For once, Teddy Kennedy got it almost right. Referring to the country's draconian new bankruptcy code, enacted last year under the cynically titled 'Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act,' Kennedy called it 'an attempt by the credit card industry to 'squeeze an extra few dollars a month out of Americans who are down on their luck.' Kennedy has captured the spirit of the bill, but not its diabolical intent. For in fact, creditors seek not merely to squeeze a few bucks out of the poor schmuck who got in over his head, but to keep squeezing more or less forever, if that's what it takes to recoup the lion's share of a delinquent loan. Indeed, the law as revised makes it so difficult for the beleaguered debtor to wipe the slate clean that it would have been more accurate to have called it the Creditor Protection Act. Ironically, although the bill divided liberals and conservatives, their argument was not over whether the little guy should be protected from predatory lenders, but whether picketers who disrupted abortion clinics should be allowed to escape civil penalties by declaring bankruptcy. Clinton and the Democrats bottled up the legislation for eight years, but it sailed through under Bush, arguably the most pro-Big Business president since Reagan. Wave of Bankruptcies In the months before the new law was enacted, and as we might have expected, there was a wave of bankruptcy filings by people trying to get in under the wire. As a result, lenders weathered more than their share of abuse, at least for a while. This was on top of heavy Chapter 7 filings following the dot-com crash a few years earlier. No surprise here. Because it was relatively easy for deadbeats to walk away from their debts, many did. We wouldn't argue
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