Bankruptcy “Reform” and the Big Democratic Tent

Dear god, where does one begin in trying to parse out this travesty?

The GOPpies propose the Family Solvency Prevention and Debt Slavery Protection Act, and seventeen; count ‘em, seventeen Democrats actually vote for this legislative anal rape of America’s vulnerable families!

And the best excuse they can give for this blatant rimjob of the credit card industry ghouls?

“Well, I believe in people taking responsibility for their financial decisions. If people borrow money, they should have to pay it back.”

>Whimper.< Shoot me now, and get it over with. Living in an America where clueless twits like this can actually rise to the highest positions of legislative power in the land, under the rubric of the allegedly more populist, leftward, compassionate Party is too humiliating.

That big bruise in the middle of my forehead? Oh, just beating my head against the wall, you know. It feels so much better than trying to do reality checks for these wholly-owned subsidiaries of the banking and credit industry.

So… clue me in, “Democratic” Senators. The real reason you voted for this obscene bonanza for the predatory bloodsuckers in the financial disservices industry is….?

They’re not making enough profits this year? (Oh, please…)

The desperate families who experience job loss or catastrophic illness and clutch at easy credit as the last remaining lifering to keep them afloat, not realizing it’s really a millstone, deserve lengthy, family-destroying torment as a payback for their “financial irresponsibility?”

Let me guess… you’re looking forward to a lucrative return from investing in privatized debtor’s prisons?

Or maybe it’s just time we repealed that silly old Thirteenth Amendment forbidding indentured servitude and debt bondage, once and for all.

Is that it?

Because honestogawd, either you guys (oh, sorry, Debbie, Mary, Blanche…) are too intellectually challenged to actually understand this critical piece of legislation and its impact, in spite of the patient explanations of Elizabeth Warren and other highly credible experts, or you’re bought and paid for by the lending vampires.

I don’t know which is more frightening and disappointing. Either way, your constituents, and all the regular American families (remember us? You’re supposed to serve our interests?) get sold down the river.

And please don’t give me that “I believe in responsibility” horse puckey. You think I don’t? You think all of the millions of Americans opposing this bill simply want to legitimize financial irresponsibility?

If so, you’re down on the “lethally stupid” side of the ledger.

Clearly, you have no capacity to understand the purpose of bankruptcy protection, its history in the United States, the current state of the credit industry (and its profitability,) and the rising tide of factors behind the increase in the bankruptcy rates.

Clearly, you have a really low opinion of American families (your constituents, remember? The ones who voted for you?) You think we’re all a bunch of deadbeats charging big-screen teevees and designer clothes who would happily default on our debts any time we thought we could “get away” with it.

Sweet. Nice to know you have such a high opinion of us.

You never listened, obviously, when it was explained to you in language a third-grader could understand, that almost all of the people who declare bankruptcy do it only as a last resort, because they couldn’t recover from losing a job or getting really sick.

Which is the purpose of bankruptcy protection in the first place. To help families hit by a disaster beyond their control, when they’ve tried their hardest to pay off their debts. To give them a genuine chance to start again, rather than indenturing them to their creditors for years, living in a precarious financial state that damages family security and stability, and makes it easier for them to fail again.

It apparently never occurred to you alleged Democrats that the bankruptcy protection system in America isn’t broken, doesn’t need “fixing.” That the real way, the effective way to address the rising tide of bankruptcy in America might be to fix the health care system, improve employment security, and regulate lending practices so that vulnerable families aren’t as easily scammed by the banking harpies.

You just didn’t have the IQ to comprehend reality, and then reason out the corollary.

Nor did you draw the connection between “financial responsibility” and the grotesquely reckless credit practices of the lending industry since deregulation began in 1978. Apparently “responsibility” only applies to families and individuals—corporations shouldn’t have to suck up any of the consequences of their own bad business practices.

Gosh. Remind me to send a note of congratulations to the good people of Montana, Indiana, Utah, Delaware, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, Nevada, Colorado, and Michigan. They must be just bustin’ their buttons with joy at being represented by such intellectual giants.

Okay, so you don’t want to claim stupidity as your excuse? You represent, you say, a conservative state where you live in terror of being voted out of office if you deviate from the redstate ideological doctrine? You held your nose as you voted, making a martyr of yourself because you know the Party needs to keep every Democrat it can in the Senate, and you just had to kowtow to the GOPpie panjandrums?

More horse puckey.

The GOPpies had a solid front on this one, boys and girls. The fix was in. There was no way they weren’t getting what they wanted. American families were already bent over, just waiting for the first thrust. Your “help” wasn’t needed.

I’ve heard it so many times before, to explain away votes likely to irritate the home folks: “Well, I voted against that one ‘cause I knew it wouldn’t really mean anything, the fix was already in, no way it could fail. I just owed so-and-so a favor, this was a harmless way to pay it.” (Or, “I had to throw a bone to those other folks, you know.”)

It would have killed you to utter that much-overused excuse one more time, at a time when Democratic unity would really have meant something, and you could have made a real moral and ethical stand on behalf of American families? Are you really that wimpy, that chickenshit?

That only leaves one other explanation, doesn’t it?

Tell me, “Democrats”— how much did your votes cost the credit card vultures? I hope it didn’t go cheap.

Now get the hell out of my tent, dammit. It isn’t big enough for the likes of you.

frothingly,
Bright

... has a helluva lot of corporate logos plastered all over it. When that tent shrinks down to the size of a beach umbrella, maybe the clueless will get clued.

middle class). We just need to regulate them good and proper as Democrats. If you want to scare away 80% of the country we should just say that all corporations are bad. Then we can sit under our umbrella and be a little tribe in a country (America) that is run by the big and powerful tribe called Corporations.

Corporations are a part of markets. Before markets or coporations... people were 95% poor. The middle class owes its existence to specialization. Our big quest as democrats is to make sure that we always, always get to regulate the things we invented. And to not let corporations teach us that public goods (public health care, safety regulations, porn industry regulations, electoral funding, etc.) cannot be delivered using the market.

We are actually fighting over the markets right now. The markets have been a human thing for 10,000 years.

So please.. do not ignore the things that are a part of our lives in favor of some Utopia where corporations go poof. The only way to change things so that congressmen & women can actually get elected with/out corporate hegemony playing a part... is to use our big tent to win the next elections.

They destroy our big tent and they have splintered the Democratic Plurality into a bunch of fighting tribes... just like the fundies & the freepers. And the only ones who will benefit from that are the very corporations who you say you dislike. The biggest tribe of all are the corporations who no longer target each other for destruction but target democrats and democratic pluralities and American democracy for destruction. Anything to keep from having to provide public goods through the market or to have to provide jobs or something good.

You want to beat the corporations back to being the tools they were created to be? GET POWER. GET POWER IN THIS DECADE. Don't let them make you hate your tent-mate. Or they will own you... and you will be the little colonial with no vote.

"...all corporations are bad?"

I don't remember writing that.

curiously,
Bright

You have to admit though that Bush's strategists really are trying to turn America into a place where democracy and plurality does not exist. We have to be vigilant about that and becoming the tribes they want. The British used indirect rule to rule the whole planet and when they came upon a group that had no hierarchy... they made it. Where they came upon groups who did not hate each other.. they made them see each other as different. Pulling down our own tent simply plays into the hands of neocons. Their biggest opposition to remaking a world according to elites... is pluralism. A majority in an election is called a plurality. A big tent is a plurality. It teaches us that we are not exactly like everyone in our party.. but we come together to get some of what we need... even though it may not be exactly what we want all the time.

Neocons will permanently make Democrats in to a group of tribes and destroy the plurality. Because neocons fully believe that they & their elites should get exactly what they want... all the time.

Our big tent... and democracy go against that.

... very moralistic, condescending misunderstanding of the point of the post. Large corporations do not like regulation--or taxes. They pay off all politicians to avoid regulation and taxation. Democrats have succumbed to their wishes against the wishes of ordinary people.

Moreover, public corporations, those comprising the market, are not the whole of the economy--not by a longshot--but they are obtaining favors as if they were.

And, if you go back to 1890 or so, 95% of the people were poor--in large part because of, not in spite of, the corporations of the day--the trusts, run by the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Morgans, Goulds and the various owners of the railroad.

Let me also remind you that in the decade after this country was founded, there was a rather vibrant merchant class in the country and there were fewer than forty corporations in all the states. The Revolutionary War was fought, in large part, against the Crown policies which gave dominance to the British East India Company--the first multinational in this country's economic history.

Now, how do you propose to get power in this decade when the corporations are winning the battle for the wealth and power of this country, when Democrats (ostensibly the party of the people) do the bidding of those large corporations, and in fact, are aiding and abetting oligarchy, when the very people benefitting from that system are the ones authorized to implement campaign funding and voting system reform, and have through that authority gamed the system in favor of the powerful.

I didn't see one specific proposal from you about how to alter that trend. I don't see a single specific proposal from you about how you would propose that the Democratic party begin the process of re-regulating industry--especially when they've been corrupted by its money and influence.

That is my point about the shrinking tent. Ordinary Democrats will begin to see the party's true intentions--the ones informing their votes, rather than the rhetoric they distribute for public consumption--and will leave the party, not for the Republicans, but more likely for a non-voting apathy or to marginally support other parties such as the Greens.

For the Democrats, corporatism is a wasting disease. The Democrats have, over the course of almost twenty years, tried to play the Republicans' game--soliciting more big money, deferring the public good for the corporate good, being economic Republicans, allowed the corporate media to define the message.

Now, I know one of one way to help fix the problem--to have a Constitutional amendment to clarify the status of corporations as artificial persons, without the rights of natural persons as those rights of natural persons are defined under the 14th Amendment and the rest of the Constitution.

Now, you tell me--how much support do you think that will have among Democrats--even with the gross assumption that they will, at some point in the next decade, be the dominant party in government?

The need for corporations and the need to see them reformed good and proper.

I do however totally disagree about letting the big tent become a small one. The things that build that big tent took a long time. I don't think it is something that goes up and down in size very easily.

I am sorry if you found my treatise on corporations patronizing. I don't know you and I was only explaining the need to not alienate the representatives that we do have.

Perhaps a reaction on my part from spending the last week defending Lieberman.. who I do not always understand... but defending his right to vote his heart when the issues that may take him across the isle on occasion were well known to all of us. If Lieberman was okay then... why all of a sudden do we want to see action and penalty for being 'quite a bit different'. I know we can all empathize with his need to be hawkish on Israel and 'dealing with the devil' at times to make a permanent peace in Israel happen. I know that is not it.. So what is it that makes us so much want to kick the columns out from under our own big tent. Anger.

I just don't want to see us destroy our only trump card. That we actually are a plurality.. even though we seem to have a hard time using that to our advantage or communicating that.

I forget that I have been through the cycle of sociopathic manipulations and life alteration in my own life and can look at you and say "don't cut your losses and run back to your kind wounded because you will just end up making a pass-time of it. The WH will take another slice out of us after the 'big tent' comes down. If we kick Lieberman out... the next attack will happen on a Monday. And perhaps it will be fiscal conservatives who will frustrate us.

What I am saying is that with the monsters you have in the WH ... they rely on exhausting and exasperating and making you fall on your knees and suffer day in day out ... in order to get you to cut your losses and hand over something that you think will quiet all the stress down. But the very next day they will go after something else of yours, and you will face the same trauma and anger and emotional roller coaster. So do not do it. Do not give in to the "idea" that if you get rid of something that is yours.. you will be able to relax. The sociopaths will take the fight to you again, in your own private life, and on your street and in your church and at your school and amongst your friends and in your Democratic Party... again with the same intensity.

You will cut your losses and cut your losses and live in a smaller and smaller group until you are and angry and exhausted person who cares for nothing outside your own four walls. Watch for the witnesses in Saddam Hussein's trial to talk about being exhausted and incapable of opposition. Watch for them when the trials start. It will be you in 6 years. Unless we all stick together and keep our big tent and build a few more election victories in 2 years.

So if the weird voting Democrats are driving you crazy and exhausting you simply by their complicity and their existence.. stop watching the news and take up gardening. Or screen out all developments on the floor of the house. Tell yourself you will only fight three "issues" a week. And save your energy for the real fight which will take place in two years. And we will need you rested and ready to go. And we will need Lieberman.

Do not "give in " on the tent. Of course you hate people in it these days.. those crazy 15 item bills the Repukes have been forcing on the House these last 10 years are to blame. They confuse and muddle and smoke up your relationship with your elected members. Exactly as they are meant to do. As with everything they throw at you.. to only way to beat this WH... is to keep the Plurality.. to keep the Big Tent. The ones who have been fooled into voting against their own needs may vote with you this time. Do not loose the centre and do not loose the left. Big Tent.

...and another key issue is what is best for America (in the overall, and most especially in the Constitutional sense,) rather than just what is best for the Democratic Party.

Philosophically, I think we (the Democratic) need to accommodate a range of liberal views-- and there is plenty of range there to keep the tent "big."

However, I have no problem at all with shoving some of the rightward-moderate DLC types who remind me of Nelson Rockefeller and his ilk (and I say that with great respect) back out of the tent to fend for themselves.

Hopefully, they will muscle their way back into the GOPpie tend and yank it back toward the center, which would be better for all of us. I have no problem with being the opposition party or even the minority party, if our overall mission is to keep a small but significant liberal-wards pressure on a ship of state that hews to a mainly centrist course. In a situation like that, small increments of liberal-wards pressure have a chance of making a difference.

It's trying to put the same small increments of pressure on a grotesquely rightward-veering behemoth that is both ineffective and heartbreaking. If the centrists can reclaim the GOP and yank things back into the middle, it will give us real liberal Democrats something to work with, as it were.

So, yes, I'm perfectly happy to dump them out in the cold, and point to the Holy Roller Revival tent over there to the right, and say "nice and warm in there, and I hear the refreshments are nummy, too!"

It may take some time but in the long run I think it will be better for America, even if it doesn't give the Democratic Party lots of power and patronage to dispense with big electoral majorities. (Remember the thing about power corrupting, after all.)

anomalously,
Bright

does not go their way.. all the time... under my tent. I just would.

...whether things "go my way."

I recognize that there is a broad spectrum of liberal views, and not all of them agree with me. In fact, I probably rank as "too moderate" or even "too conservative" for some. (For example, I live in a rural area and think that the solution to gun violence needs different approaches in urban vs. rural areas, and total prohibition is probably not the best universal approach. Stuff like that.)

But there is a line (a bit fuzzy, I have no problem conceding,) between those of us who feel that the purpose of government is to enable all of us to live together in a situation where your exercise of/access to the maximum range of human, economic, civil, and social rights doesn't have too negative an impact on my exercise of/access to the maximum range of human, etc., rights; and those who feel that the purpose of government is to build a few roads, fight wars, and make it as easy as possible for some people to get rich.

How an elected representative votes on a whole range of decisions is usually a pretty good clue as to which side of the line they fall on. There are decent people on both sides, actually. I don't agree with the "less government is more" crew, but I don't think they all have horns and tails, either. Some I think are pretty conscientious public servants, decent human beings who would never dream of kicking dogs, molesting children, wallowing in sleaze, etc.

People like that could do a lot to make that other tent --the GOPpie one-- not nearly as toxic and destructive to America as it is now. There's considerable value in that, to me.

I think Robert Byrd is more than decent, and I have profound respect for his unyielding defense of the Constitution. I admire him greatly for a number of reasons. Imagine what America would be like if the majority of GOPpies were like Byrd, McCain, etc.; and the majority of Democrats were like Feingold, Kucinich, etc.

Wouldn't that be better than what we have now?

I think so. Let's send all those nice moderate conservatives back to the GOPpies where they belong, and let them reclaim their party and re-marginalize the fundie nutjobs, neo-Imperialists and Christian Identity freaks who are currently running the show over there. We'll all be better off that way.

helpfully,
Bright

can stop you cold is local... and where the GOP cannot find hierarchies.. they try and build them. All for Lugard and Double Mandate... where you run one election but actually elect two governments.

It is not democratic. It is... neocolonial. And the elites in the tribe of corporations and the tribe of rich folk... decide the big issues like "will there be universal health care in the US like every other Western Nation". And the actual voters do not get to say much unless they let loose at church. Pretty scary for us outside to watch.

The Democratic Party leadership is creating the shrinkage in the party through a DLC-promoted program of supporting corporations at the expense of ordinary workers. The DNC has often supported corporations' interests for the sake of increased corporate donations. In that sense, they have been trying to emulate and imitate the Republicans, and their votes reflect that. (Are you aware that the DLC has, at times, received portions of its funding from subsidiaries of the Heritage Foundation, which in turn receives a significant amount of its funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing crazy--that should tell you something--why is the right wing funding a presumably Democratic institution--they don't fund anything that isn't in their ideological focus?)

As for Lieberman, I find him, based on his votes, a shill for the insurance and accounting industries, a hawk of considerable proportions, and a strong supporter of war to help prop up a corrupt Israeli government which would fail utterly without the monetary and military support of the United States. I find his association with the right wing to suppress free expression in colleges a matter which is truly odious.

As for corporations in general, I refer you to the writings of Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln, who feared greatly that their influence on the country would harm democracy, and, indeed, those individuals were prescient--corporations (particularly those involved with war tools and the multi-nationals) are the most anti-democratic force in this nation today. They consistently act in their own interests, rather than those of the common good, and have manipulated the legislative process in this country for many decades.

If you believe that support of corporations is necessary to protect jobs, ask yourself why those same corporations are exporting jobs when qualified and willing people in this country are available.

If you believe that economic growth matters to ordinary people and that corporations are fundamental in that, ask yourself why that economic growth has resulted in the highest rate of poverty of any developed nation next to Mexico, and that the distribution of real wealth and real income has become more disparate as the power of corporations has increased.

Ask yourself why the average effective tax rate on corporations is now lower than that of most lower-income workers, and that the effective corporate tax rate is now approximately equal to the tax income provided to corporations in the form of direct and indirect subsidies and credits.

Ask yourself who really benefits from this largesse to corporations. The top 400 families in this country own almost 30% of the stock. The top 1% of families own almost half the stock. The top 20% of families own 80% of the stock. Many of the ills of state budgets for education are directly attributable to declining tax revenues from corporations, since most state tax returns are based on federal returns, receipts from which have been declining precipitously in the last couple of decades, even though corporations depend heavily on that educational infrastructure.

What I am saying, quite simply, is that if the Democrats align themselves with corporations at the expense of the ordinary people, they will progressively shrink and finally fail, leaving the country at the hands of a one-party system. This is by design of the right wing. The Democrats have been corrupted by corporate money, and are now complicit in the oligarchy the right wing intends for the country.

Much is made of the 120 million people who voted in this past election. And yet, there were 79 million people eligible to vote in this past election who did not do so. How many of those were devoted Republicans? Very few, I venture. Democrats, by their devotion to corporate campaign money and their failure to live up to their obligations to the people, have alienated many of those 79 million. That is the intention of corporate leaders, not an accident of their existence.

Remember that the definition of fascism is the melding of the corporation and the state, something that is virtually complete under this administration, with the acquiescence of the Democratic leadership (in their grossly mistaken aim to achieve a bipartisanship which accommodates the aims of corporations while maintaining the appearance of having the public's interests at heart).

Nope. You misunderstand what I'm saying. You defend corporations and the Democrats' continued affiliation with them if you wish. I will not. There's one damned good reason not to do so--namely, democracy.

Take up gardening? Stop watching TV? We need Lieberman?

I don't know whether to laugh, or cry, at that advice. But, I won't take it, thank you.

I do agree the tactics must change drastically. The whole assumption must also change. Trying to solve new problems with old solutions often doesn’t work. If you can get around the vindictiveness, the need to be on top or even the need to control too many things then the possibility exists to go around the obstacle you see in front of you.

Corporations are just another "ISM". To put them aside you must go to root of where they appear from, people's greed and their ability to be detached from it or the responsibility of them. A good portion of all people in the US either work for one, provide service for one or many of them, or work for a governmental agency that is supposed to be helping control part of them.

The argument about how ones own shit don't stink comes to mind for me also.

What ever the outcome and or if some, none or all of us help it to change it, irregardless it still will.

Pull your finger out of that hole in the dike and learn to swim

cardboard box.

They shoot horses, don't they?

...but when I do, I don't pull many punches. This may be a bit over-the-top, in some ways, but, DAMN, it felt good!

cathartically,
Bright

Do you forget?

This is another example of who or what gets represented in the corporo-fascist legislatures.. and it's not the people.

Also, don't forget that -votes- don't mean much of anything any more. It's who funds the campaigns and lobbies that matters.

Sue

it's the latest in a long line of anti-citizen measures that noticeable numbers of alleged Democrats have supported.

For all the talk of electronic voting machines, they are far from the only problem. If the Dems had been doing their job between 2000 and 2004 (or between 1980 and 2004), the Bushboy would have gotten a smaller percentage of the vote than Barry Goldwater, and the election would have been impossible to steal.

Those seventeen Dems need to be humiliated and shamed by the majority of the party on the bankruptcy bill. If standing up for the working class and struggling means anything to this party--those seventeen screwed up. They need to know this will not pass.

By making those seventeen pay a price--along with the New Dem pansy asses in the House--we will show America that we DO stand for the people against the powerful. These turncoats have reinforced the view that there are few differences between the Dems and the GOP.

Sadly, I'm not holding my breath for us to stand up on this. When Reid himself sold us out--it is very discouraging.

Maybe the reaming these Dems got from us behind their votes is the explaination for why some of them are so MEEK and trembling as they approach this budget and plead for "us" on other issues this week.