Speaking of Players

Here's a very interesting article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on how the Bush Rangers and Pioneers (who raised $200,000 and $100,000 respectively for the BushCo campaign in 2004) are reaping the benefits of having their man in office. It's a long one, but worth a full read. Here's a sampling from a section focused on MBNA, the credit card company:

When MBNA's customers filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, courts wiped their credit balances away. MBNA wrote off $4.1 billion in unpaid credit-card bills last year.

To stem the losses, the company worked to change the rules. It spent nearly $20 million from 1998 to 2004 to lobby Congress on issues including bankruptcy reform. Even before Mr. Clinton killed a reform bill late in his second term, MBNA had turned to George W. Bush.

MBNA employees gave the Bush campaign more than $200,000 in 2000, the most of any company, and allowed the campaign to use an MBNA corporate jet. The new president pushed bankruptcy reform in his first term, but an unrelated congressional dispute scuttled it.

The company worked hard for Mr. Bush again last year. Former MBNA CEO Charles Cawley and Vice Chairman Lance Loring Weaver both qualified as Rangers, each raising at least $200,000 for the president's re-election.

MBNA surpassed Enron last year to become the largest corporate patron of Mr. Bush's career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

The eight-year struggle for bankruptcy reform ended within 90 days of Mr. Bush's second inaugural address. The 500-page law, initially crafted by a financial services lobbyist, mandates credit counseling for prospective filers and makes it harder to escape credit-card debt.

"The legislation in effect deputizes the bankruptcy courts as collection agents for the credit-card companies," said Mark Sargent, dean of Villanova University's law school, a bankruptcy expert, and critic of the bill. "The great irony of this is that it's having your cake and eating it too. They push credit to anyone with a pulse."

[...]
Based on the market share figures compiled by the industry analyst Web site cardweb.com, the law will give MBNA about $380 million more annually. That figure would feed the company's yearly profit of $2.6 billion.

In June, after the law passed, Bank of America agreed to purchase MBNA for $35 billion, 31 percent above the company's market value at the time. An analyst called the sale price "rich."