Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual

Description

Over the last thirty years, as wages have stagnated across the country, average household debt has more than doubled. Increasingly, we are forced to take on debt to meet our needs—from housing, to education, to medical care. The results—wrecked lives, devastated communities, and an increasing reliance on credit to maintain our basic living standards—reveal an economic system that enriches the few at the expense of the many.

The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a handbook for debtors everywhere to understand how this system really works, while providing practical tools for fighting debt in its most exploitative forms. Inside, you’ll find detailed strategies, resources, and insider tips for dealing with some of the most common kinds of debt, including credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, and housing debt. The book also contains tactics for navigating the pitfalls of personal bankruptcy, and information to help protect yourself from credit reporting agencies, debt collectors, payday lenders, check cashing outlets, rent-to-own stores, and more.

Written and edited by a network of activists, writers, and academics from Occupy Wall Street, additional chapters cover tax debt, sovereign debt, the relationship between debt and climate, and an expanded vision for a movement of mass debt resistance.

Sujets

• Mortgage
• Mutual aid

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868968
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR THE DEBT RESISTERS’ OPERATIONS MANUAL
"That debt is neither inevitable nor ethical is one of the powerful assertions of Strike Debt, whose brilliant manual is both a practical handbook and a manifesto for a true debt jubilee: an economic rebirth in which the indebted are freed and financial institutions are reinvented. It’s a stunning intersection of ferocity (against the debt industry) and compassion (for the people whose lives are broken by debt). In years to come, we may look back on it as a landmark in social transformation; right now it is both useful and exhilarating."
Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and Wanderlust: A History of Walking
"The impact of the neoliberal assault on the U.S. population in the past generation has rightly been designated a ‘failure by design.’ This failure is sharply class-based for the designers it has been a grand success, and a failure for most of the rest. The same is true of debt. That sets two tasks for those who care about the health of the society: change the design, and find ways to cope as effectively with the failures it imposes. This valuable monograph by Strike Debt provides a good guide to undertake both."
Noam Chomsky, author of Hopes and Prospects and Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment
"This manual is a practical guide that will aid anyone who is struggling with debt. But even more important, it is a political guide that illuminates the myriad kinds of debt relationships that define our society and helps us imagine how we can begin to organize collectively against debt."
Michael Hardt, coauthor of Empire, Multidude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, and Commonwealth
"The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a powerful tool for resistance and creation. It shows how we can say ‘No!’ to debt resist and refuse while at the same time opens the possibility of alternative ways of relating and creating real value together based on solidarity and care."
Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina
"The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a sober, practical book that will save its readers much money and many sleepless nights. At the same time it is a visionary text that goes into the bowels of the debt machine to chart a collective way out of the state of debt-induced indentured servitude that millions of Americans face. It is the new debt resisters’ movement’s opening challenge to Wall Street that is making the bankers anxious. Get a copy and join the movement."
Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation
"The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual is a guide for every debtor living in the United States. Given that more than 75% of American households are in debt right now, its relevance cannot be overstated. The manual is ambitious in subject matter but grounded in tone: plain and clear English is the best weapon if we want to understand the deliberately over-complicated debt economy. Readers learn that personal debt credit card, medical, student, and housing is rarely just personal and an important section on municipal debt reclaims the conversation about debt from the Right, where it is used so often to justify austerity. It questions the received wisdom that an indebted city logically must pursue cuts by showing that the money that is now considered ‘owed’ did not magically disappear; it was transferred to the 1 percent and should be taken back. The authors undo the assumptions that prop up the debt economy and challenge the notion that repaying debts is a moral duty; in fact, they argue, debt resistance is the moral choice."
Natasha Lewis, freelance journalist and Occupy reporter

The Debt Remters’ Operations Manual
Strike Debt
This edition ©2014 PM Press

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCom mercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creative-commons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
ISBN: 978-1-60486-679-7
LCCN: 2013911518
Cover and interior design: Antumbra Design/antumbradesign.org
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C OMMON NOTIONS is a publishing project that circulates both enduring and timely formulations of autonomy at the heart of movements beyond capitalism. The series traces a constellation of historical, critical, and visionary meditations on the organization of both domination and its refusal. Inspired by various traditions of autonomism in the United States and around the world, Common Notions aims to provide tools of militant research in our collective reading of struggles past, present, and to come.
Series Editor: Malav Kanuga
[e-mail] | www.commonnotions.org
OTHER BOOKS FROM COMMON NOTIONS/PM PRESS
Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952–2011
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
George Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism
CONTENTS
Glossary
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE Credit Scores and Consumer Reporting Agencies
CHAPTER TWO Credit Card and Automobile Debt
CHAPTER THREE Medical Debt
CHAPTER FOUR Student Debt
CHAPTER FIVE Housing Debt
CHAPTER SIX Tax Debt
CHAPTER SEVEN Fringe Finance Transaction Products and Services
CHAPTER EIGHT Fringe Finance Credit Products and Services
CHAPTER NINE Debt Collection
CHAPTER TEN Bankruptcy
CHAPTER ELEVEN Strategies for Survival
CHAPTER TWELVE Municipal and State Debt
CHAPTER THIRTEEN National Debt
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Climate Debt
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Prospects for Change
APPENDIX A Sample Letters to Credit Reporting Agencies
APPENDIX B Sample Letters to Consumer Reporting Agencies for Checking Accounts
APPENDIX C Sample Letter to Collection Agencies Regarding (Alleged) Medical Debt
APPENDIX D Sample Letters to Collection Agencies
INDEX
GLOSSARY
ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE MANAGEMENT A term used by insiders to describe the debt collection industry.
ACTIVE TRANSPORTATION Transportation policy or choices that prioritize walking, biking, mopeds, scooters, trolleys, buses, shuttles, light rail, local, regional, and continental train systems over automobiles.
ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE (ARM) A type of mortgage where the interest rate paid on the outstanding balance changes according to a specific indicator, often out of the control or knowledge of the borrower.
AFFIDAVIT A voluntarily written statement made by a person under oath.
AFFIANT A person who swears to an affidavit.
AFFORDABLE CARE ACT (ACA) President Obama’s health care reform law signed in 2010, most parts of which went into effect by 2014. The law has the stated intent of making health care more affordable, although at least 23 million people will remain uninsured. It has been criticized for widely expanding the role of private health insurance and for-profit care, rapidly transferring public money to private hands through the individual mandate. Also referred to as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) or Obamacare. See INDIVIDUAL MANDATE.
ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICES (AFS) See FRINGE FINANCE.
AMENABLE MORTALITY A death that could have been prevented with access to effective health care.
ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE (APR) The rate of a loan’s interest, expressed as the amount that would be accrued over the course of a year.
ASSET Anything of economic value owned by a person or company, the value of which may be expressed in cash.
AUSTERITY PROGRAMS Cuts to government spending on social programs justified as a means of balancing municipal, state, and national budgets in times of financial distress.
AUTO DEBT See CAR DEBT.
AUTO-TITLE LOAN When a borrower exchanges their automobile’s title for cash, generally for about one-quarter of the vehicle’s value, with a high APR. The vehicle can still be driven, however, during the loan’s duration.
BANKRUPTCY A court-supervised legal process in which the debts of an individual or business in financial distress are restructured or dismissed.
BANKRUPTCY ABUSE PREVENTION AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT (BAPCPA) Passed in 2005 as the result of massive lobbying on behalf of the credit industry, BAPCPA is a harsh reform to the federal bankruptcy code that makes it significantly harder and more expensive for debtors to file.
CAPITAL GAINS Profits obtained by selling assets, for example, a home, family business, stock, or bond.
CAPITALISM An economic system, or mode of production, in which the bulk of the means of production are privately owned, products are exchanged in a market (i.e., the primary determinant of prices is competition among individual enterprises trying to make a profit), and most people work for others, who own the means of production in exchange for wages or a salary
CAR DEBT Debt incurred by the purchase, use, and maintenance of an automobile.
CARBON EMISSIONS The release of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere primarily from the use of oil, natural gas, coa