Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Gender and Democracy After Sandy

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How do we now adapt to the climate-changed world that Sandy has woken us up to? Do we continue to militarize the world and talk of “hard” or “soft” options, in a country where hard means tough means masculine means good? And crucially who gets to decide? Early signs are troubling.

Rockaways one week after.

Since the storm swept into New York City, a long-frustrated lobby for the construction of a sea-barrier has seen its chance. Touting the $10 billion cost against the $50 billion the storm has supposedly cost, the barrier is presented as a “hard” option that will keep the water out. Except that it will do nothing for the barrier islands that suffered most. And if sea level rise is anything like what has been predicted, then even these barriers will be over-topped if and when a full-blown hurricane hits the region.

Alternatives have been proposed, such as the restoration of wetlands, the natural barrier to storms. We might try and restore shellfish like oysters to New York Harbor, where they used to grow in their millions, as a form of living reef. We can soften the waterfront with wetter and more absorptive environments. And we might have to stop living on the barrier islands, at least on a permanent year-round basis. That might make for cleaner water and beaches.

According to a widely-quoted geologist named Robert Young, however, in the United States:

Retreat is a dirty word.

Why designate a sensible life-protecting and ecological decision as a retreat? Why make the urban decision into a war?

In a long piece in today’s New York Times, the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman offers storm-destroyed communities a choice of futures but also unspecified responsibilities. It’s hard to see what this means in practice, as the costs involved in restoring services and roads are far beyond the reach of increases in local taxation, which is what I take “responsibilities” to mean.

As he thinks this through, Kimmelman gets more and more concerned. He starts thinking about Robert Moses, whose brutalizing pro-auto policies did so much to damage New York and against whom Jane Jacobs campaigned. Kimmelman notes:

His biographer Robert Caro wrote in the 1970s that Moses “bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works,” albeit “left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required.”

“The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting,” Mr. Caro added, “is one which democracy has not yet solved.”

And it still hasn’t.

And out of the eye of the storm, which we were told so often did not discriminate, returns the spectre of Plato and his hatred of democracy.

In fact, the storm has mixed things up in an interesting way. Occupiers have been in discussion with cops and firefighters in Staten Island. National Guard have worked alongside community groups and FEMA has been notably receptive to comment. A democracy is happening. People haven’t had time to get to what’s next. I’ve heard every kind of idea from rebuild to retire or restart the urban idea altogether. There’s no consensus yet. Anyone looked at our supposed leaders, unable to agree on what day it is?

And yet for some, the new normal is just like the old normal, the white guys get to call the shots, pretend its a war and declare themselves winners. What do you expect from a country that still has gladiators?

 

How to Go Viral

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It looks as if the Rolling Jubilee idea has gone viral. The signs are all there: lots of donations, groups all over the country, and even internationally, looking to follow suit.

Here’s a group in Long Island planning to occupy a local Dickens Festival with a debtor’s prison to raise awareness and funds for the RJ. And the infallible sign is the emergence of the trolls all over the Internet lining up to say why it won’t work.

It can seem in the mediascape that ideas simply go viral because people agree with them. Being involved in a viral event shows me how untrue that notably free-market idea in fact turns out to be. Here’s what you need: a network, a theory of what you’re doing, a grounded history and a great deal of specific action.

Obviously Occupy has a network. But it took months of meetings, assemblies, discussions and one-on-one conversations for the movement as a whole to get behind Strike Debt as an accepted group. There was considerable “pushback,” even after the successful days of action on S17 and O13. At this point, the strength of the Jubilee idea did make the difference. But launched cold, as it were, Occupy would not have backed it and there would not have been the first wave of “invisible” acceptance and dissemination. Because so many people in the movement are what advertising types call opinion shapers, this first wave was crucial.

Next, the directors had access to a media and entertainment network that brought in sufficient star-power that the event was desirable just as a night out, regardless of the cause. And then David Rees chose to launch the event on his blog. From that point, his many followers tweeted and FBed the concept, allowing it to take off in the way we’ve seen, Today the fundraising passed $350,000 or $7 million in abolished debt. That’s over 7 times the most optimistic target set by the RJ group.

Rolling Jubilee won over these opinion formers and influence generators because it had a strong sense of what it was doing and why. The concept is clean and clear. It’s backed with a history that goes back to the Bible and brought in a whole range of faith communities into the project. The research of George Caffentzis and David Graeber over many years set up the possibility for Strike Debt to generate its a historically grounded and theoretically powerful analysis of debt refusal. The publication of the book length Debt Resistors Operations Manual successfully conveyed that the group really does know what it’s talking about.

And then there’s the work. Websites don’t create themselves and organizing and publicizing a three-hour event in New York is a full-time job in itself. Press and media. Flyers, posters, social media. And then the very detailed preparation of the debt buy itself, the unpublicized trial run to be sure it would really work. Consultations with lawyers, debt buyers and accountants. Creating the 501 (c) 4 to be the legal entity. Writing copy for the website, the FB pages, the speed talks. Liaising with other groups to create the crucial first room of the Bailout with a diverse range of Occupy groups. It was the most prodigious amount of purely voluntary work I’ve ever seen from a relatively small group.

And then, when it gets launched, as if by magic, it goes viral. Enter the trolls, who assume that, because they have not been carefully coached on all the above, that none of it happened. Ironically, in this irony-obsessed culture, the appearance of the trolls confirms the importance of the meme. Trolls choose popular things to attack and their carping indicates what is trending by negative differentiation. I especially love all the posts that begin INAL (I am Not a Lawyer) and then go on to make legal rulings about the RJ. Newsflash: we consulted lawyers.

We’ve created a successful counter to the debt system. Now we have no time to congratulate ourselves, we have to try and use this momentum to create a movement.

 

Debt and Disaster

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Since the Rolling Jubilee happened, I’ve been looking for a chance to post the prepared text on debt and disaster that I didn’t exactly deliver at the event. Today was a travel day back from Puerto Rico to New York so here it is:

Tonight, even as we jubilate, we remember the victims of Hurricane Sandy from  Haiti to Jamaica, New Jersey, State Island, Breezy Point, the Rockaways and Long Island. We do so because we know that the debt crisis and the climate disaster are both caused by the insatiable greed of the one percent. Just as debt destroys livelihoods, so does the climate disaster destroy life itself. To strike debt is to save the climate.

Every time capital puts itself in circulation it hopes to make a profit. We know that without fail it adds to the deficit in the biosphere and that is destroying human and non-human life. It has been working on this deficit for two hundred and fifty years. We, the 99%, declare capitalism past due on its climate debt.

We know too that in the planetary disaster there is still inequality. We who live in the historically developed world have benefited from a grossly dispropotionate share of carbon emissions. We too owe a climate debt: to the plurality of the planet’s population who live on less than $2 a day. We must decolonize the atmosphere so that they can claim the right to existence.

We know that abolishing climate debt means abolishing monetary debt. Capital creates money by making debt. Our labor pays it off. This is called “growth.” Our incomes do not grow. But carbon emissions always rise. More growth to pay off the sea of debt means flooding like Sandy every year, everywhere. We can’t afford to pay off the debt. Instead, tonight we abolish it.

I really hope that this message doesn’t get lost in the face of the invasion of Gaza. Insofar as there has been a rational thread to Israel’s policy in the Occupied Territories, it has been in significant part about control of natural resources, especially water.

On the other hand, what is happening now seems to represent a deliberate refusal of rationality. It’s a reverse of MAD–Mutually Assured Destruction–that dominated Cold War politics. The idea was that because both sides would be destroyed in a war, it would be insane to start one. Israel now seems to say: “we will act out in any way that makes us feel better, irrationally, angrily and violently.” Netanyahu decided to call Obama and as usual the latter blinked.

I’m so tired of making this kind of analysis of Israel, whether it’s accurate or not. I just want them to stop, to leave the territories and just be a small, unimportant country dealing with desertification, drought and sea-level rise. And, yes, I used to call myself Jewish until they ruined that for me too.

Decolonial Memory and Climate Debt

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I’m in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the American Studies Conference. While this is perhaps the most progressive, even radical, academic event, it’s heartening to hear how many people have heard of the Rolling Jubilee. And how many love it. At the same time, as ever, it’s useful to look back at our situation from the decolonial perspective. The realization follows that New York is just another North Atlantic island with many of the same problems as places like Puerto Rico or Martinique.

Outside the hotel, the sea comes right the way up to the building here in Condado. Trucked in sand tries to hold it back but where the main hotels are here, there’s somewhere between twenty and thirty years before it floods. Barrier islands are no longer places to live.

On a panel about Caribbean environmental politics, two familiar themes emerged. First, zones of flooding and poverty tend to coincide and diminish the social agency of those who live there. If, as urban ethnographers have argued, you can think of cities as bodies, they also have embodied memories that are revealed at times of crisis. In this sense, they occupy themselves by making visible what needs to be done.

In Martinique, we learned, environmental activists have no issue with seeing the resonances between the current attempts to use carcinogenic pesticides, turn uninhabited beaches into hotels or mangrove swamps to shopping centers and the colonial past, including slavery. In fact, the presentation began with the monument at Anse Diamant to enslaved Africans drowned off the coast of the island.

Anse Caffard. Martinique

The figures are white because that is the color of death in West Africa from where the enslaved probably came. They look forever at the place where the ship went down and, in traditional African belief, the departed would have traveled from there via the underwater world of the spirits to an eventual return to Africa.

On the island today, activists visualize two classes: the béké, or the descendants of the slave-owners and colonists, who control all economic activity; and the people or the Martiniquais. Here is the divide between the one per cent and the 99% in the decolonial context. By decolonial, I mean that the formal colonization is over and yet the influence of the colonizers and their allies is still dominant.

The next point was more thought provoking still. Although groups like Assaupamar, for the preservation of Martinique’s culture and ecology, use the slogan Pays-nous (our country), they also recognize that, whether of African or European descent, they are not the original inhabitants. They stress a politics of responsibility rather than ownership, which the béké class do not–perhaps cannot–recognize.

I know there are many differences but I am also struck by these similarities. Coalitions of the 99% seeking to work past historical differences against a common perception that it is not possible to have the one per cent recognize what is said. Highly racialized cities, with clear segregation that overlaps the flood zones. Remember that people of color were moved to the Far Rockaways in the first place to make way for Lincoln Center so the one per cent could go to the opera.

If we are to acknowledge the realities of climate debt, we have to provincialize New York and see that it is just another flood-prone former colonial port with a race and class problem. Wall Street was the site of a slave market and a wall to keep out the indigenous. The material practices have changed but there are clear resonances that we have to learn to hear. There has been so much discussion of the memories evoked by the boardwalks destroyed in Jersey and the Rockaways. We need to listen more closely.

 

The Rolling Jubilee

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A year to the day after the eviction of Occupy Wall Street, the Rolling Jubilee–in conjunction with Occupy Sandy–put paid to the notion that it all ended on that day last year. It was a distinctively Occupy event with music, comedy, speed talks, radical nuns, great art, awesome social media. And it was obvious that it’s a year later: with a cause, with a direct action that was also a symbolic action, one that was engaged with by hundreds of thousands of people. Now that the confetti has settled, the event has raised just shy of $300,000 which abolishes nearly $6 million in debt.

When I got to Le Poisson Rouge, the venue on Bleecker Street that so kindly hosted the event, at 5.30 there was already a queue for an event that was supposed to start at 8. Inside we launched into a frantic round of rewrites as the show’s director, filmmaker Astra Taylor, decided that many of the speed talks were too long and too preachy. Written texts were thrown away and material was committed to memory or radically reshaped. Very Occupy.

Before we felt ready, the first act appeared in the audience, playing Brecht-style  versions of New Orleans brass band music, which reminded me of a long-lost UK band called the Happy End, benefit regulars in the London of the 1980s. And then I realized this event was so unlike those benefits. Instead of a crowd of mostly quite drunk, mostly young men demanding to see the band, this diverse, mostly quite stoned crowd were very mellow. They listened with good humor and even enthusiasm to the revamped talks. In fact, I saw quite a few people happily leaving before the A-list stars were on, clearly having got what they came for: a collective experience of mutual aid and debt resistance.

On Flavorwire, Judy Berman captured the feel very well, after talking about the surprising emotion she felt after filling out one of our “Hello! My Debt Is” nametags:

What I experienced after I filled out my name tag and stuck it among the others on a wall of personal debt made the night about much more than rare performances. There was something of Zuccotti Park in the air, with handwritten financial horror stories blown up to poster size and stuck on the wall of LPR’s bar area, as Occupy-related organizations tabled and handed out flyers.

She called it the “best telethon ever,” and I would have to agree.

Lizz Winstead and David Rees at the social media desk

The real hub of the evening was the social media operation. From four laptops, the tech team co-ordinated the Rolling Jubilee website, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, live-streaming and the email account. It was amazing to watch. The Facebook page achieved over 700,000 views. Tweets were running too fast for my phone to keep up. It was from this interface that the donations were raised and, according to those reading, many heartbreaking stories accompanied them. Not a few people gave a dollar because it was all they could afford but they wanted to be part of it anyway.

I had the job of talking about climate, debt and Sandy in two minutes or less, cut to 90 seconds at the last minute. I have to say, if you’re going to give a talk, do have Janeane Garofolo go on first, she warms the audience up amazingly. Seriously, I was gratified by what seemed to be serious attention after two hours of the event and others confirmed my impression. At least in New York, I do have a feeling that the climate debate is over–or more exactly, it’s changed to what it should always have been: how do we live sustainably from now on? It was a little nerve-wracking standing in the wings but on the stage it was easy to feel how supportive the audience were. When Occupy legend Amin Husain talked about Occupy Sandy, you could have heard a pin drop.

Jeff Magnum at the RJ (right)

Soon afterwards, that was really not the case, with Jeff Magnum ending the show on a blistering high note. I was probably the only person in the room who had not heard his work before to judge from the intense attention, and I have to say, he was totally excellent. Although the song going around my head all day was an old Woody Guthrie number that Strike Debt activist David Backer found and set to music

I’ve got more debt than I can ever pay/

More money than I’ll ever see

Piñata!

The evening concluded with a wonderfully anarchic breaking of a piñata, shaped like the Wall Street bull and clouds of glitter and candy filled the room.

Why was this such as success? Because the idea was brilliant. Because people are so tired of being asked for money by every political cause and having nothing to show for it. Because the 20: 1 multiplier of gift to redeemed debt was so exciting. Because it allowed people to talk openly about their own debt and not feel ashamed. Because it shows up the debt system for the rigged scam that it is and brilliantly revealed how simple the alternative could be: a socialized buy-out at 5%. Even with $11 trillion of debt out there, it’s a lot of money but it’s less than the Wall Street bailouts. $550 billion to abolish all debt.

With love to: Astra, Laura, Winter, Yates, Rosa L., Amin, Thomas, Anne, Matt, Aaron, Shyam, Stephanie, Crux, Pam, Sue, Nicole, Mike,  Andrew, Zola, David G, David B, Leina, Bre, Christina, Christopher, Suzanne, Chris, Jim, Jerry, and everyone else in Strike Debt.

 

 

Why I Strike Debt

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On a warm summer’s day this May, I found myself standing in Washington Square Park telling a crowd of strangers something that I’ve never told any of my friends or colleagues. I’m an apparently successful New York professional type. And I’m way in debt. Credit cards and mortgage. The appurtenances of the career, travel to conferences and the like, combined with falling for the housing hype, mean that in all likelihood my finances will balance only when I die. It was a very emotional moment. It’s a Strike Debt Assembly and it’s become the basis of a new political movement.

Strike Debt is an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street. We think of debt as the tie that binds the 99%, whereas for the one per cent it’s just another way to make money. From the assemblies around New York, Strike Debt has developed affiliates in Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Tampa and even the United Kingdom to name just a few. The campaign isn’t six months old yet. I’ve been in a play, given talks, been hoisted on a fellow campaigner’s shoulders outside the Plaza Hotel, done jail support, casseroled, researched, written, attended dozens of meetings and read more emails than you would believe possible.

All of this has happened because people spontaneously and clearly understand the way that debt has become a system of domination. There are reams of statistics but few come to Strike Debt looking to be convinced. They want to resist. Many are resisting already. The movement gained impetus from the passionate debt resistance in Montréal, making red squares and casserole marches the early features of Strike Debt.

But we’ve learned an enormous amount about debt and how it works. The key revelation for me is that debt is how the present financial system creates money. This is why a lender can make a profit, even if a borrower defaults on 90% of their loan, because that 10% is money that did not exist before. In short, none of this is real. In nineteenth century terminology, debt is a phantasmagoria, translated today into zombie capitalism.

Over the summer, a plan of action came together that we have put into practice. The Debt Resistors Operations Manual was collectively written and produced in six weeks, giving debtors key information about how to understand, negotiate and ultimately resist their debt. The Manual, usually known as the DROM in the campaign, made Strike Debt seem real and significant. In a purportedly digital age, there’s still nothing to beat placing a book in someone’s hands: for free.

The debt assembly became the debt burn: people would speak about their debt, as I did, and then burn it, using a bill or invoice. This gesture is powerfully cathartic and radicalizing. It set the way for two days of direct action, known in movement parlance as S17 and O13. September 17 was the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Strike Debt organized the debt zone of the storm around Wall Street and held empowering actions in and around JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Emblem Health, Standard and Poor’s and other key institutions of the debt system.

October 13 was a global day of noise in which a key theme for European participants was debt resistance. Strike Debt put out a joint statement with Réelle Démocratie Maintenant (Paris), Auditoria Ciudadana de la Deuda (Spain/15M), and the Global Spring (Portugal):

To the financial institutions of the world, we have only one thing to say: we owe you NOTHING!

To our friends, families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything.

To the people of the world, we say: join the resistance, you have nothing to lose but your debts.

The statement was mic checked in French at Columbus Circle before we dispersed to reassemble outside the residence of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, where another statement was read. Occupy Goldman Sachs is still there, reminding everyone why this movement exists in the first place. The international dimension to the campaign is crucial as we move forward and the Europe-wide 99 Agora meeting in Madrid this November made debt one of its key themes.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, as the floodwaters recede, the moral high ground has been occupied by a revived social movement. Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt together understand the debt system and the climate disaster to be different aspects of the same issue. The reason is simple. In order to “pay back” purported “debt,” it is necessary to increase the size of the economy. Presently, that cannot be done without increasing carbon and other toxic emissions. Whether the goal is that industrialized world pays its climate debt to the rest of human and non-human life, or that there be a debt abolition for the 99% in the same way that the banks were bailed out, the target is the same: fossil-fuel burning, debt-driven capitalism.

I’m writing on the cusp of what will be the finest hour yet for Strike Debt, the People’s Bailout. Early on we realized that a tacky market exists in which debt buyers purchase defaulted or past due debt from lenders for pennies on the dollar. We wondered whether we could do the same thing but instead of trying to collect the debt, abolish it. Into one of the assemblies walks an activist who has been planning just that. The final inspiration was to hold a Telethon, a live benefit, to raise the money. The overall project was called The Rolling Jubilee, in honor of the ancient concept of debt abolition as a jubilee. We crowd sourced a little money and tried it out. It worked.

On November 15, the anniversary of the eviction of Occupy Wall Street, the People’s Bailout will demonstrate how mutual aid isn’t just a nice idea but a radical tool for empowerment. For each $50,000 we collect, no less than $1 million of debt will be abolished. I’m amazed to write it like this because we had hoped—wildly, we thought—to raise $50,000 total. As of Thursday afternoon, over $200,000 has already been donated, which will abolish over $4 million of debt.

Let me say that we get that this does not abolish capitalism. But like everything else that Strike Debt has done, it’s exciting, empowering and different. It’s not just another march, petition or slogan. It does something that makes a difference.

 

Today the General Strike, Tomorrow the Jubilee!

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Today there was a general strike across Europe. From Spain to Portugal, Greece, Italy, Belgium and the UK. Hundreds of thousands rejecting austerity for the attempt to create social control by fiscal policy that it so clearly is. Tomorrow in New York, we declare victory for the Rolling Jubilee. Before we have even begun the event we are in a position to abolish $2,750,000 of debt and that rises every second. Can you feel it?

Amazing scenes, including surely the best banner drop ever, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa:

No one believes the Troika any more. The Spanish government claimed the strike was not being well observed. Here’s the Gran Via in Madrid, like Broadway in New York:

The police tried to distract attention from the issues by provoking violence in their usual way but this cannot be beaten away.

Here’s Charles Dallara, head of the Institute of International Finance,  the policies of austerity in Greece:

It is time to recognize that austerity alone condemns not just Greece but the whole of Europe to the probability of a painful and protracted era of little or no economic growth. This would be a tragedy not just for Greece and for Europe, but for the world.

It’s a global movement now. in Venice protesters draped a bank with banners reading:

You are making money out of our debts

National Theatre of Spain on strike

Currently, extended families support people in Greece.

“But when that dries up, and it will with these latest measures, there will be no reason not to descend en masse onto the streets,” said Kostas Kapetanakis, a young sociologist holding a banner demanding free education, health and welfare system. “There will be a revolt because we will have absolutely nothing to lose.”

We are not as far gone here in New York but tomorrow will be a day of jubilant revolt and mutual aid. You can follow the Telethon live on RollingJubilee.org. I hope to be in a condition to report on it for you by Thursday. Tomorrow join hands and hearts and:

Strike Debt!

The Digital Debt Workshops

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What’s so extraordinary about Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee is the catalytic effect they have on people. So much writing, so much art, so much creativity and, unfortunately, so much email. During the course of today I wrote two separate op-eds for a journal about Strike Debt. There’s no decision as yet as to which one they want to use so I had hoped to post one here tonight but I can’t. So lots of good things tomorrow and the day after!

Our personal and work computers have become workshops for the movement, turning out material and communications at such pace that if you step away for a few hours, the influx is dizzying. Over the transom today we had first Strike Debt organizer Yates McKee on television–begins at 31″:

Then Andrew Ross in a very productive debate with an editor of The Jacobin  in Dissent. Here’s Ross:

To paraphrase Marx, you don’t get to choose the conditions under which you can make a little history. The massive level of household indebtedness and the entrenched power of the creditor class are the given conditions, and so you have to act on that terrain. It’s clear that the government is not going to provide debt relief, so people are going to have to do it for themselves, by any means necessary.

And then late at night, the one we’ve all been waiting for, our “exclusive” in the New York Times:

A group of professors, documentary filmmakers, corporate dropouts and others had spent months protesting Americans’ debt burden when a novel idea arose: What if they could just wave a magic wand and make some of it disappear?

It sounds a bit odd if you put it like that, but it’s not inaccurate. More importantly, this is the second more or less favorable piece on Occupy in the Times in the course of a week and suggests that the new projects are well-planned enough to pass media scrutiny. The last word goes to an unsung hero of behind-the-scenes organizing for Strike Debt, the Rolling Jubilee and much more:

“This is a long-term thing,” said Christopher Casuccio, who graduated with about $100,000 in student debt. “We all know it’s going to take years to transform the economic system.”

 

 

Sandy, Debt and Hunger in the Americas

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So much has been happening in the United States and in New York in particular but we should not forget that some of the most acute crisis post-Sandy is in the Caribbean. Haiti and Jamaica are both facing major challenges of hunger and debt respectively. Unluckily for them, these slow disasters were not accompanied by death on the grand scale, which is the main means by which developing countries gain access to Western media. Jamaican debt should be cancelled to allow that country to recover. Haiti needs just about everything.

Sandy hit neither country directly but its heaviest rain bands passed over them both, causing 20 inches of rain in Haiti. The two islands had already suffered from the impact of Isaac earlier in the year and Haiti is still recovering from the earthquake of 2010. Or we could say that Haiti is still recovering from the indemnity imposed on it by the international powers after its anti-slavery revolution of 1791, whose last payment in 1947 just preceded the disastrous US-backed Duvalier dictatorship. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with 54% of the population in abject poverty and 80% in poverty (estimate dates from 2003, pre-earthquake), according to those radicals at the CIA. Despite debt abolition in 2010, external debt has risen to $600 million, equivalent to 50% of the national budget.

The storm literally washed away the agriculture of both countries. The Guardian reports today:

With harvests destroyed in most of the country, Haiti’s entire food security situation is threatened….

Rivers which flooded during the storm washed away topsoil, fruit trees and cultures. Eroded banks gave way and protective walls were shattered. Of the country’s 140 communes, 70 were affected by the storm.

Plantations of corn, beans, sorghum, pigeon peas, bananas, tubers, peanuts, vegetables and rice were entirely destroyed or badly damaged by wind and water. The government, which declared a state of emergency on 30 October, confirmed that over 64,000 heads of livestock were washed away.

Half a million people face hunger, or severe acute malnutrition in NGO-speak. Food needs to get out there fast, and not just those bags of corn and wheat that government sends, but things that people in weakened condition can actually eat. It sounds like a mission Occupy Sandy could take on, as the next  part of its extraordinary relief effort.

In Jamaica, agricultural damage washed away the premium Blue Mountain coffee crop, which might not seem that serious until you consider the financial condition of the country. Jamaica’s foreign debt is so acute that, together with wages, according to the country’s finance minister yesterday, it

absorbs 80 cents out of every dollar and leaves us with just 20 cents to do everything else in the country.

The IMF are back in town, no doubt demanding more austerity from the tiny ruined former colony. First cultivated for sugar by the British, Jamaica became a banana plantation for United Fruit in the twentieth century until still cheaper fruit could be found in Central America. Now it depends on bauxite (aluminum), tourism and remittances from abroad, a classic postcolonial litany.

Over at the Rolling Jubilee, an amazing $100,000 has already been donated to abolish debt, which should eliminate an awesome $2 million of personal debt. Let’s also think how we can help our American cousins in Jamaica and Haiti recover from the disaster that our emissions helped to cause.

 

 

And So It Rolls

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There are certain points in this writing project when I understand why participant anthropology doesn’t get too involved. Right now, I am so busy with writing and researching for the People’s Bailout, and updating the structure of Strike Debt itself, that there’s very little spare time for reflection on what’s happening. That’s likely to remain the case until the Bailout on N15, the anniversary of the eviction of Occupy Wall Street. At that point, I begin six weeks of international travel, lectures, research and meetings with activist groups that might ordinarily look daunting. From here it looks like a nice relaxing period of downtime.

This kind of insanity is one of the reasons that Strike Debt has committed to revamping its internal organization. More accurately, for a group that has been improvising ever since its formation in Washington Square Park in late May, we’re defining how we might organize for the first time in a general, rather than specific or project-driven, way. Although the process of working through these decisions was disrupted by Sandy, the storm has given everyone in Occupy new momentum and energy.

Interestingly, given how much time and energy was devoted to process in the first year of Occupy, there’s a clearly emerging consensus on what people want to do. First, we need to be more open and welcoming to people who are interested in what we do but can’t commit huge amounts of time, as the key organizers have been doing. We need to offer child care so parents and care-givers can attend–perhaps the biggest smile of the day was for the idea of a Strike Debt People’s Bouncy Castle.

In more of a departure from previous practice, there will be defined spheres of engagement with specific roles and delegation. While this division of tasks has some greater resemblance to existing organizations, the idea is that people can choose what sphere of engagement they want to be involved in, and that roles would rotate. When I get back, I’m going to be ready to do some face-painting and child-care, for example, rather than dive back into “bottom lining” (taking responsibility). How all this will work is still to be decided. The reason that people feel comfortable going ahead is that there’s a lot of trust in each other after all the different ventures we’ve been engaged in together.

The Rolling Jubilee is creating a lot of additional interest in the campaign and we’re going to get to the point where it’s just not possible for everyone to be involved in everything (actually we’re already there) or even to know all about everything. While that troubles my OCD side a little, the overengagement is sufficiently exhausting that I’m ready to let it go now.

And for those who were hoping to come to the People’s Bailout but didn’t get a ticket in time, good news: free livestreaming parties with their own activities are springing up like this one in the East Village. There are streaming events in LA, Chicago, North Carolina, Boston and Philadelphia. This thing is blowing up: you want to be a part of it!