Oh, policy? Barack Obama talks about credit cards

As much as we all "enjoy" responding to Hillary Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama's character and discussing polls, there's much more important things at stake in this election.  Today, Obama reminded us of that, as he chose to address the problem of predatory credit card lenders.  The AP reports:

"Many credit card companies are tricking Americans into agreements they can't afford because that's how they make big profits," he said. "Well, no company's bottom line should come before what's right for the American people."

Obama doesn't stop there...

The AP also notes that Obama links this issue to bankruptcy laws:

Obama also spoke of his opposition to an overhaul of bankruptcy laws that he said protects credit card companies more than consumers.

"Every American has a responsibility to pay what they owe, but we need to make sure that what they're paying is fair, and we've got to do more for those Americans who aren't able to climb out of debt and actually have to declare bankruptcy," he said, promising reform of bankruptcy laws if elected president. He said he opposed a 2005 bankruptcy bill because it protected lenders while "preventing middle-class Americans from getting back on their feet after a crisis — even if they've suffered an illness."

There's more on today's statement at the Obama HQ blog.  You can also see Obama's 2005 statement on the bankruptcy bill to see that he has been consistently right:

this bill would take us from a system where judges weed out the abusers from the honest to a system where all the honest are presumed to be abusers. Where declaring Chapter 7 bankruptcy is made prohibitively expensive for people who already have suffered financial devastation. With this bill, it doesn't matter if you ran up your debt on a trip to Vegas or a trip to the Emergency Room, you're still treated the same under the law and you still face the possibility that you'll never get the chance to start over.

Now, it would be one thing if most people were abusing the system and falling into bankruptcy because they were irresponsible with their finances.  But we know that's not the case. We know that most people fall into bankruptcy as a result of bad luck. And we know that a recent Harvard study showed that nearly half of all bankruptcies occur because of an illness that ends up sticking families with medical bills they just can't keep up with.

(snip)

And if we're going to crack down on bankruptcy abuse, we should make it clear that we intend to hold the wealthy and the powerful accountable too. As it is now, this bill makes it easier for a company like Enron who just bilked their employees out of their life savings to declare bankruptcy than for the employees themselves. In my own state, we even had a mining company by the name of Horizon declare bankruptcy and then refuse to pay its employees the health benefits it owed them.

The Mine Workers involved had provided a total of 100,000 years of service and dedication and sacrifice to this company. They spent their lives working hard. They did their part. But Horizon didn't do its part, and it was allowed to hide behind bankruptcy laws to leave these workers without the care they had earned.

This is wrong. It's wrong that this bill would make it harder for these unemployed workers to declare bankruptcy, while doing nothing to prevent the bankrupt company that put them there from shirking its responsibility entirely.

What kind of a message does it send when we tell hardworking, middle-class Americans, "You have to be more responsible with your finances, but the corporations you work for can be as irresponsible as they want with theirs"?

I think this is a very significant progressive issue and I am very glad that Obama is speaking out, both as Senator as Presidential Candidate.  If you've never checked it, I recommend Warren Reports at TPMCafe which covers credit cards and other ways corporations are squeezing the middle class.   [Finally, since voting records are a big deal today, Barack Obama voted against the 2005 bankruptcy bill (when it passed), and was not in the senate for the 2001 vote (when it failed.)  Hillary Clinton voted for the bankruptcy bill in 2001, but strongly opposed the  2005 bankruptcy bill, voting against cloture but (quite rightly) missing the final 2005 vote due to her husband's surgery.]