Cut One! Or join Ann Minch's ethical revolt against the credit industry

September 14, 6:18 PMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Jerusalem's Denmark Square honors the Danes who saved 99 % of the Danish Jews by civil disobedience (Wiki Commons)

Last winter, when my husband and I began getting notices that our credit card interest rates were going up despite ALWAYS being on time and NEVER overlimit, I got angry. So I cut up one credit card, and I started a new website, www.creditcardmeetscissors.com. We came up with the slogan Cut One!

I didn’t promote the website much, and I haven’t written much here or on my other blogs about credit card debt and the continuing rape of the American public by the financial industry and its enabler, Congress. And, I’m sad to say, Mr. Obama.

A lady named Ann Minch, who has relatively little credit card debt and is also an on-time performer despite having been laid off, had her credit card rate at Bank of America raised to 30 percent recently. She was very angry. But more than that, she easily identified how totally the financial industry controls the lives of middle-class Americans. She noted how in return for building the nation, and paying taxes to keep two useless wars going so Halliburton can prosper while young people are killed and maimed, we are getting a financial shellacking the likes of which the modern world has never seen. She noticed that we are so preoccupied with living day to day (obviously the intent all along) that we can’t see our way clear to protest the wars effectively, to demand US executives stop paying themselves 275 times what the average worker in their company earns, to establish universal health care so the entire nation can benefit from medical science and have some peace of mind.

She has a point, and she’s willing to take the financial lumps to prove it. She has stopped paying her credit card bill, not from lack of funds but lack of willingness to send one more dime to the despicable, unethical, greedy crooks and miscreants in charge of life in America these days. Watch her video below:

Last Saturday, I got a letter from Juniper Bank raising the rate on one of my cards to slightly above 30 percent. (Juniper, by the way, is Barclays Bank. Barclays used to be quite a respectable bank, one of the reasons I thought a credit card from them would be a decent move.) I was not as angry as I was last winter, simply because my husband had gotten reamed on one of his cards last week, and we had been angry about that. (One can take only so much anger.) With my husband’s card, it wasn’t just a raise in rates that annoyed us. It was the concurrent decrease in his credit limit for no good reason.

One might ask, so what? Wouldn’t that just mean that you’d be less tempted to overspend?

Yes and no. The way credit scores are calculated, if you are using more than 25 percent of your available credit, it will drop your credit score. My husband was, in fact, using just about 25 percent before the drop in available credit. Now he’s at or slightly above 40 percent, quite literally through no fault of his own. And forty percent is a “danger signal” to the credit card companies. One might almost think they had engineered it. (I’d like to know how many other people had experienced a similar maneuver.)

Once the credit card issuer sees the “danger signal” they’ve created, that card issuer has an excuse to drop the consumer’s available credit again, an abuse that would drop the credit score again and on and on ad infinitum unless the consumer is able to pay it all off instantly. If we could all do that, why would we have the credit cards in the first place? And worse, of course, each time one of a consumer’s creditors beats them up, the others take note and, like the bullies they are, figure it’s time to beat the consumer while he’s down. Before you know it, the consumer is maxed out on his credit cards; without spending a dime, he may have gone from 25 percent usage to 90 or even 100. And that sends the signal that this is a deadbeat consumer, even though the credit card issuers themselves have made the picture appear that way.

A word of advice: Before all you self-righteous wingnuts preach your holier-than-thou sermon about why people shouldn’t need credit cards, know this. You live in an alternate universe. The real world, from Ms. Minch’s example and mine, looks more like this:

• We have health insurance. But we also have deductibles. Credit cards have been mighty handy for that. We have a child still in college who is mainly paying her own way but sometimes needs help. I work in publishing; while examiner.com pays promptly, historically in publishing it has been necessary for freelancers to find a way to cope with chronically late payments for their work. Credit was one way to do that. The other would be having wealthy parents. I didn’t. Most don’t. And most people have lots more problems than I do now or ever did. Before anyone in America gets on a soapbox about how others should or should not manage their money, they need to walk a mile in their shoes. Even Suze Orman, a tough-as-nails finance guru, doesn’t castigate people for what they felt they had to do; she simply advises how to do it better.

However…at the moment, Suze Orman’s advice is simply a way for us to all continue being sheep herded up for the shearing by rapacious, unethical and almost preternaturally ignorant captains of the finance industry. (Suze, I love ya. But you’ll have to wait this one out while we take back our finances from some scummy thieves. Then we’ll have something left for you to help us with.)

Ann Minch was managing her money, it seems, as well as any “regular person” in America can these days. She was, in fact, following Orman’s advice to pay more than the minimum balance whenever she could. My husband and I were doing the same, even though our retirement accounts had lost 25 percent of their value, as had our home, which was for sale when the Bush debacle hit. It’s still for sale. At a lower price.

I am going to have to join Ms. Minch in her revolt. A great journey begins with a single step. Ms. Minch has taken it, and I think it’s time for the rest of us to follow.

Unless you truly want to see the baby boom generation and their children and grandchildren eating cat food, it would be both unethical and disastrous not to join the revolt begun by Ms. Minch. If you are unwilling to go to the lengths she has done, then at least cut up one of your credit cards. If you can, pay it off and save yourself paying for it a minimum of three times over, at current rates, and probably more than that if they are not shown the error of their ways via civil disobedience, the very remedy Minch is employing. If you can’t pay it in full, at least you won’t be using it and you can work on paying it down as fast as ever you can.

I’d say take on an extra part-time job to accomplish a payoff. I’d say it, but it would be laughable in the economy Mr. Bush and his banking buddies have brought us, and which Mr. Obama needs to get busy about, without more charitable donations to the banking industry, right quick.

Or you could write or call your credit card issuer, or send a video and, if you are able, refuse to pay until they begin to act like decent folk and not unconscionable scoundrels, along with Ms. Minch.

This sort of thing worked in Denmark during World War II. The Germans came looking for Jews there to send them to the camps, but found less than one percent of Denmark’s Jewish population…because the Danes rallied together to foil the Germans and save the Jews. And this happened overnight in an era before the instant communication you are enjoying at this moment. My high school history teacher’s life was saved that way when he was a boy; his family had fled to Denmark and thus survived. I have known this story for a long, long time. I think it is time to repeat it, and act together to save all Americans from the economic death prepared for us by the financial industry.

It is entirely possible all our lives will be saved if we can present a united front to the usurers who are the true terrorists in American society today. Rally with Ms. Minch in her take-it-to-the-mat video revolt, or at least Cut One! Whatever you can do to send the “No, you can’t pick our bones” message to America’s financial Charles Mansons* will help. It would be completely unethical, not to mention unchristian and uncharitable and inhumane, to do anything else.

* The behavior of the heads of America’s financial institutions is nothing less than mass murder, appallingly carried out against those who have done them no harm, not unlike the bloody murder of Sharon Tate and her companions, and just because they hold us in disdain…as the Manson Family did the wealthy of Hollywood. Charles Manson and his henchwomen are in jail for life. We needn't require that, although seeing the financial CEOs do a day’s work for a day’s pay might be nice. Mainly, as with George W. Bush, I just want them to leave so that smarter, more compassionate people can get on with the task of rebuilding America.