So incredible that I must share it with you

I'm still reading "Maxed Out" by James D. Scurlock. If you get the chance get it from your library and read it. It's quite fascinating. Also read some of Elizabeth Warren's books..she helped President Clinton veto a new bankruptcy law that would have hurt mothers with children.

Okay here's the deal and I quote most word for word from the book because I want to get this information out there to you correctly. I hope I get it across and do it justice. Here goes:

"America is fast becoming a consumer society. Get a load of this..our gross national product, even when Reagan was in office, was a result of spending, not production, which requires investment and saving. Can you believe this? As long as we continue spending our economy would stride without savings. So production and manufacturing jobs could be outsourced to China and Mexico, where it was more efficient and cheaper. Now you would think that sacrificing highly union paid jobs eventually would depress the country's spending power? Not if Americans have access to an unlimited pool of credit, it wouldn't. Amazing isn't it?

Scurlock says that Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve (retired), says that due to high technology and more efficient production of products it takes less to make more. So we grow the economy at a steady clip without the corresponding increase in the cost of labor, ergo low inflation. Comes to find out that the low inflation/high productivity theory turns out to mostly be a myth, an accounting trick.

Over the past generation, the real increase in the cost of housing has jumped 70 percent. Ditto for health care. The cost of an education is up 100 percent. Worse, wages have remained stagnant, increasing by roughly 1 percent over the same period of time."

In 2003, Elizabeth Warren wrote: "The Two-Income Trap" which explains why Americans have been living on the edge and are soon to fall off. We have not only outsourced producing, we've outsourced saving. In 2005 the national savings rate was "negative" 0.5 percent.

Get a load of this. By the way I'm getting this information from pages 162-164 of "Maxed Out" by James D. Scurlock. Okay, it seems that Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard, visited with Citigroup several years to speak about "charge-offs", customers who have stopped paying their credit card bills. She thought that if Citigroup would stop lending to these people, who clearly couldn't afford to repay them, they would instantly cut their charge-off losses by more than half. But then she realized that he had all the power there in the room, that is the vice-president of Citigroup, when he said.

"If we cut out those people we are cutting out the heart of our profits. That's where we make all of our money". And with that the meeting was over.

In 2005 President G. W. Bush, whose first election was due in part to the work of ChoicePoint, and whose number-one campaign contributor was MBNA, which made passing bankruptcy reform a top priority of his second term.

Warren and H. Clinton didn't want the bankruptcy reform bill to get passed and voted against it. But the United States Senate made it their priority in 2005. Warren should however, congratulate herself for stopping it the first time around, protecting the rights of her beloved middle-class families for five years or so. During that time, close to nine million American households filed for bankruptcy protection. I want to note here that Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) also help delay the bankruptcy reform. See the conservatives do not want people filing bankruptcy protection that clears the person of all debts. The conservatives, the republicans who work for large corporations, lenders and banks want people to remain in debt so they get large profits on the tons of fees and interest that consumers must pay.

Per disappointed Warren who says that it's all about the conservatives supporting a bill that denies millions of Americans their constitutional rights in order to protect the profits of a few companies. It's about campaign finance, it's about who wields power in Washington and it sure isn't about American families. It's about a Senate composed of millionaires by six-figure salaries, who can always depend on the kindness of lobbyist how can they possibly understand anyone having to try to dig themselves out of debt.

Bankruptcy reform is a power grab - the Congress assuming powers traditionally reserved for the judiciary. Bankruptcy use to be dealt with on a case by case issue, now a judge has assumed that the applicant is defrauding their creditors, no matter the circumstances. The purpose appears clear enough: Shut out half the middle class from discharging any debt.

This is key: According to Warren bankruptcy has never been about the poor who are too poor to accumulate a lot of debt it's about fundamental purpose is to provide a safety net for the middle class. Warren goes on to say...so we have regressed back to the 18th century when legislatures - not judges - decided whether or not a debtor should receive a fresh start or be imprisoned. Back then bankruptcy was a capital offense punishable by execution. My!

The bad cop/good cop routine that Congress and the financial industry have perfected must be confusing to the uninitiated who fall to hard times. In the end the credit card issuers win customers who can't declare bankruptcy for another seven years after they apply and lose.

Well, I think you get the picture. I admit I have quoted (some would say plagiarized) directly from the book to get the correct point across because this is very important.

Be careful out there.