Maxed Out: Documentary or Political Hit Job?

June 26th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

James Scurlock has spent the last several years of his life creating a book and now documentary about the abuses of the credit card industry and banking as a whole on the American populace. Recently his documentary, “Maxed Out”, has become available for all of us to see on DVD. The film has already won several awards and no doubt will continue to sell a great number of copies on DVD. However there are quit a few stories of people in the film that one must wonder if Scurlock wanted to accurately portray the credit card industry or just demonize them.

There’s a story of a woman in the film who lost her husband, and can no longer make her $4,000 monthly house-payment. They show footage of her selling some of her things at a garage sale and packing up some things at her home because she’s afraid she’s going to lose it. The woman went to several cash advance places to pay her mortgage and got in over her head.

We can’t help but feel bad for this woman in the film, but why is this story in a film that’s exposing the “evils” of the banking industry? Shouldn’t the family have planned for such an occasion and bought some basic life insurance to make sure money was around if one of them were to die? Did they not sign a contract stating that they would pay the house payment each month, and if they did not, the bank would have the right to foreclose on them?

There are also two mothers in the film who have had children that committed suicide because they racked up a high amount of debt in college and couldn’t take the stress of it anymore. It’s an absolute shame that those two young people were lost in such a tragic way, but that doesn’t make it Visa’s fault! A couple of young adults made some poor decisions and couldn’t handle the responsibility of dealing with the mess that they’ve made, the credit card industry had nothing to do with that!

These are just a couple of examples of the emotional appeals that are used in the film to try to persuade the audience that the banking industry is somehow out to get us, come on, really? They’re just trying to make a profit, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it can be questionable as to who they loan money, but that’s just because there’s so much money to loan out right now. If an individual and a bank can agree on a loan, that’s between them.

We don’t have the right to tell banks whom they can and cannot do business with. If someone freely enters into a contract and signs up for a financial product and didn’t happen read all of the fine print or realize entirely what they were getting themselves into, that’s because they didn’t do their homework and consider the consequences of their actions. It’s a matter of personal responsibility, nothing more, and nothing less. It’s not the banking industry’s fault that some people make bad decisions with financial products.