Occupy encore

[Young Master Smeet]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/13/occupy-wall-st-debt-buying-heart-capitalism

Guardian wrote:

Across the United States, 2,693 people have received a letter in the last few months, which identified a debt and read: "You are no longer under any obligation to settle this account with the original creditor, the bill collector, or anyone else." This is the work of the Rolling Jubilee project – a non-profit initiative which buys personal debt for pennies on the dollar in the secondary market (where debt is sold to companies who then resell it to collection agencies) but then simply cancels it.

They have used "$400,000 of this to purchase and cancel an astonishing $14.7m of debt" So, they're buying debt that is already earmarked as unrecoverable, making a loss for the original lender, and instead of trying to spend a little more to at least recoup the resale value they bought it at (which might be more economic and thus possible for a debt recovery firm) they are simply wiping the lot.

Now, this does serve a propaganda purpose to show the real value of the debts people are being chased for (that is the market value of the debt as debt, not the nominal value fo the initial loan – we could say in a Marxian sense, the use-value of the debt to its buyer is the expected return).

There is a simple objection to this strategy, once we get past it's propaganda value, which is that the function of capitalist crisis is to destroy the value of the misallocated capital, clearing the way for renewed expansion.  This strategy effectively sees workers clubbing together to destroy the capitalists value for them, and basically destroy the value of their $400K.

[jondwhite]

Seems a bit of a joke this buying up debt from the secondary debt market.More interesting is the prediction made by Gartner in October of a larger Occupy style movement in the near futurehttp://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243038/As_the_digital_revolution_kills_jobs_social_unrest_will_rise

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