorist attacks against jewish centres and homes happen, in large scale and small. jewish children are terrified to go to school due to constant physical and verbal abuse, and a number of parents are transferring their kids to jewish-only institutions.
as far as people of color at large, many (white, protestant) germans have actually blamed the antisemitic violence on arab muslims, attempting to drive a wedge between races. meanwhile, islamophobia is on the rise, with racists regularly provoking muslims who protest their demonstrations peacefully.
if those examples aren’t vivid enough for you, let me just point out that my family emigrated from germany in 2003 because the tensions in our town had grown too scary for my dad to justify staying. someone tried to detonate a car bomb on my uncle the year before that.
don’t use my deeply broken country for your useless rhetoric without considering the context you’re actually speaking about.
The big thing we need to do here is distinguish between sounds and spelling. English speakers already know that their orthography is out to lunch, but Spanish has a reputation for having a logical, consistent, “phonetic” spelling system. Most of the time, that’s true (English vowels use 5-6 symbols to stand for ~14 sounds, for example, whereas Spanish has 5 vowel symbols and 5 vowel sounds), but for b and v it’s actually the opposite.
For the sake of clarity, I’m going to write “b” and “v” to refer to the letters in the conventional spellings of each language, and /b/ and /v/ to refer to the sounds as they’re represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
IPA uses /b/ to represent a bilabial stop - that’s a sound produced by fully closing (stopping up) the two lips (bilabial). And it uses /v/ to represent a labiodental fricative - that’s a sound produced by letting a tiny amount of air escape between (fricative) the lip (labio-) and teeth (dental). (And yes, technically you could make an equally etymologically correct labiodental stop using the top lips and bottom teeth, but languages don’t tend to do this, presumably because it’s incredibly awkward.)
When you call your loan servicer, they won’t treat you like shit anymore. They won’t threaten you or harass you or insist you pay half your paycheck to get out of default. Here is what I’ve experienced while dealing with defaulted government loans.
1. Find out who owns all your debts right now. It may be early enough that your most recent loan servicer could still be the owner. If it’s been over a few months, or years, it will be a collections agency or several agencies. Check your snail mail. Their policies usually dictate that they send paper mail. Once you find the collections agency, ask for “proof of debt.” By law, they must provide you proof that they own your debts so they can’t scam you.
2. Once you establish that this agency owns your debt, tell them that you can’t afford much but would like to “rehabilitate your loans.” This means you will make a payment for 9 consecutive months. The agency, by law, must use a government formula to figure out how much you pay each month. If you make around 40K, you will be asked to pay somewhere around $100-150/month. If you are unemployed, you can rehab for as little as $5 a month. Ask them to autodebit so you don’t accidentally miss a payment. If you miss one, your 9 months starts over.
3. Once you finish your 9 months, call the collections agency to make sure they won’t autodebit anymore. They will hand your debt back over to the loan servicer you worked with before they got the loan. Most likely, you have Great Lakes, Nelnet, Navient (formerly known as Sallie Mae), or one of these loan servicers. Then go to this studentloans.gov website and make an FSA ID and PW.
4. Begin a consolidation through the student loans website. The consolidation form will ask you to write in every loan. It might be on the website already, but checkthis
NSLDS.gov
siteto be sure. This website has an up-to-date account of all your outstanding loans. Consolidating is a tedious and boring process. Make sure you have a few hours free to do this.
5. When
you consolidate, the form requires you to fill out a payment plan. You want
an IBR plan, or Income Based Repayment Plan.
This plan will allow you to make minimal payments according to your income for 20-25 years. Then, the government will forgive your loan. Consider it 25-year mortgage for your college education. Also, the IBR will re-evaluate your income every year in order to adjust the monthly payment. If you lose your job, your monthly payment will reduce dramatically, and if you find a better paying job, you may have to pay a bit more.
6. Also while consolidating, you must choose which loan servicersyou’d like to work with. I
work with Nelnet. Nelnet was difficult to work with for years, like not allowing you to email in documents–only mail or fax.
You can email scanned documents to them now. Remember, you can download free scanning apps to use with your smartphone camera. Remember to keep a log of every time you call, whom you talked to, and what you talked about. This is an important lesson I learned while calling companies for my immigrant parents. Anyway, because of
government regulation, they are actually nice to you and available 24/7.They can’t pull their bullshit anymore because they use government
calculations. I’m sure it’s the same with all the other loan servicers. As I said before, I work with Nelnet, but it really doesn’t matter which one you choose.
7. When you finish with consolidation, wait a few days and call your loan servicer. Ask them if they’ve received the request for consolidation. Then, check in with them every week for the next six weeks to hear the status of the consolidation. They are not good about emailing you updates, i.e. never. I did my consolidation wrong the first time, and they just rejected it and never notified me. I found out when I made my weekly Monday night call. Had to fill out the damn form all over again. It’s finally been accepted.
8. They will then set up you up with an IBR plan. Your payments will most likely be the same as what you payed the collection agency because they’re using the same government calculator. Autodebit those payments.
This is all I know so far. This is far better than defaulting and having the government garnish your wages. And once you begin the IBR plan, there is an end in sight!
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ON PRIVATE LOANS:
I don’t know much about these, but I know private is much harder to deal with.
1. It’s not great to default with these loans either. Defaulting and declaring bankruptcy does NOT absolve you from the loan. Your wages can still be garnished if the collections agency sues you and wins.
2. If you make regular payments, the loan servicer will not settle your debt with you. Because they’d rather have your interest payments. If you default in order to settle with the collections agency who buys your debt, you’d better have enough cash to pay them off in one lump sum. They will bargain with you to get you to pay between 50-60% of your loan. If you own 100K, do you have 60K in disposable income? If so, you shouldn’t ruin your credit!
3. You can now refinance your loans! Due to new legislation (I think it’s Elizabeth Warren’s doing), you are allowed to consolidate all your private loans under one bank and get a lower, fixed interest rate. I’m willing to bet your interest rates are at 8% or higher. You can consolidate all these to under 5%, or even as low as 2%–the better your credit, the better your rate. I would consider perhaps working with the credit unions instead of a bank.
—
I hope this helps you. If you have any questions, please send me a message and I’ll do my best to help you figure it out.
thanks, Praise.
We’re most of us working people with little to no extra income. Purposefully defaulting on your loans only works if you can settle. Don’t listen to bourgeois debtors praising purposeful default as some sort of useful and progressive direct action. You will end up with garnished wages. The stories Praise and I hear are always the same.
It doesn’t make you less radical or something to fill out this shit paperwork and receive a long term IBR plan. The payments for us are low. We’ll never pay off the majority of our loans before they’re forgiven. I don’t do it because of some ridiculous principle. I do it because it’s better than having my wages garnished.
If you need further help, I know Praise will answer your asks. She’s kind of become an expert on this process. Send her a message. She’s super cool.
Timely
Also of note, once you’re on an IBRplan, you will need to re-file that paperwork every year to stay on that plan or start paying your loans back in full, so keep up with filing your taxes and doing your paperwork!
This is what’s happening in the #DominicanRepublic. This island is using black skin as a reason to deport Haitians & Dominican born blacks of Haitian decent who can’t prove lineage after 1929. Yes.. 1929! That’s how far they went back to get dark skinned people out of the country. Get on twitter. #DomincanRepublic #HaitianLivesMatter Spanish speaking Dominican born blacks being exiled.
VICE NEWS from VICE the HBO series was on the ground last night speaking with those at risk. They have made it hard for them to register and even if they do register they are not protected from being deported.
Hating an innocent person solely because of their race, sexuality, or gender makes you a fucking asshole
Just some actual daily reminders:
All white people do racist things without being aware they are
All straight people do homophobic things without being aware that they are.
All Cis people do transphobic things without being aware that they are.
All men do sexist things without being aware that they are.
Saying things like ‘some men’, ‘some cis people’ absolves the blame of individuals and only seeks to comfort those with privilege and power.
When a post says ‘some X’, the X will always assume that they are not because THEY ARE NOT AWARE.
And most importantly,
It’s calledmetonymy,when anyone who is oppressed makes an exasperated statement like ‘i hate straight people’, they are substituting straight people for the concept of a system and a culture that teaches, incentives, and legitimizes homophobic acts and normalizes homophobic acts so that straight people constantly do honophobic things without realizing it and that’s really fucking annoying.
And just as important,
The concept of sjws dehumanizes marginalized people and categorizes them as an ‘angry and emotional’ stereotype and only adds to the oppression of marginalized people under the guise of being ‘fair’, while the only thing you are doing is cushioning privileged people from their own ignorance and privilege.
Do you ever think about the fact that the US has created and legitimized a system of institutionalized inequality by funding schools through property taxes? That basically a child’s education is only as good as the value of the property in their neighborhood. Funny how education is so often viewed as an equalizing factor when there is nothing equal about it.
I really don’t care if I’ve already reblogged this
