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For Richard Castaldo, the fight to keep his home out of foreclosure is only the latest in a life that has been full of extraordinary challenges. When he was 17, Castaldo became one of the first students shot during the Columbine High School massacre. Now, he's turned to Occupy Los Angeles to overcome this latest obstacle:

Richard Castaldo has a bullet permanently lodged in his spine from when, at 17 years old, he was shot eight times by two peers at Columbine High School.

Castaldo and his friend, Rachel Scott, were sitting outside during their lunch break on April 20, 1999, when fellow students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began shooting. Richard and Rachel were the first students hit.

“They shot us both pretty much at the same time. It was all kind of one big spray,” Castaldo said.

He remembers waiting, bleeding for more than half an hour. Before help could arrive, Klebold and Harris returned.

“During that time I heard Rachel crying, and they came back and shot her in the head and I knew she was dead after that,” Castaldo said.

Confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life as a result of the shooting, Richard moved to Los Angeles five years ago to pursue a career in music, only to fall behind on mortgage payments for his condo.Now he hopes Occupy Los Angeles can help him find a way to stay in the city he now calls home.

“I feel like they’re really the only group that doesn’t have an ulterior motive,” said Castaldo, who admits he “should have known better” than to believe the value of his condominium would go up. Roughly 36,000 California housing units received a foreclosure filing in October, according to RealtyTrac.

Time may be running out for Castaldo, as the condo is set to be sold at auction on December 6. But given other successes Occupy groups have had saving homeowners threatened by foreclosure, he may still stand a chance. Over the summer, Occupy Our Homes -- an offshoot of the Occupy movement -- saved the home of a Minneapolis woman and helped another resident of that city resist foreclosure in the same month.

There's also The Home Defender's League who are quite successful at what they do, and they also have quite a few partner organizations -- some affiliated with the Occupy movement, some not -- even in California.

Richard won't be alone in this fight, and he's in good hands.

I'll update with any new developments.

When students take out loans to pay for graduate and undergraduate school, most of them probably don't think they'll still be strapped with debt in their 80s. But according to new research, senior citizens account for nearly half of student loan debt in the U.S. ($36.5 billion). Some of them are still paying off loans from early in life, while others took on more debt when they returned to school during middle age. For these Americans, a college degree resulted not in a successful career but in a lifetime of debt.

And as if it weren't hard enough to start a new career and make your student loan payments, colleges are now withholding transcripts from graduates in loan default and playing bill collector for the U.S. Department of Education:

The US Department of Education says only that it “encourages” colleges to withhold transcripts, a tactic which the department, in a letter to colleges, claims coldly “has resulted in numerous loan repayments.” But particularly in a time when the real unemployment rate is stuck at over 15 percent, or, if long term unemployed who have given up looking for work are included, at 22 percent, it seems not just heartless, but counter-productive for schools to block their own graduates from obtaining a document they need to move on to a higher degree or to get hired in their chosen field.

“It’s worse than indentured servitude,” says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. “With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.”

The growing tsunami of student loan defaults is more than a series of personal tragedies. It is killing the dream of many low-income students who saw college as the best chance to rise out of poverty, only to find that after borrowing heavily to pay for school, they cannot get the paper needed to document their accomplishments, cannot get a job and cannot even declare bankruptcy to escape their plight. Congress, after pocketing wads of bank lobbying cash, made it all but impossible to use bankruptcy to escape student loans, requiring a court finding of “undue hardship”—an almost impossibly high legal hurdle.

Last October, student loan debt topped the $1 trillion mark, easily surpassing the total credit card debt. Last year alone, as tuitions soared and scholarship aid plunged, college students borrowed a record $100 billion for tuition and expenses.

Anonymous released yet another video message today, this time his intended audience is the unemployed population in America.

Greetings Citizens of the United States,

We are Anonymous, We are all perfectly aware of the economic crises and job shortages in this country. We are aware that many of us are still without jobs and many have had to take lesser jobs for less pay outside of our chosen professions and educational training. We sympathize with you and your families and friends in this great time of need. We support you for you are also Anonymous. We are all one and the same and we are all in this together. We are all aware that our government and the corporate controlled media are lying to us about the actual number of unemployed Americans in this country. The numbers are skewed and the information that they feed to us, we the public is false. We are tired of telling them of what we need and what we have to have to keep our families and our communities together. Now is the time to show them.

On April First through the Fifteenth 2012, we are asking for every citizen to mail in and to fax our resume and job applications to the White House of United States and to our states Governor's office. Whether we are unemployed, under employed or unsatisfied in our current job placement, we are with you and are please to stand with you in this form of peaceful demonstration.

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