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!”