US Government’s Student Loan Policies and Willful Corruption Violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On Thanksgiving morning in 2012, I was four years removed from acupuncture school. I had tried my best to build a thriving practice, but since I had graduated in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression, it was impossible. People were losing their jobs left and right. I had moved to North Carolina to marry my soulmate and the love of my life, whom I had dated in high school.

Business conditions in North Carolin were worse than they were in Arizona. It was now going to be even more difficult to build my practice and pay off these student loans. I was stressed out beyond belief. I had cried my eyes out, crying myself to sleep while praying to God, and having panic attacks because of my student loan debt and the growing realization that I was never going to be able to pay them back at the rate things were going.

Flashback 4 years for a moment:

My apartment in Tucson, Arizona was just down the street from the local Goodwill store. When I was still in college, that store wasn’t very busy. There were many cars on the streets, but not very many bikes. Around the time I graduated in late 2008, I noticed a couple of big changes. Suddenly, there was noticeably a bit less automobile traffic. There were suddenly a lot more adults riding bicycles on the streets. In talking to some of them, I found out that some had lost their cars due to repossession, and some were riding bikes to run errands because they could not afford gas anymore.

That local Goodwill store that hadn’t been very busy before, was now suddenly packed full all the time. Several of my patients from the school clinic who had followed me into my private practice were real estate agents. They went from being very successful to telling me that they had not sold a house in months, and could not afford my services anymore. Several of them even had to close down their offices and take other jobs. One 40-year veteran real estate agent that I knew didn’t sell a property for an entire year.

Flashback to Thanksgiving morning 2012:

I woke up and briefly chatted with my wife. However, I began to feel uncomfortable. My chest hurt. I felt a squeezing pain in my chest. My jaw began hurting. I noticed that my heart began beating out of rhythm. I went to the other room and grabbed my stethoscope. I listened to my heart briefly and heard it throwing premature ventricular contractions. That was odd. It had never happened before. I became very frightened. I took my blood pressure. It was very high – 165 / 110. It had never been high before. I began to feel nauseous.

I told my wife that these were heart attack symptoms and asked her to drive me to the ER. The hospital wasn’t that far away, and it would be better for her to drive me than for us to incur a $10,000 ambulance bill since I didn’t have insurance.

In the ER, I was lying on the gurney. A very nice middle-aged female doctor came in, tried to reassure me, and listened to my heart. A nurse started an IV. As the doctor began placing the ECG leads on my chest, she told me that I seemed to be very stressed out. She asked me why I was so stressed. I told her that I was an acupuncturist, that I had very high student loan debt, that because of the economy I hadn’t been able to build a successful enough practice to pay my other bills and my student loans, so I just paid my regular bills so I could actually live. I had to neglect my student loans. I told her that I was scared to death because of the debt.

Then, something unexpected happened. She looked around to make sure that none of her co-workers were around to hear her, and, as she continued placing the ECG leads on my chest, she leaned over and quietly confessed to me, with a worried look on her face, “I am too. There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to pay mine either, and I can’t sleep at night because of it.”

Fortunately, I wasn’t having a heart attack; I was just having a stress-induced panic attack, exacerbated by nerve conduction issues caused by some degenerated discs in my upper back. I survived, and thanks to my acupuncture skills and some good chiropractic treatment, I was able to shut down the intermittent heart attack symptoms, but only after five more trips to the ER over the next few months, to make sure they weren’t heart attacks either.

Think about that for a moment. One medical practitioner on the table, thinking he’s having a heart attack because of his student loans, while another tending to him was confessing to him that she’s also overcome by the exact same terror that she cannot pay her loans either.

We’re not millennial slackers who majored in philosophy or gender studies and then tried to welsh on our loans and pass them off to the public to pay them for us—the stereotype put forth by Republicans who are against any form of student loan debt relief. We are middle-aged, responsible adults, and well-respected medical professionals. We are terrified that we cannot pay our loans and that there is no escape through bankruptcy for us.

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Very recently, I began thinking that the American system of student loan debt is not only unfair, which I’ve known for a very long time, but it also has to be a violation of human rights. I began researching this, and I came across the UN Commission on Human Rights and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the UN, and member nations have agreed that these are rights that should be enjoyed by all citizens of all nations.

Now, you are probably thinking that surely the USA isn’t a serial violator of human rights. The nations that do that are far away banana republics run by dictators. Not so. In the course of my research, I discovered that the student loan debt system in the United States actually violates 14 of the 30 guaranteed human rights, and in my complaint to the United Nations, I very successfully proved, point by point, that what I was saying was true. The US is violating almost half of the human rights guaranteed by the UN Declaration on Human Rights by its draconian student loan policies, and below is a copy of my official complaint.

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My Official Complaint to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights

Student loan debt is a huge problem in the United States of America. First I will give you some of the pertinent facts about student loan debt in the United States:

There are currently about 45 million people in the United States who owe a whopping 1.6 Trillion dollars of student loan debt, mostly to the federal government, but some of this debt is private, which is owed to banks.
When student loans were originally created by President Lyndon B. Johnson, they were supposed to be interest-free, but interest was added later.
In 1978, the Bankruptcy Reform Act was passed, which made it more difficult to erase student loan debt in bankruptcy. Before, a debtor could have their debt eliminated in bankruptcy court at any time, but after the act was passed, a debtor had to wait at least 5 years to discharge their debt in bankruptcy.
In 1990, Congress passed the Crime Control Act, which lengthened the student loan bankruptcy waiting period from 5 to 7 years.
In 1991, the Higher Education Technical Amendment eliminated the statute of limitations from student loan debt.
In 1996, Congress passed the Debt Collection Improvement Act, which gave the US Department of Education the ability to offset social security payments to pay for defaulted student loans.
In 1998, amendments to the Higher Education Act made it nearly impossible to erase student loan debt in bankruptcy proceedings.
In 2005, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act passed, which eliminated bankruptcy discharge for private student loans. Current presidential candidate Joe Biden was a key person in getting this bill passed into law.
In 2005, In a US Supreme Court case (Lockhart vs. the Department of Education), the Supreme Court upheld the government’s ability to offset social security, disability, and retirement benefits to repay student loan debts.

As you can plainly see from this timeline, the government has been steadily “tightening the noose” around the necks of student loan borrowers since the 1970s. A good history of the tightening of bankruptcy restrictions around student loans is here.

Since that time, a perfect storm has been brewing in the student loan business:

It is now almost impossible to discharge student loan debt, except in the case of debtors who are “totally and permanently disabled”, or whose situation is deemed to be so hopeless that there is never any hope of them ever being able to pay the debt off. This is called the “undue hardship” requirement, and it is also almost impossible to meet this standard. I believe this is by design. You can read the ridiculous requirements of filing for total and permanent disability discharge here. One basically has to be paralyzed from the neck down or similarly permanently destroyed (practically dead) to have their student loans discharged by total and permanent disability.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the government essentially writes blank checks to students and colleges for student loans, to cover everything from books and tuition to living expenses. Colleges realized a long time ago that no one was holding them accountable and that they could raise tuition with impunity. As a result, tuition has skyrocketed. As you can see from the graphs included in this article, tuition has increased 1640% (as of 2017, when this article was written), since 1963, just before the Higher Education Act was passed. Notice also that private college tuition has greatly outpaced public college tuition.

Furthermore, many of these private colleges offer degrees that are of extremely dubious value, many of which will not result in gainful employment for most of the graduates of their program. The federal government had what they called a “gainful employment” rule, but the numbers used were greatly skewed in favor of the colleges, to keep the money rolling in despite most graduates of these schools never being able to earn a good living from the degree they received from these schools.

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Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos repealed that rule, no doubt because she is heavily invested in for-profit colleges and derives a significant portion of wealth from them. The “gainful employment rule” was unjustly terminated by DeVos. DeVos’ financial conflicts of interest should have disqualified her from holding this government position. Devos never did fully divest of these holdings that present conflicts of interest, and divesting of them can include giving them to a charity that she herself controls, or giving them to an adult child or relative. It was never divulged HOW or IF she actually did divest of these assets.

Furthermore, Secretary DeVos has demonstrated a very clear disregard for the law and for ethics. Secretary Devos was fined $100,000 for contempt of court, for her willful refusal to stop collecting student loan debts from former students who were defrauded by fraudulent schools. She, however, did not have to pay the fine. The government paid it for her. Unfortunately, this is very typical of US government corruption in this day and age.

Secretary DeVos has also taken steps to reduce the number of time students have to report being defrauded by a college, and also to reduce the amount of debt they can discharge due to such fraudulent activity.

So, you can very clearly see from the clear evidence presented thus far, that the US Government has willfully participated in fraud and deceit, and not only that, but it has taken steps to deny its citizens rights under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These rights are mostly being violated INDIRECTLY by the US government’s actions, but they are still being undeniably violated nonetheless.

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List of Universal Declaration of Human Rights being violated by the US government’s student loan policies and willful corruption:

Article 2

Under “other status” This is being violated by the status of student loan debtors as such.

Article 4

Student loan debtors are being treated as slaves, and are having their wages garnished. This infographic here has old information (the numbers are much larger and worse now) but it is still true. While it is not slavery or servitude in the old fashioned sense, it is indeed very much slavery nonetheless. The Brookings Institute reported that 80% of student loans will never be repaid, which works to enslave borrowers. Borrowers who defaulted on loans have actually been arrested and thrown in jail. This amounts to modern-day debtors’ prisons. The criminalization of student loan debt is a form of very real debt slavery.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. I believe that I have already demonstrated that this article is being violated constantly by the American system of student loan debt. Many debtors are now very seriously considering suicide, and some have already committed it due to the very real torture of being trapped in a debt that they know they can never repay. Articles here, here, here, and here tell the stories of people who have committed suicide to escape these loans and why they did it. They see it as the only means of escape from a very cruel system that has enslaved them. I believe that any sane or rational human being would agree that any system that is so terrifying as to cause those caught up in it to commit suicide at many times higher than the normal rate of the rest of the population is obviously a cruel, tortuous, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment, and most definitely in violation of Article 5.

Article 7

Equal protections under the law – Student loan debtors are being denied equal protections under the laws by not having the right to eliminate their debts in bankruptcy. The US Constitution also calls for equal protections under the laws under the 14th Amendment, which reads: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The typical argument given as to why student loan borrowers cannot discharge their loans in bankruptcy is because this is federal taxpayer money. Despite this, the federal government also loans money to farmers under FHA loans, Veterans under VA loans, and small businesses under SBA loans, among others. Yet all of these loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy proceedings, while student loans are not. Therefore, student loan borrowers do not enjoy equal protections under the laws, in violation of both the US Constitution and Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Furthermore, Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution calls for a “Uniform system of bankruptcies”. Student loan debtors are being denied this right because excepting their debt from bankruptcy is not “uniform”.

Article 9

No one shall be subject to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile. I have already demonstrated to this body in my comments and the articles linked under Article 4 that student loan debtors are being arbitrarily arrested in certain states where this is allowed. Many of these former students are sick and are unable to pay for their loans due to illness or the illness of a relative. People are now being arrested for student loan and other debts that they cannot pay. They are simply being arbitrarily arrested for being poor and unable to pay their debts, in very clear violation of Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Article 12

A student loan debt collection company made all of the personal information of student loan debtors it was working with completely accessible by the public. No doubt this company was working with the government or at least debt collection services, at least until it was busted for fraud. These leaks exposed the private information of student loan debtors to theft and free access by anyone who cared to access it, in very clear violation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are very clear attacks upon the privacy, correspondence, honor, and reputation of these student loan borrowers who had their info leaked, in very clear violation of article 12. Also attacks upon the honor and reputation are instances of many who are turning to sex work to pay for their student loans or tuition. These instances are documented in Article 22.

Article 16

The right to marry and start a family is not directly violated by the US government’s student loan policies, it is indirectly making it impossible or next to impossible for many student loan debtors to get married as potential suitors are avoiding student loan debtors en masse. This is causing a great deal of depression, anxiety, and loneliness for these poor debtors, who otherwise would have no problem getting married and starting a family. One in 8 people have had someone not date them because of their student loan debt, and 1 in 8 marriages fail because of student loan debt. That does not even count the many who can’t afford to have kids or get married because of their debt. This is very clearly, even if indirectly, preventing many from being able to exercise their right to marry and start a family, in direct violation of Article 16 of this document.

Article 17

Everyone has the right to own property. This right is being indirectly, albeit very effectively violated consistently by student loan debt policies of the US Government: Student loan debt makes the debt to income ratio much too high for most student loan debtors to ever be able to buy property, in very clear and direct violation of Article 17 of this document.

Article 22

The right to economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for dignity and free development of their personality. There are MANY college students and graduates (debtors) who are homeless right now due to student loan debt. Many are also going hungry and doing without food. This is no doubt in very clear violation of Article 22 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Additionally, many women are working in the sex trade and seeking “sugar daddies” out of necessity because of student loan debt. Many women are also becoming strippers to pay off their debt.

Article 23

The right to work. The US government and many state governments have made it illegal for people who have gotten behind on their student loan debts to work in fields that require a degree. Some states have even taken drivers’ licenses of student loan borrowers who cannot work, as if they weren’t in a bad enough situation already. Taking away their right to work or even drive is not only making a bad problem WORSE, but it is also in very clear violation of Article 23 of this Declaration. Workers with student loan debt can lose their job, too.

Article 24

The right to rest, leisure, and reasonable working hours. While the US government is not violating this article directly by any edict or law requiring student-loan debtors to work ridiculously long hours without rest, it is most definitely violating it indirectly by not allowing the discharge of student loan debts in bankruptcy. This causes many former students to feel that they have no choice but to take on three or four jobs in order to try and get ahead on their student loan debts. Putting student loan borrowers in a position where they cannot escape a debt without working multiple jobs is definitely violating this article, even if indirectly. Here is a story of a doctor who has to work 80 hours a week due to student loan debt.

Article 25

The right to an adequate standard of living – I believe that the news articles that I have referenced in earlier articles of the Declaration VERY CLEARLY demonstrate that this right is also being violated by the US Government’s extremely harsh and onerous student loan debt policies. MANY people are going hungry, working 2, 3, or even 4 jobs, and many are also homeless because of student loan debt, in very clear violation of Article 25 of the Declaration. Additionally, many have already committed suicide; many more are contemplating suicide, and many women are being forced to work in the sex trade in order to pay for either tuition or student loan debt, as documented in Article 22.

Article 26

Everyone has the right to an education. Isn’t this what this entire complaint is about? Most nations have free college as a public good. While most are not opposed to paying for college, due to corruption in the US, college has become extremely unaffordable and is coming with some very high non-monetary costs – a lifetime of debt, homelessness, and the need to work three or four jobs or do sex work to pay it off. This article says that “Technical and Professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” In the USA, nothing could be further from the truth, as I have already more than adequately demonstrated with numerous examples. People in the USA are being denied an education because they cannot afford it. Among other reasons, “expected family contributions” are so high that many cannot afford to pay them. This is a direct violation of Article 26 of this Declaration.

Article 28

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. It is abundantly clear and quite obvious that this is NOT the case in the USA because of student loan policies of the United States of America. Most of these rights are being violated very clearly by the US government.

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In addition to all of the above Declarations being flagrantly violated by the US government, there is a multitude of horror stories from people who have had their lives completely destroyed by this debt, which is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and, in most cases, will never be paid off.

Here is a web archive of stories from the residents of only one US state, Illinois. You can read the horror stories of people whose lives are being absolutely destroyed by this debt. The site operator has since taken down these letters/examples from the site, but they are still accessible through the above link to the web archive.

The US government’s answer to most of this is that they have “income-based repayment” plans. That is true that they do, however, they are 1) extremely difficult to navigate, and 2) inherently extremely corrupt. There are SCORES of people who have tried to have their loans discharged by participating in these plans who found out the hard way that what I am saying here is true, that the plans are nearly impossible to navigate and properly apply for, and they are so corrupt that they look for any little mistake as a reason to deny borrowers discharge when the time comes. Despite thinking they had fulfilled the requirements for student loan discharge, 147,000 people were denied discharge.

One subject matter expert in this field is Alan Collinge, founder of Student Loan Justice. He wrote a book on this subject entitled The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in US History and How We Can Fight Back. Alan has also appeared on 60 Minutes (top story), Fox News, Fox Business, CNBC, and many other TV news networks, and has written articles for The Hill, Forbes, The Good Men Project, and many other national and international newspapers and magazines. He is probably the most knowledgeable subject matter expert in this field. I strongly encourage you to contact him for information and validation that everything I am saying here is true.

Another excellent subject matter expert in this field is A. Wayne Johnson, who recently stepped down from the US Department of Education to run for Senate. He very publicly said that the US student loan system was “fundamentally broken,” and that “the laws have got to be re-written”. He was formerly in charge of the government’s entire portfolio of 1.5 TRILLION dollars of student loan debt. He is now saying that ALL student loan debt should be canceled. I would highly recommend getting in touch with him, as he is another subject matter expert in this field, and he was the one running the program until he quit because he discovered just how incredibly corrupt it is.

Thank you all very much for your active investigation of this matter, and for taking the time to look into it.

Sincerely,

Derek Williams
US Citizen and student loan debtor

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