As much as I am against credit card debt, I'm fed up with the double standards of Paulson and Bush. There are plenty of Americans who pushed debt onto credit cards because they were struggling to keep up and put food on the table or heat their homes. In the eyes of the Republicans, tough luck. For Wall Street millionaires Paulson can't do enough to help them out including his sneaky tax breaks that have been part of the GOP agenda for decades. I'm still waiting to see blood ooze out of the pores of Wall Street superstars and quite frankly, I don't see it ever happening. They're total failures yet people like Paulson can't stop coddling them and stepping on everyone else to make sure their bank accounts are properly balanced and bonuses arrive on time.
Federal bank regulators have rejected a request by banks and consumer advocates for a program to let lenders forgive huge portions of credit card debt.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency rejected the request for a special program that would allow as much as 40 percent of credit card debt to be forgiven for consumers who don't qualify for existing repayment plans.
An unusual alliance of financial industry interests and consumer advocates, represented by the Financial Services Roundtable and the Consumer Federation of America, made the request to the Treasury Department agency on Oct. 29. It demonstrated the urgency of the situation in a deepening economic crisis: consumers — even those with strong credit records — defaulting at high levels on their credit cards, while banks battered by the credit crisis bleed tens of billions from the losses.
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