Strike Debt Bay Area: Debt Resistance in the Age of Trump

• Our medical debt erasure campaign with RIP Medical Debt is doing well (but needs more signal-boosting). We joined another Alameda County campaign, and together we’re more than halfway to our minimum goal. Our donation page is here. The online version of our flyer, with live links, is here. Our FAQ is here. We can also link you to a printable version of the flyer if you have places to hand them out.
• Continuing our discussion group on Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth (moving on to Chapter 7 and the end of the book, on May 11 at 4:30 at the OMNI). Two of the book group members entered the author’s competition for an 8th way to think like a 21st-century economist.
• Organizing for public banking in the East Bay! Public Banking East Bay (which overlaps significantly with our group) is also an active member of the California Public Banking Alliance. The Green New Deal envisions financing through public banks! AB857, which will pave the way for local and regional California public banks, is in committee hearings next week in Sacramento.
• Supporting student debt resistance, working with our sister organization, The Debt Collective. At the end of last year, the Debt Collective won a huge victory against Betsy DeVos and the Trump Department of “Education.”
• Supporting the progress of bail reform law, better than the 2018 California law (including the new end of cash bail policy in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Charlotte’s county), while also fighting modern day debtors’ prisons and exploitative ticketing and fining schemes
• Helping out America’s only non-profit check-cashing organization (an Oakland institution) and fighting against usurious for-profit pay-day lenders and their ilk
• Advocating for postal banking, now a national conversation because of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bill to restore it to U.S. law
• Fighting the current proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, while promoting single-payer / Medicare for All to end the plague of medical debt
• Organizing for Tiny Homes, better sanctioned encampments than Oakland is now currently creating, and other ways to help homeless people get housing and support
• Promoting the concept of universal basic income
• Bring your own debt-related project!

Strike Debt – Principles of Solidarity

We also oppose debt because it is an instrument of exploitation and political domination. Debt is used to discipline us, deepen existing inequalities, and reinforce racial, gendered, and other social hierarchies. Every Strike Debt action is designed to weaken the institutions that seek to divide us and benefit from our division. As an alternative to this predatory system, Strike Debt advocates a just and sustainable economy, based on mutual aid, common goods, and public affluence.

Strike Debt is committed to the principles and tactics of political autonomy, direct democracy, direct action, creative openness, a culture of solidarity, and commitment to anti-oppressive language and conduct. We struggle for a world without racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression.

Strike Debt holds that we are all debtors, whether or not we have personal loan agreements. Through the manipulation of sovereign and municipal debt, the costs of speculator-driven crises are passed on to all of us. Though different kinds of debt can affect the same household, they are all interconnected, and so all household debtors have a common interest in resisting.

Strike Debt engages in public education about the debt-system to counteract the self-serving myth that finance is too complicated for laypersons to understand. In particular, it urges direct action as a way of stopping the damage caused by the creditor class and their enablers among elected government officials. Direct action empowers those who participate in challenging the debt-system.

Strike Debt holds that we owe the financial institutions nothing, whereas, to our friends, families and communities, we owe everything. In pursuing a long-term strategy for national organizing around this principle, we pledge international solidarity with the growing global movement against debt and austerity.