The Supremes: ‘You Keep Me Hanging On….’

Posted by David Falvey on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 - 2,265 views

The Supremes: ‘You Keep Me Hanging On…..’

I called the US Supreme Court: The Supremes because they ‘keep me hanging on for justice’.

Presently, there’s a consumer bankruptcy case before The Supremes and it’s In re Ransom. This case is very important to the little guy trying to get out of debt. Why? This case represents a very pro-consumer case for the little guy. Under the Bush Administration, they had enacted into law the new bankruptcy law called ‘BAPCPA’ or the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Consumer Protection Act of 2005. The only problem with this law is that there are no Consumer Protections provided but that’s typical on how the lobbyists get a pro-creditor bill labeled. Truth in legislative labeling isn’t required by Congress so they are free to mislabel legislation as it has done for generations.

In a nutshell, MBNA went before the US Senate and told our esteemed Senators that there was ‘abuse in the bankruptcy law’. This was like when Robert Preston in the Music Man went into Rivercity and told the people that there was ‘sin in Rivercity’. The citizens of Rivercity were shocked. The Music Man told them that the boys were going behind the barn and smoking cigarettes. The boys were playing pool and worse, they were reading French magazines behind the barn. And that did it. The citizens were shocked. And our US Senators were shocked when they were told that there was abuse in the bankruptcy law.

And therefore, MBNA, (the largest credit card company in the world who paid Barbara Bush $250,000 per appearance to explain to their executives how to bake chocolate chip cookies -I’m not making this up- and MBNA was the same company who was the fourth largest donor to the Bush Re-election Campaign and you must remember that the Bush campaign had to raise $400,000,000 for his presidential election campaign in order that he could take a job paying $250,000 per year because he was desperate to serve our country because his oil company was losing money and his baseball team wasn’t doing well (check out my numbers on http://www.opensecrets.org/

Most people haven’t heard of Charles Cawley but he was the CEO of MBNA See attached article. ) Well under the leadership of Cawley, his swarm of attorney-lobbyists ran the magic elixir of ‘campaign contributions’ under the noses of our US Senators and then they got religion. They had to reform Rivercity and the Bankruptcy Code was amended under Bush. Clinton had vetoed the legislation after talking with consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren and Hilary.

Essentially, you have to admire Cawley because for relatively a few million dollars he was purchasing the whole Federal Bankruptcy judicial system. And who ever said that our Congress isn’t the best legislative body that body can buy? And what would this prize mean to Charles Cawley? He was turning the entire Federal Bankruptcy Court system into his private collection agency. You have to admire the man. He has total ‘cojones’. His political strategy is simple, daring and imaginative. In a word, he’s brilliant because he knows that ‘he who pays for the political campaigns, calls the legislative shots’. But to their credit both he and Bush did have a sense of restraint in passing this legislation because they didn’t require that U.S. Bankruptcy Judges to wear the Walmart happy face logos on the back of their robes with the saying, “How Can We Help the Credit Card Industry, today?”

Now having said all of that, let’s back to the main agenda, In re Ransom. The Courts and the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys have not gone gently into BAPCPA (Just call it: ‘The Bush: New Debtors’ Prison Act’) and a number of Court have made decisions which the credit card industry sees as a potential threat to its ‘Debtors’ Prison Act’ (There hasn’t been a Debtors’ Prison in the US since about 1810 but Cawley and his attorney-accountant lobbyists want to have a ‘Plastic Prisons’ versus a prison with iron bars’)

Essentially, according to the ‘Means Test’ in Ransom, a debtor can take a deduction for a car loan for which he isn’t presently paying under the theory that everyone has to eventually pay on a car loan. This is a very common sense observation but it’s very inconvenient to the evil forces Cawley gathering on Witch Mountain. Therefore, you can guess who is trying to ask our Supremes to over-turn the 9th Circuit’s position that the consumer can take this deduction under the Means Test. And this would mean a stunning blow against all the work of the credit card industry to establish their ‘New Debtors’ Plastic Prison’.

And, of course, I am worried. Our Supremes have consistently voted in favor of Wall Street and Big Money. And we must not forgot that this is the same U.S. Supreme Court that brought us Gore v. Bush which most legal scholars see as a ‘stain on the U.S. Supreme Court’ because they blatantly interfered in the political process and make a partisan and political decision to repay various Republicans for their appointed positions. The U.S. Supreme Court maintains its moral authority by being ‘above politics’ and making impartial decisions. The Gore v Bush decision will smell to high heaven for all eternity and like a nuclear power plant, ‘heaven and earth will pass away but their radiation will keep on decaying’.

One of the arguments for the Supremes interfering in the Bush Presidential Election was that they had to prevent a ‘constitutional crisis’ and our Nation couldn’t withstand the indecision.

If you remember: the people were not rioting, no one was torching buildings, the military forces were not disorganized. Everyone was just patiently waiting for the process to take its course because historically we have had presidential elections which were too close to call and the U.S. Constitution provides for this problem and the election can be decided by the House of Representatives. See Rutherford Hays and Samuel Tilden election 1876 Presidential election.

But the Supremes saw a serious problem. The U.S. House of Representatives had a majority of Democrats and Al Gore was a Democrat and by using their advanced mathematical skills, the Supremes concluded that this was a very dangerous situation. The Laws of Probability said that the Democrats would vote for a Democrat, namely, Al Gore; therefore, we wouldn’t have a Republican President who could drive the national debt into the stratosphere and wage 2 wars which no one understands.

And so many decisions by the Supremes have been completely aligned with Wall St and Big Money that I fully expect that their decision in Ransom will be just another ‘tip of the hat’ to Bank of America who is taking the appeal and this is the same bank that is ‘too big to fail’, so the average citizen’s tax money had to be used to keep them out of bankruptcy. I can only shake my head at the irony and promise to print a retraction or at least acknowledge their decision if the Supremes vote for the consumer.