These Are The New Rules

The flood didn't stop while we were away from the house. When we returned from the hospital, my wife and I found a stuffed mailbox, and a significant proportion of that was made up of offers from credit card companies. We get offers addressed to me, we get offers addressed to her, and we get offers addressed to some person who has exactly the same first name, last name, address and credit history as my wife, but a different middle initial.

Now, I don't know about your house, but in ours, we have clearly defined gender roles, and that means I dispose of the credit card solicitations. (Here's a hint: we don't need any more credit cards. We're doing our best to get out of the debt we already have, as we're being eaten alive by interest charges.) I used to just tear the solicitation letters up and throw them away, but in our town, we have to pay for every bag of trash we put out to the curb. It doesn't seem fair to me that I should pay for the credit card companies to keep offering me something I don't want. Therefore, I have adopted the vastly more amusing tactic of cutting up the offer letter into tiny pieces, stuffing it into the postage-paid envelope, and mailing it back to them. Let them pay for postage and for someone to open it and process it; maybe someday they will take the hint! (Yes, I know, they can't very well figure out who it came from, so they can't take us off their lists by this criterion. I kind of like it that way.)

One of the offers in our latest batch, however, really caught my eye, just as I was about to put the scissors to it. This one was festooned with the United Airlines logo, and was offering a Visa card tied-in to United's frequent flyer program.

Wait a minute: Is that really United Airlines offering a credit card? United Airlines? What's going on here?

United Airlines, you may recall, was recently allowed to default on its pension fund under the terms of its bankruptcy. The pensioners will see their benefits cut by more than half, and those benefits won't even be paid by United. That will be done on the taxpayer's dime. In other words, you and I, the ordinary taxpaying public, are now assuming billions of dollars' worth of promises that United Airlines made. This will be the largest corporate-pension default in US history. (For now. Now that this smooth move has been given the green light, expect it from every mega-corporation saddled with a pension fund it would prefer to forget, starting with all the other airlines.) And yet, even though they need the court to shield them from their creditors, they have the wherewithal to plaster the country with credit card solicitations.

Isn't that great? United Airlines, filing for bankruptcy protection, gets to stiff a whole bunch of people it had promised to pay. At the same time, thanks to the noxious bankruptcy bill recently rammed through Congress, this is exactly what you and me and United's employees and retirees are now expressly forbidden to do, even when we get in over our heads and are forced to declare bankruptcy. A lot of United's retirees are going to be forced into bankruptcy themselves by this event, since many of them will no longer be able to afford their bills when their pensions are cut by 50% or more. Yet, these people will not have the option of going into any kind of meaningful bankruptcy protection. Hooray for Republican hegemony as they force-march us all into debt slavery!

As the bankruptcy bill was being pushed through a Congress bought and paid for by the banks and the credit card companies, its champions repeated the endless refrain: "people should pay their debts." Well, sure. That's just good old-fashioned common sense. We can all agree on that. People should pay their debts, and they shouldn't be able to discharge those debts except under extraordinary circumstances.

But if you aren't careful with how the Republicans use words, you might have only heard what they said, not what they meant. See, when they said, "people should pay their debts," you might have thought they meant that everyone, everywhere, in all circumstances, should honor the promises they make. And if that's what you heard, good for you: you are a very good, right-thinking American. And you're also wrong.

See, these are the new rules. When people make promises to large, well-connected corporations, those promises must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, when large, well-connected corporations make promises to ordinary people, those promises can be broken at will. If you don't think this will affect you ... just wait.

In the meantime, your friendly neighborhood Congress has some advice for you: don't get sick. Don't get laid off. Don't get divorced. Don't let anyone in your family get sick. Don't let your employer steal your pension. And on top of everything else, don't get behind on your monthly interest payments. The payments are more important than your food, your rent, your medical bills, or anything else. After all, there are a lot of K Street lobbyists who want that money. They are depending on you. And they're not about to let you let them down.




PS: Tired of the bullshit? Join the Plastic Revolution - http://www.plasticrevolution.org/