The shady credit agencies that run your life
Your credit score affects everything from job offers to home loans — and the way it’s calculated is deeply flawed
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/02/the_shady_credit_agencies_that_run_your_life/singleton/
I highly recommend reading the entire article, but I was most interested in the final bit:
Or how about a credit-reporting agency of the people, for the people and by the people? Similar to the Move Your Money campaign, a Move Your Credit Score campaign might be an experiment worth running, if only to keep the topic in the minds of the public. The idea is that we would all volunteer to submit our information to our own agency, which would agree to sell its scoring to banks and other lenders at a lower fee that those currently charged by credit ratings bureaus. The banks would certainly try to squash it, but a national campaign would be a good way to expose the mess and gain the attention of the mainstream press, which has so far largely confined its reporting to “How to Improve Your Credit Score” pieces.
Taking back the control of our financial destinies is something the 99 percent can certainly rally around. Left, right and center, this is an issue none of us can escape.
Doing so would certainly not be without huge challenges, but clearly the ‘market’ needs competition. Ever since my wife was victim of an identity thief (which, btw, the police were totally uninterested in investigating; all they had to do was show up and put the cuffs on, my wife had done all the work for them!) I have closely monitored my credit. My report is full of all sorts of cruft and crap, none of them have the slightest idea where I currently work and most are confused about where I live. I would think that the actual users of the credit system would be happy to have a better report and if you were to offer the better report for less money, I think you could get a lot of business right off the bat. Of course, all sorts of new laws would be put in place (sort of like the breaks put on to credit unions as well as health care unions), so you would have to employ lots of the slimy lobbyists that the ‘bad guys’ hire, which, of course, needs deep pockets, etc., etc., etc.
Of course, if we were to re-create a society that simply excluded the 1% (of course, immediately replacing them with today’s current 2%, but such is life) and all stick together, we could dramatically transform our society in just a year or twain. Of course, since the majority of our population is made up of sheeple, it is inevitable that more than enough morons will believe the lies promulgated by the 1% to break the back of the movement.
