Look...over there! Green numbers! GET HIM!!!

Occupy would be better off writing the URL of their youtube page on 2,000 one dollar bills and dropping them from one of the condos downtown. A $2,000 ad buy is like broadcasting radio signals into outer space.

Though I will say it is heartening to see occupy try to move beyond just camping in parks, I question this ad.
Debt - sure, no one likes it. But whose fault is it that you got into debt in the first place? No one made you buy your latest iphone with a credit card.

"So... don't go into debt over stupid things like cars and televisions?"

...or housing, food, education, you know, all that frivolous shit.

Amazing all those thousands in loans for an education that failed to teach them what irony means.

Jesus Christ, this is exactly what you libertarian fucktards ought to be up in arms about.

Yes, for about twenty years, people borrowed and borrowed and borrowed to support lifestyles they couldn't genuinely afford. Your government looked the other way while shitty lenders across the country and Wall Street cynically exploited the rules (and broke them, in many cases) to encourage as much of this preposterous lending as possible, in order to feed the lucrative financial market that lending created.

When the party ended in a spectacular worldwide quasi-depression, what happened? The lenders went bankrupt, and Wall Street got bailed out when the government essentially guaranteed (i.e. agreed to take the losses on ) most of this shitty debt. None of the people who got rich participating in this were docked pay, taxed an extra nickel or thrown the fuck in jail, they simply remained rich and moved on to the next honey pot.

Now, in order to swallow this shit sandwich, federal, state and local governments have to make sweeping budget cuts. Will re raise that money from those individuals/industries/companies most responsible for the situation? Of course not, we'll cut kids' education. We'll cut health care for old people. We'll cut jobless benefits for the people fired because of the recession. We'll make retirement shittier for people who've worked their whole lives and paid into Social Security. Anything else would be socialism, right?

If we didn't have a political system so completely beholden to moneyed interests and a financial regulatory system so thoroughly dominated at the highest level by Wall Streeters, THIS ALL WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED.

It seems like a libertarian wouldn't be OK with this (i.e. being forced to get less services from the government for their tax dollars because of other people's scams and fuckups). Libertarians often complain that people think they are essentially heartless Social Darwinists - well, can you blame them, based on the comments above?

To me, individual liberty should also mean individual responsibility, and that doesn't just stop at punishing people who borrowed too much: that principle has to extend all the way up the ladder, or the principle is just tarted up Social Darwinism. Government agencies, individuals and corporations that enabled/profited from this ought to be likewise held to account.

The unbelievably galling fact that they aren't has laid bare who our government and other institutions actually work for, and that is what Occupy is all about to me, and I have a hard time understanding anyone who doesn't find this state of affairs completely fucked up. (tl;dr)

I know, right?

i·ro·ny/Noun: The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

I thought it was primarily the housing market that was the problem - giving loans above what most could afford was most of what began to break the system, causing an inflated market and so on.
The personal debt they are referring to in the ad seems like it is just credit card debt. Or it is framed that way seemingly for debt of $7800 per person.
Most of which folks tend to get on frivolous buys.
About libertarians - I've not considered myself one before. Been a registered democrat for 20 years. Worked on campaigns too.
But yeah - responsibility. Those of us with debt have a responsibility to pay it off. No one has made us get into debt except ourselves.
But if you are talking about cracking down on 'payday' loans and such with outlandish interest rates that prey upon the ignorant, I'm with you. But even these have begun to get regulated, right

It was primarily the housing market just because of the size of the assets at issue.

The logic that allowed the creation of a market for mortgage-backed securities made many smaller markets possible that were identical in structure, only for different assets. One of those assets was credit card receivables. Another was auto loans, and there even securitized packages giving rights to slices of health club dues.

Basically, every obligation of ordinary americans could suddenly be turned into securities to be bought and sold. The greed for more and more of these securities on the part of the Wall Street firms that packaged and sold them, coupled with the lack of regulation, led to a race to the bottom in terms of lending standards by the shady lenders toward the bottom of the pyramid.

Remember the good old days, when you'd hear people complaining about coming home to a mailbox stuffed with pre-approved credit card junk mail?

Yeah, I still get them. Alot of them. There may be slightly less of them, but I still get them all the time.
Today in fact too.

For what it's worth, I think you're well-meaning frankieb. We disagree on a lot of (i.e. most) points, but I don't think you're ill intentioned. That said, on this issue I think you're missing a few pieces of the debt puzzle, other problems include:

-Ballooning student loan debt. I strongly believe work needs to be put in place to cap student costs. There also needs to be framework to counsel and educate students on 1) debt and 2) their major/coursework before they're allowed access to student loans.

-Predatory lending practices to students and at-risk members of society re: credit cards. There is just no rational argument that says a student or persons with zero wages, should ever have been issued credit cards, other than a secured cards.

Individuals with debt have a responsibility to pay their debts, unquestionably. However, and I believe in this strongly, our government and lending institutions have an equal responsibility to insure that credit is only extended to individuals that meet certain criteria (wage, size of down payments and likelihood they'll make good on their debts). It just shouldn't be handed out carte blanche. And I don't think anyone can argue effectively that this hasn't been the case in America in the last 20 years.

"I believe in this strongly, our government and lending institutions have an equal responsibility to insure that credit is only extended to individuals that meet certain criteria"

That is exactly what is happening now, which is why the upper middle class and up are the only people who can get a home loan or new lines of credit. NINJA loans should be outlawed, but sometimes people who wouldn't qualify under tighter regulations really do need money in a pinch, and currently, those people have to hang. It's debt or bankruptcy.

As for ballooning student loan debt, that's on the individual. If you're 18 and able to get into college, you're smart enough to know that $80k in student loan debt isn't a wise investment (I'm not counting the ITT/Apollo College/Univ. Phoenix in that equation. They need to be protected from themselves). That's why many of us who got into much better schools than UO still ended up being Ducks.

@Chuck, I really don't think student loan debt is solely on the individual. I think we need to do a better job as a people preparing students for higher education. Granted, you may have been smart enough to have a clear vision of what you wanted to do when you went to school and a concept of the financial burden student loans represent, but a lot of people I know sure as heck didn't. I escaped crazy loans sheerly out of a character flaw, my own dislike of formal education (granted I worked full time and went to school full time - I wanted to finish quickly). Furthermore, I suspect there's a lot of people who assume they'll have a job that can meet the debt that they're racking up whey they complete their education. Also not the case. Another point to consider is the drop-out/non-complete rates for college. Tack on the student loan bil that l folks are accountable to regardless of whether or not they complete their education and you see the benefit of taking better steps to prepare our students. It's a problem that I don't have a solution for, but the conversation needs to get jumpstarted.

Banks aren't lending right now because they're unsure of what's going to happen in the market, not because of a sense of responsibility to borrowers or government oversight. And given the binary choice between hard-to-get credit and easy-to-get credit, I'd argue for the difficult end of the spectrum.