Category Archives: debt

A Crack in the Debt Wall?

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In this morning’s New York Times, there was an odd story about Irish mortgages. It suggested that substantial debt abolition was set to happen but gave very little detail. So I went online to try and find out more and, as far as I can tell, it’s not true. Or, given that there were no details, it’s true that some people in Ireland want this to happen but it’s not clear whether it will. So why was it on page one of the “paper of record”? We can only presume that some people of influence are trying to sow the seeds for debt “forgiveness” as the paper calls it.

In the piece, now not visible on the top pages of the website, Peter Eavis asserts:

The Irish government expects to pass a law this year that could encourage banks to substantially cut the amount that borrowers owe on their mortgages, a step that no major country has been willing to take on a broad scale.

With more than 50% of Irish mortgage holders now underwater and the Allied Irish Bank raising interest rates on mortgages recently, such a decision makes sense. Only there’s no clear indication that it’s actually happening.

What Eavis is referring to is the Irish Insolvency Bill, proposed last June in the aftermath of the Keane report into the financial meltdown in Ireland. Media reports at the time noted that Keane placed

huge store in the implementation of a personal insolvency bill in early 2012.

 

This legislation is curiously lost in the parliamentary process with no clear account of what’s going to happen being available.

In fact, Irish media reported today the creation of a new joint Irish and UK personal insolvency company, Debt Options, which will be based in Dublin. The Leicester-based firm IrishBankruptcyUK.ie, has been involved in the write-off of more than €1 billion worth of Irish debt in the UK over the last year. Expectations are that more business is to be had because Irish procedure requires expensive legal counsel and a

six-month personal insolvency arrangement process with the bank

Clearly this investment would not have been made if people involved in Irish bankruptcy proceedings thought the government was about to act.

Certainly, debt forgiveness or abolition is in the air in Ireland. Here’s the Irish Independent from September after Blackrock showed that negative equity was at 50% and Moody’s reported that 20% or more of such mortgages would default:

“Principle modification” — which is a nicer way of saying “debt forgiveness” — is, according to Moody’s, the only solution. This has been empirically proven by Blackrock. Thus, we have a known cure that we won’t countenance and can’t afford.

That forgiveness is the answer has also been argued by Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart and backed up by several economists in Ireland, including Oxford’s Ronan Lyons, Trinity’s Brian Lucey and UCD’s Ray Kinsella.

Banks know that even mentioning this possibility is financial kryptonite to their sector. But just look at the figures. Short of mass repossessions, there really is no alternative. The message from the banks is: “Stay calm, don’t worry, this is under control.”

Quite frankly, our banks have been lying to us. This is about as controlled as herding butterflies.

Well put. So we have to conclude that the Times put this story on A1 because it too wants to put pressure on the banks. Who pushed them to do that? The only conceivable “source” that might have such clout would be the Federal Reserve or similar high placed financial regulators. Debt activists have been hearing rumors for a while now that debt abolition is on the Fed’s agenda.

Mortgages are $14 trillion. The earth may be moving under our feet.

 

 

A Transnational Communication on Debt

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A few days ago, I reported on the European action against debt, which is part of the October 13 Global Day of Action. This falls within the Global Week of Action against Debt and IFIs (October 7th to 14th), which will be observed worldwide. This week of action was established in the World Social Forum at Nairobi in 2007, to denounce the injustice of foreign debt on peripheral states and the submission policies imposed by multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Strike Debt has consensed a communication with Démocratie Réelle Maintenant (Real Democracy Now!), the group formerly known as the Indignés (Outraged) and spokes from the Spanish 15M movement. The Communication may also be agreed to by other global social movements. It’s a statement of solidarity and joint outlook, not a redefinition of either movement or the O13 day of action.

I think it’s an interesting text so I’m pasting it below:

 

October 13 against debt

International communication.  

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

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

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

On O13, we will mobilise against debt in several cities of the world: Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Paris, New York…

The state response to the financial and economic crisis is the same everywhere: cuts in expenditure and austerity measures under the pretext of reducing deficits and the repayment of a public debt which is the direct outcome of decades of neoliberal policies.

Governments in the service of finance are using this pretext to further reduce social spending, lower wages and pensions, privatize public utility and goods, dismantle social benefits and deregulate labour laws, and increase taxes on the majority, while social and tax giveaways are generalized for the big companies and the highest net worth households.

The campaign to subdue the world to public and private debt is a calculated attack on the very possibility of democracy. It is an assault on our homes, our families, our social services and benefits, our communities and on the planet’s fragile eco-systems—all of which are being destroyed by endless production to pay back creditors, who have done nothing to hog the wealth they demand we make for them.

Faced with such coordinated attacks on our social gains, resistance is getting organized around the world, there are national general strikes and the ‘indignados’ movements are increasingly active. In Iceland, the people refused to pay the Icesave debt to the UK and the Netherlands. In Spain, and in Portugal, from the 15th of september, enormous demonstrations against debt have gathered more than 1 million of people, and a movement of major scale is growing around the surrounding of the Parliament in Madrid to demand a Constituant process.

We from the Occupy / Real Democracy Now / 15M movement call for public and private debt resistance and refusal. Debt resistance includes: fighting for free public education, free healthcare, defending foreclosed homes, demanding higher wages and providing mutual aid.

In Europe as in Egypt and Tunisia, initiatives for a citizens’ audit of public debt analyze how much of the public debt is illegitimate, odious or unsustainable, and must therefore be cancelled. Paying such creditors is stealing what rightfully belongs to the population and payments will continue to be the cause of college and hospital closures, pensions cuts, and so on and on. And the debt feed the debt.

We Don’t Owe, So We Won’t Pay! We Are Not a Loan.  Bad laws allowed all this debt. Let’s rewrite them together.

 

It seems that O13 will be a major day in Spain, notable in France, and marked by many smaller actions worldwide. If the global social movements can begin to properly co-ordinate, for example via a current proposal that there be global actions on the 22nd of every month, that could be a very interesting development.

 

 

 

The Global Debt Resistance

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Another day, another enormous resistance to the neo-liberal austerity regime. Today it was Greece, yesterday Spain. before that Portugal. Now a media and governmental meme is emerging in which it is said that “only” the periphery of Europe are in trouble and that the “strong” countries are doing well. It is hinted that Greece can and should leave the Euro. This is all bravado.

In “strong” France, it was announced today that unemployment has passed the three million mark. Despite the socialist victory in the Presidential elections, French activists see a continuity of austerity. I’m translating below a call to action on October 13 issued by the Paris Assembly of Démocratie réelle maintenant, the French equivalent to Spain’s Democracia Real Ya! Anti-debt groups across Europe and in the Americas are now working to co-ordinate a call for O13. Can what we used to call the left finally get its global act together?

Here’s the French call, translated rather literally, to be true to the original, which centers on the “casseroles” used in Montréal, the banging of pots and pans (all emphasis original):

Citizens! Into the Streets and To the Casseroles to Cancel Illegitimate Debt!

Debt is a racket!

Closure of schools and hospitals, reduction or suppression in social services, increased sales tax, absence of affordable housing…Such politics of austerity, applied for years in Latin America and Africa, are now current in the European Union. No population has been or will be spared, with the most precarious being the first affected. The situation is serious: let’s wake up!

Austerity claims to be legitimate because it results from excessive expenditures on benefits…In reality, sovereign debt comes from both the savagery of private banks since the 2008 crisis and the numerous fiscal gifts to the richest and to corporations for decades.

The debt also results from the excessive interest rates that we pay to private banks from whom the State borrows to finance itself, since it can no longer borrow from the Central Bank. The total debt results from compound interest built up over the past forty years!

The public debt is odious when we are told to reimburse the same people who are responsible for the crisis and who have not ceased to enrich themselves since.

The public debt is not legitimate when it impoverishes us, the 99%, in order to sustain private and unwarranted lenders.

To pay the public debt is just to produce… private debt: that of students, those in precarious housing, the sick, workers, the unemployed, farmers, undocumented immigrants, as well as all those who have to pay the individual price of the dismanteling of public services and benefits.

To continue with growth at all costs imposed by the blackmail of debt is also to increase our ecological debt, which, far more than the public debt, is what’s really at stake in the 21st century.

Where is democracy if we cannot say NO to that which is in the interest only of the privileged and when collusion reigns between them and those who govern us? Where is democracy when all future debate and politics is barred by European treaties, the latest of which, known as the Budget Treaty, is even now in the course of ratification by our so-called “representatives”?

The abolition of illegitimate debt must also be extended to other countries: we demand that the French state cease to shake down other nations in the name of odious debt, which they have already largely repaid, while we continue to pillage their wealth. We won’t pay illegitimate debt, not here or elsewhere! The only legitimate debt that we have is to respond to the call of the African [President] Thomas Sankara to create a global front against debt.

October 13 is a global day of action! Paris, rise up, everyone in the streets with your casseroles for a great unity march from Goldman Sachs to the Assemblée Nationale [Parliament/Congress]: stop the European budget treaty, cancel illegitimate debt here and elsewhere.

After the march, we will meet in an assembly to discuss alternative futures and to build common outcomes from the mobilization.

So there are a couple of points to note here. Obviously this is a more substantive and less media-oriented press release than is now common in the Anglophone world. And the focus is at first more on sovereign (or public) debt. The analysis moves into full agreement with global debt campaigns as it highlights how public debt produces private debt at the expense of developing nations and the biosphere. What might just be happening here is the formation of global anti-capitalist movement with a common theme. I find that idea more than a little intriguing.

 

Que se vayan todos!

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It’s time for them all to go. Who? The global neo-liberal Goldman Sachs-dominated financial elite. Around the world, it’s clear that people are coming to this conclusion and for good reason. In Portugal mass demonstrations forced the government to backtrack on cuts and raise taxes instead. In Egypt, workers are meeting in assemblies. What’s happening is a widespread withdrawal of consent to be governed in the name of austerity, cuts and finance. There are alternative programs emerging. The last year and a half was the warm up. Now it begins.

Egyptian car workers

I spent the morning reading about the civil rights movement as part of Strike Debt’s project to think about how to expand and build its campaign. Then I get online to see what’s going on in Spain, and there it is, happening. Today was a day of action 25S/S25 in which the Congress was encircled.

You wanted demands? They have demands:

– The dismissal of the entire government, as well as the dismissal of the Court and the Leadership of the State, because of betraying the country and the whole community of citizens. This was done in premeditation and is leading us to the disaster.

– The beginning of a constitutional process in a transparent and democratic way, with the goal of composing a new Constitution

They want the elimination of all remnants of Franco-ism and the beginning of a new democracy and sustainable employment. Central to that process is the citizens’ audit of debt:

– The audit and control of the public debt of Spain, with moratorium (delay) of debt’s payment until there is a clear demarcation of the parts which not have to be paid by the nation, because they have been served private interests using the country for their own goals, instead the well being of the whole Spanish community

This is the outline of a political alternative, one that could operate state power, albeit in a very different way.

It was in order to visualize that claim that the massive encircling of Congress took place today. It began earlier with a rally in the Avenida del Prado at the center of Madrid. Here’s a video (HT Marina Sitrin):

They’re chanting: “They don’t represent us.” Indeed they don’t with official unemployment at 24% and poverty at 22%.

They moved off to Congress:

To Congress

There were, shall we say, quite a few people there by the time they arrived and established the circle.

The police behaved with typical restraint.

But as often as the police waded into the crowd, they reformed, sat down and held the ground. Their chants reflected the manifesto: “It isn’t a crisis, it’s a fraud!” and “This is not a democracy, it is a Mafia.”

Ugly Naked Man with a sign: “Life Without Hope in Madrid”

The tunes were often ones used at soccer matches, together with classic left slogans like “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido.” These are forms of social connection that Occupy in the US can’t really draw on. Attending professional sport is a luxury event here, as is class activism. The Indignados are activists because they activate such patterns of social life. NFL referees can go on strike–NY state workers cannot.

If Occupy is to follow, it will have to learn how to cross the color lines that still prevent social activism from cohering here. It’s not that social conditions are different. Poverty in New York City, center of global capitalism, stands at 21% and the top 20% make an incredible 38 times the income of the bottom 20%. Madrid’s unemployment rate is 18.6%, while it reaches 13% in parts of New York like the Bronx, with much more stringent conditions and shorter eligibility. Of course, that difference is both  marked by and defines racialized hierarchy in the US. That’s the task ahead on this side of the Atlantic.

For the Indignados, today was simply a step on the road to the Global Day of Action on October 13, preceded by  O12’s celebration of America Latina Indignada or Occupy Latin America! Which makes sense because this refusal to be governed by neo-liberalism follows in the wake of similar Latin American refusals from Argentina to Bolivia and Chile. As so often, resistance moves from the decolonial regions to the former colonial metropole.

Last March, Madrid led and New York followed in September. Can we close the gap this time?

For A Climate Debt Strike

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Yesterday I had a bit of a rant about the destruction of the biosphere, ending in a call for action. It was that piece that got tweeted and FBed more than anything. So what does climate-related direct action look like? At the end of a day of Strike Debt meetings, it became clear: a climate debt strike.

How did we get here? There was a full day of Strike Debt discussion. A two-hour meeting looked at next steps for the movement after S17 in long breakouts. The consensus was to pursue greater networking at local NYC level and at national level. Task forces were created to investigate both processes. The immediate target is October 13, or O13, the European day of debt action, when Strike Debt will be doing solidarity actions.

Next, a debrief from S17. A strong sense here that the day went well for OWS in general and Strike Debt in particular, who were in the thick of things throughout. There was some concern that our messaging didn’t get out in the MSM, but no real surprise about that. On the positive front, The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual was a huge hit everywhere from Occupy Tampa to the Brooklyn Book Fair and the Free University.

At the end of all this a group retired to a local Happy Hour just to kick back. Everyone’s kidding around and suddenly a passionate debate about climate justice has started. Perhaps it was no coincidence that people from Panama, India and Palestine got this moving, calling attention again to the privilege that even a protestor on Wall Street has in relation to residents of underdeveloped nations. The daily threats of toxicity, disease, food insecurity (aka hunger), pollution and sea level rise make daily life in many locations a permanent emergency.

Climate justice activists have long highlighted the “climate debt” that the developed world owes to those places it has underdeveloped. That is to say, developed nations should cut cut their carbon emissions sufficiently far as to leave “room” for currently underdeveloped nations to expand their industrial economies in such a way as to mitigate their everyday emergency.

So far, this concept has won lip-service, some green-washing ads from corporations and not much else. Eco-activism has long concentrated on trying to influence national governments or global governance structures like the United Nations. The collapse of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio earlier this year made it clear that such options are no longer viable.

Just as we have seen with financial justice, the only way that the global one per cent will concede climate justice is if a radical movement forces the issue onto the agenda. We have begun to organize a debt resistance movement in the finance economy. We need to start to organize debt resistance in the climate economy. Which is to say that all debt refusal is also climate debt resistance.

The reason is simple. In order to “pay back” purported “debt” it is necessary to increase the size of the economy. At the present moment that cannot be done without increasing carbon and other toxic emissions, increasing land grabs from indigenous peoples and increasing primary extraction, like tar sands. Debt refusal is not an immoral welching on an obligation. It is at once the political claim that such debts were coerced; and deceptive and the moral claim that the economic growth required to “repay” them must be refused in name of all life.

A debt strike is a climate debt strike. Join the resistance. Strikedebt.org

Freedom, Justice and Privilege in NYC

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The intense last few days in New York City have reminded us of the interaction between the desire for freedom, the operations of legally-sanctioned justice, and the workings of privilege that constitute the moment. The social order functions, but it does so in ways that are palpably out of joint. In the cracks of capital, a desire for radical change has emerged that is not unmarked by these contradictions.

Late on S17, a group of us headed to 100 Center Street, where arraignments are held in Manhattan, to do jail support for some of our friends, who had been arrested for protesting in a bank. Note that this bank, which was one of the most culpable during the crisis, has not yet had any of its operatives arrested. We walked a surreal trail through winding walkways and a maze of buildings to a Rite-Aid under the Brooklyn Bridge, where, somehow, a police officer returned one arrestee’s personal possessions to her spouse. In our tired state it seemed for a moment that those arrested would emerge from the pharmacy as well. In fact, we had to return to Center Street, which turned out to be complicated because no-one could remember the way and none of the many police officers on duty knew. Once finally there, we discovered that none of our friends were on the docket for night court.

We returned the next day in greater numbers but it was not until 5pm that the OWS people were scheduled for arraignment. We entered the court and sat on the unforgiving wooden benches. A theater of the absurd played out at the front as lawyers muttered to the judge and their clients, while officers of the court walked this way and that with endless sheaves of paper. Thick files appeared for each person, visualizing the density of the carceral bureaucracy. People appeared for arraignment through a door, behind which bars and cells painted that depressing shade of official cream could clearly be seen.

As is common in such arraignments, the protestors appeared very late on the docket. As we sat in this bleak space, we witnessed a seemingly endless parade of people of color, mostly men, mostly African American. From the widely-available literature, everyone knows that the prison-industrial complex is a central component of the apparatus of racialized segregation. We know that 2.3 million people are currently behind bars and another 5 million or so under some form of correctional supervision. Seven times as many African Americans as “whites” are in the system.

Even knowing all this, it is something else to see it in action, to see shackled bodies, the bruises on one woman’s face that shocked her defense lawyer into taking photographs, a man with his hands bound behind his back in such a way that to sit caused an involuntary rictus of pain, still another hobbling up the aisle to the arraignment, barely able to walk.

From the DA’s office, a lawyer intoned the terms “the people” and “justice” with regularity. We were not so convinced. Does it serve the people to have a woman incarcerated for fifteen days for the alleged crime of stealing a bottle of shampoo? Would this have happened if she had been “white”? My soto-voce comments on all this caused me to be expelled from the courtroom for “talking,” as if it were a school assembly.

Of course, you may be thinking that it is a reflection of my own privilege that this sight was new to me. Yesterday at the Free University in Madison Square Park, which continues until Saturday, the subject of privilege was raised in a discussion hosted by Tidal. Facilitating the discussion, Rosa L., who happens to be a person of color, pointed out that OWS has its own privilege by virtue of being in New York City. As I have often recalled, Arundhati Roy made exactly this point when she visited. She also insisted that it was, paradoxically, all the more important that we continue to make visible the lack of consent, even at the very heart of neo-liberal capital.

Nonetheless, the intensity of the media attention to New York does mean that OWS receives more coverage and discussion than is equitable in relation to other Occupations and radical actions. The discussion explored how we might best make use of that attention by stressing global initiatives and other interfaces outside New York.

In the Strike Debt teach-in that I facilitated later on, I again felt this double-bind. The participants looked to New York for models, perhaps even for leadership, but there are inevitable tensions that follow from that. Is the way forward, then, to create the best movement we can in New York and see if and how it inspires others? This was the pattern set by the original occupation. Or should there be an attempt to create an organization that reaches outside New York? I tend to the former, others to the latter. It’s such tensions between how to claim freedom while recognizing privilege that create the need for new practice and new theory.

The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual

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Occupy first changed the national conversation on inequality and capitalism to the extent that the full force of the nation-state was turned against a few thousand campers. Who would have predicted that a tent was so subversive an object that its sale would be banned in many locations? Next, it changed the national calendar by bringing together labor unions and immigrant groups to celebrate May Day together for the first time since the Cold War.

Since that day, Occupy has changed its internal conversation. Emerging from a series of horizontal assemblies in May, the Strike Debt campaign that will launch on September 17 moves from convergence around the tactic of occupation to consensus around the politics of debt. Debt is the tie that binds the 99%, whether you’re part of the 75% of Americans in debt, or the 25% below the poverty line whose lack of access to official debt is the scarlet letter of impoverishment. We stand with the millions already in default on mortgages, student loans, credit cards and medical bills, with those struggling to make ends meet, and with those whose life opportunities are foreclosed by the amount of debt it now takes to construct the disappeared American Dream.

We refuse the assertion that debt must be forgiven to corporations but totally repaid as a matter of morality by people. We understand this for what it is: a system of social control that constrains us to lifetime of debt, ended and resolved only by death. In short, you are not a loan. And to help you, Strike Debt has published this weekend The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, a systematic practical guide for debtors on how to improve your situation and what your options are, up to and including debt refusal. In the words of the opening declaration:

We gave the banks the power to create money because they promised to use it to help us live healthier and more prosperous lives—not to turn us into frightened peons. They broke that promise. We are under no moral obligation to keep our promises to liars and thieves. In fact, we are morally obligated to find a way to stop this system rather than continuing to perpetuate it.

Like Tidal, the Manual is free. It was researched, written and edited collaboratively in an intense two-month period and printed in a week. For those accustomed to the sclerotic pace of academic research, this process has truly been an eye-opener. It’s been published in paper by a mixture of donations and support from those within Strike Debt. You can get a copy this weekend in Washington Square Park on Saturday from 11-6pm or at the launch event for the Manual at Judson Church on Washington Square South at 7.30pm on Saturday 16 September. A PDF version is available here and the Manual will continue to be updated as we get better informed and as the situation changes.

The Manual is one of the most substantive pieces of militant research to emerge from the Occupy movement, a pleasant contrast to the moribund rash of books and articles based on one person’s take on what happened last September. The not-so-easy-to-fool  people at Naked Capitalism have given it a thumbs up already:

this guide achieves the difficult feat of giving people in various types of debt an overview of their situation, including political issues, and practical suggestions in clear, layperson-friendly language.

Indeed, the Manual covers all forms of debt and offers a crisp political analysis of the debt society (no, I’m not praising my own writing here!).

1.5 million demonstrate for Catalan independence this week.

The future is about building the possibility of openly declared debt refusal, or debt strike, following the lead of students in Quebec, consumers in Greece and the Catalan independence movement. Do not go quietly into austerity, join us.

We Disrupt Wall Street To Strike Debt

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After a long day of action planning, including training in Zuccotti Park, a performative walk around the Financial District and a late night discussion in a pub, Strike Debt consensed on its actions for September 17, using the slogan: “We Disrupt Wall Street to Strike Debt.” This will be a non-violent disruptive and celebratory refusal of those who would subjugate our lives to debt, in the place where they do that work of subjugation. It affirms life, love, and companionship over the isolation and fear that is the debt society.

The morning begins at 7am at 55 Water Street. From there the movement will swirl around Wall Street, spreading confetti, bubbles, balloons and a ticker tape parade as a celebration of our refusal to be debt peons and to insist that debt abolition is both necessary and inevitable. There’ll be visual and performative acts of non-violent civil disobedience that will make the point that to live in the red is not a valued life. We assert that we are not a loan in the shadow of the towers built by ratings agency Standard and Poor’s, who give credit ratings to student loans and the CDOs that brought down the global economy. We assert life in the face of AIG, the disastrous insurance company that took billions of federal bailout money as household debt went through the roof. We assert a culture of mutual aid in front of JPMorgan Chase, one of the many corrupt banks that have paid no penalty for their scandalous behavior.

The action will not be measured in numbers, whether of participants or arrests. It’s a qualitative difference, one that will compel Wall Street to show its true colors in barricades, fences, security cordons and mass police presence. All for a few people carrying banners and balloons. What are they so afraid of? Could it be that they worry that the concept of living a life that is not measured by debt might prove popular if people became aware of it?

Want to find out more? Check the Strike Debt Facebook page for updates, come to the Convergence in Washington Square Park on Saturday 15 from 1-4 pm. Figure out how to get involved: because if you’re reading this, you already are.

How Occupy Has Won the Argument

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A rash of Serious Books by Serious People–the kind who get on the news or NPR–has validated Occupy’s critique of American political economy. Not that they put it that way. But from debt to Big Oil to the economy, it seems that the unwashed anarchist rabble–as those same Serious People see OWS–were right all along.

I’m bit a bit unfair to some of these writers. Joseph Stiglitz, whose term “the one percent” was part of the inspiration for “the 99%,” calls his new book The Price of Inequality, an Occupy-friendly concept. And Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! uses a slogan for a title. The primary conclusion of both writers is that the current economic crisis is in fact a political crisis. It’s at this point that we tend to say, “we know!” However, in the rarefied domain of academic economics, this is heresy. Stiglitz warns mainstream liberals that they are at risk of an Arab Spring:

our own country has become like one of these disturbed places, serving the interests of a tiny elite.

Apart from the Orientalism, the idea that this is new and the suggestion that the 2011 events were a bad thing, I agree!

Of course, what’s at stake in many of “these places” is oil. New Yorker writer Steve Coll has a massive tome out, exploring what he calls the Private Empire built by ExxonMobil. The book uses the judicious tone of his home journal but nonetheless amply reveals how astonishing the power wielded by this “too big to fail” behemoth has become. For example, when agreeing to drill oil in Chad, ExxonMobil and other Big Oil companies secured a thirty-five year compact. It provides that

the State guarantees that no governmental act will be taken in the future, without prior agreement between the parties, against the Consortium which has the effect either directly or indirectly of increasing the obligations or amounts payable by the Consortium or which adversely affects the rights or economic benefits of the Consortium.

As well they might: Coll notes that the $5.3 billion profit made by ExxonMobil when this was signed in 1988 was several times larger than Chad’s entire economy.

This history, and many others of its kind, like the Memorandums of Understanding by which India’s mineral wealth has been handed over to private corporations, indicates that the concept of corporate personhood, complete with “human” rights, was created in the underdeveloped world and then imported to the neocolonial metropole. Even Republican administrations wait to be told what ExxonMobil want. The reviewer of this book for The Nation noted that even Coll’s own foundation has received grants from ExxonMobil–although, to be fair, Coll recused himself from the process.

Coll cites some interesting evidence that ExxonMobil were prepared to accept a carbon tax, while vehemently opposing a cap-and-trade policy for carbon. You wonder why the Obama administration, never one to stand on principle, couldn’t have found that out so that some small limitations on fossil fuel use might have resulted.

Arguably, it’s too late. In an article on Truthdig, Chris Hedges quotes Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,

Our solution is our problem. Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable.

This is Strike Debt’s argument: the “externalities” created by growing the carbon-based economy sufficiently to pay off even a percentage of household and sovereign debt would include disastrous eco-cide. Coll notes in passing that extracting fuel from tar sands uses immense quantities of water, as does fracking. In both cases, the water is horribly toxic afterwards. When we have 63% of US counties in drought, can we really afford to use this water to accelerate climate change and produce more drought? What happens when humans start running short of water in the US? Are humans small enough to fail?

Where there are political arguments in these books, they are not being discussed by either political party. Where there are political implications, they are being drawn out only by the social justice movements. The disturbances have only just begun.

Life After Debt

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So I have my ups and my downs with my Occupy life. Today was one of those days where I love this movement. In a day of rolling events in East River State Park in Brooklyn, a tight plan for S17 emerged, Strike Debt consensed on its actions for the weekend and then we held the Life After Debt action.

East River State Park is a patch of grass with a few benches that runs down to the East River, offering a spectacular view of Manhattan. I got there via brunchtime Willamsburg, a picture-perfect cliché of hipster Brooklyn, all oversize glasses, plaid shorts and undersized tops: and that was just the men. There was a resolutely apolitical vibe. In the park, sunbathing, picnics and in the corner, a group of intensely discussing people.

After three hours, the direct action people had set aside some personal disagreements and finally devised a workable and compelling plan for S17. Details will be forthcoming but what struck me across today was the effectiveness of focused collective intelligence. It’s like rehearsing a play. There can be all kinds of mess, sometimes you need for the whole thing to get to the verge of falling apart and then all of a sudden it palpably clicks into shape.

That happened with Strike Debt today. It’s a disparate group with plenty of personality and some divergence as to tactics and goals. When you get the Occupy process right, though–an agreed agenda, timekeeping, tight facilitation, temperature checks and bottom lining–it’s surprising how the group can rise above that in a way that I have (almost) never seen in academia, for instance. I could give you the decisions but that’s not the point. On a micro scale you learn how a horizontal democratic process grounded in trust and política afectiva actually works.

And then we enacted it. The first Strike Debt action called people together to refuse their debt by describing their debt situation and then symbolically burning their debt. We gathered in a circle facing the river with some new Strike Debt banners. It happened to be a gorgeous day, clear and sunny–there’s going to be some great pictures of the event but I was too busy to take any, sorry.

As people stepped up to speak it seemed to grow quiet even in this very public place. We heard people talk about suddenly diagnosed medical conditions that are not covered by insurance, but might be life-threatening, plunging a life into chaos–and debt. How a piece of bad advice from a union about unemployment benefit led to a contingent faculty member being sued. And many times about the craziness of student debt. To speak in this assembly was at first upsetting but then affirming. Debt is no abstraction. It destroys lives. We’re trying to take them back.

We walked down to the river in procession, took the ashes of the debt papers people had burned and cast them into the water. It wasn’t sad, it was calming and beautiful.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t expect any transformation in the macro-situation in regards to debt any time soon. Finding these alternative ways to live as if there was a life after debt makes that otherwise devastating prospect bearable. And someone had made a cake.