I hang my hat at Tumblr
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At last count, Steven Katz owed $80,000 on his six credit cards, and he has no intention of paying any of it off. In fact, he’d like to show you how to be like him—a “credit terrorist” in open revolt against the banking system.
Debtorboards.com (“Sue Your Creditor and Win!”), a five-year-old online forum where he’s collected countless tricks and tactics for evading and repelling persistent creditors. He’s written how-tos on shielding your assets from seizure, luring collection agencies into expensive lawsuits, and frustrating private investigators looking for debtors on the run. He’s even infiltrated the bill collectors’ forums, where he’s been tagged a “credit jihadist” and his site’s been called a “credit terrorist training camp,” a label he embraces. “Debtorboards is one of the biggest and most successful temper tantrums ever,” the 59-year-old Katz boasts. The site has more than 10,000 members—double what it had in 2009.
”(via alternet-working)
“Someday people will look back and wonder, What were they thinking? Why, in the midst of a stalled recovery, with the economy fragile and job creation slowing to a trickle, did the nation’s leaders decide that the thing to do—in order to raise the debt limit, normally a routine matter—was to spend less money, making job creation all the more difficult?”
What Were They Thinking? by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books
Um, I’d like us to just skip ahead to that point, OK?
Obama for America: W. on the job market facing recent graduates: I graduated with a BA in...
W. on the job market facing recent graduates:
I graduated with a BA in Psychology in May of 2010. I have been searching for a job since graduation and have applied for over 600 jobs that I am qualified for, or overqualified for.
I just got off the phone with a potential employer who let me…
It’s so nice to see the Obama campaign blogging submissions from former presidents.
Some really great analysis of what the WeArethe99Percent folks are after, and and answer to those who say “these people don’t know what they want.” The takeaway:
Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay.
(via Soup)
“Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens. Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families. This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage.”
“It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.”
Who are the 99 percent? - The Washington Post
Nice bit from Ezra Klein on a Tumblr you should be following.
Federal Nondefense Investment plus State and Local Investment plus Private Investment in Structures. Basically total public and private investment in our built environment.
Yes. This is kind of terrifying
The Solman Scale of under— and unemployed rose from 18.09 percent to 18.29 percent. That means 29,286,000 Americans say they want a full-time job, but don’t have one.
Oh, for God’s sake.
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Two weeks after Lehman’s bankruptcy in September 2008, Morgan Stanley countered concerns that it might be next to go by announcing it had “strong capital and liquidity positions.” The statement, in a Sept. 29, 2008, press release about a $9 billion investment from Tokyo-based Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., said nothing about Morgan Stanley’s Fed loans.
That was the same day as the firm’s $107.3 billion peak in borrowing from the central bank, which was the source of almost all of Morgan Stanley’s available cash, according to the lending data and documents released more than two years later by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The amount was almost three times the company’s total profits over the past decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
”(via quotingthecrisis)
Down But Not Out: 'I'm not stupid but I sure have been made to feel that way.'
My story won’t be any different from the article and stories I read on your website but it is good to know I am not alone. Everything people wrote about feeling horrible about themselves and not sleeping, not going out, not having money for food is true of me! I have a BS in Education and taught…
