Rolling Julibee

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The Digital Debt Workshops

Posted on November 13, 2012






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.”







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Sandy, Debt and Hunger in the Americas

Posted on November 12, 2012




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: