“This is so sad,” she said. “It’s going to take years to fix all this.”
An automated radio message came in telling her to stay out of the city’s airspace. She had Frans circle Manhattan offshore, rising a bit as they did. There was a layer of puffy summer clouds drifting in from the west and over the city. The dramatic alternations of sunlight and cloud shadow made the long spine of Manhattan look like a piebald dragon, slain and lying dead in the bay. Amelia called home to tell Vlade she was going to make a circuit or two before coming in. He was with other people in the dining hall, she could hear. She said hi to them all.
“It looks like the superscrapers uptown didn’t sustain much damage,” she said. “Do you know how they did?”
“We hear they’re okay,” Charlotte said.
“People charged them last night,” Vlade said. “Tried to get in them to get some shelter, but they were kept out.”
“But couldn’t they be turned into temporary refugee shelters? It looks like they’d fit everybody in Central Park, more or less.”
Charlotte said, “That’s what I was thinking. But the mayor won’t do it.”
“Well shit!”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Hi Amelia!” came the voice of Roberto.
“Roberto! Stefan, are you there too?”
“I am here.”
“I’m so glad to hear your voices! What did you do in the storm?”
“We almost got eaten by muskrats,” Roberto said.
“No! I love muskrats!”
“We talked them out of it,” Stefan said. “Now we like them too.”
“Maybe we can do a study together. They’ll be rebuilding, just like us. I can see that the storm surge got pretty high.”
“Twenty-two feet!” the boys shouted.
“A lot of buildings are gone. How did our building do?” Amelia asked.
“Okay,” Vlade said. “The farm was wiped out, but the windows all held. This is one tough old building.”
“No farm? What will we eat?”
“Fish,” Vlade said. “Clams. Oysters. And so on. We might be a charity case for a while.”
“That’s not good.”
“Everybody will be.”
“Not the people in the superscrapers,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t like that,” Amelia said.
She told them she would let them know when she was coming in, then ended the call. She floated back north hanging over the East River, looking down at the wreckage in the shallows of Harlem and Queens and the Bronx, then at the immense towers of the Cloister cluster, metallic and colorful in the sun. Even though she had ascended to twenty-five hundred feet, the tallest towers still overtopped her.
The image of the boys’ muskrats came to her. So many animals would certainly have drowned in a surge that high. In fact at that very moment she spotted a pile of animal bodies, piled like bonfire wood on the big north meadow of the park.
Something turned in her as she realized what that little pile was, like a key turning in a lock, and she sat down hard on her pilot’s stool. After blindly staring down at the city for a long time, she couldn’t have said how long, she tapped the buttons that got her back in the cloud, and went live with her people around the world.
“Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing.”
As she was saying this, she turned the Assisted Migration around and headed south. “Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see.”
She looked into the bridge camera. “So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today.”
Her call line was lighting up, and she could see that Nicole wanted to talk to her. And her friends at the Met tower wanted to talk to her too. She thought she had better take the call from her friends, as she wasn’t really sure what to say next.
She paused her cloud feed and answered the call from the Met. Charlotte and Franklin and Vlade all said hi at once, sounding relieved she had answered. They also sounded surprised, and maybe a bit alarmed, that she had said what she had said.
She cut them off. “Listen guys, I’m going for it here. You can help me or I can just wing it on my own, but I’m not going to back down. Because the time is now. Do you understand me? The time is now.” She was getting upset, and she paused to collect herself. “I’m up here looking down at it, and I’m telling you, the time is now. So you’d better help me!”
“We’ll help you,” Franklin said loudly over the clatter of their voices. “Put an earbud in and just keep going for it.”
“Yay,” Amelia said.
“Really?” Charlotte said.
“Why not?” Franklin said. “She may be right. And she’s already done it. So listen, Amelia, just say it your way, and if you seem to be having trouble, pause and listen to the voices in your ear, and we’ll feed you lines.”
“Good,” Amelia said. She put in an earbud and heard her friends arguing among themselves like little mice in her left ear. She unpaused her feed to her people and spoke again to the cloud.
“What I mean by a householders’ strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages … maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated … So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? … That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
“You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
“… What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged. I always wondered what that meant. It doesn’t make sense as a word, but—okay, never mind. The point is, when we stop funding their follies they will crash real quick.
“At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real
. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!”
Amelia took a deep breath, listened to the voices chattering desperately in her ear: Charlotte and Franklin in rapid counterpoint, having a little real-time editing war over what she should say. Amelia just repeated whatever sounded good to her in what she managed to catch of their discourse. Kind of a mélange of the two of them, but so what.
“I know this all might sound radical. A little extreme. But we have to do something, right? Or nothing will change. It will keep going on with them wrecking things. And this householders’ strike is the kind of revolution where they can’t shoot you down in the public square. It’s called fiscal noncompliance. It uses the power of money against money. In fact it’s a very neat trick, if you ask me. You may be thinking that it’s such a neat trick that it probably wasn’t my idea, and that’s true. I’m an airship pilot with an animal show in the cloud. Here I am! So, yeah. Still just Amelia Black. But I’ve seen the damage done. I look down on it all the time. I carry the animals away from it. And I’m looking down at it now. There’s a pile of dead animals in the park … And I’ve talked with friends who have been working up this plan. And I think it’s a good one. It’s not just silly Amelia making another bonehead move—I mean, wait here just a second …
“… Because at this point it’s democracy versus capitalism. We the people have to band together and take over. We can only do that by mass action … It’s a case of all for one and one for all. If enough of us do it they can’t put us in jail, because there will be too many of us. We’ll have taken over. They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers.
“… So, tell everyone you know about this, and feel free to share this show and its message, to forward it and all that … And anyone who stops payment on their odious debts and tells us about it, immediately becomes a full member of the Householders’ Union. They’re happy to have everyone join them, so do it. Send in your information, membership is free right now. They might ask for union dues later. They’ll fix your credit rating later. For now they’ve got it covered. And it’s definitely a case of the more the merrier. You know, I’ve noticed that everything that is really worth doing, it’s always the more the merrier.
“… Maybe not everything. What I hope we’ll end up with is a big householders’ union, or a co-op, or whatever you want to call it. Used to be called government, and maybe it will be again, once we get people in office who will actually work for the people rather than the banks … So, yeah. The more of you join in, the better our chances will be! So talk it over with your family and friends. Let’s try it and see what happens! And if it doesn’t work, you know, whatever. We can all talk it over in jail. If there’s enough of us, maybe this whole island here will be the jail. So it won’t be that different from the way things are now, right?
“… Oh. Hey, my friends are telling me that I should probably quit while I’m ahead. That is so often true! So that’s it for this episode of Assisted Migration with Amelia Black. See you next time!”
On the ferry-boats the hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose …
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide …
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation or ever so many generations hence …
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried—
—Walt Whitman
h) the city
Strategic defaulting. Class-action suits. Mass rallies. Staying home from work. Staying out of private transport systems. Refusing consumer consumption beyond the necessities. Withdrawing deposits. Denouncing all forms of rent-seeking. Ignoring mass media. Withholding scheduled payments. Fiscal noncompliance. Loud public complaining.
The interesting volume Why Civil Resistance Works makes the case that nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth supposes this greater success for nonviolent resistance movements happens precisely because they are less violent, and therefore more likely to win agreement and compliance from the governments being opposed, and from the people whose welfare is supposedly in question. Seizing the state to achieve economic justice is seen as the principal success of these kinds of movements. General strikes and people massing in urban centers are usually understood to be the classic forms of civil resistance, but all the other methods listed above fit the definition, and have been effective in the past.
So, in the summer of 2142 people started doing all these things. The actors were many, as there was no cohesion or agreement on either means or ends. It began spontaneously soon after Hurricane Fyodor struck New York, when the emergency response to that catastrophe did not include the requisitioning of the empty residential towers of the city. This was the spark that lit the train of subsequent events. Riots in New York spread around the world at varying levels of intensity, depending on local circumstances. And in tough times it takes riots, Clover insists in Riot. Strike. Riot, to drive the point into capital’s thick skull that a change is on its way and must occur, indeed is occurring.
The coastlines naturally led the way in this rioting, being most stressed, but even in Denver significant percentages of the population joined the various householders’ unions and refused to pay rents of all kinds, mortgages and student loans especially. This form of resistance was expectedly popular. Purchase of nonessential consumer goods also dropped massively everywhere, crippling business growth by way of a perfectly legal fuck-you, which after all was merely a case of people not spending money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need. So, although there were only scattered mass demonstrations and occupations of city squares, and the results of the fiscal noncompliance were hard to see and report, there was a powerful sense of some underwater current in the global civilization now pulling it out into an unknown sea. History was happening. When that happens you can feel it.
The tug out to sea was naturally felt by the markets, as they are a sensitive instrument when it comes to noting volatility. One element that went into determining the IPPI was householder confidence, widely regarded as one of the fastest and most accurate indicators of housing price change. It had been considered impossible to rig or artificially shift householder confidence measures; polling five million households was standard practice now, and so reported levels of confidence were seen as indicators that could not be manipulated, being so much larger than any manipulation could be. They showed a real thing. But the Householders’ Union grew so big so fast that it influenced the behaviors of about twenty percent of all households, and the mood of a much greater percentage than that. So its calls for financial noncompliance could all by themselves torque the indexes.
The IPPI numbers therefore fell sharply, and that dragged down the Case-Shiller numbers, and this caused the previous rapidly rising coastal housing price average to be regarded as a bubble, and that all by itself caused the bubble to burst, in a classic the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. That bubble’s popping caused all of its derivative bubbles to pop too, which caused all banks and investment firms to call in all their liquid assets and to stop loaning anything at all, even the standard interbank loans that kept the real economy going. Quickly, promptly in fact, one of the largest investment firms collapsed and declared bankruptcy, and the fiscal relationships between all the big financial firms were now so tight that all of the biggest private banks in the United States and Europe then dashed to their central banks to demand immediate relief and salvation, in the form of massive new infusions of money, to ease their panic and keep the entire system from crashing.
All this was reported; everyone around the world was watching it unfold. Finance had once again frozen, as confidence died and trust disappeared, and no one knew what paper out there was good anymore—no one knew what was money and what was dust. The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway.