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
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
posted by Paul at 9:30 PM
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