Strike Debt! Debt Resistance for the 99% Rolling Jubilee. Keep Calm and Get Excited About the Rolling Jubilee. Occupy has created a Strike Debt wing, which has a new project: a Rolling Jubilee.
There will be a livestream of the Debt Jubilee fundraiser tonight, starting at 8pm ET, that you can access from their webpage. It features Janeane Garofalo, Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Lizz Winstead, and many more. You should check it out. To give you a sense why I find this new project fascinating, I'll quickly review three random projects I've been working on recently, all of which are related to this new project.
The first is on what bankruptcy law professor Ronald Mann refers to as the "sweat box" model of consumer debt and bankruptcy. Another is focused on student debt, particularly about how the collapse of public higher education has been a planned political project. The final one is arguing that one explanation for why our recovery is so slow has to do with a debt overhang. To Forgive Is Divine (Then Comes the Tax Bill) The people who brought you Occupy Wall Street have come up with an extremely clever idea: raising money to buy random citizens’ overdue debt, and then—poof!
—forgive it. One day a debtor is fielding calls from a collection agency; the next day, she’s not. If this vanishing act sounds too good to be true—and it might be, but we’ll get to that—it helps to start at the beginning. Debt is easiest to think about as a negative thing: It’s money you owe somebody. From that somebody’s perspective, though, debt is money coming due. When debt becomes overdue, it gets cheaper, and when it becomes really overdue, it sells for pennies on the dollar.
David Rees, a humorist best known for his Get Your War On comic and How to Sharpen Pencils book, wrote on his blog that Strike Debt has successfully tested the idea with a $500 purchase of $14,000 in debt, a ratio of 1 to 28. This is all nitpicking, though, compared with the big, inevitable catch: taxes. Strike Debt is still declining interview requests. Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee: The Debate.
Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee: The Debate Of the organizing strategies emerging from Occupy, few have the momentum of Strike Debt.
Organizers believe that debt is what Americans hold in common; debtors must be the class that unites and fights for a fair economy beginning with the elimination of medical, housing, education, and credit card debt. It reflects the widespread attitude that made David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years so popular and the conditions that made the 99 percent Tumblr a catalog of loans and unpaid mortgages. But is debt the most powerful category around which to organize? Why organize around debt, rather than class, occupation, grievance? As we speak, Wal-Mart workers are organizing warehouse strikes and teachers unions in Chicago, Wisconsin, and beyond are engaged in labor struggles to fight back austerity. As post-Occupy activists strategize and build, these questions will be paramount. -Editors. It's the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World. Interest charges are a strongly regressive tax that the poor pay to the rich.
A public banking system could realize savings up to 40 percent - allowing taxes to be cut, services increased and market stability created - with banks feeding the economy rather than feeding off it. In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35 percent to 40 percent of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35 percent to 40 percent cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of "Wall Street greed," but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system. Tradesmen, suppliers, wholesalers and retailers all along the chain of production rely on credit to pay their bills. (Source: Adapted from Of Two Minds) Consider California.