San Diego Resorts To Terror To Collect Debts

San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre has announced that the city will post the names of "delinquent" debtors on an internet website, in an effort to pressure them to pay up.

Before I comment on this action, a little background is in order. Since moving to San Diego I have not even been able to keep up with constant reports of financial mismanagement, pension scandals, arrests of public officials for corruption, mayors resigning in shame, accusations of election fraud, and other negative press that plagues "America's Finest City". I gave up trying to figure out San Diego city administration long ago, when my car was broken into the day after I bought it, and my call to the police department that my taxes help pay for was met by an answering machine.

Suffice it to say that San Diego is not a shining example of how to run a city. It's more like a worst-case scenario in the video game Sim City, where players are forced to rob Peter to pay Paul without ever achieving financial stability. The weather is good, but public officials and administrators here have exhibited a degree of incompetence and corruption that rivals Chicago during the Al Capone era. This is public record. Just do a Google search for "San Diego scandal" to see what I mean.

The city claims that "delinquents" and "deadbeats" owe more than $90 million (or $56 million, depending on the report you read) in unpaid debts, despite abundant examples of incompetent accounting. For example, the San Diego Tribune analyzed account lists provided by the city and quickly identified a $154 overdue library fine that had been misreported at $8372. I don't know about you, but I'd refuse to pay eight thousand dollars for a copy of Curious George Goes To The Hospital no matter how many nasty names they threatened to call me.

Despite the heated name-calling and rhetoric about "deadbeats" being responsible for San Diego's financial problems, there is one debt the city says it really doesn't try that hard to collect--the city owes itself $108,253. Each of the other 550,000 debtors on their 35,000 page list are "deadbeats", but not the city itself. San Diego is an honorable city.

Approximately 81% of the outstanding debts are due to parking tickets, which implies that San Diegans really are deadbeats who refuse to pay fines when they abuse their driving priveleges. But this impressive statistic doesn't tell the whole story. Anyone who drives in San Diego regularly is well aware that the police force in this nearly bankrupt city spends most of it's time measuring the degree of wheel rotation on cars parked on even the slightest inclines, desperate to compensate for the city's mismanagement of public funds by handing out as many parking tickets as possible (which is probably why they don't have time to answer the phone when a real crime occurs). No wonder there are so many outstanding parking tickets, and no wonder so many people refuse to pay this kind of blatant extortion.

In other words, if published numbers are to be trusted at all, 81% of the debt the city is trying to collect only exists because the city effectively imposed an arbitrary tax on its citizens (i.e., a flurry of parking tickets) to raise money to compensate for its own gross mismanagement of the real money it did have available before city officials squandered it. Brilliant.

The story gets even better. In his latest effort to collect these taxes--er, I mean "delinquent debts", City Attorney Aguirre has announced that the city will post the names of debtors on an internet website in an effort to coerce them into paying.

Aguirre explains the new collections tactic this way: "Every dollar counts, every dime counts. We don't want to embarrasss anyone unnecessarily, but our job here at the city is to prudently manage public funds under the law. We have an obligation to do that and that's what we intend to do." Clearly, City Attorney Aguirre is an honorable man. He's just doing his job--you know, "just following orders". Interestingly, that's the same explanation Adolph Eichmann used to explain his significant role in prosecuting the Holocaust, and it's the same explanation that American collection agents use today to explain their role in terrorizing debtors from behind the safe firewall of a telephone or mailroom.

Except for one thing: there can be no conceivable purpose to publishing debtors names in any public forum except to embarass them--or, to state it without rhetoric, to terrorize them with fear of public humiliation in order to manipulate their behavior. So now, an untold number of San Diegans who refused on principle to pay what essentially amounts to extortion in the form of dubious parking tickets are now about to be faced with public humiliation as their reward for exercising their right of protest against unjust and incompetent civil administration.

Make no mistake about it, it is a fact of human nature that fear of public humiliation ranks among our greatest fears, regardless of the nation, culture, or era in which we live. Polls, academic studies, and simple common sense have made it clear that the most common fears shared by humans include fear of death, public humiliation, and financial problems. We are talking more or less about mortal fears here, not the transient fear you experience when a car suddenly pulls out in front of you, which goes away as soon as you realize there is no danger. Mortal fears create physiological symptoms of anxiety, which leads, among other things, to anxious thinking and bad decisions. That is why collection agents generally use every "legal" means at their disposal to inspire not only fear, but mortal fear in their victims when they harass debtors, even while they speak gently about not wanting to cause "unnecessary embarassment". This is standard behavior in the collections industry, and it is one of the most morally reprehensible things I've encountered in all my years of researching the American Debtors Prison.

To put it even more simply, we are talking terror here, not simple fear. Mortal fears are literally terrifying.

Public humiliation is a form of terror just as surely as if you resort to pointing a gun at someone's head and threaten them with death, or force the average person to speak in front of a large audience against their will. In each of these cases, the victim experiences horrible physiological and psychological consequences, and that is why some form of appeal to mortal fear (terror) forms the basis of all effective forms of torture.

And this is how San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre proposes to deal with San Diego's financial problems.

At this point, I must ask an obvious question: are there really 550,000 "deadbeats" in this city of 1.3 million people? Or is it possible--just possible--that the same ineptitude that got San Diego into this financial crisis is resorting to terror tactics against a generally decent population that, as a whole, isn't even attempting to avoid paying their legitimate debts?

If the correct answer is that San Diego really is populated by 550,000 "deadbeats", it kind of makes you wonder why San Diego calls itself "America's Finest City".

Either way, San Diego voters just elected a new mayor to replace the one who resigned, and this time it's a former chief of police.... So if nothing else, we know that local answering machine salesmen should fare well over the next couple of years. Just be careful where, and when, and how you park if you visit San Diego, unless you too want to see your name posted on the city's list of "deadbeats".

All the best,
Paul

Congressional Negligence On Privacy Issues

The U.S. Congress, after half a century of gross negligence in responding to threats against personal privacy brought about by technological and societal change, is suddenly scrambling to do something in response to recent high-profile news reports of "data breach" by irresponsible U.S. corporations.

As one might expect, Congress's response thus far to this incredibly serious threat has been mostly rhetorical, primarily aimed at creating high-profile news reports showing that Congress is on the job (albeit, fifty years late). Several bills have been proposed and discussed, talking heads on both side have begun talking, and individual Congressmen and women are tripping over each other to reach the microphone first and be seen as proactive on this issue, much like middle-class housewives trampling each other at a Wal-Mart to purchase a limited supply of beanie babies the week before Christmas.

But despite all the hullabaloo, no bills have been passed, and the bills proposed thus far are certified, Grade-A political manure that lack not only foresight, but any meaningful comprehension of the problem, let alone any clue how to deal with the problem of personal data loss and identity theft.

What incited all this activity on Capitol Hill was not the efforts of many people like myself to expose the American Debtors Prison, identity theft, and the unparalleled threats to individual liberty and autonomy that credit bureaus and other information brokers have created for their own personal profit at the expense of everyone else. No, what incited this activity was a flury of media reports about "data breach" by, apparently, one irresponsible U.S. corporation after another over the past several months.

"Data Breach" is the benign euphemism that politicians and "experts" use for a phenomenon that has potentially cataclysmic consequences for ordinary people like you and me. It means that someone, or some corporation, somewhere, has been gathering personal information about U.S. citizens, and that information has been lost or stolen. And all the news reports in recent months concern only those instances of data loss and theft that companies have bothered to report--there is no federal law requiring that a company disclose the loss of your social security number, birth date, bank account number, sexual orientation, or any other piece of data on you they have manage to scavenge. It doesn't matter that the third-party who "breached data" might use this information to steal your identity and throw you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt, if they are nice, or use this information to utterly destroy your life forever, if they are mean. The federal government does not require incompetent companies to tell you when they lose your private information.

However, so far twenty one states have passed laws requiring companies to reveal "data breach", and this is probably the only reason it has been in the news so much lately. If the states had not passed these laws, what corporate executive has the courage and character to confess to the world that their negligence has put thousands or millions of their fellow citizens at risk of catastrophic identity theft or worse?

At this point, it appears that the U.S. Congress is primarily seeking to jump on the states' bandwagon and pass a law requiring negligent data brokers to make it public whenever they lose people's personal information. And get this--one of the main arguments against such a law is concern that citizens will become numb to the situation when they receive perhaps dozens of notifications of "data breach" each month.

Yes, you read that correctly--Congress is making no apparent effort to actually prevent wholesale data loss and theft, but instead it fully expects this to happen on a regular basis, and merely wants to ensure that Congress is given credit when data brokers are forced by law to repeatedly disclose their negligence.

I could name names in Congress who have been vocal on this issue, and quote quotes from talking head "experts" who actually believe there is something to debate here. But what's the point? In the half century since the invention of the modern credit card (and hence, modern credit bureaus), Congress still has not developed the slightest comprehension of how serious this problem is. Is it any wonder that Congress remains unaware of, and unconcerned by, the existence of the American Debtors Prison?

Members of Congress are guilty of gross negligence that FAR exceeds any genuine mistakes or errors or judgement that have led so many people into the American Debtors Prison. And the situation will never change until The People take a stand, organize a movement against the American Debtors Prison (and the information systems upon which it is founded), and vow on their sacred honor to vote on the sole basis of candidates' demonstrated position on matters that are crucial to each U.S. citizen's financial security. For in a capitalist society, where net worth is equivalent to opportunity, it is impossible for citizens to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (not to mention freedom and democracy), when they are not in full control of their personal finances.

If you are interested in joining such a movement, please visit my website.

All the best,
Paul

College President's Children Don't Need Student Loans

Contrast the previous entry ("Miracle in Kalamazoo") with today's news report that five U.S. college presidents now receive more than one million dollars in annual compensation, with many more not far below the one million dollar barrier.

It would be a digression to dwell too much on the sorry state of U.S. higher education today, or to mention my own experience as a graduate teaching assistant at a "major research institution", where at least two students in each class I taught were functionally illiterate. Suffice it to say that the quality of U.S. higher education is generally poor, and there is a reason why high school graduates in a country like Russia are generally regarded as better educated than many U.S. graduates from four year institutions--including the same four year institutions whose presidents are compensated somewhere around one millions dollars each year.

Instead, I'll just note that tuition costs are far outside the reach of most students. Specifically, they are outside the reach of those students who are in the worst financial position to take on massive student loan debt before they have a college degree, and before they even apply for their first responsible job. However, many of the presidents of these same overpriced diploma factories are in a fine position to send every member of the largest family they can spawn to Harvard Medical School for eight years. You would think that only the presidents of colleges and universities that graduate only literate, well-educated, and competent students would earn that much money, for a job well done.

But that is simply not the case in a nation where the American Debtors Prison is fueled in large part by a predatory student loan system. Plato's Academy this ain't.

All the best,
Paul

A Miracle In Kalamazoo

The American Debtors Prison is a truly dark and dreadful place to live, made even worse by the fact that nearly every established institution in America, in one way or another, helps to tighten the grasp on debtors. Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes quite unintentionally.

One unfortunate consequence of all this is uniquely personal to me: It forces me to focus on "negative" things most of the time when discussing debtors imprisonment, though I don't want to, because the American Debtors Prison is so powerful and pervasive that nobody, anywhere, is winning meaningful battles against it. It just keeps getting worse and worse, year after year, and there is really no organized movement in place to even draw attention to it, let alone to stop it. (If you'd like to help create such a movement, visit my website).

So it is with greater pleasure than you could possibly imagine that I can report here that a group of donors has established a truly amazing program that will detour an entire generation of young people in Kalamazoo, Michigan away from one of the main superhighways to debtors prison: student loans.

Over the past three or four years, this group of anonymous donors has silently created a program that will offer college scholarships to students who graduate in the Kalamazoo school system and enroll at a Michigan college or university. The percentage of college costs paid are proportional to the number of years from Kingergarden through 12th grade that a student spent in the Kalamazoo school system. Students who receive their entire K-12 education in Kalamazoo will enjoy scholarships paying 100% of tuition and fees.

Think for a moment about what this really means. Yesterday, there were children living in Kalamazoo who were destined to one day endure the legal domestic terrorism of Sallie Mae, General Revenue Corporation, Educational Recovery Systems, and so many other student loan "servicers". But today, because of the actions of some people who cared, many of those same children now have a destiny that does NOT include being terrorized by Sallie Mae, General Revenue Corporation, Educational Recovery Systems, and so many other student loan "servicers". That is an amazing victory in the battle against modern debtors imprisonment! Even better, it will help prevent debtors imprisonment from student loans, rather than seeking to free student loan debtors from misery after it is too late.

It sounds so simple--making it possible for young people to earn a higher education and train themselves for a productive career without rendering all that education and training pointless by indebting them tens of thousands of dollars to ruthless student loan collectors before they even apply for their first responsible job.

Almost makes you wonder why the U.S. Department of Education never thought of this....

I find it especially noteworthy that despite the sheer magnitude of generosity, foresight, and good citizenship involved here, the group of donors who established "The Kalamazoo Promise" program wishes to remain anonymous. In other words, they are individuals, not self-interested corporations seeking to do "good work" that primarily benefits themselves through positive public relations.

Almost makes you wonder why Sallie Mae never thought of this....

I was born and raised near Kalamazoo. The last time I visited it, in the early 1990's, it was a mostly impoverished and somber place. Now there is hope that this one program alone will boost the local economy by simply educating the population, which will attract more families and businesses who seek to raise their children in a community that demonstrably values education.

Almost makes you wonder why so many egg-headed economists whose "expert" opinions are constantly sought by the press never thought of this....

In response to the program's announcement, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm said, "What a tremendous act of generosity on the part of the donors who made this possible and what a tremendous opportunity for all these children in Kalamazoo public schools who can now go to college and chase their dreams." I couldn't agree more.

Almost makes you wonder why Governor Granholm never thought of this....

But someone did think of this. And not only do the people of Kalamazoo, Michigan owe these anonymous donors an enormous debt of gratitude (the only kind of debt worth owing, in my opinion), but so does every American citizen--including you and me. Because The Kalamazoo Promise makes it clear, finally, that everything in America does not have to be utterly "negative". All it takes is generosity rather than greed, foresight rather than shortsightedness and blind faith, and good citizenship rather than apathy and politics, to make the world a better place.

All the best,
Paul

Secret CIA Prisons?

The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA has been operating secret prisons in various countries around the world since 911, for the purpose of "questioning" suspected terrorists. Since then, the expected round of accusations, denials, and international calls for investigation of these allegations have roughly held equal visibility in the media to stories concerning Hollywood celebrities' love lives. One can easily daydream a fairly accurate response by news media executives: "The U.S. government may be imprisoning and torturing people in other countries? Put it on the very top--of page three."

But even if the United Nations investigated the matter and found that the U.S. government is demonstrably guilty of foreign torture and atrocities not seen since Nazi Germany's operation of concentration camps in Poland and other countries, would anyone really be shocked? I seriouly doubt it, because no one seems genuinely shocked that such an accusation could ever be made against the U.S. government in the first place.

But this is the United States of America--the land of the free, home of the brave, and author of some of the most significant pro-human rights documents in the history of human civilization. How could people not be shocked by even the mere accusation of human rights atrocities committed by the United States government?

The existence of U.S. prisons at Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo are already well-documented, and few people seem to really care, despite evidence that activities within those prisons more closely resemble the Spanish Inquisition than anything prescribed by American law or the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, ongoing debate over the Bush administration's admitted affinity for human torture (of other people--not themselves) has rarely reached the fevered pitch of debate on whether the Star Wars prequels stand up to the original trilogy.

Are American citizens really that barbaric in their apathy toward human suffering? Are they really as bad as those nameless masses who allowed the Spanish Inquisition, or the Crusades, or the Holocaust to occur? Do they really consider arbitrary imprisonment and torture an acceptable form of behavior simply because the United States was attacked on its own soil by Muslim terrorists once, when most other nations have been attacked repeatedly for centuries or millenia?

Are Americans really that stupid?

I don't think that is the case. However, without a clear understanding of just why Americans do allow their government to commit acts that violate human rights which have been cherished since the Magna Carta, we are really left with no alternative explanation.

But where can we find this understanding? Right here in our homeland. With the largest prison industry in the world, and a hidden American Debtors Prison which effectively incarcerates unknown numbers of citizens without bars, Americans have gradually become desensitized to the idea that false imprisonment and torture are human right violations at all, and instead regard them as natural features of the "rule of law". There was a time in America when people were considered innocent until proven guilty. Yet today, "Law" and "Prison" are words that just seem to go together, as if anyone who finds themselves on the business end of our legal system deserves to be imprisoned, and the only injustice occurs when anyone is not incarcerated after being suspected of an offense. No trial, evidence, proof, or conviction is even necessary any more, in a court of public opinion that is openly held in the mass media daily.

The Washington Post story about CIA prisons overseas might be bogus. Those prisons may or may not exist. But we do know one thing for certain: American citizens in general don't seem to care too much about stopping or preventing these kinds of human rights violations by their own government either way.

So why should they care about abolishing the American Debtors Prison either? I'll tell you why. Because the assumption of "guilty until proven innocent under conditions of torture" holds true for CIA terrorist prisons and the American Debtors Prison alike. However, while very few American citizens could conceivably be mistaken for a terrorist, nearly all adult citizens are debtors....

All the best,
Paul

FBI Accused of Abusing USA Patriot Act

The Associated Press reports that members of Congress are (finally) becoming concerned by the FBI's abuse of the USA Patriot Act, in light of revelations that each year the FBI authorizes more than 30,000 investigations of ordinary U.S. citizens' personal records, including financial and telephone records, emails, and even web-surfing habits--under the pretense of investigating terrorism. One can only imagine that while the FBI is busy looking at... perhaps YOUR personal information, the real terrorist elements in the United States are hard at work planning another major attack on American soil, unhindered by FBI agents who are too busy probing into your life and mine.

Keep in mind, one does not become a U.S. citizen by merely flying into JFK Airport in New York, or by jumping over a fence in Tijuana, Mexico. The vast majority of U.S. citizens were born here, and love the country they were born and raised in, while the rest have lived here for years, and demonstrated their affinity for our way of life before being granted citizenship. So why would the FBI suspect 30,000 of these citizens each year of being hell-bent on "destroying democracy"--so much so that they would even embark on suicide missions that will ultimately ruin their entire extended families' lives? The simple answer is, the FBI doesn't suspect anything of the kind. Even the FBI is not that irrational. There are other reasons why they are looking at YOUR personal records....

The USA Patriot Act is a Bush administration initiative that immediately responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by doing exactly what any foreign "enemy of freedom" could only dream of accomplishing in the United States: annihilating the very concept of personal privacy in the United States. Why is this deadly to freedom? Because a democratically-elected representative government MUST first and foremost answer to The People by allowing public monitoring of its activities, and by publicly responding to citizens' grievances that result from that oversight. By allowing the U.S. government to turn the tables on democracy, and instead allow a supposedly representative government to secretly monitor details of citizens private lives, the U.S. Patriot Act officially transformed the United States government from a democracy to a tyranny. The last time the government legally spied on its own citizens in the United States with such impunity, was when the British Empire spied on a group of citizens named George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among many others. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence lists a number of crimes against humanity, perpetrated by King George, which are not at all irrelevant in post-911 America:

"He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury."

"For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments."

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

"He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."

"He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power."

Yes, I will admit that rhetoric may be used to convice people to give up their privacy and freedom in the interests of "national security". But rhetoric can also be used to convince people to commit mass suicide in the interests of joining with the UFO mothership that is waiting for them in a nearby comet. Rhetoric can even be used to convince citizens that the American Debtors Prison does not exist.... Rhetoric can be used to convince people of anything--and that is why rhetoric simply is not enough to justify U.S. government actions that subvert the U.S. Constitution, and defy the wisdom of U.S. Founders like Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security." In slightly over two centuries we have come full circle to the very form of tyranny that Thomas Paine decried in one of the most significant documents of our nation's founding, appropriately entitled Common Sense.

Americans fearful of terrorism have become so willing to give up essential liberties, that they forget the hell of tyranny that inspired their own ancestors to go to such extraordinary lengths to guarantee that we would possess the essential liberties we need to thwart tyranny in our time. They forget that tyranny IS terrorism.

In fact, I would go even further and suggest that the magnitude of courage exhibited by our founding generation in guaranteeing our essential freedoms is matched only by the magnitude of cowardice our own generation has exhibited in its eagerness to give up those same essential freedoms.

So just what is the FBI doing with all that personal information about U.S. citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism? Nobody knows. But that is precisely the point. If the United States were still a democracy--if we were still free--we would know exactly what they are doing with that information, because it is the right and responsibility of citizens in a democracy to maintain oversight over the activities of government "of The People, by The People, and for The People."

The only thing we know for certain is that the FBI spies on citizens using the same information infrastructure that makes the American Debtors Prison possible. And if debtors prisoners can have their productive lives ended without ever being charged or tried for any crime, we should fear to imagine what the FBI could do to any U.S. citizen "at a time and place of our choosing" (as Mr. Bush would say), using that very same information.

All the best,
Paul