Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Revolt Spurred Via the Internet
sas-dot writes "UK's newspaper Independent outlines the brewing consumer revolt being fomented on the web. 'Consumer militancy' is becoming ever more common, as individuals join forces on the internet to fight back against the state and big business. Businesses from banks to soccer clubs have been the target of these groups, in each case facing the fury of consumers who feel they have been wronged. For example, 'A mass revolt has left the high street banks facing thousands of claims from customers seeking to claw back some of the £4.75bn levied annually on charges for overdrafts and bounced cheques. More than one million forms demanding refunds have been downloaded from a number of consumer websites. The banks are settling out of court, often paying £1,000 a time.' Are these kinds of organized 'advocate mobs' going to be the future of internet activism?"
Our businesses are smarter and have forseen the trend. They are rallying against the consumers who believe they have rights.
RE: that British bank scandal, the courts there determined that banks were breaking the law. This was then reported by the news (such as BBC) who published handy tips on reclaiming unfair fees.
Is it thus fair to call a press which publishes information about this issue, along with all the people who makes use of that information, an "advocate mob" out to bully corporations out of their profits? In fact, who is the more organized here? The private companies with enough funds to hire PR agents, attorneys, and lobbyists, or those citizens who assert their rights as legislated by parliament and enforced by the courts?
Some attitudes replaced or by cgi optimizes
Maybe people don't consider this to be a big issue. Usually, to spark a boycott, you need something really unexpected or shocking, which would rally the people into action. A good example of this is Shell, when it tried to sink an oil platform in the North Atlantic, which resulted into massive boycotts all over Europe. Or, more recently, Citgo, which saw a slump in sales after Hugo Chavez had his famous "Bust is Satan" speech at the UN (Citgo is owned by the Venezuelan government).
The Bank of America case is different. What they did was neither shocking nor unexpected. At times when people speak of amnesty for illegals and when there are efforts to grant them driver licenses and scholarships to their children, giving them credit cards doesn't sound far-fetched enough to spark a large protest. (In addition, people are more interested in Smith's decomposing body and Britney's shaved head at the moment.)
I guess aiding and abetting law breakers just isn't enough to get the typical US citizen's ire up....
Yes, well, that would also involve not eating hot dogs from meat packing plants that are blatantly breaking employment laws, and not fueling the problem by hiring curb-side landscape workers completely outside the law. People can't have it both ways, and... they want to.
But the whole credit-card-issuing thing brings a new, and especially noxious form of credibility into the illegal alien scenario. You can get a Visa/Debit card in Mexico, for example. So why not just bring your real account with you from home? Oh, right... because you're a criminal. The only plus side of this is that when an illegal is busted for one crime or another, and cut loose pending a trial date, there's a better chance of finding them by tracking their gas station purchases, etc. But... that's not worth the philosophical price paid for rewarding the initial law breaking in the first place. I would think that the legal immigrants would be up in arms over this dillution of what they work so hard to accomplish.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No it's not, because, frankly it doesn't affect anyone I know. People don't care. I don't care.
If an illegal alien can go and open a bank account, it's fine by me. Bank of America is not in the law enforcement business, it's in the banking business. This alien is supporting an American business by opening that bank account.
No, let's talk about predatory lending, sneaky credit card terms, deceitful charges, etc.
Let's talk about MBNA (now part of Bank of America) and BofA being some of the heaviest hitters to push through new bankruptcy law that makes everyone a peon to credit card companies, regardless of circumstances! Let's talk about the fact that an amendment to limit credit card interest rates to 30% (yes, that's thirty f'ing percent) was rejected last yaer. Yes, credit card companies did not want their interest rate limited to a cut-throat ceiling of 30%!
Let's talk about my platinum Bank of America card moving from 2 late payments (by even a day!) in 6 months to 2 late payments in 12 months to 1 late payment in 12 months before they bump your rate from a good APR to an insane 20%+ default APR. Let's talk about two-cycle billing (my roommate, who normally pays off his entire balance got bitten by this because he miscalculated and payed off a $1 less than the balance)
Let's talk about CapitalOne (and some other predatory lenders) not reporting your credit limit to the credit reporting agencies, which is ILLEGAL to do, but there is not enough activism or pressure to change that.
So yeah, let's talk about that, and then you can tell me why I should care that Bank of America issues a bank account to an illegal alien, when there are all these other topics out there that affect every damn American.
Big business profits motivate Bush administration's every single action:
* ignoring BofA bruhaha
* encouraging "guest worker status" to permit legal under-minimum-wage labor
* signing the bankruptcy bill
* pushing ethanol fuel (big ethanol lobby)
* against discount drugs from Canada
* crazy cronyism in Iraq (KBR, Halliburton)
I mean, there is very little that's not big business motivated.
That's "football clubs" to the rest of us.
:-)
Disclaimer: I am an American.
Ah, but see, by saying "soccer" it removes all the ambiguity. Most non-Americans know what "soccer" is, they just think it is an incorrect term to describe that sport with 2 goals and a buncha guys kicking a ball around. Had the poster said "football" then the American population would assume the summary was referring to American football while the non-american population wouldn't be confused for they would expect to see "American football" to describe football and "football" to describe soccer; a clever non-American would however assume that since this is an Amermican website that the summarry was actually referring to American footbal by saying "football". So had the summary said "football" to describe soccer, only non-presumptuous non-American's would infer the correct meaning...By saying soccer, everyone infers the correct meaning, and a few people get pissed off and/or roll their eyes.
P.S. I'm not arguing over which is the more correct term, thats a useless debate...Seeing as I am an American and a Slashdotter, I suppose I'm supposed to be double-arrogant and double-argumentative. . so yeah, soccer is THE correct term
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
You know, it's a tricky situation. I like the policy of granting credit to someone without demanding a social security number, since that use is WAY outside the purpose of the SS number. Even FDR claimed the number would not be used for ANYTHING except social security when he helped create the program (moreover, he imagined it as a temporary solution to an immediate problem with a gradual fade out of the program replaced private retirement accounts, but that's another discussion).
So I think it's great policy. That it can be abused by illegals is another matter.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I'd like to add to what you said.
I call it "the myth of the $6.00 head of lettuce." This is when someone complaining about illegal aliens gets nailed with the "yeah, but do you want to pay $6.00 for a head of lettuce? Because that's what it would cost if an American were picking it!"
First of all, by most accounts, these illegals are well paid - well above minimum wage, and not the slave labor rates that so many like to claim they are making. The benefit to the employer is not having to pay payroll taxes, which is a huge hit to any company, and also not having to deal with full time employees that get paid whether there's any work or not.
But let's say, for sake of argument, that the typical illegal only makes $3.00 an hour picking 30 heads of lettuce. Of course, any monkey can work a lot faster than that, but let's err on the safe side.
That means that, out of the $1.29 I pay for a head of lettuce at my supermarket, only $0.10 goes to pay the worker who picked it.
Now let's say that same guy gets paid $12/hour instead. It'd only be $0.40 to pay the worker who picked it. My cost would increase by $0.30.
So, to all the idiots who say "yeah, but do you want to pay $6.00 for a head of lettuce?" I say "No, but I'll pay $1.59 to help keep out illegals and improve the economy in other ways."
What part about "illegal" do people not understand? I have sympathy for people wanting to come here. My wife is from South America, it took years for her to become a legal resident (we'd already had one child). I spent thousands of dollars and countless hours taking her for medical exams, to get fingerprinted (several times, since they kept changing the rules about what they'd accept), getting documents translated and notorized...
I'm not saying it should be that brutal, but I'm saying that I did put my money where my mouth is - there's a right way and wrong way to immigrate to another country. Illegally is the WRONG way.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
(Disclaimer: I don't know if the U.K.'s any better than the U.S. in this regard):
In the U.S., if consumer revolt ever becomes enough of a problem, the companies will just buy some laws making it illegal for consumers to collude against them, and/or crush complainers under the weight of the civil court system.
"Most peopel also know that immigrant workers are good for the US . .
So truth is now a function of popular opinion?
Illegal immigrants are great for the factories and construction companies that can get them to work for sub-minimum wages. They're just a burden on the rest of us that have to pay taxes to build the public infrastructure and fund the public services that everyone uses(and illegals don't pay for). It's also a documented fact that illegals ship substantial portions of their earnings back to their home countries, so the wealth doesn't even circulate in the rest of the economy. Not to mention the grave security risk of having 20 million illegals that we know nothing about running around our country. That's supposed to be a "benefit to the US"?
Who's a whacko? Somebody that dares to defy the status quo and question insane government policies?
Americans don't have any respect for the law, because the law doesn't have any respect for us.
There's just no way someone can look at the American revolution and its causes -- the very principles that the country was founded upon -- and then look at today's America and not see hipocrisy. The Drug War?! DMCA!? All the creepy shit that's been happening since September 2001? Even little day-to-day stuff, like speed traps that are set up to generate revenue instead of improve safety.
It's a joke. Today's America is an "us versus them" situation where "them" is the government itself -- which is supposed to be us. The only law that Americans respect is this law: don't get caught. Why would you expect anyone to get their ire up over breaking immigration law? Most Americans don't know jack shit about what the immigration laws are -- all we know is that the laws are probably unfair, and almost certainly arbitrary and not tuned to maximize any particular political ideal -- neither racist protectionism nor freedom and the power of diversity. There are no ethical principles upon which any of our laws are based; they're all made from compromises between competing special interests. Why should anyone expect immigration law to be any different?
It's not worth getting upset over. (Except when you're in the crosshairs.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
> Mind you I don't fault the immigrants, illegal or otherwise for wanting to come here to better their life, but I firmly believe that starting off by entering the country illegally is the wrong way to do it.
It would be nice if there was a reasonable way to do so legally, but people are against that, too, for some reason.
> A large percentage of specific crimes in high immigrant areas (drug and robbery issues in LA for example) are committed by illegal (and often gang members) immigrants.
A large percentage of specific crimes in high white areas are committed by whites. A high percentage of gang related violence involves gang members. A high percentage of the sky is blue. A high percentage of illegal aliens are here illegally.
Shocking, I know.
> While I realize that these people may be the minority of their total population, the easiest way to deal with it is deportation of all illegals.
Good idea, let's send all our criminals to another country. Maybe... Australia?
> make work visa's easier to get for Mexicans, I DON'T CARE, just stem the tide of people who are outside the system.
Here, I can agree.
Apparently, in the cases mentioned in the article, businesses were doing things that prompted their customers to leave when they found out that what they were faced with was "policy" instead of just "bad luck".
Market transparency is great ... it forces businesses to be honest and to actually compete on value instead of relying on (modest) barriers (including ignorance) to keep their customers. If a business uses practices that hurt it when the public finds out about it (as was the case here), can those practices be either good or reasonable? What's not to like?
And look at the flip side of the coin ... if people are happy with the way a business works they will write about that too.
The unfortunate thing though is that the farmer that makes a few extra cents profit costs us thousands of dollars when uninsured immigrants need medical care. While we have ensured that inflation of food prices stays low medical costs have skyrocketed.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The existence of a law has no correlation with the prescence of morality. Many immoral things have been and are still legal. Many things that could very well be considered not only moral, but righteous, are illegal.
You're right that attempting to change a situation through the democratic process is important, and that to some extent law is a social contract we all deal with to get along a bit better... but that does not mean that all laws should be obeyed, and it MOST CERTAINLY does not mean that any particular law is MORAL.
Sometimes, you do need to break laws.
Well, that's fine. But don't pretend that law is the ultimate arbitration of morality, that's all. Law and morality are not even passingly related. And incidentally, I think you'd find that if your family is living in abject poverty, you'd do whatever you could to help or protect them, so on purely moral grounds I'd have a hard time faulting an "alien" for trying to get work here. Their action may be Illegal, sure, but not immoral. They are still human beings doing the best they know how to. If, for some reason, we feel the need to protect ourselves from them, then so be it. But that doesn't make them immoral people, nor necessarily us immoral, unless you're advocating for extreme violations of basic human rights like torturing them to make an example or something perhaps.
Basically, if someone wants to treat them like criminals then they should feel free, but they should at least man up and admit that the "illegals" or "aliens" are people who aren't necessarily some slavering horde of theives and rapists. It's not ok to justify the actions behind some guise of "morality". if it's justified then it may be a pragmatic reality, but it's not a moral question, and pretending something is a moral question when it is not, ironically, often allows quite immoral behaviour to be justified, so I'm a little distrustful of people using it lightly. People tend to more extreme reactions if they paint their target as an immoral being.
Not saying you were; you were just asking a question. Just explaining my reaction and its cause.