JULY 7, 2008 --

LPR sent  the following letter to AP Business Writer Rachel Beck on reading her article, June 28,  about banks taking action against credit cardholders, lowering their available credit which can result in lower credit scores that raise the cost of borrowing to the consumer. LPR here offers the text of the letter (typos removed) to its clicksters.

Please see my website which mentions the problem regularly, including current posting. Lonely Pamphleteer Review -- www.lonelypamphleteer.com

I don't think it is unfair to conclude from your informative article today that to cover poor or deceptive business practices on mortgages, banks are seeking to make good their losses from  the most vulnerable people they can find.

I have long tried to point out that banks like WaMu and HSBC -- you will get directly to my website by googling "Wamuvilles" -- have been running up damage claims with their oppressive interest rates.

When I was in law school, I was told that plaintiffs should mitigate damages, not run them up.  If a cardholder pays a bit late on one or two payments, HSBC, for example, applies 31.99 percent to the entire balance which has to bring in considerably more than was lost on the late payment.

It is unclear to me how we ever threw out the concept of usury, which 31.99% interest clearly once would have been termed.

It is as if the face of Henry F. Potter were smiling in the office of every bank these days. (Referring to the banker in Frank Capra's  film "It's a Wonderful Life.")  He believed in squeezing what he termed "the riff-raff."   

Madison, in Federalist 57, offered another model for our leaders -- serve the common good, do not seek the "ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few," hold "sympathy of sentiments and communion of interests" with the people. Tyranny, Madison noted, must occur where such sympathy is lacking.

My website calls for cooperative free enterprise. That, I believe, is what George Bailey represented in Capra's great film. What we are getting, at the present time, is predatory free enterprise, I believe.

Our leaders are silent, the crunch on consumers gets tighter and the common good (a/k/a the economy) suffers.  

Let me pose this question: business claims times are better when taxes are lower with even more money going to government. The banks seem to take a different view when it comes to interest rates, don't they?

Sincerely,

David R. Zukerman