A word of warning. In less than 3 weeks the new bankruptcy bill

[Sub Atomic]

goes into effect.

One of the more hideous and obvious paybacks to the credit card companies is allowing them to increase your minimum monthly payment percentage from 2% to 4%.

Essentially, if you've been paying just the minimum or barely more, you're going to be in for a rude awakening.

And yes, I'm going to be in that boat as well.

I am planning on talking to my credit union to see if I can get a loan that will allow me to pay off my CC debt. At that point, they all get cut up and the accounts closed.

As I've figured it, my loan payments over 4 years will be about as much as I send to the CC companies now. Except my payment schedule for the credit cards, with what I send them every month, is more like 12 years.

If you have outstanding credit card balances, please, please do everything you can to pay them off/transfer balances to a lower interest card/whatever.

It's going to be very, very ugly when this bit of shite hits the fan.

[nashville_brook]

1. can't wait for the msm to catch up on this.

i can see geraldo holding poor peoples' credit card bills, crying.

[CrispyQ]

2. I have family members who pay no attention to what's going on

& are living paycheck to paycheck. I think they will be in for a big shock when they get that first bill!

BTW, they all think I'm a total nut job.

[bleedingheart]

3. Part of me doesn't give a shit anymore...

the same "out of the loop" people vote for morons who screw them and yet they never seem to get it...

Perhaps when they find themselves in a bigger debt hole they may figure it out....I hate to see stuff like this happen but it seems people don't learn until they get burned.

[tjdee]

4. My credit is already in the toilet....as long as I'm not going to be arres

ted I'm okay with that. They want to hunt me down and garnish the hell out of my paycheck, they're welcome to.

I won't be able to buy a house for many years or buy a car without astronomical interest rates...

but as long as I don't have to go to jail and leave my kid here alone, I'm okay with that.

[newswolf56]

5. When you realize the reason we have such a huge credit-card debt...

is because wages have fallen ever further behind the cost of living, then you understand that this doubling of credit-card minimum payments is the most calculatedly vicious, deliberately ruinous legislation in U.S. history. It will literally force millions into indentured servitude -- denying the protection of bankruptcy even as it imposes the burden of impossibly high payments -- and it will fling millions more lower income people into permanent pauperhood.

Anyone who doubts the extent to which capitalism has reverted to the Tyrannosauric greed that was its chief characteristic during all the centuries before the Russian Revolution and the New Deal need only look at this legislation. Anyone who doubts the reality of the class-war being waged against us all by Bush and the oligarchy he represents need only look at this legislation. Anyone who doubts that the oligarchy is methodically concentrating its wealth and just as methodically disempowering all the rest of us need only look at this legislation. Anyone who doubts that Republicans and their allies are enemies of the people need only look at this legislation. It is absolute proof of all these ugly truths, proof also that we are now governed by money-supremacists who are methodically granting ever more omnipotence to the wealthy few even as they reduce all the rest of us to wage-slavery -- or abandon us to extermination by neglect.

In the face of this evidence, anyone who denies the historical truth of class struggle (and thus the renewed relevance of Marx) is either a liar or a fool.

Every Democrat who voted for this bankruptcy legislation -- and there are many -- has maliciously betrayed every one of us who is not part of the oligarchy and is a traitor to the working class who should either be voted out of office or at the very least forced to admit that he/she has been deliberately deceiving the voters and is in fact a secret Republican -- the enemy of everyone who must work for a living or who is disabled or limited-income elderly or otherwise chronically poor. Deliberate deception by the sort of conniving wealth-supremacist politicians who claim to be Democrats yet voted for the bankruptcy law is precisely what is wrong with the Democratic Party today -- why so many people correctly believe that (with the exception of a very few politicians), the party has been wholly co-opted by the rich and turned to the goals of money-supremacy to the exclusion of all else.

The corporate media's Josef Goebbels behavior in this matter is equally despicable: first suppressing coverage about the bill's savagery, then protecting the politicians who voted for it. Just as enactment of the law itself shows the monstrous cruelty at the heart
of true capitalism, so does the media's conduct in this matter prove that America's vaunted "free press" is a lie.

For those interested, here is an (alternative media) link to a list of allegedly Democratic senators who voted for this infinitely vicious law:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0309-36.htm

I could find no similar listing for the House vote -- not even in a half day of Googling -- showing just how determined the media are to protect those class-traitors who enacted this unspeakable measure.