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Wired for Success TV

Mastering the 7 Areas of Life

www.wiredforsuccess.tv Presented by
Melanie Gabriel & Beryl Thomas

[Episode 27] Occupy Wall Street Strike Debt

Occupy Wall Street - Strike Debt - Wired For Success [Episode 27]

[0:00:10] Beryl: So welcome to another episode of http://www.wiredforsuccess.tv. I am Beryl Thomas and with me is my co-host Melanie Gabriel. Say hi Mel. Melanie: Hello everyone. Beryl: And todays very special guest is a young man called Aaron Smith whos part of a group of volunteers who go by the name of Strike Debt. Strike Debt, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street is dedicated to exposing the enormous inadequacies of a system that forces people into debt to pay for the very basics in life such as housing, education and medical care, debt that is owed by the 99 percent to the 1 percent. Aaron has been a participant in several initiatives of Occupy Wall Street from park maintenance to research on the financial system. Hes also a host of Occupy Wall Street Radio on WBAI. Strike Debt recognizes that what 99 percent of Americans have in common is debt. But by joining together and taking collective action, there are ways to write off these debts, ways that are unavailable to the individual. Today Aaron is going to tell us about their Rolling Jubilee initiative where they buy debt for pennies on the dollar but instead of going out and collecting the debt, they abolish it. So welcome Aaron. Its fabulous to have you on our show. Thank you so much for being here. Aaron: Thanks Beryl and thanks Mel for having me. Pleasure to be here. Beryl: So you are doing incredible work, Aaron, your organization. Tell us why Occupy movement started this new offshoot Strike Debt. What was the inspiration going on there? Aaron: Well, from the very first moment that we were in the park last fall, you could tell that the reason a lot of people are coming own there and the reason that sort of tied everyone together we call it the tie that binds the 99 percent was that they were in these crushing amounts of debt and that this debt was shaping the choices that they made in life and it often came from not [0:02:06] [Indiscernible] get spending but to sort of daily basic needs. Forty percent of Americans put basic needs on their credit cards. More than 50 percent of the debt collection accounts in the country are from medical expenses. Almost twothirds of bankruptcies are from medical expenses.

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Housing debt is ubiquitous and was a major factor in the financial crisis and tuition debt is spiraling out of control. Its now larger than auto loans and larger than credit card debt in the United States. So everyone, almost everyone has debt and almost everyone is making choices in their lives in order to pay off that debt. Theyre essentially mortgaging their future in order to pay for their ability to survive in the present. This is a theme from very early on in the park. One day a man held up a piece of whiteboard and just asked people to write the amount of their debt on there and you had people just streaming in, writing these huge amounts of debt and telling stories about how they got into debt. So it has been a motivating principle ever since the early days of Occupy Wall Street and that several campaigns came out of that. One of the most [0:03:12] [Indiscernible] was the Occupy Student Debt campaign, which was a goal to sort of build a movement to end the student debt problems here in the United States. What they did, one of their initiatives was to issue a pledge for people to sign that. One million people signed this pledge. All of them would stop paying their student debt and they ended up only getting about 10,000 people to sign the pledge and they learned something very interesting in the process of going through this pledge, which helped then form Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee. What they learned was that there are actually already 5 million people who are in default in their student loans in the United States and this number is growing extremely rapidly. I think its actually close to six million now. Just growing since last year. So what they realized is that this group of people who are already in default who were already basically on Debt Strict can be thought of as this invisible army, these people who are sort of isolated from one another but are participating in debt resistance because they have no other choice. So that became the motivating principle behind Strike Debt when we started meeting in Washington Square Park in May of this year was that if we could somehow mobilize this invisible army, if we could somehow get them to step out of the shadows and see each other as a collective force rather than this individual, isolating situation that theyre in, then we could start to build a debt resistance movement and thats exactly what weve been doing since May. Beryl: So tell me what the Debt Resistance Movement is. Well I know what youre doing is youre collecting donations and then youre able to buy debt with those donations in a way that an individual couldnt do. So I love what youre saying about people coming together because as individuals, youre very isolated and youre very disempowered but actually when you come together as a group, youre much more empowered and you have found a way to be able to buy up that bad debt. Would you like to talk about that?

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Aaron: Right, yes. So the Rolling Jubilee which youre mentioning is just one tactic and I want to frame it within the larger context of Strike Debt, right? So as you said, yeah, coming together and realizing the power of our collective action is really the motivating principle of Strike Debt. We like to say that debt when treated as an individual is a burden but when we act together, its leverage. Like the old saying goes, if you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. [0:05:31] [Inaudible] million dollars, the bank has a problem. Together we owe the banks trillions and trillions of dollars and we are standing together to say to them we actually owe you nothing and were going to start using that as a point of leverage for negotiating a better future. So the way that takes shape in several [Inaudible], first we did we held a number of debt assemblies in Washington Square Park. We just brought people together, had them talk about how they got into debt. The very first of these, I remember so well because I thought, maybe we have two or three people and then we would start to do the heavy work and having the conversation to try and tie together all their situations between housing debt and medical debt and tuition debt. That wasnt what happened. What happened was we had 50 people who just told their stories, these incredible, heart-wrenching, compelling stories of just people living their daily lives and all of a sudden discovering themselves up to their eyeballs in debt and doing things like hiding from debt collectors and changing the way they live their lives in order to get rid of this debtor to pay off this debt. So that was the first step, to step out of the shadows, to relieve the shame of being in debt. Its your obligation. Its only you that has to deal with it. Weve moved on from there to building tactics for people to actively resist debt. So we wrote something called the Debt Resistors Operations Manual which you can get on our site StrikeDebt.org and its just a bunch of practical, everyday tips and tricks that people can use to resist debt collectors, to get out of debt and to minimize the amount of debt that they have in their lives. Now the Rolling Jubilee is an idea that has been kicking around in activist circles for a number of years and the basic premise is this. It turns out that in the United States at least, large lenders, banks, hospitals, things like that are required by law to sell off debts after 90 days or 180 days. It depends on the particular state and the particular kind of debt. When they sell it off, they get a tax write-off for the difference between how much the debt was originally for and how much they sell it for. So because they have to sell this debt by law and because they get a tax write-off, they sell it for an incredible discount, something like 95 cents off. Sometimes as much as 99 cents off.

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So there are these firms set up called debt buyer that just have these volume arrangements. They just buy all of the debt thats sold off. So they get incredibly good deals and then they sell it and they break it up into pieces and they package it in ways that debt collectors might like and they sell it off to debt collectors. Then this is where we come in. We say, Instead of selling to those debt collectors, we will pay you the same price that they would pay and we will just take the debt and we will get rid of it. We wont try and hound these people with phone calls. We wont show up at their houses. We wont show up at their sick beds which a lot of debt collectors do. They embed themselves in hospitals and then try to get people to sign off on their debt while theyre sitting there in the [0:08:22] [Inaudible]. The tactics get awful. You can read more about it in the Debt Resistors Manual. So what we do, is we erase the debt. We send the debtors a certified letter that says heres what has happened. We [Inaudible] already and have a nice day. You no longer have to worry about this particular debt. Thats the basic idea. So we found that we can get debt for about [Inaudible] on the dollar. Every dollar that comes in, were able to raise about $20 worth of debt. Beryl: For every dollar that comes in, youre able to clear $20 of debt. Aaron: About, yeah. Its an estimate because it depends on which package we buy. Beryl: And how did you even find out about this? This is what I cant work out. Was it an insider told you this story? How did you guys work this out? Aaron: This is an idea that has been kicking around in activist circles for a number of years now. Its an open secret. They [0:09:20] [Inaudible] this is done. Its just that people didnt think to actually go ahead and do it until earlier this year when an artist named Thomas Gokey who lived in Syracuse at the time decided to just try it and he got together $500 and he bought $14,000 worth of peoples debt and he let them know that he was erasing it. Then when he realized this worked, he got in touch with us and we started doing the hard work of investigating how to scale it. We talked to the IRS. We talked to tax lawyers. We incorporated, started a non-profit and we sort of built the infrastructure over the course of about four months and then we launched the Rolling Jubilee on November 15th. Beryl: You did that very rapidly, didnt you? Aaron: I mean it didnt seem very rapid at the time. Melanie: Did you get much resistance in putting this together?
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Aaron: No, not at all. I mean in fact we are I cant reveal the identity of who were working with in the industry but you need to be a certified a debt buyer in order to purchase the debt. So we are working with people in the industry and one of them said I think this is a sentiment thats pretty widely held. I have kids and theyre going to be graduating with all this debt. This needs to stop and I think [0:10:35] [Inaudible] they completely understand that the system that theyre participating in is out of control and we need to shine a light on it and we need to help people. There has been no resistance from the part of the debt buyers. There might be if we were able to grow much, much, much larger. I mean I want to make a point. The Rolling Jubilee is dealing in hundreds of thousands of dollars right now. The secondary debt market in the United States is tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Its not even a matter of just getting bigger and getting more press. We would need to be something qualitatively different than what we are right now in order to actually affect the debt market. What were doing is helping peoples lives and educating from the public. Were not actually going to buy up all of the debt. Were not actually going to change the way the debt market operates with just this action. Beryl: No. Aaron: But we are educating people and were going to help people change the way that they deal with debt and that is whats dangerous to the banks. That is what they might start to resist on. But I think thats a bit far down the road at this point. Beryl: So when you say you help people change the way they deal with debt because a lot of this debt they cant help but take on, can they? Its not like you got to reeducate them not to take on debt because we all need some money to live and in the US, you have to pay your medical bills. So are you saying you got to educate people to demand that the system changes? Aaron: Yeah. I think thats exactly right. Its often the case that people just have to take on this debt as the [0:11:59] [Indiscernible] of their daily life. You made the point extremely well. Its not that people are just sort of spending buying three flat screen TVs and cars and what not. This is medical debt. This is tuition debt. This is basic needs. The eventual goal of the debt resistance movement is for us to stop treating basic needs as products. We treat them as goods. We treat them as goods in common. We dont treat them as things that should be financed by mortgaging our future, by debt financing.
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Thats a long goal. Thats a decades long goal but it begins with educating people about the fact that this debt that theyre taking on, it doesnt have to be that way and its not that it doesnt have to be that way because you can choose something else right now but its that we together collectively can choose another world. Beryl: OK. Melanie: So I just want to pick up on the bit about educating people. So you mentioned the Debt Resistors Manual which can be downloaded from your site. Does this manual and I have to hold my hands up and say I have no chance to have a look at it yet. Does this manual remind us? Because for those of us who can be supportive but are not involved in this, were really isolated from this world and I think even people who are in debt dont realize that its not just them. Does this manual sort of reveal the extent of the dreadful things that people go through and also begins the education process in terms of what they could do? Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. In fact thats a primary goal of the manual is to sort of shine a light on exactly how insidious the debt infrastructure has become and in particular predatory practices of debt collectors which is sort of our initial focus with these projects. We also have on the website at StrikeDebt.org something called the Strike Debt Organizing Kit which basically tells you how to start your Strike Debt Chapter wherever you are and theres dozens of chapters now springing up all over the world. Theres one in the UK. Theres one in Toronto, all over the United States, and these will show you how to build this sort of debt assemblies, the sorts of things that have really brought people together here in New York City. It will talk to you about how to flesh out the Debt Resistors Manual for your own town, how to focus on debt strike. So were talking about moving into targeted strikes on particular collectors or particular lenders or hospitals or something like that where we start to unseat the debt infrastructure in targeted locations. Beryl: By doing that, you said earlier something like this will start to frighten the banks. This will start to make the banks realize that there is a force to be reckoned with. Aaron: One hopes, right? Earlier this year, actually a couple of years ago, sorry, there was the group that started to buy houses that were in foreclosure and instead of flipping them and reselling them for a higher price, what they would do is just give them back to the people who were living in them and perfectly brilliant idea. It didnt cost the banks any money because they were already going to sell it for that amount anyway on the foreclosure options. But the banks stopped dealing with those people. They refuse to sell to anyone who wasnt going to sell it off to a different person.
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Melanie: Forgive the simplicity of my question. Whats the advantage of the bank to interfere there? Aaron: The reason for that is they are afraid of something called moral hazard. So the idea there is that if someone knows that someone else will just buy their house, and then sell it back to them at the foreclosure price, then they will just go into default and they will wait to get [0:15:45] [Inaudible]. Of course no one talks about the fact that the banks dont have any downside to when they make these loans because they sell of mortgage-backed securities. They sell off student loan asset-backed securities. They sell off securities for their write-off, their charged-off debts and medical debt and credit card debt. No one talks about the fact that the banks have a moral hazard but when a person wants to do it, when an individual wants to do it, when an individual wants what the asset is actually worth to the bank, then all of a sudden everyone is afraid. So we think maybe something like that might happen down the road if we start to get big enough. But its a little bit more difficult in the debt collection industry because its much more fragmented and they actually dont know who our debt buyers are and were not changing the buying patterns [0:16:28] [Indiscernible] debt buyers. So we have a little bit of resistance strategy there. Melanie: Oh, I see. So by being mysterious about it, they cant interfere and [Indiscernible]. My goodness. Aaron: We will see how it plays out. I think the banks are large and powerful and they will eventually find a way to stop dealing with us, if they want to. But I think if we get large enough for them to care, thats a [0:16:50] [Inaudible]. Beryl: And if you achieve your goal of people demanding that the system change, because I dont think youre planning on continuing this rolling what you said earlier, not planning on this growing massively. You are hoping that people will work together and stand up with a stronger voice and that makes me think do you have any politicians who are supporting you? Aaron: We dont talk to politicians. [Inaudible] with these types of initiatives is that if government wants to follow us, theyre certainly welcome to do so. But were not going to get bogged down in the sort of transactional politics. So the attorney-general of New York State right now is a guy named Eric Schneiderman who wrote a great article in Nation magazine about four years ago where he said the problem with politicians on the left is that they perform something called transactional politics. They get these checklists from left-leaning organizations and they check off and they say, I will support abortion rights. I will support environmental rights. Check, check, check, and thats all those organizations ever ask of them.
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They dont do the transformational work of building movements outside of politics and in order to really do that, you cant get involved in the nitty-gritty of trading nuclear regulatory for pro-choice or something like that. We cant do that. What we have to do is show that there is a very widespread desire for a different world and if this current government wants to try and catch up and create that world, thats up to them. But in the meantime, were going to start [0:18:18] [Inaudible] instead. Beryl: Youre doing it anyway. And again I have to say the speed with which youve done this is incredible and thats probably because you dont have politics involved. You have a common belief there and you just forge through. Can you talk a little bit just about the way that Occupy Movement has got other offshoots? I know in a previous conversation you talked about Occupy Sandy which we dont hear about. The mainstream media do not talk about these things. Melanie: Whats going on there? Aaron: [Inaudible] article about Occupy Sandy which is really well-written but it hasnt gotten enough of the press relative to things like Red Cross and FEMA. So the basic idea here is that the hurricane hit New York recently and New Jersey and the areas around it. It was extremely severe. Im sure you saw the photos of Downtown Manhattan all blacked out. But the parts that were hardest too were of course the poorest communities that were right on the coast in the port areas. The very first day after Sandy hit, you saw just of their own initiative people involved with Occupy, taking bicycles down there and doing something that Red Cross would never do, FEMA would never do. They just went up to people and they said, What do you need? Rather than show up Red Cross showing up with its tents and with its medical kits and FEMA showing up with its aid packets and its loan applications, which I will get back to you in a second. They said, What do you need? Thats how you ended up with people going into high rise buildings and going up to the 12th floor and helping elderly people get down or get whatever they need through those dark stairwells that they refused to walk in because they were afraid. So you found Occupy sort of filling a niche in both response and recovery work that no other organization has and this is part of the ethos that we have of not working with governmental agencies or not working through governmental agencies is that we really believe that by espousing a sort of idea of mutual aid where were helping to build a community together rather than charity where its like Im giving you X and you can go deal with the thing that Im giving you.

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Were helping to build a stronger infrastructure for all of us in parallel to the government and in parallel to the relief organizations. So I mentioned the FEMA loans and I really want to push on this because Strike Debt actually just released its 23-page public service report which looks in-depth at how non-profit organizations and the government have responded to Sandy. What you find is that loans are really their response. We got a lot of emails in the days after Sandy and personally, people who live in New York got emails from credit card companies saying, We heard youve been affected by Sandy. Were so sorry. We want to help you. Here, were going to raise your credit card limit. This is their response, right? This is also FEMAs response. So in order to get any kind of FEMA aid, you need to apply for a loan. You need to fill out a loan application and therefore you need to be able to be someone who can take on a loan, which is again at about six percent interest which is way, way higher than the going interest rates here. Their response to crisis is essentially to create more of the debt crisis and to create sort of this disaster capitalism approach and what were saying is instead of taking on those FEMA loans in order to rebuild your business or your house or instead of selling out your business or your house to the corporations that are already rolling out their development plans for the boardwalk areas and port areas here in New York City. We will just help you build your house. We will tear out the moldy carpet. We will tear out the moldy drywall and we will get the community together and have everyone build in place right now. Thats the sort of aid that moves people outside of the debt infrastructure. Thats exactly what we hope to see in the long term with things like medicine, with things like education, with things like housing. Beryl: This is a remarkable story, Aaron, and its tragic that more people dont know about it but as you say, its probably not in the interest of the mainstream media and for government to know that to have people knowing that this is whats going on. Aaron: Its just not a sexy of a story. I mean lets be honest. Five hundred people trained to [0:22:30] [Indiscernible] bunch of drywall around is not all that exciting story to tell. You want to talk about the disaster itself and that nobody [Inaudible]. Melanie: So what kind of other things are we so terribly ignorant about that the Debt Resistors Manual points to? Aaron: So theres one thing that were working on right now and I will just give you kind of a preview. Were not ready to go all the way with this yet. But so as I said earlier, more than 50 percent of the debt collection accounts in the United States are from medical debt.

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This is going to be incredibly byzantine to people who dont deal with our healthcare system because it is actually extremely byzantine. But we have a bunch of laws in the United States around health insurance privacy or health record privacy and so the basic gist of the notion is that in trading around all of these medical debt accounts, you need to sort of prove legally that you own the title to that debt account. We believe that because of the health insurance privacy acts, and because of the way these debts are traded back and forth, that most debt collectors actually cant prove that they have the legal right to [0:23:44] [Inaudible] accounts. Yet they do so anyway. So theres a trick that you can do which is if you write a letter to the credit agencies here in the United States, theres three of them. They have to verify what youre disputing in your letter within 30 days or it gets off of your credit report. Were encouraging the millions and millions of people, tens of millions of people who have medical debt collection accounts to write letters. One in 14 people in America have these medical debt collection accounts. Write letters and just wait 30 days and we bet that millions and millions of these accounts will prove to be illegitimate and that debt will disappear without anyone spending a dime except on [0:24:21] [Inaudible]. Beryl: One in fourteen people have these. Aaron: One in seven Americans is being pursued by a debt collector and half of the debt collection accounts are medical debt collection accounts. Beryl: Thats overwhelming. Aaron: Its about 20 million people. Beryl: Good lord and theyre probably worrying themselves to a heart attack probably, worrying about those, and its not even genuine debt that they owe. Aaron: Yeah. It has probably not been handled [0:24:52] [Inaudible]. So its like in the mortgage crisis, is that all these banks are trading mortgages back and forth and they actually ended up losing the paperwork or losing the titles. Stuff was no longer valid and people were starting to get banks were starting to get worried about this because there were lawsuits [Inaudible] all over the country. So the federal government pushed all of the state attorney generals to sign a settlement with the banks where they got out of it for just $25 billion. This is a fraction of the trillions and trillions of dollars that they could have lost if people were allowed to go ahead with their lawsuits. We have a window of opportunity here because there has not been any settlement yet with medical debt collectors.
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Melanie: An eye-opener. Beryl: It is an eye-opener indeed and Im interested in your own if you dont mind me asking you this. Youre a young man doing an incredible thing here. How has this changed you by being involved in Occupy Movement? Can I ask you that? Aaron: Wow. Ive done a lot of interesting things in my life and I have to say that being involved with Occupy in the last year, Ive met most of the most intelligent and hardworking and just excited individuals that I have ever met in my entire life. We joke about how we spend two months working on a project together and the idea of being apart some of our friends who work in the Rolling Jubilee are going on the road for a few months. The idea of being apart for a few months is all of a sudden horrifying and we often know very little about each others personal lives. Yet we feel so close to each other. After working with someone for months day in and day out, hours and hours a day, you find yourself asking things, So what exactly is your job? Were very close to each other because weve done all this very intense work together. Melanie: So you [0:26:42] [Indiscernible] together by a single purpose which overrides all the other trivial stuff. Aaron: Yeah, its an incredible environment to work in and Im excited because it just seems to be more and more innovative everyday and more and more people are showing up, who have more and more skills and more and more ideas. Beryl: So it sounds like it really is gathering momentum even though were not hearing about it in the mainstream. Aaron: Yeah, and I think thats fine. The fact of the matter is this idea that theres another way to live our lives outside of simply waiting for the government to do everything for us, sort of letting corporations do everything to us, is infectious and people are really standing up. Just today here in New York City, theres a university here called Cooper Union which has been free for 100 years. Its sort of one of the last [0:27:30] [Indiscernible] of free education. Recently, they announced that they were going to start charging tuition essentially to pay for these vanity projects, this giant new building that they build and the higher salaries theyre giving to administration. Instead of just taking it, the students are rising up. Theyre fighting back and theyre occupying the main building right now. Theyre in their third day at this very moment and theyre holding huge protests in Cooper Square and Downtown Manhattan and its the sort of thing that just happens now. Its people feel like they can stand up and demand a better world and this would have been just unthinkable about two years ago and its very exciting to see it unfold day by day.
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Beryl: Its very exciting. So where do you think this is do you feel like the momentum is gathering to such a point that we really will see some definite changes in the systems? Do you see the shoots of something new coming? Aaron: I do, yeah. I think of Occupy not as an organization or even a movement. I think of it as a set of principles and a network of people that have been practicing together. So we get the sense that there is another world that we want and that this world involves people power and it involves making decisions locally and via democracy and were practicing how to do that. Were developing how to do that and were finding all of the ways in our life in which democracy has been taken away from us or never actually existed in the first place and were starting to practice what a democratic solution would look like. We will fail many times along the way but we will also discover many new things along the way and I think that that idea is extraordinarily infectious and youre seeing it around the world and youre seeing it be practiced in entirely new ways, ways unlike it has been ever practiced before. Beryl: You really are pioneers, Aaron. You realize that, dont you? Youre pioneers. Youre the frontier men. Aaron: I hope we find this frontier very populated very soon. Beryl: Go Melanie. Sorry. Melanie: I was merely going to say so for the many who live in a kind of bubble and are totally unaware of this very serious situation, having woken them up to it, what is it they can do to be of assistance? Aaron: Yeah. So there are a lot of things to do. Here in New York City, were holding an open house on December 16th 2:00 PM and thats going to be a leap to this Global Visioning Summit. So on January 21st again in New York City but with video links to people all around the world, were going to start brainstorming what to do with all of these new ideas and what tactics [0:30:18] [Inaudible]. Were going to talk about what tactics have worked in debt resistance movements and the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain and in the UK as well. We start finding commonalities and building global solidarity around these issues. The issue of municipal and national austerity is directly related to the issues that we work on and building that bride I think is next. So I encourage people to inform themselves about the issues. Go to StrikeDebt.org. Follow us on Facebook. See us on Twitter and talk to your local Strike Debt chapter or if there isnt one, start one and get ready. Start envisioning what it would look like to resist
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debt around you, to strike debt around you and then take part in this global summit. I think a lot is going to come out of this. Not least of which are a set of tactics that everyone can work with together in a sense that this network as I was saying, Occupy is this network. This network is global now and this network is based on striking debt. Beryl: And we really shouldnt wait for somebody else to do this. As individuals, we need to either donate to you. Theres a Donate button on your website. Either donate or as you say, take some practical action. At least start thinking about one of those Strike Debt chapters in your own area. Aaron: How we use Strike Debt is going to look different in every context, in every situation. In just a few months, weve come up with all these tactics that make sense in New York City and makes sense in the United States. But once you latch on to that idea that you can imagine a world that isnt financed by debt, and where youre not mortgaging your future to survive in the present, new tactics will appear in every [0:32:07] [Inaudible]. We dont want to tell you what those are. It may be joining the austerity resistance movement. It may be sort of finding areas within your municipality that have been shut down or privatized. But what we need to do is start thinking local and then we will help build global out of that. Melanie: Very empowering. Beryl: Its very empowering. Its encouraging to hear what you say about there are people even within this system that doesnt work or only works for the few who are waking up. Like that chap you said who has got the young children. But waking up to how rotten and unfair this system is and something has to change it. It seems like people are waking up Aaron. Aaron: Yeah, people are definitely. I mean everywhere we go, this idea has resonance across the political spectrum too. I think especially here in the United States on the socalled right end of the spectrum, people are very enthralled by the idea. We got a lot of good press in magazines like Forbes and Fortune which are generally right-leaning magazines. People are enthralled by the idea that this is actually people taking action. Were not saying, hey government, fix this. Were saying, No, were going to fix this right now. If government wants to do something about it, thats fine. They can follow us. They can follow our lead. But this particular aspect of the idea I think has a strong resonance around the world and around the political spectrum. Melanie: Well, yes, so much food for thought here.

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Beryl: It has been enlightening and its just wonderful to hear that so many of you are doing such incredible things and giving up your time and its I feel very emotional to hear these things are happening and I just hope and hope that it gets bigger and bigger and we will do everything we can by publicizing this. Will you come back and talk to us again, Aaron, about the next phase of Strike Debt and where it goes next? Will you be a regular contributor to http://www.wiredforsuccess.tv ? Aaron: Sure thing, either myself or someone else in Strike Debt will certainly be happy to talk to you especially when we get towards the Global Visioning Day in January 21st. Beryl: We would love to. We will certainly talk about that on our site. Yeah, come back then. Thank you. Melanie: So would you like to remind the viewers? I know you mentioned it before but I think it would be nice to just remind them how they would find out more. Aaron: Things are changing everyday. We send a lot of updates and news about debt and initiatives and new Strike Debt chapters that we hear of around the world. We do this via our Facebook page which is just Strike Debt, via our Twitter feed which is also just StrikeDebt, one word. You can find all of those things via our main webpage which is StrikeDebt.org, which will link you to the Rolling Jubilee. It will link you to the Debt Resistance Manual. It will link you to the Strike Debt Organizing Kit and that will be sort of the place to go for all of the updates of when our initiatives come out. Beryl: Thank you very much. Thank you for tuning in to todays episode of http://www.wiredforsuccess.tv. We would just quickly like to mention before we wrap up. If you are watching on this episode on our site then please comment in the box below and leave any thoughts or questions there Secondly, if you are watching this on youtube, then be sure to press the subscribe button above and subscribe to our youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/WiredForSuccessTV?feature=mhee Thirdly, if you are listening to this on ITunes be sure to subscribe to our podcast channel And if you are watching this on social media then please feel free to share this episode with your friends. You can find us at https://www.facebook.com/WiredForSuccesstv and https://twitter.com/WiredSuccessTV

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Lastly regardless of where you are listening to this episode from, if you havent done so already then please head on back to our main site, wired for success.tv and join our newsletter for updates and content by adding your name and email. We do reply to all comments and suggestions so we would love to hear from you. So thank you for tuning in and remember to tune in for the next episode of wired for success where we help you master the 7 areas of life From myself Beryl, my co host Mel and our interviewee Aaron we bid you farewell until next time

Take care

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