View source for Debt Community Gathering - 17 Dec 2012

= Debt Community Gathering - 17 Dec 2012 = 

Approximately 15 people attended tonight's community gathering.

Most of the time I've been teaching at Salem state, around 80% of my
students thought the US was democratic.  During the last three
semesters, that number has dropped to 20%.  That's a sample of one
class, but it's something.

An easier way to make the point -- you can pay for education
beforehand, or you can pay for it after.  Many countries have free
education before, and higher taxes after.  You don't need to be very
radical to see that makes sense.  If you have a better income, you
have more money to pay for the things you'd like to have.

If you are a trash picker in France, you get five weeks vacation.  If
you're a mid-level manager in the United States, you get 2--3 weeks
tops.

30 years ago, 95% of the people going to college could work a minimum
wage job, and graduate debt-free in four years.  Neo-liberalism
privatized everything.  Taking money out is great for the
super-wealthy.  The trends of defunding education and increased
military spending brought us to where we are today.  We just need to
reverse this trend.  We can go back incrementally.  For example, lower
the social security age 1 year every year, until everyone is covered.

What you've said about neo-liberal is really correct.  When schools
are defunded, wages go down.  There are groups who want to reduce
public education funding because "government is bad"; the religious
right wants to reduce education funding, because they send their kids
to private schools.  To fix our infrastructure, we borrow money from
private institutions, and those loans are guaranteed.  It's worldwide
austerity.  The day NAFTA went into effect in Mexico, the Zapatistas
started an uprising.  Wasn't just because of taking away communal
lands, it was because NAFTA threatened to kill them as a community and
as culture.  They've been able to maintain their uprising for 19
years.

I read a book this year: Stieglitz "The Price of Inequality".  It's
very a readable book about economics and it talks about how wealth was
transferred upward.  It's about why Occupy makes sense.  It's worth
reading.

Stieglitz is a left liberal.  If you want to find a time where things
were working well, look at US between 1945 and 1975.  It wasn't
utopia, but things weren't all that bad.

(We pause to do introductions.)

76% of people are in debt, and much of that is linked to medical debt.
Part of this is due to the fractional reserve system; the reserve
system allows banks to lend money out of nowhere.  A bank only needs
$1000 to lend $10,000.  A bank can survive one bad loan, but if all of
them go bad, the system falls apart.  This is what happened a few
years ago; people realized that bonds, etc, had no value, and they
started spiraling downward in value.

Governments borrow from the private sector to cover what they don't
make from taxes, then they repay those private sector debts with
taxes.  It's a delayed payment of taxes to the banks.  Services get
privatized, and the wages tend to come down.  Privatization is another
way of redirecting social surplus.  A lot of scams reinforce this.
For example, changing the day that your interest is paid, or your
payments are due.

Have you heard of contracts of adhesion?  They're the "click here to
agree to terms and conditions" things you see on the web.  Most of
these contracts require you to give up your right to sue in courts.
It's not a contract between two free parties.  It's a contract with
one free party.

This is all linked to two trends: (1) financialization of capital.
It's easier to make money through interest than through making goods.
(2) Austerity, which is another way of shifting social surplus.  In
US, these trends work largely through privatization.

In Greece, the banks said "if you're going to default, then we're
going to destroy your country, so have another election".

Argentina and Iceland have gotten away with letting their currency go
into default.  Argentina had around five presidents in a month.  The
IMF tried to impose austerity measures, and Argentina wouldn't stand
for it.  Currency itself is an agreement, it has no value unless two
people agree to it.

Tinkerbell economy: the economy works because you believe it does.
When Tinkerbell disappears, then you have an depression.

The fiscal cliff is another form of austerity; it's a way to force
unnecessary cuts to social services.  Naomi Klein has a book called
Crisis Capitalism -- it's about creating crises to force restructuring
of economic systems.  Austerity is frequently multi-faceted, and not
blatant.  We're told that they only way to improve the economy is to
create jobs, and the only way to get good jobs is to destroy the
environment.

Globalization, in the sense of extending the simplification of
production.  Less skilled workers do everything, you use labor where
it's cheapest, and shipping has become less expensive over time.
We've reduced consumer buying power.  People shop at Walmart because
it's all they can afford, and this reinforces the need for low-priced
imported goods.

If minimum wage had continued rising with productivity since the
1970's, then minimum wage would be 25.00/hour, and not
$7-something/hour.

In Iceland, they jailed a lot of the bankers.  But Iceland is a little
country with a small effect on the world economy, so they were able to
get away with doing that.

The Debt Resistors Operations Manual (DROM) has a lot of practical
methods for helping people stave off debt on a day to day basis.  To
be effective, we need to focus on both collective and individual
actions.

Last time, we were lucky enough to have one of the Strike Debt people
to talk about their work.  Strike Debt wrote the DROM.  They met every
week for months, and different groups worked on different projects.
The DROM was one of the projects.

Jubilee is tradition of forgiving debt on some particular occasion.
Strike Debt discovered that distressed medical debt could be bought
for pennies on the dollar.  They found ways to purchase this debt, and
held a telethon to raise money to purchase it.  OB contributed $500 to
this cause.  Their goal was $50,000 to buy a million in debt.  They've
raised nearly $500k, and have purchased (and forgiven) several million
dollars in debt.  Their goal is not to solve the debt issue; they were
more interested in drawing attention to it.  This campaign captured
the love of mutual aid, which has always been a key part of Occupy.

People asked, can Occupy pay my medical debt?  There are a few reasons
why this isn't possible.  First, there's tax liability.  Payoffs had
to be limited to $11k, to avoid gift taxes.  Also, when debt is sold,
it's packaged together like a stock or bond.  When you buy the debt,
you get a package, and you don't know who's debt is in the package.

Strike debt has been helping affiliates form all around the country.
(We haven't become an official affiliate yet).  They've done a series
of debt assemblies, where people get together to talk about debt.
There's a lot of shame associated with debt.  Coming together and
talking about it had the effect of raising consciousness.  People
realized that what they thought of as personal issues were really
systemic, and it was a transformative process.

There was a book launch for DROM.  Even there, there were a lot of
people who had shame around their debt, and were astounded to find
others who felt that way.

Strike debt is doing symbolic burning of debt notices.

Debt assemblies help consciousness, but they also give you a way to
take it further.

We have a debt boulder.  It's sort of a street theater prop that's
made appearances in several of our demonstrations.

Strike debt has a variety of groups.  Different tactics apply to
different kinds of debt.  Writing letters to your creditors to dispute
every little inaccuracy in your credit report is a practical tactic.
Also having old items removed from your credit report.  There's a
tension between having the debt, and trying to chip away at it.

There are programs to pay back student loan debt, but these involve
working for the military, a non-profit, or a govt. agency.  There are
different goals: if you're not in debt, stay out; if you're in debt,
how do you get out of it?  With student loans, we're seeing that
people aren't earning enough to repay them.  What are people able to
do?  Work two jobs, file bankruptcy (not for student loans)?

The Obama administration recently started an initiative: after 20
years, under certain conditions, the remainder of your student loan
debt can be forgiven.  The administration has started offering to make
deals with debtors.  They're being far more accomodating.  This is a
very recent development.  Collection agences aren't going along with
the program because they want to; it's because it's the only way
they'll be able to collect.  You have to be in certain programs in
order to qualify.

Student loan repayment can be capped at a certain percentage of your
income.  There are other programs; like teaching, or working for a
non-profit.

Here's a wringer that got some people.  If you started off with
$35,000 in loans and paid according to plan, you ended up with $41,000
remaining.  If that was partically forgiven, then the IRS would swoop
in an try to collect taxes on the amount forgiven.

We could turn OB into a 501(c)3, and pay everyone a salary a dollar
per year :) Their student loan debt would be forgiven, by virtue of
working for a non-profit.

There's a lot of students who have awful student debt.  If we could
find someone who really knew about these student loan relief programs,
we could do an informational event.  We should also ask people what
created debt in the first place.  Medical debt might be hard to
organize, because of the shame issue.  It might be easier to form a
campaign around student debt.

Congress has to power to change any law, including the law about
student loan debt being excluded from bankruptcy.

When I first came to Boston, I saw someone down by BU wearing a
T-shirt that said "Boston University ... 0 to 60,000 in four years".
A few days ago, I was talking to a Berklee student and mentioned this
T-shirt.  We reaction was "wow ... $60,000 ... that's it ?!?"

At some universities, there's already organizing around tuition hikes,
which gives us something to tap into.

We have 250,000 college students.  Having a cultural event to involve
them could be a good move.  How would college administrations react to
this?  It could be a way to coalesce.

The advantage of medical debt, is that it's void of moral hazzard.
Student debt might have moral hazzard (i.e., they could have gone to a
community college).  I'm not saying we shouldnt' do it; I'm just
saying there are things we should think about.

We probably won't solve anything.  The point is more about building
awareness and involvement.  I'd like to weave organizing around
student debt with organizing around labor issues.  If we can get
regular meetings around student debt, salt that with other issues that
are relevant to their lives.

We should start planning for a big action, along the lines of what
you're talking about.  And we could plan something else on medical
debt.  Our resources are limited. We don't need weekly events.  Maybe
something in two months, and then something another two months later.
Build networks of people and get them working with each other.

It's not just students with student debts.  Once they finish college,
that's when the debt really hits.  There are tons of people in boston
who are post-college, and are trying to pay off their loans.  In
Occupy, we saw lots of people who graduated college and couldn't repay
their debt.  I think this is winnable.  By that, I mean that things
can't go on like this -- people not being abot to pay off student
loans.  Something has to change.

I don't have a house or car, so there's little incentive for me to
want to pay off student loans.  Most of kids who graduated with me
have bullshit jobs.  I think that so many people will default.

As with the AIDS crisis, I think there are many people privately
dealing with their trauma.  Silence is Debt.  Your are not a loan.
I'm happy to make T-shirts, so we can start spreading the message
around.  We need to start creating the giant iceberg that will crash
the ship of state with debt.  We have the facilities to make T-shirts,
we just need the shirts.

There were people in Boston who were working on debt issues, so we
could buy into something that's under way.  Community colleges are
more expensive now, they cost as much as private colleges used to.
Parents are also affected; if their kids can't support themselves,
then the parents have to subsidize them.

StrikeDebt tried to get 1MM people to pledge to a debt strike; if a
million people sign, then no one repays.  They considered this
campaign a failure; only around 10,000 signed the pledge.

You could frame the question as "how old will you be when you finish
paying your student loans".

Should we have a mailing list for this group?  (Agreement, we should
have a mailing list).  Steve will set one up.

During our next meeting, let's work on planning the debt movement.
We'll meet on Jan 14th.

[[Category:Strike Debt]]