Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

It’s The Social Connections That Are Being Broken

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Last night, ironically enough, I should have been participating in a panel called Nightmare on Wall Street: the One Percent and the Ecological Crisis. Today with great fanfare, the wretched Stock Exchange reopened, powered by a polluting generator, even as all around the power was out and people with different mobilities were stuck in buildings. Goldman Sachs remained powered up throughout the storm, no doubt having its own generating system. Meanwhile, people in NYC were forced to take holidays to cover the days lost if on salary, or were simply unpaid if not.

Crime Scene–the tape is about right

Downtown has been abandoned to fend for itself. The legions of wait staff, creative economy people, freelances and other precarious labor, who keep downtown what it is, are not working and so are not being paid. In high-rises below 34th Street, people with mobility issues are stuck. On the floor where I usually live–the 14th–there’s an elderly woman with a walker, a young woman in a wheelchair and a man with an electronic chair. Another man has heart issues and really should not be walking up 14 flights. And that’s just the people I know. Water is being restored to city housing by generators but that leaves tens of thousands without. The statistics about cell phone service are wildly different to the experience of trying to make a call. The social connections are being broken, not just the electrical circuits.

Further the climate disaster is being followed by a disaster for the climate. Generators are running everywhere, people are driving who would normally use mass transit and so on. The “climate” is an abstraction and so is the “economy.” In modernist practice, there was a division of mental labor designed to elucidate what was “really” happening. Whatever the name for our current condition, this separation no longer helps. All our grievances are connected. The social hangs together by a series of such connections, which can be broken as easily as water entering a fusebox. Once down, such connections are much harder to restore.

In relation to this idea, Peter Rugh’s essay at Waging Nonviolence has a rousing meme that will motivate all of us trying to connect climate work to political activism:

we’ll need an environmental movement as radical as reality itself.

For those of us still struggling to come to terms with the material impact of Sandy–no power, no water, no phone–this is not yet the moment for long essays in response to the motivating force of Pete’s call. But I hear it.

And it makes me think about the way that Strike Debt has been able to address the reality that so many of us experience–debt–and has thus made it possible to radicalize it. To follow the example in Pete’s essay, the Black Panthers supplied free breakfast for children that needed it and offered health care for those who could not afford it. If there is to be more than a green-washing moment after Sandy, we’ll need to be able to do those two things: first, find a way to identify the impact that biosphere destruction is having in people’s everyday lives in order to even think about alternatives; and second, offer mutual aid and sustainable alternatives, just as so many are doing in the streets of New York right now.

It’s about finding the connections and then finding the way to make them visible and sayable. So, as I have been saying, a debt strike is also a climate strike. Debt abolition is climate change mitigation. Because the way that debt is “repaid” is by more growth, which inevitably means more carbon emissions. Abolish debt, abolish those emissions. The Jubilee is not just a liberation of human misery but a breathing space for the biosphere.

But just as debt abolition can only be the first step to the end of the system that creates debt, so must a pause in emissions lead to systems of social connection that don’t rely on the oil-coal-steel-auto-defense nexus of the military-industrial complex. That’s the abstraction. The reality is what’s happening in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, West Virginia and everywhere touched by the disaster.

Today we learned that it would have cost about $10 billion to install floodgates at the entrances to New York Harbor. Not by coincidence, that is also the estimate of what it will cost to restore mass transit. They “couldn’t afford” the first, so now we all have to pay the second via higher transport costs. And so on.

Take a small step. The People’s Bailout on November 15–recovery permitting–intends to raise money to abolish debt. $5 will abolish $100 of someone’s debt. You can be part of the awareness raising by donating your Twitter account once a day to retweet a Strike Debt tweet. No other changes to your account will follow, just once a day, your followers will see a Strike Debt tweet retweeted by you. Join the resistance.

Unprecedented, Not Unpredicted

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It was dramatic, you have to give Sandy that. About eight last night, a dramatic set of explosions with pink and green flashes was followed by a bright white pulse. And then the lights went out. Water started rising rapidly to the west of us, crossing Tenth Avenue and to the East, reaching as far as Avenue B. It was all over the FDR, down 34th St, 14th St, 4th St. There was a time when you began to wonder if it would reach us in the middle of Manhattan (just by Washington Square Park in the NYU housing). Then at 10.30pm Twitter reports indicated the water was falling back. We turned off the phones to save batteries and went to sleep.

Daylight revealed a plethora of problems. No power means no water in an apartment block like ours. No elevators of course. And we’re on the 14th floor. A look outside the door revealed that the exit signs and emergency lights on the stairs weren’t working. A long walk down revealed that all of downtown was without power. Long Island–one alternative destination for us–was just as bad. It became clear that solutions were days away. While we had many containers of water, it turns out that a manual flush uses a lot. Time to leave. Right now, I’m occupying New Haven, CT, where there are plenty of trees down but the power is still on.

And also to ask questions. From the radio, we learned that NYU Langone hospital had a defective back-up generator, leading to an emergency evacuation last night. As we drove past it today, a fleet of private ambulances with yellow stickers indicating that they had been commissioned by FEMA were lined up outside. No other sign of FEMA by the way. Why was so basic a safety system insecure? Why did the expensive and noisy building of the NYU Co-Generation plant not protect at least the water supply for its residences? And so on. All those infrastructure dollars shaved off budgets over the neo-liberal expansion years now stand revealed as essential, not dispensable.

The real bottom line of the hurricane is, as you know, that all the warnings and predictions so many have made about the game-changing effects of climate change. You can measure this from one simple figure. In 1821, the highest water level previously recorded at New York was 11.21 feet. To be prudent, Con Ed, the local electricity company, builds its facilities to be capable of withstanding not just this flood but one two feet higher. Only last night we went clean over 13.5 feet and the electric grid went down.

So much about Sandy is unprecedented, but none of it was unpredicted. There was very little rain by hurricane standards in New York. The wind was fierce certainly but it was a tropical storm, not even a hurricane. These events are about water level and water temperature. Sandy kept energy all the way to New York because the Gulf Stream is abnormally warm after the hot summer. The water levels are higher due to the ongoing effects of climate change. With the massive melt in the Arctic this year more water is liquid in the Atlantic than usual. As we saw in Japan last year, relatively small rises in sea level when compressed in high sea level events by wind or other forces result in extraordinary high waves, tides and storm surges.

The only surprise for anyone who has followed climate and ocean change news reports, let alone the scientific literature, is that it’s happening somewhat faster than expected. As I have observed on several occasions in this writing project, at some point the debate over Zuccotti Park would become academic because it would be underwater. Given that Wall Street was reported flooded last night, I’m assuming that happened last night. And from a New York-centric point of view, we dodged the real bullet yesterday because New Jersey took the worst of the storm.

Governor Cuomo has been talking extensively about the changed weather pattern but only  in terms of how to defend and prepare. We’ll have to do that of course. But unless we change the patterns of our existence, none of it will matter. A long, dreary clean-up is ahead. Let’s make the emergency into the emergence of a new pattern of everyday life that works on the understanding that there’s a new normal.

 

Waiting for the Lights to Go Out

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Southampton, Long Island, before Sandy arrives

I like snow storms. I love thunder and watching the crack of lightning. This is no fun at all. The bands of rain and wind are coming in faster and harder already and we’re not expecting Sandy to make landfall till 8pm. There’s water over Battery Park, the FDR drive and the East River parks at 2.30. Long Island’s lights are out. Ours will be soon, no doubt, and you start to realize what a dark little box a NYC apartment really is.

Twitter and Facebook are alive with contempt for the climate silence of the campaign and a certain hope that perhaps this will be the event that changes all that. Just last weekend, David Attenborough, the BBC TV naturalist, speculated that it would take a disaster to do so. I’d like to see that– but I doubt it.

If things are bad, we will be told, as if this were yet another gun violence disaster, that now is not the time to talk about what caused the storm. Or that no one weather event can be attributed to long-term climate change. Or that it wasn’t as bad as predicted so the climate change lobby was wrong again. And before we get dried out on the East coast, before the power is restored upstate and in Long Island, we will have re-elected at a minimum the know-nothing Republican House, perhaps also a Republican Senate or President.

Given a golden opportunity to look presidential, Obama came on TV around lunchtime and delivered remarks with the affect of a professor changing the due date on a test. I don’t recognize or understand this person, who sometimes goes away when Obama is in front of a large crowd or even in the latter debates after the damage was done.

For Republicans, their angry white male core constituency regards science and research as two more of the things that prevent them from getting ahead. The coal-steel-auto-airplane-defense matrix that created the well-paying (usually union) jobs they hanker after both caused the climate crisis and has moved to China forever. That’s why Romney talks about expanding defense: not because we need the materiel but because it offers the prospect of some jobs where there are so few now.

We should not look down on these people. If you visit Copenhagen, to take just one example, there are windmills everywhere. In New York, not only are there no windmills but I can’t recall ever seeing a solar panel. In a place with broiling summers, why aren’t the roofs of all the buildings covered in panels to power the A/C? Why did diesel generators sell out immediately, while so few people have solar installed? I don’t have either at our house because both are expensive. But it never seems to occur to anyone that a solar panel could do the work of a generator without having to be refueled and without the noxious fumes.

We have all been in denial. For a few days around this storm, should it prove to be as devastating as predicted, there will be attempts to break that wall but, if past experience is any guide, the carapace of obfuscation will seal over the issue once again.

I don’t know when I will be able to get back online after tonight–maybe tomorrow, maybe not. But the work ahead came to me in a title: The Debtor’s Guide to The Climate Disaster.

It’s the Climate, Stupid

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That, of course, is the election slogan that never was. As Hurricane Sandy meanders over towards New York, the streets are so deserted, you half expect to see tumbleweed. After an endless campaign, we face the farce of a huge climate-change generated weather “event” that no one can name as such, because the issue has become unsayable. The canard is that to discuss climate disaster will scare the low-information voter. Let’s look at why that’s wrong and why the political establishment has closed ranks anyway.

Nothing to see here

The Serious People in Washington tell us that there is no consensus on climate change or action to deal with it. Wrong and wrong. It’s true that around the time of the 2008 economic crisis, popular sentiment placed far less value on the issue. But that has notably rebounded since as you can see from this chart.

So while agreement on the settled scientific consensus around global warming did drop, it never fell below 50% and is now at 62%, perhaps the greatest majority around an issue tagged as “Democratic” or “progressive” that there is, other than on reproductive rights. Nonetheless, even the new-fangled moderate Mitt Romney did everything short of actually eat coal and drink crude oil in the first debate, prompting the always timid Democrats to back off.

But the Brookings Institute report on climate change action options published in June 2012 shows how it would be possible to claim that majority for climate-related policy. It’s true that taxation and cap-and-trade schemes are not popular. But other options remain.

Here 77% of respondents, including 58% of Republicans, support requiring electricity to come from renewable sources. That’s a Senate-proof super-majority!

And a 52% majority (75% D /28% R) support the existing policy of using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions. So there’s no need for Democrats to obfuscate the issue, one on which a clear divide exists between the two parties, so much so that 90% of oil company campaign contributions, which are usually carefully divided between candidates, has gone to Romney.

So why has the issue been so comprehensively back-burnered? There’s a dark corner of think-tank and government activity called climate security. This purports to measure the impact of climate change on national security. So climate security types have a different assessment of the situation than most people.

The Lancet, 2009

This diagram is taken from the British medical journal The Lancet. It shows, on top, countries mapped by quantity of carbon emissions. The United States is huge, while Africa is tiny. The bottom half maps countries by likely mortality due to climate change generated events. Here Africa becomes huge, whereas the US all but disappears.

There are those in climate security who see this kind of disparity as a form of strategic advantage to the US, despite the many issues of migration and disruption that are expected. In short, then, some in the US military-industrial complex are willing to let this kind of scenario play out for the strategic gains it entails. To be fair, others are not. But there’s a funny way that the most cynical view tends to win out in such circles.

The Lancet based its diagram on the 2007 IPCC consensus that a 3-4 degree rise in temperature was what could be expected. Since then, global efforts at CO2 mitigation have largely failed, emissions have risen to new heights and the feedback loops appear to be more virulent than had been expected. Translation: it’s much worse, much faster than was thought in 2007-9. US mortality rates are still going to be a lot lower than Africa’s, but drought, flood, fire and hurricane is not exactly what the term “security” suggests.

We know how to deal with this. It would mean a decentralized, demilitarized and de-industrialized way of life. Sounds good to me. And it may be something that people will be more willing to talk about if the New York city subway floods. Already the expectation is billions of dollars of damages. If we had spent that money on renewables and research back in 2007, perhaps this wouldn’t be happening. It’s not too late. But don’t look to our defunct electoral system for the solution.

The Continuing One Per Cent Hatred of Democracy

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Today I got a packet in the post with copies of the new issue of Public Culture. I’d almost forgotten that I have a short essay in it called “Why I Occupy.” It’s actually not on the website yet. It was written back in January and I expected that it would feel badly outdated. There are some references to May Day that seem that way but the core of the piece is about democracy and elections, making it oddly timely.

After some personal contextualization, I argue:

In the space that has opened up between the disappointment engendered by “Obama” and the emergence of Occupy has come a widespread, realization that no election of a single candidate or party is likely to change the neo-liberal consensus, let alone transform capitalism. Hard on the heels of this commonplace (in certain left circles at least) came the opportunity and responsibility to try and do something about it.

What I mean here is that “Obama” does not stand for the person of the president himself, and his failings or successes, but the fundamental concept of a representative democracy functioning primarily via the occasional selection of a “great man” in the style of Carlyle (or the even more occasional selection of a great woman).

Of course, we can say that the Republicans chose to block Obama at all points. In most parliamentary democracies that wouldn’t be surprising: the opposition is supposed to oppose. What can’t happen here is a debate about neo-liberal capitalism. We are only allowed to hear about “government,” big or small. In this non-debate it becomes perfectly possible for a candidate like Romney to reverse his position repeatedly and still seem “serious,” not just because of the weakness of the US media (though that is real), but because the policy difference is not dramatic.

After all, neither candidate has taken a serious new policy position for the election. Obama will carry on muddling through, already signaling “concessions” to Republicans on the fiscal cliff. Romney will give tax cuts to the rich. Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who probably won’t overturn Roe v. Wade. Romney will appoint those who probably will.

The drama comes in questions of culture and identity. By performing functionally in the first “debate,” Romney gained authority with those who wanted to act out a desire for heteronormative white masculinity. They call it “being a real man.” In those people longing for a reassertion of (white) American dominance, no policy position is as important as being allowed to express this sense of hierarchy.

After Colin Powell (himself let it be said something close to a war criminal in 2003) endorsed Obama, Republican John Sununu retorted that it was because both men are African American. Powell’s chief-of-staff pointed out the obvious:

My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that’s despicable.

Such comments won’t swing a single vote because it’s been an open secret for years. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate the “end of Reconstruction” effect that a Romney victory would have, even if it later seems like the last hurrah of the white majority, before the demographic rise of a diverse majority.

Win or lose, I suspect that the Romney campaign has succeeded in creating a new wave of white male rage. And here’s the difference–Romney will have to give them things, whether on reproductive rights, or science education, or affirmative action that will make things notably worse. He will do so gladly in exchange for the continued rule of neo-liberal oligarchy.

But what of democracy? In the Public Culture essay I wrote about the perceived crisis in democracy:

For a thinker like Jacques Rancière, there would be no contradiction here. Rather than call this “post-democracy,” Rancière has argued that the Platonic “hatred of democracy” has always continued to apply to Western society. That is to say, in the fashion of Bruno Latour, we have never been democratic.

There are two component parts to democracy: the demos, the people, and kratein, to rule. Who are the people? The Romney view is that they are corporations and those that serve them, which would appall Plato and latter-day Platonists like Carlyle alike. There’s no sense left of aristocracy, the rule of the best. It’s palpably oligarchy that dominates, the rule of the few, those who have power but no authority.

The demos as all the people has never ruled. It has never even been allowed to speak. That’s what the 99% meme was all about: not that we are all identical, except in this one regard, we have never been allowed to have a part. Occupy tried to democratize democracy. It perhaps underestimated the forces of racialized and gendered domination that continue to classify and separate the people. It’s still not over.

 

Savile, Silvio, Sandusky: The Abuse of Authority

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From Italy, Britain and rural Pennsylvania, a triangle of the abuse of authority fills the news. The appalling allegations against the British celebrity (now deceased) Jimmy Savile now run into the hundreds. The leering Silvio Berlusconi was finally sentenced to a jail term that, regrettably, no one should expect him to serve. And it was reported that Penn State students are divided over the ethics of the Sandusky case.

By now we have to see this as systemic. From the Clinton-era scandals to the Catholic Church, and the priapic fantasist of the IMF Dominic Strauss-Kahn to this latest wave of abuse, it’s clear that there is a consistency.  In a perverse parody of the embodied claim to freedom represented by the Occupy movement, the neoliberal quest for dominance is being acted out on the bodies of those who everyone moves past and fails to see–the orphan, the sex worker, the disabled, the impoverished.

What is important to stress is that this has nothing to do with sex or desire. Dominance and submission as forms of pleasure depend, first, on the consistent possibility to end the play and, second, on the equal status of the participants. In the abuse of power, the abused have no such equality and are subject to verbal and media attacks if they speak up. This violence extends to journalists like Laurie Penny (@pennyred, a good friend of Occupy) or Suzanne Moore, whose thoughtful work on feminism and sexuality attracts amazingly vile comments: on the Guardian, Independent and New Statesman websites, note, not on some Tea Party discussion board.

In the university sector, an ethics class at Penn State is being taught around the Sandusky scandal. Depressingly enough, one student sums up the discussions on campus like this:

You either somehow support child abuse or you hate Penn State.

That’s reminiscent of the accusation of America-hating leveled against people bringing up the Abu Ghraib photographs, a discourse sufficiently successful that undergraduate freshmen at NYU this year did not recognize the photographs when shown them in class.

At Penn State, the discussions are lively around the case, pleasing the professor Jonathan Marks:

This was his role: to encourage, and promote, discussion. He never offers his opinion on the scandal, allowing the students to cultivate their own ideas.

Now, Marks is not quoted here and I suspect he might not put it quite like that. But the teaching strategy is familiar enough. I wouldn’t myself use it in this case because I don’t see an ethical dilemma here. It seems from the article that his intent was to give students ethical frameworks with which to analyze their existing tensions over Sandusky. Is that enough?

While these points may be salient, I have to recognize how abuse plays through academic life. In every department in which I have taught, male faculty members have approached me with comments about the attractiveness of some of the students. I’ve not joined the discussion or encouraged it but I have to realize that I did not forcefully condemn it. I eye-roll and change the subject. Again, to be crystal clear, I am certain that none of my colleagues engaged in abuse of the Sandusky kind.

As I write this, though, I now remember an incident long ago, in which the first discussion I had with a faculty member at an institution I had just joined was his request for me to sign a letter supporting him in a case of sexual harassment. He had tenure. I was a first-year assistant professor. I signed. I later met the victim and realized what a mistake I had made. Luckily, the university upheld her view and he was asked to leave.

What of Occupy? There were allegations of abuse, even rape, at the encampments. I never saw anything like that but I was not there overnight when the incidents were supposed to have happened. Do men claim too much authority, talk too much, always stress action over mutual aid? I wish I could say no.

This is an age of dominance without hegemony. Military power has failed to win the battle of hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Iraq. The wages of whiteness have been devalued. Certain men feel that their diminished authority must be acted out as dominance over the bodies of others. The impact of these rolling revelations is that such assertions of dominance cannot be limited to those negative spaces like the Army or the Church that radicals and liberals alike feel comfortable criticizing. It’s in media, in universities, in progressive politics and it’s not that we didn’t know but that we didn’t know it was still this bad. Or maybe that should be I didn’t know.

I just went for a walk. There was a fashionably dressed young man urinating against my building in full view of everyone at 10 o’clock at night.

This is the movement

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Here’s why we do Strike Debt. A day in the life of the debt movement. I look at the news over breakfast. The New York Times is editorializing about rescheduling private student loans. These are $150 billion but only 15% of the total. I worry for a moment that this might be how the process co-opts the debt movement but then I remember that Congress never passes anything so it scarcely matters.

Email. People are sending in text for the packet we’re putting together for Strike Debt groups that are starting up across North America–Nova Scotia, Toronto, Portland, Tampa, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and others. Actors write in about the excerpt from Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay that we might do at the People’s Bailout.

Meetings. A gathering organized by Marina Sitrin to introduce people from Strike Debt to Alex, an activist from the Athens Assembly movement. The network of neighborhood assemblies he describes is very impressive, drawing in older people, stay-at-home mothers and other non-activist types. Actions include days at hospitals where cashiers strike and allow people to get health care without paying. Although doctor visit co-pays are still low at €5, in a country with 25% unemployment, it’s still too much for many.

Other actions center on preventing those unable to pay their electricity bills from being cut off. The government has added substantial extra taxes to the bills for the purpose of repaying their loans, nothing at all to do with the utility. So many people who simply can’t pay face losing power. Today yet more cuts were announced, including devastating redundancies to civil servants and a mass lay-off of associate professors at universities. Fully 85% of the new loans that come in exchange for these cuts go directly to the banks and there will be no advantage to the population at large. American politicians say we must not become Greece. The point is rather that austerity policies supported by America have created this new “Greece.” All power to the resisters.

The Trouble is the Banks

On to meet with an editor of the new book The Trouble is the Banks: Letters to Wall Street. This is a collection of letters posted to the popular Occupy The Boardroom website. Writers presented their stories about dealing with banks or what they think of the banks, their outrage, their wit and their hopes for the future. It’s great stuff and you can get a copy for only $10. Do consider adding a small donation if you can afford it. The meeting discussed presenting the Occupy The Boardroom project to activist groups in Spain who are now taking on Bankia, Santander and other failed Spanish banks. I’m going to Spain next month so I can meet with people in 15M and see what they think.

This was a good prelude to the next stop, a meeting in the NYU Library in support of the Cost of Knowledge campaign. Organized by a group of mathematicians, the campaign protests the extortionate prices of for-profit academic journals published by Elsevier and Springer. These journals price themselves at rates on average ten times higher per page than very similar journals published by learned and scholarly societies. Further, they compel libraries wanting to subscribe to popular, well-used journals to get them in large “bundles” that include extensive subscriptions to far less popular publications. In short, the free labor of academics adds up to an astonishing $3 billion annual profit for Elsevier, taking money out of university and library budgets.

The mathematicians have withdrawn from Elsevier journals in tranches, ranging from total boycott to a minimum refusal to publish there. As of today, over 12,000 have joined the campaign. The other side to this campaign is open access, meaning that anyone, not just people inside universities, should have access to publications. Knowledge is the commons of the information society, the basic tool of immaterial labor. Anyone thinking that maths wouldn’t be a part of such a discussion should have seen the crowd taking Occupy Algebra at the Free University last year.

This is the movement: from activists and organizers to mathematicians and librarians, people have decided that enough is enough. If the capitalist machine insists on eating itself, we have to refuse to participate and find other ways to do what we want. A day like this sounds tiring as I write it down but it was in fact more energizing to feel this wave building.

How and Why to Refuse Debt

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Strike Debt Portland #N3

Everyone knows that the slogan “we are the 99%” changed political discourse worldwide. With even mainstream media now filled with debt stories, it’s only a matter of time before Strike Debt, debt refusal or debt jubilee becomes a meme. The news is all about debt. In Europe, the social movements are laying the way towards a major debt refusal.

Look at what’s in the news just today. The Federal government is finally going to begin overseeing the actions of debt collection agencies. Debt assemblies are filled with stories of people receiving phone calls from these agencies in the middle of the night, about their harassment of family members and friends and the open threats made of physical and even sexual violence. In a foolish loophole, companies doing less than $10 million a year in collections (about 37% in terms of the total dollar amount) will be exempt from these rules.

Following the conviction of banks for mortgage fraud in Nevada, the Federal government is finally joining in here too. Nevada sued the Royal Bank of Scotland for hustling people into mortgages that did not require initial full payments and had a low start-up interest rate. Such options kept the casino of house prices going. However, borrowers who took these options saw a rise in both the principal and then the interest rate after a brief period. And now 60% of mortgages in the state are underwater. Nevada won $42.5 million in damages, $36 million of which will be distributed among homeowners: debt abolition by another name.

Today, too late, the Federal government filed a suit for $1 billion in damages against Bank of America for similar fraudulent mortgage practices. The hustle here was to move the bad mortgages off B of A’s books to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bank made its money on fees and percentages, while the taxpayers got stuck with the bill. Bank of America? Bad for America. Shame that this suit wasn’t filed two years ago so that the administration could have something to show people going into the elections–if Romney wins, the whole thing will disappear of course.

This kind of thing is everywhere:  Illinois today announced that its whole provision of state services has been damaged by debt repayment, resulting:

in decrepit commuter trains and buses, thousands of unsound bridges, 200 hazardous dams and one of the most inequitable public school systems in America.

To sum up: everything we have been saying in Strike Debt, and that I have been writing here about debt, is not the wild delusion of extremists but the increasingly mainstream view of the debt society.

Where we part ways with The New York Times and Co. is over solutions. It’s past time to push matters towards debt refusal. In Europe, they’re planning exactly how to do that. A group of Italian organizations–Attac Italy, Centro Nuovo Modello di Sviluppo, Re: Common, Rivolta il debito, Smonta il debito–have issued a call for a New Public Finance to be debated at the Europe-wide Firenze 10+10 convergence in November.

Their key tactic is a citizen’s audit of the debt. This audit will establish what aspects of public and private debt are “odious” (debt-speak for illegitimate) and therefore to be abolished or rescheduled. Such audits are planned across Europe. The strength of the tactic is that it reverses the morality question. Rather than it being “immoral” not to repay one’s debt, it will be seen to be immoral to issue fraudulent loans of the type made by Royal Bank of Scotland and Bank of America. Further, by initiating a public debate on debt via the audit, the movement can win popular opinion before any debt refusal. That refusal would then seem logical, fair and necessary.

Here’s how they put it (their translations which I have not modified):

The creation of the debt was to the benefit of the few and not the majority of people. The non-taxation of financial income, the lack of genuinely progressive tax reform, and the corrupt use of public spending for social control, have benefited a restricted class of people, and the gap between rich and poor in our country has become more profound.

A public and participatory audit – both at national and at local authority level – is necessary for assessing which debts are illegitimate and therefore not to be recognized, and which should be rewarded instead by restructuring the debt composition through an immediate freezing of the payment of interests and a fair, democratic and transparent renegotiation with the creditors.

This proposal will be modified, expanded and developed in Florence but the outlines of the project are clear and powerful.

How would you carry out such an audit? It requires a nationwide debt refusal movement, organized in local chapters, with local autonomy but consistent with an overall set of principles. Such a movement exists in Spain. We’re building it here. It’s happening.

 

Mapping Strike Debt

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Lately everyone has been telling me how tired I look. In part, that’s the cold that everyone in New York seems to have. Partly, it’s a way of saying that I am middle-aged. It’s also that Strike Debt is in full gear and it has been throughout so everyone is, in fact, wiped out. But it continues to be interesting and provocative so we keep doing it.

Over the course of two long discussions yesterday and today, one within Strike Debt and the other at Occupy University, the figure of Strike Debt as a set of intersections arose. It’s not “just” about the debt in other words. It’s about using debt to open new conversations and new approaches that make it possible to organize and conceptualize differently.

So the figure of Strike Debt above is both a map of how debt and debt resistance plays out, and a configuration of how the group might be organized. There are four poles: mutual aid and resistance form one axis, while the local and the (inter)national forms the other. Each site and each axis is in itself a place of intersection and none exists independently. Debt itself, after all, is a set of agreed or compelled relationships. It allows us to explore questions of human interaction, as well as the interface of the human and non-human.

Sets of related terms arise as a result of the interplay across the axes.

Cluster one: Modes of Engagement

Mutual Aid/Jubilee/Gross Domestic Product/Growth/Abolition/The Commons/ Bankruptcy/Refusal/Resistance.

These are different ways of configuring relationships to debt, credit, interest–in short, mediated human interaction in terms of value. They are not linear but reconfigure according to which term in the cluster you stress (like mind-mapping software if you get the geeky reference). So if you stress bankruptcy, it might be as refusal or resistance but it might also have to do with GDP. It might be a way of talking about Jubilee. Growth becomes a question rather than a solution. It might not be growth in conventional terms but growth of leisure time or social services.

Cluster two: Politics of Affect

Calm/Love/Radicalism/Encouraged/Healing/Smile/Feminism/Trust

These are all terms used by participants at the end of the OccU session on Debt and Climate this evening. They are not words often associated with either debt or climate change. The ways in which people worked together to see intersections and commonalities, as well as emerging tactics to engage with these issues, generated this positive sense. Just as it has been crucial to make people feel better about being in debt by talking about it, so does climate change need to seem scaleable. Presenting debt abolition and climate change mitigation as mutually reinforcing solutions–because debt cancellation reduces the need for growth and allows for lower emissions–was more successful than dealing with the two issues separately.

Cluster three: Tactics

 Mapping/Aesthetics/Organizing/Social Cost Accounting/

Stop Shopping/Countervisualizing

Some of these terms might be interchanged with Modes of Engagement and vice-versa: they are intersecting. Mapping, though, emerged repeatedly as a key tactic for debt resistance and climate change mitigation. In short, it’s a fundamental mode of countervisuality. Aesthetics, both in the formal sense relating to artworks, and the generalized sense of bodily perception was also something we wanted to reclaim from the banner to the performance and the street action.

Want to see what this intersection looks like? Check this video promoting the 14N International Strike in Europe:

Austerity Fails

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This is not a headline I expect you will see in many US papers tomorrow, which will be consumed with whatever gaffe, zinger, or body language is supposed to have determined the “debate.” Sadly, facts and ideas have no place in these bizarre performances that increasingly revolve around the unspoken axis of racial tension.

Meanwhile, it has become clear that the austerity policy of our global hegemons is a failure even on its own terms. The Eurostat agency today reported on the economic condition of the Eurozone and the full membership of the European Union. Short story: despite a minimal decline in budget deficits, government debt is up all over the region.

Details:

• Eurozone government debt: €8.22 trillion in 2011, up from €7.833 trillion in 2010

• Eurozone debt/GDP: 87.3% in 2011, up from 85.4% in 2010

• Eurozone deficit: 4.1% of GDP in 2011, down from 6.2% in 2010

• EU government debt: €10.433 trillion in 2011, up from €9.826 trillion

• EU debt/GDP: 82.5% in 2011, up from 80.0% in 2010

• EU deficit: -4.4% of GDP in 2011, down from 6.5% in 2010

It’s interesting to note that the budget deficit in the U. K. is almost as high as in Greece and Spain at 7.8% and fourth highest in the EU overall, yet there are no urgent IMF missions to London, presumably because the Old Etonian government there is already sufficiently hostile to benefits and social investment. Even Germany exceeds the ridiculous target of state debt being 60% of GDP as if this number had any bearing on reality.

However, the Franco-German leadership of the EU has hinted to Ireland that a “retroactive recapitalization” of Irish banks to the tune of €64 billion may be forthcoming–but no promises. This is the “reward” to Ireland for being a model for how to accept austerity so as to save banks over people. Strangely, the Irish, suffering through mass unemployment, recession and collapsed housing markets, are still not celebrating.

In the vocabulary of Goldman Sachs, we are all “muppets,” unsophisticated clients who do not realize how even apparently beneficial deals being presented by the bank in fact generate high levels of profit for the lender. It is some kind of final acting out of hostility that the one clear commitment made by the Republican candidate has been to abolish Sesame Street and its muppets.

Occupy Goldman Sachs

In more news you won’t have heard, a group of occupiers has set up a new Occupy outside the residence of Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The action follows the O13 mic check at 15 Central Park West, where Blankfein lives. Although there was one spurious attempt to evict them by claiming that the sidewalk was in fact in the park, although it is clearly on the far side of the avenue from the park, the small group of occupiers have held on for several days so far.