Astra Taylor, Brian Kalkbrenner, David Graeber, Mike Konczal, Sarah Jaffe
N+1 Magazine | Original Article
A panel discussion held at the Occupy! Gazette‘s Occupy Onward Conference, December 18, 2011, at the New School for Social Research, New York City. Transcript from Occupy! Gazette Issue 4.
David Graeber, Debt, The First 5,000 Years
Mike Konczal, The Roosevelt Institute
Brian Kalkbrenner, Occupy Student Debt
Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet
Moderator: Astra Taylor, Occupy! Gazette
Transcribed by Elisabeth AsherAstra Taylor: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our hastily arranged conference. It’s really nice to see you all here.
So, debt. It’s nice to talk about this subject here at the New School, the institution responsible for my debt, the institution I have begrudged for the last decade, every month when I pay $400 in interest.
One of my favorite moments of Occupy Wall Street was the second or third night. I walked up to Zuccotti Park–it was early on, I was shocked that there were so many people there—I’m sort of walking along the corner of Broadway and Liberty, and there’s this guy, he’s playing a carnival barker, and he says, “Step right up! Write down what you owe to the bank; write down what you’re worth to the 1 percent!” He had these huge sheets of paper, and he had probably, you know, two dozen markers, and people were writing down what they owed and what type of debt. I actually walked by and went into the park and had this weird hesitation about putting that number down—because I would have to think about it. I would have to think about how much money I owed. But, as we were leaving, I went and I took the marker and I wrote it down, and it was $42,000. I felt sick to my stomach. Behind me, a girl who couldn’t have been more than 22 or 23 years old writes down $120,000 of student debt. And I thought, this is a radical moment, because we are articulating this number out loud, and we are putting it in a political context, and this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. I’ve known that something was wrong with this, people haven’t been really discussing this issue, something’s happening. More…
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