Let’s get one thing straight: your credit score isn’t just a number. It’s a modern–day oracle, a mysterious calculation wielded by shadowy financial criminals to determine if you deserve a car, a house, or even the privileged to rent a $2,500 studio with no windows, and a shower that doubles as your kitchen sink. But what is this credit score? Where does it come from? And why does it feel more like astrology for banks than actual math? The Credit Score didn’t have a stronghold before, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government operated) recommended the FICO score for mortgage lending in 1995. Why this was allowed to happen follows like the majority of America’s His-story of discrimination, but I digress.

The Three Unholy Guardians of Your Fate. Meet the gatekeepers of your financial destiny: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion- the Bermuda Triangle of personal finance. These three credit bureaus have more power over your adult life than many hustling mothers. They track your every financial move like a jealous ex. Did you miss a $15 payment in 2016? Still there? Co–signed your family members’ junker car, and they had memory loss to you signing for them? Stressed about how your score will react? The crazy thing is– despite having literally the same data– each company will have a completely different score. As if turning in a homework assignment and getting an A, a C-, and a we need to talk note. You know when three siblings can’t get their lies straight.

The Vague Algorithm of Doom. Have you ever tried to figure out how your score is calculated? Don’t bother. It’s like trying to learn the secret recipe for Coca–Cola. You’ll get vague answers like “payment history,“ “credit mix,“ and “dark rituals conducted under a blood moon.“ You’d think paying off your credit card would help. Seldomly, it does. Sometimes, your score drops instead, like the algorithm is punishing you for being smart enough to stay away from debt and trying too hard. It’s like the double–standard corporate smack in the face of many minorities, “you’re too qualified.“ But if you find an error– say, a loan you never applied for– you get to play the game of contacting the Credit Dispute Customer Service, a place where logic goes to die and your emails get sent on Space X flights to nowhere.

Chalk up Another Win for Corporate America. Credit bureaus own your financial data, but you don’t. That’s like someone borrowing your car, driving it off a cliff, and then sending you the repair bill. These agencies collect and sell your data to lenders, insurers, landlords, and even potential employers – often without your knowledge (profits with envelopes of cash paid to your favorite politicians). Regardless, if the information is incomplete or completely incorrect, it doesn’t matter to them. The real customer isn’t you. It never has been, but the companies buying your report. The business of America is maintaining the business and not its citizens. Reality check, corporations have more rights and protections than most citizens.

Flawed Scores Keep You in Debt. Bad or middling credit? Congrats, you now qualify for high–interest loans, sky-high insurance premiums, or deposit requirements for basic utilities. You worked hard at school for your degree or license and ready to contribute with a fresh take on knowledge; nope, you also are punished for not having any bad credit; therefore starting your adult life in credit debt with unearned higher interest rates. Now you’re desperate to accept that whopping $0.50 raise to cover an extra lunch; yet still corporate control. These flaws aren’t bugs– they’re features for lenders. If your score goes down, you’re considered “riskier,“ so they can charge more. If it goes up, you’re seen as “creditworthy,“ and they… still making money from you with interest and fees. Heads they win, tails they win more. This cowardly American system (claimed by corrupted capitalists) has stayed true to the routine of built-in back doors for corporations to screw over its people.

The Credit Repair Industry Is a Side Hustle for the System. When a system is broken, capitalism finds a way to profit from the damage. That’s where many credit repair vultures, I mean agencies thrive. A handful are legit, many however are not even close. They prey on the vulnerable, desperate, ill–informed, or combination of all three. But all exist because the credit bureaus are incredibly bad at their one job. Even financial institutions offer “credit building“ programs now – essentially charging you to fix a score that they or their buddies helped break. There’s no need to mention the correlation to why the U.S. government removed financial education from public schools.

Your Score= Your Social Passport. Do you need a job? A home? A phone plan? You’re going to be judged by your credit score– regardless of how accurate or fair it is. Corporations love this because it gives them an easy excuse to deny access or reasonable fees, charging more, or pushing you into riskier products. It shifts the blame from systemic inequity to personal responsibility: “Sorry, we’d love to approve you… but your score says you’re not tying hard enough.“ Oh, don’t worry about protection from the most lucrative corporate side hustle of identity thefts by “accidentally selling“, nope, “leaking“, nope, umm oh just another “data breach“… Despite numerous scandals – Equifax’s massive 2017 data breach or reporting errors that ruined people’s lives – while collecting profits. The true American dream= the government and corporations constantly failing at their jobs and getting rewarded.

Bottom Line. Standard & Poor (S&P) downgraded America’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ in 2011; also, Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating to AA+ in 2023. Both are meaningless because the U.S. debts and balance sheets are trash. We are steadily allowing a country that positions their friends to keep us all in the-chains-of-debt. Corporate America wins because the rules for this high–stakes game are secret, the refs are biased, and the players have to keep paying just to stay in it. The house wins– especially when the scorekeeper is on the payroll. To recap: They sell our information, cover it up, the government fines some of them, and we take all the loses. The company then charges us more to fix what they broke. From personal experience, having your identity stolen is a nightmare. I’m already Black in America! Yet the prosperous world of identity theft/ corporate theft has minimal hurdles. But hey, thefts and breaches are added to the last pages of your credit report, where most won’t look beyond the BIG BOLD NUMBERS that scream Get That Money! We keep getting sold on the lie that if the government allowed certain companies to fail then we all fail; however another corporate bail out of billions to trillions of free money to them that we the people will pay; but somehow we the people who received a measly $2,000–$4,000 depending on how many kids you created, we are the problem? Our politicians and those elected to serve us have been serving themselves the first and the last slices of the pie.

The storm of change is coming! We deserve better from a government and a country that constantly claims being the greatest. Well be great then damn it!

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