Credit card companies insist, despite billions of dollars in profit every year, that they're being financially crippled by bankruptcies, even though the bill does absolutely nothing to shut down the trusts and exemptions and fraud on employees and other legal scams that allow corporations and millionaires to hold onto their assets while fairly easily filing bankruptcy to dodge their debts. This is a bill aimed solely at average Americans. The credit companies cite a "skyrocketing" number of bankruptcies - but the number of bankruptcies per year is down considerably from its peak of several years ago, in the wake of the dot-com bust. So what does the bill accomplish? It creates a single national average standard for living costs - rent or mortgage, price of food and gasoline, etc. - so that, should you hit desperate financial straits, you'd be judged by average costs in Iowa City rather than where you live. The lives of every single American will be reduced to a mean average statistic if the credit card companies get their way. Judges would no longer look at individual situations and decide what's best; all that would be predetermined.
Your kid suddenly comes down with leukemia and treatments cost more than the cheap insurance your job has whittled you down to pays out for them? Tough. Lost your job and you need every scrap of your savings to keep up your house payments so your family isn't living out of your car or an old refrigerator box? Tough. Can't afford to pay your credit cards and put food on your table? Tough.
Here's a sample of changes proposed to the bill that were shot down: closing the aforementioned loopholes that make bankruptcy a happy and profitable practice for corporations and millionaires. Protecting the homes of the elderly. Limiting the amount of interest the companies can charge. Protecting servicemen and their families. Protecting those with catastrophic medical conditions or undergoing severe economic setbacks. Prohibiting predatory lending.
This is a bill designed to let lenders run amok. As I mentioned, lenders wrote it, after funneling millions of campaign dollars into Congress.
There are two things you can do, right now. The House website now conveniently allows you to send e-mail directly to your representative through their system. Even if you don't know who they are, the site will find them for you. Click here to go to the House Of Representatives mail system. Tell them you are opposed to Bill S. 256, the bankruptcy "reform" bill, and you want them to vote against it. Be polite. Click the link and do it right now.
Then, if you like, go to Debtslavery.Org to see what else you can do.
The administration used to love to talk about the number of jobs being created until they never came anywhere near prognostications, without ever mentioning that jobs being lost are usually higher paid professional or union jobs, while jobs being gained are mostly low-pay jobs without benefits. Even in existing jobs, benefits are being constantly chipped away at even as health care and insurance costs go up and up and up, resulting in a de facto income decrease for most American working families. The administration is working hard, having turned over the treasury to the rich and decimated taxes while jacking up military spending to astronomical levels, to eliminate social programs that might help more Americans cope with growing economic disorder. One has to wonder whether credit companies are so eager to see this bill passed not strictly because of current greed but as a hedge against future widespread economic collapse.
Just contact your representative and do it quickly, okay? Like right this minute.
