Benefit screenings of "MAXED OUT"

The CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival presents a series of pre-festival benefit screenings of the new documentary MAXED OUT on May 15 & 16 at 7:15 and 9:30 at the worker-owned Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight Street (at Cole Street), in San Francisco.

From small-town America to the White House, MAXED OUT reveals how the modern financial industry really works: how so-called “sub-prime” borrowers — a euphemism for the broke and bankrupt — are now the industry's "preferred customers", why banks and credit card companies actually want you to make late payments, and why Americans are now going broke at a faster rate than during the Great Depression.

The film also looks at the personal information business, in which 90 percent of all credit reports have errors in them, but the companies that compile them don't bother to correct them, because negative reports mean higher individual interest rates — and industry profits.

And, in an echo of the current student loan scandal, MAXED OUT exposes how companies pay colleges millions of dollars for students' private data, then entice teenagers into life-long debt servitude and financial subsistence.

The film will be followed by a Q & A session with credit experts/activists. Tickets to benefit the 2007 Anti-Corporate Film Festival (Oct. 19-21 in San Francisco) are $10 and are available online at http://virtuous.com/events/countercorp/.

For more information on the screenings (including a trailer of the film), CounterCorp, or the 2007 Anti-Corporate Festival, visit our website at www.countercorp.org.