T he college student (call her Carol) averted her eyes, trying to keep her professor from seeing the tears. She had come reluctantly to seek his advice. The tremor in her voice told him she’d reached a frantic impasse, a collapse of her nervous system colliding with her resolve to work things out on her own.

Her problem was not failing grades, sexual indiscretion, drug abuse – none of the problems familiarly associated with university students.

The monster that towered over Carol, hounding her days and troubling her sleep, was debt – credit-card debt that for two years had sucked her dry financially and emotionally and now, after 24 months of disciplined diet, restrained purchasing and faithful monthly payments, had left her exhausted and fearful but no better off.

She’d taken on after-school jobs, paid punitive fees amounting to two-thirds the total amount she’d originally owed. But they’d all gone to arbitrary penalties and constantly escalating interest payments, now an unconscionable 26 percent. She still owed the credit card company about the same as when the nightmare of economic liposuction began two years ago.

Carol’s dilemma: Must she drop out of school for a few years, work full time until she pays off the suffocating debt and then try later to pick up the tattered threads of her college career?

A million-and-a-half Americans – some students but most older, many wracked by unmanageable medical bills and physical disabilities leading to unemployment – were forced last year into filing for personal bankruptcy.

Congress, trying to curb bankruptcies, passed a new bill that puts a heavier burden of proof on any who apply. Far worse than that are the unprecedented powers that the bill gives to credit card companies (mostly owned by a few big banks) to double and triple oppressive annual interest rates on consumers, shorten and change due dates for payment, and in other ways gouge billions of precious dollars annually from unwary card holders.

That particular “anti-bankruptcy” law demonstrates clearly just who has this Congress’ ear. It isn’t the average folks – wage-earners, consumers, borrowers for homes, cars and hospital bills. The current congressional leadership isn’t interested in people like these. It listens to the powerful, the wealthy, the big banks and credit card companies that finance campaigns and gouge their profits out of common folks.

In recent elections, credit card companies gave $25 million to congressional campaigns; banks, which own most of the card companies, gave $76 million.

This bill typifies the current legislative climate, full of gesture and puffery. It rails at the inadequate cure (bankruptcy) and makes it more inaccessible but does nothing to heal the disease (poverty, joblessness, high health and education costs).

Debt, like dope, makes you feel better for a little while, but in the end it can entrap you.

Consider the “variable interest” home mortgage. Congress let lenders make it alluringly easier to get into debt for a home but painfully harder (in many cases impossible) to hold onto it. It was a trap, a snare for the unwary. Its predictable result: millions of foreclosures as interest rates skyrocketed and gullible young couples lost their dream homes and all they’d put into them.

Carol’s personal story is a metaphor for the United States. Everywhere we look in America, we see the specter of rising debt.

Our national debt has doubled in the past five years. Now, at its historic peak of $8.5 trillion, it is eight times higher than in 1980. The average citizen’s share of it is over $28,000.

Americans owe a piece of that to foreign investors, and we’re paying annual bond interest to the Chinese government.

Credit card debtors owe $800 billion, compared with $200 billion in 1990. Outstanding consumer debt (not counting home mortgages) has risen to a record high of $2.35 trillion. Total mortgage debt now tops $9 trillion, compared with $5.5 trillion in 1991.

Every few days at our house, some marketer calls, wanting to issue us an additional credit card or sell us on taking out a “reverse mortgage” or “home equity” loan.

We shudder to wonder how many Americans, in debt and strapped for immediate cash, are putting family homes on the block out of joblessness, medical bills or other pressing needs.

What happened to usury laws? And to lawmakers’ concerns for average citizens?