I know what it’s like to be hounded by bill collectors. And regardless of how I feel about the Tea Party’s politics, if they spearheaded an initiative to abolish the $6,000 in medical debt I had racked up in Houston, Texas, after breaking my elbow with no health insurance, and if they did the same with thousands of others’ debt out of sheer desire to do good, I would feel radically different about the Tea Party. And if they led a disaster recovery effort that was on the ground in affected communities long before governments and well-funded relief organizations were able to provide help, I might even think about joining them. Occupy Wall Street, the populist economic justice movement the corporate-owned media and corporate-owned political class has been declaring as “dead” for months now, has been doing all of the above.When the camps were evicted, the media breathlessly reported about the official death of the movement and blamed nonviolent protesters for the city governments squandering millions of tax dollars on constant and overwhelming police presence and re-seeding grass in parks (that somehow costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to do). And after more than 30,000 marched through New York City on May Day, the media gleefully announced the death of Occupy Wall Street, since the ragtag populist movement didn’t succeed in getting 100% of Americans to take off work to participate in the general strike. By the time #S17 came around, the weekend of Occupy Wall Street’s 1-year anniversary, there were tens of thousands of people in the streets of New York, and the NYPD arrested hundreds of nonviolent protesters (including me), yet the media coverage was scant and inconsequential, and garnered just a passing glance.

Yet despite the Occupy funeral dirge that’s been played in dozens of headlines, the movement has flourished in its post-encampment phase. Occupy Sandy has become a full-scale military-style operation that has developed a highly-efficient means of training and deploying volunteers, storing and transporting goods, feeding the hungry and putting clothes on those who have none. Police who were arresting protesters on #S17 weekend are now handing bags of clothes down assembly lines, side by side with those same protesters.

Occupy’s solidarity through charity has affected people beyond New York as well, as the Strike Debt Rolling Jubilee has raised almost half a million dollars in small donations to erase $8.4 million (and counting) of distressed medical, student loan, and mortgage debt less than a week after launching. While speculators trade the debt of poor, sick, and injured people on the market like a commodity, purchase it for pennies on the dollar from the banks, and move to collect the full amount for profit, Occupy Wall Street’s Strike Debt project (born on #S17) decided to do the same thing, except upon purchasing the debt, they would abolish it. While I didn’t donate to any political campaign all year, I gladly gave $100 of money I can’t really afford to give to Strike Debt, and slept like a baby that night knowing that my contribution erased $2,000 of someone’s debt.

[A.K.: Yeah, me, too. I didn’t donate to political campaigns this year, but I gladly gave $100 to Strike Debt and slept like a baby that night.]