As I brought supplies to Hermana’s car from Occupy Sandy’s Free Store on Staten Island, she seemed abashed to ask for anything more. “What else can we get you?” I asked. “Do you need cleaning supplies? Food? Batteries? Take anything you need.” She smiled and mumbled amiably. I was immediately struck […]
The first signs of a UK movement focusing on debt emerged during a session organised by the OT at the Up the Anti conference on 1 December 2012. Titled ’Are “debt strikes” the future of anticapitalist resistance?’, the session utilised a more participatory format than others during the day. Following an introduction […]
It is the 41st birthday of Christiania, and spirits are high. Visitors from all over Denmark and abroad crowd around the stalls on Pusher Street, in front of artistically graffitied walls and around oil barrels, buying their evening’s smoke before flocking to one of the many venues and bars. The […]
Every single one of us holds the key to power – debt. Just as coal miners in England used their access to coal to flip the balance of power, so debtors can use their access to credit by declaring a ‘debt strike’, to force a revaluation of the bank stranglehold […]
The two recent child abuse scandals have both found themselves derailed by exactly the same method: a protracted session of the mainstream media navel-gazing and taking pops at one another. The Jimmy Savile case turned into a study of why Newsnight didn’t report on the story. Meanwhile, the re-examination of […]
Nearly 300,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves due to the pressures of debt between 1995-2011. In the state of Maharashtra in 2006, 4453 people committed suicide. That’s around one every eight hours. At the time of writing, I receive word of another seven farmers who died over the course of […]
Emma Avilés is from 15-M’s PACD (Citizen’s Debt Audit Platform) working group – Barcelona, 7th October 2012 Occupied Times: When did you start this campaign? Emma Avilés: The international debt audit campaign began in the summer of 2011 at a summer university course with Eric Toussaint, an expert in world […]
On September 27, 21 year old Alex Haigh became the first person to be sent to prison under the new law that criminalises squatting in residential buildings. He received a sentence of three months in Wormwood Scrubs for the crime of temporarily residing in an empty building while he looked […]
There is an uneasy calm in Northern Greece right now, with no sign yet of the harsh Balkan winter or the demonstrations against soaring fuel costs and taxes it will bring. I was last here two years ago, during the early days of the crisis – people were joking about ‘tin […]
Leaked digital communications between various branches of Occupy reveal tensions within the movement, which celebrates its birthday this month. Three groups, Occupied Media (OM), Occupied News (ON) and Occupied Press (OP) are at the centre of a war of words, with spokespeople from each of the horizontally organised, non-hierarchical, leaderless […]