Weekly Round Up – November 22, 2013

Before we get to the good reads!

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A Few Good Reads

Here are a few of my favorite reads from the past week.

1. Climate debt collectors: Occupy wants the 1% to pay up

Last year, Strike Debt — a small collective of New York-based academics, filmmakers, and business types published a short book called The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual [PDF], which alternated between dispensing advice on how to clean up credit scores and chronicling the recent history of the finance industry.

Strike Debt is also known for a project called the Rolling Jubilee, which buys up old medical and mortgage debt that people might be despairing of ever paying off, and then erases it. The Rolling Jubilee earned the somewhat backhanded honor of being named “one of the few good ideas to come out of Occupy Wall Street” by Forbes. Open this article

2. LightSquared Sues Ergen, Dish Over Debt Purchases:

LightSquared on Friday sued Dish Network Corp. and Chairman Charlie Ergen, saying Mr. Ergen illegally purchased LightSquared debt before Dish bid on the company’s assets.
The suit, filed Friday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, says that, among other things, Mr. Ergen ordered Dish Treasurer Jason Kiser to purchase — through a newly created investment entity called SP Special Opportunities LLC — more than $1 billion in LightSquared debt in the months before Dish bid on the telecommunications company’s assets. Open this article

3. US debt default would be like Lehman crash: OECD

A U.S. debt default would create significant confusion and uncertainty in financial markets and could prove as catastrophic as the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said in a new report.

Lawmakers in the U.S. side-stepped a debt default at the 11th eleventh hour in October and brought an end to prolonged negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. But talks are set to resume in the new year with the debt ceiling extended until February 7 and funding approved until January 15. Open this article

4. Detroit accused of exaggerating $18bn debts in push for bankruptcy:

Detroit’s debts are a fraction of the $18bn lawyers pushing for bankruptcy say they are, and their costs are “irrelevant, misleading and inflated,” according to a report released Wednesday.

A Demos thinktank report, issued as a city judge decides whether to allow Detroit to file for the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, lays the blame for the city’s woes at the feet of falling revenues, Wall Street banks and “extreme assumptions” calculated to make its problems worse than they are. Open this article

5. Cardinal O’Malley: cohabitation, student debt threaten marriage

Baltimore, Md., Nov 20, 2013 / 04:06 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Cultural trends discouraging marriage are among the biggest challenges to the Church in the U.S., says Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who also sees signs of renewal and hope among young people.

“Concerns about marriage – people not getting married, falloff in Mass attendance, (and the) challenge of catechizing the young Catholics” are some of the more troubling trends facing Catholicism in the U.S., the Archbishop of Boston said to CNA Nov. 11, during the general assembly of the national bishops’ conference in Baltimore. Open this article