Who Hijacked Our Country

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Credit Card Companies Trying to Squeeze Blood Out of a Turnip

Those poor banks. Thanks to the federal legislation they purchased several years ago, they’re now able to squeeze and gouge and draw and quarter their prisoners customers like never before.

But now they’ve made a horrifying discovery: After too much bloodletting, their victims might declare bankruptcy. And then they can’t be gouged any more. Damn! These credit card CEOs are in the same position as a torturer when the victim dies too soon, before the torturer had a chance to get his rocks off.

In states that allow debt collectors to garnish their creditors’ wages, the bankruptcy rates are much higher than in neighboring states that don’t allow this practice. In the most striking example, Georgia — where wages can be garnished by creditors — has four times the bankruptcy rate as South Carolina, where the practice is prohibited.

It already seemed like a pretty obvious cause and effect connection, but now it’s been clearly spelled out in a study of millions of bankruptcy records from 2006 to the present. This study has produced an Economic Stress Map — a geographic, chronological and visual display of economic misery based on the unemployment rate, foreclosures and bankruptcies.

It was the bankruptcy “reform” legislation of 2005 that gave credit card debt the same legal priority as child support payments and back taxes owed to the IRS.

When credit card debt and child support payments were put on an equal footing, there’s probably no way to calculate how much child support money went uncollected. In any case, the irony was lost on millions of “Family Values” “For The Children” drones.

And speaking of our burgeoning Beacon of Freedom south of the border: The United States has been training Honduran soldiers for decades now. But how well did we train them? In the event that Honduras was taken over by some rabble-rousing Communist who tried to redistribute some of the Oligarchs’ hard-earned wealth to the riffraff — would our American-trained Honduran soldiers know how to handle this emergency?

Ah, that’s our boys!

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