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Congress Investigates Carriers' Debt Collections
Julie188 writes "'Tis the season for the government to crack down on abusive practices by your secretly evil national wireless carrier. Next up: a congressional committee will be looking into a debt collection practice that prevents customers from filing lawsuits. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) will be examining a contract clause that forces customers to waive their right to sue and instead agree to forced arbitration. He is hot on the tails of the carriers after a similar investigation of credit card companies lead to nine banks removing the forced arbitration clause from their contracts. This follows the week's earlier news that the FCC was going to try to come up with new rules to prevent wireless bill shock."
Tis the season for the government to crack down on abusive practices by your secretly evil national wireless carrier
That is the worst kept secret EVER. They are all evil, every last one of them, and if you don't know this by now then you must not have ever had a cellphone before.
They should ban forced arbitration clauses in any one-sided contract including credit cards, telecommunications service, cable service and utility service.
Cell phones and mobile networks are technology. They are some of the most complicated consumer technology we have today, in fact. Anything and everything relating to such technology is surely fair game here at Slashdot, even if it involves the companies who provide the technology, or the consumers who use it. After all, they're the ones who drive the technological developments.
Arbitration is essentially a system of parallel, private courts run by corporations, for corporations and for the express purpose of denying justice and avoiding the laws of the land. It's an absolutely corrupt system and should not be allowed to exist in any form whatsoever. Allowing seemingly innocuous instances of this practice has lead to private companies forcing rape victims to give up their rights. Corporation employees can abuse people in any way they please and can rely on their own private courts to avoid any reprecussions. Judges support this creeping privatisation of the judiciary as they are rewarded with handsome salaries as the private magistrates of these twisted courts.
Around the time of the Jamie Leigh Jones rape arbitration scandal, I remember speaking with someone in management about arbitration--I live in Ireland. He claimed that the trend in business--magazines, conferences and so on--was pushing arbitration heavily. As the "modern" way of doing business. The conversation sent a chill down my spine. The laws of my country and the people in it were being put in dire jeopardy, our legal protections being replaced right under our noses by this latest innovation in American savagery. At least I live in the EU; I can only imagine what must be occurring in Latin America or indeed the US itself.
Arbitration is lawlessness. It is rule by the powerful over the weak. It's not even a form of order, as arbitration courts have no strict rules, no obligation to consider precedent, no means of appeal, and are not even obliged to publish their rulings, let alone have an open court. The North Koreans have a more enlightened legal system--and again that is not hyperbole. Any society that accepts the rule of such courts has abandoned all pretence of justice and equality and has turned the clock back a thousand years before even the Magna Carta. And no other society should follow them down the path to ruin.
May the Maths Be with you!
The Universal Service Fund really is a tax. The bill was written specifically to make the phone companies look bad (ha ha I know) by taxing them above and beyond normal federal tax rates, then giving them the option to pass the charge onto their customers. Every business on the planet is going to pass that tax on, but congress can look good by saying "Hey your evil phone carrier is not voluntarily taking this tax out of their profits!"
When possible, politicians try to have someone else collect their taxes so they're not the ones getting shot in a "shoot the messenger" situation.
Yes, and this is done by denying people their rights. It's much cheaper to pay a rent-a-judge to deliver the verdict you'd prefer; I'm not disputing that. But my position is that this is an illegitimate system, and is essentially lawlessness in a pinstriped suit.
It was the purest form of arbitration. The whole rotten system was laid bare for the world to see just how corrupt it really was, and exactly what its true purpose is. There are numerous examples of companies having people signaway their rights with smallprint mines in contracts. It's fraud, and the financial system once again leads the way, with credit card contracts being rife with these crooked mandatory binding arbitration clauses.
So where there is no law, we must rely on private industry to make its own. No. Never. Better no law at all than a corporate one--and that's not hyperbole!
May the Maths Be with you!
>>>You're confusing devaluation with inflation.
They are two sides of the same coin. Like addition and subtraction. Or multiplication and division. What you call "inflation" is CAUSED by devaluation of the fait currency, because the Central Bank increased they money supply by approximately 100 fold.
Put another way: If they had held the money supply constant, as they did in the 1800s, then a candybar would still cost just 1 penny. A man's business suit would still be just $5. And so on.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Put another way: If they had held the money supply constant, as they did in the 1800s, then a candybar would still cost just 1 penny. A man's business suit would still be just $5. And so on.
If they'd held the money supply constant, things would be pretty out of whack by now simply due to the population expansion.
76 million people in 1900 with all the currency distributed amongst them... 300+ million people now... that means the currency is going to be distributed a lot more thinly... better hope a business suit doesn't cost $5. Few would be able to afford it.
I did not pony up for a lawyer the last time around, so I don't know the rates.
I don't care about the rates. its a one-time fee, more or less, for the duration of the job.
some things to worry about: non-compete clauses; sections that talk about what the company 'owns' when it buys you (hint: if you do your own software work on the side or ANY business, the company you are applying for seems to think - these days - that they get to own ALL your efforts. even if not related to the core business!
example from my last contract:
"outside activities: while you render services to the company, you
agree that you will not engage in any other employment, consulting or
other business activity without the prior written consent of the
company"
I was shocked to see that! that was verbatim quotation from my last contract (that I refused to sign).
under that clause, if I sell a house, mow a lawn for a fee, fix a computer for a fee or write C++ code for someone on the weekends, the company gets to own all or any part of that 'work' they want. its absurd! beware of these 'no outside business' bullshit clauses.
and as for picking the right or best lawyer, I'm not sure that matters as much. what DOES matter is that you show up with 'same' so as to balance things. they have a lawyer and you'd be nuts to not have one, as well. they are TRYING to craft a document that expressly and clearly screws you. they hope you won't try to cross out lines. they KNOW what they ask for is technically illegal but they push it anyway.
ie, as engineers, we tend to see the world in a light of honesty. we want our code to be clean and run correctly and have no 'incorrect' things (bugs, malicious code, etc). BUT, big lesson here: much of the rest of the world does not follow our code of ethics. they TRY at every turn to lie, cheat and screw you over. such is the job of HR. I'm not kidding; I wish I was. their job is to create the most absurd contract they can get away with, legal or not. even if you sign it, you are not bound by illegal rules but they get you to THINK you are. quite evil.
the larger co's have optimized this and know what to back down on. the smaller ones are the ones you have to watch out for. they don't tend to have enough experience (as companies) to know what's fair and what they can and cannot get away with. smallers ones are very screwed up and you have to watch them like a hawk. they haven't been burned by their own bad behaviour enough to know better.
simply showing up (over the phone, I mean) wiht a lawyer is sufficient for most of what you are trying to do. its a show of force and also showing them you are SERIOUS about your job but you also realize that things must be done 'in a certain way' and that means if they have high powered lawyers crafting their screw-you document, you at least have to show up with SOMETHING other than your social security card and a pen. they count on the fact that you assume they have legally vetted their own doc. they have, but not in the way you think!
I'm nearly 50 and have been working in software for over 30 yrs. it took me a LONG time to learn this lesson. please benefit from this and save yourself a lot of hassle. no matter what, don't bypass this! you may think the company is above-board but corporate ethics are at an all-time low these days. you'd be surprised what a lawyer ON YOUR SIDE can find fault with, in those scummy employment one-sided contracts.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I have no idea what you're talking about
Its simple. If you hold the money supply constant while the population quadruples you create a currency shortage. No different than if you held anything else constant... housing for example.
Bottom line, you can't hold currency constant.
You think people benefit because now they have to spend $500 to get a business suit instead of the $5 it cost in 1910? Or ~$200/week on food instead of the ~$2 it used to cost? If you do think that's beneficial, then you're no better than the corporations.
I didn't say this benefits people. I just said holding it constant doesn't. So to sum up: Not expanding it causes problems. Expanding it to much causes problems.
> 76 million people in 1900 with all the currency distributed amongst them... 300+ million people now... that means the currency is going to be distributed a lot more thinly...
Ahhh.. the Fed is the Capitalists way of "distributing" wealth.
Say, I have $1000 and there is 100,000 in circulation. That means my share of the total wealth is 1/100. Now if the Fed pumps in another 100,000 my share is suddenly 1/200. The other way to achieve that same effect would have been to tax me 50% on my savings. But then that's all "socialist". Nobody wants to do that.
I don't care why they do it.. to stabilize the economy, to account for the population growth.. the end effect is that it devalues (effectively, taxes away) my hard earned dollars that I've diligently saved up. It's like I'm working hard at putting money away in the bank but the Feds have a back door into the vault where they can walk in and take a portion away anytime they feel like it.
They're taxes, yes. The thing is, they're taxes on the telco that they are passing through to you based on an estimation of your share" of their actual obligation. The money you pay the telco goes in their pocket and if they slightly over-collect from enough people they can pocket it. This is distinct from sales tax which mandates any over-collection to be turned over to the state. The "taxes" section is taxes you owe that the business collects on the government's behalf. This distinction is why they're separate.
Honestly, what a business should do when they get a tax increase is raise their rates. People object, of course, so the telcos lobby heavily to be allowed to "pass this on" directly so they don't look like the bad guy. In reality, it's a simple cost of doing business and should be rolled into the normal rate. At least, that's my opinion.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
Arbitration is useful in many circumstances.. just not when it's in one-sided contracts. My grandfather, for example, served as an arbiter for quite a few years after he retired. Most of the disputes he presided over had to do with local business disputes over payment, quality of goods, etc.. they were too large to be adjudicated in small claims court, and too small for it to make sense paying lawyers for full blown civil litigation. Sometimes there initially would be a court filing, and the judge would recommend the parties go to arbitration instead since it would be cheaper for both, in which case most of the time the parties both go and select a mutually acceptable arbiter.
The main problem with arbitration occurs when one party gets to choose the arbiter, which leads to moral hazards and conflicts of interest. Even consumer-corporation binding arbitration would not ipso-facto be a bad thing, so long as the consumer had equal say in choosing the arbiter (which would tend towards local arbiters). The two problems with binding arbitration in the consumer contract world is that the corporation chooses the arbitration firm, and the locale. This means that it's often no cheaper for the consumer to go into arbitration than it would be for them to sue (since say, they live in Kansas and the arbitration firm is in California), while the corporation can put a lot of pressure on the arbitration firm to find in their favor as the price of continued business.
As long as arbitration remains essentially local, and the arbiter is mutually acceptable to both parties, it's often a lot cheaper while being just as equitable as a civil tort (more so in some cases, since you can pick an arbiter that has expert field knowledge, rather than hoping the judge is a quick learner).