I was 9 years old, and the phone in our house had a weird problem: It kept ringing with calls from people I didn’t know. They’d ask for “Mom or Dad” in a stern voice. And when I told them Mom and Dad weren’t home (as was usually the case), the voices would leave ominous messages: “This is so-and-so from Macy’s (or Visa or MasterCard or Discover or San Ramon Bank). We’re calling about the overdue invoice from May (or April or March or November). Please send payment as soon as possible.”

I could always sense irritation when I took their message, as if they thought I was the reason their money never showed up.

I wasn’t. Like many American divorces, my parents came with the added bonus of severe financial hardship. At the time, I didn’t get why we had to drop off my dad’s new car at some random parking lot in Martinez with the keys inside. I didn’t understand why we had to move out of our house and into a different one farther from where I went to school. Or why, even after the bank repossessed a car and a home, the “creditors” — what my parents called those angry telephone voices — didn’t stop calling.

What I did get was that their calls were not as important as they sounded. What was important then was whether or not one of my parents would stick around long enough to cook dinner — or even talk, for that matter. Usually their “talking” started out OK, but more and more often it would devolve into fights that would last for hours, with both of them screaming at each other from different sides of the living room in the same malicious tone. And when they would see a note that one of the “creditors” called, the screaming only got louder, until one of them would shut themselves up in their room (they slept in separate rooms after we moved). Then the talk was over, and soon after, one of them would leave.

Our family’s downward spiral ended in two drastic legal measures: divorce and bankruptcy. When you’re pulling coins out of the sofa to buy groceries and not talking to your spouse except to lacerate him or her with more blame and/or hurt — when there ain’t no way things are getting better on their own — all you can do is wipe the slate clean and move on.

But this week President George W. Bush signed off on a piece of legislation that makes it harder for families to do just that. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 makes it so that even after filing for bankruptcy, many debtors will have to devise a way to pay back some of those angry telephone voices.

The credit industry (and the Republican legislative majority that passed the bill) claim that it will put a stop to “abusive” bankruptcy filings, which they say have been escalating. Too many people living the high life, and forcing others to pay for it, they say. The new laws will make credit cheaper for everyone, they say.

Uh huh.

Filing for bankruptcy, by the way, makes the next 10 years of life for the filer absolute hell. Being poor sucks now, but try living in the real world with the worst credit rating possible. You can’t get a credit card (so you can’t buy anything online or by mail-order, buy a plane ticket or rent a car). You can’t get a loan, so good luck buying a house or a car. In a consumption-driven world, you might as well have your hands tied behind your back.

A recent Harvard study found that half of all U.S. bankruptcies are related to illness or medical bills. I bet the other half are related to divorce.

Or they are from people who got tricked into acquiring a huge amount of credit debt — lord knows it’s hard with all these credit card applications clogging our mailboxes every day — and eventually can’t pay anymore.

But in any of these circumstances, what occurs that entitles the debtor to be stripped of his or her right to a clean slate? In a society that depends on its members buying commodities with terminal voracity, don’t we at least owe our fellow consumer the chance to start over, with no grudge?

That is how it’s been since 1898 — but this is a new era of American politics, where The Good Ideas We Had are meaningless. Where the explanation for each increasingly inexplicable action by the body that claims to be our government lies in the intricacies of special-interest lobbying.

In other words, follow the money, and you’ll find yourself looking at a group of interests — Credit, Retail, Evil — that’ve been clamoring for the first major bankruptcy change in 27 years. That don’t seem to care that their advertising trickery and dauntless persistence have created an overuse of and dependence on credit that’s now regarded nonchalantly as the American Way. Or that the states hardest hit by the new law, where bankruptcy filings are most common — Utah, Texas, Indiana, Ohio — are all generally Republican.

While it’s getting harder to overstate the horror of current congressional reality, the benefits of a fresh-start bankruptcy law are crystal-clear. More than 10 years after their double-whammy of bankruptcy then divorce, both my parents have happily remarried and restarted their financial lives. I haven’t picked up the phone from an angry creditor since. But with a government of con men who manipulate the system exclusively for the benefit of big business, who notice the less fortunate only when they owe money, I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that future generations won’t be so lucky. Class warfare’s apparently been declared — so who’ll blame me for asking: When begins the revolution?