Tuesday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: Occupy Wall St's Debt Resistors' Operations Manual; 'You are not a loan'; Too ashamed to revolt?; 'The hapless David Shearer'; Ghost steel warehouses; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 am today in association with NZ Mint.

As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read is #3 from David Graeber, the author of 5,000 years of Debt, which was referred to in a recent Alan Bollard speech.

1. Debt Resistors' Operations Manual  - Whatever happened to Occupy Wall St?

The momentum seemed to die after the initial protests, but it has been beavering away in certain areas to recapture that surge of interest and support.

Here's a new twist.

The Occupy Wall St movement has issued a 132 Debt Resistors' Operations Manual. Here's the link and I've embedded it down below FYI.

The funniest thing of course is the link is on Scribd, which takes Google Ad Words advertisements. These ads work out the subject matter of what's on the page and put in 'appropriate' ads. In this case the ads are for debt collection services and mortgages.

Here's a sample from the manual:

We gave the banks the power to create money because they promised to use it to help us live healthier and more prosperous lives—not to turn us into frightened peons. They broke that promise. We are under no moral obligation to keep our promises to liars and thieves. In fact, we are morally obligated to find a way to stop this system rather than continuing to perpetuate it.

This collective act of resistance may be the only way of salvaging democracy because the campaign to plunge the world into debt is a calculated attack on the very possibility of democracy. It is an assault on our homes, our families, our communities and on the planet’s fragile ecosystems—all of which are being destroyed by endless production to pay back creditors who have done nothing to earn the wealth they demand we make for them.

To the financial establishment of the world, we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing. To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything. Every dollar we take from a fraudulent subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we withhold from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect. These are acts of debt resistance, which come in many other forms as well: fighting for free education and healthcare, defending a foreclosed home, demanding higher wages and providing mutual aid.

Occupy Wall Street/Strike Debt: The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual

2. Thumbs up - Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism likes it. Here's her review:

This guide is designed not only to give individuals advice for how to be more effective in dealing with lenders but also sets forth some larger-scale ideas. This is a project of a new OWS group, Strike Debt. Fighting for debt renegotiation and restructuring, something that the bank-boosting legacy parties have refused to do, is becoming a new focus for OWS efforts.

Quite a few well qualified people who in Occupy fashion are going unnamed, participated in developing this manual. Having read most of the chapters in full and skimmed the rest, I find that this guide achieves the difficult feat of giving people in various types of debt an overview of their situation, including political issues, and practical suggestions in clear, layperson-friendly language. For instance, the chapter on credit ratings gives step-by-step directions as to how to find and challenge errors in your credit records, and what sort of timetable and process is realistic for getting results. The chapter on dealing with debt collectors is similarly specific and detailed.

3. Can debt spark a revolution - David Graeber, the author of The 5,000 years of Debt book cited by Alan Bollard in a recent speech, wonders in this piece in The Nation if debt can spark a revolution. It's deeply subversive and not a little entertaining.

As a member of the team that came up with the slogan “We Are the 99 Percent,” I can attest that we weren’t thinking of inequality or even simply class but specifically of class power. It’s now clear that the 1 percent are the creditors: those who are able to turn their wealth into political influence and their political influence back into wealth again. The overriding imperative of government policy is to do whatever it takes, using all available tools—fiscal, monetary, political, even military—to keep stock prices from falling. The most powerful empire on earth seems to exist first and foremost to guarantee the stream of wealth flowing into the hands of that tiny proportion of its population who hold financial assets. This allows an ever-increasing amount of wealth to flow back into the system of legalized bribery that American politics has effectively become.

When we were organizing the Wall Street occupation in August of 2011, we really didn’t have any clear idea who, if anyone, would actually show up. But almost immediately we noticed a pattern. The overwhelming majority of Occupiers were, in one way or another, refugees of the American debt system. At first, that meant student debt: the typical complaint was “I worked hard and played by the rules, and now I can’t find a job to pay my student loans—while the financial criminals who trashed the economy got themselves bailed out.”

4. And the chance of a revolt? Here's Graeber again:

Most revolutions, revolts and insurrections in world history have revolved, at least to some degree, around debt, from the uprisings that created the Greek democracies to the American Revolution—or pretty much any other anticolonial revolt. We may be standing on the brink of a similar juncture. Yet history shows it’s notoriously difficult to assemble debtors into a coherent movement; indebtedness is isolating by nature, and the very feelings of anxiety and humiliation it sparks have made it a potent ideological tool. But history also reveals that when such movements do form, the results tend to be explosive.

What are the prospects for Occupy if it evolves into an explicit movement of debt resistance? If that happens, the battle will not be won by proposing policy changes. The power of Occupy was always that of delegitimation: an appeal to the profound feeling, shared by so many Americans, that our political class is so corrupted that it’s no longer capable of addressing the problems faced by ordinary citizens, let alone the world. To create a genuinely democratic system could only mean starting over entirely.

The financial system isn’t really any different. The first step is to state the problem clearly: our current economic arrangements can barely even be called “capitalism,” unless it’s some form of Mafia capitalism based on loan-sharking, extortion and fixed casino games. The second is to hammer home just how much the system’s illegitimacy undermines the moral force that debt still holds over so many Americans, thus fostering a gradual withdrawal of consent from the system. Increasing numbers of us are already doing this by refusing to pay our debts, whether out of necessity or by choice.

5. How American debtors are finding their voice - Here's The Nation again with some reporting on how the Occupy movement is morphing into a movement focused on debt.

What’s surprising, then, is that debt hasn’t been made more of a central issue of Occupy organizing until now. Though the Occupy Student Debt Campaign has done some important work (particularly around what it called 1T Day, when student loan debt hit 
$1 trillion), the issue took center stage only after a series of small Occupy Theory assemblies that were held once a week beginning in May in Washington Square Park, attended by some of the same people who were at the Tompkins Square Park gatherings that planned the initial occupation. A few weeks in, the group found its focus; on June 10, during the inaugural NYC Debtors’ Assembly, there was a palpable spark. People testified through a cardboard “debtors’ mic” for more than two hours, many noting that they had never spoken publicly about their burden before. A deeply personal issue—one that is often a source of private shame—was being politicized before everyone’s eyes. The epiphany that suddenly connects the individual to the collective speaks to one of Strike Debt’s best slogans: “You are not a loan.”

6. Could it actually take off? - Mike 'Rortybomb' Konzcal writes at Next New Deal about whether this Debtors' Resistance Movement could take over where Occupy left off.

He wonders whether Americans' have embedded their sense of personal failure so deep that most are too ashamed to speak up.

Over the summer, Jodi Dean argued that debt would be a difficult connective thread to pull off for a political movement. It's too individualized, too prone to viewing people as failed market agents, too moralized, and it can mimic unhelpful reactionary arguments against the welfare state and the government. I know people involved in organizing homeowners, especially underwater and deliquent homeowners, and I can say that these are all very accurate problems. Beyond that, nobody likes their identity as a struggling debtor. People can take pride in their role as workers, as citizens, and as numerous other things organizers can build on, but debt is a real challenge. The failure part runs deep.

7. 'The hapless David Shearer' - Jane Clifton has written an excellent piece at The Listener about the Asset Sales delay. She nails the problem for David Shearer. Yikes.

Leader David Shearer is growing to deserve the doom-laden epithet: hapless. Trying valiantly to reposition Labour as being pro-work in the context of the welfare entitlement debate, he again muffed his lines, to create a now deathless meme most usefully subtitled Diddler on the Roof. He began a speech describing a sickness beneficiary who, according to his neighbour, was hoofing up and down quite ably fixing his roof. Shearer said, one would have thought quite reasonably, that he, too, opposed people claiming benefits illicitly. From the response of the left Twittering classes, you’d have thought he had advocated the return of the Poor House and work camps. How dare he question the honesty and deservingness of the man on the roof? But that wasn’t the worst of it. A nationwide search seemed to be launched by Shearer’s detractors to find the roofer and give him redress, and Shearer eventually cracked under media interrogation to half-admit – it’s often not clear between the ums and ahs what he is and isn’t trying to say – that the anecdote was at least as allegorical as factual. There may or may not have been an actual roofer, and even if there was, Shearer did not ascertain the particulars of his infirmity. Had he made the point that he deplores benefit cheats for the same reason he deplores corporate tax-dodgers, he might have proofed himself against the blizzard of both right- and left-wing scorn.

One thing’s for sure. If the US State Department had trouble deciphering Key’s slap-happy diction – nearly committing us to all “next conflicts” in arms rather than mere civilian do-gooding co-operation “in that context” – they would have no luck at all transcribing a Shearer blurt. What the orderly American mind would make of: “Yeah, yeah … this guy supposedly – I think he said he had a bad back or something or other and the point was, I mean I wasn’t actually …”

8. The Liquidationists - Paul Krugman has accused Mitt Romney of the sins of the Liquidationists of the 1930s, who argued the economy needed a jolly hard recession to 'clean out' the excesses of the boom.

Mr. Romney’s language echoed that of the “liquidationists” of the 1930s, who argued against doing anything to mitigate the Great Depression. Until recently, the verdict on liquidationism seemed clear: it has been rejected and ridiculed not just by liberals and Keynesians but by conservatives too, including none other than Milton Friedman. “Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession,” declared the George W. Bush administration in its 2004 Economic Report of the President. And the author of that report, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw, has actually advocated a much more aggressive Fed policy than the one announced last week.

Now Mr. Mankiw is allegedly a Romney adviser — but the candidate’s position on economic policy is evidently being dictated by extremists who warn that any effort to fight this slump will turn us into Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe I tell you.

9. Ghost Steel warehouses - Reuters reports Chinese banks are finding there was no steel in the warehouse to back the promise of collateral made by many warehouses and steel factories...

China's demand has faltered with the slowing economy, pushing steel prices to a three-year low and making it tough for mills and traders to keep up with payments on the $400 billion of debt they racked up during years of double-digit growth.

As defaults have risen in the world's largest steel consumer, lenders have found that warehouse receipts for metal pledged as collateral do not always lead them to stacks of stored metal. Chinese authorities are investigating a number of cases in which steel documented in receipts was either not there, belonged to another company or had been pledged as collateral to multiple lenders, industry sources said.

Ghost inventories are exacerbating the wider ailments of the sector in China, which produces around 45 percent of the world's steel and has over 200 million metric tons (220.5 million tons) of excess production capacity. Steel is another drag on a financial system struggling with bad loans from the property sector and local governments.

"What we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg," said a trader from a steel firm in Shanghai who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media. "The situation will get worse as poor demand, slumping prices and tight credit from banks create a domino effect on the industry."

10. Totally Stephen Colbert on Scientology.