Occupy’s new ground: Debt resistance
A new manual marks the launch of a new campaign and, possibly, a movement
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/18/occupys_new_ground_debt_resistance/
This is a very interesting idea, though I fear it really represents the seed for the return to debtors prison here in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that the oligarchy has taken advantage of the little guy (the shrinking middle class is the quite clear evidence) and bend and twist the law to suit themselves. However, for the little guy to also bend and twist the law almost certainly means bad things are going to happen to the little guy. As a case in point, just this morning a good friend of mine was telling me about how the SEC has ‘cracked down’ on a trading scheme (perfectly legal up to this point!) that he was using (to good effect, I might add; I tried to interest him into building a hedge fund around it, but he wants to keep it as a hobby, I guess). Anyway, he has been making so-called covered trades with options such that he had locked in his maximum loss when he submitted the trades though, in principle, based on the underlying value of the stock, he was ‘risking’ large sums of money. There really wasn’t any risk (even on paper) because the paired trades he made protected each other, yet the underlying transaction is now the one that the regulators will be evaluating, not the actual funds at risk. I am quite certain that if you read the regulations you would find fine print that exempts all large, politically connected trading organizations from any such enforcement, this is pure and simple a law put in place that impacts a politically insignificant population so that the politicians and regulators can crow about how tough they are on Wall Street. Why this is apropos to the article mentioned above is because it is specifically targeted legislation/regulation that is all about maximizing the returns of the oligarchy at the expense of the rest of the country.
Were this nascent movement to actually gain steam and somehow avoid being prosecuted out of existence I see it having a huge impact. A lot of the oligarchy depends on us sheeple being unwilling or unable to turn to alternatives. The US has built itself into a debt driven society so unwinding all that debt has unfortunate consequences for our economy in the short-term. However, at first blush it would seem that much of that impact would come to the issuers, buyers and holders of that debt, classes of people that seem to mostly be the oligarchy, so it seems like a good way to ‘stick it to the man’ AND improve our personal situation.
In case you are interested here is a link to the debt document:
