"You know who one of the most popular customers of credit card companies is right now? People who have been through bankruptcy. The reason, as a Vice President of MasterCard once explained to me, is, 'We know two things about them: one is that they can't file for bankruptcy again, and second, they have a taste for credit.' And I said, 'What does that mean?' And he said, 'Well, they're willing to make minimum monthly payments forever! And that's where we make our money.' Death will be the only debt discharge they will ever see!" — Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School Cassandra, in Maxed Out.
James Spurlock's Maxed Out, about America's love affair with plastic credit, shows how debt in America has a body count. We hear from the mothers of college students who hung themselves rather than cop to the shame of their credit-card loans. We listen to the daughter of a missing woman predict just where authorities will find her mother's body, and a distraught truck-driver's wife who vanished from a Midwestern filling station after learning her husband had obtained credit reports detailing her gambling debts. A more surreal fate awaits Minnesota farm wife Doris Gohman, who explains her battle to convince three major credit bureaus that she is not legally dead.
Spurlock shows Americans displaying an almost carnal taste for debt. College kids swipe cards to buy fast-food sodas. Credit card poster boys Chris and Luke, a pair of faux blonde students, became media darlings in 2001 when they became human billboards for FirstUSA Bank. TV's Robin Leach explains how his Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous empire was built on the premise that Americans would rather dream themselves into debt than contemplate the tacky reality of paying cash.
But the real villain of the piece is a bit of political hanky-panky that would make Tony Soprano pant with envy. Spurlock argues that banking conglomerates have bribed the major parties to, in effect, legalize loan-sharking. This, combined with an overhaul of the bankruptcy laws (the legislation written by bank-card lobbyists), has created the potential, Harvard's Warren cautions, for an America that is as egregiously divided by class as it once was by race.
Maxed Out demonstrates that when shady business dealings create a problem, our success-driven culture will provide a bevy of questionable solutions. From the smug young owners of a high-tech, maximum-pressure debt-collection agency, with a staff of 44 phone counselors who will even call a debtor's neighbors to achieve the maximum shame, to the evangelical-like host of a Nashville-based radio program who specializes in get-out-of-debt concerts, Americans have a mind-boggling array of choices for making that monthly minimum. But only death can end the need to pay altogether.
The mothers of the dead students found their attempt to lobby their legislature for tougher credit-card laws thwarted by an old-boys network of lobbyists who paid the campaign contribution price of admission to America's largest floating crap game.