Category Archives: student debt

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

Public Intellectuals: wrong on debt, wrong on climate.

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Like many NYC residents, I get a lot of magazines and journals in which the self-styled public intellectuals get to hold forth on the state of the world. As these people get a great deal of access to the media, we hear much insistence on their importance. Today I read two leading articles from either side of the Atlantic that made me question whether we do in fact still need or want such public intellectuals. In addressing two of the main themes of the moment, student debt and climate change, these pieces both decide that their subjects have been overblown on grounds that are clearly tendentious. Another journalism is possible–I would say necessary.

Writing in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard grad (1976) and president of Harvard Crimson, doesn’t see too much to do about student debt. Over at the London Review of Books, Malcolm Bull of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, agonizes over climate change ethics. Both are worryingly wrong, albeit from very different political perspectives. Lemann tends to quote Obama, Bull prefers Lenin. Both stress a highly partial account of their topic to get to their conclusions.

Nicholas Lemann: Mr One Percent

 

Lemann contrasts the “apocalypse mode” of writing on student debt with the good sense of Obama, speaking at UNC:

“In today’s economy, there’s no greater predictor of individual success than a good education. Right now, the unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. The incomes of folks with a college degree are twice as high as those who don’t have a high-school diploma.” These figures communicate the over-all reality of the situation better than do the anecdotes about heavily indebted graduates who can’t find jobs.

In fact, Obama is being cute with his stats here. While it’s unsurprisingly true that college graduates over the age of 25 have better employment than high-school dropouts, it’s also true that

Thirty five percent of unemployed college graduates and those with advanced degrees have been without a job for more than a year, the same rate as unemployed high school dropouts.

And here’s the real kicker. According to a recent study by Northeastern University of Labor Department reports:

about 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed last year.

So what Obama said is true but it’s highly selective with the truth. I wonder how many of those unemployed graduates are part of the one million people who owe over $100,000 in student debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?

He continues to err when he suggests that

Research libraries and philosophy departments can’t possibly make money; they require subsidies from business schools and biomedical-research labs, but that drives tuition higher than it would be if universities dropped their money-losing functions.

As Chris Newfield and others have shown, humanities programs tend to be net profit makers for universities because their tuition charges easily cover their costs. Science labs, run on national grants, are loss makers because their overheads are not fully covered by those grants. A report from the University of California showed that UC lost $720 million on overheads when “winning” $3.5 billion in science grants–in a year when the system had an $813 million shortfall. In other words, almost all the budget crisis in California was due to underfunded science labs.

Lemann ices the cake by concluding:

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do.

I don’t think even the Ivies are making that kind of an argument. All this is supposed to lend force to Lemann’s support for the continuation of “lower” student loan interest at 3.4%. In fact, all that is lower is the rate of extortion, because the Federal Reserve loans money at a steady 0.1% at present. It only costs the government notional dollars that it might have extracted from students. Let’s think instead about the cost of unlevied taxation on capital gains, all subject to ceiling of 15% tax and realize the absurdity of this argument.

More puzzling is the lengthy discussion of climate justice in the LRB by Malcolm Bull. Bull appears to want to make a Left case for being a climate skeptic, although his piece takes a carefully weighted path. His LRB editor got the tone right with the headline: “Must we save the world?” There’s a very English cleverness and irony there that serves to wash over some worrying positions.

At the outset Bull asks of global warming: “Are humans causing it? Almost certainly.” Almost? There’s no reputable source that holds otherwise any more, even if there are well-funded climate skeptics at the Heartland Institute and elsewhere to give the illusion of debate. In the US alone, 15,000 temperature records were set this March. Bull asserts that warming is being offset by the “the protective effect of sulphate aerosols.” That sounds nice doesn’t it? These aerosols, which Bull speculates “could in theory be pumped into the atmosphere indefinitely for the sole purpose of reducing global warming,” are very toxic. You’ll know them better as things like sulfur dioxide, a by-product of burning coal that are well-known to cause asthma, emphysema, bronchitis and other respiratory conditions with potentially fatal effects. So perhaps not such a good idea after all.

This is the tendency of the writing here: not transparently refutable but taking a path of most resistance to climate change analysis. Bull concentrates solely on temperature increase as the index of climate change, while most in the field now look at parts per million of carbon dioxide, changing pH levels in the sea, ice melt, desertification and so on.

This tactic causes much of the analysis in the piece to be off target. There is an extensive discussion of the ethical relationship between present emissions policy and the future. This misses the point that climate change is now, it’s already happening and it’s too late to reverse, as Bill McKibben graphically puts it in his book Eaarth:

We’re not going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed. We’re like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 30 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue.

Or if you think that’s corny how about this: according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2009

changes in surface temperature, rainfall and sea level are largely irreversible for more than a thousand years after carbon dioxide levels are completely stopped.

Writing in 2012, Bull prefers to put it this way:

As for rises in sea level, the 2007 IPCC projections range from 18 to 59 centimetres – which is not enough to submerge anywhere other than the lowest-lying areas.

Which is to say, Pacific islands, Manhattan, Pakistan, Florida, Holland and other low-lying areas: too bad. And to ignore how sea level rise affects the salinity of the soil, the magnitude of storms.

Flooding in Koror, Palau--"move on, nothing to see here"

In the end, I don’t think such outcomes are Bull’s central concern. Like some others, he worries most about the political future:

what climate change most conspicuously undermines is not the nation-state but democracy, for it requires supranational institutions at a time when there is no supranational democracy, and allows that at a national level the interests of future generations might take precedence over those of the current one.

This is the carbon dictatorship theory–that in order to control what is now out of control extraordinary measures will be required and they could only be dictatorial.

I would say that the global social movements have shown a very different set of possibilities. It is just as conceivable that a move away from the high consumption, fossil-fuel driven, debt accumulating permanent crisis might occur. Such a scenario would make it imaginable that carbon debt be taken as seriously as bond market debt. Direct democracies might be thought of as our last best hope, which could certainly do no worse than any of the current social systems. If we’re going to get from here to there, then quite frankly, we’re going to need a different kind of intellectual to help us think how to do it.

 

 

So-so-so-solidarité: austerity vs. education

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Ceci n'est pas un riot/This Is Not A Riot

From Spain to Canada, the U.K. and U.S., student debt and education funding has become the defining issue of austerity. States have responded with violence and by accusing activists of being violent, a wonderfully Orwellian twist. Above, Canadian artist Max Liboiron visualizes the Red Square protests with the title “This Is Not A Riot.”  Sadly a fully representative scene would have to show charging riot police. The recent police violence changes how we think of Canada, formerly thought of as a more humane version of the US–see below.

The passing of Loi 78 does not seem to have deterred many of those involved. A new website “Arrest me, somebody/Arrêtez-moi quelqu’un” borrows from the 99% meme:

Céline Magontier

Text reads: ” I disobey Bill 78″

Clémence Boisvenue

“I don’t listen to my parents, much less Bill 78.” By identifying themselves and indicating their intent to disobey, these people are technically already in breach of 78.

One student union CLASSE (Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante) has already indicated that they will not abide by Loi 78 and made a public declaration to that effect yesterday in Montreal.

However, the mainstream student unions did supply a route plan to the police and the march was therefore permitted: and enormous.

Montreal May 22--red everywhere!

Without playing the numbers game, this presence makes it clear that Loi 78 is not going to end the strike or undermine its support.

The contest between education and austerity maps the boundaries of the latter. On Tuesday, educators from kindergarten to university levels in Spain went on strike to protest cuts and tuition increases–student fees have been increased by 50%. Conservative provinces controlled by the ruling Popular Party have implemented the cuts, while other regions struggle to minimize the impact. So when you read pieces about the euro worrying about the budget deficits in the Spanish regions, this is the real agenda: austerity vs. education. Of course, austerity affects other areas of life as well but it’s here that transatlantic resistance has been mobilized and it’s here that the issue will be decided.

So in NYC, where education is in a mess from K-16, a day of solidarity efforts and perhaps a realization that, at least for the present, the centre of the global movement is Montreal. It was an object lesson, though, in why past left tactics don’t work in the new climate and the still-vibrant sense of possibility generated by Occupy.

At 2pm a handful of people gathered for a traditional picket of the Quebec government offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Police compelled protestors to march in a small circle in the street behind barricades, while a sentorian-voiced RCP organizer bellowed slogans. It was totally depressing, relieved only by the excitement of three Quebecois teenagers on a trip to New York.

Free University Washington Square Park

At five, we gathered in Washington Square Park for Free University. A crowd of about one hundred arrived in a warm, conversational mood. The Free University had about five classes on offer but the crowd spontaneously split into two groups: one focused primarily on the events in Canada and the other on issues of counterinsurgency, debt and violence. After a while both groups ended up in a free-flowing discussion about what next for Occupy, with some stringent self-criticism as well as some affirmation. Free University has hit a nerve, supplying the need for an open exchange of ideas that used to be the hallmark of Liberty Plaza. If it’s not yet drawing in many new people, it is allowing those who have been involved for a long time to discuss and rethink our strategies.

Unlimited Strike/Grève Illimitée

At 8.30, the time that the students hold their marches in Montreal, a few hundred people left Washington Square Park on a wildcat march up Broadway across town on 13th around and about a bit and into Union Square.

A qui la rue? A nous la rue!

Traffic was terrible anyway so I’m not sure how disruptive it was but it was fun and a morale-booster. There was even some dancing in the street.

A-Anti-Anticapitalista!

Some victories have been accomplished–Cooper Union students have fought off efforts to introduce tuition at their historically free institution, at least for two years. Like the Quebecois, they understood that it’s the moment when tuition is introduced that is the one serious opportunity to defeat it. For the moment, we say:

Avec nous, dans la rue!

On est plus de cinquante!

In short, it seems that it’s Montreal’s turn to shift the dynamics: solidarité!

 

Sovereigns to Students: Debt Enforcement as Law

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Occupy Montreal! 5 21 12

A qui la rue? A nous la rue? Or as we say down here: Whose streets? Our streets! As ever it sounds better in French, smarter even. Tomorrow is the 100th day of the student strike in Quebec that has now been the subject of the state of exception Loi 78. In a way, we can be grateful for this resort to violence because it clearly reveals that the use of state-sanctioned force in defense of debt extends from sovereigns to students.

The student resistance is remarkable both for its foresight into the disaster of student debt and its fortitude against police violence. There were 308 arrests yesterday and tonight’s action is just getting underway.

The acceleration of this repression has come in synchronization with the increased drumbeat against Greece. Increasingly, it is said by “sources” that Greece must leave the euro, perhaps even the European Union, should it dare to consider debt abolition. Such discourse seeks to transform the moral discourse of debt into sovereign enforcement. It relies on the absurdity that Greece should cut its social services in order to borrow more money to repay debts incurred at the suggestion of the very bankers who now cry foul. Canadian students are now subject to this violence in advance–they are being compelled to accept future debt at the cost of present violence.

Perhaps we have not fully recognized the value of this struggle until now. Making up for lost time, there has been an impressive rallying of solidarity actions in the past few days.In New York tomorrow, there is a rally at the Quebec government offices at Rockefeller Plaza (access from 48th St) at 2pm. This will be followed by a march leaving from Washington Square Park at 8pm.

The Free University group happened to be meeting yesterday evening and it was quickly decided to hold a Pop-Up Free University tomorrow in the time in-between. So there’s banner and sign-making at 5pm in Washington Square Park and teach-ins, open forums, skill-shares and other events from 6-8pm.

First and foremost, there’s the opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in Quebec.

I’m leading a discussion for Occupy Student Debt on the connections between the student debt crisis and the state of exception. We’ll reflect on how student debt has metamorphosed from an issue of personal responsibility and morality, discussed only in private, into a matter for the exercise of the supreme force of law. Loi 78 gives the Quebec state the power to claim all actions that question debt feudalism.

In this action, Quebec has highlighted the close proximity of debt and state violence, as  David Graeber has pointed out:

Modern money is based on government debt and governments borrow money in order to finance wars.

This apparatus has been vastly expanded since the end of the Cold War to no very good effect internationally. Even in the Counterinsurgency New York Times, there has been a more-or-less open recognition recently that the war in Afghanistan is an expensive and pointless failure. It was in Chicago that it is “working,” insofar as it has exercised overwhelming force against public protest.

Chicago 5 19 12. Credit: Sarah Bennet.

Quite rightly, Occupy Theory will be holding an open forum on these counterinsurgency tactics tomorrow.

What alternative could there be to the regime of permanent debt, consumerism and anxiety? OWS Sustainability have a number of skill shares happening at Washington Square Park that suggest some possibilities. There’s one on how to create a worker’s cooperative, not as the “solution” but as part of what they’re calling the “transition economy” from the present disaster to something more offering more possibilities to people, and less destructive to non-human life. Then we can learn about permaculture, sustainable forms of culture that are not subject to the market requirements of built-in obsolescence.

Debt claims to be morality but is always violent in theory and in practice. The pattern that is emerging tells us that the creditors are worried. Show them they should be–attend, like, tweet, support the Quebec strike, the solidarity rallies and your own local debtors.

 

Going viral, going unmentioned: global Occupy

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After May Day, there was some internal discussion in OWS as to both the success of the actions and the press coverage. If the goal of May Day was to give a boost to actions worldwide, it’s beginning to look as if it succeeded (without claiming that OWS or Occupy “caused” any non-Occupy events). It feels like something is happening, there’s a new wave of actions and certainly a new wave of repression. Media is another matter.

On Friday, there was a very substantial demonstration in the northern mining town of Calama, Chile, demanding a greater share of the revenues produced by the copper mined there. The town was blocked by barricades and there was a communal cacerolazo, the banging of pots and pans with spoons and forks.

Calama

Yesterday I saw barricades all the way along Union Square and University Place for some kind of march and there were needless to say cops everywhere. It turned out it was for the annual Union Square Dance Parade and some intrepid Occupy folks had got in on the event. Video by Randolfe Wicker:

In Chicago last night after the highly dubious arrest of three protestors as “terrorists,” a peaceful marcher named Jack from OWS was run over by a police van. There are many pictures on the #nonato twitter feed of injured people.

Today what even the Chicago Tribune, no leftist paper, called “a massive anti-war protest” culminated in a return of medals by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that had many in the audience in tears.

Frankfurt 5 19

In Frankfurt yesterday, 20,000 protested the austerity regime after police mass arrested over 400 people on Friday. Note signs in Greek, German and English in this one photo, evidence that participants see themselves as part of a global movement now, even in Germany, anchor of the European austerity policy.

Montreal--"Crime: To Have an Opinion"

In Montréal, police used their new law against last night’s student demonstration, declaring it illegal as of 9pm and following up with 69 arrests. Student websites have closed to be replaced with anonymized sites that formally advise people not to attend the events that they list. The Quebec Liberal Party and the state Education Ministry websites were down for much of the day: it was inaccessible when I tried to access it. Who do we know that might have done such a thing? Hint: think Guy Fawkes.

Tonight, reports of concussion grenades and mass panic from the Montreal Gazette.

So here in New York a day of intense discussion and action following all this. The Occupy Theory Climate Assembly was a wide-ranging discussion that provided an interesting snapshot of the current state of the movement–it will be discussed at greater length another time.

Eagle in Washington Square Park for Occupy Theory

There was an eagle there, though, which must be some kind of a sign, right?

It turned into a discussion with Direct Action of how to call attention to the weekend-long series of dramatic events.

Soft circle in Times Sq. Credit: Lisa Sabater

OWS met at Fox News, the Military Recruiting Station in Times Square and at the nearby police station, soft linked arms and mic checked a statement, which read in part:

We are all Chicago, / we are thousands in the streets! / We will not be terrorized into silence / as we protest the illegitimate power / of financial and military elites / from the G-8 and NATO.

 

Mic Check! / We are all Montreal, / we are thousands in the streets! /we refuse the draconian emergecy law / invoked by the government; / we will continue to rise up / and strike against tuition-hikes. / Free education is a right!

 

Mic Check! / We are all Frankfurt, / we are thousands in the streets! /We stand against the globalization of austerity /and the punishment of the people / for the crimes of the bankers. / Another world is possible, / and she is on her way!

On Tuesday May 22 in New York there is a rally at 2 pm in support of Montreal on the 100th day of the Quebec Student Strike, outside Quebec government offices, 1 Rockefeller Plaza.

There will be a pop-up Free University in Washington Square Park from 5-8pm, with discussions on the situation in Canada, historical precedents and what it means for the movement.

At 8pm, March Against Repressive Anti-Protest Laws Worldwide leaves from Washington Square Park.

How much of this will appear in mainstream media outside the towns in which it has happened? If recent history is anything to go by, relatively little. Even OWS media advisory people felt that there was no new story on May Day without huge numbers of protestors (although I would argue that 50,000 people is an event) or arrests. Perhaps a truly global movement might merit a mention? Let’s get on it.

 

Civilians in the Red Square

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One of the Plus Brigades tactics taught to people at OWS Spring Training was “civilians.” It means breaking up the mass of demonstrators and disappearing into the New York city foot traffic, only to recongregate later at an arranged spot. It’s a good way to get onto Wall Street for example. In light of the on-going militarization of North American cities and the right to assembly, it begins to take on other meanings. It can be resistant simply to claim civilian status, to act like a civilian, to demand that law enforcement treat this as peacetime.

I had been wondering if Occupy’s tactic as a whole might be “civilians,” a returning into the social fabric with challenges to its normalizing operations punctuated by resurgences on selected days–the next “day” is targeted in New York as September 17, the one year anniversary.

Red Square of solidarity hangs over a union in Montréal

What has happened in Chicago and Montréal makes it clear that “civilians” is every bit as much about resisting the militarization of everyday life. In Chicago three activists have been arrested for alleged terrorism offenses: based on the presence of a home-brew kit. Supposedly the bottles indicated preparations for Molotov cocktails. As might my recycling. Now those arrested are subject to the full panoply of anti-terrorism legislation. As the day has gone on, the police have dramatically amplified their charges, while defense lawyers are suggesting yet another operation co-ordinated by police informants.

Anti-NATO demonstrators at the statue for the Haymarket Martyrs of 1886

In Montréal the hasty legislation passed through Québec’s parliament yesterday was a veritable State of Emergency. Known as Bill 78, it’s extraordinary. In addition to ending the academic year forthwith and requiring students to return early next semester (what happens to those trying to graduate I wonder?), the law then criminalizes protest in a new way:

any gathering of 50 or more people must submit their plans to the police eight hours ahead of time and must agree to any changes to the gathering’s trajectory, start time, etc. Any failure to comply will be met with a fine of up to $5,000 for every participant, $35,000 for someone representing a ‘leadership’ position, or $125,000 if a union – labour or student – is deemed to be in charge. The participation of any university staff (either support staff or professors) in any student demonstration (even one that follows the police’s trajectory and instructions) is equally punishable by these fines.

So my entire class last semester would have had me liable for draconian fines, given that we attended OWS actions (by consensus and in ways determined by group members). They’re not finished though. You can’t cover your face with a mask, scarf or hood–in Canada, with its mild winter climate.

Passages like this make it truly State of Exception legislation, a new low for North American civil liberties post-Cold War:

Anyone who, by act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, consent, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offence under this act is guilty

You could be accused of giving advice for teaching radical texts, be accused of omission for not reporting an activist student to the police–this is truly unpleasant catch-all legislation.

The overreaction stems from the anxiety that anti-austerity is on the move. Counterinsurgency doctrine holds that the first element of defeating insurgency is to quarantine it and then cut it out for fear of contagion. So it’s not the hundreds of activists in Chicago, or even the thousands in Montréal, that are causing the panic–it’s the idea that this might go viral from Athens to Paris, Chicago, Montréal, Frankfurt–and then where next? This is Contagion: The Reality Show only it’s not funny.

So civilians, yes: people with civil rights, who should be presumed to be acting as civilians not insurgents, who have the right to assembly, free speech and self-presentation. These are very fundamental propositions and for those of you who have been standing back from the movement for any of the usual reasons, now is the time to get back involved. Like it or not, this involves you now.

In New York, there’s a meeting in solidarity with Montréal on Sunday at 3pm in Union Square by the Gandhi statue. Hope to see you there.

 

 

 

Student debt: stage one accomplished

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With a rash of recent publications in the mainstream media, it’s clear that the first stage of the Occupy Student Debt campaign has been accomplished: to raise awareness and make this a national issue. Now it’s time to start working on promoting the solutions to debt that the media still shy away from: Jubilee, free public higher education and transparent private sector financing.

I’m going to give three examples of student debt becoming more visible, two of which are personal in the Occupy tradition of representing yourself first and foremost. My awareness of student debt was raised when Ruth Gilmore, as president of the American Studies Association, challenged us to find out more about how our students worked (for money) and their levels of debt. My eyes were opened to the crisis around me.

Even before OWS, I had crafted what I’d now call a community agreement with my students, stressing attendance and participation, week-long “due dates” on assignments, giving credit for collaborative projects, having no cumulative assessments and so on. I think it has proved very successful, judging from the evaluations. Nonetheless, let’s be clear: debt is  an educational crisis, one in which the experience of financing is the dominant one of “college,” not learning. I’m close to a point where I can’t envisage how to do this ethically at all.

These stories were the starting point for the TEDx talk I gave a few weeks ago. Here’s the video, which you’re welcome to use although the quality of the sound and images is not quite as high as I would have hoped.

The next item across the media transom is an essay by Thomas Franks in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine (paywall). Franks tells the now familiar story of student debt for the mainstream liberal audience of Harper’s. Then he gives it a twist. He quotes an anecdote from David Graeber, in which Graeber describes how one of his former students is now working as an escort on Wall Street to pay back her student debt. She’s literally getting screwed by the system. Franks ends the piece with a quote from what remains the most accessed post in my writing project:

I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

What’s interesting about this citation is that when I used the line at an NYU faculty meeting, Andrew Ross, who’s been a lion-hearted organizer of Occupy Student Debt, took care to point out he didn’t quite want to go that far. Whereas I tend to go for it, Andrew looks to sustaining coalitions–so this is no knock on him. That was a few weeks ago. Now this quote is good enough to go into public libraries all over the country.

And if you have a Facebook you’ll know that the New York Times today published a long anecdotal article on student debt in their “please give us a Pulitzer Prize” format. The piece is fine at the level of showing how difficult it has become for many people to afford college. It’s strong on the J-School 101 theme “personalize the story” with wholesome, middle-class white kids from Ohio being used to illustrate the ongoing disaster that student debt has become.

It’s weak on analysis and deficient on political context. For example, it’s true that 3% of borrowers owe more than $100,000 as the Times says: would it not be more compelling to spell that out? One million people owe more than $100K. There’s a strange formulation about debt patterns at private schools, which range, they say from:

under $10,000 at elite schools like Princeton and Williams College, which have plenty of wealthy students and enormous endowments, to nearly $50,000 at some private colleges with less affluent students and less financial aid.

Anyone who knows anything about student debt knows that students at Ivy Leagues and elite schools can be just as way over their heads as people at other private institutions. I could give you stories from each of my own classes–see the TEDx above.

Even more bizarrely a federal official is quoted as suggesting that student debt is like the mortgage crisis:

Mr. Date likened excessive student borrowing to risky mortgages. And as with the housing bubble before the economic collapse, the extraordinary growth in student loans has caught many by surprise.

While student debt can and does ruin lives, it is almost impossible to default on in a permanent fashion. Lenders can and do take money from unemployment benefit and Social Security. There are no bankruptcy provisions for student debt and you can’t be foreclosed on. Default and delinquency rates are up, yes–but the lenders are doing so well out of the interest rates that they won’t ever really lose money.

It’s on solutions that the piece really falls down. It seems to suggest only that the costs of college be made clearer to applicants and that students need to make choices compatible with their resources not their aspirations. There’s a bit of a suggestion that states might want to raise their support for their higher education institutions and some thought from the Republican governor of Ohio that the universities are to blame for wanting to be good in all areas. Funny, I thought that was the point of a university.

Nowhere is there a discussion about activist calls for debt abolition, a Jubilee, free public higher education, a return to education as a top priority in private schools, private school accountability and the other goals of the Occupy Student Debt movement. Now we have to move quickly to advance that agenda so that pious lamentations about student debt don’t become an election year formula, crowding solutions out of public discussion.

 

After Striking

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For the first time at OWS you can hear the words “After May Day.” It seems almost surreal after so much planning for this day. When the events of May are over, it’s a fair bet that the global social movements will once again have the world’s attention. What will we do with this second chance? It’s time to begin imagining how to connect our issues.

So as not to lay this on anybody else, I’m going to explore this by means of the most popular topic in my own project–namely student debt–and the least, which would be climate change. How can we avoid being co-opted on the former and ignoring the latter?  No answers, no demands, just questions for the Spring.

Student debt has become a viral topic in the past four months. Barely mentioned in the media until recently, it was theme of the week in the presidential and congressional elections. And what was until this week a mostly OWS slogan is now in the mix:

Romney Super PAC ad

Yes, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC called American Crossroads has used the Occupy Student Debt slogan in an attack ad against Obama. The quote marks in this still I made from their video suggest that they even know where it comes from. The theme of the ad is that while Obama is off being a “celebrity,” real problems have been mounting for American young people.

Obama has indeed done little to mitigate the student debt crisis, although the subject was one of his most reliable applause lines in 2008. Romney has no solution at all, certainly not the one proposed by OSDC: free public education. He knows Obama won’t argue for anything like that. If this meme goes viral across the Right, we risk losing one of the most effective OWS projects.

On the other hand, from micro to macro, climate change is  dropping out of sight in Occupy. When I post about it, as I noticed when I did finally look at the stats before going to Madison, readership plummets. In the Occupy global action week coming up in mid-May, climate is not mentioned at all, no doubt for fear of this alienating effect.

A news item this week seemed to encapsulate this dilemma. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, workers at a French steel plant owned by the multinational giant ArcelorMittal  have been occupying it to try and prevent its closure. However, an article in Le Monde this week clarified why the plant is not opened or closed.

This is a bit complicated, so here’s the takeaway: the steel producers are using climate change carbon credits to make a load of money for doing nothing. In more detail: under the terms of the European Union carbon trading agreement, companies were given a “free” level of pollution in 2005. Emissions would have to be paid for if they exceeded this level but a credit could be achieved by reducing them below it. ArcelorMittal has “reduced” its emissions by simply closing its plants. While some of its credits have been stored, others have been cashed in, allowing them to make $140 million in 2010: for doing nothing at all.

So if François Hollande wins the presidential election and gives ArcelorMittal an incentive to reopen the plant, it will have to be sufficiently large to exceed this free money and all the costs of actually producing. That’s not allowed by the “market,” the same market that gave all these credits to ArcelorMittal in the first place. They can cash them in, or hold the French government to ransom for a few jobs, with any actual steel production being carried out in India without tiresome regulations.

Here we see the pincer movement of financialized capital. The most widely accepted solution to the financial crisis from the Paul Krugman wing of the Democratic Party to the left is economic growth. For the green left, however, growth means more carbon emissions and accelerated climate change. For anarchists, it’s now taken as read that the current permanent expansion of capitalism must collapse because there are not infinite resources to exploit.

However, if you can capitalize total inactivity at technically an infinite rate of profit–and don’t forget all those tax deductions for the declining hardware and the savings on salary–this implosion may allow for a continued rate of profit even if there is widespread climate change.

I don’t have a simple answer to these dilemmas. I do think it suggests that a new form of affinity group is going to have to think how to cross the lines of the existing working groups to imagine a form of systemic critique that goes beyond the perhaps self-evident anti-capitalism. And that’s precisely as not simple as it sounds. The upside is that the space created by the activism of May gives enough time to get on it.

1T Day: Waiting for the Debt Jubilee

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At the time I began writing this, I should have been at the Occupy Student Debt march to mark 1T Day, the day when student debt crossed the one trillion dollar mark. Instead I was in an airport waiting room, watching cable TV and thinking about the Jubilee. It turned out to be a good place to spend 1T Day after all.

According the Wall Street Journal, a trillion dollars of student debt may have happened as early as February. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York put student debt at $870 billion in December 2011, so it must be close. But no-one really knows.

Instead of participating in this day of action, I was waiting for a delayed plane that was at first said to need “cleaning.” This process went on and on, until United admitted that they could not clean the plane. It became clear that a vast malfunction of the toilet system had, well, covered the plane in shit.

Sitting there with my copy of David Graeber’s Debt, it seemed to me that this plane was a metaphor for the financial crisis itself. This system, in which our duties are to “sit back and relax,” while under the restraint of keeping your “seatbelt securely fastened,” promised to function invisibly, magically shrinking distance at ever-reduced cost. Instead, fossil fuel use has destroyed the atmosphere, corporations cannot successfully manage to privatize what should be a public system, and we have all been literally and metaphorically sprayed with their effluent.

In my waiting room haze, I mused that this spray was given literal form by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, which has recently been shown to be caused by the oil company’s excessive greed for profits, in the just the way that you always knew it had been. The repellent John Brown, former CEO of BP, ordered his staff to

Go to the limit. If we go too far, we can always pull back later.

So that’s all right then. Browne then went on to cover himself in further glory by heading the Browne Review of higher education in the UK, which argued for the end of limits to tuition fees. The result has been that education that was provided to me freely is now being charged for at £9000 a year (about $16,000)–reasonable by some US standards perhaps but the upward acceleration is so dramatic, you have to wonder where it ends. Corporate profligacy is rewarded by the ability to recommend individual austerity. Or simply put, big oil creates student debt.

As I waited, I heard the phrase “student debt” from the TV. CNN was covering Obama speaking today at the University of Iowa. He revealed that he and Michele had only managed to pay off their own student debt in 2004, at the time he became a US Senator. The students cheered wildly, although I’m not sure why: because Obama was therefore like them? Or because they could imagine emerging from their indebtedness to become a Senator or a President? It’s telling that Obama made this speech at a land-grant public university. Until very recently, such institutions would have been low-cost or free, especially for in-state students. The University of Wisconsin, where I was just visiting, had a 5% tuition raise this year as the icing on the cake of another round of serious cuts amounting to $250 million.

Obama gave a good soundbite but the change he is advocating for is trivial. He is calling for interest on Federal Stafford loans to remain at 3.4%, rather than doubling to 6.8% as they are set to do this July. As the money comes from the Federal Reserve, whose prime rate is next to zero, this still represents substantial exploitation of students and their families. Indeed the objection is the “loss” of revenue, entirely notional in any event, which amounts to a rounding error in the Pentagon budget. It’s not going to happen in a Republican-dominated Congress anyway, it’s just a bit of electoral theatre.

As Graber says at the end of his book, what we need is a debt jubilee, meaning a cancellation of debt, as called for by the Bible, which is always right in America, except when it benefits those who need debt. Sitting there in the airport, I reflected that like most airlines, United has been through bankruptcy, as American Airlines currently is doing. Unlike personal bankruptcy, such corporate bankruptcy is very rewarding. The company gets to restructure its debt, reduce its obligations to its workforce, and increase costs for its customers. These bankruptcies brought you things like baggage check charges and no food on planes, while reducing salary, benefits and pensions for airline workers, putting them, no doubt, in debt.

So, like George Costanza, we need to do the opposite: cancel debt for ordinary people. Create more jobs by turning the airlines, subways and railroads into a sustainable, integrated low-cost public transport system. Reduce the retirement age so employers need to hire new staff. All financed by taxes on financial transactions and increasing taxes on capital gains to the same levels as income. Impossible demands? Maybe. But when Occupy Student Debt was established six months ago, we weren’t having a national discussion about reducing student debt and now we are doing. Let’s see where we are in six more months, shall we?

Once More Into the Debt, Dear Friends–at TEDx

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I spent today at a TEDx event organized by NYU students. I was approached to participate by a woman who had taken one of my classes. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do it, so, knowing that most of the organizers were from the Business School, I proposed a talk on the student debt crisis, expecting them to reject it. But they called my bluff.

So I presented the now-familiar cocktail (to regular readers) of $1 trillion of student debt, the 27% default rate and declining applications to high-cost institutions. I localized it by considering the rising debt crisis at NYU. At present some 55% of NYU students graduate in debt with the average debt amounting to just over $40,000.

Some of this is unintended debt. One young man came into a class of mine last semester smiling broadly. When I asked him why, he said that the loan office had given him four times as much money as he had requested. Horrified, I asked why he had accepted it and he said: “Free money!” If only it was. No surprise then that NYU ranks #6 in the nation for student debt. Ahead are a group of very much less well-known institutions, such as the Florida Institute of Technology and Barry University, scarcely the New Ivy company that NYU likes to claim for itself.

So we are all puzzled that NYU has launched an expansion plan that will build immense new towers across the middle of Greenwich Village, including a hotel. No indication has been provided as to how this will be paid for but NYU has announced that “[it] is not afraid of debt.” Perhaps it should be. It has been calculated that, if you use a low estimate of $4 bn. for the construction, the interest payments alone would be more than the current tuition and fees generated by the flagship College of Arts and Science.

The University is pursuing debt financing like never before at what may turn out to be precisely the wrong time.For other participants in the TEDx event highlighted the continuing impact of the global financial crisis, arguing that it was likely to redefine our sense of how markets operate–in this new context, debt is certainly something to be concerned about.

There’s another form of convergence going on, whose consequences are less clear. No less than three TEDx presentations highlighted the interface between new ideas about marketing, the viral idea, and the global Occupy movement. All the presenters wanted to see socially good results from this, but it’s not hard to see how others might try and appropriate it.

The concern about being co-opted is widespread in Occupy circles at the moment. Are the Move On 99% training sessions–direct imitations of the OWS Spring Training–which are patently directed towards promoting the Democratic Party, a good thing or not? We can take a positive view and see the progressive wing of the Democrats being mobilized by Occupy. Or we can be less sanguine and see the ideas as being diluted into the usual election-year boilerplate.

Berlin Biennale Occupy space

Another discussion is happening around the Berlin Biennale, one of the many global art fairs, hosting a space for Occupy (as above). Based on discussions with Occupy Berlin, the space includes recycling, a garden, an autonomous university and undefined action space. Here Occupy is rendered into a shopping list for a want-to-be radical art fair, whose ultimate rationale is the continuation of the global art market, the epitome of one percent luxury furnishing.

Yet the very packaged nature of the Move On and Berlin Biennale projects misses the key element to all viral memes–the unexpected. These gestures are so predictable within the context of two-party politics and art world solipsism that I’m not sure I can even be bothered to be annoyed by them.

The last convergence is the most obvious–the interface between Occupy and structured digital media platforms like TEDx, which is a licensed and carefully-filtered project:

  • TED does not grant licenses to those associated with controversial or extremist organizations.
  • TEDx events may not be used to promote spiritual or religious beliefs, commercial products or political agendas.

Given that, as Alessandra Renzi pointed out in her recent talk at NYU, many apparently familiar organizations are now being officially designated as “extremist” from environmental groups to art activist performers The Yes Men, you wonder how such filtering is applied.

Organizers of TEDx events always hope that one of their talks gets “promoted” to the highlighted section of the site. My guess is that a talk on student debt–especially one given by a surprisingly nervous professor–won’t make that list. Except maybe with a little help from his friends…now that would be unexpected;) Links to follow.