A boon to Visa, not consumers

As a college student, I get about 8,000 new credit card offers a day. Credit card companies target me because they think I am lazy, naive and unlikely to spend a lot of time reading the fine print about just how much interest they intend to charge me (please -- naive? No way).

They even throw in cool incentives like competitions to win new gadgets and extreme sports apparel. Boy, they really understand their target demographic. I'm wild! I'm extreme! I ... fall asleep after The Daily Show.

Apparently, Congress thinks the calls and e-mails I get are great. In fact, the Senate just voted overwhelmingly to make it easier for credit card companies, long thought of as the true patriots of the financial sector, to keep squeezing consumers for every last ounce of debt. The recently passed Senate resolution makes it even more difficult for Americans to declare bankruptcy. At worst, the bill would prevent 20 percent of those who could currently dissolve their debts through bankruptcy from doing so, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute.

The passage of this bill represents the worst of American politics. From Web log "Daily Kos": "This is clearly Exhibit A of the corrosive effect of money in our political system -- a bill supported by nary a voter, yet pushed through by a powerful, rich industry. The credit card companies have had their risk reduced by a significant amount. Yet they will not lower rates to reflect their reduced risk." Many Democrats were left scratching their heads. How could so many of their own have voted for a bill that so blatantly rewards credit card companies at the expense of the average consumer?

But the most egregious example of Democratic hypocrisy came from Joe Lieberman, the target of many liberal bloggers' ire. His Joementum notwithstanding, Lieberman's routine betrayal of his constituents should make his next primary challenge a difficult one. By voting to end discussion on the bill and then voting against it when it was clearly going to pass, Lieberman must have thought he was being very tricky. But hey, who cares about Americans in debt? There's probably a video game out there that offends somebody right at this very minute.

That the senators who eagerly supported this legislation couched it in the rhetoric of populism is even more disgraceful, but I suppose hardly surprising. Maybe somewhere there's a legislator who truly believes that the system is plagued by people who spend so lavishly that they cannot cover their expenses and then declare bankruptcy instead of paying off the poor, patriotic credit card companies.

But a recent Harvard study found that over half of the people who filed for bankruptcy did so because of medical bills and that most of those people had health insurance. So keep lecturing me about personal responsibility. Really, I love it.

It's not enough that these people are unemployed or seriously injured or both. Visa will have its pound of flesh ounce by ounce, but they will have it.

Our government has already spent far more of our money on the war in Iraq than credit card companies spent to get this bill passed. But this nasty piece of domestic legislation reveals far more about the priorities of our representatives, Republican and Democrat, than our foreign policy ever will. The war in Iraq remains palatable to the American electorate because, for most, it has not altered our daily lives in the slightest. But this legislation will make a difference, especially as the cost of health care continues to spiral out of control.

At least on the Internet, resistance to this bill has been surprisingly bipartisan. After all it was Utah, the reddest of the red states, which had the most bankruptcy filings last year. Maybe, just maybe, the massive Republican support behind this bill will chip away at the painstakingly crafted image of the GOP as the party of the little guy. But I won't hold my breath.

No amount of flag-waving or patriotic sloganeering can undo the corrupt underside of American politics that this vote exposes. Is it the best system we've got? Absolutely. Is it a government of the people, by the people and for the people? Well, that just depends on which people you're talking about.

Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and former editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Tuesdays.

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