I'm poor. Which of course means that I've got bad credit. It's a little hard to have good credit when you have to decide whether to pay the phone bill or the garbage collection bill this month. I also tend to notice the subtextual messages in commercials. Things like cleaning makes women happy (Swifter sweeper), men can't cook (Campbell's soup), and that the only purpose of women is to have an orgasm over body spray (Axe). It's a bad habit I picked up from my mother. Well, those freecreditreport.com commercials have been running a lot around here. You know, the extremely offensive ones with the crappy band. They really piss me off because the message in them isn't even left to the subtext. The main character flat out states that he has a crappy job and lives in the basement of his in-laws house because of bad credit. Feck, he even states that he should have dumped his wife before they married because of her credit.
This got me thinking as classist and offensive as those commercials are. There is a poisonous nugget of truth to them. The fact is that some landlords check your credit when you try to rent from them. Some employers check credit reports, in fact my (currently separated) wife was denied a job because of what was on her credit report when we were still together. Let's not even get into how hard it is to buy even a lemon of a car with poor credit.
What I start thinking of is... How did we allow Credit Reports to gain so much power in our society? Also, we have to wonder how they are allowed when they clearly contribute to Civil Rights violations? I know that last seems like it's out of left field, but the fact is that since people are denied jobs and housing based poor credit. With bad credit being a problem usually only faced by the poor.... Well, I'm sure that everyone can see where I'm leading.
There is also the fact that the Credit Reporting agencies aren't exactly known for the accuracy of their records. Everybody knows at least one person whose found something false on their credit records. Of course the inaccuracies are always negative. After all, nobody is lucky enough to be named William Gates and somehow manages to get the software magnates credit rating. What really tweaks me off about this, is that it's impossible to get wrong information off of your credit report. Even if you successfully get it removed. It's going to reappear later because of the loose standards Credit Reporting agencies have for information gathering.
What's the solution? Simple, ban the use of Credit Reports for anything but Credit Applications. I think that anyone checking credit reports as part of the hiring process should face the same penalties as if they were refusing to hire based on ethnicity or gender. Of course we also need some serious accountability and transparency for Credit Reporting agencies. Or even simpler, ban Credit Reports all together.