Salon: Generation bankrupt. And if these wrinkle-free failures — who have already gone from slackers to high rollers to slackers again — aren’t feeling so exuberant anymore, who can blame them? Their lives are about to get worse. A new bill moving through Congress — which President Bush has promised to sign — may make it even harder for them to work their way out of the morass of credit card debt.
Here’s predatory behavior from another kind of banker — the sleazeballs who beg people to get credit cards and go into debt.
The credit-card industry has been pushing cards on all of us for years. A good customer in that industry is one who runs up large debts and gets hammered for the outrageous interest charges the issuers charge, not to mention big fees for even the slightest mistake of timing.
Having gotten customers hooked on credit, the industry “persuades” Congress (with the help of $37 million in “contributions”) to twist the bankruptcy code so that credit-card creditors move to the head of the line in bankruptcy proceedings. It would be shameful, but again we’re talking about an industry that hasn’t the slightest idea what that word means.