CREDIT CARD USERS WEPT AS SUMMERS SLEPT
By
Jon Christian Ryter
April 26, 2009
NewsWithViews.com
According to USA Today, Resident Barack Hussein Obama had a "get tough" meeting at the White House on Thursday with 14 of the nation's largest credit card executives. Before the April 23 meeting Obama used the Oval Office bully pulpit to chastise credit card companies. The White House press corps told the media that Obama planned to impose new rules on credit card companies to protect consumers against abusive interest hike hike. In an all too common photo op, Obama told the TV cameras that people receiving low interest credit card offering find "...themselves starting off with a low rate and the next thing they know, their interest rates have doubled, fees that they didn't know about that are suddenly tacked onto their bills...There has to be strong and reliable protections for consumers protections," Obama concluded. "Protections that ban unfair rate increases and forbid abusive fees and penalties. The days of anytime, any reason rate hikes and late fee traps have to end."
The White House Press Corps told the media that Congress was ready to impose new regulations on credit card companies if those companies did not agree to reverse detrimental "issuer policies" that have saddled consumers with a new, unexpected, round of unaffordable debt that has further crippled the ability of consumers to use credit. It is important for consumers who actually expect something other than political threats and meaningless rhetoric to come out of Thursday's meeting to remember that the credit card giants are, first and foremost, campaign contributors not only of Obama, but of those who sit on the congressional committees and possess the power to regulate them. It's also important to note that those credit card executives paid dearly (through campaign contributions) to have written into the lending laws the provisions that allow them to arbitrarily raise your credit card interest rates when your neighbor fails to pay his bill. Why do you think the White House has politely asked those corporate heads to reverse these issuer policies instead of repealing their right to do so?
And, that's why when Sen. Chris Dodd [D-CT] was asked by a CBS-TV reporter this morning when the consumers could expect legislation to provide the relief from credit card interest abuses that Obama promised, he waffled. Dodd surmised that with 535 members in Congress, its hard to predict when such legislation would be forthcoming. Pushed, he said he was sure something would be done.
|
Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! |
That's why the much-hyped "federal slapdown" of the credit card was so boring that Economic Advisor Lawrence Summers found time during the Obama "berating of the interest-gougers" to take a nap. In the April 23 issue of USA Today, Gannett reporter Kathy Chu said: "Today, [Resident] Obama and economic adviser Lawrence Summers are meeting at the White House with executives from more than a dozen credit card companies..." The tone of Chu's article suggested the White House was going to get tough. And, by the end of the meeting, credit card interest relief would be on its way to the US consumers who have already been brutally raped by Obama's three trillion, five hundred billion dollar stimulus for the rich that they are expected to pay. Right? Wrong.
