Law and reality in publishing and entertainment (seldom the same thing) from the creator's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into politics, military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting. |
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06 June 2004
Dept. of Just Desserts
at
06:49
[UTC8]
AmeriDebt, one of the morass of "credit counseling" firms aiming to help consumers "avoid" bankruptcyand, in the case of a few of them, thereby preserve the ability of the creditors to sue the consumershas itself filed for bankruptcy. Now, admittedly, the FTC is indeed picking on AmeriDebt for deceptive marketing and excessive fees: It could just as well have gone after most of this late-night-cable-TV-based "industry" for the same or related problems. That is not to say that AmeriDebt doesn't deserve such attention; only that it has, thus far, been singled out. Would it surprise you to know that one of the biggest of the "credit counseling" firms was established by a consortium of subprime lenders and department-store finance arms? I didn't think so.