Emissions trading was elevated as the international policymaking community’s preferred mitigation solution by the passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a multilateral agreement ratified by 156 sovereign states and infamously ignored by the United States, then the world’s largest emitter.^[2] Seeking to accommodate corporate firms’ capital accumulation strategies, emissions trading policies issue commoditized credits to pollute (one credit allowing one legal ton of CO₂ emissions) capped on a nation-by-nation basis toward the overall goal of reducing emissions through decentralized redistribution of credits among actors with different propensities to pollute. While proponents perceive the market as a neutral means for resolving the tension between climate change’s global reach and the divisive state of global politics, further investigation reveals this supposed neutrality to be a sham.

Dodging Historical Responsibility

As a complex phenomenon with an inexorable historical context, one might expect solutions to global warming to deal with history frankly. Cap-and-trade approaches, however, do exactly the opposite. The Kyoto Protocol’s allotment of credits on a historical basis is most gracious toward those countries with the most significant historical responsibility for emissions, the United States and the countries of the European Union, which in 2007 accounted for more than half of the world’s cumulative CO₂ emissions with less than a sixth of its population.^[3]The prevalent system of “grandfathering,” where countries allocate the largest portions of their credit quotas to their most polluting industries, similarly reinforces embedded inequality but on the scale of individual domestic economies.^[4] Nations and industries with the greatest historical responsibility for emissions are, with emissions credits, perversely given the most freedom to continue polluting.

An institutionalized moral hazard framework for allocating carbon credits cannot change long-standing behaviors responsible for creating the climate crisis in the first place.

The Market Cannot Fix The Planet

Despite the fact that the Kyoto Protocol’s recourse to the market evades historical justice, proponents of carbon trading schemes are slow to realize the deeper, structural problems with the cap-and-trade approach. From the perspective of the biosphere it is expansion of the traditional economy itself that is the problem. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark note, “in a properly functioning capitalist economy savings are redirected into investment or new capital formation designed to expand the scale of the entire economy… it is such expansion that is the chief enemy of the environment.”^[5]

In other words, as firms save money (for example, by switching to greener technology that lowers fixed costs like electricity bills), they redirect that money into expanding the scale of their operations in order to make even more profit. Environmentalist Wes Jackson sums the point up sharply: “When the Wal-Marts of the world say they’re going to put in different lightbulbs… what are they going to do with savings? They’re going to open up another box store somewhere. It’s just nuts.”^[6] An economy based on carbon-intensive, production-based growth cannot cleanly transition away from this reliance by replicating its profit-maximizing market-based approach in carbon trading. Instead of addressing the core of the problem cap-and-trade schemes expand it.

Cap-And-Trade Is The New Bubble Economy

Industrial capitalism is not the only capitalism at play in cap-and-trade. In today’s heavily finance-based market systems, risky trading schemes analogous to those responsible for the global recession and subprime mortgage crisis are beginning to appear in carbon trading markets as well.^[7] Understanding how carbon credits are calculated is necessary to understanding how these markets evolved.

In theory cap-and-trade enables markets to efficiently allocate plots of land to their most economically productive uses, while building in the risk associated with greenhouse gas pollution. For example, a polluting firm might purchase a carbon credit to offset its emissions, and the credit may represent a tract of land in the Amazon to be kept clear of development in order to act as a carbon sink.

In order for these calculations to take place cap-and-trade first requires establishing baselines. The baseline process is essentially arbitrary. Setting a baseline requires measuring the projected change in emissions a climate-friendly project might accrue against the amount of emissions happening would the project not be implemented. While at first glance this process seems logical, the blind spots are significant. Since greenhouse gasses are a function of human activity, the baseline requires deciding on quantity and quality of human activity over time. Furthermore, since accurate measurements of carbon sequestration — a natural process for trees, akin to breathing — are difficult to produce, it is easy to be seduced by the market incentive to overvalue the amount of sequestration taking place. Since valuation schemes are not rigorously regulated, traders are free to manipulate conditions as they see fit, allowing polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gasses while doing little to abate global warming overall.^[8]

The picture gets more complicated with the introduction of the negative futures contract, where sellers of credits promise not to emit. In exchange for no effective change in behavior, a firm is able to offset its carbon emission on paper while not performing or causing any real offsets ecologically.

Like the relationship between collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and home mortgages, emissions credit prices are not aligned with any real underlying asset such as the health of the environment. Instead their prices are determined by market demand. Since the debt obligations are bundled in tranches to offset risk and regulatory oversight is absent, no real assets guarantee the debt. As both a trade in debt and a negative futures contract, the buyer-seller relationship of emissions trading is cemented by the seller’s appearance of not having emitted a set amount of carbon, which is then borrowed by the buyer to emit the same amount. In a vein similar to the collateralized debt obligation market preceding the 2008 financial crisis, this sweet but unsustainable arrangement foreshadows a massive risk of default, namely that the parameter of the emissions trading game, the health of the atmosphere, is not improving but instead deteriorating at a rapid pace. Emissions credits, while meant to insure buyers against overall rises in emissions, thus aggravate the destruction of the environment.

The cap-and-trade market is not a solution to the greenhouse gas problem. In fact, it is a Trojan horse, a magnification of the problem masquerading as a solution. Not only does it ignore the historical responsibility of the United States and Europe in creating the climate scenario we are now embroiled in, it also actively rewards and incentivizes increased pollution with risky trading structures that proved their volatility in the subprime mortgage crisis. Effective environmental solutions will need to look elsewhere.

Yet widespread anti-U.S. anger continues to surprise Americans.^[7] Election after election, the American voter is led to believe that U.S. militarism is a force for global good, benefiting foreigners as well as Americans. We are fed this message by politicians captured by a defense industry that annually boasts record-breaking profits and unprecedented sums spent on political lobbying.^[8] Both parties package military spending in the language of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The glaring logical inconsistency should be read at its face. U.S. military spending directly benefits only military contractors and the politicians whose reelection campaigns they fund. At home and abroad, the U.S.’s unrivaled militarism cripples entire societies. Recognizing this contradiction requires moving beyond domestic party politics and the mainstream media locked firmly in its shadow.

War, on the Ground

To wage war in modern times is to accept the premise that the men, women, and children of another country have intrinsically less valuable lives than those of our own. But this idea is too repellent to be sold directly. Today, the prevailing rhetoric underpinning American militarism is “counterterrorism.” Protecting our own, we are told, requires killing others. Thus, thousands of ordinary foreign citizens continue to be slaughtered and starved to benefit American military and economic interests. This logic of counterterrorism is as malignant as terrorism itself. More dangerously, it directly exacerbates the problem it purports to solve.

To recall a recent example we might consider the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq, universally condemned by international lawyers and human rights experts^[9] as an illegal war of aggression^[10] motivated primarily by geostrategic interests but cloaked in the standard language of freedom, security, and democracy. Historically, the U.S. happily funded Saddam Hussein’s genocide and chemical warfare in Kurdistan, in which he massacred thousands, and stopped only when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened oil-rich U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.^[11] Later we learned that in the course of the 2003 war buildup the White House knowingly lied about Iraqi WMDs, forging official documents to wage war under false pretenses.^[12],[13]

In the years since the invasion of Iraq over 120,000 civilians have died. These are the officially disclosed deaths, but further analysis of the Wikileaks “Iraq War Logs” may bump the figure past 132,000.^[14] Using only the conservative estimate, quick math shows that since March 19, 2003, an average of 33 civilians have died daily in occupied Iraq. All the while, America’s longest war (remember Afghanistan?) continues escalating, with civilian death tolls accelerating amid plummeting general health outcomes.^[15] Yet recent reports suggest the Afghan War may stretch well past the advertised withdrawal date of 2014: maybe 2017,^[16] maybe even 2024.^[17]

How should members of any society react to such catastrophic destruction experienced firsthand everyday for a decade? “Counterterrorism” as executed can never succeed in combating terrorism, but it has already provoked global hatred of America, perpetuating a state of permanent war propelled by select defense contractors.

Expanding our focus beyond the official war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan makes this picture clearer.

A Portrait of Global Empire

The U.S. military has undergone such stunning growth in the past fifty years that an accurate count of the number of U.S. bases globally is unavailable. Most credible estimates place the figure between 1,000 and 1,200.^[18] Overall U.S. military expenditures are similarly outsized, accounting for 46% of the world’s total military spending.^[19] In terms of GDP-proportional military allocations the U.S. is in illuminating company. At 4.06% (considering only basic Pentagon spending, a very narrow scope) we occupy a similar range as Angola, Syria, Chad, Oman, and Turkmenistan, edged out only by Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and North Korea.^[20] Just last year the U.S. tripled its global arms sales, cornering roughly 78% of the world market, followed next by Russia with a paltry 5.6%.^[21]

As disturbing as the readily available facts are, the war machine extends far deeper than these initial figures suggest. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) forces now conduct an average of seventy covert missions each day in 60% of the world’s countries, doubling their Bush-era presence in sixty countries to an undisclosed list of 120 or more under Obama.^[22] Established in 1987, SOCOM carries out the U.S. military’s most secret missions. In recent years it has snowballed into a full-fledged shadow paramilitary, described by outgoing SOCOM chief Eric Olson as “a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies.”^[23] Since 9/11, the SOCOM budget has quadrupled to $9.8 billion, and its number of personnel deployed abroad has also increased fourfold.^[24] While almost entirely opaque, SOCOM is highly sophisticated. “Black ops” troops conduct kill/capture campaigns across the Greater Middle East, while so-called “white” forces regularly conduct secret joint-training exercises with client militaries worldwide.

Especially disconcerting among the SOCOM spectrum are the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a clandestine sub-command tasked mainly with the tracking and killing of suspected terror suspects.^[25] Reporting directly to the President, JSOC effectively functions as the President’s private global army, maintaining an extrajudicial hit list that includes American citizens.^[26] John Nagl, a counterinsurgency advisor to ex-CIA director David Petraeus, has called it “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine,” completely outside of any democratic accountability.^[27]

Constant War, Everywhere

It is difficult to overstate the scope of the American military. What analysts have described as the U.S.’s “new ‘Scramble for Africa’” again underlines its true global reach.^[28] The U.S. has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in military infrastructure this past year across Africa. An average of 5,000 U.S. military and Department of Defense personnel are now deployed at any one time, monitoring drone wars as far as Mali and Somalia, while ground troops conduct operations in Uganda and Ethiopia.^[29]

The pattern on display in Africa — significant military action in undeclared conflict zones, underreported and virtually unknown to the American public — illustrates the shadowy paradigm under which U.S. militarism largely functions. The message of protecting freedom does not begin to square with the reality of multiple secret wars violating foreign countries’ sovereignty across continents.

In Iran, the push for military action continues building despite an overwhelming lack of evidence justifying intervention. Iranian civilians continue to suffer under crippling sanctions^[30] intended to dissuade their government from pursuing a nuclear weapons program that most credible sources — including the U.S.’s own official National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)^[31] — agree does not exist. The sanctions on Iranian civil society flagrantly violate U.N. prohibitions on torture and collective punishment. In addition to targeting civilians economically, the U.S. continues to expand its military presence in the region^[32] despite a sea of bases in the Gulf that already encircle the country.^[33]

Troublingly, the buildup augments an ongoing covert war led by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad that has been underway for years. Like SOCOM, the CIA in recent years has become yet another paramilitary arm of the U.S. government, waging war under false or totally absent pretexts. U.S. officials have openly stated^[34] that the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK), a cult terrorist organization, has worked alongside Mossad operatives to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists in shootings, car bombings and poisonings.^[35] Earlier this year, revelations were made that JSOC secretly trained MEK operatives in Nevada as early as 2005, while they were still officially listed as a terrorist organization.^[36] A Foreign Policy report shows how Israeli agents, supplied with CIA intelligence, have coordinated a number of mosque bombings and deadly explosions at nuclear facilities.^[37] And since 2009, a joint U.S.-Israel cyber warfare campaign has seen at least three virulent worms damage nuclear centrifuges.^[38]

It should come as no surprise that the hypocritical funding of terrorists in the name of counter-terrorism breeds distrust and resentment globally. The logical connection is obscured, however, by a mainstream American press that effectively keeps these details secret. Why, they reason, would we want to report on policy developments so uncontroversial in Washington? Thinking along these lines, the mainstream media has itself become complicit in the U.S.’s growing militarization, offering no third voice of reason outside of the captured parties.

Extrajudicial assassinations such as those authorized by the CIA showcase the tragic consequences of this tripartite silence. Once, George W. Bush’s policy of indefinitely detaining terror suspects without charges at Guantanamo Bay was controversial. But since his Democratic successor cemented and superseded this practice a suffocating mainstream silence has prevailed.

Pakistan is an official U.S. ally in the war on terror. Nonetheless, U.S. drones have killed over 3,000 Pakistanis from 2004-2012, of whom 600-800 were civilians, including 176 children.^[39] A recent collaborative study by Stanford and NYU’s law schools documents the severe social toll of drone strikes, noting a “breakdown in the region’s basic social engagements.”^[40] Afraid of the ever-present threat of a drone strike, people avoid congregating in groups of three or four. Parents fear sending their children to school. Ancient social gathering places like the jurga, community dispute resolution councils, are now largely avoided. Journalists and medical doctors will not go to the scene of an attack for six hours afterward, fearing a secondary drone strike known as a “double tap,” a second missile designed to eliminate those assisting victims. The U.S. government has in the past derided such assaults as heinous terrorist acts despite itself repeatedly targeting civilian mourners at victims’ funerals.^[41] Even more troublesome under international human rights law is the growing use of  “signature strikes,” which are carried out on unknown targets based on “patterns of life,” though these criteria remain opaque.

For years, the Department of Justice has refused to formally justify drone killings while publicly insisting they reduce the threat of terrorism.^[42] Testimony from actual terrorists and basic social science data suggest the polar opposite.^[43] The study notes only 2 percent of those killed by drones have been identified as high-value targets, meaning 98 percent are either low-level insurgents or civilians. Unsurprisingly, drones are immensely unpopular among the Pakistani people, with 97% of informed Pakistanis opposed. In fact, the U.S. remains the sole country in the world where a majority of people favor drone use.^[44]

War Abroad, Decay at Home

At home, our President’s institutionalization of drone killings into a “kill list” and then a “disposition matrix”^[45] has cemented executive paramilitarization at historic heights. Constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald summarizes the situation succinctly: “If you believe the President should have the power to order people, including U.S. citizens, executed with no due process and not even any checks or transparency, what power do you believe he shouldn’t have?”^[46]

The candidate that ran on a “sunshine” transparency policy has classified more documents than any other prior administration, while using the WWI-era Espionage Act to persecute more government whistleblowers than all other previous administrations combined. Simultaneously, his own officials leak information perceived as politically advantageous, making the expansive New York Times hagiography of the President and his “kill list” possible.^[47]

While seemingly unlimited funds are pumped into the American war machine and interest-free Federal Reserve loans to prop up swollen banks, an austerity-rotten economy continues to eat away at ordinary Americans’ lives. For the first time in U.S. history, white Americans’ lifespans have actually shortened,^[48] and overall U.S. life expectancy has plummeted to 49th in the world.^[49] Child poverty rankings place the U.S. 31^st out of 34 OECD countries,^[50] while for the first time since the Great Depression children can expect to be poorer than their parents, on average by 12%.^[51] More Americans now toil through low-wage jobs than in any other developed society.^[52]

Yet Obama’s drastic expansion of global war evokes remarkably little mainstream controversy, emphasizing the need to escape the bipartisan framework. If we are to reclaim our captured country and the world that it is in turn attempting to capture, we must join the global mainstream. Identifying the giant economic forces driving U.S. militarism — defense contractors, energy multinationals — and highlighting the odious activities they make possible is the first step. The next step is to hold our elected representatives individually accountable for their complicity in these crimes, withholding our support for a system that has proven itself incapable of doing so.

Politicians on the campaign trail like to posture and paint themselves as “tough on terror,” working to “keep America safe.” Destruction of societies at home and abroad does not do either of these things. Let’s accomplish this the right way. We can keep our communities, schools, and collective futures safe by standing together firmly against American militarism.

Lead image courtesy U.S. military. U.S Soldiers detonate firebombs in an Iraqi palm grove, Dec. 22, 2008. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Walter Pels, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.

I write our first extended feature exploring the pressing domestic issue of ballooning student debt and tuition costs, framing it within the context of the increasingly corporatized American nonprofit university. The piece also highlights a few current nodes of resistance.

Jonathan Lyle focuses this broader analysis on North Carolina’s public university students, currently mounting a vibrant campaign against the rising tide of austerity budgeting. An organizer himself with the North Carolina Student Power Union (NCSPU), Jonathan offers an insider’s viewpoint on the pitched academic struggles in his home state.

Our third piece, another extended feature by Bobo Bose-Kolanu, delves deep into the history and culture of students’ institutional opposition. Documenting the coercion and surveillance of student activists by the CIA, FBI, and other state actors with exceptional detail, Bobo paints a startling portrait of the U.S.’s covert repression of dissent. He reminds us yet again that the stakes of student activism are far from trivial.

I learned a lot in the course of compiling this issue, and we hope that you as a reader will too.

Warmly,

Prashanth

Fast-forward just a few years, and thanks largely to the vocal efforts of organizers with Occupy and global student resistance spanning across continents, the struggles of today’s debt-ridden college generation have become a pressing political flashpoint demanding urgent resolution.

Massive walkouts late last year at colleges in the New York and University of California systems helped ignite the student debt issue with real potency. Students, the mainstream media finally noticed, are outraged enough to take drastic steps in resisting the collective burden of rippling debt and defaults. Taking cues from student protestors worldwide, American college students have become increasingly adversarial against the unreasonable financial demands placed upon them by university administrators and debt collectors. California students recently attained at least a temporary success, turning out young voters in record numbers to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest and freeze tuition hikes at public universities.

Around the same time as last year’s walkouts, Occupy Wall Street’s Education and Empowerment working group staged a large event at Liberty Plaza organized around a “debt refusal pledge” that ushered in the vibrant Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC). In his speech via People’s Mic, Andrew Ross, a Strike Debt organizer and professor at New York University, emphasized the core principle animating students’ resistance worldwide, one deeply antithetical to today’s extreme neoliberal ideology driving the privatization of basic social goods like education, healthcare, and housing.

“Since the first days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the agony of student debt has been a constant refrain,” Ross said. “We’ve heard truly harrowing personal testimony about the suffering and humiliation of people who believe that their debt will be unpayable in their lifetime… Education is not like buying a car or a flatscreen TV. Education is a right and a public good.”

The debt refusal pledge, still open for signatures on the OSDC website, reads as a succinct, aspirational statement of student protestors’ core beliefs:

As members of the most indebted generations in history, we pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed this pledge.

Student loan debt, soon to top $1 trillion, is poisoning the pursuit of higher education. With chronic underemployment likely for decades to come, we will carry an intolerable burden into the future. The time has come to refuse this debt load. Debt distorts our educational priorities and severely limits our life options.

Education is not a commodity and it should not be a vehicle for generating debt, or profit for banks. Education at all levels –pre- K through Ph.D. — is a right and a public good.

• We believe the federal government should cover the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities.
• We believe that any student loan should be interest-free.
• We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books.
• We believe that the current student debt load should be written off.

In acknowledgment of these beliefs, I am signing the Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal.

That these fundamental beliefs are controversial in today’s political atmosphere is a stunning symptom of the extent to which the religion of market economics has consumed our daily lives. The widespread indebtedness and underemployment of college graduates in the U.S., if anything, should be viewed as a staggering failure of the market to provide a secure, viable future for the country’s youth.

A report released by the New York Federal Reserve Bank early this year underlines the extent of the crisis. Cumulative student debt in this country, the report found, stands at $870 billion, easily surpassing the figures for credit card and automobile loans, with 27% of borrowers in repayment past due and 21% with delinquent loans. Some 37 million Americans currently hold an average of $23,500 student debt, defaults on which have risen for the fifth straight year such that 218 American colleges now have default rates over 30%. For poor and young households, student loan payments are harsher still, devouring roughly a quarter of all income. Yet while financial ruin looms for the significant number of students overwhelmed by their debt burdens, hedge fund investors who profit by betting against student loans are eager to collect the windfall, predicting default rates as high as 40% for current graduates. This is already the reality at the growing number of two-year for-profit universities, where 96% of students take on debt and 40% are in default within fifteen years.

Recent graduates are at the same time facing the worst job market since statistics were first logged in 1948. As of last summer, less than half of those actively seeking employment in the labor market aged 16-24 had paying jobs, and nearly half of those gainfully employed worked in the hospitality and retail industries, notorious for their low-paying and insecure job positions. Youth of this so-called “lost generation,” journalist Gary Lapon observes, can expect “a future of working low-paying jobs they are overqualified for in order to pay back loans for degrees that mean little at a time when the fastest-growing industries don’t require workers with a college education.”

Underpinning the explosion in student debt has been steep tuition increases across U.S. universities. Since 1978, average tuition rates have increased over 900%, 650 percentage points above inflation — as compared to the massive bubble in housing prices that increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during that same period.

Analysts have moreover pointed out that the unfettered growth in college tuition has gone plenty of places, none of them concerned with improving instructional quality. Mark Bosquet, author of How the University Works (2008) points out:

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.

As Bosquet explains at length, cuts to tenure-track positions have made academic labor increasingly precarious. Graduate students super-burdened with debt can easily be forced into sub-minimum wage labor, while the newfound wealth of cheap student labor pushes recent PhDs into insecure adjunct positions with depressed wages. Increased debt and tuition thus function counterintuitively to de-professionalize and degrade the quality of academic instruction.

Coupling this trend is a rise in the pay-scale of university administrators and the burgeoning college managerial class — a wholesale “corporatization” of the university. At current rates, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 college administrators will outnumber instructors at four-year nonprofit U.S. universities.

Malcolm Harris has sketched the broader ramifications of this trend:

Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. […] When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have… “Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition… And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major… As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the academy.

This dystopian future of a totally privatized university with indentured servitude as the price of entry is not one we as students in the academy have willfully chosen. Countervailing efforts, while still young, are building with immense promise.

As just a single, domestic snapshot, activists with Strike Debt have provided a framework for systemic analysis and long-term direct action against unjust debt, which they hope will underpin the movement for decades. Organizers have researched and compiled “The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual,” combining educational material with guides for replicable direct actions. Studying the Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s, organizers learned that debt can be bought on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar and eventually abolished, leading to the nascent “Rolling Jubilee” campaign where debt in default will be bought and abolished through mutual aid. As many activists have noted, the Rolling Jubilee promises to “spark” the largely silent issue of debt resistance but does not yet offer a full solution.

What this all points to is a need for the radical reorientation of political priorities. Campaigns by student organizers across the country and the world have pushed their beholden political representatives and public education officials to resist the myopic tide of austerity. Gone, they insist, is the time for technocratic policy fixes. The well-publicized executive order President Obama issued last year on the heels of deep cuts to Pell Grants and government subsidies for graduate tuition has been widely observed to provide only marginal relief for less than one-fifth of the country’s debt-burdened students.

As Ross and others have remarked, the political establishment must come to the understanding that education is a public, not private good, with benefits that accrue to the community at large. Depriving people of their right to an education through unaffordable tuition hikes and dissuading them from further studies by virtue of enormous debt burdens is a road to total social collapse. And we must avoid this future at all costs.

Student debt is just one of many kinds of odious, unjust debt — like that incurred for healthcare, housing, and other basic needs — that lay neoliberal mythology bare. As Richard Dienst notes, “The rulers can no longer pretend that debt is something we freely choose as a matter of rational self-interest. Instead, people are forced to take on debts in order to have any chance of having what counts as a good life in this society.”

For many Americans, this sort of indentured servitude is not an acceptable bargain. And the numbers in vocal resistance are quickly growing.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.

Occupy Wall Street captured the world’s imagination last year by uniting the left under the common tactic of occupation. Yet, with the fading of many of the original encampments, a new organizing principle is needed. Debt is a common problem that unites us collectively, providing an altogether promising and transformative opportunity for the Occupy movement to advance.

This year, the height of Occupy’s first summer months saw one of the year-old movement’s most promising developments to date beginning to take shape and blossom — a broad debt resistance movement under the simple banner: “Strike Debt.”

It is an idea first articulated as a question: what is debt? Debt is a social relation naturalized as fact, unequally applied to structure and limit debtors’ future life chances. It is, as Occupy organizer Yates McKee writes, “the tie that binds the 99 percent.” Debt cloaks itself in the language of morality (“refusing to repay is wrong”) while making its presence felt through threats and coercion.

And it’s easy to see all around us. Our society is debt-ridden to the core. Student loans alone have cumulatively topped $1 trillion in the U.S., burdening a record one-in-five households. The math is harsher for poor and young households, whose student loan payments consume roughly a quarter of their income.

Defaults on these loans have risen for the fifth straight year, with 218 American colleges now boasting default rates over thirty percent. Sixty-four percent of all bankruptcies are caused by medical loans, while credit card debt, also creeping toward the $1 trillion mark, generates an average of 16.24% interest that large banks borrow at a Federal Reserve prime loan rate of 3.25%. And we can’t forget the millions of Americans in varying stages of home foreclosure, a sad accompaniment to our decaying cities and states, themselves swindled by Wall Street interest rate swaps that leave them struggling to finance schools, hospitals, and basic public infrastructure.

Amid these mounting tensions, perhaps it was unsurprising that debt resistance bloomed as a central organizing principle during this summer’s thematic Occupy assemblies, each focused on distinct core issues.

Called by Occupy Theory, publishers of the free, radical magazine Tidal, these meetings brought activists together in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, where attendees sat in the shadows of New York University, the college with the nation’s most highly indebted students. They met to discuss what could be learned from the student protesters in Quebec, Canada, who were also protesting financial barriers to educational access.

The marchers in Montreal, they reflected, emphasized their opposition not only to tuition hikes but also more broadly toward the overarching neoliberal ideology that made such cuts to public education appear necessary. Organizers from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC)have long been thinking along the same lines: debt as a way of life, an indentured servitude, foisted upon members of the 99% by the 1%, abducting agency and the ability to imagination a fulfilling personal future outside of financial constraints. For indebted students the situation is painfully clear. In the words of Occupy organizer Amy O., “our future is owned by them, as we are forced to make decisions about our existence in light of our debt.”

Entire life paths are made unthinkable by the single fact of crushing debt obligations.

At the same time as many Americans literally reorient their lives in light of their debt, the private debt of Wall Street speculators has been diffused and distributed to the general population. As the popular slogan goes, “the banks got bailed out; we got sold out,” our future lives tied up into odious debt held by financial institutions. What does it mean that banks can be “too big to fail”? Why do we pay when the banks gamble and lose, and yet we get nothing when they return a profit?

The same institutions playing “heads I win, tails you lose” with our money own us twice: once with their debt that has taken the country’s budget hostage, and again with our personal burdens. Is it not the height of injustice that sovereign countries have their debts “restructured” and passed along to their citizens in terms of brutal austerity regimes as people are concomitantly obligated to debt-finance medicine and education? In this odious world structured by the 1%, basic social goods — healthcare, education, housing, retirement — are barred from the public, attainable to so many only through inexorable private debt that pads financiers’ bonuses.

Strike Debt is not concerned with debt “forgiveness,” which would imply the blameworthiness of the debtor and the generosity of the creditor. Instead it transforms the morality of debt itself. Its members argue that democracy can only be salvaged by refusing to honor immoral debts that impoverish and enslave the multitudes while a few financial elites profit. Our society — not the banks — is “too big to fail.”

We can’t afford to ignore the multiplying symptoms of our system’s failure: the staggering default rates of bankrupt students, the masses for whom further education remains a financial impossibility, those dissuaded (and punished) from receiving proper healthcare by pure cost; and those predatory vultures, the debt collection agencies, circling above them all.

Profit-centered debt urgently needs to be reformed toward more socially productive forms of credit, and Strike Debt has begun to lay the first foundations of resistance that could set us on this path. Andrew Ross, a Strike Debt organizer and sociologist at NYU, predicts that “if the struggle over wages was a defining feature of the industrial era, the struggle over debt will be the battlefield of our times.”

The idea doesn’t seem farfetched in our atomized neoliberal age, where few expect to ever become workers in a unionized labor force but virtually everyone — as individuals as well as members of political communities — is ensnared in debt.

Recognizing debt as a common condition holds the potential for solidarity on a massive scale. As a central issue, debt has the potential to build bridges of solidarity between Occupiers and anti-austerity activists worldwide. A popular chant among marchers in Europe is “We won’t pay for your crisis!” The red squares Quebec protesters wore showed that tuition hikes would place students “squarely in the red.” A historical connection can also be drawn to the largely successful global justice movement of the 1990s, when enormous anti-austerity movements effectively kicked neoliberal IMF technocrats out of power in East Asia and Latin America.

Anthropologist David Graeber reminds us in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years that debt absolution (cancellation of debt), moreover, has been an institutionalized practice and oftentimes a political necessity throughout human history. Just last year, the King of Saudi Arabia proclaimed a broad cancellation of debts in a bid to maintain power as the Arab Spring destabilized regimes in neighboring countries.

Strike Debt is still at an infant stage, but already its accomplishments are heartening. Working with established OSDC activists, Strike Debtors have provided a framework for systemic analysis and long-term direct action, which they hope will underpin the movement for decades.

Organizers have researched and compiled “The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual,” combining educational material with guides for replicable direct actions.

Studying the Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s, organizers learned that debt can be bought on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar and eventually abolished. This knowledge has led to plans for a “Rolling Jubilee” beginning this November, where debt in default will be bought and abolished through mutual aid and a “People’s Bailout” for which community-based “pay-it-forward” funding mechanisms are being rigorously sketched and tested.

While the dream of a sweeping, global debt strike and an alternative, socially equitable credit system may seem distant, the building begins now. It has already begun. Occupy united the left under a common tactic of public occupation, and now Strike Debt offers unity around a common problem. In our day, debt has widely become the slavery of most to the profligacy of a few. A shining injustice illuminating the arduous path forward.

Strike Debt has a website (strikedebt.org) with ways to get involved and learn more.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. He has been published for extensively writing about the effects of globalization on labor forces in the Global South and is more broadly interested in the intersection of political economy, global ecology, and democracy. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.