Strike Debt emerged while the Society was occupying the Berlin Biennale. It was a collation of Occupy Student Debt, Occupy Theory and other OWS working groups. Strike Debt organized protests, teach ins and published the Debt Resisters Operation Manual, which is available free online. Numerous chapters of Strike Debt sprang up across the U.S. creating an informal, autonomous network of debt resisters.
The Rolling Jubilee was developed in Strike Debt and went on to raise $701,317 used to abolish $31,982,455.76 of medical debt. We realized that Rolling Jubilee was a strategy to draw attention to the billions of dollars of medical, not the answer to solving the problem. And we chose medical debt because of the guilt and shame that society places on debtors. Before the Affordable Care Act, which the Society affectionally refers to as Obamacare, people could not afford health insurance and those working who had health insurance were dropped by insurance companies leading to bankruptcy. The Debt Collective emerged from the Rolling Jubilee.
The Society represented Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee at two conferences:
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•Public Banking Institute, Oakland Bay Area, CA 2012. Link to Guns & Butter, Berkley Public Radio broadcast of presentation with fotos of from OWS protest from our first anniversary action.
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•Observatory for Debt & Globalization, Barcelona, Spain 2015
