Kick 'Em When They're Up, Kick 'Em When They're Down

This makes my blood boil:

As one of more than two million Americans who rushed to a courthouse this year to file for bankruptcy before a tough new law took effect, Laura Fogle is glad for her chance at a fresh start. A nurse and single mother of two, she blames her use of credit cards after cancer surgery for falling into deep debt.

Ms. Fogle is broke, and may not seem to be the kind of person to whom banks would want to offer credit cards. But she said she had no sooner filed for bankruptcy, and sworn off plastic, than she was hit with a flurry of solicitations from major banks.

"Every day, I get at least two or three new credit card offers - Citibank, MasterCard, you name it - they want to give me a credit card, at pretty high interest rates," said Ms. Fogle, who is 41 and lives here. "I've got a stack of these things on my table. It's tempting, but I've sworn them off."

If it seems odd to Ms. Fogle that banks would want to lend money to the newly bankrupt, it is no mystery to the financial community, which charges some of the highest interest rates to these newly available customers.

Under the new law, which the banking industry spent more than $100 million lobbying for, they may be even more attractive because it makes it harder for them to escape new credit card debt and extends to eight years from six the time before which they could liquidate their debts through bankruptcy again.

"The theory is that people who have just declared bankruptcy are a good credit risk because their old debts are clean and now they won't be able to get a new discharge for eight years," said John D. Penn, president of the American Bankruptcy Institute, a nonprofit clearinghouse for information on the subject.

Bloodsuckers, vampires, ghouls. Extortionists. These people are evil. And I use that word with great deliberation. Take a look at the Woody Guthrie quote on my sidebar. I can't think of anything in our society that those words apply to better than these flesh-eaters.