If there is a poor man among your brothers in any of the towns of the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward your poor brother.Some days are born special. I woke up at
--Deuteronomy 15:7
I didn't read either message and I still haven't. I know the statement they're trying to make and, frankly, I'm not that interested.
Every few weeks my phone rings off the hook (if it had a hook) with pestering calls from billion dollar corporations and their low-paid representatives inBut, really, I just don't have what they want.
Sometimes they trick me. My phone rings, I look at it, there's a number, my mind's running slow, I think maybe it's important, and I make the mistake of taking the call. I did this a little while ago. It was Citibank. I owe them $12,000.00 because they were generous enough to subsidize my education.Apparently they didn't do it out of the goodness of their patriotic hearts.
A lot of people complain about having phone conversations with computers. People like to bemoan the loss of personal interaction in our modern life. Me? I'd rather talk to a machine about my debts than have a stranger chide me and make me feel low. I am low, I know that, I'd just rather hear it from a machine.Banks are amazing beasts. We give them our money and they do whatever the hell they like with it. If you write a check to someone in
But if you owe the bank money suddenly they're all talk.
So I answer my phone and there's some woman from somewhere representing the world's largest bank telling me to give them money. I decide this is as good a time as any and start giving my information so they can immediately swipe a couple hundred of my dollars that, presently, belong to Fifth/Third.
And then the lovely woman on the other end of the line asks me a question. She says, "Can you tell me why you are late making your payment?"
Low. I told you (hell, you know) they make you feel low. The richest bank in the entire world is asking me why I can't give them a couple hundred dollars. Sure, I owe them money, but when I'm choosing between The Lexicon Project, buying myself dinner and giving money to Citibank, well, the choice is clear.
So I did what any good person would do. I answered her question with a question of my own. "Can you tell me," I said, "why a few months ago Citibank gave $2,000,000,000.00 to Enron and its investors?"
There was a pause, and then this some woman from somewhere says to me, "I can't answer that, you'll need to call customer service."
I told her, as politely as I could, that I wasn't going to call customer service because their answer would be just as unsatisfying as hers. They don't want to answer my question and I don't want to answer theirs.
If a man loses his life savings at a poker table in Vegas, nobody's gonna to be there to reimburse him. But when some idiot invests money with Enron or Delphi or Refco or Citibank and that craps game goes to shit, $2 billion appears from nowhere.
The stock market is legalized gambling. It's not a revolutionary idea -- we all know it. If the market crashes, the house wins (they call it a "severance package"). That's the way the corporation crumbles.
I recount all of that as a longwinded preface to this:
Last spring our President and our Congress passed the Bankruptcy Reform Bill making it harder for individual Americans to declare bankruptcy and cancel their debts. The new law helps credit card companies (like, say, Citibank) and hurts average Americans.
The evidence is clear. Witness the victims of Hurricane Katrina who are flocking to bankruptcy court ahead of the deadline or the hundreds of average Americans who stood in line today in Denver, or the good folks here in our own community who made it down to 100 E. Vine Street to file their papers and terminate their credit.
Bankruptcy Court In-take, 100 E. Vine St., 10/14/05
I'll pay late payments unto death before I give those bastards their $12,000.