Occupy Wall Street and the Personal Debt Crisis [View all]

[Time for change]

Last edited Sat Sep 15, 2012, 12:03 AM - Edit history (1)

Many have wondered what happened to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in the United States, since its arrival on the national scene in 2011. To some it seems to have disappeared. But it’s much more complicated than that, as discussed in a series of articles in the September 24 issue of The Nation.

Though nobody fully understands what happened to the movement, it seems to have morphed into something somewhat different rather than disappeared. A wide variety of repressive measures, local and otherwise, made the movement very difficult to sustain in its then current form. So, many of its most prominent players have gradually changed their tactics and strategies. In some sense it could be said that the movement, of necessity, has gone underground.

Many have said that the greatest legacy of OWS has been the infusion into national consciousness of the fact that many of the wealthiest among us have been carrying on an undeclared class war against the rest of us. The American oligarchy doesn’t want anyone to talk about this because the greater our awareness of this class war the greater the likelihood that we will do something about it. If we do talk about it they accuse us of class war.

Highly related to this class war is the massive amount of debt that has plagued the American people in recent years. Accordingly, the scattered remnants of the OWS movement have to a large extent begun emphasizing this problem as the underlying and uniting purpose of the movement.


State repression of the Occupy Wall Street movement

Several measures have been used by the state to suppress the OWS movement. It is instructive to consider them. Nathan Schneider discusses this in "Occupy, after Occupy" – One year after Occupy Wall Street shook the world, what lies ahead for the movement?

The most obvious tactic has been violent police repression, such as that which was used to evict the movement from Zuccotti Park in New York in November 2012. Since then, police have been extraordinarily vigilant in striving to prevent resurrection of the movement in New York:

Whenever Occupiers have gathered in public spaces in New York, police have seemed especially willing to use force to ensure that no new occupation can establish itself. “Across the United States, abusive and unlawful protest regulation and policing practices have been and continue to be alarmingly evident,” concluded a report produced by the Protest and Assembly Rights Project…

Less well known is the infiltration of the movement, for the purpose of imprisoning the movement’s most important actors over the long-term:

The wave of evictions that ended most of the country’s 24/7 occupations in late fall was only the beginning of the crackdown. Meetings and actions over the winter seemed especially rife with infiltrators, and such suspicions were confirmed in May, when undercover officers lured activists in Cleveland and Chicago into terrorism charges that could put them in prison for decades….

Terrorism! Wow! The ace up the sleeve of all police states to gain and maintain their power.

Propaganda to publicly discredit the movement is another major tactic. The New York Police Department publicly claimed to have found DNA evidence, later discredited, that OWS was linked to an 8-year old unsolved murder. The propaganda has even entered the public culture with a Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. In that movie a major participant in the OWS movement:

takes all of Gotham City hostage, resulting in an anarchic spree as the city is handed over to “the people.” A climactic sequence, partly filmed on Wall Street while OWS was still in Zuccotti Park a few blocks away, depicts a battle for the Financial District in which a column of gallant police officers – backed by the crime-fighting vigilante Batman charges against a vicious mob of 99 percenters armed with AK–47s to save the day.

OWS as indoctrination and training for future actions

Schneider notes that, even if the occupation strategy of the OWS movement is not resurrected, it still will have served important purposes behind increasing public awareness of the problems that the American oligarchy poses to us:

The movement’s real accomplishment has been even more significant than just “changing the conversation.” Because news reporters don’t make a habit of paying attention to grassroots activists the way they follow presidential exercise habits or wobbly stock tickers, they’re not attuned to the sea change brought about by Occupy. But people organizing for economic justice – especially young people – now know one another. They’ve practiced direct democracy in general assemblies and risked their bodies in direct action. They’re talking with each other over networks that they created themselves, as well as traveling together and building their capacity for future action.

Thousands have occupied public spaces and been arrested for their convictions who might otherwise have thought the police were there to protect them. Young people who were once merely interested in social change are now committed to it.

The importance of debt as a unifying principle

Perhaps the most significant change in the movement is the emphasis on debt as a motivating and unifying factor. It is intimately connected with the undeclared class war against the 99 percenters, and it is something that affects almost all of us, even those who are well off enough to avoid personal debt. Astra Taylor explains the importance of debt to the movement in "Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt".

Occupy organizers have been searching for a next step: a way to marshal the political energy that still exists without starting from scratch or denying all that their movement has achieved. This process has recently given rise to an initiative called Strike Debt.

Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent… from the underwater and foreclosed upon homeowners who were first pummeled by the economic crisis, to the millions of debt-strapped students who are in default or on the brink, to all those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, to workers everywhere who have been forced to compensate for more than thirty years of stagnating wages with credit card debt, to the firefighters and teachers who have had to accept pay cuts because their cities are broke, to the citizens of countries where schools and hospitals are being closed to pay back foreign bondholders. Given the way debt operates at the municipal and national levels, the issue affects us all – even those who are fortunate enough to be debt-free, as well as those so poor they don’t have access to credit. Debt is one of the ways we all feel Wall Street’s influence most intimately, whether it’s because of a ballooning mortgage payment or a subway fare hike or a shuttered clinic.

Young people are supposedly investing in their future when they go into debt to get an education, but once they sign on the dotted line, the banks have enormous power over their lives…Debt has become the means of subjecting everyone – from sovereign nations to homeowners and victims of payday loan sharks – to a mixture of ersatz morality and threats…

Individuals are kept in line through the prospect of foreclosure, higher interest rates and damaged credit scores, while entire populations from countries teetering toward collapse have been punished with cuts to wages and social welfare programs…

And much of the debt business is a big scam. Recent evidence, for example has shown that the process is “riddled with fraud on a scale akin to the foreclosure scandal, including the robo-signing of documents”. I suspected as much when I noted my own son paying monthly unexplained charges on his credit card debt that almost equaled his huge monthly payments.

Yet instead of our government helping us with this monumental problem, it has used it as an excuse to cut much needed social problems. Taylor explains:

As individuals, many of us are in debt because we have to borrow to secure basic social goods – education, healthcare, housing and retirement – that should be publicly provided. Meanwhile, around the world, debt is used to justify cutting these very services, even as the game is further rigged so that the 1 percent continues to profit, raking in money from tax cuts, privatization schemes and interest on municipal and treasury bonds…

And now the loan sharks have enlisted the help of the state to make it even worse:

Creditors have found ways to gouge those who are struggling by adding fees, increasing interest rates, and even – depending on the type of debt – garnishing wages, tax refunds and Social Security payments…

The banks and big corporations have been bailed out with a sum that will approach a mind-boggling $16 trillion in the end; regular people and their communities have been left holding the bag and will be paying for a long time to come…

$16 trillion dollars! For those of you not accustomed to thinking in terms of such large numbers, let me put it in personal terms. That averages out to about $50 thousand dollars for every man, woman and child in the United States – which is going from us to them.

Taylor finishes her article with a recommendation:

The first thing Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt must do, then, is transform our understanding of the morality of debt. Is it moral for the 1 percent to extract money from the 99 percent for things like college and cancer treatments? Why should the 99 percent honor their debts when the 1 percent have walked away from theirs without remorse? Framed this way, Strike Debt is not advocating debt “forgiveness” – which implies a benevolent creditor taking pity on a blameworthy debtor – but rather the abolition of the current profit-centered debt system…

Debt and the cancer of American capitalism

Noting that the OWS movement has revived the idea of social class as a political issue in our country, David Graeber, a veteran of the OWS movement explains that what made this possible is the changing nature of American capitalism as it came to use debt as a means of controlling our lives. Graeber explains, in "Can Debt Spark a Revolution?":

It’s now clear that the 1 percent are the creditors: those who are able to turn their wealth into political influence and their political influence back into wealth again. The overriding imperative of government policy is to do whatever it takes, using all available tools – fiscal, monetary, political, even military – to keep stock prices from falling. The most powerful empire on earth seems to exist first and foremost to guarantee the stream of wealth flowing into the hands of that tiny proportion of its population who hold financial assets. This allows an ever-increasing amount of wealth to flow back into the system of legalized bribery that American politics has effectively become. …

What made this possible is a change in the fundamental nature of American capitalism. Instead of accumulating wealth by actually producing things, Wall Street has figured out how to accumulate wealth for themselves through the manipulation of money, speculation, trickery, and outright fraud – all with the help of the state. Of course, they try hard to prevent us from understanding this:

The financial industry actively discourages us from scrutinizing the actual social relations on which its wealth is based. What happens on Wall Street is supposed to be too complicated and advanced for regular people to comprehend.

But OWH shined a light on the process:

The rise of OWS allowed us to start seeing the system for what it is: an enormous engine of debt extraction. Debt is how the rich extract wealth from the rest of us, at home and abroad. Internally, it has become a matter of manipulating the country’s legal structure to ensure that more and more people fall deeper and deeper into debt. As I write, roughly three out of four Americans are in some form of debt, and a whopping one in seven is being pursued by debt collectors.

There’s no way to know just what percentage of the average household’s income is now directly expropriated by the financial services industry in the form of interest payments,
fees and penalties. What statistical information is available suggests it is somewhere between 15 and 20 percent… “Financialization,” then, is not just the manipulation of money. Ultimately, it’s the ability to manipulate state power to extract a portion of other people’s incomes. Wall Street and Washington, in other words, have become one. Financialization, securitization and militarization are all different aspects of the same process….

Solution

Graeber explains that the solution lies in bringing an understanding of the illegitimacy of the process to enough Americans that they will no longer stand for it:

The first step is to state the problem clearly: our current economic arrangements can barely even be called “capitalism,” unless it’s some form of Mafia capitalism based on loan-sharking, extortion and fixed casino games.

The second is to hammer home just how much the system’s illegitimacy undermines the moral force that debt still holds over so many Americans, thus fostering a gradual withdrawal of consent from the system. Increasing numbers of us are already doing this by refusing to pay our debts, whether out of necessity or by choice….