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The Devil’s Salary: A Conversation on Debt
March 28, 2014 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm GMT
LAUNCH Friday March 28th, 7.00pm
Join Andrew Ross at MayDay Rooms for a discussion of his new book Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal
We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy—where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street and the City of London, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system.
Andrew Ross teaches at New York University, and is an activist with Strike Debt, the Rolling Jubilee, and the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. He is the author of, most recently, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.
http://www.orbooks.com/
He will be in conversation with Andrew McGettigan, a freelance writer on the arts, philosophy and education. He is a trenchant analyst of the financial transformation of higher education in the UK, and the author of The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education.
There will also be a display of historical material from the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa archive held at MDR