Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Doing While Thinking

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520 Clinton, Brooklyn HQ of Occupy Sandy

There’s a sense of intensity in New York these days. There are rats of astonishing size to be seen in the subway. On my way to Occupy Sandy today, I was part of a platform of horrified travelers at Brooklyn Bridge watching them having sex in the early afternoon. It seems like a portent but the disaster has already happened. It’s time for doing. Doing while thinking.

In the course of the week since I first went, Occupy Sandy has developed from a totally improvised project to a rather amazing operation. Stations are clearly identified, from volunteer orientation to driver dispatch, donation collection, packet creation, tech ops, kitchen, sanitation and media. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the park only indoors. Occupy has reconstituted itself only this time its orientation is entirely outwards.

As it did in Zuccotti, Occupy is getting good press now for the first time in a while. OWS people have been posting this piece from the New York Times on social media and via email:

Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery.

There’s no question to my mind that this is right–there’s a palpable desire to do something, anything. Ironically, the mayor’s office, notable by its absence from all the disaster areas, has been seen trying to co-opt Occupy-led relief efforts in Red Hook.

Even while the Times was coming onto the Occupy team, it had to get in a little dig:

After its encampment in Zuccotti Park, which changed the public discourse about economic inequality and introduced the nation to the trope of the 1 percent, the Occupy movement has wandered in a desert of more intellectual, less visible projects, like farming, fighting debt and theorizing on banking.

It’s a false distinction as the Occupy Sandy banner shows–OS thinks of itself as a mutual aid project, which is very much an intellectual as well as practical concept. And it’s an odd list: farming, which has been been the concern of Occupy Farms, isn’t usually thought of as intellectual by contrast with economic inequality. Debt, on the other hand, is precisely about economic inequality.

Yesterday, artist David Rees launched the Rolling Jubilee to the wider world outside OWS via his blog How To Sharpen Pencils. Launched in conjunction with a co-ordinated social media campaign, the concept has gone viral, with features on CNN, Forbes, the Daily Telegraph, Salon, Daily Kos and all over the Internet.

Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker St

The Jubilee begins with The People’s Bailout, a benefit event at Le Poisson Rouge to raise money in order to abolish debt that is currently in default. As I’ve explained before, the money will be put into the secondary debt market, established by banks and other lenders to sell on defaulted debt. The Rolling Jubilee will buy this debt but rather than attempt to collect on it, it will abolish it. The debt-buying team have tried out their method and it works.

The point is to use mutual aid as a means of questioning the debt system, just as Occupy Sandy uses mutual aid to question social services and disaster relief. The People’s Bailout relieves individuals of their debt burden. It also asks why, if banks can accept 5% of the total debt from debt collectors, individual debtors are expected to pay 100% of what’s owed to a debt collector who had nothing to do with the loan. Further, why should loans that the banks knew to be dubious be repaid? Why should medical emergencies or the desire for an education lead to personal financial disaster, while banks and other speculators walk away from their debts?

The benefit venue sold out within hours of the blog post. Organizers hope to raise $50,000 during the Telethon and if they do, no less than $1 million of people’s debt will be abolished by the people. The People’s Bailout is doing while thinking. So is Occupy Sandy.

What To Do Now

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It’s Friday and it’s been a hard week. I’m not asking you read tonight. We don’t all have to be out on the streets in the disaster zone but there’s something each of us can do. It beats waiting for the so-called government to do something.

Here’s reporting from Cindy Milstein on the situation right now:

No sign of tents or Occupy Sandy Relief at Coffey Park in Red Hook, but plenty of signs of suffering: water still being pumped out of buildings, public housing & corner stores with no lights and probably heat, downed trees & debris lingering, toxic smell in air and toxic-looking muck on ground, single Red Cross truck giving out supplies, ConEd & “restoration” workers with masks/gloves on, homemade & bilingual signs about where to get help or when/if school is open, and police. Lots & lots of police — doing nothing (which is maybe preferable to doing something!)

Watch this video by David Borenstein on the situation in the Rockaways and see if you don’t start thinking about Katrina:

 

Back to the Autocracy of Austerity

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The post-Sandy crisis can be understood as an intensification of austerity. The result of the storm has been to render New York into a version of Madrid or Athens (with no disrespect to the citizens of those great cities). Increasingly, debt is the means of eliminating what little democracy there is within the representative system, even more than it is the agent of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” What Europe has discovered is that you can’t vote out the debt system. Call it the autocracy of austerity.

And so, we kept the insane misogynists and climate deniers out, which was a necessary and good thing to do. But after the consultation with the state of Ohio as to who is in charge of austerity, the US establishment has returned to its favorite game of cutting benefits and programs to service sovereign debt, as if no interruption had occurred. In Athens yesterday, yet more cuts were voted in against the popular will. The European and Mediterranean social movements are unifying around a platform of resistance. We should join them: ¡No Debemos, no pagamos!

Today in New York: 15,000 school children sat in buildings without heat in 40 degree weather. Gas was rationed, because even though the entire planet is run for the benefit of the fossil fuel companies, they can’t get it together to deliver their product. Only 25% of the city’s gas stations are open in the largest city in America. 100 city housing projects out of a total of 400 still have no power. Up to 40,000 are homeless. FEMA is currently proposing to pay for only 75% of storm-related damage to utilities, leaving householders to make up the rest on increased bills. And on and on.

Athens 11 7 12

In Greece yesterday, the Troika got their tame coalition to pass tax increases, cuts in benefits and so-called “labor reforms,” meaning a reduction in workers’ rights. The Greek left, which is now working together in a bloc, reacted furiously calling a two-day general strike and Athens became a battleground. I wonder which US manufacturer made the tear gas?

Across Europe, this policy of co-ordinated resistance is growing. There will be a general strike across national borders on November 14. At the 99 Agora meeting held in Madrid from November 1-4, the conclusion was clear:

Debt is the major domination tool of the system.

This key axiom was developed into a statement as follows [translation slightly modified]:

Lack of democracy in Europe has allowed that, under the threat of debt, people’s basic rights are being violated. We denounce the agents responsible for emptying democratic institutions of popular sovereignty. We point to transnational corporations, especially international banks, for grabbing wealth through the payment of interest and the privatization of public companies in strategic sectors.

We already know that government debt was not acquired for the benefit of the people. We therefore consider it illegitimate debt and will not pay. The link between debt, austerity and privatization is clear.

We consider it urgent to end the growing impoverishment of the people and ensure that all can cover their basic needs, as reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; housing, food, healthcare, education, employment and social services. We call on social movements working on protection of these rights to coordinate protest actions and build alternatives together.

We know that the EU economic policies being implemented are not intended to improve the welfare of the people, neither in mid or long term, and we look at our sisters in the South, whose suffering must serve as a lesson.

Debt abolition requires transnational popular mobilization around a common agenda, just as capital has its transnational agenda. 99 Agora proposed an international agenda of action, education and networking. It’ll be developed in Florence in the days to come at the Firenze 10+10 conference. A calendar of days of action has been suggested, from the G8 meeting in London to the World Social Forum in Tunisia.

In this country, Strike Debt affiliates are active nationwide and the People’s Bailout is almost here. Small traces of resistance against the behemoth of global capital: yes. Isolated and without possible future: no.

The Cold After the Storm

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After Katrina, it was hot, freakishly hot. After Sandy, it is cold, ridiculously cold. There’s six inches of snow on the ground, howling winds. In Spike Lee’s classic When the Levees Broke, there’s a montage in act one of people saying over and over “it was hot.” Most people in New York and New Jersey who lost housing will be indoors tonight, so we may not get a parallel montage. But we’re only just beginning to understand what we’ve been through and are continuing to go through.

During MSNBC’s broadcast of the election results last night, a poll showed that 15% of voters rated the response to Hurricane Sandy as the top reason behind their vote. Of those people, 70% voted Obama and 30% Romney. It seems odd until you realize how little has been done because the scale is so much greater than we have fully realized. If you go to this link, you can see before and after aerial photographs of the coastline taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that make it clear that rebuilding is not a serious option.

NBC has been pushing the issue in its news partly because their anchor Brian Williams grew up on the Jersey shore and is still very attached to it. Over and again, middle-aged white men like Williams and Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, have been evoking their loss and nostalgia for a past that was in any case long gone. Obama toured with the crown prince of Jersey nostalgia, Bruce Springsteen, whose Jersey classic Asbury Park 4th July (Sandy), usually called just Sandy, has acquired an entirely new meaning.

This combination of a sense that Sandy indicated both what we now need to do, and what it is that we have lost, gave Obama his winning margin.

What will be done with it? Last night before tuning in to the results, I watched last week’s episode of Treme. By coincidence, it featured the documentary film maker Kimberly Rivers-Roberts, whose work in Trouble The Water was nominated for an Academy award. In a complex interplay of experience and fiction, the episode showed a group of the characters being drawn into watching Rivers-Roberts’ extraordinary footage of the waters rising in the Lower Ninth Ward during Katrina.

We then cut to her husband recreating the moment when they led a group of survivors to dry land only to be shot at by National Guard troops. These soldiers were nominated for bravery medals. In Treme, people who experienced Katrina play characters who also went through the storm, like Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, who came to national attention in Spike Lee’s film and has now become a Treme regular.

What such moments suggest is that there is no outside to the climate-changed biosphere, no retreat into a world of superhero make-believe. In his acceptance speech, Obama presented himself as a “champion” of those in need. Our system currently works that way. Today I called my re-elected congressional representative to complain that after ten days, my house had not been restored to electric power. A few hours later, the current was flowing.

But on the ground, moments of heroism are rare, and champions hard to find. As the new ice storm blew into New York, this was what people in Staten Island saw at the FEMA office

As crazy as this seems, the makeshift shelters are no good against the driving snow of a Nor’easter. We’ve yet to recognize that as well as the broken roller coasters and carousels, the space shuttle Enterprise in New York was damaged, thousands of artworks in studios in Chelsea and Red Hook were destroyed, and so on and on.

We don’t need a champion in all this. We need to hear that the press release put out today by Keystone XL to the effect that they are “confident” that the northern sector of their pipeline to extract tarsands will be confirmed in January was wrong. We can’t wait and see how the new administration chooses to decide because for us, shivering in Sandy’s cold, there is no choice. From now on, no more nostalgia, no heroes or champions. It’s time for direct action.

Hope, Crisis and Love: Part Two

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Four years ago, there was a financial crisis. People put a huge effort into electoral politics around the theme of hope. Many of those hopes were imprecise, just a sense that things could only get better. A year ago, people took to the squares to renew their hopes by direct democracy. Again, the issues were imprecise but this time by design. The Presidential election this year was not about hope. Perhaps the difference now is that it is the nature of the crisis that is unclear. Is it about energy and climate? Debt? Democracy? The answer that frustrates people is probably the right one: all of the above. So what is the affect of this multi-dimensional crisis if it’s not hope? For Occupy, it’s love.

One of the most dividing terms in the Occupy movement has been “love.” Movement people like to talk about it as a key motivator and form of social engagement. Critics ranging from Zizek to Thomas Frank have looked down on the idea, and warned against the movement falling in love with itself. In other words, what we call love, they saw as narcissism, or masturbation. Trust two middle-aged white guys to tell everyone who they should fall in love with.

To be fair, their follow through was very different. Frank was comparing Occupy to the Tea Party and their “success” in having Ryan nominated as Vice-President. As a grouping resistant to representation, this kind of goal was never mentioned in Occupy. Zizek’s critique was that we could not imagine the future that we wanted. Perhaps that would have been an investment in hope, which predicts a better future. Love is a less certain emotion–it might be great, it might not, but your choice is to go with it because at some level you feel you must.

Psychoanalysis wants to tell you that not only do you not know what you want, what you think you want is a displacement of something else. There’s no doubt that the mechanisms of displacement and disruption (the slip of the tongue) are part of the present mental apparatus. How does this work politically? When the students of 1968 pushed Jacques Lacan on this question, he famously sneered back at them

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new Master. You will get one.

His meaning was the “revolution” would end up as a new form of reaction. Less noticed has been the exchange in which Lacan admitted to the students that the Oedipus complex on which such negations are based was itself a colonial imposition. It is that complex that disrupts the individual’s claim to know itself by a disruption from the Real. But this Real isn’t really real: it’s a colonial construction of a reality that was certainly experienced as such but, like all constructions, can fall down.

Decolonizing is, then, first a personal project of deconstructing and then reconstructing a mental apparatus that can be something other than the “individual” presumed by the patently collapsed neoliberal economic market. This reconfigured means of relating to others would be what we have struggled to call “love.” We’ve seen a great deal of it in the disaster zone this past week.

The debate is now over how this remaking of a sense of community can be made more permanent and how it can be scaled to a larger arena. The European-Mediterranean movement is ahead of us here. Their continent-wide organizing and community building is much more established and I’ll report back on this tomorrow. In this, there is hope. If a continent so radically divided by religions, languages, politics and history can forge a common movement, then hope is a way to do politics in the present, not some future to come.

And do we need it, the next storm is headed to NY and NJ with tens of thousands still without power, with coastlines totally vulnerable to storm surges, tunnels still flooded.

Katrina on the Hudson

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Devastated suburbs, vulnerable city spaces, immense budget numbers, shortages of all kinds: welcome to Katrina on the Hudson. Today I drove to the Rockaways to drop off supplies and then around the South shore of Long Island. For someone who has done research on Hurricane Katrina, some things seemed very unpleasantly familiar, for all that the evacuations and mass transit system kept the death toll far lower.

We still don’t know the full extent of what happened. It’s looking as if the entire beach front from Jersey along Fire Island to Montauk has been devastated. Communities in the Rockaways are at the very earliest stages of recovery. Contamination by sewage and other toxic elements is palpable in places. Now the city council are talking about FEMA trailers becoming part of the cityscape until the New Year at least. People in New Orleans will be shaking their heads and saying “here we go again.”

The Rockaways are still a disaster zone. The coast is just devastated.

The sand has been piled up to create some passable roadways but others have simply disappeared.

A former roadway

While the houses closest to the water show most damage, there’s debris and ruined furniture awaiting garbage collection for miles.

You can see here that the accumulated sand in front of the house is about two feet thick. It’s a massive removal job to imagine disposing of all this sand and all the new wreckage.

Power stops long before the beach at about 157 Ave, just south of the Belt Parkway, two bridges away from the barrier island. I saw one power crew at work the whole time I was there. As planes going into Kennedy roar overhead, the only governmental presence was a few National Guard armored cars, some wandering police taking souvenir photos and a fire truck. No FEMA, no Red Cross.

Gathering clothes on the sand covered parking lot

There’s a very impressive mutual aid effort. Clothes donations fill the former beach parking lot. They’re going to be much needed. It was cold by day down by the water and temperatures are close to freezing tonight in New York. There were free food services too, cooking Mexican and Chinese.

As much as these efforts are amazing, they can’t meet the full demands of what’s needed here, as Nick Pinto pointed out in his blog:

Occupy Sandy is mobilizing an army of sincere and hardworking volunteers, and is working to assess the needs of residents. But they don’t have the earthmovers necessary to clear the streets of sand and rubble. They don’t have the ability to restore power to residents. The crisis in the Rockaways remains severe, and it’s looking less and less like a natural disaster and more and more like a failure of the state.

(Just to be clear, the photos above are not Occupy Sandy efforts). So what’s going to be crucial is shaping a new politics going forward that sustains the horizontal voice of the communities but also reconfigures the practices of the state. New York local politics have been a byword for corruption and incompetence for, well, centuries. Things have to change.

We need to acknowledge the full scope of what’s happening and how we have far more questions than answers. Driving around the South shore, it was clear at certain points that the massive sewage spills of the storm had not been dispelled. It can’t just be at the places where the stench is unmissable that this is a problem. What does it mean to say on the Long Island Power Authority website that some locations should

plan for the potential that power restoration could extend a week or more beyond November 7th [?]

That’s obfuscation pure and simple.

There are 57 schools closed indefinitely by the storm, nearly all in Brooklyn and Queens. How many of these have majority minority student bodies and what’s being done for them? Can we make the media move beyond their “coverage” resulting from placing a “reporter” in the rain, wearing an anorak, in some place that floods? How can we coalesce the new seriousness of social media into a functional citizen’s media?

There’s great urgency to help people in the immediate term, a short term need to restore functional social conditions and then comes the chance for change.

The next storm is already on the way.

 

 

Are We Awake Yet?

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For many years we have been living in a dream. In that dream, we have been told there is no alternative to the financialization of everything; that shareholder returns and growth were more important than considerations like sustainability or resilience; and that climate change was a long term issue or not true. In the dream, we didn’t agree but we couldn’t seem to disagree. Are we awake yet?

It’s been known for some time that New York was a hurricane disaster waiting to happen. Now that it has happened the response has been so familiar. Too slow from officials, except where wealth is concentrated. Amazing from individuals and organizations locally, wherever there is need. The trick this time is to make sure that the energy and connectedness does not dissipate once the dryout is over and the power is back on. It’s still too soon to say we woke up but we are waking.

Here was one of the many wake up calls. It came last February from Nature, the top science journal, written by MIT and Princeton scientists:

NYC is highly vulnerable to storm surges. We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs [Global Climate Model] show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1 m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.

Like I’ve been saying, like so many climate Cassandras have been saying, but with the data for New York, what just happened can happen every three years or so now. It might not happen for another 20. But they are using a very conservative model of sea-level rise. And you might have heard, the Greenland ice sheet melted over 90% of its surface this year, which is the primary source for sea-level rise.

Courtesy Occupy Sandy

Signs that perhaps we are now waking up: the amazing and beautiful response to people’s need in NYC. I was down at the Occupy Sandy center in Brooklyn today at 520 Clinton Avenue, just off Atlantic near the Barclays Center. Special needs for:

  • heavy outdoor cleaning stuff and contractor-style clean up bags
  • diapers, wipes and all infant stuff/twine, rope and other such.

Open tomorrow, closes at 4pm). There was just a torrent of people volunteering and bringing the things needed. They have so many clothes they don’t need any more.

As I walked back over this evening, I saw a smaller, although decent sized, group of people doing a call center for Obama. In 2008, those centers were so packed you could hardly get in or find something to do. That’s exactly how the mutual aid project was today, perhaps some of the same people. Many were young but people with vehicles were at a premium to get out to the Rockaways and Staten Island.

Back in the day in the park, Occupy became NYC social services, providing food, clothing and bedding for those who had nothing. It’s happened again and it shows that there really is something to be said for the idea that Occupy is in itself a disaster response, as Rebecca Solnit has suggested. Its issue last time was how to connect to communities. Done this time. Now how do we build that?

Sign number two: people don’t want the financialized “aid” being offered by FEMA, a.k.a. more loans. In Red Hook last night, CNN reports that local businesses had no use for the long-term 4-8% loans being touted by FEMA:

“Most of us are deeply overextended as it is,” said Monica Byrne, the co-owner of local restaurant Home/Made. “We’re all shut down. We have staff we can’t pay. We really need some support that’s not about loans.

Because loans require repayments, and an 8% interest rate is a lot, as any student can tell you. Federal loans can’t be bankrupted or negotiated. It’s time for debt abolition after Sandy.

Although we’re not going to be able to target individual loans because of the weird way the defaulted debt market works, The People’s Bailout will do just that: buy medical and educational debt that people have had to default and abolish it. Please come! The financialized world is broken. The future is ours together: we are drowning in debt and we need to bail each other out, just as we are rescuing each other from the storm.

 

Touring the Zone

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This is my diary of touring the disaster zone yesterday (November 3) that I could not post because of continued Internet outage in Manhattan. I traveled across Connecticut, Long Island and Manhattan. Here’s the diary:

Left Connecticut early this morning and saw man electric utility trucks from Detroit on I95. Ironic, that a city famed for being ruined is in a position to help us out. The ferry to Long Island was mostly carrying tree and garden company vans. When we got over there, you could easily see why. Trees and plants are down everywhere, in wild tangles with phone, cable and electricity cables, which hang heavily from the utility poles here, like over-ripe fruit. All the Internet, HD cable, fax machines and the other wired devices of our time have been suspended above the streets on these poles, waiting for a wind to blow them down. Sandy obliged, just like Irene before her. The hurricane swung right around New York City and landed a haymaker on Long Island.

At our own little house, a hundred-year oak had split down the middle and blown against the way its branches used to hang right onto the house. This bad luck was offset by the fact that a huge oak branch that snapped off at the front of the house blew clean away from it and landed harmlessly in the bushes. The tree at the back gave the house a thump, cracked the sheetrock and some rafters but the wooden frame absorbed the shock. We’re looking at persuading the insurance to pay–and talk to people from New Orleans about that–or a FEMA loan. Whatever happens, it’s more debt, as the insurance never fully covers it. Others were not so lucky. There are apparently over 100,000 buildings severely damaged or destroyed on the island. So no complaints.

As we drove back to NYC, the trail of damage was palpable. Human needs were most visible for gasoline. As has been widely reported, there were very long queues, including hundreds at one station trying to fill gas cans to keep generators running. Police were out to keep crowds under control. The irony that the one product that’s done more than any other to cause all this should be in short supply is palpable. Even more, between the generators, the leaf blowers and the wood chippers, and all the other improvised means of staying warm, keeping things frozen and so on, Long Island has used its carbon emissions for years to come.

Back in the city, recovery was underway in Manhattan, despite the still visible signs of duress downtown. The lobby of our building was filled with bottles of water and Meals Ready to Eat, the rations issued to military personnel in the field. Apparently our local Congress person Jerry Nadler had them delivered by the Navy. Where, we might ask, were our wealthy landlords NYU in all this?

The Ramones “Rockaway Beach”

We have power but no Internet/phone/TV like many others. Looking at the devastation in the Rockaways, it’s no hardship. When I was about fifteen I loved the Ramones song “Rockaway Beach.” To me in London,it seemed brilliantly inventive to imagine a beach called Rockaway, setting up the chorus “Rock-Rock-Rockaway Beach.” I was even more delighted to realize some time in the late ’90s that the beach was real. Maybe not so much any more.

It Feels Different Now

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I can’t say where this ends up but everything feels different now. I don’t know if this lasts or not. There’s a sense that pieces are falling into place and matters are being put into perspective. Sandy affected an area the size of Europe. It does feel like climate denial is dead. It’s going to cost $50 billion. Which only makes us realize what a scam the bailouts really were. Popular indignation cancelled the marathon, whose only justification was that it would bring in cash. And the election? Obama’s going to win for once again being the grown-up in the room when a crisis hits.

Where do we go with this? If this climate disaster does send people in the direction of solutions rather than barriers, some good could come of it all. We may need to have barriers at the harbors now, but that can’t be all we do. We saw over the past couple of days that it’s only mass transit that keeps New York going. It needs investment in clean technology and better connections. Taxis only made things worse by clogging up roads and driving like lunatics. They have to go. And how ironic is it that the one substance in short supply in the storm-affected area is the one that did most to cause it: gasoline. Can we grow up and do what everyone else in the world does and have ride-shares, park-and-rides and other collective systems now?

Now we also know that you can clean up a Europe-sized disaster for $50 billion but that the same amount would barely prop up a small bank. So we’re getting some perspective on the insanity of the post-2008 settlement. Perhaps the fact that Goldman Sachs was lit up all the way through was just a coincidence. Perhaps. But it’s one of those symbolic moments that suggest a change might be in the air. And the fact that ING, a bank, was the main sponsor of the marathon was definitely one of the reasons it felt so wrong to do it. That and the fact that it was supposed to start in flood-devastated Staten Island.

We’re heading back into the city tomorrow. New England with power is still somehow creepier than a dark city, which, despite all the allegations, has not seen any crime or looting. Here there are non-stop TV ads for an election that seems other worldly. Just as the country now pretends it did not elect George W. Bush (and to be fair, the first time it didn’t), the shameful candidacy of Romney will fade from memory as soon as the counting is done. Which does not give Obama a pass.

Then we’ll see. For the past year, it has sometimes felt like the issues being discussed in this space about climate, debt, mutual aid and democracy were addressing only a small fraction of the people but that it was important to keep that discussion open. Now we can see why it mattered. The mutual aid being carried out by OWS people in Red Hook, Chinatown and the Lower East Side is part of a city-wide effort. Our outrage at the corporations and the climate deniers is finding support from so many of those affected, as well as people like Andrew Cuomo.

For Strike Debt, the Rolling Jubilee is still a great idea and please come and support it! It’s not time to talk about debt strike but about debt abolition as a means to start over in a sustainable way, to cancel debt so that emissions don’t have to be generated to make the “growth” required to pay it back, about mutual aid instead of isolated debt destruction. It’s not about money, it’s about love.

It’s not at all time to declare victory and go home. Things are far too uncertain for that. It just feels different now.

How to Have Theory in A Crisis Foretold

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It was known this was coming, just not exactly when. A week or more ago, the metereologists predicted the storm surge, which is what did the damage. Now the chatter begins that we cannot say that climate disruption “caused” this storm. What is causation in the context of extremely complex intra-active systems with human and non-human components? How can we understand an event that we knew would happen and that we know will have happened again? What happens to time and space in this crisis of understanding?

I’m bringing together in this title Paula Treichler’s classic How To Have Theory in an Epidemic about the AIDS crisis and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. For Treichler, as well as being an infectious disease, AIDS was also an “epidemic of signification.” For example, although it might be said that a virus does not discriminate in the sense that it will infect any host it can, AIDS revealed many of the pre-existing patterns of discrimination in US and global cultures. For Marquez, the fact that the murder of Santiago Nasar was known to be coming did not prevent it, despite many trying to do so. His story shows that intentions are no more linear than the networks of communication that convey them.

I’m just thinking aloud here, so I’m going to go by bullet point.

  • Causation, Chaos and Climate

It’s one of the best-known of all clichés that a hurricane might be “caused” by the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Yet media insist on running around telling us that we can’t be sure if climate change “caused” this storm. No, because change of state is by definition indeterminate. One minute it’s stable, the next it is not. But let’s just do the obvious for the sake of it. The number of Atlantic storms has increased exponentially:

So we’re more likely to have major storms than we ever were. There are two tropical storms out there right now, which don’t appear headed for land. Two, the water over which the storms pass is warmer than ever, giving the storms more energy and more water to displace. Here’s the temperature of the ocean at the time Sandy formed:

Sea temperatures in the Atlantic

Anything yellow/red is warmer than usual, red is way warmer. Like up by New York.

Third, higher sea level on average produces exponentially greater rise during high sea-level events. Here’s a chart worked out for Australia. I don’t know of one for the US. Even the smallest dot represents a multiplication of 100 times. The largest dot represents a 10,000 time multiplying factor.

So: more storms with more energy producing exponentially higher sea-levels. That’s “all” we knew for sure.

Notice also that the major cities in Australia in the map above are all near to larger dots, perhaps precisely because European colonization favored large natural harbors as a place to settle to facilitate trade. It’s only just dawning on people in the US that the colonial pattern of settlement contains its own time bomb that is now going off, after several centuries of what we might call carbon emission abuse.

  • New Urban Geographies

New York City now has its own North/South divide. It turns out that uptown in NYC is literally up, just as it is in New Orleans, protecting the wealthiest from the intra-action of their own consumption patterns. The cultural divide between Mid-town and Downtown is now literally visible.

And to everyone’s surprise, the first sections of the downtown grid re-energized were those in the financial district! Who would have thought it?

There are other inequalities being revealed. As David Rhode points out in The Atlantic, people like me and him have had the time and financial resource to escape the blackout zone. We’re able to do so because of others like the garage staff who drove my car out of a pitch dark underground lot, and the door and maintenance workers at my building. Because they are at work, they’re not able to help family, friends and neighbors. So those areas come back more slowly.

It’s an internal but real segregation, reflecting the ingrained divide within the city:

Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest and most gentrified borough, is an extreme example. Inequality here rivals parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Last year the wealthiest 20 percent of Manhattan residents made $391,022 a year on average, according to census data. The poorest 20 percent made $9,681.

Only Heavily Indebted Poor Countries like Niger have worse divides. We both have plenty of Heavily Indebted Poor (and relatively poor) People, of course. Just for the record, I am nowhere near that top 20% and I am surprised at how high that earnings figure actually is–you often hear claims that if you make more than $350,000 you are in the one percent. Clearly that’s also a manipulated figure.

Only today, Thursday, is the city getting food and water into downtown. Parts of Brooklyn and Queens are far more in need. No one seems to get the extra difficulties confronting people with mobility issues. All these consequences flow from the conception of New York as a city of immaterial labor, where you are responsible for your own health–eat right! work out!–not your employer. Should you “fail” that requirement, you become invisible. So many people have lost pay during this week that they can ill afford but no one is promising them a bail out.

  • Patterns of Resistance

In a non-linear, time-distorting crisis, you have to resist what will happen, as much as what has already happened. Yesterday a Presidential candidate was arrested. No, it was not Romney up for perjury but Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

She was participating in the blockade of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas. Arrested, she was photographed by one of the remaining tree-sitters. Let’s remind ourselves that we already know that if the carbon in the tar sands is released by combustion NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said “it’s game over for the planet.” This, too, is foretold. We know that Romney will approve the pipeline. We have a sinking feeling that Obama will too because why else approve the Southern half?

What do we do? Circulate this picture. Make Obama aware that if you do vote for him, it’s on condition that he stand up to the oil lobby after he wins his last election. Vote Green in places where the Presidential election is not close enough to risk making the state Republican (Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, that’s you).

If you have the privilege of mobility and arrestability, consider getting up in those trees. Or joining 350.org. Or helping with recovers.org–that link is for the Lower East Side, and here’s the one for Red Hook and Astoria.

Don’t give money. Don’t sign a petition. Do something.

It’s not too late but it’s too late too pretend we don’t know what to do.