Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Swamped

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New Orleans After Katrina

New Orleans After Katrina

In an article in the current New Scientist, it is reported that 85% of the world’s river deltas now regularly flood in ways that are catastrophic. Guess where most of the world’s population also live. I ran by the River Thames on a cold, dry day in London today and the water was four inches from the riverbank. There’s a higher wall on the north side of the river, but still. We’re swamped.

We’re swamped in debt. The banks are paying fines, finally. But they will write them off in some way and continue to make profits. No one went to jail.

In New York, students at Cooper Union are occupying a room at the top of their building in protest at the absurd practices of their administration. Having constructed an expensive new Engineering building without thinking how to pay for it, Cooper now wants to end its proud tradition of free education to pay some bank. A year ago Cooper tried to close down St Mark’s Books, the last great bookstore in New York for a few more dollars in rent that could be squeezed out of a nail salon or a pharmacy.

Thank heavens the students have principles because the administration tried to buy them off with an insipid deal whereby current students would not pay fees. As we saw in Quebec this past year, resistance is as moral protest against the principle of tuition fees. Or you end up where UK students are with fees having gone from £300 ($500) a year to £9000 ($15000) in five years.

All of these details were brought home to me today in long conversations with people struggling to deal with the way that the crisis has shaped their own lives. An editor confronting mediocre manuscripts atrociously copy-edited but knowing her own job depends on achieving her target. A couple wanting to develop careers and raise their children facing insuperable practical issues and deciding to separate. And so on. We all know far too many examples of this kind, where the professional and the personal collide to the loss of the people involved.

Which is why I keep insisting that the climate disaster is the piece that ties the case for the 99% together. We can’t go on like this or we’ll all be swamped.

 

Pop-Up Neoliberalism

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Welcome to the Olympic Park

I went today to see the Orbital, the monument by Anish Kapoor erected at the London Olympic Park. Or rather I didn’t because, as you can see above, people are not allowed in at the moment, while the majority of the site is being demolished and removed. What they suggest is going to the department store John Lewis to have a look from their windows. The whole place looked shabby and sad, leaving the Orbital as a memorial to pop-up neoliberalism.

I’ve been following the ArcelorMittal steel company that paid for the Orbital throughout a long-running strike in France, which has recently led to a recent showdown with the new Socialist government. However, almost all the UK media insisted that the Olympics were a grand triumph of Britishness and any such discussions were considered all but treason.

Get out to Stratford now and it’s not very uplifting. You can only dimly see the park through screens as you leave the station. You then have to walk through a branded shopping mall of the Prada/Hugo Boss variety. I went into one shop to get a pencil and, as I was just about the only person there, I got into a talk with the shop assistants. It turned out that these upscale segments were “pop-ups” and would be kept open only until Christmas Eve, when they would be taken down and all the staff would lose their jobs. Lovely timing, that. A nasty young manager, who obviously had a degree in marketing, came over to silence this unprofitable conversation between human beings. I went out to the back of the fancy shops and, sure enough, they were just jacked up boxes.

Pop up shops

The structure itself will disappear, as the Olympic site across the road already is doing, having ceased to be able to make a profit.

Not a hurricane, the end of the Olympic Park

Denied access to the park, I walked in the cold to try and get to see the Orbital. The architects had clearly thought about how to monetize even a sight of the place because the sidewalks were parapeted with little Berlin walls to prevent you from catching an unauthorized glimpse at 500 metres.

Nothing for you to see here

As you can see, a bit further down, the top of the wall was now lowered so you could see Mr Kapoor’s masterpiece. It’s a odd duck and no mistake.

Orbital by Anish Kapoor

Formally, it’s a mess with the extension from bottom left off into space on the right distracting and breaking the flow of the piece. It looks better from the other side, as I saw later from the train, but I couldn’t photograph through the glass. Even so, what is this? There’s a viewing platform on top of what looks like one of those terrifying circular exits to European car parks. The spectacle is, simply, the spectacle. Or was.

Except now that the tents have literally been folded, the view is of Stratford, an as-yet ungentrified part of the East End. Were you to get up to the top, you would see views like this if you looked east:

Stratford

Of course, you’re not supposed to look this way. You were to look at the Olympic Stadium next door, smaller than I expected, or best of all towards the skyline of the City of London, home of all the most egregious scams of neoliberalism from CDOs to LIBOR and who knows what else.

Kapoor claimed an affinity with Taitlin’s legendary Monument to the Third International. Hogwash. What it actually looks like is a folded-in combination of the characters for pounds, dollars and euros: £/ $/ €. So I suppose that in a way, it really was the most appropriate monument that there could have been.

The Climate Needs a Jubilee

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I’m on sabbatical. This is an academic practice giving faculty time to research, free from teaching and administration, every seventh year. It’s a Biblical injunction, commanding that the land should lie fallow every seventh year, transferred to the labor of learning. Every seventh sabbatical was a Jubilee.

According to Jubilee USA, who campaign for debt abolition, the Biblical text is wide-reaching:

In the Jubilee, there is release for those enslaved because of debts, a Sabbath rest for land and people, redistribution of lands lost because of debt, and a reordering of prices for land and labor based on proximity to the next Jubilee.

Reordering, redistribution and rest. The planet’s climate needs such a Jubilee.

Midland Beach, Staten Island, 11-25-12

So, lest we forget do some of the victims of its most recent episode, Hurricane Sandy. Astra, occupier and Rolling Jubilee member, describes how in Midland, Staten Island:

Electric and heat are back on, sure, but many homes are totally uninhabitable and mold a growing public health crisis, one that’s damaging the repairs people have managed to do. People’s stories of dealing with FEMA and other government agencies and insurance companies were devastating, each household trapped in a different bureaucratic tangle. You can only get a grant if you can’t qualify for a loan, and many can’t get either. People in tears recounting being reduced to sleeping in their cars, not having access to their meds, talking about what it is like to have lost everything, and the insult of being given a $1300 check, as if that could cover damages, and no other aid.

Debt as the solution to climate disaster is so mindless it would make you laugh if it wasn’t so stupid. Because when the debt has to be repaid, that will require financial growth and more carbon emissions, worsening the climate crisis. It’s apparent that real estate developers already have their eye on a disaster capitalism opportunity on the East Coast.

There’s a new calculus at work in neoliberal climate politics. The developed nations have decided to make the issue the responsibility of the climate-threatened world. Lord Stern, the British banker whose 2006 climate report suggested that maybe the Copenhagen conference in 2009 might take action, has changed his tune. Now he is saying:

Developing countries must take on the lion’s share of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, because of the “brutal arithmetic” of climate change.

That is to say, developing countries do now account for about half of global emissions. So the arithmetic of neo-liberal brutes like Stern means they must do most of the cutting. Per capita, nations like the US still claim far more than their fair share, however.

Furthermore, there’s a climate crisis because of the cumulative effect of two hundred and fifty years of emissions, not those of the last five. This is where the climate jubilee comes in. After five times fifty years without taking a rest from ruining land, running up debt and corroding the atmosphere, it’s past time.

Slowly even mainstream commentators are starting to realize that governments and representatives are not going to be the agents of the change, as here George Monbiot in the Guardian:

the struggle against climate change – and all the crises that now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy.

Yes, indeed. Disappointingly, though, the call in the article is for campaign finance reform, the change-free change that everyone pretends to agree on.

A climate jubilee would mean turning things off, reducing the work day, creating a living wage, debt abolition, land redistribution and sustainable agriculture. It’s not going to happen, you say. The same thing was said about the Rolling Jubilee. Let’s start to ask the more interesting question: how do we make it happen, 99% to 99%?

 

Resistance Across Borders

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After a hectic few days in the Schengen area, it’s clear that while the two clichés of life under globalized capital are still true, there’s something else happening too. The clichés are about the contrast between how easy it is for the beneficiaries of the financialized life to move around and how difficult it is for those from underdeveloped parts of the world who do much of the menial work that enables it. The new aspect is the growing worldwide resistance.

In Europe, it’s very much the case that for E.U. passport holders, borders are dissolving. Students at Strasbourg University in France can not only visit close-by universities in Switzerland and Germany, they can borrow books from their libraries and take them to what is technically a different country.

Less visible are those who keep the system functioning or have been excluded from it. I had excellent coffee this morning in a typically Parisian cafe run with exquisite politeness by a Vietnamese couple. On the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, once a by-word for working-class radicalism, there’s a Starbucks and the other signs of globalized homogeneity. In the Marais, still very much a queer/Jewish quartier when I was a student, it’s all upscale shopping and restaurants. Financialization has achieved what Baron Haussmann could not do in the nineteenth century and thoroughly exiled the dangerous and marginal classes from Paris. The average tourist might only catch a glimpse of the city’s diversity as they head for the Eurostar at Gare du Nord.

As part of that displacement, there are more barriers to the globalized knowledge system. Although tuition for a course at the Sorbonne is still only €250 ($320), the European university system is actively trying to become more hierarchical, exemplified by all the paywalls around journals and even newspapers. When you get into the National Library, it feels like getting into a fortress, after you press your passcard on multiple readers, go through many sets of double metal doors, through repeated turnstiles and down several escalators. OK, we get it.

So far, so familiar. What I did also see was the ways in which a resistance is forming that is aware of its differences and distinct histories but also has a good deal in common. I had a long discussion last night with activists in the Debt Group of Réel Démocratie Maintenant, formerly the Indignés. Although some French people had been saying the movement was over, the group showed me some dramatic video footage of movement people working with peasants and green activists to defend a rural occupation against some very violent police. I heard about actions to create a Cahiers de doléances, or Dossier of Grievances, and to establish an Estates-General. These are legacies from the revolution of 1789, reconfigured for the era of financialization. At the same time, they are planning a Europe-wide protest against police violence and its attempt to stifle opposition.

Because just like Spain, just like the UK and of course the US, debt is a driving issue in the French movement. They are more involved with institutional politics than we are and there was some hope caused by the election of Socialist majorities and a Socialist president. However, last week, the government made it clear that they were not going to nationalize the steel furnaces at Florange owned by ArcelorMittal that I’ve often discussed here, where there have been occupations and other militant actions. The company itself refused to bid for the European Ultra Low Carbon steel initiative, as if to say that there’s nothing they will do.

And that passivity by government and disdain by corporations is producing a backlash. The French media this morning were filled with disdain for the pathetic UN climate convention meeting in Doha, Qatar. To put the matter in perspective, the world’s at risk island and developing nations were asking the richer countries for an already-promised $60 billion of support for adaptation. This is equal to the amount President Obama has requested to clean up Hurricane Sandy. No worthwhile steps of any kind were taken to deal with climate change itself, with nations moving on to consider who pays for “loss and damage.” Contrary to some Anglophone media reports, I don’t consider this a win.

If there’s going to be change, it’s going to come from the movements forcing the issue, working together across borders and being aware of the need to prioritize the planetary aspects of the issue. It’s a tall order but I do see very concrete and material signs of that convergence emerging, as people come to realize that 2008 not only bankrupted the banks, it also derailed the Western representative system.

Debt, Haiti and Jubilee

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Whoever called Paris the city of light definitely wasn’t here on a wet Friday in December like today. You felt you were barely able to wake up. In the subterranean depths of the National Library, I time travelled to 1826 when France imposed an indemnity on Haiti for having declared itself independent. And from those old papers you could begin to sense how the free republic tweaked the nose of the old slavers and monarchists. You could also perceive how the modern debt system was from its beginnings a racialized tool of domination.

Haiti became free in 1804. There’s a few documents available that record the moment, like this text of the declaration of independence:

France did not recognize the new Republic and continued to hope that it might regain its old colony. By 1826, it was clear that this would never happen. Haitians had been free for a generation and what one French colonist called “the magic of slavery” no longer worked.

In return for accepting Haiti’s independence, France demanded an indemnity of 150 million livres, the old monarchist money. However, the true believers in colonial slavery were incensed. They valued their property in the former Saint-Domingue, including human property, at no less than four billion livres so this sum seemed derisory. A pamphlet and newspaper war began, sounding for all the world like Fox News, declaring that a war could easily be won in Haiti, slavery restored and the plantations reopened.

There are dozens of such documents in the National Library. They tell another story as well, one of the post-revolutionary debts of the old slavers, unable to get their hands on the indemnity because their creditors claimed it first or because bailiffs intervened.

Against that, there’s so little from Haiti but what remains is eloquent in its own way. Haiti passed a law in February 1826 accepting the indemnity as a national debt. There are two clauses to the law, which I was able to read today. Above was Haiti’s new coat of arms, which displayed powerful cannon suggesting that the country would defend its motto “Liberty or Death,” and replaced the fetishized cash crops, like sugar and coffee, with a splendid palm tree.

The law declared:

Article One

The indemnity of 150 million pounds consented to France in exchange for the full and entire recognition of the independence of Haiti, is recognized as national debt

Art II

The President of Haiti will take measures which his wisdom will suggest to him to liberate the nation from this debt.

So although the French portrayed the indemnity as compensation for the wrongful abolition of slavery, the Haitians presented it as a contractual exchange for the full and entire recognition of their independence.

And where the French law required an extensive 27 member commission to decide what to do with the indemnity, Haiti devoted one line to the not very important question of repayment. In the first year, they borrowed the money from France to repay to France. For the next two years nothing was repaid. French royalists worried out loud about the possibility that they might refuse to pay it.

Working on that fear, President Boyer (below) had the indemnity reduced to 90 million.

But it was not all détournement and bluff. To repay the debt, Boyer had to establish a national bank of Haiti in 1826 and he compelled the subalterns to do forced labor to raise money.

But the implied leisure of Haiti’s emblem, the palm tree, was not lost on the colonists. The racist diatribes in 1826 against the formerly enslaved, accusing them of living in “indolence,” doing nothing but dance the bamboula, sleep in the sun, and eat tropical fruit prefigures both Carlyle’s widely-cited discourse against the emancipated of 1846–and of course the much desired “holiday in paradise” now sold to Northerners. What an irony: the tropical island depends for its hard currency on the former slave owners’ fantasy of the life of liberated slaves.

At Bowdoin College that same year of 1826, the second African-American to graduate from college gave the commencement address about Haiti. John B. Russwurm did not mention the debt. He was jubilant:

Can we conceive of anything which can cheer the desponding spirit, can reanimate and stimulate it to put everything to the hazard? Liberty can do this. Such were its effects upon the Haitians—men who in slavery showed neither spirit nor genius: but when Liberty, when once Freedom struck their astonished ears, they became new creatures, stepped forth as men, and showed to the world, that though slavery may benumb, it cannot entirely destroy our faculties. Such men were Toussaint L’Ouverture, Desalines and Christophe!

Such jubilant theory was exactly what the former colonists feared. They thought it meant the end of slavery and the Caribbean colonies and it did. Boyer thought he could turn the debt to his advantage and not overly burden his new nation in so doing. If he did not succeed in doing so, it was largely because the new imperialist era of the nineteenth century saw exactly what a threat Haiti had become.

Jubilant Theory

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Today was a work day at the University of Strasbourg. Over the past several months of giving talks, I have become accustomed to a certain routine. The organizer goes into a certain amount of detail as to why they are not sure how many people will attend. Their anxiety is two-fold. My academic work is not located in a specific discipline and it connects to the movement. Then we go in and find that far more people than expected have turned up and they then proceed to ask a great deal of questions. The organizers are then relieved and delighted.

That was the pattern here today, where I gave a talk showing how the research I have done on visuality requires an engagement with political practice. I then talk about a variety of militant visual culture research projects, ending with Strike Debt. It was a tad challenging because I had to do this in French, which is hard but not too bad. And then there were questions. If you read the above paragraph you will see the drawback. I got 75 minutes of questions, in French obviously.

What was interesting was that, for all that people downplay “French theory,” I was asked detailed questions about my relationship to Marxism, Autonomia, Situationism, Rancière and postcolonial theory. The mood in the room was far from as serious as this might sound because we had covered the Jubilee. Although the debt jubilee was new to this audience, the concept of jubilation might not have been so much.

Yesterday I bought a book called Postanarchism explained to my grandmother by Michel Onfray–at the station bookstall of all places, try getting something similar in Penn Station. Onfray has a rather dazzling list of the different aspects of anarchism that compose his concept of postanarchism, including

the right to jubilation…thinking of theory as the product of action.

Although I don’t really think I am a postanarchist, or that Strike Debt would be considered as such, who cares? But I prefer simply Jubilant Theory. What happens with Jubilant Theory is this engagement that people feel with the project that makes them even though they don’t know who I am and helps them enjoy what they hear.

One person said to me that they had never heard what they called un grand universitaire americain–a big-deal American professor–talk about engagement and political practice. Perhaps that’s just a measure of who gets invited. Or perhaps it’s an indication of one way to make the often-disparaged humanities more popular with the current precarious generation of students: to speak to their situation and offer something positive to do about it.

Riding the Rails

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The Occupy 2012 Road Trip has come to France via high-speed rail. You can get from London to Paris in two and a half hours now. Well, you can get from Calais to Paris pretty fast, and the Brits don’t delay you that much. Why is this impossible in the US, I thought? Why did the Republicans manage to delete all the high-speed rail from the stimulus and why did the Democrats let them get away with it? The train was packed, as was the link to Strasbourg, also high speed, which gets you from Paris to 30 kilometres from the German border in two hours.

Like most people I know, I really like trains. I was sitting there looking out of the window, ready to give Europe a boost, when I saw something that I don’t think I’ve seen in Western Europe before: a full-blown shanty-town. If you live in, or have traveled to, a developing country you’ll know what I mean. Informal housing, not officially connected to services, constructed out of sheets of corrugated aluminum (aluminium UK readers). The settlement was on the steep slope of a railway siding, so most of the structures must get soaked whenever it rains or snows by the runoff. And it was snowing. After London, it didn’t feel that cold out, but not so that you would want to sleep in one of those places.

As I was taking this in, I looked down at the journal I was reading, a very interesting collection of essays on race, colonialism and debt in the current American Quarterly (mostly paywalled but with a useful online resources section here) {PS American Quarterly, check out Strike Debt!!} Many of the essays show how the foreclosure disaster was particularly visited on African-American and Latina/o households, who were targeted for sub-prime high interest rate mortgages.

From there I went to thinking about China Miéville’s recent wonderful oddity Railsea [spoiler alert!!] The novel at first seems to be a reworking of Moby-Dick set on an alternative Earth where humans ride everywhere on railways–the rails, as they call them–and Captains of special trains pursue particular monstrous animals, known as their Philosophy. But we hit an alternative loop and go in search of the end of the Railsea. Without giving away too much, it turns out that the whole reason this railway world exists, with all its poisonous soil, abandoned materials from another world, mutant creatures and other foibles, was to pay off debt.

When I got off the rails, I was at once impressed by the apparent comfort and prosperity of Strasbourg, home to the European parliament, a body that is routinely steam-rollered by the Troika but apparently makes a nice living at it. I mentioned this to my anarcho-communist hosts. Oh no, they said. The city just puts all the “dangerous people” (their ironic quotes, meaning migrants, the dispossessed and so on) outside the centre of the city.

The Revival of British Elitism

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When I arrived in Britain, I wrote about feeling certain resonances with past and present struggles here and elsewhere. I have to say that, now I’ve been here longer, those echoes are harder to hear as I get accustomed to the din of the present.

It’s not that things are going so well. The neoliberal government has admitted that its own austerity policy, supposedly designed to reduce state debt, has in fact added £150 billion ($240 bn) to borrowing requirements. As ever, this is advanced as evidence for more cuts in benefits and state institutions.

It seems that the present version of Thatcherism has decided it needs only one of the original two driving forces. Thatcher was devoted to ending the post-1945 settlement, in which redistribution of wealth funded state health, education and retirement programs. The current government is, as Stuart Hall pointed out, far more radical in its ambitions in this area than even the Iron Lady.

The other side to Thatcherism Mark 1 was a resentment from the free-market radicals that they might get into the elite universities or top tier institutions but still not be One of Them. Thatcher cultivated an aggressive cultural politics against such exclusivity, not on the grounds of cultural quality but of free-market access. That has been binned altogether.

The current plump, white, smug and entitled faces of the government are almost parodically upper-class twit of the year, but their palpable sense of entitlement to run the place (into the ground) is just as noticeable.

George Osborne

London is awash with public schoolchildren (meaning private in that UK-way) wearing uniforms and already manifesting the first realization that they are going to get to be in charge.

Last night I went to a panel on the best books of the year organized by the Guardian, in fact actually in the Guardian building, which is just around the corner from the British Library. Both the audience and the panel were white, mostly middle-aged and formidable. Perfectly formed, media-ready paragraphs dropped from each person in turn. Every book was “exquisitely written” and “utterly compelling” but no book of last year apparently had anything at all to say about the political and economic crisis.

One young person did venture to ask a question as to whether e-books–widely disparaged on the panel–did not have the advantage of being cheaper. He has a point. UK books other than mass-market paperbacks are expensive, unless you get them on Amazon–but as the target was the Kindle, what’s the difference? Nonetheless,  he was mown down by the cultural institutions: E-books were “perfectly fine for pornography” (BBC), incompatible with “Literature” (Guardian) and just plain wrong (Independent).

I’m sure all these people are appalled by the government and are personally lovely. Not that I have the slightest interest in a Thatcherite culture of monetary value but to watch the cultural consensus swing into action like that was indicative of how the long-standing hierarchies of class objectified as “taste” have restored themselves.

The top ten per cent, especially in London and the South-East, are pulling away from the rest of the country. They own about 50% of the country’s wealth, a massive 850 times greater than the lowest ten per cent. The professional class, who are mostly losing ground in the US. are part of this overall rise but cannot keep up with the wealthiest. In the very top of top one per cent, according to MP Michael Meacher,

The increase in wealth of this richest 1,000 [households] has been £315bn over the last 15 years

Meanwhile about 10% of the country is using payday loans to get by with effective interest rates of 300%.

The Occupy movement in the UK has had its difficulties. Even the current issue of the excellent Occupied Times sees the movement as “splintered and isolated.” Certainly my British friends and family have been, to put it mildly, skeptical about my involvement. The word “crazy” was liberally used by one colleague last week. Nonetheless, it seems to this outsider that the UK needs a radical movement more than ever. More follows.

Climate Change Makes Growth Makes Debt

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For some time, I have been asserting that climate change, debt and official growth figures are linked. New reports on the macro and micro levels show that the increase in climate-change-generating emissions is the same as that of global growth. Added together, they equal the figure for the increase in global debt.

Emissions are the correlative of “growth.” But now we can see that they combine to generate debt in excess of both, requiring yet more “growth” to pay back the debt. Which causes more emissions, but never enough growth to recuperate the debt. The practical results are those the new Strike Debt report on Hurricane Sandy clearly shows: climate disaster makes profit for certain sectors by debt financing. Nothing is solved, everything gets worse.

Start with climate. A new report on CO2 emissions this year shows continuing bad news:

Data show that global CO2 emissions in 2012 hit 35.6bn tonnes, a 2.6% increase from 2011 and 58% above 1990 levels.

While this is a slight decline from 2011, emissions levels are running far ahead of any possible chance to restrict climate change to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels–if you think this year was bad, remember we’re not even half way to 2 degrees yet.

Interestingly, global growth levels are exactly the same according to current reports:

Global GDP growth is now expected to expand by an estimated 2.6% in 2012, very close to the global recession threshold of 2.5% and well below the long-term average growth rate of 3.5%. However, the forecast for worldwide GDP in 2013 is 3.2% growth.

So the “growth” we have is in fact experienced, as we all know, as recession in all but name. It now precisely mirrors carbon emissions, demonstrating statistically what I and many others have been saying: you cannot grow your way out of this financial crisis because it still further destroys the biosphere. Yet I did not realize that growth and emissions were in such lock-step.

Here’s the kicker: debt levels are rising at the aggregate of growth plus carbon emissions, as the end of year statements are showing:

Overall global debt capital markets activity totaled US$4.2 trillion during the first nine months of 2012, a 4% increase from the comparable period in 2011. Bolstered by a resurgent corporate debt market, third quarter global debt activity totaled US$1.3 trillion.

Climate change plus growth thus equals debt: minus a percentage point for losses caused by climate disasters. So here’s how it works: climate disaster generates more borrowing, which produces weak “growth,” because the disasters also cause huge personal losses.

I’m aware that “adding” emissions figures to fiscal growth is not real mathematics. Nonetheless, the comparison is striking and the realization that debt is outpacing growth two to one, even as emissions accelerate, is the definition of a no-win situation. As long as the economy is thus predicated on generating debt, we will have low growth and high carbon emissions.

The “micro” example comes from New York City, where residents are learning the hard way that FEMA is just another loan agency. All people wanting FEMA support are required to apply for loans. A new report from Strike Debt called “Who Pays for Sandy?” highlights the difficulties behind the apparent “assistance” being offered:

[the] application is reported to be at least thirty pages long. Applicants are reporting that the forms are difficult to complete, because flooding destroyed much of the required paperwork.

Nor are the loans so great when you get them. Interest rates are determined by credit scores and the ceiling on loan amounts is not very high. Nonetheless FEMA loaned about $6 billion after Katrina, with expectations post-Sandy being for much greater amounts.

As Strike Debt puts it:

By only offering loans to already struggling homeowners, FEMA and the SBA shift the burden of disaster to individuals and send profit to the loan servicers.

In short, climate change disaster generates debt creating growth. But it’s the debt that will be the highest number and the longest legacy.

I

The Future of Occupy 2012

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It’s somehow December already and this project will not cross another change of month. After more than 325 posts, the end is in sight. So what’s next? Some ideas are in development and for others I thought I might ask you, the occupiers of 2012, what you think.

Already under construction is a web-based archive of the project using the Scalar multi-media software that I’ve mentioned a few times here. This will allow for better searching of the project and will have built-in “paths” tracking twenty keywords that have come up repeatedly, that allowing readers to track specific themes. And it will also serve as an archive of the project, whether for those in the movement, those interested in performative projects of this kind, or digital activists.

Perhaps that’s enough? But I’ve also had the thought of doing a book based on the two dominant ideas that have emerged during the course of the project. One of these is clearly debt and the emergence of the Strike Debt movement. Debt took me by surprise. I didn’t expect to be writing about it much in January. But once I did write about it, I noticed how people responded and that interest was part of the reason for my participation in Strike Debt.

The other area is all those issues now summarized by “climate”–climate change, food justice, primary extraction from mining to fracking, and the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. Here the process was reversed. I expected to develop ideas about climate, but at first found that there was not as much interest. Since the hurricane, that has dramatically changed. As occupiers will know, I’ve been interacting these themes as “climate/debt” and I would do so in any book.

I imagine a short book with a selection of key posts and some of the longer essays that I’ve written elsewhere during the course of the year on climate/debt, together with a general introduction. If there was any money that came my way, I would of course donate it to the movement.

Why a book? Because of the obvious impact that The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual had as a book. The online archive will be there for everyone, always free. A book can go other places and attract different sorts of attention, perhaps create different forms of debate.

But there have been past controversies around books in the movement. I’d be curious to know what people think. Is this a good idea? Do you want to tweak what might go into the book and how?

Finally, what of the future? There’s going to be a movement in 2013. That wasn’t necessarily clear in January. I can’t possibly sustain another durational writing project. Should I carry on with occasional pieces in this format? Post in a different way? Or just stop altogether?

I would love to hear your thoughts by whatever means you feel comfortable with: please know that I am genuinely asking because, whatever else this project is, it was always for you, the occupiers, and the only opinion that counts to me is yours. With love.