CREDIT CARD ABUSES
Have you ever been charged a $29 fee for being 2 days late with a $15 payment?
With the Democrats back in control of Congress, guess what? As you likely saw on last night’s news, credit card companies are being called to task for some of their more outrageous, bullying, tactics. Already they are announcing some voluntary changes.
Democrats care about people struggling to make ends meet. Republicans, when they had the gavel, cared about toughening the bankruptcy laws even for victims of catastrophic illness.
I am a capitalist. But to work well, capitalism needs enlightened oversight and regulation. Democrats don’t want a welfare state; but we don’t want Dickensian London, either.
HECK OF A JOB, JIMBO
And while I’m being partisan . . .
The same ABC newscast reported:
A proposal to keep seriously wounded vets from falling through the cracks of the bureaucracy was shelved in 2005 when Jim Nicholson took over as the secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department, according to the former VA employee who was responsible for tracking war casualties.
As a result, seriously wounded veterans continued to face long delays for health care and benefit payments after being discharged from the military, says former VA program manager Paul Sullivan. . . .
And what was Jim Nicholson doing before he was appointed to this Cabinet post? He was chairing the Republican National Committee. (Can’t get much more partisan than that.)
Republicans don’t govern terribly well – be it their management of FEMA or Iraq or this V.A. disaster or applying oversight to the credit card industry – because, some say, they are pretty much anti-government.
OUR EXPONENTIAL TRAJECTORY
Has this six-minute video already landed in your in-box? The one about ‘shift happens?’
Some of it, especially at first, is kind of simple-minded (did we not know there are four times as many people in China as there are here in the U.S.?). But it builds. Today’s kids really ought to watch it before deciding not to do their homework.
