The Burning Questions

 I am sure there are lots of us who simply hate our car, but try not to do what this teen did.

A New York teen is facing arson and reckless endangerment charges after he set fire to his BMW. Long Island police have quoted the boy as saying his motive was “he hated the car”. Now typically I would say “Who cares”, its his property,  however surveillance vidoe showed the vehicle was parked directly next his aprtment building at the time he set fire to it, like less than five feet.

The sad thing is, half the country is offering “Cash for Clunkers” the thing would have likely brought him in two or three thousand in trade somewhere! Now thats burning hatred here on The Burning Questions.

Credit card companies are some of the most powerful lobbyists in our nation.  They have used their financial power to destroy the hard-working individual.  They offer these great introductory rates to consumers to lure them into a contract which makes a loan shark look like a good option upon close investigation.  Read the fine print.  Hell, the fine print is so laden with jargon that no one can understand it anyway.  The problem is that people generally do not understand what the rules really are.  They have no idea that they can lose that wonderful rate if they fail to pay some other completely unrelated bill on time.  If one has a card that is close to the limit, and some other card company reports that the individual made some sort of payment mistake, then the one close to the limit can jack up the rate sending the account over the limit, accruing massive fees.  Once the account is over the limit, they can adjust the rate to the maximum allowed by law.  All other companies can then follow suit!  This makes it nearly impossible to ever pay the accounts back down to a respectable level (if there is such a thing) and the account will never return to the original deal’s interest rate.

That is a pretty powerful position.  The original interest rate on an account may be 10 percent, but the limit is something over 30 percent!  For a person with a 5000 dollar balance, this is a huge increase in the monthly payment.  The individual may have been paying somewhere between fifty  and one hundred dollars a month, but is then side-swiped by a two-hundred or three-hundred dollar minimum per month.  This simple detail sends many into a financial downward spiral that they can not recover from.

Now legislators are giving billions to corporations in order to keep them (hopefully) from going under and are taking that money from the individuals who are looking at bankruptcy themselves.  This has to stop.  The companies are reaping the rewards of faceless immunity of the law and something has to be done about it. What happens when the corporations that sent these individuals into bankruptcy, give out the big bonuses and file themselves?  I think they should suffer as we do.  They should be held responsible for their actions.  Yes, the government has thrown money at the problem to stall the situation, Now they need to begin holding these individuals responsible rather than let them hide behind the title of the corporate entities they create to avoid such responsibility.  Credit card companies are at the top of this list with others such as insurance, banking(which are often the keystones of the credit card companies), and industrial corporations.