Category Archives: debt

Bringing It All Back Home

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The old adage says you can’t go home again. Like most such remarks, it’s about half true. I spent a lot of my twenties in the British left-wing world, at the kind of event I was at today. It was called Up The Anti, a discussion of where to go next after Occupy and all that.

The old patterns were very much in evidence: a plethora of small parties and groups claiming allegiance to Trotsky and other revolutionary legacies; a very serious focus on the issues; some under-representation of women and people of color on panels; unco-operatively designed rooms with steep rakes and fixed desks.

And despite all that being true today, the panel organized by the Occupied Times and Strike Debt UK had a familiar energized feel of the beginning of a movement. We began with David Graeber doing his usual, excellent introduction to debt as a political and historical topic. He has a great knack of making you feel smart as you listen to him and he won the audience over to the idea of debt as an activist issue.

I went next and had the simple pleasure of describing all that Strike Debt has been up to from the first debt assemblies via the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual and the direct action days to the Rolling Jubilee. I gave it a lot of “jubilant” energy, plussing it up as we say. So when I announced that the fund has raised enough money to abolish $10 million in debt (ok, almost), I was surprised to be interrupted by applause, very un-English.

I think I benefited from not reading as English to the audience, at least in the sense that I don’t have a place in the complex intra-left debates. I don’t carry any of the baggage of Occupy London, which several people suggested had left some difficult legacies, although I don’t myself know directly about that. And the Jubilee is just a win, and we all need wins from time to time.

There was a great presentation that followed about Third World debt and we went into breakouts. The direct action breakout that I joined was clearly interested in doing a Jubilee in the UK, although some people pointed out differences in the credit laws that make it much more difficult. There were other good ideas about working with community groups, looking ahead to housing benefit cuts and so on. It was all a bit vague and suggested the need for a lot of research.

It was all so familiar from only six months ago, when we decided to do something similar in New York. If people keep coming, talking, researching and doing actions, Strike Debt UK will find its own way to engage the debt system. I got a contact buzz off the activists. It seems that to go home, you have to go differently than when you were first there. Then it works.

Debt: The Next UK Jubilee Won’t Be Royal

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So today I tried the debt meme in London at Goldsmiths College. I’m starting to get a feel for how this goes. There’s an academic constituency that sees themselves as representing “theory,” who tend to be skeptical. There’s a cultural studies crowd, who are intrigued but concerned it might be a bit much. And then there are the younger people, who get it, and who want to put it into action, wherever they happen to be.

There’s no doubt that debt is a major unspoken issue in the UK. Even the laissez-faire government has been prompted to rein in payday loans that charged an insane 1700% interest. The charity StepChange reports that 17% of its clients are using payday loans in 2012, nearly doubled in the last three years. UK debt is currently nearly 500% of GDP, despite recession,  if you count personal, company and national debt.

The chart from StepChange’s recently published report shows how much difficulty lower income households in the UK find themselves in.

Large and increasing numbers of people are behind on rent, fuel bills and council tax (the UK version of property tax). Credit card debt is up, with households owing £8000 ($12,000) on average. Step Change show that a lot of people are using “the plastic safety net,” paying bills by credit cards. And students are now looking at £9000 ($13,500) annual tuition bills, up from only £3000 two years ago.

So debt refusal, debt abolition and the Rolling Jubilee were ideas that clearly sparked a lot of interest. It’s a much greater step here than in the US in some ways because people still believe in government and the social contract, even after thirty-five years of neo-liberalism, known here as Thatcherism.

Perhaps the comedy of errors around the media crisis will change some minds. When the tabloids were caught hacking people’s phones, especially that of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler, there was outrage. Wait for the official report, government said. Now the report is out. The Conservative plurality that dominates the government has, in US parlance, punted. Too soon to act, too rash, all the predictable and predicted hogwash.

The crisis is above all a crisis of authority. Media-backed government has rammed through the socio-economic transformation of Thatcherism in a seemingly unchallengeable alliance. If the public start to see the relationship as being as not only corrupt, but blatantly refusing the process of reform, then more radical options will start to seem necessary.

Switching back to debt, is a UK Rolling Jubilee possible? Just as you would expect, there is a secondary debt market but it’s clubby and less open than in the US. Here

impaired loans have either been handled in-house by banks or sold on to specialised debt collection agencies. So-called distressed debt funds have also started to snap up defaulted UK consumer loans, attracted by the country’s relatively stable, transparent and creditor-friendly legal code.

At the same time, there’s also consumer protection and charities like Step Change. But the Financial Times article quoted above worried that the secondary market was getting overextended. Sounds like it’s time for a Jubilee.

Three Years to the Spanish Revolution

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So today I made a major mistake. I left Barcelona. I am aware that I am romanticizing the city, but romanticism has a radical genealogy and is not to be confused with sentimentality. This morning I wandered around the city streets and headed for the site of the CNT headquarters during the Spanish Civil War. It’s now a bookshop, which in properly anarchist fashion, was not open when I visited in contradiction to its posted hours.

Barcelona still has the small bars and restaurants that are so enticing to those of us who grew up in dull Northern cities. Paris feels like a museum these days but Barca has the feel of a place that matters. To be involved in the movement in New York has often felt like a marginal activity. In Barcelona, I found my most radical utterances were received as mainstream, not just by activists but by the academics, artists and journalists that I met. Last night one activist said to me that she expected there would be a revolution in Spain within three years. I  believed her.

Whether it wins, that’s another matter, but the reasons for the left shift are not hard to find. Today the European Union yet again bailed out the banks with a 

payment of €37 billion from the euro zone bailout fund to four Spanish banks on the condition that they lay off thousands of employees and close offices as part of their restructuring.

The chief culprit Bankia will lay off 6000 people, and some of the other banks are merging so there will be over 10,000 redundancies to prop up the banks. Needless to say, the chance of any economic recovery took another backwards step today.

“No to Unemployment, No to Evictions”

And the mortgage crisis has got so bad that even the austerity dedicated government has decreed a stop to foreclosures, following a rash of foreclosure-induced suicides. Foreclosures were running at an incredible 500 a day, with a backlog of some 350,000 reported. There were at least eight reported suicides by debt in October and early November, causing angry street protests.

At the same time, Spain is feeling the effects of climate change. I was talking to someone from Seville yesterday, who told me that the summer temperature is regularly 48 degrees C/118F. The entire city becomes nocturnal to compensate. Yesterday in Barcelona, there was a tropical downpour that followed months of drought in the summer. Desertification is an issue across the country. While six per cent of fertile land has already become desert, up to a third of the country is considered under threat.

Fires, floods and beach erosion are all serious issues and long-term measurements indicate that there is a visible trend. For example,

Spain has lost 90% of its glaciers in the past century, with the remaining ice expected to disappear completely within a few decades, according to the environment ministry. While the Pyrenees were covered by 3,300 hectares of glacier when records began at the end of the 19th century, now only 390 hectares remain.

So Spain exemplifies the climate/debt conundrum. Austerity is causing the economy to shrink. Debt repayment is still demanded from banks, government and private citizens alike. If the economy were to grow sufficiently to make this possible, the climate disaster could only accelerate.

This is a contradiction so acute that the revolution being openly discussed in Spain might seem like the only sensible solution. Perhaps that accounts for the resilience and optimism of the Barcelona activists, despite all the tensions, splits and hardships that exist. Or perhaps it’s harder to break a great city than the neo-liberals think.

Homage to Catalonia

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At the risk of being a cliché, Catalunya is really a remarkable place. I don’t think many other cities could take the kind of battering that has been meted out and retain this kind of spirit and vitality. Perhaps the highlight of my trip was meeting with Catalan debt activists, full of ideas and dynamism on the same day that the newly elected government indicated a swingeing new round of cuts. The Jubilee has rolled across the Atlantic. Watch out.

I had two morning interviews with journalists from La Vanguardia, the leading local newspaper that now publishes in Castilian and Catalan. It feels like a real newspaper, engaged, serious and questioning. My interlocutors were wildly different: a very generous woman interviewing for the magazine, and a guy from the main paper grilling me like a film noir detective, in between telling me the story of his life.

Just as the first interview was all about Occupy/Strike Debt and the second about visual culture, I had two constituencies for the talk I gave later: one from or interesting in the social movements; and one for visual culture. I tried to show that I think they are the same but the academic audience left with some dissatisfaction that my 40 slides did not include enough “images.” I suppose they meant art work and it was true that a talk called “Technologies of Direct Democracy” was not very art-centered.

It reminded me of the early visual culture days, when people would demand to know how I considered my work to be art history, which I didn’t. On one memorable occasion, a well-known author of a modern art textbook insisted I declare that I loved art. I declined.

All of this paled by comparison with a dynamic meeting with debt activists in Barcelona that followed. This group is working on an excellent initiative called : Put A Banker In Jail. When they opened the crowd-sourced funding website, it crashed immediately because so many people were trying to donate. Like the Rolling Jubilee, the donations were mostly small from €3-5 but the intent was very clear: put the banksters in jail. At first 32 were indicted but the process has gone ahead for five leading characters, so that the others can be called as witnesses against them. As in the U.S., defendants can refuse to testify but witnesses cannot. One of the defendants is the head of Bankia Rodrigo Rato. Apparently, the court date is December 24 so with luck we can get a banker in jail for the holidays.

I was able to share some of the Strike Debt ideas, like the debt assembly and the debt burn. Interestingly, in Spain the idea of the jubilee did not resonate in the way that it does in the U.S. because of the history of the African-American church. So when I explained what it was, there was much, shall we say, jubilation. Although also some hesitation about working with the church in  a country where the Catholic church’s record is appalling.

There was a frank recognition that the inventiveness of the movement here is in part a consequence of the mass unemployment that has in particular left younger highly qualified people with nothing to do. At the same time, the slogan “We Don’t We, We Won’t Pay” came not from the movement but from the barrios, where it seems to be simple common sense.

From us in New York, the Catalans want amplification and publicity, which we can do. And to work together on a co-ordinated debt abolition movement. Which could be the start of something massive.

 

 

Debt Colonialism: A View from Barcelona

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I’m in Barcelona for a couple of days, giving talks and interviews and holding discussion for the visual studies program, the Center of Contemporary Culture and with the movement. There’s not much difference between the people involved. It’s distinctly humbling to get up in front of people from 15M and talk about the global justice movement, even as the wheels are turning in the debt crisis.

Yesterday was an election in Catalunya for the state assembly, called by Artur Mas, the head of the CiU nationalist party. His hope was to sweep the board on his nationalist call for independence. Instead he lost ground to a more extreme nationalist group and the left made some small gains. No one seems quite sure what this all means as yet.

Meanwhile from different sides of the world, furious mainstream politicians are starting to use the language of debt colonialism. In Greece, Syriza’s leader Alexis Tspiras named his country a “debt colony.” In Argentina, the finance minister Hernán Lorenzino called the court verdict compelling his country to repay 2002 debts to vulture funds “judicial colonialism.”

In this latter case, speculative debt buyers have engineered a potential collapse of the national (and perhaps international) economy, just as debt buyers of personal debt ruin individual lives in the pursuit of personal profit after the original lenders have settled. There is late speculation that the EU may finally have agreed some kind of deal on Greek debt. But the process makes Tsipras’s point: the discussion was held in Brussels between France, Germany and the IMF.

Here in Barcelona, activists are in several minds. Some feel frustrated with the constant lack of response from their central government, no matter how dynamic or well-attended their actions become. It’s said that attendance at the legendary neighborhood assemblies is notably down. On the other  hand, there are activist banners hanging in hospitals and doctors’ offices protesting the cuts and entire families from school children to grandparents are reported to have participated in the N14 general strike.

You can’t miss the crisis. There are cranes all over but none of them are working, leaving buildings half-complete. Graffiti and posters are everywhere. For a traveler accustomed to being broke in the Eurozone, prices are notably lower than expected. A light lunch for €5, an express bus from the airport to the city for the same. Museums, galleries and cultural centers are all concerned with the crisis. I’ve written about this many times but, as always, it’s different to be here. It just reinforces the respect that I have had for the resilience of the movement. More to follow.

 

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.

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.

 

 

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.

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.