Since arriving on Capitol Hill in March, Bill Foster has been keeping busy. On his first day in office, he cast the deciding procedural vote on an bill championed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to create an independent, outside panel to investigate ethics complaints against House members. Since then, as The Beacon News reports, he's turned his attention to the deceptive and exploitative techniques of predatory lenders and credit card companies.
Such regulation is vitally important, especially in times of economic downturn. As Mose reported last month, predatory lending is a growing industry that nudges unknowing low-income borrowers into cycles of debt through loans strapped with exorbitant interest rates. Credit card companies aren't much better: after the industry was throughly deregulated in the late 1970s, banks bilked cash from clients through confusing and punitive measures while simultaneously lobbying Congress to implement bankruptcy reforms that made it even more difficult for working households to crawl out from under their debts.
Using his role on the House Financial Services Committee, Foster is now doing his part to push back, advocating legislation that would standardize credit card service contracts:
"There are a lot of 'gotchas' like double-cycle billing buried in the fine print that nobody ever gets the chance to read," he said. "I don't want to have the situation where credit card companies are competing with each other over who has the cleverest fine print.
"There's a lot to be done to protect credit card consumers."
He also intends to write a bill regulating payday loan businesses, arguing that they represent "an end run around the usury laws. They're siphoning money from communities that can least afford it."
(Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user taberandrew.)
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