Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition

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Regarding the importance of strategic motives, while approximately 38% of defaulters do have the ability to pay, we find that the estimated likelihood of default among low equity borrowers with the ability to pay is fairly low. Specifically, our IV estimates indicate that an increase in the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio from 75% to 125% raises the default probability of a high residual income borrower from about 3% to about 5%. However, we find that an increase in the LTV ratio from 75% to 125% raises the default probability for a low residual income borrower from 10% to 17%. This finding highlights a quantitatively important interaction between ability to pay and borrower equity in the pay/default decision. This tiny book presents a good overview of how governments and finance collaborated to create the debt crisis, and how it produces revolving-door debt circumstances for individuals and less-powerful governments. Chapter 2 is especially good. Apparently, just after the original Italian production opened, women took over the cash registers in a supermarket in Milan and only paid the prices from before the recent large increases, and a court freed them. While there were cheers for some of the political points made in this production, I can't imagine many of those in the press night audience, who seemed mostly young and very well-spoken, would have raided the Sainsbury's Local next door on their way home, but who knows?

Can't Pay? Won't Pay! Is based on Dario Fo's "Non Si Paga? Non Si Paga!", a pointedly political work that he wrote to highlight the plight of ordinary Italian workers during the economic crises of the 1970s, but although the characters retain Italian names there's no room in this production for cod Italian accents. On a colourful multi-room set resembling a children's adventure playground from designer Cécile Trémolières that promises the anarchic fun of a farce, Antonia (Samatha Power) relates to her younger friend Margherita (Katherine Pearce) the story of housewives at the supermarket protesting about the doubling of food prices (like the cost of the university car park I was parked on) and then eventually rob the place. Antonia has bags full of shopping, but she has to hide it before her morally righteous husband Giovanni (Roger Morlidge) comes home. It's a farce, so of course he comes home early, and Margherita is persuaded to stuff the shopping inside her coat while Antonia tells Giovanni that her friend is pregnant to explain the bump, using his complete ignorance of the workings of the female body to weave a web of lies to set up the rest of the story.

To compare the magnitudes of residual income loss and changes in equity on default, we show that our baseline estimates indicate that head of household job loss has an equivalent effect on the likelihood of default as a 35% decline in home equity, and if both the head and spouse lose their job this has the same impact on default as a 55% decline in home equity. These point estimates are very stable when we restrict the analysis to only involuntary job loss spells. To measure unemployment, we use the fact that the PSID provides the employment status for both the head and the spouse over the previous calendar year as well as at the time of the interview. We discuss our exact unemployment variable definitions in detail in Section 3.2, where we present the results from our empirical models. Using the measure of employment status at the time of the survey yields an unemployment rate of 5% in our sample of mortgagors. For the years in question (2009, 2011, and 2013), the average of the headline unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was 8.5%. 6 All of our instruments are strong predictors of residual income, and deliver similarly large estimates of the causal effect of residual income on mortgage default. Our IV estimates indicate that a 10% decline in residual income raises the probability of default by between 1.1 and 2.5 percentage points. Dario Fo is Italy’s leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires. Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! is set in Milan, but “the problems are desperately familiar…Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed” (Michael Coveney, Financial Times) Dario Fo is Italy’s leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires. Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! is set in Milan, but “the problems are desperately familiar…Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed” (Michael Coveney, Financial Times) [125]…more We Can’t Pay? We Won’t Pay! by Dario Fo – eBook Details

Your employer shouldn’t dismiss you for making the employment tribunal claim, but it might make things difficult at work.If your employer has made a mistake, they should fix it straight away by paying what they owe you. If you don’t think it’s a mistake, you should still talk to them to try and resolve the situation. Ask your employer to pay you what they owe you It was total rubbish.We left at the interval, earlier would have been preferable but we didn't wish to upset those who seemed transfixed by this garbage. The one redeeming feature was that there was no "f" word during the first half. Absolutely detested it. Across the battlefield, debt holders are negotiating from a significant position of power. They already have a lot of money and a government willing to bail them out, so they can afford to be patient. They influence and write local, state, and federal legislation around debt. They have nothing to gain from giving in to debtors' demands for *blanket* forgiveness: if they forgive debt, they lose money, but if they do not forgive debt, they lose less money. You should think about whether you’d be better off leaving your job. If you resign, you can still take legal action against your employer. If the reason they haven’t paid is that they’re having money problems, it might be difficult to get any pay they owe you.

The Debt Collective has given us a visionary roadmap for forming an army of debtors that is powerful enough to make capital scream." —Naomi Klein It is a funny play, that mixes farce (most appreciated in the character Margherita), really strong political messages, the stage manager (that's right, he's in there, too), the Pope… yes, even the Pope is inside this madness. If you think your employer might never pay you and you’re considering resigning, you should talk to an adviser. If your employer has underpaid you Having read the play previously i felt that all of the plays humor could be lost on me as i knew it inside out. But as i watched it, the play the old jokes i had read a thousand times before leaped out at me with fresh new meaning and the frequent comical entrances of various props people was not only funny but also created a unique way of distancing the audience to remind them of the plays political nature. Jo Donellys use of script was relatively forgotten due to her acting skills and i thouroughly enjoyed myself throughout the entire performance. Now we’re told we’ve got to pay these energy increases, these huge energy increases, as well. And we’re finding ourselves in this impossible situation,” she said. “So it’s really bleak.”In the Online Appendix, we consider an alternate definition of affordability based on the Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) guidelines, and find consistent estimates of strategic default. 3. Default and Residual Income When you go to see one of Dario Fo's plays you have to be prepared for the social commentary and the political and religious criticism. The play is set in the 1974 Italy when unemployment and food shortage were latent and freedom of expression was supposed to be a right - but really it wasn't. It emerged during cross-examination that the prices fixed by the supermarkets were out-and-out robbery. In the end all the women who had been charged were freed because "there was no case to answer". To put it simply, the court decided that those shoppers had paid the correct value of the goods. Consequently, you can deduce that the owners had arbitrarily increased the process, doubling them. The bosses were the real thieves. some people have no sense of the theatre, why do people have to be so critical. They play might not be that great but you could at least have the common decency to enjoy it.

I went to see this play on a school trip and it is superb. The acting was mind-blowing, the plot was hilarious and the way Jo handled the script was excellent. As described below, the combination of mortgage data with borrower information on income, employment status, balance sheets, and consumption enable us to measure ability to pay, and analyze its importance in the default decision in considerably more detail than in the previous literature. From snooker halls to pubs, at work or at the school gates, everyone is talking about how much they’re already struggling and their fear of when bills go up again in October,” a spokesman for the group said.

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That said, I find this book a little light on the details when it comes to organizing around debt abolition. It's a thorny practical problem on an individual level. Refusing to pay debt can absolutely rip up your life in the short term; your unwillingness to pay can lead to garnished wages, denial of housing, and so on. So many folks still have a lot to lose in the short term. And, as the book stresses, debt abolition without a radical restructuring of multiple social systems--water and power, work, housing, education, incarceration, medicine--will be incomplete, and debt would begin to accumulate again immediately. So comprehensive debt relief won't happen overnight, meaning that debt abolitionists will be in riskier positions for a longer period of time. Following this descriptive analysis, we quantify the relative importance of strategic motives versus ability to pay by analyzing how changes in home equity and in residual income affect the probability of default in a multivariate setting. We first fit linear probability and logit models of default on a rich set of covariates that allow us to control for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The UK's first performance of Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! was in London in 1978. It was a success and was revived for London’s West End in 1981 where it ran for 2 years. “Time Out” reported, “Fo’s ingenious farce careers through an escalating progression of improbabilities and confusions until it concludes with a thorough and well-timed solution." (I saw that performance towards the end of its run.)