THOMAS OLIPHANT
A GOP fleecing of card users
NEW YORK
What ought to be called the usury business has earned its caviar from President Bush's Republican Party. The banking, insurance, and real estate interests have ponied up more than $25 million for Bush this year, six times more than in 2000.
And the biggest corporate supporter of all, as it was four years ago, is a monster called The latest goodie was a ruling from Bush's Treasury Department preempting all state laws, notably in California, that have sought to put a brake on some of the most abusive credit card practices -- a remarkable flip-flop for a conservative government supposedly respectful of states' rights. The campaign cash is also gushing because the personal finance people know Bush will back another attempt in Congress to make it harder for Americans to escape, via bankruptcy, the debtor prisons constructed for them. The usury industry now has another reason to give Bush money: John Kerry's decision to take aim at one of the most abusive of the credit card scams -- the sudden jacking up of interest charges on consumers who are making their card payments on time. Millions of Americans know too well how this works: You miss a payment on some other bill (it could be a $50 phone bill) and all of a sudden your credit card interest rate soars to anywhere from 30 percent to as much as 48 percent. In the racket, they call this "universal default," but it amounts to changing the terms of a loan in the middle of the game. Kerry would end this practice, he announced last week, with the stroke of a regulatory pen. The finance business is also opposed -- and therefore so is Bush -- to another Kerry proposal that would require full disclosure to families of the true cost of making only those deceptively small minimum payments the credit card bosses entice people to make. The reason they do this is that they want to trap you into high-interest debt for as long as they can, and telling you the true cost interferes with their business strategy. Continued... |
