{"id":743,"date":"2005-03-08T04:58:38","date_gmt":"2005-03-08T04:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:02","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:02","slug":"moral_bankruptc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=743","title":{"rendered":"Moral Bankruptcy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Marshall has spun off an excellent temporary blog<\/a> on the travesty of the new bankruptcy bill.<\/p>\n

I’m strongly opposed to this, but resigned to it’s passage. The venal residents of Democratic SkyBoxland are too busy tongue-kissing the bought-and-paid for residents of the Grand Owned Party on this issue. Here’s a case where there are real issues – the casual washing away of debt – that need to be addressed, but not by indenturing whole classes of people to finance companies that are as culpable for bad underwriting as the borrowers are for irresponsibility.A bill that stood on three legs:<\/p>\n

* Borrower responsibility, shared by borrowers of all economic classes;
\n* Lender responsibility, in limiting the fines and penalties on distressed borrowers, and in tightening underwriting requirements and marketing regulations to make it harder for lenders to push credit on people, and raise the rates to usurious levels if a payment is missed.
\n* Realistic provisions for health and other genuine personal disasters<\/p>\n

…would be a good bill.<\/p>\n

And the reality is that this is a disaster for the Democratic Party. Why??<\/p>\n

Because instead of standing for something – the powerless against the powerful – they regularly sell out. See my old post<\/a> about Kos’ client, Rep. Jim Moran, who took a personal loan of $447,000 from MBNA four days before he signed on as a lead sponsor of the bill.<\/p>\n

This kind of thing makes it damn hard to stand up and point fingers where and when they should be pointed.<\/p>\n

But hey, as long as the contibutions and consulting contracts keep coming in, that’s OK, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Josh Marshall has spun off an excellent temporary blog on the travesty of the new bankruptcy bill. I’m strongly opposed to this, but resigned to it’s passage. The venal residents of Democratic SkyBoxland are too busy tongue-kissing the bought-and-paid for residents of the Grand Owned Party on this issue. Here’s a case where there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}