RULE of the POOR

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DEMOCRACY, by DEFINITION
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/18/opinion/old-age-president-2020.html
https://newrepublic.com/reclaiming-future-growing-appeal-socialism-age-inequality
https://lithub.com/can-democracy-survive-contemporary-capitalism/
Can Democracy Survive Contemporary Capitalism?
by Astra Taylor / June 5, 2019

“What is democracy? Since this deceptively simple question first came into my mind, I haven’t been able to shake it. We think we understand the word, but what are we really referring to when we talk about a system in which the people rule themselves? The word democracy is all around us, invoked in almost every conceivable context: government, business, technology, education, and media. At the same time, its meaning, taken as self-evident, is rarely given much serious consideration. Though the headlines tell us democracy is in “crisis,” we don’t have a clear conception of what it is that is at risk. The significance of the democratic ideal, as well as its practical substance, is surprisingly elusive.

https://twitter.com/astradisastra/status/1185922664092913666

For most of my life, the word democracy didn’t hold much appeal. I was of course never against democracy per se, but words such as justice, equality, freedom, solidarity, socialism, and revolution resonated more deeply. Democracy struck me as mealy-mouthed, even debased. That idealistic anarchists and authoritarian leaders are equally inclined to claim “democracy” as their own only demonstrated its lack of depth. North Korea does, after all, call itself a “Democratic People’s Republic,” and Iraq was invaded by the U.S. Army in the name of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But today I no longer see the opportunistic use of the word as a sign of the idea’s vapidity. Those powers co-opt the concept of democracy because they realize that it represents a profound threat to the established order, a threat they desperately hope to contain.

After making a documentary film, What Is Democracy?, I now understand the concept’s disorienting vagueness and protean character as a source of strength; I have come to accept, and even appreciate, that there is no single definition I can stand behind that feels unconditionally conclusive. Though the practice has extensive global roots, the word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a seemingly simple idea: the people (demos) rule or hold power (kratos). Democracy is the promise of the people ruling, but a promise that can never be wholly fulfilled because its implications and scope keep changing. Over centuries our conceptions of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they do so remain eternally up for debate. Democracy destabilizes its own legitimacy and purpose by design, subjecting its core components to continual examination and scrutiny.

Perfect democracy, I’ve come to believe, may not in fact exist and never will, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make progress toward it, or that what there is of it can’t disappear. For this reason, I am more convinced than ever that the questions of what democracy is—and, more important, what it could be—are ones we must perpetually ask. Right now, many who question democracy do so out of disillusionment, fear, and outrage. Democracy may not exist, yet it still manages to disappoint. Political gridlock, corruption, unaccountable representatives, and the lack of meaningful alternatives incense people across the ideological spectrum; their anger simmers at dehumanizing bureaucracy, blatant hypocrisy, and lack of voice. Leaders are not accountable and voters rightly feel their choices are limited, all while the rich keep getting richer and regular people scramble to survive.

In advanced democracies around the world, a growing number of people aren’t even bothering to vote—a right many people fought and died for fairly recently. Most Americans will say that they live in a democracy, but few will say that they trust the government, while the state generally inspires negative reactions, ranging from frustration to contempt and suspicion. The situation calls to mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s observation from The Social Contract: “In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies; under a bad government no one cares to stir a step to get to them. . . . As soon as any man says of the State What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost.”

A cauldron of causes generates an atmosphere of corrosive cynicism, social fragmentation, and unease, with blame too often directed downward at the most vulnerable populations. And it’s not just in the United States. Consider the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union, the decision known as Brexit; the resurgence of right-wing populism across Europe; coups and reactionary electoral victories in Brazil; and the rise of fascism in India. Plato’s warning about democracy devolving into tyranny rings chillingly prophetic. The promise of self-rule risks becoming not a promise but a curse, a self-destructive motor pushing toward destinations more volatile, divided, despotic, and mean.

Taking a more theoretical approach to democracy’s winding, thorny path and inherently paradoxical nature can also provide solace and reassurance. Ruling ourselves has never been straightforward and never will be. Ever vexing and unpredictable, democracy is a process that involves endless reassessment and renewal, not an endpoint we reach before taking a rest (leaving us with a finished system to tweak at the margins). We cannot rethink democracy if we haven’t really thought about it in the first place.

One thing I’ve learned is that the people who are most averse to deepening democracy know exactly why they despise it (Plato, who helped invent political philosophy by railing against democracy, arguably began the trend). A political science major told me that she doesn’t value democracy much. “The phrase that inspires me,” she said, “is the American dream and that ability to climb.” Opportunity mattered to her and her friends more than inclusion. I expected them to see democracy and capitalism as mutually reinforcing; instead, they perceived the two to be at odds in key respects: democratic demands, whether for progressive taxation or for liberal immigration policies, would diminish their social and economic distinction.

“In capitalism, there are going to be people at the bottom,” one young man enthused, confident of his place at the top and cognizant that his position was antidemocratic. Members of a privileged economic minority, these students recognized that impediments to popular sovereignty (such as the Electoral College, which handed two of the last five presidential elections to a candidate who had lost the popular vote) were necessary for the continued dominance of their class. (James Madison had as much in mind when he promoted the idea that the Senate should protect the “invaluable interests” of “opulent” landlords against expropriation by the more numerous masses.)

https://twitter.com/zeithistoriker/status/1193876010619604999

As much as I disagree with the students’ beliefs, this right-wing position is at least the consequence of sincere, if self-centered, consideration. In contrast, many people who say they value democracy have a remarkably difficult time defending the principle in a meaningful or substantive way. Platitudes routinely eclipse more profound or personal reflection: democracy amounts to “free and fair” elections, “the peaceful transfer of power,” or “freedom,” pure and simple. During the process of making my film, no one I met on the street suggested that democracy was a continuous process of egalitarian inclusion and power sharing made possible by tireless agitators, even though that’s a legitimate if long-winded way to define it. Nor did anyone respond with the classical description, that democracy is the rule of the people. (Though I did come across a number of men who, once they realized how little they actually had to say on the subject, told me, authoritatively, that thanks to the genius of the founding fathers America is not actually a democracy but a republic, as if that were enough to cease any further inquiry.)

We could conclude that people who struggle to speak about such an essential component of modern life are just ignorant or perhaps too distracted to be engaged, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. The problem stems, I believe, from that fact that democracy is something people rarely encounter in their everyday lives: certainly not during the media- and celebrity-obsessed, money-driven circus of national elections; nor at their jobs, where they are often treated like replaceable cogs in a machine and have to keep their heads down; nor at their schools or colleges, where they are encouraged to see themselves as consumers seeking a return on investment rather than as citizens preparing to participate in the common good. For all our lauded freedoms, democracy isn’t something we actually experience all that much. No wonder, then, that people can barely describe it.

Typically, democracy is considered to consist of one person, one vote, exercised in periodic elections; constitutional rights; and a market economy. On paper at least, there is no shortage of states that conform to this rather limited conception—by some estimates, 81 countries moved from authoritarianism to democracy between 1980 and 2002. Yet recent studies reveal that democracy, defined by the preceding attributes, has weakened worldwide over the last decade or so. According to one well-respected annual report, 71 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2017, leading to an overall decrease in global freedom. In early 2018, the Economist warned, “Democracy Continues Its Disturbing Retreat”—this not long after the magazine’s yearly Democracy Index officially downgraded the United States from a “full democracy” to a “flawed” one.

Yet democracy doesn’t retreat either of its own accord or by some organic, immutable process. It is eroded, undermined, attacked, or allowed to wither. It falls into disrepair and disrepute thanks to the actions or inaction of human beings who have lost touch with or, in some cases, sabotaged the responsibilities and possibilities that a system of self-government entails. While today it’s common to blame extremists for jeopardizing democracy, studies show that across Europe and the United States it is middle-of-the-road centrists who tend to hold the most hostile attitudes toward democratic practices, preferring strong and effective centralized decision making to messier, more inclusive processes. Less than half of Americans who identify with the political center view elections as “an essential feature of democracy” and only half of them, or 25 percent of centrists, agree that civil rights are crucial. Apathy, or even antipathy, toward self-government and the difficult daily work it requires is one of the stones that help pave the way to a more authoritarian society. That apathy is helped by the fact that the American system was never designed to be democratic to begin with.

As with many other liberalizing nations of the late 18th century, the republic did not consider the majority of its residents to be members of the polity. Enslaved and indigenous people, all women, poor white men, certain immigrants, and some religious groups were denied rights, including the most basic right of citizenship, the right to cast a ballot. These founding inequities, only fitfully and incompletely redressed, continue to shape our present. As numerous academic studies show, the national agenda is set by plutocrats and well-represented interests, while the preferences of the broad population have virtually no impact on public policy. The inequalities that plague us today are not an aberration nor the result of whichever party happens to be in power, but a plausible result of the political system’s very design, which in crucial ways was devised by a restricted and privileged class of men.

https://twitter.com/turk1shlenin/status/1185610878701522946

In the fifth century BCE, the celebrated statesman Pericles famously praised the political structure of Athens: “It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few.” Given the existence of slavery and the exclusion of women, Athens failed to meet the bar by modern standards. Yet as Plato and Aristotle noted, the overwhelming majority of people who made up the Athenian demos were not wealthy. Rule of the people, they observed, by definition means rule of the poor, since citizens of modest means are bound to vastly outnumber the rich.

This basic insight has been negated in our time as neoliberal capitalism and the massive financial inequities it creates dismantle hard-won democratic gains. Under a legal order where money qualifies as speech in the context of campaign spending and lobbying, the richest are able to purchase influence while everyone else struggles to be heard; in a system where the affluent can pass their assets to their offspring virtually untaxed, inherited wealth ensures the creation of an aristocratic class.

If the last 50 years has demonstrated anything, it is that formal political equality, exemplified by the right to vote, is not enough to ensure democracy, as the wealthy have many avenues to exert disproportionate power. While earlier generations focused on expanding suffrage, today we face an arguably more formidable task: saving democracy from capitalism. Extending democracy from the political to the economic sphere is the great challenge of our age, and also the only way to protect political equality from the concentrated financial power that is proving to be its undoing.

A mere eight men—six of them American—hold the same amount of wealth as half the people on earth, their private fortunes built on mass penury. The United States, perhaps unsurprisingly, is more an oligarchy than a democracy. Year upon year, the vast majority of the income generated globally flows into the pockets of the top 1 percent of the world’s population, while the incomes of ordinary citizens have stagnated over the last four decades. Whereas an American born in the 1940s had a 92 percent chance of outearning their parents by age 30, for those born in the 1980s, that likelihood has fallen to 50 percent; in some places in the Midwest, the odds are worse. A recent Federal Reserve survey revealed that almost half of Americans are too broke to cover a 400-dollar emergency expense, and they would have to sell possessions or borrow money to do so.

Even more shocking, given the veneration of the achievements of the civil rights movement, is that there has been no progress for black Americans with regard to unemployment, homeownership, and incarceration since the push for racial equality reached its peak 50 years ago. As the Economic Policy Institute reports, “In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate. In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate, which saw modest gains over the same period. And the share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.” The financial crisis of 2008, which wiped out half the wealth of black households, contributed to this grim state of affairs. Yet, today, one of the few bipartisan issues uniting Democrats and Republicans in Washington involves repealing the meager Wall Street reforms passed following the crash. There may be elections and some safeguards of civil liberties, and we should be grateful for this, but the state is hardly run by or for the people it purports to serve.

The forces of oligarchy have been enabled, in part, by our tendency to accept a highly proscribed notion of democracy, one that limits popular power to the field of electoral politics, ignoring the other institutions and structures (workplaces, prisons, schools, hospitals, the environment, and the economy itself) that shape people’s lives. This is a mistake. To be substantive and strong, democracy cannot be something that happens only in capitol buildings; self-rule has to be far more widespread. If we believe that democracy should serve all of society, how can we call ourselves democratic when workers juggle multiple jobs as record-breaking profits flow to owners and investors?

When millions of people, disproportionately poor and people of color, are locked behind bars? When access to learning and lifesaving treatments are denied to those who can’t pay? When the planet may be rendered uninhabitable so that a small number of companies can maximize revenues from fossil fuels? When the global 1 percent are on track to control two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030? We can view these issues as distinct and unrelated, or we can understand them as fundamentally interconnected, as joint symptoms of the fact that those with money, not “the many,” rule.”

PEOPLE’s RULE
https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/527/an-imperfect-unionhttp://cleojournal.com/2019/08/23/what-ails-democracy-an-interview-with-astra-taylor/
https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/bookforum-talks-with-astra-taylor-21974
Bookforum talks with Astra Taylor
by Natasha Lennard  /  May 20, 2019

“As with your recent film, the central question of your book is “What is democracy?” What are the risks of failing to ask that question?

AT: The big risk is that we will think democracy describes something we have, or rather had, and that we only need to turn back to the clock to 2015 or so for everything to be good and democratic again. That’s not my view. The historian Richard Hofstadter described an intellectual as someone who can turn anything into a question, which I always liked. On the one hand, What is democracy? is an almost embarrassingly simple query, but it’s also an incredibly important and surprisingly rich one. “Democracy” is this word we hear all the time, but rarely pause to reflect on.

Democracy is also not something people actual do that much of in their day to day lives—not at their jobs or in their schools, for example. There’s a moment in the movie where I tell the political theorist Wendy Brown that I wrestled with whether or not to make democracy the theme of the film, and that was a genuine dilemma for me. Perhaps because I came of age when George W. Bush and company were “bringing democracy” to Iraq and Afghanistan, I always felt the word rang pretty hollow. But after making this film and writing the book, I see the word’s vagueness and protean character as a source of strength. Democracy is the deceptively simple promise that the people (demos) rule or hold power (kratia)—deceptively simple because it actually requires a complex set of supports to enact.

Of course, who counts as “the people” and how they rule is always up for debate and reconsideration. Democracy is a risky proposition—by definition it undermines its own legitimacy. Plato’s famously anti-democratic musings were, for example, made possible by democracy, which invites people to reflect on what system of government is best and to criticize the system they’ve got or even reject it outright. But it’s also a powerful and hopeful proposition, because it means that who the people are and how they rule can always be expanded and reimagined. For example, not that long ago, as women, you and I wouldn’t have been part of the demos, right?

Ancient Athens didn’t invent the practice of democracy, only the word. And the Athenian community certainly had its major democratic failings—the exclusion of women, the enslaved, foreigners and let’s not forget the brutal facts of imperialism! But it’s worth emphasizing one thing on which Athenians were very clear and that Plato and Aristotle both highlighted: democracy means rule of the poor, because the poor are always bound to outnumber the rich. In his book Democracy: A Life historian Paul Cartledge compares the Athenian system to a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” cribbing from Marxist terminology to describe a system of working class control. And the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, whom I really admire, did fascinating work on this topic, specifically on how the participation of the peasantry was promoted through various mechanisms from sortition (the random selection of political officials) to offering payments for attending the Assembly. This economically egalitarian component of ancient democracy often gets overlooked, but it’s arguably the most significant component given our problems today.

You organize the book’s chapters to each address a core tension, indeed a seeming contradiction, that animates democratic ideals and practices. For example, “Freedom/Equality,” “Conflict/Consensus,” “Expertise/Mass Opinion.” You cite Cornel West, who called democracy a “leap of faith” which requires “living in the tension.” Why did you feel democracy was best interrogated through its paradoxes?

AT: I like paradoxes, I always have. It was a framework that was there from the beginning, at least for the book. Even the title—Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone—tries to express a duality I often inhabit: sometimes I feel like our society is so messed up that we just need to burn it all down and start anew while I also recognize the fact that there have been remarkable social reforms that I shouldn’t take for granted or be glib about and need to help protect. While there has never been a true democracy there has been democratic progress—and that progress can be reversed.

But as I write in the book’s introduction, I am focused on a very specific kind of paradox, namely the ones I think are intrinsic to self-rule and that will not go away, even as we continue to make democratic progress. For example, I do not see the divide between the rich and poor, owners and laborers, as an intractable and eternal fact of human life (even if some rich people insist that’s the case). I can imagine a world where wealth is equitably distributed. But I cannot imagine a democracy where we don’t have to wrestle with the question of how to balance the needs of people living now with those yet to be born or the local scale with the global one.

Your film closes with socialist-feminist theorist Silvia Federici saying that democracy is worth fighting for, but that “we must define it never from above, always from below.” In the book, you expand on the difficulties therein, such as fighting the systems which sabotage public education, knowledge and understanding, which a “democracy from below” would require. The disenfranchising prison system comes immediately to mind, as does the privatization of schooling. Would democracy as defined “from below” require the dismantling, indeed the abolition, of many of the systems that liberal democracy has long maintained?

AT: Yes, I think a whole lot of dismantling and abolition will be required if democracy is to be on our horizon. But that’s not just destructive or nihilistic work—it requires tearing down and building up. This brings us W. E. B. Du Bois and his concept of abolition, which Angela Davis briefly mentions in the film. Du Bois understood “abolition-democracy” as the road not taken out of Reconstruction. It would have been both a dismantling of the structures of white supremacy and the creation of new inclusive, egalitarian, and socialistic institutions that were—that I would say still are—required to make the promise of emancipation real. Democracy isn’t just spontaneous, it needs structures and supports to facilitate democratic outcomes and nurture democratic sensibilities. But then the challenge is how we put those structures and supports in place when people don’t seem to be democratically inclined, or are even hostile to democracy. That is the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s famous paradox: how do you get democracy out of an undemocratic people? Centuries later, it remains a valid question.

You note that capitalism and the resulting individualism of a market driven society “taken to its extreme, erodes the very idea of the people.” Historic experiments in democracy were clear about the incompatibility of combining a wealthy ruling class with a people’s rule. Plato (an elitist) was explicit about this. Which brings us to the central question of contemporary democracy: do you think true democracy is possible under capitalism?

AT: This takes us back to the point about democracy being, by definition, rule of the poor—not the oligarchic rule of the rich we have today. But just like we can ask, “Which democracy?” we can also ask, “Which capitalism?” I think there was a period in the twentieth century when democratizing processes benefited from market expansion and stability, and that’s no longer the case in the same way—we’re in a different moment with a different balance of powers. Today, capitalism is the biggest threat to democracy. Capitalism, with its tendency to concentrate wealth, subverts the political equality democracy depends on. But that’s obvious. The hard thing is figuring out what to do to tame or transcend and incredibly powerful, adaptable, merciless, and global economic system.

 

I try to get at this challenge in the film. I visit Siena, Italy, as a way of visualizing the origins of financial capitalism. There, Silvia Federici and I view and discuss a series of frescoes called The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338-9. The paintings were commissioned by the merchants and bankers who ruled the city, which is the home of the oldest bank still in existence, the Bank of Siena, founded in 1472. Fourteenth-century Siena was no egalitarian democracy, but the power of the ruling merchants was localized and visible, present in the form of the towering homes of the wealthy who lived next door to the poor rabble. Federici points out that today we face a different problem when confronting power and wealth: it operates through opaque international systems that are difficult to regulate or trace; it’s hard to fight something you can’t easily see or reach. We definitely have our work cut out for us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paZpxu5KKvM

Your chapter addressing the issue of “inclusion” and “exclusion” brings up one of the most thorny questions about democracy. You reference a discussion with political theorist Wendy Brown, who states that that democracies must be bounded in the sense that if “we” are to rule as the people, we must have a constitutive sense of who and what that “we” will be. She rejects, however, that this “we” must be constituted by the brutal demarcations of nationality, race, gender or class. She suggests that we must re-constitute a sense of the localized demos. What are your thoughts on this?

AT: I’m of multiple minds here. And of course Brown’s thinking is more complex and nuanced than I can convey—I highly recommend her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, which was published in 2010 but is very prescient. Brown’s comments play a key role in the film and the book because they are really provocative and I believe she has a point: a demos that claims to be universal and include everyone risks being both incoherent and imperial. So somehow we need to be internationalists while also recognizing that communities should have a say over their destinies—it’s a paradox, but one we can’t just wish away. We also have to remember that not everyone always wants to be included in the demos. Historically, anti-colonial struggles and many indigenous communities have fought, and continue to fight, to be separate and distinct, to maintain their sovereignty and resist what they see as predatory, assimilationist forms of inclusion.

Another thing I take away from Brown’s comment is that we have to create more egalitarian conditions where exclusions don’t do as much damage, and boundaries are permeable. Around the time of the French Revolution the Marquis de Condorcet called for the abolition of inequality between nations, saying, “Equality between the nations and equality within a single nation are mutually dependent,” and I think that’s right. Now whether we need to have nations is another question! Finally, Brown raises a concluding point, and it’s a strategic one. In order to create such conditions—in order to dismantle anti-democratic global capitalist structures and replace them with something else—we have to work from the bottom up. As citizens, as individual human beings, there’s no other way. Most of us don’t have the power to work from the top down.

https://twitter.com/hannahmpatchett/status/1187463463020331010

I think the problem of identity is sort of implicit here. Identities, national or otherwise, are tricky beasts—they bind and divide. Yet even if we want to emphasize broad identities—like class, for example—we still have to struggle to determine who, specifically makes what decisions, when, how, and where. Not everyone can or should be involved in everything. People need to belong, but history shows that belonging can have a dark side. Somehow we have to foster identities don’t negate more encompassing, cosmopolitan forms of solidarity. This is part of the reason why, in the film, I cut from the conversation with Brown to a scene where a young man, Hasan Hmaydan, is on his way to volunteer with refugees who have arrived at Piraeus Port (which happens to be the port where Plato set the Republic, so the film comes full circle). Hasan explains how he is both Syrian and Greek. He’s doing the work of democracy at the grass roots, but he also embodies the fact borders are not and never will be absolute and that we all have multiple identities and that there is actually no contradiction in that fact at all.

https://twitter.com/Ali_Kourani/status/1187435515982819329

When we talk about inclusion, as you note, we tend to speak in terms of identity and diversity but all too often fail to talk about class. Can explain what you mean when you say “class exposes inclusions’ limits”?

AT: In a nutshell, I’d say that I don’t want poor people to be included (whatever that means), I want them to not be poor anymore! In a world as rich as ours, poverty should not exist (and neither should billionaires). I recently interviewed my friend Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, for an article, and she said it well: “People today think the problem is access. They think that we need to remedy exclusions with inclusions. What gets missed is the nature of the institutions people are being integrated into.” Are we including people into a pyramid shaped society, and trying to make the tippy-top slightly more diverse, or are we fighting for inclusion with the aim of leveling the pyramid so no individual’s success is contingent on another’s suffering and immiseration?

One of my favorite details in the book is about how pirates offered a model for managing the problem of conflict and consensus in a democracy. Tell us about the pirates.

AT: That part was really an excuse to pay tribute to two of my favorite historians, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, who have written about pirates at length in various books. Pirates, as we all know from childhood, were the ultimate rebel outsiders. Ship crews were often incredibly diverse in terms of nationality and race and ran as veritable workplace democracies, even offering some of the earliest examples of health and unemployment insurance on record. They were also intensely egalitarian, with crews voting on all kinds of matters and income relatively equalized.

It was only during the heat of battle that the captain was actually allowed to boss people around. The rest of the time he was just an ordinary shipmate who could be deposed at any moment. What I admire is that they adapted their process as conditions demanded. When things were calm, they deliberated at great length, making sure all voices were heard—when they were at risk of dying, they chose one person to be decisive and everyone got in line. I’ve been in so many activist groups that can’t get the balance right, and that crash and sink on the rocky shoals of badly run meetings, so maybe I just take heart that pirates pulled it off and stayed afloat.”

PREVIOUSLY

FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS
https://spectrevision.net/2019/04/03/forgive-them-their-debts/
SIGNALING DISTRESS
https://spectrevision.net/2018/12/25/signaling-distress/
DEBT FORGIVENESS
https://spectrevision.net/2017/10/06/debt-forgiveness/

DEBT NULLIFICATION
https://spectrevision.net/2015/08/21/debt-nullification/
ELITE PANIC
https://spectrevision.net/2013/05/03/elite-panic/
MASS DEBT CANCELLATION
https://spectrevision.net/2013/04/12/mass-debt-cancellation/

WE OWE YOU NOTHING
https://spectrevision.net/2012/09/14/we-owe-you-nothing/
ODIOUS DEBT
https://spectrevision.net/2011/07/24/odious-debt/
TODAY’S PIRATE
https://spectrevision.net/2009/12/11/todays-pirate/

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