Jumaane's Debt

Recently, my take on establishment politics shaming a black candidate for his debt was published in the NY Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-cheap-attack-on-jumaane-williams-20180807-story.html

Here's my full, unedited version:

Recently, the race for New York’s Lieutenant Governor between the incumbent, Kathy Hochul, and Jumaane Williams, the Brooklyn Councilmember, reached an ugly but significant moment.

After reports came out that Jumaane defaulted on his debt over previous small business loans, Kathy immediately went after him, releasing a negative ad portraying her opponent as a deadbeat debtor who can’t be trusted with the state’s multibillion dollar budget.

Perhaps if this was taking place before the 2008 financial meltdown, caused by creditors and lenders, the public might’ve fallen for Kathy’s rhetoric. Mankind has struggled for thousands of years with the concept of “debt”, though our core view is clear: You owe someone money, you are morally obligated to pay them back (Noticed I used “mankind”, not “humankind”).

We must recognize that we are as a society the biggest hypocrites in perpetuating the vilification of debtors in our communities. Why? Because we, as a nation, are in trillions in debt to our foreign allies with no intent or even a plan to pay it back. Why not? Because we are the world’s remaining superpower with by far the largest armed forces in the world.

Debt is all relative to who owes the money and who lends it. There’s no way for countries like China to enforce the debt we owe them as long as our military imbalance remains.

When it comes to collecting what we’re owed from smaller nations, we rely on authorities like the IMF to make sure every dollar is returned with interest. In a similar way, our local and state governments allow all sorts of “austerity" measures to punish and scare individuals who are in default and can’t pay back to private lenders.

For example, in 19 states, local authorities are confiscating the drivers’ licenses and other government licenses of those who can’t pay back their student loans. In New York, there is a debt collecting practice known as “sewer service”, where false affidavits claiming notice has been served enable collectors to win when unsuspecting debtors don’t show up in court, allowing them to seize bank accounts and automatically deduct from salaries.

In the underground world, mobs use “leg-breakers” as enforcement to collect debt. In mainstream society, we use “austerity measures”.

The problem is that for the last 15 years, creditors and lenders have relied on outdated supply, demand, and consumption charts to calculate growth, and our central bank system has not normalized their policies since the 2008 breakdown. This has led to zero and even negative interest rates, culminating in a completely rigged system against the debtors.

Simply put, there isn’t enough money and growth to pay back the trillions of interest and loans and the party is about to end.

For corporate politicians on both sides of the aisle, they are protecting their donors’ interests by doing whatever they can to “keep the party going”, meaning continuing the “rat race” so the people in it continue making minimum payments on the interest to the creditors.

This means taking out borderline racist ads, shaming a political candidate for being in debt.

This means going into places like Puerto Rico without a full plan to make its local communities more resilient against creditors, who seek to recoup their interest through full austerity measures.

This means barring innovative long-term solutions, like Blockchain technology, from coming to New York by instituting the nation’s most stringent regulations (BitLicense), all to allay fears of crypto-economics disrupting our debt-driven growth society.

The irony of Kathy Hochul shaming Jummane Williams about his debt is that she’s directly tied to an office, led by Governor Andrew Cuomo, where a top aide, Joseph Percoco, was convicted of pay-to-play, trying to sell access in order to pay off his insurmountable debt (close to $800,000).

Again, it matters who’s doing the borrowing.

The double standards in Kathy’s treatment of a white man who committed a federal crime to pay off his debt versus a black man trying his best to settle business loans, show the dirty side of how we are all guilty of perceiving “debt” in our society. If Kathy wants to shame Jumaane for his debt then she should also shame the governor for allowing his top aide to sell his office to pay off his debt.

From campaigning to governing, we have a responsibility, especially in New York, to have honest conversations about debt and money. It was our underwriting, derivatives, and algorithms that justified the leveraging of under-qualified borrowers and debtors, which ultimately made a handful of people even wealthier for predicting when they will default.

It was our constituents in the finance industry that convinced President Obama and Washington to bail out the failing banks with a stimulus package, while we left thousands of mortgage borrowers in bankruptcy.

We can no longer afford to get by just using slogans like “protecting Main Street over Wall Street” to pander at rallies, not while 45 million Americans suffer from $1.5 trillion in student debt.

Instead of shaming those on the losing side of a rigged, debt-driven society, we must do more to fight for an economy of abundance where we no longer have to accept a “win-lose” dynamic.

As a member of the New York State Assembly, I have proposed creating the nation’s most comprehensive office dedicated to financial and economic resilience. This office will focus on developing economically resilient communities based on peer-to-peer and cooperative models to support a rising collaborative economy, which will bring countless people out of the vicious, debt-driven cycles.