occupy wall street - strike debt [episode 27] wired for success tv

7/29/2019 Occupy Wall Street - Strike Debt [Episode 27] Wired For Success TV

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~ Wired for Success TV ~

Mastering the 7 Areas of Life

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Presented by

Melanie Gabriel & Beryl Thomas

[Episode 27]

Occupy Wall Street Strike Debt

Occupy Wall Street - Strike Debt - Wired For Success [Episode 27]
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[0:00:10]

Beryl: So welcome to another episode of http://www.wiredforsuccess.tv. I am BerylThomas and with me is my co-host Melanie Gabriel. Say hi Mel.

Melanie: Hello everyone.

Beryl: And todays very special guest is a young man called Aaron Smith whos part ofa group of volunteers who go by the name of Strike Debt. Strike Debt, an offshoot ofOccupy Wall Street is dedicated to exposing the enormous inadequacies of a systemthat forces people into debt to pay for the very basics in life such as housing, educationand medical care, debt that is owed by the 99 percent to the 1 percent.

Aaron has been a participant in several initiatives of Occupy Wall Street from parkmaintenance to research on the financial system. Hes also a host of Occupy Wall

Street Radio on WBAI.

Strike Debt recognizes that what 99 percent of Americans have in common is debt. Butby joining together and taking collective action, there are ways to write off these debts,ways that are unavailable to the individual.

Today Aaron is going to tell us about their Rolling Jubilee initiative where they buy debtfor pennies on the dollar but instead of going out and collecting the debt, they abolish it.

So welcome Aaron. Its fabulous to have you on our show. Thank you so much for beinghere.

Aaron: Thanks Beryl and thanks Mel for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Beryl: So you are doing incredible work, Aaron, your organization. Tell us why Occupymovement started this new offshoot Strike Debt. What was the inspiration going onthere?

Aaron: Well, from the very first moment that we were in the park last fall, you could tellthat the reason a lot of people are coming own there and the reason that sort of tiedeveryone together we call it the tie that binds the 99 percent was that they were inthese crushing amounts of debt and that this debt was shaping the choices that theymade in life and it often came from not [0:02:06] [Indiscernible] get spending but tosort of daily basic needs.

Forty percent of Americans put basic needs on their credit cards. More than 50 percentof the debt collection accounts in the country are from medical expenses. Almost two-thirds of bankruptcies are from medical expenses.

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Housing debt is ubiquitous and was a major factor in the financial crisis and tuition debtis spiraling out of control. Its now larger than auto loans and larger than credit card debtin the United States. So everyone, almost everyone has debt and almost everyone ismaking choices in their lives in order to pay off that debt. Theyre essentially mortgagingtheir future in order to pay for their ability to survive in the present.

This is a theme from very early on in the park. One day a man held up a piece ofwhiteboard and just asked people to write the amount of their debt on there and you hadpeople just streaming in, writing these huge amounts of debt and telling stories abouthow they got into debt.

So it has been a motivating principle ever since the early days of Occupy Wall Streetand that several campaigns came out of that. One of the most [0:03:12] [Indiscernible]was the Occupy Student Debt campaign, which was a goal to sort of build a movementto end the student debt problems here in the United States.

What they did, one of their initiatives was to issue a pledge for people to sign that. Onemillion people signed this pledge. All of them would stop paying their student debt andthey ended up only getting about 10,000 people to sign the pledge and they learnedsomething very interesting in the process of going through this pledge, which helpedthen form Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee.

What they learned was that there are actually already 5 million people who are indefault in their student loans in the United States and this number is growing extremelyrapidly. I think its actually close to six million now. Just growing since last year.

So what they realized is that this group of people who are already in default who werealready basically on Debt Strict can be thought of as this invisible army, these peoplewho are sort of isolated from one another but are participating in debt resistancebecause they have no other choice.

So that became the motivating principle behind Strike Debt when we started meeting inWashington Square Park in May of this year was that if we could somehow mobilize thisinvisible army, if we could somehow get them to step out of the shadows and see eachother as a collective force rather than this individual, isolating situation that theyre in,then we could start to build a debt resistance movement and thats exactly what wevebeen doing since May.

Beryl: So tell me what the Debt Resistance Movement is. Well I know what youre doingis youre collecting donations and then youre able to buy debt with those donations in away that an individual couldnt do. So I love what youre saying about people comingtogether because as individuals, youre very isolated and youre very disempowered butactually when you come together as a group, youre much more empowered and youhave found a way to be able to buy up that bad debt. Would you like to talk about that?



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Aaron: Right, yes. So the Rolling Jubilee which youre mentioning is just one tactic andI want to frame it within the larger context of Strike Debt, right? So as you said, yeah,coming together and realizing the power of our collective action is really the motivatingprinciple of Strike Debt. We like to say that debt when treated as an individual is aburden but when we act together, its leverage.

Like the old saying goes, if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. [0:05:31][Inaudible]million dollars, the bank has a problem. Together we owe the banks trillionsand trillions of dollars and we are standing together to say to them we actually owe younothing and were going to start using that as a point of leverage for negotiating a betterfuture.

So the way that takes shape in several [Inaudible], first we did we held a number ofdebt assemblies in Washington Square Park. We just brought people together, hadthem talk about how they got into debt. The very first of these, I remember so wellbecause I thought, maybe we have two or three people and then we would start to do

the heavy work and having the conversation to try and tie together all their situationsbetween housing debt and medical debt and tuition debt.

That wasnt what happened. What happened was we had 50 people who just told theirstories, these incredible, heart-wrenching, compelling stories of just people living theirdaily lives and all of a sudden discovering themselves up to their eyeballs in debt anddoing things like hiding from debt collectors and changing the way they live their lives inorder to get rid of this debtor to pay off this debt.

So that was the first step, to step out of the shadows, to relieve the shame of being indebt. Its your obligation. Its only you that has to deal with it.

Weve moved on from there to building tactics for people to actively resist debt. So wewrote something called the Debt Resistors Operations Manual which you can get on oursite StrikeDebt.org and its just a bunch of practical, everyday tips and tricks that peoplecan use to resist debt collectors, to get out of debt and to minimize the amount of debtthat they have in their lives.

Now the Rolling Jubilee is an idea that has been kicking around in activist circles for anumber of years and the basic premise is this. It turns out that in the United States atleast, large lenders, banks, hospitals, things like that are required by law to sell off debtsafter 90 days or 180 days. It depends on the particular state and the particular kind ofdebt.

When they sell it off, they get a tax write-off for the difference between how much thedebt was originally for and how much they sell it for. So because they have to sell thisdebt by law and because they get a tax write-off, they sell it for an incredible discount,something like 95 cents off. Sometimes as much as 99 cents off.



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So there are these firms set up called debt buyer that just have these volumearrangements. They just buy all of the debt thats sold off. So they get incredibly gooddeals and then they sell it and they break it up into pieces and they package it in waysthat debt collectors might like and they sell it off to debt collectors.

Then this is where we come in. We say, Instead of selling to those debt collectors, wewill pay you the same price that they would pay and we will just take the debt and wewill get rid of it. We wont try and hound these people with phone calls. We wont showup at their houses. We wont show up at their sick beds which a lot of debt collectors do.They embed themselves in hospitals and then try to get people to sign off on their debtwhile theyre sitting there in the [0:08:22] [Inaudible].

The tactics get awful. You can read more about it in the Debt Resistors Manual. Sowhat we do, is we erase the debt. We send the debtors a certified letter that says hereswhat has happened. We [Inaudible]already and have a nice day. You no longer haveto worry about this particular debt.

Thats the basic idea. So we found that we can get debt for about [Inaudible] on thedollar. Every dollar that comes in, were able to raise about $20 worth of debt.

Beryl: For every dollar that comes in, youre able to clear $20 of debt.

Aaron: About, yeah. Its an estimate because it depends on which package we buy.

Beryl: And how did you even find out about this? This is what I cant work out. Was it aninsider told you this story? How did you guys work this out?

Aaron:This is an idea that has been kicking around in activist circles for a number of

years now. Its an open secret. They [0:09:20] [Inaudible] this is done. Its just thatpeople didnt think to actually go ahead and do it until earlier this year when an artistnamed Thomas Gokey who lived in Syracuse at the time decided to just try it and he gottogether $500 and he bought $14,000 worth of peoples debt and he let them know thathe was erasing it.

Then when he realized this worked, he got in touch with us and we started doing thehard work of investigating how to scale it. We talked to the IRS. We talked to taxlawyers. We incorporated, started a non-profit and we sort of built the infrastructure overthe course of about four months and then we launched the Rolling Jubilee on November15th.

Beryl: You did that very rapidly, didnt you?

Aaron: I mean it didnt seem very rapid at the time.

Melanie: Did you get much resistance in putting this together?



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Aaron: No, not at all. I mean in fact we are I cant reveal the identity of who wereworking with in the industry but you need to be a certified a debt buyer in order topurchase the debt. So we are working with people in the industry and one of them said

I think this is a sentiment thats pretty widely held. I have kids and theyre going to begraduating with all this debt. This needs to stop and I think [0:10:35] [Inaudible] they

completely understand that the system that theyre participating in is out of control andwe need to shine a light on it and we need to help people.

There has been no resistance from the part of the debt buyers. There might be if wewere able to grow much, much, much larger. I mean I want to make a point. The RollingJubilee is dealing in hundreds of thousands of dollars right now. The secondary debtmarket in the United States is tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars ayear.

Its not even a matter of just getting bigger and getting more press. We would need tobe something qualitatively different than what we are right now in order to actually affect

the debt market. What were doing is helping peoples lives and educating from thepublic.

Were not actually going to buy up all of the debt. Were not actually going to change theway the debt market operates with just this action.

Beryl: No.

Aaron: But we are educating people and were going to help people change the waythat they deal with debt and that is whats dangerous to the banks. That is what theymight start to resist on. But I think thats a bit far down the road at this point.

Beryl: So when you say you help people change the way they deal with debt becausea lot of this debt they cant help but take on, can they? Its not like you got to reeducatethem not to take on debt because we all need some money to live and in the US, youhave to pay your medical bills.

So are you saying you got to educate people to demand that the system changes?

Aaron: Yeah. I think thats exactly right. Its often the case that people just have to takeon this debt as the [0:11:59] [Indiscernible] of their daily life. You made the pointextremely well. Its not that people are just sort of spending buying three flat screenTVs and cars and what not. This is medical debt. This is tuition debt. This is basicneeds.

The eventual goal of the debt resistance movement is for us to stop treating basicneeds as products. We treat them as goods. We treat them as goods in common. Wedont treat them as things that should be financed by mortgaging our future, by debtfinancing.



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Thats a long goal. Thats a decades long goal but it begins with educating people aboutthe fact that this debt that theyre taking on, it doesnt have to be that way and its notthat it doesnt have to be that way because you can choose something else right nowbut its that we together collectively can choose another world.

Beryl: OK.

Melanie: So I just want to pick up on the bit about educating people. So you mentionedthe Debt Resistors Manual which can be downloaded from your site. Does this manual

and I have to hold my hands up and say I have no chance to have a look at it yet.Does this manual remind us? Because for those of us who can be supportive but arenot involved in this, were really isolated from this world and I think even people who arein debt dont realize that its not just them.

Does this manual sort of reveal the extent of the dreadful things that people go throughand also begins the education process in terms of what they could do?

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. In fact thats a primary goal of the manual is to sort of shine alight on exactly how insidious the debt infrastructure has become and in particularpredatory practices of debt collectors which is sort of our initial focus with theseprojects.

We also have on the website at StrikeDebt.org something called the Strike DebtOrganizing Kit which basically tells you how to start your Strike Debt Chapter whereveryou are and theres dozens of chapters now springing up all over the world.

Theres one in the UK. Theres one in Toronto, all over the United States, and these willshow you how to build this sort of debt assemblies, the sorts of things that have reallybrought people together here in New York City. It will talk to you about how to flesh outthe Debt Resistors Manual for your own town, how to focus on debt strike. So weretalking about moving into targeted strikes on particular collectors or particular lenders orhospitals or something like that where we start to unseat the debt infrastructure intargeted locations.

Beryl: By doing that, you said earlier something like this will start to frighten the banks.This will start to make the banks realize that there is a force to be reckoned with.

Aaron: One hopes, right? Earlier this year, actually a couple of years ago, sorry, therewas the group that started to buy houses that were in foreclosure and instead of flippingthem and reselling them for a higher price, what they would do is just give them back tothe people who were living in them and perfectly brilliant idea. It didnt cost the banksany money because they were already going to sell it for that amount anyway on theforeclosure options.

But the banks stopped dealing with those people. They refuse to sell to anyone whowasnt going to sell it off to a different person.



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Melanie: Forgive the simplicity of my question. Whats the advantage of the bank tointerfere there?

Aaron: The reason for that is they are afraid of something called moral hazard. So the

idea there is that if someone knows that someone else will just buy their house, andthen sell it back to them at the foreclosure price, then they will just go into default andthey will wait to get [0:15:45] [Inaudible].

Of course no one talks about the fact that the banks dont have any downside to whenthey make these loans because they sell of mortgage-backed securities. They sell offstudent loan asset-backed securities. They sell off securities for their write-off, theircharged-off debts and medical debt and credit card debt.

No one talks about the fact that the banks have a moral hazard but when a personwants to do it, when an individual wants to do it, when an individual wants what the

asset is actually worth to the bank, then all of a sudden everyone is afraid.

So we think maybe something like that might happen down the road if we start to get bigenough. But its a little bit more difficult in the debt collection industry because its muchmore fragmented and they actually dont know who our debt buyers are and were notchanging the buying patterns [0:16:28] [Indiscernible]debt buyers. So we have a littlebit of resistance strategy there.

Melanie: Oh, I see. So by being mysterious about it, they cant interfere and[Indiscernible]. My goodness.

Aaron:We will see how it plays out. I think the banks are large and powerful and they

will eventually find a way to stop dealing with us, if they want to. But I think if we getlarge enough for them to care, thats a [0:16:50] [Inaudible].

Beryl: And if you achieve your goal of people demanding that the system change,because I dont think youre planning on continuing this rolling what you said earlier,not planning on this growing massively. You are hoping that people will work togetherand stand up with a stronger voice and that makes me think do you have anypoliticians who are supporting you?

Aaron: We dont talk to politicians. [Inaudible] with these types of initiatives is that ifgovernment wants to follow us, theyre certainly welcome to do so. But were not goingto get bogged down in the sort of transactional politics. So the attorney-general of NewYork State right now is a guy named Eric Schneiderman who wrote a great article inNation magazine about four years ago where he said the problem with politicians on theleft is that they perform something called transactional politics. They get thesechecklists from left-leaning organizations and they check off and they say, I will supportabortion rights. I will support environmental rights. Check, check, check, and thats allthose organizations ever ask of them.



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They dont do the transformational work of building movements outside of politics and inorder to really do that, you cant get involved in the nitty-gritty of trading nuclearregulatory for pro-choice or something like that. We cant do that.

What we have to do is show that there is a very widespread desire for a different worldand if this current government wants to try and catch up and create that world, thats upto them. But in the meantime, were going to start [0:18:18] [Inaudible]instead.

Beryl: Youre doing it anyway. And again I have to say the speed with which youvedone this is incredible and thats probably because you dont have politics involved. Youhave a common belief there and you just forge through. Can you talk a little bit justabout the way that Occupy Movement has got other offshoots?

I know in a previous conversation you talked about Occupy Sandy which we dont hearabout. The mainstream media do not talk about these things.

Melanie: Whats going on there?

Aaron:[Inaudible]article about Occupy Sandy which is really well-written but it hasntgotten enough of the press relative to things like Red Cross and FEMA. So the basicidea here is that the hurricane hit New York recently and New Jersey and the areasaround it. It was extremely severe. Im sure you saw the photos of DowntownManhattan all blacked out. But the parts that were hardest too were of course thepoorest communities that were right on the coast in the port areas.

The very first day after Sandy hit, you saw just of their own initiative people involvedwith Occupy, taking bicycles down there and doing something that Red Cross wouldnever do, FEMA would never do. They just went up to people and they said, What doyou need? Rather than show up Red Cross showing up with its tents and with itsmedical kits and FEMA showing up with its aid packets and its loan applications, which Iwill get back to you in a second.

They said, What do you need? Thats how you ended up with people going into highrise buildings and going up to the 12th floor and helping elderly people get down or getwhatever they need through those dark stairwells that they refused to walk in becausethey were afraid.

So you found Occupy sort of filling a niche in both response and recovery work that noother organization has and this is part of the ethos that we have of not working withgovernmental agencies or not working through governmental agencies is that we reallybelieve that by espousing a sort of idea of mutual aid where were helping to build acommunity together rather than charity where its like Im giving you X and you can godeal with the thing that Im giving you.



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Were helping to build a stronger infrastructure for all of us in parallel to the governmentand in parallel to the relief organizations. So I mentioned the FEMA loans and I reallywant to push on this because Strike Debt actually just released its 23-page publicservice report which looks in-depth at how non-profit organizations and the governmenthave responded to Sandy.

What you find is that loans are really their response. We got a lot of emails in the daysafter Sandy and personally, people who live in New York got emails from credit cardcompanies saying, We heard youve been affected by Sandy. Were so sorry. We wantto help you. Here, were going to raise your credit card limit. This is their response,right?

This is also FEMAs response. So in order to get any kind of FEMA aid, you need toapply for a loan. You need to fill out a loan application and therefore you need to beable to be someone who can take on a loan, which is again at about six percent interestwhich is way, way higher than the going interest rates here.

Their response to crisis is essentially to create more of the debt crisis and to create sortof this disaster capitalism approach and what were saying is instead of taking on thoseFEMA loans in order to rebuild your business or your house or instead of selling outyour business or your house to the corporations that are already rolling out theirdevelopment plans for the boardwalk areas and port areas here in New York City.

We will just help you build your house. We will tear out the moldy carpet. We will tearout the moldy drywall and we will get the community together and have everyone buildin place right now. Thats the sort of aid that moves people outside of the debtinfrastructure. Thats exactly what we hope to see in the long term with things likemedicine, with things like education, with things like housing.

Beryl: This is a remarkable story, Aaron, and its tragic that more people dont knowabout it but as you say, its probably not in the interest of the mainstream media and forgovernment to know that to have people knowing that this is whats going on.

Aaron: Its just not a sexy of a story. I mean lets be honest. Five hundred peopletrained to [0:22:30] [Indiscernible]bunch of drywall around is not all that exciting storyto tell. You want to talk about the disaster itself and that nobody [Inaudible].

Melanie: So what kind of other things are we so terribly ignorant about that the DebtResistors Manual points to?

Aaron: So theres one thing that were working on right now and I will just give you kindof a preview. Were not ready to go all the way with this yet. But so as I said earlier,more than 50 percent of the debt collection accounts in the United States are frommedical debt.



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This is going to be incredibly byzantine to people who dont deal with our healthcaresystem because it is actually extremely byzantine. But we have a bunch of laws in theUnited States around health insurance privacy or health record privacy and so the basicgist of the notion is that in trading around all of these medical debt accounts, you needto sort of prove legally that you own the title to that debt account.

We believe that because of the health insurance privacy acts, and because of the waythese debts are traded back and forth, that most debt collectors actually cant prove thatthey have the legal right to [0:23:44] [Inaudible]accounts. Yet they do so anyway.

So theres a trick that you can do which is if you write a letter to the credit agencies herein the United States, theres three of them. They have to verify what youre disputing inyour letter within 30 days or it gets off of your credit report.

Were encouraging the millions and millions of people, tens of millions of people whohave medical debt collection accounts to write letters. One in 14 people in America have

these medical debt collection accounts. Write letters and just wait 30 days and we betthat millions and millions of these accounts will prove to be illegitimate and that debt willdisappear without anyone spending a dime except on [0:24:21] [Inaudible].

Beryl: One in fourteen people have these.

Aaron: One in seven Americans is being pursued by a debt collector and half of thedebt collection accounts are medical debt collection accounts.

Beryl: Thats overwhelming.

Aaron:Its about 20 million people.

Beryl: Good lord and theyre probably worrying themselves to a heart attack probably,worrying about those, and its not even genuine debt that they owe.

Aaron: Yeah. It has probably not been handled [0:24:52] [Inaudible]. So its like in themortgage crisis, is that all these banks are trading mortgages back and forth and theyactually ended up losing the paperwork or losing the titles. Stuff was no longer valid andpeople were starting to get banks were starting to get worried about this becausethere were lawsuits [Inaudible]all over the country.

So the federal government pushed all of the state attorney generals to sign a settlementwith the banks where they got out of it for just $25 billion. This is a fraction of the trillionsand trillions of dollars that they could have lost if people were allowed to go ahead withtheir lawsuits.

We have a window of opportunity here because there has not been any settlement yetwith medical debt collectors.



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Melanie: An eye-opener.

Beryl: It is an eye-opener indeed and Im interested in your own if you dont mind measking you this. Youre a young man doing an incredible thing here. How has thischanged you by being involved in Occupy Movement? Can I ask you that?

Aaron: Wow. Ive done a lot of interesting things in my life and I have to say that beinginvolved with Occupy in the last year, Ive met most of the most intelligent andhardworking and just excited individuals that I have ever met in my entire life. We jokeabout how we spend two months working on a project together and the idea of beingapart some of our friends who work in the Rolling Jubilee are going on the road for afew months.

The idea of being apart for a few months is all of a sudden horrifying and we often knowvery little about each others personal lives. Yet we feel so close to each other. Afterworking with someone for months day in and day out, hours and hours a day, you find

yourself asking things, So what exactly is your job? Were very close to each otherbecause weve done all this very intense work together.

Melanie: So you [0:26:42] [Indiscernible] together by a single purpose whichoverrides all the other trivial stuff.

Aaron: Yeah, its an incredible environment to work in and Im excited because it justseems to be more and more innovative everyday and more and more people areshowing up, who have more and more skills and more and more ideas.

Beryl: So it sounds like it really is gathering momentum even though were not hearingabout it in the mainstream.

Aaron: Yeah, and I think thats fine. The fact of the matter is this idea that theresanother way to live our lives outside of simply waiting for the government to doeverything for us, sort of letting corporations do everything to us, is infectious andpeople are really standing up.

Just today here in New York City, theres a university here called Cooper Union whichhas been free for 100 years. Its sort of one of the last [0:27:30] [Indiscernible]of freeeducation. Recently, they announced that they were going to start charging tuitionessentially to pay for these vanity projects, this giant new building that they build andthe higher salaries theyre giving to administration.

Instead of just taking it, the students are rising up. Theyre fighting back and theyreoccupying the main building right now. Theyre in their third day at this very moment andtheyre holding huge protests in Cooper Square and Downtown Manhattan and its thesort of thing that just happens now. Its people feel like they can stand up and demand abetter world and this would have been just unthinkable about two years ago and its veryexciting to see it unfold day by day.



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Beryl: Its very exciting. So where do you think this is do you feel like the momentumis gathering to such a point that we really will see some definite changes in thesystems? Do you see the shoots of something new coming?

Aaron: I do, yeah. I think of Occupy not as an organization or even a movement. I thinkof it as a set of principles and a network of people that have been practicing together.So we get the sense that there is another world that we want and that this worldinvolves people power and it involves making decisions locally and via democracy andwere practicing how to do that.

Were developing how to do that and were finding all of the ways in our life in whichdemocracy has been taken away from us or never actually existed in the first place andwere starting to practice what a democratic solution would look like.

We will fail many times along the way but we will also discover many new things along

the way and I think that that idea is extraordinarily infectious and youre seeing it aroundthe world and youre seeing it be practiced in entirely new ways, ways unlike it has beenever practiced before.

Beryl: You really are pioneers, Aaron. You realize that, dont you? Youre pioneers.Youre the frontier men.

Aaron: I hope we find this frontier very populated very soon.

Beryl: Go Melanie. Sorry.

Melanie:I was merely going to say so for the many who live in a kind of bubble and are

totally unaware of this very serious situation, having woken them up to it, what is it theycan do to be of assistance?

Aaron: Yeah. So there are a lot of things to do. Here in New York City, were holding anopen house on December 16th 2:00 PM and thats going to be a leap to this GlobalVisioning Summit. So on January 21st again in New York City but with video links topeople all around the world, were going to start brainstorming what to do with all ofthese new ideas and what tactics [0:30:18] [Inaudible]. Were going to talk about whattactics have worked in debt resistance movements and the anti-austerity movements inGreece and Spain and in the UK as well.

We start finding commonalities and building global solidarity around these issues. Theissue of municipal and national austerity is directly related to the issues that we work onand building that bride I think is next.

So I encourage people to inform themselves about the issues. Go to StrikeDebt.org.Follow us on Facebook. See us on Twitter and talk to your local Strike Debt chapter or ifthere isnt one, start one and get ready. Start envisioning what it would look like to resist



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debt around you, to strike debt around you and then take part in this global summit. Ithink a lot is going to come out of this.

Not least of which are a set of tactics that everyone can work with together in a sensethat this network as I was saying, Occupy is this network. This network is global now

and this network is based on striking debt.

Beryl: And we really shouldnt wait for somebody else to do this. As individuals, weneed to either donate to you. Theres a Donate button on your website. Either donate oras you say, take some practical action. At least start thinking about one of those StrikeDebt chapters in your own area.

Aaron: How we use Strike Debt is going to look different in every context, in everysituation. In just a few months, weve come up with all these tactics that make sense inNew York City and makes sense in the United States. But once you latch on to that ideathat you can imagine a world that isnt financed by debt, and where youre not

mortgaging your future to survive in the present, new tactics will appear in every[0:32:07][Inaudible]. We dont want to tell you what those are.

It may be joining the austerity resistance movement. It may be sort of finding areaswithin your municipality that have been shut down or privatized. But what we need to dois start thinking local and then we will help build global out of that.

Melanie: Very empowering.

Beryl: Its very empowering. Its encouraging to hear what you say about there arepeople even within this system that doesnt work or only works for the few who arewaking up. Like that chap you said who has got the young children. But waking up tohow rotten and unfair this system is and something has to change it. It seems likepeople are waking up Aaron.

Aaron: Yeah, people are definitely. I mean everywhere we go, this idea has resonanceacross the political spectrum too. I think especially here in the United States on the so-called right end of the spectrum, people are very enthralled by the idea. We got a lot ofgood press in magazines like Forbes and Fortune which are generally right-leaningmagazines.

People are enthralled by the idea that this is actually people taking action. Were notsaying, hey government, fix this. Were saying, No, were going to fix this right now. Ifgovernment wants to do something about it, thats fine. They can follow us. They canfollow our lead. But this particular aspect of the idea I think has a strong resonancearound the world and around the political spectrum.

Melanie: Well, yes, so much food for thought here.



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Beryl: It has been enlightening and its just wonderful to hear that so many of you aredoing such incredible things and giving up your time and its I feel very emotional tohear these things are happening and I just hope and hope that it gets bigger and biggerand we will do everything we can by publicizing this. Will you come back and talk to usagain, Aaron, about the next phase of Strike Debt and where it goes next? Will you be a

regular contributor to http://www.wiredforsuccess.tv ?

Aaron: Sure thing, either myself or someone else in Strike Debt will certainly be happyto talk to you especially when we get towards the Global Visioning Day in January 21st.

Beryl: We would love to. We will certainly talk about that on our site. Yeah, come backthen. Thank you.

Melanie: So would you like to remind the viewers? I know you mentioned it before but Ithink it would be nice to just remind them how they would find out more.

Aaron: Things are changing everyday. We send a lot of updates and news about debtand initiatives and new Strike Debt chapters that we hear of around the world. We dothis via our Facebook page which is just Strike Debt, via our Twitter feed which is also

just StrikeDebt, one word. You can find all of those things via our main webpage whichis StrikeDebt.org, which will link you to the Rolling Jubilee. It will link you to the DebtResistance Manual. It will link you to the Strike Debt Organizing Kit and that will be sortof the place to go for all of the updates of when our initiatives come out.

Beryl: Thank you very much.

Thank you for tuning in to todays episode ofhttp://www.wiredforsuccess.tv.

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Lastly regardless of where you are listening to this episode from, if you havent done so

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We do reply to all comments and suggestions so we would love to hear from you.

So thank you for tuning in and remember to tune in for the next episode of wired for

success where we help you master the 7 areas of life

From myself Beryl, my co host Mel and our interviewee Aaron we bid you farewell until

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