Katrina Victims About To Get Hammered Again

Thanks to the Republicans' refusal to given them an exemption to their scummy, putrid, awful new bankruptcy law. You can read about it in the New York Times. Those who know me understand that I have personal feelings about this. I won't get into them. I'll just say this. The whole point of bankruptcy laws is to give people who suffer enormous losses--as most of us are bound to at some point in our lives--a chance to emerge from crushing debt and start their lives over. Half of personal bankruptcies owe to massive medical expenses. Most of the rest come from natural disasters, layoffs, job loss, divorce, deaths in the family or other bad circumstances. It's sickening to see a gaggle of pampered congressmen, whose every breath is covered by the best insurance taxpayers can buy, drafting laws to punish people who find themselves in these positions. It's one thing to have government by benign neglect (the best outcome we could have hoped for from Bush); it's quite another to have a government that seems to actively hate the people it governs.

Taste the arrogance in this statement by James Sensenbrenner:

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, rejected the notion of reopening the legislation, saying it already included provisions that would ensure that people left "down and out" by the storm would still be able to shed most of their debts. Lawmakers who lost the long fight over the law, he said, "ought to get over it," according to The Associated Press.

Uh-huh. They'll be forced into Chapter 13 if the income they had before the storm rubbed out their jobs indicates that they have enough disposable income to pay a high percentage of their total debt. And they'll have to attend "consumer counseling" classes which will advise them to--what--live in a place that doesn't suffer from storms, floods, or earthquakes? Then they'll have to go through a six month waiting period, during which creditors will treat them oh, so gently, with the lawsuits and wage garnishment and other fun stuff. They'll need to have enough to hire a lawyer because Sensenbrenner and his buddies complicated the law to make filing bankrupcy pro se nearly impossible. And they'll still have to spend money paying off debt that they could have otherwise spent rebuilding their ruined lives.

Thanks large, Sensenbrenner. Fuck you and your mamma.