Help the Strike Debt’s #RollingJubilee go viral. Help forgive millions of dollars of debt from countless people drowning in their circumstances. Find out more here…
http://www.sparrowmedia.net/2012/11/the-rolling-jubilee-and-peoples-bailout/
Random postings, links, and whatnotisms that interest one Adam Ballah, proprietor of little here or there.
November 15, 2012
November 9, 2012
A more awesome game!
Now OWS is launching the ROLLING JUBILEE, a program that has been in development for months. OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT.(If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)
November 6, 2011
Meanwhile in Iceland:
Protests and riots continued, eventually forcing the government to resign. Elections were brought forward to April 2009, resulting in a left-wing coalition which condemned the neoliberal economic system, but immediately gave in to its demands that Iceland pay off a total of three and a half million Euros. This required each Icelandic citizen to pay 100 Euros a month (or about $130) for fifteen years, at 5.5% interest, to pay off a debt incurred by private parties vis a vis other private parties. It was the straw that broke the reindeer’s back.
What happened next was extraordinary. The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland’s leaders to the side of their constituents.
From Why Iceland Should Be in the News, But is Not by Deena Stryker
September 27, 2011
From “America Needs its own “Spring’”, by David Talbot
I founded Salon 16 years ago because I thought the country needed a strong, independent news operation. The Web gave my collaborators and me a platform for free and spirited journalism, and we took full advantage of it. For the first time in my life as a journalist, we — editors, reporters, critics and designers — were in sole control of our work, not managers and corporate sponsors…
Americans are deeply worried and dispirited. Three years ago, as the country slid into a bottomless recession, we rallied around a presidential candidate who promised real change, only to see him fall captive to the same forces of greed and endless war that have brought us to ruin. The alternatives presented by the Republican Party would only accelerate this national decline. We’re faced on the one side by a well-meaning but ineffectual leader who has waited far too late in his presidency to rally the people around the powerful themes of jobs and economic justice — and on the other side by GOP leaders who are competing to see how quickly they can dismantle the last decent vestiges of public life in America.
We can no longer wait for the country’s corporate-dominated political system to solve our problems. All of us know friends and family members who are in dire straits; many of us are barely clinging on, struggling to pay the bills and raise our children, while trying to give them a sense of hope for the future. The richest get even richer, the rest of us get poorer. The gap between the powerful and the powerless in America grows wider than ever…
Last week I visited the young people who were camped out near the New York Stock Exchange, in protest against Wall Street’s reign of greed. They told me they had little to look forward to in today’s America. No jobs, a crushing load of student debt, and a political system that seems completely rigged against people like themselves. But they had not given up hope. Inspired by the social upheavals in the Arab world and the protests in Europe against rapacious financial elites, these young Americans are calling for their own “American Spring.”
Salon wholeheartedly embraces this process of national renewal…
June 29, 2011
“For a while, debt was also falling because the banks were tightening up their lending standards. It appears to be that people are paying off one debt and then just as soon taking on another to make ends meet. Americans are tapped out, and despite their expressed desire to get out of debt, they just can’t get off the treadmill…
The backdrop to all of this is the long-term upward redistribution of wealth in this country, with those on top of the pile taking an ever increasing share of the national income and leaving the rest of us to fight over the crumbs…
And it’s important to understand that it is this overhang of personal debt, rather than the public debt over which Washington is obsessing, that is really dragging down the economy. It’s an economy that’s built largely on consumer spending after all…”
from Guernica
Not that I’m keen to see consumer spending rise…
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