credit cards

Let Them Eat Clarity!

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capitalist_pig Hold shares in a crashed bank, hedge fund, or major corporation? Here’s your bailout check, sir!

Live down the social ladder and hold a credit card you struggle to pay? Will you get some bail-out money? Nope. Maybe a mandated reduction of your interest rate? Nope. A cap at least on your present rate? Nope again. You get this instead:

The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to put new restrictions on the credit card industry, passing a bill whose backers say will make card-issuers spell out their terms in fewer words, using plain English.

And this:

Among other things, the Senate measure would prohibit companies from raising interest rates on existing balances unless a card holder was 60 days behind, and then it would require the rate to be restored to its previous level if payments were on time for six months. Consumers would have to be notified of rate increases 45 days in advance. And companies could not charge a late fee if they were late processing a payment.

Statements would have to be mailed 21 days before a payment was due. It would be harder for companies to issue cards to people under age 21. Rates could not be increased within the first year, and promotional rates would be in force for at least six months.

Oh, huzzah! Now — oh, glorious day! — it will be slightly easier to know exactly how the bailed-out class is using its publicly-provided do-over to continue raping you. And they will, of course, have to rape you according to some new, very slightly slower timetables. With the Democrats in power now, that much goes without saying, you see.

Why? Well, this is capitalism. Our overclass needs a chance to over-accumulate some more capital, so they can fuel their next “investment” bubble. Will it be in tulips? Stocks? Collateralized debt claims? Survival shelters? That’s for them to say, and for us to bend over and take.

To make a long, sickening story short: You know any new law is a disaster when it passes the Senate, as this great fart-in-your-face did, 90-to-5.

Remember When…

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…credit card and car-loan interest payments were, like houses, tax-deductible?

From Wikianswers:

On Oct. 22, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Reagan called the 829-page, 33-pound bill “the most sweeping overhaul of the tax code in our nation’s history.”

The new code gradually phased out all deductions for interest paid on car loans, charge-account purchases, vacations and anything else that fell under what the law termed “consumer loans.”

This is a pretty obvious yardstick for assessing President Obama and his (and his party’s) efforts to rescue and ram through the overclass’s pet Chicago-school/supply-side theory of how to fix a Depression.

What’s Leaving YOUR Wallet?

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Click here to peruse the credit-card “change of terms” notice I got yesterday from Capital One.

“The rate will be determined by adding 26.15% to the Prime rate.”

This game is so over, folks…

Don’t hold your breath for help.  Hit the shred button instead.

Information Control

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Apologists for corporate capitalism love to equate it with freedom.  Big Brother would be proud of this claim, and jealous of its success.

The truth is that corporate capitalism/market totalitarianism is as dependent on information control as state totalitarianism was.

If you doubt this, inquire.

You might start by watching the first 2 minutes of this video, which shows “Mythbusters” host Adam Savage explaining how the credit-card corporations squashed his show’s expose of the extreme ease of hacking/stealing RFID codes, which are now widely used (and heavily advertised as a great breakthrough) to speed up credit-card purchases.

This story is the tiniest tip of a humongous, virtually un-discussed iceberg.