Category Archives: Rolling Jubilee

We Are Rolling

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The Rolling Jubilee has rolled out its first debt abolition. Letters to over forty (former) debtors have been mailed out in specially designed care packages. The point here is that if you are in debt, you’re used to getting letters of all kinds, carefully designed to get you to open them, that are about repayment. So these shiny gifts want to send the message that they contain something very different.

The Debt-Mas Tree with a Care Package

The Debt-Mas Tree with a Care Package

Here’s what people will read:

We write with good news: the above referenced account has been purchased by the Rolling Jubilee Fund, a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization. The Rolling Jubilee Fund is a project of Strike Debt. The mission of this project is to buy and abolish personal debt. We believe that no one should have to go into debt for the basic things in our lives, like healthcare, housing, and education.

You no longer owe the balance of this debt. It is gone, a gift with no strings attached. You are no longer any obligation to settle this account with the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else.

A letter to a former debtor

A letter to a former debtor

The Rolling Jubilee debt-buying team has taken incredible care with all the mechanics of this process. The team itself includes accountants and lawyers. They’ve been meeting with legal advisors since the summer to get this right.

Today the legal team also went public, via an interview with Nick Pinto of the Village Voice. Sadly, this was necessary because certain economics commentators on the institutional left took it upon themselves to claim that Strike Debt was going to get the debtors into tax trouble. The assertion was the IRS would see the debt forgiveness as income. Strike Debt is clear that it’s a gift and not subject to tax.

The tax lawyer dismisses the concern that the Rolling Jubilee is engaged in commercial activity: “It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me,” she said. “When Habitat for Humanity is helping people build houses, someone still has to buy the lumber. It doesn’t change their tax status. The critical thing is that this is a not-for-profit organization, and it’s not engaged in trying to make money.”

The fact is that as of now, there’s $100,000 less medical debt out there. That has to be a good thing. We know it’s a drop in the ocean but that’s not the point. The Jubilee is a hack, or very precisely, a détournement. This latter was the way the Situationist International used the system against itself, which is exactly what the Rolling Jubilee has done.

It’s inspired activists in the UK to set up their own organization, Strike Debt UK. Writing in the new issue of the Occupied Times, the activists ask:

Can we, for example, buy discounted debt on the secondary debt market? Do we want to do this? What is the procedure? What are the relevant laws in England and Wales? Do we need a Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual here? Many of the questions raised in the group highlighted the need for people to come together, do the research, and share their findings in an accessible way. It also became very apparent that debt is becoming a popular tool in the resistance of capitalism, and as defaulting becomes more commonplace, we need to establish processes which will protect people, rather than financial institutions.

These are the right questions to ask. It would be nice if our friends on the established left felt like helping out. But we’ve been doing fine by ourselves so far. The next step is coming. Watch Barcelona in January, New York in February, maybe London in March. We are rolling.

Jubilant Theory

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Today was a work day at the University of Strasbourg. Over the past several months of giving talks, I have become accustomed to a certain routine. The organizer goes into a certain amount of detail as to why they are not sure how many people will attend. Their anxiety is two-fold. My academic work is not located in a specific discipline and it connects to the movement. Then we go in and find that far more people than expected have turned up and they then proceed to ask a great deal of questions. The organizers are then relieved and delighted.

That was the pattern here today, where I gave a talk showing how the research I have done on visuality requires an engagement with political practice. I then talk about a variety of militant visual culture research projects, ending with Strike Debt. It was a tad challenging because I had to do this in French, which is hard but not too bad. And then there were questions. If you read the above paragraph you will see the drawback. I got 75 minutes of questions, in French obviously.

What was interesting was that, for all that people downplay “French theory,” I was asked detailed questions about my relationship to Marxism, Autonomia, Situationism, Rancière and postcolonial theory. The mood in the room was far from as serious as this might sound because we had covered the Jubilee. Although the debt jubilee was new to this audience, the concept of jubilation might not have been so much.

Yesterday I bought a book called Postanarchism explained to my grandmother by Michel Onfray–at the station bookstall of all places, try getting something similar in Penn Station. Onfray has a rather dazzling list of the different aspects of anarchism that compose his concept of postanarchism, including

the right to jubilation…thinking of theory as the product of action.

Although I don’t really think I am a postanarchist, or that Strike Debt would be considered as such, who cares? But I prefer simply Jubilant Theory. What happens with Jubilant Theory is this engagement that people feel with the project that makes them even though they don’t know who I am and helps them enjoy what they hear.

One person said to me that they had never heard what they called un grand universitaire americain–a big-deal American professor–talk about engagement and political practice. Perhaps that’s just a measure of who gets invited. Or perhaps it’s an indication of one way to make the often-disparaged humanities more popular with the current precarious generation of students: to speak to their situation and offer something positive to do about it.

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.

 

The Rolling Jubilee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lizz Winstead and David Rees at the social media desk

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

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

Jeff Magnum at the RJ (right)

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

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

More money than I’ll ever see

Piñata!

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

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

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

 

 

Today the General Strike, Tomorrow the Jubilee!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are making money out of our debts

National Theatre of Spain on strike

Currently, extended families support people in Greece.

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

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

Strike Debt!

The Digital Debt Workshops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Doing While Thinking

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520 Clinton, Brooklyn HQ of Occupy Sandy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker St

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

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

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

The People’s Bailout and the Rolling Jubilee

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Here’s an exciting new initiative from Strike Debt: the Rolling Jubilee. This project will raise money by means of a benefit and other donations to buy back debt in default: and abolish it. Whereas the traditional Jubilee has been a gift of the overlord to the subjugated, the Rolling Jubilee is mutual aid by and for the 99%. The project is set to launch at the People’s Bailout on November 15 at Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, New York (tickets are not yet on sale).

The event casts light on a shadowy area of American financial markets, where banks and other lenders sell debt in default at very low rates between 5 and 10% of face value. The purchasers are normally debt collectors, who then try to extract some percentage above what they paid out of these most destitute of people. A couple of home truths emerge from the very existence of such markets.

Banks and other lenders do just fine with such a return because all debt is a way of creating new money. By getting a return of 5%, the bank has that much more new money rather than having lost the 95% not repaid by the debtor, as we might imagine. Next, as a society, we traffic in this misery. 15% of Americans are now being pursued by debt collectors. The Rolling Jubilee will buy what it debt it can on these markets: and abolish it.

The Bailout will be an evening of guest performers doing music, comedy, and variety together with speed teach-ins and debt-related performances. Local community groups and Occupy workgroups will be there as well and it promises to be an amazing night. It will be livestreamed, so it’s also a Telethon. On the night, there will be ways to donate to the Jubilee, and all money so donated will be used to abolish debt. The target is $50,000 which would abolish an amazing $1 million of debt.

That’s a drop in the ocean of debt, of course. It’s just a beginning, both to the Jubilee and to the awareness of how debt operates in this society. If we collectively decide to be active both in abolishing debt–$5 abolishes $100 of debt!–and in opening a new discussion about the kind of country that makes money selling debt, then the Jubilee will be rolling.

Questions will be asked about how exactly the abolition will be carried out and I don’t as yet know the answers to them but I’ve been told that once the mechanism has been fully prepared, it will be announced. Already, it does seem clear that it’s not really possible to target any one person’s debt for abolition. I did a Google search myself and quickly came up with a company called LoansMLS, who are willing to sell me debts as varied as $30 million of second mortgages in California at 10% of face value or a $36,500 home improvement loan at 8%. But you can’t find out specific information about the debtors and that’s presumably the last vestige of privacy they/we have left.

What matters here are not so much the technicalities of this process as the debate it needs to open about debt as a commodity. For all the rhetoric about the morality of repaying debt, banks don’t seem to need more than these small percentage returns to be ahead. A debt abolition on a general scale would be the greatest stimulus to the economy imaginable, as people who had hitherto scraped every penny together they had to send to banks that don’t even need it, would now be able to spend that on goods and services. That’s 15% of the entire population that could be helped, even before we get to underwater mortgages, Federal student loans (which are not resold) and high-interest credit-card debt.

Beyond even that benefit, it’s time to talk about what kind of a society we really want to live in. Have we so little imagination that the only possible discussions are whether or not to cut taxes for the wealthy, or who said the word “terror” when? Are we not better than that? Clear your calendar for the People’s Bailout, an evening a year to the day after the mean-spirited and illegal eviction of Occupy Wall Street, when we look ahead to our better futures.