I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.
Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.
So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.
Well one big fix would be to make legal services free at point of services and instead make the government responsible for paying the salaries of lawyers.
Call it Justice for All like Medicare for All but more patriotic sounding and litigious.
Kills SLAP suits, and opens the gates for people who had legitimate grievances but were scared of the legal fees and costs to have access to their day in court.
Why would regular people need protection? They don’t have shareholders! 🤷🏻♂️
To make major, sustained, positive change would require widespread violent revolution.
It’s the only thing we will have left pretty soon. Capitalism is pretty close to flatlining. Then we will have a Corporate Congress and the nation will become The United Corporation of America - in name as opposed to now where that’s what it is but it’s not yet called that.
We already have corporate Congress.
I do anticipate fascism becoming overt after November, but the powers that be will market it well, like that time they turned Nazism into ‘White Nationalism’.
Good question and good examples. With things like forced arbitration in user agreements I’d love to know more on how to turn things around on this.
I spoke to a lawyer about something similar to this recently and he basically just laughed at me. Told me there is no way it’s worth it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight it in court and would basically have no gain to me personally at all. Overturning such a small amount no matter how wrong or immoral it is would be extremely costly on both sides but they have way more money to throw at the issue than I do which I totally agree with honestly. So you can do something that’s totally immoral, just as long as you have tons of money behind you to pay for it
And this right here is one of the fundamental injustices of the American legal system. It’s completely fucked that some conglomerate can basically railroad an individual into poverty from a bullshit lawsuit and that private individuals without deep pockets essentially have zero recourse in the legal arena.
Open revolution is about the only avenue left.
$1000 is likely small claims court. At least where I was, no lawyers are allowed for small claims so the landlord would have to come to deal with it himself or a representative of the payment company.
Have you seen the [email protected] community? This would be a good post there as well, I think!
That latter issue is actually being worked on, law wise, right now.
Explain how!
The FTC is working on a bill or something to make “one click cancel” required.
Which is an excellent answer to the question, “how do we fix it?” Vote for fucking Democrats!! Democrat administrations enact consumer protections!
Corporations tried out binding arbitration and the people just took it with very little complaining. So why not keep eroding consumer protections or the other rights citizens fought for in the before times?
Capitalism.
European countries are also capitalist countries, but they have much better consumer protections and laws. It can be done.
I think going back in time and video gaming Reagan would be a good start
Video gaming?
You should consider the kind of things that happen in video games.
But Minecrafting Reagan would not be possible so it has to be Ponging him. Or Q*berting him ?
Eaten by a Subnautica Reaper?
I just started listening to a new podcast series called Master Plan that talks about how this happened deliberately and systematically over decades. It followed the Powell Doctrine. You can hear a conversation between the primary host, David Sirota, and Brianna Joy Gray (she’s not one of my favorites, but I tuned in because it was him) on Bad Faith podcast.
a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent
You got over $1000 in late fees from a single month of not having the full amount?
I can’t tell you. Because the mods won’t like it.
But it rhymes with Piolence.
And Viola Ants
