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| Surveying Predation |
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| at base, we're defaulting to continue predation upon the poor |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, July 27, 2011. There is an epidemic of demands that we take surveys everywhere you go, especially on the web. I am even asked to fill out a survey when I donate blood. It infuriates me to be given five choices as to whether I was treated as I supposedly would expect to be treated. What more can these poor people do? They already rub my feet and stroke my brow and sing a Te Deum a capella in five parts while my hallowed blood falls into a bag in clumps. Like they do for you, right? In the event, I won't do surveys anymore and told them to consider each visit excellent in all ways until I send them notice of a meaningful falloff in service. I hate over precision in trivial concerns. But if they sing something by Bach, who's so overdone, or their Latin pronunciation is incorrect I'll let them know, all righty. What I really hate, though, is that it reminds me of a dark period in my past. I may have mentioned that I served time in jail years back, and that during that period of probation I worked at various jobs. One was for a local marketing firm which made the phone calls of the sort we all we all hate doing surveys. Although we claimed we didn't sell, we were just gathering information, we did indeed sell, but not close the deal. That was often done by another team. We also participated in scams. One of them involved vacuum cleaners for a famous manufacturer. One team would call up poor, rural neighborhoods in the south and sell them high end vacuum cleaners. Frankly, the assumption was that they were poor, unemployed, often drunk, and black with no need of a vacuum for what were, sometimes, dirt floors. I wasn't part of those teams. I was, after all, already a felon. I was part of the team that called to notify they were late in payments and what were they going to do about it. The alternatives had fat penalties on them. In short, I was part of predation on the poor. And from the get go, that's what it was intended to be, because how could it not have been? I read today that Wells Fargo Bank is under the gun and fire of the federal government. In a fight with the Federal Reserve, Wells Fargo is accused of steering about ten thousand borrowers into those noxious subprime mortgage loans. Some had their loan documents falsified by bank personnel. Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $85 million to settle the civil charges if it did not admit wrongdoing. But now the city of Baltimore and the DOJ accuse Wells Fargo of using those same practices deployed against black borrowers in majority-black neighborhoods, which is called "reverse redlining," when people on one side of a neighborhood line just didn't qualify for loans previously. But now they did! Just like elsewhere, Baltimore says the bank knowingly targeted poor black borrowers, uncaring if the loans would default. They didn't care, since the bank sold those loans to investors, who sold them upstream further. And it was all insured. Sound familiar? It should, because it is a major cause of the economic meltdown for which we are now being called to account. And in a small way, years back, I participated in laying the groundwork. I probably should be ashamed of more of my past than I am, but predation on the aged poor gets no argument from me. I was guilty of that. In my defense, I did eventually walk out, a risky move when on probation. The government of the United States is about to default on major loans, the first time we have ever defaulted. This will occur primarily because the Republicans are committing predation on the poor and minorities whom they realize won't vote for them. They do not want the Bush tax cuts repealed, primarily because so many of the GOP's supporters benefit from them. These cuts were on the obscenely wealthy, and wouldn't affect their life style at all if dropped. The GOP wants you to visualize them as job makers, but the vast majority are not productive and are living off unearned income as alimony wives or WASProt trust funders. In fact, whether Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, the majority of actually productive wealthy are FOR the repeal of the tax cuts. Republicans have no answer for that, because they know precisely who would benefit from keeping them on the books. The Republican office holders themselves. Sometimes, it seems all of a piece, doesn't it? I'd take a survey on that. |
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