BANKRUPTCY ABUSE PREVENTION AND CONSUMER PROTECTION ACT OF 2005
(Senate - March 08, 2005)
Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, this bankruptcy bill is mean-spirited and unfair. In anything like its present form, it should and will be an embarrassment to anyone who votes for it. It is a bonanza for the credit card companies, which made $30 billion in profits last year, and a nightmare for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak.
It favors the credit card companies, the giant banks, and the big car loan companies at every turn. It favors the worst of the credit industry--the interest rate gougers, the payday lenders, and the abusive collection agencies. It hurts real people who lose their savings because of a medical crisis or lose their jobs because of outsourcing or suffer major loss of income because they were called up for duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It protects corporate interests at the expense of the needs of real people. It does absolutely nothing about the glaring abuses of the bankruptcy system by the executives of giant companies such as Enron, WorldCom, and Polaroid, who lined their own pockets but left thousands of employees and retirees out in the cold.
It favors companies like MBNA, a top credit card issuer, with over $80 billion in loans, which has contributed $7 million to Federal candidates, a half a million dollars to President Bush alone, and spent over $20 million in lobbying, since 1997, when their lobbyists wrote this bill.
On the other side are people like special ed teacher Fatemeh Hosseini on the front page of Sunday's Washington Post. She fell on hard times when her husband left her and their three children. After her credit card debt reached $25,000, she stopped using the cards and took a second job to try to pay down that debt. She paid $2,000 a month but was hit with very high interest rates, which were raised even higher because of missed payments, heavy late fees, and over-limit penalties.
She made no new purchases, but by last June her $25,000 debt had nearly doubled to almost $50,000. The longer she tried to pay what her statements told her were her minimum payments, the more her debt went up. When all of her salary was going for payments, she had no choice: she was forced into bankruptcy, in the hope of getting the ``fresh start'' the Nation has long provided to its working people when they hit bottom.
This bill says to companies like MBNA: We'll help you scare that teacher out of going into bankruptcy by making the bankruptcy process expensive and burdensome to people like her. If we can't scare her away, we will help you squeeze your high interest rates out of her for a few years longer, even though she can't possibly pay off the amount she owes. We will take sides with companies like you and against people like her.
That is what this bill says. We all know that is wrong. How could the Senate possibly do something so immoral and unreasonable and unfair to our constituents when they are most in need of our help? Where are the vaunted values our colleagues talk about so much? Why didn't the Judiciary Committee do something about this travesty before it reached the floor? Why haven't we fixed it on the floor after more than a week of debate?
This bill was bulldozed through the committee on the pretense that we should not deal with its serious problems there but should wait until it reached the full Senate for serious negotiations and basic improvements. We were assured that there would be good-faith discussions and compromises and that all reasonable amendments would be given fair consideration.
But now there has been no good faith at all--no meaningful discussions, no negotiation, no real consideration of any of the very reasonable amendments that have been proposed to give this bill some shred of balance and fairness. On the contrary, the Republican leadership has invoked the strictest possible party discipline. When individual Republicans say they want to support or offer constructive amendments, they are ordered not to do so. Even when a Republican identifies a serious gap in the bill, such as the very basic jurisdiction outrage pointed out by Senator Cornyn, an outrage that has prejudiced workers and retirees in almost every State, the Republican leadership said no and refused to let the amendment be called up.
The excuse for this bad faith and breach of promise is itself bizarre. The Republican leaders say they cannot upset the delicate compromise reached two Congresses ago, but the only real compromise was the one that had the Schumer amendment in it, and this year's bill doesn't have that amendment in it. In committee Senator Schumer discussed his amendment, but I didn't see the other side jumping up to adopt it in order to restore and preserve the so-called compromise. The floor leaders have not indicated that they plan to accept this amendment to restore and preserve the supposed compromise.
Let's be clear--any pretense of protecting a previous compromise disappeared when the bill's sponsors unilaterally took the Schumer amendment out of the bill before introducing it this year. So there is no compromise before us in the first place. What's more, even the 2001 bill is now totally obsolete.
A great deal has happened in the past 4 years that helps us understand the real issues in this bill and shows that abuse of the system by consumers is not the real problem. We have now felt the full impact of the Bush economic decline, the broad record levels of sustained unemployment.
We have seen an explosion of medical costs, prescription drug costs, and health insurance costs. We have seen job after job eliminated or downgraded or outsourced.
A half million guardsmen and reservists have been called to active duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, leaving their families and their jobs and their small businesses behind to suffer the economic consequences, but this Senate said no to the Durbin amendment.
We have seen the enormous harm caused to employees and retirees by corporate mismanagement and fraud at major companies like Enron and WorldCom and Polaroid, which abused the bankruptcy laws to avoid their obligation to their own loyal workers. We have seen credit card rates go higher and higher and higher, as high as 30 percent or more, plus fees and penalties and charges, raising credit card profits by another $10 billion, even as general interest rates remain low.
We have seen the credit card companies use a self-help remedy for the problems they create by their own indiscriminate and predatory marketing practices. They charge still higher risk-based rates to the very same people who can't even afford the lower bait-and-switch rates.
We now know a lot more about the abuse of bankruptcy this bill was supposedly designed to address. Four years ago we were told we were a nation of bankruptcy abusers. But now, thanks to the careful study of actual bankruptcy case files, we know the truth. We know that 50 percent of the families who go bankrupt have suffered from serious medical problems and have exhausted their savings. Most of those families had paid for health insurance, but it still left them with no financial protection from serious illness or accidents.
If the family is impacted by cancer, you know right at the outset, even if they have health insurance, they are going to have a $35,000 bill. If it is the heart or stroke, it may be $20,000. If they have a child, spina bifida, autism, other kinds of serious children's diseases, it is going to be $15,000 to $20,000. We
know that right at the start. And in too many instances, that is just enough to throw hard-working Americans into the bankruptcy system and the harsh provisions of this legislation. Most of these families tried in every possible way to avoid bankruptcy for years. They gave up food and medicine and utilities and other necessities of life and even transferred their elderly parents into less adequate nursing homes in order to try and avoid bankruptcy. But facts like these don't bother the sponsors of this bill. They just make it up as they go along.
In the past week, for example, some of us offered amendments that would exempt people from the burdensome procedures in this bill if their finances were devastated by medical problems or because they were called up for military duty, and they were voted down. Instead the bill's sponsors introduced and adopted a devious amendment that they said would do what our amendment did. But, of course, it did nothing of the kind. It simply added some words about medical costs and military callups in a way that did not change the real substance of the committee's bill.
The sponsors also said our amendments exempting those below the median income from the means test were unnecessary because low-income filers were already exempt. If they really mean what they say about no means testing for people below the median income, then they should not be refusing to accept our amendment which makes that exemption absolutely clear.
Another Democratic amendment would have placed a generous limit of 30 percent on the interest rates any credit card company could charge. It very carefully stated that it would not change the status quo in States which already had lower limits. That didn't stop the bill's supporters from claiming that the bill would be an intrusion on States rights because it would lift the limit in States with a lower limit.
And perhaps the most outrageous claim of all, one which I thought was dead and buried after it was dragged out in 2001, was dragged out again--a big blue chart and all--and further inflated in their debate. The sponsors repeated the old chestnut that every American family is paying $400 a year in a hidden bankruptcy tax for abuses that this bill would stop. Only now they say this mysterious tax has risen to $550 per person per year.
How is the original $400 number calculated? The debts discharged from all consumer bankruptcies each year are about $40 billion. There are 100 million families in the United States. Therefore, those consumer bankruptcies must be costing each family $400 per family. But this phony math assumes that every dollar discharged in bankruptcy, 100 percent, could have been collected in full, if not for the massive abuse of the system by every consumer who goes bankrupt.
It assumes that the credit card companies and payday lenders and other lenders who collect this debt under the bill would somehow distribute it to all 100 million American families instead of keeping it for themselves. Obviously, neither of these assumptions is true. Even the bill's supporters have long ago conceded that the maximum conceivable amount recoverable from the consumer bankruptcies is about 10 percent of the total. Other estimates conclude that the real number is a small fraction of that.
We don't have to guess what a responsible lender's loss from bankruptcy abuse might be. The lead-off pro-bill witness at our hearing on the bill was the head of the Wisconsin community credit union, testifying for the national credit union lobby. He told us in the last 9 years his credit union has had an average of 10 bankruptcies a year from 11,000 members. He estimated that the 9-year loss from abusive cases was $15,000 to $75,000, with the higher figure based on an unlikely assumption of 15 percent abuse. His credit union's loss from possible abuse spread across its entire membership was 15 to 74 cents a year per member--not per every family in his county or state, but just his members. Yes, a real 15 cents instead of the mythical $400 dollars we have heard about for years on this floor.
Why is that lender's loss from abuse so low? Because that credit union cares about its members, who are also its owners. It gives them a credit level appropriate to their finances, and does not promote across-the-board increases in credit limits. It routinely monitors credit card debt for signs of trouble. When members hit hard times, the credit union does not pounce on them. It looks for ways to help them out. In short, it is a careful and responsible lender, not a predatory lender.
Hello? Could this tell us something about the real problem here? Perhaps the credit card companies who are really pushing this bill should think again about having solicitation desks every fifty feet in the airport, offering gifts to anyone who signs up for a card. Perhaps they should think twice about offering multiple cards to young college students. Perhaps they should not encourage people to raise their card limits recklessly or send them pre-printed checks against their accounts in junk mailings. Perhaps they should not send monthly statements urging their customers to pay only the monthly minimum and pile up their debt.
This bill does nothing to prevent the enticements that the credit card companies use to run up their profits. It does nothing to prevent the real abuses of the system by those who use unlimited homestead exemptions or ``protective'' trusts to hide tens of millions of dollars from the bankruptcy process.
We still have time for common sense amendments on all of these issues, but unless there is a change in direction, Republican party discipline will be invoked to defeat them.
In fact, the present bankruptcy system has an effective way of dealing with real abusers. Bankruptcy judges can and do deny the petitions of those who have defrauded or abused the bankruptcy process. The corporate sponsors of this bill know that, but their real motivation is only partly to squeeze millions more dollars from the people who do get into the bankruptcy system.
The more insidious purpose of this bill is to frighten people away from the system altogether, by making it so burdensome and expensive, that they delay filing for bankruptcy or never file. That way, the predatory lenders can continue to collect excessive interest and fees and penalties month after month from people who cannot afford to pay them.
What this bill does to catch the very small number of potential abusers--most of whom can be caught and screened out under the existing system--is to impose huge new paperwork and filing and counseling and other barriers on all those who seek to enter the system, whether they are above or below the median income level, and whether or not there is the slightest indication that they are trying to game the system.
Why else would the bill place such strict and intolerable personal liability on the bankruptcy lawyer for mistakes made in the detailed information provided by the client? In Boston and throughout the country, pro-bono lawyers from leading firms now lend a hand with bankruptcy filings to people down on their luck. The sponsors know that if this bill passes, those firms will not let their lawyers do that public interest work, because the risk will be too high.
There is so much wrong with this bill that we must take the time to get it right. That is why we must have a serious discussion and negotiation and amendment process.
That is why we must defeat tomorrow's cloture vote and continue to seek a bill that is not an embarrassment to the Senate and the fundamental principle of fairness and simple justice for all. It's wrong, deeply wrong, for the Senate to rubber-stamp the greed of the credit card industry.
In a few moments, the Senator from New York will be recognized. I wanted to add a word of support for his amendment. His amendment is not about abortion. It is about violence. Those who promote the culture of life should not be encouraging acts of violence against any members of our society. There is no legitimate reason to oppose this amendment. Those who break the law through violence and intimidation should not have bankruptcy as a shield.
Finally, in a vote later this afternoon, the Senate will declare its true loyalties. Do we stand with low- and middle-income families who fall on hard times, or do we stand with the credit card companies looking for higher and higher profits at any cost? If we are true to our values, we will stand with America's families and defeat this bill because above all else, America stands for freedom and fairness and opportunity. There is nothing fair about a single parent struggling to make ends meet only to be gouged by credit card companies with double-digit rates. There is no freedom in falling ill with cancer and facing a mountain of medical bills only to be hounded by credit card companies to pay them first.
And what is fair when an average American who has done everything right still has to go alone into bankruptcy court and stand up against the big credit card companies and all their might and try to make a fresh start?
I am reminded of the words of Leviticus in the 25th chapter which reads: If one of your brethren becomes poor and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him, but fear your God that your brother may live with you. You shall not lend him your money for usury nor lend him your food at a profit.
One glance at the story of Fatemeh Hosseini shows that even when you try your hardest to repay your debts, you are met by the cold, cruel world of the credit card companies. [...]
(Senate - March 08, 2005)
Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, this bankruptcy bill is mean-spirited and unfair. In anything like its present form, it should and will be an embarrassment to anyone who votes for it. It is a bonanza for the credit card companies, which made $30 billion in profits last year, and a nightmare for the poorest of the poor and the weakest of the weak.
It favors the credit card companies, the giant banks, and the big car loan companies at every turn. It favors the worst of the credit industry--the interest rate gougers, the payday lenders, and the abusive collection agencies. It hurts real people who lose their savings because of a medical crisis or lose their jobs because of outsourcing or suffer major loss of income because they were called up for duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It protects corporate interests at the expense of the needs of real people. It does absolutely nothing about the glaring abuses of the bankruptcy system by the executives of giant companies such as Enron, WorldCom, and Polaroid, who lined their own pockets but left thousands of employees and retirees out in the cold.
It favors companies like MBNA, a top credit card issuer, with over $80 billion in loans, which has contributed $7 million to Federal candidates, a half a million dollars to President Bush alone, and spent over $20 million in lobbying, since 1997, when their lobbyists wrote this bill.
On the other side are people like special ed teacher Fatemeh Hosseini on the front page of Sunday's Washington Post. She fell on hard times when her husband left her and their three children. After her credit card debt reached $25,000, she stopped using the cards and took a second job to try to pay down that debt. She paid $2,000 a month but was hit with very high interest rates, which were raised even higher because of missed payments, heavy late fees, and over-limit penalties.
She made no new purchases, but by last June her $25,000 debt had nearly doubled to almost $50,000. The longer she tried to pay what her statements told her were her minimum payments, the more her debt went up. When all of her salary was going for payments, she had no choice: she was forced into bankruptcy, in the hope of getting the ``fresh start'' the Nation has long provided to its working people when they hit bottom.
This bill says to companies like MBNA: We'll help you scare that teacher out of going into bankruptcy by making the bankruptcy process expensive and burdensome to people like her. If we can't scare her away, we will help you squeeze your high interest rates out of her for a few years longer, even though she can't possibly pay off the amount she owes. We will take sides with companies like you and against people like her.
That is what this bill says. We all know that is wrong. How could the Senate possibly do something so immoral and unreasonable and unfair to our constituents when they are most in need of our help? Where are the vaunted values our colleagues talk about so much? Why didn't the Judiciary Committee do something about this travesty before it reached the floor? Why haven't we fixed it on the floor after more than a week of debate?
This bill was bulldozed through the committee on the pretense that we should not deal with its serious problems there but should wait until it reached the full Senate for serious negotiations and basic improvements. We were assured that there would be good-faith discussions and compromises and that all reasonable amendments would be given fair consideration.
But now there has been no good faith at all--no meaningful discussions, no negotiation, no real consideration of any of the very reasonable amendments that have been proposed to give this bill some shred of balance and fairness. On the contrary, the Republican leadership has invoked the strictest possible party discipline. When individual Republicans say they want to support or offer constructive amendments, they are ordered not to do so. Even when a Republican identifies a serious gap in the bill, such as the very basic jurisdiction outrage pointed out by Senator Cornyn, an outrage that has prejudiced workers and retirees in almost every State, the Republican leadership said no and refused to let the amendment be called up.
The excuse for this bad faith and breach of promise is itself bizarre. The Republican leaders say they cannot upset the delicate compromise reached two Congresses ago, but the only real compromise was the one that had the Schumer amendment in it, and this year's bill doesn't have that amendment in it. In committee Senator Schumer discussed his amendment, but I didn't see the other side jumping up to adopt it in order to restore and preserve the so-called compromise. The floor leaders have not indicated that they plan to accept this amendment to restore and preserve the supposed compromise.
Let's be clear--any pretense of protecting a previous compromise disappeared when the bill's sponsors unilaterally took the Schumer amendment out of the bill before introducing it this year. So there is no compromise before us in the first place. What's more, even the 2001 bill is now totally obsolete.
A great deal has happened in the past 4 years that helps us understand the real issues in this bill and shows that abuse of the system by consumers is not the real problem. We have now felt the full impact of the Bush economic decline, the broad record levels of sustained unemployment.
We have seen an explosion of medical costs, prescription drug costs, and health insurance costs. We have seen job after job eliminated or downgraded or outsourced.
A half million guardsmen and reservists have been called to active duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, leaving their families and their jobs and their small businesses behind to suffer the economic consequences, but this Senate said no to the Durbin amendment.
We have seen the enormous harm caused to employees and retirees by corporate mismanagement and fraud at major companies like Enron and WorldCom and Polaroid, which abused the bankruptcy laws to avoid their obligation to their own loyal workers. We have seen credit card rates go higher and higher and higher, as high as 30 percent or more, plus fees and penalties and charges, raising credit card profits by another $10 billion, even as general interest rates remain low.
We have seen the credit card companies use a self-help remedy for the problems they create by their own indiscriminate and predatory marketing practices. They charge still higher risk-based rates to the very same people who can't even afford the lower bait-and-switch rates.
We now know a lot more about the abuse of bankruptcy this bill was supposedly designed to address. Four years ago we were told we were a nation of bankruptcy abusers. But now, thanks to the careful study of actual bankruptcy case files, we know the truth. We know that 50 percent of the families who go bankrupt have suffered from serious medical problems and have exhausted their savings. Most of those families had paid for health insurance, but it still left them with no financial protection from serious illness or accidents.
If the family is impacted by cancer, you know right at the outset, even if they have health insurance, they are going to have a $35,000 bill. If it is the heart or stroke, it may be $20,000. If they have a child, spina bifida, autism, other kinds of serious children's diseases, it is going to be $15,000 to $20,000. We
know that right at the start. And in too many instances, that is just enough to throw hard-working Americans into the bankruptcy system and the harsh provisions of this legislation. Most of these families tried in every possible way to avoid bankruptcy for years. They gave up food and medicine and utilities and other necessities of life and even transferred their elderly parents into less adequate nursing homes in order to try and avoid bankruptcy. But facts like these don't bother the sponsors of this bill. They just make it up as they go along.
In the past week, for example, some of us offered amendments that would exempt people from the burdensome procedures in this bill if their finances were devastated by medical problems or because they were called up for military duty, and they were voted down. Instead the bill's sponsors introduced and adopted a devious amendment that they said would do what our amendment did. But, of course, it did nothing of the kind. It simply added some words about medical costs and military callups in a way that did not change the real substance of the committee's bill.
The sponsors also said our amendments exempting those below the median income from the means test were unnecessary because low-income filers were already exempt. If they really mean what they say about no means testing for people below the median income, then they should not be refusing to accept our amendment which makes that exemption absolutely clear.
Another Democratic amendment would have placed a generous limit of 30 percent on the interest rates any credit card company could charge. It very carefully stated that it would not change the status quo in States which already had lower limits. That didn't stop the bill's supporters from claiming that the bill would be an intrusion on States rights because it would lift the limit in States with a lower limit.
And perhaps the most outrageous claim of all, one which I thought was dead and buried after it was dragged out in 2001, was dragged out again--a big blue chart and all--and further inflated in their debate. The sponsors repeated the old chestnut that every American family is paying $400 a year in a hidden bankruptcy tax for abuses that this bill would stop. Only now they say this mysterious tax has risen to $550 per person per year.
How is the original $400 number calculated? The debts discharged from all consumer bankruptcies each year are about $40 billion. There are 100 million families in the United States. Therefore, those consumer bankruptcies must be costing each family $400 per family. But this phony math assumes that every dollar discharged in bankruptcy, 100 percent, could have been collected in full, if not for the massive abuse of the system by every consumer who goes bankrupt.
It assumes that the credit card companies and payday lenders and other lenders who collect this debt under the bill would somehow distribute it to all 100 million American families instead of keeping it for themselves. Obviously, neither of these assumptions is true. Even the bill's supporters have long ago conceded that the maximum conceivable amount recoverable from the consumer bankruptcies is about 10 percent of the total. Other estimates conclude that the real number is a small fraction of that.
We don't have to guess what a responsible lender's loss from bankruptcy abuse might be. The lead-off pro-bill witness at our hearing on the bill was the head of the Wisconsin community credit union, testifying for the national credit union lobby. He told us in the last 9 years his credit union has had an average of 10 bankruptcies a year from 11,000 members. He estimated that the 9-year loss from abusive cases was $15,000 to $75,000, with the higher figure based on an unlikely assumption of 15 percent abuse. His credit union's loss from possible abuse spread across its entire membership was 15 to 74 cents a year per member--not per every family in his county or state, but just his members. Yes, a real 15 cents instead of the mythical $400 dollars we have heard about for years on this floor.
Why is that lender's loss from abuse so low? Because that credit union cares about its members, who are also its owners. It gives them a credit level appropriate to their finances, and does not promote across-the-board increases in credit limits. It routinely monitors credit card debt for signs of trouble. When members hit hard times, the credit union does not pounce on them. It looks for ways to help them out. In short, it is a careful and responsible lender, not a predatory lender.
Hello? Could this tell us something about the real problem here? Perhaps the credit card companies who are really pushing this bill should think again about having solicitation desks every fifty feet in the airport, offering gifts to anyone who signs up for a card. Perhaps they should think twice about offering multiple cards to young college students. Perhaps they should not encourage people to raise their card limits recklessly or send them pre-printed checks against their accounts in junk mailings. Perhaps they should not send monthly statements urging their customers to pay only the monthly minimum and pile up their debt.
This bill does nothing to prevent the enticements that the credit card companies use to run up their profits. It does nothing to prevent the real abuses of the system by those who use unlimited homestead exemptions or ``protective'' trusts to hide tens of millions of dollars from the bankruptcy process.
We still have time for common sense amendments on all of these issues, but unless there is a change in direction, Republican party discipline will be invoked to defeat them.
In fact, the present bankruptcy system has an effective way of dealing with real abusers. Bankruptcy judges can and do deny the petitions of those who have defrauded or abused the bankruptcy process. The corporate sponsors of this bill know that, but their real motivation is only partly to squeeze millions more dollars from the people who do get into the bankruptcy system.
The more insidious purpose of this bill is to frighten people away from the system altogether, by making it so burdensome and expensive, that they delay filing for bankruptcy or never file. That way, the predatory lenders can continue to collect excessive interest and fees and penalties month after month from people who cannot afford to pay them.
What this bill does to catch the very small number of potential abusers--most of whom can be caught and screened out under the existing system--is to impose huge new paperwork and filing and counseling and other barriers on all those who seek to enter the system, whether they are above or below the median income level, and whether or not there is the slightest indication that they are trying to game the system.
Why else would the bill place such strict and intolerable personal liability on the bankruptcy lawyer for mistakes made in the detailed information provided by the client? In Boston and throughout the country, pro-bono lawyers from leading firms now lend a hand with bankruptcy filings to people down on their luck. The sponsors know that if this bill passes, those firms will not let their lawyers do that public interest work, because the risk will be too high.
There is so much wrong with this bill that we must take the time to get it right. That is why we must have a serious discussion and negotiation and amendment process.
That is why we must defeat tomorrow's cloture vote and continue to seek a bill that is not an embarrassment to the Senate and the fundamental principle of fairness and simple justice for all. It's wrong, deeply wrong, for the Senate to rubber-stamp the greed of the credit card industry.
In a few moments, the Senator from New York will be recognized. I wanted to add a word of support for his amendment. His amendment is not about abortion. It is about violence. Those who promote the culture of life should not be encouraging acts of violence against any members of our society. There is no legitimate reason to oppose this amendment. Those who break the law through violence and intimidation should not have bankruptcy as a shield.
Finally, in a vote later this afternoon, the Senate will declare its true loyalties. Do we stand with low- and middle-income families who fall on hard times, or do we stand with the credit card companies looking for higher and higher profits at any cost? If we are true to our values, we will stand with America's families and defeat this bill because above all else, America stands for freedom and fairness and opportunity. There is nothing fair about a single parent struggling to make ends meet only to be gouged by credit card companies with double-digit rates. There is no freedom in falling ill with cancer and facing a mountain of medical bills only to be hounded by credit card companies to pay them first.
And what is fair when an average American who has done everything right still has to go alone into bankruptcy court and stand up against the big credit card companies and all their might and try to make a fresh start?
I am reminded of the words of Leviticus in the 25th chapter which reads: If one of your brethren becomes poor and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him, but fear your God that your brother may live with you. You shall not lend him your money for usury nor lend him your food at a profit.
One glance at the story of Fatemeh Hosseini shows that even when you try your hardest to repay your debts, you are met by the cold, cruel world of the credit card companies. [...]
Ms. Hosseini
would still qualify for a chapter 7 if she filed today. Instead of giving mbna and everyone else $2000 per month, use it to get a good lawyer. It's around $1500 give or take for a lawyer and she can pay him instead. No biggie. The other burdensome issues are a couple of more documents. Other then that if Ms. Hosseini would have her paperwork in order and be completely honest she would have her discharge and no more mbna
!
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