Every time you use a credit card, the merchant is charged 1.5% to 5% "merchant discount fee" that helps pay for the bank’s services and for the credit card system. This means every time you use a credit card, you help support a corporation that does not have your or most peoples’ interest in mind. Credit card corporations vehemently fight against legislation to cap interest rate limits and other methods to keep vulnerable people from ruining their financial security. Every time you use a credit card, you support the exploitation of poor and uneducated people. Stop using credit cards! Credit cards are only useful in rare situations and should never be used on a regular basis.

"Virtually all credit card holders are being taken advantage of under the present circumstances. If you’re a responsible person of middle-class or upper-middle-class means, and you act totally responsibly by paying off your balances every month, doing it on time, you are not being rewarded for that. In fact, you can be penalized for doing that. If you are very poor, if you are older, and if you’re very young, very vulnerable, three very vulnerable constituencies, you’re being exploited by this process. So virtually everyone who holds a credit card one way or the other, under existing laws today and provisions, can be completely taken advantage of by the credit card industry." Chris Dodd, senior Democratic member of the Senate Banking Committee.

More at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/interviews/dodd.html

Stop credit card use

This entry was originally published at Interconnectedness by Mikhail (Misha) Lomize