Martha Stewart - A "Model" Prisoner

The myopic media has performed exactly the kind of circus acts one would expect upon Martha Stewart's release from prison: Follow her around and take a lot of photographs. Ask this billionaire how prison treater her. Ask her what she's going to do next.

Long forgotten is the actual reason Stewart went to prison--profiting by abusing access to privileged information that is not available to the masses of impoverished and "middle class" Americans who routinely lose their hard-earned money to inside traders in the stock market, salesmen of pointless products, etc. (To be precise, Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators, not of insider trading).

The most tragic part of this circus is not the media's fascination with Martha Stewart's imprisonment, however. It is their portrayal of Stewart as some kind of heroine, who did her time with dignity, dutifully paid her debt to society, and patiently awaiting her opportunity to become America's favorite (and presumably, honest) entrepreneur once again. A role model to us all, indeed.

One Los Angeles Times headline articulated this heroic theme in six words: "MARTHA STEWART: HUMILITY DONE TO PERFECTION", and offered empathy for Ms. Stewart's sad plight:

Naturally, it took a lot of hard work — scrubbing prison bathroom floors, foraging for wild onions on prison grounds, learning to cook with a microwave, befriending women whose lives bore no resemblance to her own, even losing a Christmas decorating contest. But Stewart is more sympathetic, perhaps more human, than she's ever been. After 23 years as the world's most capable hostess, a fantasy so many Americans loved to hate, she seems to have acquired the one useful trait the public felt she lacked: humility.

With domesticated reporting like this on every channel, the news media lost its best opportunity in years to inform The People of one of America's worst ongoing atrocities: the prison industry. No mention of prisoners being beaten or raped. No mention of them being put to work as cheap labor for corporations. No mention of wrongful or political imprisonment. No mention of solitary confinement doing what it does best--driving human beings to the limits of their sanity and making them even more dangerous, rather than rehabilitating them into contributing members of society.

Those who are interested in the reality of prison life for non-billionaires might want to visit the Prisoner Activist Resource Center (http://www.prisonactivist.org/), since the mass media never bothered to mention any of these subjects. All we got from the maintream news media was a Christmas decorating contest. Stewart herself had more to say on the subject than all mainstream news media combined in a post made to her website while incarcerated, which vaguely urging the government to consider prison "reform".

I would like to take this opportunity to describe a true American heroine, in constrast to the media's portrayal of Martha Stewart as a role model.

Susan MacDougal was a partner of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the now famous Whitewater land deal. She was never convicted of committing any financial crime (like Martha was), but instead was incarcerated for refusing to testify against the Clintons. According to MacDougal, she only refused to lie about the Clintons when special prosecutor Ken Starr demanded that she did under penalty of imprisonment. As so often happens in these cases, we may never know exactly what led to MacDougal's incarceration among hardened criminals in a federal penitentiary. Fortunately, what happened with Whitewater is entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

What is relevant is Susan MacDougal's actions upon her release from prison. She wrote a book about her experience and began touring as an advocate for prison reform. You see, some people actually care enough about other people to empathize with them, learn about the reality of their experience, and take positive action to stop human suffering where they see it. Susan MacDougal opened her eyes while in prison, saw something horrific happening in the land of the free, and decided to devote her time to doing something about it.

In contrast, Martha Stewart immediately began planning to host another television show this Fall. In the meantime, she held an internet chat interview with her fans, where she applied her experience in the brutal American prison system to answer hard-hitting questions like these:

Kathyrn_NYC: Can you tell us about the poncho you wore when you flew home Thursday night?

Susie315: Why are you at a new house? What about Turkey Hill? Who's there or did you sell it?

PM1113: Can you please tell me where the daily show will be taped and how I can be a member of the live audience?

Denise: How did your pets react when you returned home?

Polski: Martha, what did you prepare as your first meal when you returned home?

Sueannf: Do you have your ankle bracelet? What does it look like? Is there any time of the day that you can take it off? Is it uncomfortable?

Carmel: Hello, Martha. My 10-year-old daughter is a fan of yours as well. She would like to know what your middle name is. Hers is Rose. Thanks, Martha!

Marcus: Martha, what is your favorite movie, and have you watched it since you got home?

On the bright side, there were a few questions about Martha's experience at Alderson Prison:

ilovetea: I have heard that you were foraging for wild greens on the Alderson grounds. I am very interested in what to look for when foraging, and where I might find out more information on this topic.

Yes, Martha Stewart was a "model" prisoner alright. By ignoring the enormous human suffering that exists behind so many prison walls in this country, she is setting the standard for American apathy and mediocrity. A truly cynical person might even expect that the government she has failed to redress despite this grand opportunity might one return the favor.... As for me, I can only hope Martha Stewart will finally do something meaningful with her entrepreneurial talent and use it toward reforming our prison system. A good citizen like that deserves to be a billionaire.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem likely. Ms. Stewart already assured us that good citizenship is the furthest thing from her mind, in the same internet chat:

weezy: Will you do a memoir of your time at Alderson?

Martha: I don’t plan to write a memoir of Alderson per se, but when I do write my autobiography it will surely contain a section relating to the last five months.

It is up to the American People to pick up Stewart's slack by supporting Susan MacDougal's efforts, and sending donations to prison reform advocacy groups instead whenever the urge to buy an overpriced monogrammed towel set strikes them.

Banking Industry Purchases Bankruptcy Reform Bill

If you haven't already heard, the U.S. Senate has voted in favor of bankruptcy "reform" legislation that was written by U.S. banks, credit card companies, and automakers. The bill, which the financial industries have tried to quietly sneak past The People ever since the Monica Lewinsky diversion, is finally about to get what they paid for from the Republican Congress. And the American People are about to effectively lose one of their most crucial rights as the very same elected officials who irresponsbily ignore our mutli-trillion dollar national debt sentence average Americans to the American Debtors Prison for failing to repay as little as a few thousand dollars on creditors' schedules.

The news media, as usual, has provided only the most superficial reporting on the matter. Headlines such as "Bankruptcy May Become More Difficult" imply that the new law is only a possibility rather than a bought-and-paid-for certainty, in the absence of public outrage that will never exist without substantial reporting on the matter. And throughout this insufficient reporting, journalists continue to quote tired, rhetorical slogans that prove precisely nothing, but imply a great deal about the characters of anyone who files for bankruptcy (e.g., "too many people abuse the bankrupcty system"). Notably absent from this reporting are stories of corporate CEO's who personally made millions of dollars by leading their companies into bankruptcy--a very real and common abuse of the bankruptcy system that is not even addressed by the legislation under consideration.

Exactly how does an individual American citizen "abuse" the bankruptcy system, or somehow come out ahead by filing for bankruptcy? That is like absusing fire on a freezing cold night by burning your house down to keep warm. Filing for bankruptcy is a devastating decision financially, emotionally and even physically. There is nothing easy about bankruptcy, especially since the advent of the American Debtors Prison. In fact, bankruptcy all too often becomes a one-way ticket to the American Debtors Prison now that computer databases have made the "clean slate" an impossibility. Bankruptcy is the very last resort for most people.

Do some people go on major shopping sprees, then immediately file for bankruptcy when they find themselves overwhelmed by debt? Of course they do. Do most people who file for bankruptcy fall into this category? Of course not. A nation with debt collectors who have been known tell children to write "my parents are deadbeats" on the wall with lipstick is a nation that does indeed have some truly sick, irresponsible people in it. But even I do not call for an end to the debt collections industry just because that industry tends to attract more lowlifes than, say, non-profit homeless advocacy. Instead, I call for criminal and civil prosecution of those individual debt collectors who take advantage of their legal capacity to terrorize others. It is a terrible thing when we punish all debtors because a relative few take advantage of a system that is designed to protect everyone, especially when those few "deadbeats" are destroying their own financial futures in the process, and legislators are dismantling the system for an entirely different reason to begin with--to please the corporate campaign contributors.

You may learn more about this bill at the Talking Points Memo special blog on the subject. But you'll probably learn more about it even more quickly by viewing The Onion's unique approach because this bill is tailor-made for humor, if it weren't such a serious threat. I would also recommend reading Senator Edward Kennedy's final statement to the Senate on this subject.

The gist of the bill is this: debtors who wish to file for bankruptcy will be required to pass a "means test" in order to file for Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy. Those who do not pass this test will be forced into Chapter 13 bankruptcy on a six-year repayment plan instead. In case it isn't already obvious, let me clearly state what is wrong with this:

1. Those who truly need a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy the most, by definition, are too poor to afford the exhorbitant legal costs associated with presenting an adequate case for the "means test".

2. Forcing anyone to work for six years violates the 13th Amendement prohibition against involuntary servitude for non-criminal offenses. A six-year repayment plan forces debtors to work for wages that go to creditors instead, and the failure to repay a debt is a civil, not a criminal offense.

3. The bill essentially removes all risk from irresponsible lending, which can only lead to greater occurence of irresponsible lending, and therefore increased need need for bankruptcy--the exact same phenomenon we've witnessed in recent decades as predatory lending practices led to a dramatic rise in personal bankruptcies.

4. When our Founders mandated in the U.S. Constitution that Congress establish a uniform bankruptcy code, they did not mention a "means test". The first purpose of bankruptcy is to protect citizens from creditor harassment and terror, and then to provide for a "clean slate" from which any citizen may rise again and contribute meaningfully to the strength of our nation, rather than being forced into slavery, which can only degrade us all. Bankruptcy has the further benefit of encouraging lenders to be very careful who they allow to borrow money from them, because bankruptcy introduces risk for lenders.

As I try to discuss this legislation with other people--even intelligent people--the conservative slogan "Too many people abuse the system" spews from their mouths like banking industry "campaign contributions" (*wink*) flowing into Capitol Hill. This statement is absolutely false, and the fact that so many people repeat it anyway only indicates how easy it is to manipulate millions of peoples' fundamental beliefs when you have control of the mass media. The truth about this legislation is out there, if anyone cares to look for it. Even members of Congress themselves admit that this horrible legislation was written by financial corporations, not by those legislators whom The People elected to Congress. Does it really take only simple-minded slogans to turn Americans into simple-minded people who passively support the erosion of their own foundation of freedom? Activists have been fighting against this bankruptcy "reform" legislation for years, and until now they have succeeded--by refusing to allow the financial industries to purchase votes quietly, without the public learning about it. They have my deepest admiration for their hard work and accomplishment in this. However, with recent Senate passage these activists have all but given up, and I'm saddened to see them resign to the idea that this will indeed become law even before it is voted on in the House of Representatives.

We cannot stop this fight now. It is too important. Activists need to accept the fact that sometimes the bad guys win, because bad guys are ruthless and don't obey the rules. But even though President Bush plans to sign this bill into law, it must first pass the House of Representatives, and therein lies our opportunity. We need to Speak Up--and LOUDLY--to everyone who will hear. We need to educate and inform the American People of what is going on at Capitol Hill. We need to encourage not thousands, but millions of Americans to call, write and email their U.S. Representatives and order them to REPRESENT the American People, not the credit card companies. We need to realize that freedom and opportunity in a capitalist society begins with personal financial security, and to commit ourselves to voting entirely on the basis of candidates' records with respect to protecting our citizen's personal finances. We need to inundate every form of news media in America with requets that they give this story the high priority it deserves, and forget about Michael Jackson for a while. There is still much we can do to stop this bill from passing, and we are all guilty of poor citizenship if we fail to try right up until the moment President Bush signs away the American Peoples' life savings to pay for this bill Visa and Mastercard bill.

Government Of Deabeats, By Deadbeats, and For Deadbeats

From October 4, 2004: According to a two-part cover story on the national debt in USA Today, the average American household's personal debt is $84,454, and the average American household's share of our national debt is $473,456. Meanwhile, some $53 trillion dollars in government debt and liabilities incurred by the Baby Boomer generation starts becoming due only four years from now as the generation that racked up all that debt begins to retire and relax, leaving repayment to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on. Written before the 2004 presidential election, the USA Today article notes that neither George W. Bush nor John Kerry had bothered to address the national debt at all during their campaigns. I guess neither man thought it was very important. Perhaps that is because four years from now, whoever won would no longer be in office....

It is difficult for me not to quote even more stastitics about the national debt. And believe me, there are plenty of terrifying statistics to quote. So I'll try another way to illustrate the severity of this problem, and the threat it poses to our nation's future.

Have you ever wanted to be a millionaire? Probably. A million dollars is a lot of money. If you do the right thing with a million dollars you can lead a pretty comfortable life without ever working a crappy job for low wages again. Yes indeed, a million dollars is a lot of money, because one million is a very large number.

But 53 trillion is a much, Much, MUCH larger number.... Allow me to illustrate.

There are approximately 280 million citizens in the United States of America. So if you wanted to become a millionaire by asking your fellow Americans to each give you one dollar, you'd only need to ask about one-third of all Americans. But if you wanted 53 trillion dollars, you'd need to ask each man, woman and child in America to give you $189,286.

The seating capacity for the Rose Bowl in Pasadena is 91,136 people. If, after the Rose Bowl game, everyone in the stands left $1 on their seat, you could pick up all those dollar bills and have almost exactly the amount you'd need to pay off one average American household's personal debt. However, to pay off the national debt each person in the stadium would have to leave nearly $600 million dollars on their seat.

Few of us will ever know what it is like to even have a million dollars, so let's make a comparison between some numbers that are more relevant: the amounts of debt each American citizen actually owes, on average.

If the average American personal debt were a one-story building, the average American portion of the national debt would be almost six stories high. If a drive from New York City to Columbus, Ohio represents the average American's personal debt, you'd have to drive from New York City to Los Angeles to represent the average American citizen's portion of the national debt.

Still not convinced that the national debt is a problem worthy of a Presidential candidate's undivided attention? Then consider how long it would take to pay off the average personal debt versus the average portion of our national debt, using only your current annual income.

If your gross annual income is $20,000, it would take just over four years to pay off the average American personal Debt. But it would take nearly 24 years to pay off your portion of the national debt. That is if every penny of your income--before taxes--were applied.

If your gross annual income is $100,000, it would take 308 days (more than 9 months) to pay off the average American personal debt, but it would take almost five years to pay off your portion of the national debt. Again, that's every penny you earn from your hard work for nearly 5 years, before taxes--if you earn $100,000 a year.

In case you didn't notice it already, I'll state the obvious: millionaires and billionaires won't like paying off their portion of the national debt, but at least they can. Poor people don't have a living prayer of ever paying off their portion of the national debt. To make matters worse, if you read the U.S. government's budget each year, most of the money our government spends goes directly or indirectly to help our millionaires and billionaires, and barely serves poor people in any meaningful way at all beyond basic bureaucratic services.

Our outrageous national debt is more than just a stain on the American character. It is a truly mind-boggling example of criminal fraud, because those in our government who voluntarily chose to take on all this debt have never once shown any interest in actually paying it off, even though they were always well aware that it is absolutely, positively inescapable that future generations WILL have to repay it--or suffer the consequences. For their own personal and political gain, they sacrificed our children's future. And Americans continue to elect and re-elect politicians cut from exactly the same cloth. Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush in 2008? What exactly do you expect either one to change?

Meanwhile, the same government that created this national debt with no intent to repay is responsible for the existence of the American Debtors Prison, in which citizens with even a few thousand dollars in debt that they have every desire to repay, but temporarily can't, are driven into poverty or homelessness from which they will never recover--solely on the ludicrous stereotype that anyone who does not repay their debts, for any reason, must be a "deadbeat". If a hard-working American who cannot repay their $53 credit card bill because they lost their legs in an industrial accident is a "deadbeat", what on earth do we call wealthy and powerful politicians who stick their own constituents with $53 trillion in debt and liabilities that they never intended to repay in the first place? I don't think a word for that degree of arrogant irresponsibility even exists in the English language. If there's no bread, let them eat cake.

Perhaps during the next presidential election we should be a little less afraid of the bogey-man of Baghdad, and instead be genuinely terrified of our national debt's very real threat to our nation's financial security. This isn't a matter of tolerating the necessary evil of hypocrites in public office. It is a matter of national survival. In a capitalist society those who have a positive net worth win, and those with a negative net worth lose. Beginning four years from now, that 90+ percent of the American population who cannot afford to repay their portion of the national debt are going to learn the excruciatingly hard way what it means to lose, and the American Debtors Prison will quickly become as overcrowded as every federal penitentiary in America already is today. The time has come when we must vote for candidates on the sole basis of their fiscal responsibility, and their commitment to standing up for individual debtors' rights. Any other criteria can only result in an implosion of American society in the decades to come.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

- Abraham Lincoln

Are Half of American Bankruptcies Really Due To Medical Bills?

January 2005: A study published in the journal Health Affairs (www.healthaffairs.org) estimates that half of all U.S. bankruptcies are the direct result of increasingly out-of-control medical costs, even though 75% of the patients studied had health insurance at the onset of illness. Led by Harvard Medical School professor Dr. David Himmelstein, the study paints a horrific picture of financial desperation, and appears to challenge the financial industry's long-standing assertion that all personal bankruptcies are due entirely to debtor's fiscal irresponsibility and fraud. A PDF version of the study is available online at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w5.63v1.pdf.

While I applaud any and all attempts to demonstrate that the health care "industry" has transformed the traditionally noble profession of medicine into a for-profit abomination that allows poor people to suffer and die for no good reason, I would like to suggest one alternative to this kind of expensive, grant-funded academic research: Open your eyes, look at the world around you, believe what your senses tell you, and use that grant money instead to help Americans who are struggling to stay alive in the American Debtors Prison. It is more than obvious that poor Americans cannot afford adequate health care, and that many debtors became inmates in the American Debtors Prison not because they are fiscally irresponsbile, but because they had the audacity to become seriously injured or ill while living in poverty.

The fact is, Health Affairs is an organ for discussing health care policy. It is primarily a political tool, not a medical research laboratory or financial consultant. The authors of this study certainly mean well, but it appears to be yet another instance of statistics being applied to junk science in an effort to influence public policy. By the researchers' own admission, they studied only 1771 out of 1,451,000 American families that filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and from this intensive research extrapolated the bombastic estimate that approximately 700,000 of those total bankruptcies in 2001 were the direct result of medical bills. And they only interviewed 931 out of the 1771 cases studied--the remaining "research" of real human beings' very real experiences was done entirely on paper. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions....

Yes, medical costs are wildly out of control, and can obliterate many American families' life-savings literally overnight. Yes, urgent medical treatment can result in overwhelming debt that was forced upon the patient against their will, merely because they exercised their instinctive will to live--not because they casually chose to sign a debt agreement. But the American Debtors Prison does not exist because of debt. It exists because creditors themselves prevent prisoners from repaying their debts. This academic study makes it appear that medical bills alone were the reason for so many personal bankruptcies, which implies that the first thing honest, hard-working Americans do when confronted with debt is to file for bankruptcy. There is no consideration at all for the ruthless, terrorist collections practices that force drowing debtors to file for bankruptcy when they would usually prefer to reach some kind of reasonable settlement with creditors--especially when repaying the people who saved their lives. The distinction is subtle, but very important.

All the best,
Paul

"Powerful" New Weapon to Battle Identity Theft Is A Dud

Columnist Sandra Block informed us in November, 2004 that "starting Wednesday, consumers will have a new line of defense against identity thieves," when federal law enacted a year ago finally kicks into action. The new law allows consumers in 13 states to order free credit reports from all three credit bureaus, so they may monitor their credit reports for suspicious activity. Citizens of the other 37 states must wait until September, 2005 to get the free reports. Meanwhile, citizens of all 50 states still must pay $4-$8 each to learn their credit scores, however, because the new law applies only to credit reports. Ms. Block hailed this legislation as being a powerful weapon for consumers: "Monitoring your credit report is one of the most effective ways to protect yourself against identity theft, an insidious crime that often goes undetected until victims start receiving calls from collection agencies about fraudulent accounts."

You may order your credit report by visiting a Federal Trade Commission website, http://www.annualcreditreport.com/, by calling a toll-free number (877) 322-8228, or by writing to: Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. When requesting your report, you must provide your name, address, Social Security Number, date of birth, and possibly more "specific identifying information" to the credit bureaus to receive your credit report. Exactly what this "specific identifying information" is wasn't made terribly clear in Ms. Block's article, which reads more like a press release from Capitol Hill than a thoughtful and well-researched act of serious journalism.

Ms. Block--a money columnist for USA Today, of all things--completely missed the insignificance of this new federal law, and failed to mention those facts that are most relevant to American consumers. Once again, it is up to unpaid volunteers to dig deeper than shallow mass media journalism, to find the real story. So allow me to explain what this "powerful" new federal law really means:

First and foremost, this legislation "defends" against identity theft in exactly the same manner that a coroner "defends" against murder. By definition, you are searching for illegal activity that has already occurred when you monitor your credit report. Simply reviewing your credit report will not prevent a single thief from stealing your identity. At best, monitoring your report may allow you to catch a thief early, and begin the long, costly, tedious process of attempting to clean up the mess they made that much earlier, with no guarantee of success. But only the stupidest criminals continue to use a person's identity indefinitely. It is far safer for them to ruin your credit quickly, and move on to another victim, than to keep pretending to be the same person, especially when they know you will figure it out one way or another soon enough. Ms. Block's description of identity theft helps to perpetuate the myth that "identity theft" involves literally stealing another person's identity, as if plastic surgery and sleeping with your spouse were involved. The truth is, they are not stealing your identity, they are stealing your money, as quickly and quietly as possible.

Second, inmates in the American Debtors Prison have only one conceivable hope for ever getting out of debt: flying low under the radar and preventing the personal information brokers from tracking their every move and interfering with honest attempts to earn an income with which to pay their debts. In order to receive the free credit reports, debtors prisoners must provide a relative wealth of current, accurate information--including current address and the aforementioned "specific identifying information". Does this refer to current income perchance? Since most credit reports contain inaccurate information--not because of identity thieves, but because of credit bureau negligence--how can any personal information unquestionably identify an inquiring consumer better than their name and social security number? It seems the credit bureaus have found yet another way to extort current, accurate information from debtors prisoners which can and will be used against them outside a court of law: provide them this information "voluntarily", or they will refuse to send you your credit report, and you will risk having your identity stolen on top of all the other financial problems you already have.

Third, what kind of legislation designed to "protect" the American People from an urgent threat waits a year before going into effect, and then goes into effect in stages over the course of nearly one more year? It turns out that our Great Protector, the U.S. Congress, has done the credit bureaus a great favor by preventing tens of millions of consumers from demanding their free credit reports at once, which would require the credit bureaus to spend more money on creating new jobs, training, etc., than they will eventually earn by selling all the new personal information they are gathering in this consumer advocacy farce.

Fourth, it has been well-established for years that most consumer credit reports contain errors, including errors that can result in denial of credit, rental housing, employment, etc. The credit bureaus have never exhibited a sincere interest in gathering accurate information, because negative information implies that they are doing a better job of researching consumers than their competitors. Credit bureaus like negative information about consumers, and they are notorious for resisting all attempts to remove inaccurate information--even when required to do so by federal law. The only thing this new federal law does is make credit reports free (eventually). It doesn't compel the credit bureaus to finally comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act or any other prior legislation designed to ensure that the credit bureaus only traffic in accurate information. Obtaining your own credit report should be free. Why do we need a slow-moving federal law to force them to be free, unless the credit bureaus have some kind of vested interest in preventing consumers from correcting errors in their credit reports?

Fifth, as mentioned in Ms. Block's article, consumers will still have to pay $4-$8 to learn their credit scores. If we assume that just one third of all Americans are adults, then somewhere around 100 million people must pay $4-$8 apiece to learn their credit scores. That translates to anywhere from $400 million to $800 million in annual revenue for credit bureaus, if every American adult sought to learn their credit scores, like the financial "experts" recommend.

Sixth, in his own article on the subject, Sam Hananel of the Associated Press writes that the Federal Trade Commission warns consumers to "beware of scammers who might send e-mails pretending to offer a free credit report as a way to elicit personal information." Translation: this new federal law may actually create more identity theft by helping scam artists who phish for "specific identifying information" by email, since millions of concerned and confused consumers have now been led to believe they have a powerful new weapon against identity theft.

The American Debtors Prison website (http://www.americandebtorsprison.com/) exists in part to explain the fine print of bogus "pro-consumer" legislation like this, which in fact is nothing more than a public-relations mirage that has been carefully crafted behind closed doors to ensure that the credit bureas will profit regardless. Shame on USA Today and other mainstream media for failing to investigate the stories they publish, and merely refashioning government press releases to make it sound like the U.S. Congress is truly protecting consumers. Congress should have forced the credit bureaus to prevent identity theft, since they are the ones who profit from invading consumer's privacy in the first place, just like identity thieves do....

All the best,
Paul

Welcome!

Welcome to the American Debtors Prison blog! Here you get the real story on debtors' issues.

What is the American Debtors Prison? Visit www.americandebtorsprison.com to find out!

All the best,
Paul