- Just wait till the end to hear the officer’s official police report and compare with the video.
- Unreliable Narrator: Police Auditors provide a useful exercise for understanding self-serving History. We get to see the creation of official records and compare them with video. It would be interesting to conduct a wider sample of police reports to see how pervasive this phenomena is.
- The sad part is his desperation to get info; when he asked her to come with him to the front of the car he knew what he was trying to do. If you’re reading this sir, you are a very sad man. You do not represent integrity in any form or fashion. (police entrapment)
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- GST is becoming my favorite auditor. She is so calm and correct it makes it fun to watch the tyrants twist into a pretzel to justify their actions
- This cop has a lot of opinions on what she was doing , yet no laws were broken, Why does he need to mention that her conduct made others not do their job? in his report?
- The officer kept interrupting her when she tried to tell him that photography can’t be the sole reason for suspicious activity because it’s legal in public
- The cop knew early on that he was wrong, that’s when the power trip kicked in and he tried on multiple occasions to bully her into submission, fail
- This whole “See Something Say Something” mentality in this day and age! Granite State has provided proof that these tyrants lie through their teeth all the time. Turning legal activity into a crime is their mindset! Thanks SJVT for bringing this to your channel!
- Everything he referred to about trespassing was nothing to do with your video taping…you were abiding by the law. This villain twisted and turned and tried jamming you up with his corrupt actions. He was a sneak and a dishonest cop with no integrity.
- He crawled back under his stone once you stood your ground. Excellent vid. This creep realised his error and tried to smooth it out with you. Great exposure of a villain who no doubt has committed similar acts of oath breaking. His ‘report’ about this ‘incident’ was pure paranoia and BS. They are strong against the weak, and weak against the strong. Stay strong. Stay safe.
- He was most certainly trying to cover up how stupid she made him look! She was trying to keep from being followed by a Little boy that got his feelings hurt! Why would anybody in the world want to be followed home whether it’s a cop or not? Tell me if this sounds familiar? “In this day and age “ you never know what kind of person it is that’s trying to follow you whether they’re in uniform or not. If you’re a female you have to be suspicious of anyone that’s following you when they have absolutely no reason to do so. You were stalking her and trying to get all her information because she hurt your feelings and you wanted to get eve
- She is amazing! I love how she is so calm and reserve. Good follow up to her video.
- A more or less realistic example of of your basic cop unable to process the fact that the photographer is exercising a right guaranteed by the same Constitution the cop swore to uphold…
- “Trespass” the go to charge of the day. “Get back for my safety” the catch phrase. “Stop resisting stop resisting”. The battle cry.
- Between Granite State Transparency in Massachusetts and Auditing America in Rhode Island.it seems the cops up there are most tyrant-like..it seems to be a whole different level in New England..scary.
- You would be acting oddly if you were being stalked by an armed man.
- I would love to see you guys get more organized. More like a large entity, like the police or organized crime. So it’s not one against a bunch of cops and the system. Be in groups, have lawyers on standby, have a fund that all of you pay into to help the ones that get arrested, have the laws in hand and high lighted for the purpose of education. I could go on. Get professional and actually make a difference. At this point they don’t fear you guys at all. I would love for you to respond back to me and tell me what you think. Thanks
- Damn. This cop needs to be a writer. He can spin quite a story. He was doing his best to make you seem crazy .
- What law is it so it’s a “federal law” I just told you. Lol. But why don’t you tell me exactly which federal law it is the one with numbers. He’s the one interrupting. A real lawyer would tear this officers report apart into shreds I love how he’s trying to make himself look good in the report like he’s doing everything quote on quote by the book. Oh poor baby his life is so hard. Well nobody told her to leave and she had yet to actually enter the property. She has to have actually been inside the fence in order for that to work. Yeah watching this having a lawsuit would be probably easy because this cop clearly as fishing for anything he can get his hands on to arrest her and so far he’s having trouble finding anything mostly because she knows what she’s talking about and he doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about. He did a double investigation. I’d be sueing the company for trying to illegally aquire my name
- As a United States Marine that fought for the freedoms we enjoy and Vietnam corpsman father fought before me this is Despicable when you take a position as a cop to Serve and Protect not act like you’re a lawyer or Gestapo thank God there’s young people like these people in the world bringing to light the blue corruption about time way2go New Generation the world is in good hands keep up the great work Semper Fi oorah
- Well thanks to this cop we all now know exactly what goes on behind the fence. This information is now common knowledge to the criminal/terrorist community and its all thanks to an ignorant security guard and an equally ignorant, officious, over zealous cop who, who had he educated himself in the law, would not have needed to respond to the call in the first place.
- If police would simply avoid confronting people who aren’t breaking the law no “disturbance” would be created. In this scenario the police and the complainant are the public disturbance, not the auditor.
- Cop: “I don’t want to set you up for failure”. Salem witch hunt here.
- When an officer says they are trying to figure it out that means they don’t know the law and they are going to try to trump up something
- When I seen the clip from CT3 I knew I had seen the video before, I didn’t realize it was that long ago. I was a creeped out then as seeing again today. That was completely incompetent, didn’t hold knowledge of basic laws that everybody should (ie the constitution, trespass, public easement, ID requirements) and a few others, but seeing that report is even scarier than what I saw in the video. He he will lie to that extent over someone taking pictures from a sidewalk, I can only imagine a case where there is actual crime. He will turn a trespasser into a murderer. I think that would constitute immediate separation from any position granting limited authority. I better never see him in Disney World with a camera, I’m calling the police… Lol
- Rarely people end up being paid as part of their job to do what they most desire: playing baseball, travel, eating, watching movies. Cop work is unique in that a vast number of people end up being paid to indulge in their desire to mislead, intimidate, physically abuse, lie, and even kill or all of the above.
- It is so embarrassing that this officer had no clue about the laws and what he was talking about. Officer Weiss was making up nonsense about “security issues” with FAA in his report. She did not cross the fence at any time during the course of her footage, therefore there was no “crimal trespass” or evidence of criminal activity solely by filming the outside of a government facility. She was not required to provide an ID if there is no evidence of criminal activity present. He is only trying to save face after being embarrassed of his lack of basic knowledge law and police procedure. He gets a “F” for his performance. This would be a complaint case against the officer of possible misconduct and falsification of official documents that would fall on my desk when I was in Internal Affairs. – Sgt. D. Brown, (ret.) – Denver Sheriff’s Department
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This Historical Moment was Inevitable, but the Outcome is not
may uh thei’m seeing with a little more claritythat all these moments ofyou know reactionary apparelthe sociological parallel is that youhave or a political parallelis that you have a reactionary minoritypartythat has a parliamentaryand a paramilitary wingand the republicans are just reproducingthis pattern with with just you knowelegance right and if you look at thejanuary 6uh investigation you know they’reproceeding on two tracks and the twotracks are the majority literally themajority of senators and house representhouse members who tried to overturntheir elections using their votesas outside the gates you have you knowpeople kind of messing you know withwith truncheonsrightandyou have to kind of follow that threadyou know in 2020 you know you talk aboutyou know the movement you know for blacklivesat the same time asi think it was about a dozen states wereindemnifying people for the crime of umdriving their vehicles vehicularhomicide into crowds rightand if you look at the statistics ithink there was something like you knowlike there were there there were nearlya hundred vehicular assaults you knowthis is terrorism right the automobileas a weaponuh uh and you know kind of pushing backyou know movements for democracy andequalityandyou justyou know we we we need to be and youknow i thinkand then as we look at this january 6investigation you have this housecommittee that seems to be doing veryaggressive work and this justicedepartment that seems to be you knownowhere to be found because they’requote unquote institutionalists that’swhere you get into the democratic partyfecklessness where we have this attorneygeneral whoum you know hopefully is building thesecases from the ground up but we don’tknow we haven’t heard anything right sowe have no kind of organized voicewithin the democratic partywho is saying you know really kind ofnaming the stakes with any kind ofuh clarity and aggressivenessumthat has the power to do something aboutit or maybe not and that’s why we’rekind of on the the precipice you knowumand you know you still have this kind ofadlai stevenson kind of obama strain inthe democratic partythat says the problem ispolarization and we’re saying too manymean things about the oppositionrightumand that’s a real problemand billyeah so umsee first of all i think i i’m going to
say two things that will sound perhaps
paradoxical
one is that i think this moment was
inevitable
the second is
that
i do not think that the outcome
is inevitable
so i think that this moment was was
inevitable because this is the result of
racial settler colonialism
um
this is the result of
the failure of the civil war
to
actually resolve
part of the question
and it was also the result of the fact
that during this great democratic or
small d moment in the south called
reconstruction
native americans were being annihilated
in the west
right so yeah these contradictory things
are going on so in in so i think that
the the failure of the united states to
ever come to grips with its own past and
with the question of a genuine democracy
um even within the context of capitalism
made this inevitable this clash
and and i think that when i talked
before about right-wing populism as the
herpes of capitalism it’s because the
virus is in the system
it’s not outside of the system and
periodically like a stomach bug hitting
you right it’s in the system
so the system needs to be cleansed
um and and and so the outcome of this
clash
is not inevitable
um so
we have at least
70
of the population that has not lost its
mind
i mean that’s very significant
um
and and i think that what is critically
important mark you and i have talked
about this
is that people have to organize at the
base
and and it can’t be relying on
the eloquence of barack obama or the
feistiness of of biden in order to stop
this plague
when the right shows up at school board
meetings
we need to be there
when the right attacks
uh or tries to
stop the vaccine
we need to be there
when they come after election officials
we need to be there
now i realized the implications of this
i realize that that may lead to physical
altercations but in general i have found
the right to be quite cowardly
this is true not just in the united
states but in other places they are
bullies
and they they often think they can get
away quite literally with murder
until and unless progressives stand up
and say
no pass iran
we’re not playing this game yep
um and and we should remember just
historically the spanish fascists in
1936
could have been defeated in a matter of
months had it not been for the nazis and
the italian fascists
intervening we can actually stop this
thing from happening so i think it’s
really important that we do not fall
prey to fatalism which i see certainly
in the liberal media
but also in segments of the left and one
final thing mark there’s also segments
on the left you and i have discussed
that really downplay this danger from
right wing authoritarianism and continue
to think that the main enemy are
centrist democrats
i want to go upside people’s heads and
ask them what what are you smoking what
is it is it like alcohol and herb or
you’re adding some other stuff
what is it that that you think is going
on here yeah so i think we just have to
grapple with that
so let me let me jump in here for a
minute and this is we so we brought us
youtube just brought us to this moment
let’s talk about this moment what that
what what you just said um uh really
means bill and what you were saying
earlier rick that so so how does that
happen though let me posit something
that may sound negative but let me just
pause it anyway and you can tear it
apart okay
so i’m watching the right
and i see a right wing
that
appears to be
more organized
than progressives of the left or anybody
else
and well-funded
and well-armed i might add
in all these complications that we
talked about whether it was hitler in
1930 germany 1932 or
or or 1877
or right now a lot of it is being fueled
by no no don’t take that back that part
of it is
that
people who have been in the military
are upset and angry and on the right
as my two grandsons who now serve in the
united states army said to me
that almost all the guys they meet
in the combat units are on the right
as opposed to units they’re in when
they’re much more open-minded
because they’re in the space core and
all that kind of stuff so they’re in a
very different kind of place but so so
they so so that reality exists
and the fact that
the right wing inside the republican
party
has
literally control of 26 states in the
union and in 41 states they’re put in
legislation to diminish voting rights
and to control the vote so they can
control the elections coming up
and that means that they could possibly
for numerous reasons including the
failure of bodies and others to take
over in 2022 the the federal legislature
which is significant
and the left is kind of and progressives
are kind of embedded inside the
democratic party and i’m not saying here
go start another party that has no power
at the moment but that are embedded
inside the democrats with very little
power within them
and the unions are now struggling to get
back on their feet and you see strikes
taking place and people organizing
but the power of the unions are not what
they were
so what do we mean
and what do you mean but when you say
now it’s time to kind of stand up i i
mean i understand standing up to them
and i
even in my even if even in my if my
dotage here i’m willing to stand up
against these fools
but but
but but the question is what does that
mean if we are not organized to really
confront
either industry
polls or in the community in the
elections in school boards and more
so that that so so what is it going to
take to really stop them
is the question i’m asking the two of
you well mark the democratic party
didn’t organize the civil rights
movement
the democratic party didn’t organize the
chicano moratorium in 1970 right right
democratic party didn’t organize
stonewall
right i mean so i think it’s really
important that people
break with passivity and start thinking
about okay
how do we organize
uh like like i’ve been talking for years
about the necessity to organize
democracy brigades and my critical image
was the union leagues of the 1860s and
1870s that were organized based
particularly among african americans but
also among poor whites to fight to
advance
reconstruction the problem
there
is that they didn’t take the necessary
steps
to ultimately smash the terrorists the
white terrorists but i think that we
need to be thinking at the local level
of building brigades of people
volunteers
that are engaged in this fight for
democracy
and i think that the longer that we sit
back and we wait
for something to come out of congress or
out of the white house it ain’t gonna
happen and i agree with you rick about i
mean i
i keep hoping that the justice
department is working something up and i
actually think that they probably are
but man are they quiet
yeah you know and and and so i think
that that’s necessary i mean you know i
want to see
at a school board meeting
when these lunatics show up i want to
see our forces there
right and basically saying to these
lunatics do you want to debate about
critical race theory let’s have the damn
debate
but you are not going to bully this
board into some ridiculous stuff like
these different uh pieces of legislation
are being uh passed in in various state
legislatures but we have got to we we
can’t we are our own liberators we’re
the ones that are going to have to
constitute these organizations and so it
might not be entire national unions it
might be local unions it might be naacp
chapters it might be immigrant rights
groups right that come together even if
on an ad hoc basis
and say one of the things we’re going to
take up making sure to protect these
election officials making sure that
people can vote making sure that
vaccines happen
uh making making sure to protect the
right to abortion right that we’re gonna
do this and we’re gonna do it in the
streets
rick you want to jump in on that
well uh
yes
but another thing is you know i’m a big
fan of um
uh
a socialist thinker carl palani who
points out that um
society is organized around market
values always create you know basically
nihilistic apocalypses
and that there are always people within
basically the the ambit of capital in
the ruling class who grasp this
and so we have allies within the ruling
class like you know the Rockefellers who
you know in the 1860s and 70s you know
built a school system in the south for
african americans right which was a very
radical thing to do
so we have allies and we have to search
them out uh because these people grasp
that um if you know we’re uh talking
about a republic of of insects and grass
as um
um uh you know who was it the great
writer about nuclear apocalypse you know
they they don’t win either
so um
you know when after but you know power
yields nothing without a demand and you
know after the urban rebellions of the
60s one of the things that happened was
you know employers were like holy crap
you know if you read the harvard
business review they’re like we need to
bring african-americans into you know
uh
corporate america right
so um
we have to find all sorts of pressure
points right all sorts of pressure
points because you know we’re talking
about
civilization or barbarism and
uh we might have allies that um
you know um
are not our usual allies because we’re
talking about whether the thing you know
basically human life can
be sustained on the planet
and um so bottom up top down inside out
outside in you know we got a you know we
got to build a real popular front for
democracy
i i want to just add to that i just
agrees 100 rick and and uh just point
out that
uh something that uh your comment
triggered
in in response to the 50s and 60s
there was what you described
and but there was also
the response from the right the the the
what become becomes a right-wing
populist movement
and this this this politics of revenge
revenge
yeah uh that we see
germinating in the late 60s and and and
then spreading out
and i um i thought about that a lot
after 2020
because we had this historic post-george
floyd murder
uh uh movement around the country right
we had demonstrations uprisings
everything
and
so there were two responses part of
corporate america and the political
establishment responded with greater
attention to so-called diversity
to re-examining u.s history et cetera et
cetera
but then there was equally this
right-wing
authoritarian backlash
that i would argue that the black lives
matter movement as a whole was
completely unprepared for
because that right-wing backlash was
organizing it wasn’t just protesting
they were organizing and the george
floyd black lives matter movement
was protesting but did not create
lasting organizations and points of
pressure
it was predictable
it’s what we saw in 1968
right
nixon didn’t appear out of nowhere
george wallace didn’t appear out of
nowhere it was a particular response
that we have to always keep in mind it’s
part of
of the the this virus
in the u.s system
that’s an interesting analogy i i think
that’s that’s true i mean i
as someone who was in the midst of 1968
i think about all the failures of 68
that those of us who were too busy in
the streets battling as opposed to uh in
the community organizing and i think
that’s that’s part of part of the issue
we face
um but i’m gonna be getting this in kind
of a positive note that there is
there’s light at the end of this tunnel
and there’s room for there’s room to
stop
the right and to build something new and
i think that’s really the kind of
message that we that we need to kind of
push really hard
that’s right um and and i and i you know
we in the conversation they both have
been really great and kind of describing
why we’re here and also what we have to
do to get there um and i do want to
thank both of you for joining us today
um uh and rick palestine and bill
fletcher this has been a really good
conversation
and i want to tell all the folks out
there who are watching listening to us
today um that we’re going to continue
this conversation that bill fletcher and
i will be producing a whole series of
conversations not just about oh woe is
me but what can be done why we’re here
and what can we do
um and we’ll also be also talking to
organizers from across the country the
poor people’s campaign and other
organizations who are actually
organizing on the ground there is a way
to stop this and that’s what we’re going
to focus on
uh and we are uh in the middle of a
battle for the future and i think
we’re all here and for me who has
children and grandchildren and waiting
and even great grandchildren which is
kind of scared to say but i do
that it’s for them
not we’re going to let them inherit a
better society not something that the
right can control
uh and again thank you both so much both
for the work you do and for being with
us here today on the steiner show on the
real news it’s always good to talk to
both of you i mean it’s really important
to do that thank you so much
and uh i want to thank you all for
listening here today
with uh and loving hearts like like
these we can’t fail
amen to that and i want to and all of
you out there remind you that to hear
the real news you can still go to
realnews.com forward slash donate
continue your donations real news to
keep these things alive uh and look at
to our reports on the rise of the right
and uh other projects we’ll be doing i’m
gonna thank dwayne gladden and stephen
frank for editing and monitoring this
broadcast and thank you all for watching
today and listening to the i mean and
being part of the mark steiner show here
on the real news thank you take care and
keep on fighting stay the course
[Music]
Where Did Money REALLY Come From?
Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” discussing the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and found absolutely no evidence for this. Instead, it seems that early human societies were had reciprocal gift exchange, whereby one person would gift something to their neighbor, and that person would be tacitly indebted for something of similar quality. Barter has only been observed between groups that didn’t frequently come into contact, and sometimes between outright enemies, or among people that are already used to money but for some reason have no access to it. Watch the whole talk here: https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs
How David Graeber Changed the Way We See Money
The radical anthropologist was that rare figure: a scholar who was also an activist.
In the third edition of the college-level textbook Macroeconomics, the economists Andrew Abel and future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke blithely assert that “since the earliest times almost all societies … have used money.” They say that money arises from the inefficiency of barter—of trading one good for another—because “finding someone who has the item you want and is willing to exchange that item for something you have is both difficult and time-consuming.”
The evolution from barter to money is an old story in economics, repeated down the centuries in one form or another, to the point that even children are aware of it. It also happens to be only that: a story, and one with precious little evidence to back it up outside the heads of those who tell it.
While some economists imagine primordial villages and basic agricultural systems where birds are exchanged for flowers to illustrate the history of money, Abel and Bernanke come up with something much more immediate: The economist is hungry.
Barter systems would indeed make it difficult for an economist to eat lunch. Would a restaurateur exchange his goods for a lecture on monetary policy? Perhaps not, and the meal goes unsold and the economist goes hungry. Thankfully, the economist has students to whom he can sell his knowledge for dollars, which then function as a medium of exchange with which he can purchase his meal. The restaurateur is paid, the economist is satiated, while the students have learned something worthwhile.
But the only people who pay Ben Bernanke directly for his thoughts are investors. Students do not. Perhaps instead they borrow money to pay for the lecture, along with other lectures, a place to live, and the associated administrative costs of providing lectures to students. The interest on the debt eats up most of the students’ subsequent income from the job market, leaving them with no chance of ever paying off the principal in a reasonable timeframe. The debt will stick with them forever, even shaving off dollars from their Social Security checks, and make the normal mileposts of adult life—marriage, children—difficult or impossible to achieve. Fed up with their narrowed prospects, they join a group of activists who have taken up space, literally, in the shadow of New York’s financial institutions and they start talking about what they have in common: their debt. And they decide to do something about it.
Now this story, like the one the economist tells about the origin of money, is a stylized one used to illustrate broader truths about the world. But unlike what economists have said about money, it largely accords with known facts, and for that we have to thank the radical anthropologist David Graeber, who died earlier this week at the age of 59.
“We owe David so much,” the filmmaker and debt organizer Astra Taylor told me, noting immediately how he would have disapproved of using the language of obligation to encapsulate his life’s work.
Graeber had a long and distinguished career as both an activist and academic when the publication of his magnum opus, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and his work helping organize Occupy Wall Street in 2011 made him that rare thing: a serious scholar and organizer who garnered respectful profiles in Bloomberg Businessweek and the Financial Times. He spent the last decade-plus at Goldsmiths and the London School of Economics after Yale controversially cut him off from tenure, which he suggested was due to his being “quite active in the Global Justice Movement and other anarchist-inspired projects.”
“The thing to understand about David is that he really was someone who equally had a foot in social movements and intellectual scholarly production,” Taylor said. “There are people who are known as leftists through their writing and the internet and never do anything that qualifies as organizing.”
Graeber was a link not just between grassroots movements and the academic world, but between generations of leftist social movements. He was a veteran of the anti-globalization protests in the 1990s who helped start Occupy, one of the facilitators of a debtor movement that would influence the policy agendas of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He was a supporter of the United Kingdom’s anti–tuition fee protests in 2010, which would be the seed of the Momentum movement and Jeremy Corbyn’s ascendance to the leadership of the Labour Party.
The question Debt sought to ask was one that seemed natural in the wake of a debt crisis that would claim millions of homes and thrust much of the industrialized world into first a sharp economic crisis, then a self-destructive series of austerity measures designed to stem the tide of sovereign debt.
What was debt? What was its history, where did it come from, and how did it take such a central role in our personal and economic lives? Why was our language of obligation and morality the same as the one used to describe our credit card bills? Why does the Lord’s Prayer ask God to “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors”?
To even begin to answer this question, Graeber had to start with money and the bad history used to explain it. Generations of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians had tried to find the origins of money (John Maynard Keynes referred to his own studies of money as his “Babylonian Madness”), but economists, especially in their textbooks, resorted to fancy.
These just-so stories about how money emerged from barter can evoke a kind of childish primitivism (“You have roosters, but you want roses,” one textbook says) or use imaginary historical examples. Even the stalwart progressive Joseph Stiglitz uses “what appears to be an imaginary New England or Midwestern town,” Graeber writes, to explain how money can replace barter, in the form of farmer Henry selling his firewood to “someone else for money” and then buying shoes from Joshua.
Graeber, in contrast, identifies the origin of money as “the most important story ever told” for economists, tracing it back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and even to Aristotle. This was “the great founding myth of economics,” he writes, that money was not in fact the creation of governments. It followed that economics was its own form of inquiry, separate from other ways of thinking about social life.
Graeber points out this account “has little to do with anything we observe when we examine how economic life is actually conducted, in real communities and marketplaces, almost anywhere—where one is much more likely to discover everyone in debt to everyone else in a dozen different ways, and that most transactions take place without the use of currency.”
Whereas the traditional account puts barter before money and money before debt, Graeber reverses this, noting that barter tends to only emerge in pre-industrialized societies when exchange happens outside of a familiar cultural context.
In the historical record of ancient societies in Mesopotamia, for example, there are prices of things that may be denominated by “money” (what an economist would call the “unit of account”). But merchants “mostly did much of their dealings on credit,” and “ordinary people buying beer from the ‘ale women’ or local innkeepers did so by running up a tab, to be settled at harvest time in barley or anything they had on hand.”
Where debt emerged in Sumeria, so did novel forms of social domination, whose eventual effects were so dire as to necessitate harsh management of its lenders. Those early Sumerian loans to peasants quickly led to peonage, with farmers “forced into perpetual service in the lender’s household.” Fields would go unsown or not be harvested as farmers would leave their homes in order to avoid collection. The result was periodic debt amnesties.
The book covers everything from Neil Bush’s divorce to speculation that the major world religions were responses to the coin-using great empires of the “Axial Age” of 800 B.C.E. to 600 C.E. (“It would be foolish to argue that all Axial Age philosophy was simply a meditation on the nature of coinage, but …” runs one especially expansive passage.) There is a reexamination of Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs being spurred on by his own debt, and vignettes about the functioning of debt and money in Madagascar, where Graeber did field anthropological research.
Debt’s deep dive into the whole history of civilization had a paradigm-shifting political point. Graeber wanted to show that “war, conquest and slavery … played a central role in converting human economies into market ones,” and that “historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.”
He wanted to show that not only did money not arise from barter but also that states and markets worked hand in hand in its creation. And more than that, he wanted to interrogate an economic and historical worldview that tried to “reduce all human relations to exchange, as if our ties to society, even to the cosmos itself, can be imagined on the terms of a business deal.”
He ended Debt with a call for “some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt.” This would not only
relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also … would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way.
Thanks to Debt’s almost absurd good timing, as well as his own involvement in Occupy, Graeber became one of the most prominent leaders in the post-Occupy anti-debt movement. Or rather, in the spirit of an anarchist activist, he enabled others to take the lead. Graeber’s efforts in helping start what would later become the Debt Collective were more like being “a facilitator or putting a band together,” Taylor, one of the group’s leaders, said.
The initial group that Graeber helped organize, Strike Debt, instituted a “rolling jubilee,” buying up medical debt and forgiving it. The group evolved to organize challenges to student loan debt incurred at for-profit colleges and has claimed to have helped eliminate over $1 billion of debt. Its efforts garnered the respectful attention of The New Yorker, which described the jubilee as “one of the few Occupy offshoots that has had a tangible effect on people’s lives.”
Debt Collective’s work would be echoed directly by the dueling calls from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to cancel student loan debt during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The ideas in Debt also have been picked up by the Keynes-inspired thinkers that make up the school of Modern Monetary Theory, who see the state as a tool to mobilize the economy’s resources for the common good, unlimited by its ability to tax or take on debts and deficits. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referenced MMT when it came to funding the Green New Deal, and a leading MMT thinker, Stephanie Kelton, worked with Sanders. One of the brightest stars in the MMT firmament, Nathan Tankus, is an avid reader and admirer of Graeber.
“If we end up winning the fight over debt, money, and deficits and manage to fundamentally reshape this society it will have been in no small part of because of Graeber’s work,” Tankus said.
And while he is credited with coming up with the slogan “We are the 99 percent”—perhaps Occupy’s most enduring rhetorical legacy—he claimed that he could only be held responsible for “the 99 percent,” while “two Spanish indignados and a Greek anarchist” were responsible for “We,” and only later did a “food-not-bombs veteran put the ‘are’ between them.”
This impulse to go beyond himself, to submerge himself in the collective, wasn’t foreign to his scholarly work, either. At the time of his death, Graeber was working with archaeologist David Wengrow on a history of social inequality. It’s supposed to cover the last 42,000 years.