Gutless Wonders

Yesterday's votes on the horrid bankruptcy bill in the Senate were disgusting. This is a bill written by credit card companies (total profits last year: $30 billion) that upends the notion of bakruptcy protection (mandated in the Constitution) and instead forces those at the lowest end of the scale to pay through the nose. 50% of all bankruptcies come from soaring medical costs on people who have health insurance. That statistic makes "health insurance" and "bankruptcy protection" lose all their meaning.

When The Free goddamn Republic sees through the muck on this one, when Glenn frickin' Reynolds and a host of others know that this is simply a payout to a wealthy lobby, it boggles the mind why any Democrat worth his salt would vote for cloture. Who is the contstituency on this bill outside of the credit card industry? Who LIKES credit card companies? They have a public opinion rating below even politicians. We get hundreds of bait and switch offers in the mail every year, we see that they send out bill as close to the "must pay" date as possible, we see them jack up the interest rates while all the while screaming "payment holiday" and "special deal!" This awesome article from the LA Times shows that the credit card industry makes millions off of "bankruptcy cheaters" anyway, and that even while bankruptcy filings have gone up, so have profits.

But boggle my mind Democrats did yesterday. Biden. Carper. Salazar. Stabenow (!). Lieberman. Nelson. Actually, BOTH Nelsons. Johnson. All of them should hang their heads in shame today. This is going to cost a lot of Americans a lot of heartache. In fact, most of them are in the Red States. Here are the top ten bankruptcy filing states:

Utah 1
Tennessee 2
Georgia 3
Nevada 4
Indiana 5
Alabama 6
Arkansas 7
Ohio 8
Mississippi 9
Idaho 10

There was no good reason to vote for this bill other than to slather oneself in credit-card-company cash.