The Kitchen Counterstrike video inspired a lengthy post on another blog. Check it out. You’ll see that he is only half right. He’s correct that in general people use credit card debt too much and to their own dismay (though, I think he leaves off the “in general”). He’s wrong to let the banks off the hook for their side of the exploitative relationship. He also makes a lot of assumptions that tend to tip the scale further to “blame the victim.”

I don’t have time for a lengthy rebuttal this week, but here’s a couple of spots that jumped out.

I am not sure of the point of his video. The customer service at Bank of America has generally been good. If you don’t bounce checks or sign up for their crazy-interest credit cards, it is a great bank. If you call some low-wage telephone customer service person and give them a hard time about the bank’s policies, I am not sure it accomplishes anything.

He’s right:  he did miss the point. It’s not a critique of customer service, per se.  A customer service call is mostly the setting, not the plot of the story. It is a demonstration of the unreasonableness of the bank’s credit card system, and it helped to have a personification of the bank.

The real culprit, in this scenario, is US, not THEM. We need to all look long and hard in a MIRROR before marching on Wall Street. While the excesses of banks and predatory lenders are to be condemned, we also need to fess up to our complicity in the deal. Loan sharks stay in business only because people willingly come to them asking to borrow money.

If you go to a loan shark, and later get your kneecaps busted, are you really an innocent victim? Or should you have seen that coming from a mile away?

This getting close to blaming the “victim.”  It almost leads me to wonder if he thinks women wearing short skirts deserve to get raped.  (Should have seen that coming, eh?)

Here’s the good point and important issue he raises that I didn’t touch on in the Kitchen Counterstrike post:  the consumer mindset that leads many into the credit card trap.  We’re conditioned to want a bunch of crap we don’t really need.  It’s an idea worthy of follow-up.

However, he goes on about how much I “borrowed.” Granted, the way I laid out the facts make it easy to jump to those conclusions. Yes, I failed to mention how the $18,000/$22,000 figure is made up of a big chunk that was, in effect, double-counted as it was a balance transferred back-and-forth between two account to find a lesser rate. That being said, anyone who thinks I went into debt over “WANTS not NEEDS,” has never been to my home.

But his point about not being seduced by material wants is worthy of a read, if you can hold your nose about him almost giving the banks a pass.