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Subject: [NYT] A Sudden Rush to Declare Bankruptcy is Expected
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Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 22:06:11 -0700 (PDT)
Welcome to 2002. Companies that have taken on way too much debt can
screw their shareholders and even some of their debt-holders by
declaring bankruptcy, as Enron and Worldcom have done; meanwhile,
it becomes more difficult for individuals who have similarly taken on
too much debt, to dig their way out of their own holes...
In my next life, I'm coming back as a corporation. They get all the
perks. :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/27/business/27BANK.html
A Sudden Rush to Declare Bankruptcy Is Expected
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, July 26 The compromise bill, which was approved on Thursday
by Congressional negotiators and is expected to be adopted in both the
House and Senate by the end of next week, will make it much harder for
Americans to wipe out their debts when they declare bankruptcy.
After the agreement, lawyers around the country said that they had begun
to receive calls and visits from debtors worried that they needed to
file bankruptcy before the old rules lapse next year.
"I've had plenty of calls this morning," said Gary F. Weltmann, a
consumer bankruptcy lawyer in Washington. "And I'm telling people that
they need to take action now."
Marty K. Courson, a bankruptcy lawyer in San Francisco, said he was
"getting ready for the onslaught."
"I do think there will be a lot of people trying to use the old rules,"
he said.
The White House announced today that President Bush would sign the bill,
which was scheduled for a final vote in the House late tonight and in
the Senate next week.
"The president looks forward to signing that," said Ari Fleischer, the
White House spokesman. "That bill enjoys widespread bipartisan support
for good reasons."
The bill, which had been stalled until this week in a House-Senate
conference committee, passed both chambers by overwhelming margins more
than a year ago. The conference committee approved the bill Thursday
after agreeing on an abortion-rights provision that had been the final
obstacle to passage; the provision will bar anti-abortion protesters
from using the bankruptcy laws to avoid paying court judgments as a
result of clinic protests.
The bill has long been the top legislative priority of the credit card
and banking industries, which say that many people now abuse the
bankruptcy system by writing off debts that they should be able to
pay. There were 1.45 million bankruptcy filings last year, a record, up
19 percent from 2000.
"This legislation restores integrity and accountability to our
bankruptcy system by offering a fresh start to those who deserve one
while cracking down on those who don't," said Representative F. James
Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee.
Critics, including top consumer-rights groups, described the bill as a
gift to lenders in exchange for a recent, drastic increase in campaign
contributions to members of Congress. They also said that it would do
harm to millions of Americans in financial distress as a result of lost
jobs, poor health or divorce.
The bill's opponents have also questioned the timing of its passage,
which comes in the midst of a Congressional crackdown on abusive
accounting practices by many of the largest companies, including some of
the same financial services companies that have lobbied strenuously for
the bankruptcy bill.
"The timing couldn't be worse," said Travis B. Plunkett, the legislative
director of the Consumer Federation of America. "It takes a lot of gall
for Congress to make a move like this when so many Americans are
concerned about corporate abuses, and when the economy is so shaky."
Senator Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat who is a leading critic of
the bill, said today that "it boggles the mind that at a time when
Americans are more economically vulnerable, when they are most in need
of protection from financial disaster, we would eviscerate the major
financial safety net in our society for the middle class."
Bankruptcy lawyers said that the bill would do harm to low- and
middle-income clients who would be saddled with debts that would take
them years to pay back. The new law will end the debt-free "fresh start"
that many of those debtors had been permitted under the current law.
Recent studies have shown that the average American filing for
bankruptcy has a median household income well below the national average
of about $42,000 in 2000. A study cited in Congressional testimony last
year showed that the average person filing for bankruptcy had a car that
was six to nine years old, and that a quarter of those people had
medical debts exceeding $1,000.
"I won't deny that there are people who abuse the bankruptcy system,"
said Mr. Weltmann, the Washington lawyer whose firm calls itself the
Bankruptcy Center. "But there are honest, hard-working folks who are
really going to be affected by these changes."
The bill would impose a means test on debtors, based on median incomes
in their home states, for bankruptcy filings under Charter 7 of the
federal bankruptcy law, which permits debtors to erase most of their
unsecured debts, like credit card bills.
Debtors with an income above the state median would be barred from
filing under Chapter 7 and would instead be required to file instead
under Chapter 13, which requires that a portion of the unsecured debt be
repaid over time under the court-administered plan.
Mr. Courson, the San Francisco lawyer, said that the changes would "hurt
a lot of consumer debtors who really, rightfully belong in Chapter 7."
"My clients, for the most part, are honest and unfortunate people, and
they've just got heavy debt," he said. "You can always find some
circumstance where a person really went to town with a credit card and
got themselves in trouble. But I have people who are just plain old
poor. My experience is something wildly different than the story that
the credit card companies make to Congress."
----
aDaM@XeNT.CoM -- .sig double play!
At its peak, there were more than 100 peer-to-peer start-ups. There now
remain, at most, a couple of dozen companies concentrated in a few
niches. The main activity of companies venturing into peer to peer is
file sharing. But the dozens of overoptimistic forays into alternative
economic systems, hyper-sophisticated technologies, and recording
industry collaboration turned out to be dead ends. Peer-to-peer
auctions, peer-to-peer supply chain management, and peer-to-peer e-mail
may have failed because they were ahead of their time. It's more likely
they failed because they were just ahead of themselves. Clearly, the
public's appetite for file sharing has increased, and the state of the
art has improved dramatically. But companies have still not yet found
satisfactory business models, thus leaving file sharing's last chapter
unwritten.
-- Gene Kan, http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20020710/tc_zd/942734
XML proxies are add-ons to firewall and network environments that have
the ability to monitor XML traffic and apply business rules and IT
policies such as security, routing, performance, management,
transformation, and connection provisioning. Current firewalls aren't
able to peek in the envelope and decipher XML traffic, said report
author Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink senior analyst. XML proxies are not
only able to understand network protocols, but also the XML-based
content traveling on top of those protocols, Schmelzer said. ZapThink
identifies a slew of new vendors with XML-ready security solutions,
including Flamenco Networks, Forum Systems, Reactivity, Vordel, and
Westbridge Technology, among others... ZapThink estimates that XML
represents just 2 percent of network traffic today, but that will
increase to almost 25 percent by 2006.
-- http://www.internetwk.com/story/INW20020726S0004
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