> There ought to be a Drop the Debt campaign for Americans. There is a
> global justice movement to drop the debt of highly indebted poor
> countries, but there is none to drop the debt of American workers, or
> at least curb usurious interest rates, proliferating high fees, and so
> on (cf. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/>) that
> impoverish us and enrich no one but banks and credit companies.
> Justice ought to begin at home. The weakness of American leftists is
> that, more often than not, activism that addresses foreign policy
> (debt, war, etc.) is divorced from activism that tackles domestic
> concerns. Those who can't make demands for themselves can't and won't
> make demands for others.
Amen, Yoshie. All of these topics have been on my mind of late, including a few minutes ago. The American left fucking annoys me with it's obsession with stuff happening elsewhere. Two hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, prompting some of our comrades to go there and help, while the rest of the left went to Washington to engage in a pointless, feel good Bush-bashing festival. My radical librarian friends will pass resolutions about censorship in other countries and against the war, but they won't stand up here in the U.S. against library and workplace Internet filtering, or the new campaigns against sexual free speech. It's fucking easy to observe the liberal "Banned Books Week" when that revolves around respectable liberal literature, whereas none of this addresses the lack of erotica, porn, and sexual speech in our public libraries.
I just drafted a letter scolding a local activist friend who is a young guy who decided to buckle under when the collection agency for SBC sent him a demand for money that our closed infoshop allegedly owes SBC. I've been fighting SBC and their attempts to collect for a fraudulent charge against us. My comrade is worried about his credit record, so he went ahead and paid the ridiculous $200 charge.
This may sound completely crazy, but I have this idea about creating the "Coalition Against Credit Reporting". It would be a campaign against credit reporting that reduces many of us Americans to virtual 21st century serfs. Think about it. Aren't credit reporting companies such as Equifax simply legally sanctioned identity theives? Why should they have the right to spread slander and misinformation about my life? How many people are beign fucked over by these companies whose credit reporting doesn't illustrate the circumstances of people's lives? I paid my rent on time for over 10 years until I lost my job and couldn't find work. But if you looked at my credit report it wouldn't show anything about the circumstances of my life.
We need a Drop the Debt campaign for Americans. Let's start with student loans that exist for those of us who haven't been in a classroom in 15 years or long.
Yoshie's right.
Chuck