#Debt Collection United States

[mnscredit]

Debt Collection in the United States: Most debt collection agencies in USA work on a contingency fee basis, where the cost is usually a percentage of the total amount owed.

[reasonsforhope]

Masterpost: Reasons I firmly believe we will beat climate change

Posts are in reverse chronological order (by post date, not article date), mostly taken from my "climate change" tag, which I went through all the way back to the literal beginning of my blog. Will update periodically.

Especially big deal articles/posts are in bold.

Big picture:

Mature trees offer hope in world of rising emissions (x)

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (x)

Good news: Tiny urban green spaces can cool cities and save lives (x)

Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected (x)

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world (x)

Sun Machines: Solar, an energy that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge (x)

Wealthy nations finally deliver promised climate aid, as calls for more equitable funding for poor countries grow (x)

For Earth Day 2024, experts are spreading optimism – not doom. Here's why. (x)

Opinion: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (x)

The World’s Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think (x)

‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief (x)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (x)

Young Forests Capture Carbon Quicker than Previously Thought (x)

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how. (x)

Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows (x)

The global treaty to save the ozone layer has also slowed Arctic ice melt (x)

The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past (x)

Scientists Find Methane is Actually Offsetting 30% of its Own Heating Effect on Planet (x)

Are debt-for-climate swaps finally taking off? (x)

High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN (x)

How Could Positive ‘Tipping Points’ Accelerate Climate Action? (x)

Specific examples:

Environmental Campaigners Celebrate As Labour Ends Tory Ban On New Onshore Wind Projects (x)

Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa (x)

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution (x)

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds [Scotland] (x)

The American Climate Corps take flight, with most jobs based in the West (x)

Waste Heat Generated from Electronics to Warm Finnish City in Winter Thanks to Groundbreaking Thermal Energy Project (x)

Climate protection is now a human right — and lawsuits will follow [European Union] (x)

A new EU ecocide law ‘marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals’ (x)

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII [United States] (x)

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren. [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study (x)

Chart: Wind and solar are closing in on fossil fuels in the EU (x)

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (x)

Countries That Generate 100% Renewable Energy Electricity (x)

Indigenous advocacy leads to largest dam removal project in US history [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world (x)

China is set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early, new report finds (x)

‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis (x)

Largest-ever data set collection shows how coral reefs can survive climate change (x)

The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What Does It DO? [United States] (x)

Good Climate News: Headline Roundup April 1st through April 15th, 2023 (x)

How agroforestry can restore degraded lands and provide income in the Amazon (x) [Brazil]

Loss of Climate-Crucial Mangrove Forests Has Slowed to Near-Negligable Amount Worldwide, Report Hails (x)

Agroecology schools help communities restore degraded land in Guatemala (x)

Climate adaptation:

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives' (x)

‘Sponge’ Cities Combat Urban Flooding by Letting Nature Do the Work [China] (x)

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala (x)

A green roof or rooftop solar? You can combine them in a biosolar roof — boosting both biodiversity and power output (x)

Global death tolls from natural disasters have actually plummeted over the last century (x)

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be (x)

This city turns sewage into drinking water in 24 hours. The concept is catching on [Namibia] (x)

Plants teach their offspring how to adapt to climate change, scientists find (x)

Resurrecting Climate-Resilient Rice in India (x)

Edit 1/12/25: Yes, I know a bunch of the links disappeared. I'll try to fix that when I get the chance. In the meantime, read all the other stuff!!

Other Masterposts:

Going carbon negative and how we're going to fix global heating (x)

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

President Biden announced $3 billion to help replace lead pipes in the drinking water system. Millions of Americans get their drinking water through lead pipes, which are toxic, no level of lead exposure is safe. This problem disproportionately affects people of color and low income communities. This first investment of a planned $15 billion will replace 1.7 million lead pipe lines. The Biden Administration plans to replace all lead pipes in the country by the end of the decade.

President Biden canceled the student debt of 317,000 former students of a fraudulent for-profit college system. The Art Institutes was a for-profit system of dozens of schools offering degrees in video-game design and other arts. After years of legal troubles around misleading students and falsifying data the last AI schools closed abruptly without warning in September last year. This adds to the $29 billion in debt for 1.7 borrowers who wee mislead and defrauded by their schools which the Biden Administration has done, and a total debt relief for 4.6 million borrowers so far under Biden.

President Biden expanded two California national monuments protecting thousands of acres of land. The two national monuments are the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which are being expanded by 120,000 acres. The new protections cover lands of cultural and religious importance to a number of California based native communities. This expansion was first proposed by then Senator Kamala Harris in 2018 as part of a wide ranging plan to expand and protect public land in California. This expansion is part of the Administration's goals to protect, conserve, and restore at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

The Department of Transportation announced new rules that will require car manufacturers to install automatic braking systems in new cars. Starting in 2029 all new cars will be required to have systems to detect pedestrians and automatically apply the breaks in an emergency. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects this new rule will save 360 lives every year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually.

The IRS announced plans to ramp up audits on the wealthiest Americans. The IRS plans on increasing its audit rate on taxpayers who make over $10 million a year. After decades of Republicans in Congress cutting IRS funding to protect wealthy tax cheats the Biden Administration passed $80 billion for tougher enforcement on the wealthy. The IRS has been able to collect just in one year $500 Million in undisputed but unpaid back taxes from wealthy households, and shows a rise of $31 billion from audits in the 2023 tax year. The IRS also announced its free direct file pilot program was a smashing success. The program allowed tax payers across 12 states to file directly for free with the IRS over the internet. The IRS announced that 140,000 tax payers were able to use it over their target of 100,000, they estimated it saved $5.6 million in tax prep fees, over 90% of users were happy with the webpage and reported it quicker and easier than companies like H&R Block. the IRS plans to bring direct file nationwide next year.

The Department of Interior announced plans for new off shore wind power. The two new sites, off the coast of Oregon and in the Gulf of Maine, would together generate 18 gigawatts of totally clean energy, enough to power 6 million homes.

The Biden Administration announced new rules to finally allow DACA recipients to be covered by Obamacare. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama era policy that allows people brought to the United States as children without legal status to remain and to legally work. However for years DACA recipients have not been able to get health coverage through the Obamacare Health Care Marketplace. This rule change will bring health coverage to at least 100,000 uninsured people.

The Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules that require LGBTQ+ and Intersex minors in the foster care system be placed in supportive and affirming homes.

The Senate confirmed Georgia Alexakis to a life time federal judgeship in Illinois. This brings the total number of federal judges appointed by President Biden to 194. For the first time in history the majority of a President's nominees to the federal bench have not been white men.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States

The vast majority of America's debt collection targets $500-2,000 credit card debts. It is a filthy business, operated by lawless firms who hire unskilled workers drawn from the same economic background as their targets, who routinely and grotesquely flout the law, but only when it comes to the people with the least ability to pay.

America has fairly robust laws to protect debtors from sleazy debt-collection practices, notably the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which has been on the books since 1978. The FDCPA puts strict limits on the conduct of debt collectors, and offers real remedies to debtors when they are abused.

But for FDPCA provisions to be honored, they must be understood. The people who collect these debts are almost entirely untrained. The people they collected the debts from are likewise in the dark. The only specialized expertise debt-collection firms concern themselves with are a series of gotcha tricks and semi-automated legal shenanigans that let them take money they don't deserve from people who can't afford to pay it.

There's no better person to explain this dynamic than Patrick McKenzie, a finance and technology expert whose Bits About Money newsletter is absolutely essential reading. No one breaks down the internal operations of the finance sector like McKenzie. His latest edition, "Credit card debt collection," is a fantastic read:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-waste-stream-of-consumer-finance/

McKenzie describes how a debt collector who mistook him for a different PJ McKenzie and tried to shake him down for a couple hundred bucks, and how this launched him into a life as a volunteer advocate for debtors who were less equipped to defend themselves from collectors than he was.

McKenzie's conclusion is that "paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States." If you stand on your rights (which requires that you know your rights), then you will quickly discover that debt collectors don't have – and can't get – the documentation needed to collect on whatever debts they think you owe (even if you really owe them).

The credit card companies are fully aware of this, and bank (literally) on the fact that "the vast majority of consumers, including those with the socioeconomic wherewithal to walk away from their debts, feel themselves morally bound and pay as agreed."

If you find yourself on the business end of a debt collector's harassment campaign, you can generally make it end simply by "carefully sending a series of letters invoking [your] rights under the FDCPA." The debt collector who receives these letters will have bought your debt at five cents on the dollar, and will simply write it off.

By contrast, the mere act of paying anything marks you out as substantially more likely to pay than nearly everyone else on their hit-list. Paying anything doesn't trigger forbearance, it invites a flood of harassing calls and letters, because you've demonstrated that you can be coerced into paying.

But while learning FDCPA rules isn't overly difficult, it's also beyond the wherewithal of the most distressed debtors (and people falsely accused of being debtors). McKenzie recounts that many of the people he helped were living under chaotic circumstances that put seemingly simple things "like writing letters and counting to 30 days" beyond their needs.

This means that the people best able to defend themselves against illegal shakedowns are less likely to be targeted. Instead, debt collectors husband their resources so they can use them "to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit."

Here's how this debt market works. If you become delinquent in meeting your credit card payments ("delinquent" has a flexible meaning that varies with each issuer), then your debt will be sold to a collector. It is packaged in part of a large spreadsheet – a CSV file – and likely sold to one of 10 large firms that control 75% of the industry.

The "mom and pops" who have the other quarter of the industry might also get your debt, but it's more likely that they'll buy it as a kind of tailings from one of the big guys, who package up the debts they couldn't collect on and sell them at even deeper discounts.

The people who make the calls are often barely better off than the people they're calling. They're minimally trained and required to work at a breakneck pace. Employee turnover is 75-100% annually: imagine the worst call center job in the world, and then make it worse, and make "success" into a moral injury, and you've got the debt-collector rank-and-file.

To improve the yield on this awful process, debt collection companies start by purging these spreadsheets of likely duds: dead people, people with very low credit-scores, and people who appear on a list of debtors who know their rights and are likely to stand on them (that's right, merely insisting on your rights can ensure that the entire debt-collection industry leaves you alone, forever).

The FDPCA gives you rights: for example, you have the right to verify the debt and see the contract you signed when you took it on. The debt collector who calls you almost certainly does not have that contract and can't get it. Your original lender might, but they stopped caring about your debt the minute they sold it to a debt-collector. Their own IT systems are baling-wire-and-spit Rube Goldberg machines that glue together the wheezing computers of all the companies they've bought over the last 25 years. Retrieving your paperwork is a nontrivial task, and the lender doesn't have any reason to perform it.

Debt collectors are bottom feeders. They are buying delinquent debts at 5 cents on the dollar and hoping to recover 8 percent of them; at 7 percent, they're losing money. They aren't "large, nationally scaled, hypercompetent operators" – they're shoestring operations that can only be viable if they hire unskilled workers and fail to train them.

They are subject to automatic damages for illegal behavior, but they still break the law all the time. As McKenzie writes, a debt collector will "commit three federal torts in a few minutes of talking to a debtor then follow up with a confirmation of the same in writing." A statement like "if you don’t pay me I will sue you and then Immigration will take notice of that and yank your green card" makes the requisite three violations: a false threat of legal action, a false statement of affiliation with a federal agency, and "a false alleged consequence for debt nonpayment not provided for in law."

If you know this, you can likely end the process right there. If you don't, buckle in. The one area that debt collectors invest heavily in is the automation that allows them to engage in high-intensity harassment. They use "predictive dialers" to make multiple calls at once, only connecting the collector to the calls that pick up. They will call you repeatedly. They'll call your family, something they're legally prohibited from doing except to get your contact info, but they'll do it anyway, betting that you'll scrape up $250 to keep them from harassing your mother.

These dialing systems are far better organized than any of the company's record keeping about what you owe. A company may sell your debt on and fail to keep track of it, with the effect that multiple collectors will call you about the same debt, and even paying off one of them will not stop the other.

Talking to these people is a bad idea, because the one area where collectors get sophisticated training is in emptying your bank account. If you consent to a "payment plan," they will use your account and routing info to start whacking your bank account, and your bank will let them do it, because the one part of your conversation they reliably record is this payment plan rigamarole. Sending a check won't help – they'll use the account info on the front of your check to undertake "demand debits" from your account, and backstop it with that recorded call.

Any agreement on your part to get on a payment plan transforms the old, low-value debt you incurred with your credit card into a brand new, high value debt that you owe to the bill collector. There's a good chance they'll sell this debt to another collector and take the lump sum – and then the new collector will commence a fresh round of harassment.

McKenzie says you should never talk to a debt collector. Make them put everything in writing. They are almost certain to lie to you and violate your rights, and a written record will help you prove it later. What's more, debt collection agencies just don't have the capacity or competence to engage in written correspondence. Tell them to put it in writing and there's a good chance they'll just give up and move on, hunting softer targets.

One other thing debt collectors due is robo-sue their targets, bulk-filing boilerplate suits against debtors, real and imaginary. If you don't show up for court (which is what usually happens), they'll get a default judgment, and with it, the legal right to raid your bank account and your paycheck. That, in turn, is an asset that, once again, the debt collector can sell to an even scummier bottom-feeder, pocketing a lump sum.

McKenzie doesn't know what will fix this. But Michael Hudson, a renowned scholar of the debt practices of antiquity, has some ideas. Hudson has written eloquently and persuasively about the longstanding practice of jubilee, in which all debts were periodically wiped clean (say, whenever a new king took the throne, or once per generation):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Hudson's core maxim is that "debt's that can't be paid won't be paid." The productive economy will have need for credit to secure the inputs to their processes. Farmers need to borrow every year for labor, seed and fertilizer. If all goes according to plan, the producer pays off the lender after the production is done and the goods are sold.

But even the most competent producer will eventually find themselves unable to pay. The best-prepared farmer can't save every harvest from blight, hailstorms or fire. When the producer can't pay the creditor, they go a little deeper into debt. That debt accumulates, getting worse with interest and with each bad beat.

Run this process long enough and the entire productive economy will be captive to lenders, who will be able to direct production for follies and fripperies. Farmers stop producing the food the people need so they can devote their land to ornamental flowers for creditors' tables. Left to themselves, credit markets produce hereditary castes of lenders and debtors, with lenders exercising ever-more power over debtors.

This is socially destabilizing; you can feel it in McKenzie's eloquent, barely controlled rage at the hopeless structural knot that produces the abusive and predatory debt industry. Hudson's claim is that the rulers of antiquity knew this – and that we forgot it. Jubilee was key to producing long term political stability. Take away Jubilee and civilizations collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Debts that can't be paid won't be paid. Debt collectors know this. It's irrefutable. The point of debt markets isn't to ensure that debts are discharged – it's to ensure that every penny the hereditary debtor class has is transferred to the creditor class, at the hands of their fellow debtors.

In her 2021 Paris Review article "America's Dead Souls," Molly McGhee gives a haunting, wrenching account of the debts her parents incurred and the harassment they endured:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

After I published on it, many readers wrote in disbelief, insisting that the debt collection practices McGhee described were illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

And they are illegal. But debt collection is a trade founded on lawlessness, and its core competence is to identify and target people who can't invoke the law in their own defense.

Going to Defcon this weekend? I’m giving a keynote, “An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse,” today (Aug 12) at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

[finchandthebard]

The "tiktok ban" should scare you and here's why.

Rant made by an autistic, history-loving, chronically online American tiktok cosplayer. Please let me know if I've gotten anything wrong and I will edit the post.

Reblog to spread awareness!

This is not just about Tiktok, and it's not about national security. The Tiktok ban is wrapped up in the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which has the ability to ban any foreign website or app that the United States government sees as a threat to their "democracy." Not only that, but if the gov't didn't want China to gather data, then they would ban things like Shein and Temu (the latter which they advertised during the Super Bowl), which collect similar data that Tiktok does. If they wanted to prevent our data being stolen in general, they would ban companies like Meta, which monetarily supports the Tiktok ban and had to change their name because "Facebook" was associated with the largest data leak in history.

The documentations of the Tiktok court interrogations prove how incompetent our government is. Repeatedly asking the TikTok CEO Mr. Chew if he's Chinese while he repeatedly assures them he's Singaporean. The officials being concerned that they can't find Singapore on a map. The officials then being confused why the app would be able to have access to their wifi because it needs wifi to load.

The possibility of the US buying Tiktok exposes a greater issue in America: monopolies. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 that restricted the activities of large companies known as monopolies, which started out as small companies and would either buy other companies or buy the factories which produced all their materials. This eliminated competition in the market and gave the monopolies almost full control of quality and prices of items, and it was considered very anti-American at the time. Since the US already has multiple major social medias, including Facebook (Meta), Instagram (Meta), Threads (Meta), X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, and Reddit, adding Tiktok would mean that nobody could compete with the US in the social media market. This makes them a monopoly, and it's incredibly dangerous.

Banning Tiktok breaks several American trademarks. A) the Republicans banning Tiktok are very concerned about their second amendment right to own guns, but they seem to not care about the first amendment right to freedom of speech and press, which Tiktok delivers. Of course there are app guidelines, but for the most part you have fairly uncensored political and ethical commentary like no other social media. B) the only other countries that have banned Tiktok are either heavily demonized by America or are direct targets for American propaganda (ex. China), which really doesn't make the ban look good. C) banning a social media for the purpose of censorship is a trademark of communism, which Americans are INCREDIBLY wary of.

Your country may follow in suit. Because of America's influence as a global superpower and an ally to many other major powers, America banning Tiktok would likely lead to a domino effect in other countries.

The rich get richer. There is a concept called social darwinism, in which it is the rich's beliefs that the poor must fend for themselves without the help of the government in order to make a living - "survival of the fittest." Tiktok contributed around $14.7 billion USD in 2023 and $24.2 billion in 2024, and it supports around 224,000 jobs [source]. The actual Tiktok website says in 2023, they contributed $15 billion USD in revenue and supported 7 million US businesses [source]. Without these jobs, there could be in increase in homelessness, debt, and sickness due to withdrawals (if you're incredibly addicted to Tiktok) and lack of quick dopamine hits (due to the rapidfire nature of the algorithm).

Remember that the president is not your friend !! Many of the political figures rallying to support Tiktok right now, such as President Biden, initially voted for the ban. President Biden is likely supporting now so that Trump won't get credit for it, and future President Trump is likely doing it for brownie points among younger generations.

The Xiaohongshu migration exposed the American government and its lies. The stories from American 'Tiktok refugees' about the questions from native Chinese on the Xiaohongshu / Rednote / Redbook app (considered the Chinese mixed of Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook) posed a lot of conspiracies and realizations about the American government. The Chinese actually own their homes, they have lower food prices than we do, and they have a slim homelessness rate. Whether this is true or not, it has greatly influenced how we see ourselves in the grand scheme of the American oligarchy, and that is not something that can be suppressed with an app being banned.

Tiktok is not totally Chinese! The CEO is Singaporean, as I've already stated, and there are multiple headquarters in the US, with the main one being in Los Angeles.

In conclusion...

Whether Tiktok is banned or not, whether permanently or not, no matter who saves it or rallies against it, remember that it is harder to scare and control someone when they are in a group. And if you think this was interesting, I'd love it if you could reblog to show some support and inform your friends as well. <3

THIS IS NOT RIGHT VS LEFT❗️IT'S UP VS DOWN❗️

[fatehbaz]

Good question:

In the United States, many jails and prisons can and will charge you money for every single night that you spend imprisoned, for the entire duration of your incarceration, as if you were being billed for staying at a hotel. Even if you are incarcerated for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. What happens when you’re released?

In response to this:

---

So.

You’re getting charged, like, ten dollars every time you even submit a request form to possibly be seen by a doctor or dentist.

You’re getting charged maybe five dollars for ten minutes on the phone.

Any time a friend or family tries to send you like five dollars so that you can buy some toothpaste or lotion, or maybe a snack from the commissary since you’re diabetic and the “meals” have left you malnourished, maybe half of that money gets taken as a “service fee” by the corporate contractor that the prison uses to manage your pre-paid debit card. So you’re already losing money every day just by being there.

What happens if you can’t pay?

In some places, after serving just a couple of years for drugs charges, almost 20 years after being released, the state can still hunt you down for over $80,000 that you “owe” as if it were a per-night room-and-board accommodations charge, like this recent highly-publicized case in Connecticut:

Excerpt:

Two decades after her release from prison, [TB] feels she is still being punished. When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 1/2 year imprisonment for drug crimes. [...] “I’m about to be homeless,” said [TB], 58, who in March [2022] became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. [...] All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars [...]. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in some places to scale back or eliminate such policies. Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019. [...] Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California who is leading a study of the practice. [...] Connecticut used to collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison [...].

Text by: Pat Eaton-Robb. “At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt.” AP News / The Associated Press. 27 August 2022.

---

---

Look at this:

To help her son, Cindy started depositing between $50 to $100 a week into Matthew’s account, money he could use to buy food from the prison commissary, such as packaged ramen noodles, cookies, or peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches. Cindy said sending that money wasn’t necessarily an expense she could afford. “No one can,” she said. So far in the past month, she estimates she sent Matthew close to $300. But in reality, he only received half of that amount. The balance goes straight to the prison to pay off the $1,000 in “rent” that the prison charged Matthew for his prior incarceration. [...] A PA Post examination of six county budgets (Crawford, Dauphin, Lebanon, Lehigh, Venango and Indiana) showed that those counties’ prisons have collected more than $15 million from inmates — almost half is for daily room and board fees that are meant to cover at least a portion of the costs with housing and food. Prisoners who don’t work are still expected to pay. If they don’t, their bills are sent to collections agencies, which can report the debts to credit bureaus. [...] Between 2014 and 2017, the Indiana County Prison — which has an average inmate population of 87 people — collected nearly $3 million from its prisoners. In the past five years, Lebanon’s jail collected just over $2 million in housing and processing fees.

Text by: Joseph Darius Jaafari. “Paying rent to your jailers: Inmates are billed millions of dollars for their stays in Pa. prisons.” WHYY (PBS). 10 December 2019. Originally published at PA Post.

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Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers University-New Brunswick led study. The study [...] finds that charging pay-to-stay fees is triggered by criminal justice contact but possible due to the co-opting of civil and administrative institutions, like social service agencies and state treasuries that oversee benefits, which are outside the realm of criminal justice. “A person can be charged $20 to $80 a day for their incarceration,” said author Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of Rutgers' criminal justice program. “That per diem rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees when a person gets out of prison. To recoup fees, states use civil means such as lawsuits and wage garnishment against currently and formerly incarcerated people, and regularly use administrative means such as seizing employment pensions, tax refunds and public benefits to satisfy the debt.” [...] Civil penalties are enacted on family members if the defendant cannot pay and in states such as Florida, Nevada and Idaho can occur even after the original defendant is deceased. [...]

Text by: Megan Schumann. “States Unfairly Burdening Incarcerated People With “Pay-to-Stay” Fees.” Rutgers press release. 20 November 2020.

---

So, to pay for your own imprisonment, states can:

-- hunt you down for decades (track you down 20 years later, charge you tens of thousands of dollars, and take your house away)

-- put a lien on your vehicle, house

-- garnish your paycheck/wages

-- seize your tax refund

-- send collections agencies after you

-- take your public assistance benefits

-- sue you in civil court

-- take money from your family even after you’re dead

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - January 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles!

1. Landmark debt swap to protect Indonesia’s coral reefs

“The government of Indonesia announced this week a deal to redirect more than US$ 35 million it owes to the United States into the conservation of coral reefs in the most biodiverse ocean area on Earth.”

2. [FWS] Provides Over $1.3 Billion to Support Fish and Wildlife Conservation and Outdoor Access

“Through these combined funds, agencies have supported monitoring and management of over 500 species of wild mammals and birds, annual stocking of over 1 billion fish, operations of fish and wildlife disease laboratories around the country, and provided hunter and aquatic education to millions of students.”

3. Philippine Indigenous communities restore a mountain forest to prevent urban flooding

“Indigenous knowledge systems and practices are considered in the project design, and its leaders and members have been involved throughout the process, from agreeing to participate to identifying suitable land and selecting plant species that naturally grow in the area.”

4. Responsible Offshore Wind Development is a Clear Win for Birds, the U.S. Economy, and our Climate

“[T]he total feasible offshore wind capacity along U.S. coasts is more than three times the total electricity generated nationwide in 2023. […] Proven strategies, such as reducing visible lights on turbines and using perching deterrents on turbines, have been effective in addressing bird impacts.”

5. Illinois awards $100M for electric truck charging corridor, Tesla to get $40M

“The project will facilitate the construction of 345 electric truck charging ports and pull-through truck charging stalls across 14 sites throughout Illinois[…. E]lectrifying [the 30,000 daily long-haul] trucks would make a huge impact in the public health and quality of life along the heavily populated roadways.”

6. Reinventing the South Florida seawall to help marine life, buffer rising seas

“[The new seawall] features raised areas inspired by mangrove roots that are intended to both provide nooks and crannies for fish and crabs and other marine creatures and also better absorb some of the impact from waves and storm surges.”

7. Long Beach Commits to 100% All-Electric Garbage Trucks

“[Diesel garbage trucks] produce around a quarter of all diesel pollution in California and contribute to 1,400 premature deaths every year. Electric options, on the other hand, are quieter than their diesel counterparts and produce zero tailpipe emissions.”

8. ‘This Is a Victory': Biden Affirms ERA Has Been 'Ratified' and Law of the Land

“President Joe Biden on Friday announced his administration's official opinion that the amendment is ratified and its protections against sex-based discrimination are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.”

9. A Little-Known Clean Energy Solution Could Soon Reach ‘Liftoff’

“Ground source heat pumps could heat and cool the equivalent of 7 million homes by 2035—up from just over 1 million today[…. G]eothermal energy is generally considered to be more popular among Republicans than other forms of clean energy, such as wind and solar.”

10. Researchers combine citizens' help and cutting-edge tech to track biodiversity

“Researchers in the project, which runs from 2022 to 2026, are experimenting with tools like drones, cameras and sensors to collect detailed data on different species, [… and] Observation.org, a global biodiversity platform where people submit pictures of animals and plants, helping to identify and monitor them.”

January 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[follow-up-news]

Medical debt will be removed from consumer credit reports for all Americans under a final rule announced Tuesday by Vice President Kamala Harris.   The rule will affect more than 15 million Americans, raising their credit scores by an estimated average of 20 points. No Americans will have medical debt listed on their credit report — down from approximately 46 million Americans who had this kind of debt on their credit report in 2020.  The vice president also announced that states and localities have already utilized American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to support the elimination of over $1 billion in medical debt for more than 700,000 Americans and that jurisdictions are on track to eliminate approximately $15 billion in medical debt for up to almost 6 million Americans.  “No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency,” Harris said in a statement Tuesday. “This will be lifechanging for millions of families, making it easier for them to be approved for a car loan, a home loan, or a small-business loan. As someone who has spent my entire career fighting to protect consumers and lower medical bills, I know that our historic rule will help more Americans save money, build wealth, and thrive.” Harris had previously announced the effort to remove medical debt from credit reports last summer. It may still face legal and political challenges, from credit reporting agencies and debt collectors, as well as from President-elect Donald Trump. 

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 28 July 1915, the United States invaded Haiti, crushing opposition and setting up a dictatorship which governed the country for the next 19 years. US Secretary of State Robert Lansing claimed the invasion was necessary to end "anarchy, savagery and oppression" in Haiti, and claimed that "the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organisation." The government had been lobbied for some time by US banking interests to occupy Haiti to assert US financial dominance as opposed to dominance by the financial institutions of the French former colonial power. In the years of occupation, the US forcibly dissolved parliament, killed thousands of people – and posed for photographs with their corpses – as well as siphoning wealth from the country. They also tied people up with ropes and forced them to work for no pay, killing people who attempted to flee. US authorities installed a puppet leader, Louis Borno, who admired fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and had him take out a loan from the National City Bank, the forerunner of Citigroup. Around a quarter of Haiti's revenues then went towards paying for this loan. The measures left Haitian farmers "close to starvation level", according to the United Nations. While formal US colonial occupation ended in 1934, US retained neocolonial financial control of the country through the remaining debt until 1947. Reflecting on his role in the events, US Major General Smedley Butler stated that he "helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues," and described himself as a "racketeer for capitalism." More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/10016/us-invasion-of-haiti https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=668997001940185&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[asiwassayingimnotgay]

top 11 hardest bsd abilities to discover (not listed in order)

(might contain some spoilers)

Dazai (No Longer Human). To begin with, my man had to find someone with a ability. (Probably like, 1/1,000,000 people) And then touch them, if Dazai was a normal guy, and not the demon prodigy, he 100% wouldn't have known he had this ability

Yosano (Thou Shalt Not Die). How'd she even discover this? There's very few scenarios where someone would be half dead, and I doubt that any normal person would be able to discover that they had a ability like this. There's still a chance, but it's very small.

Fitzgerald (The Great Fitzgerald). Imagine, you're a middle class man, normal life, normal income, nothing crazy about your life. How the hell do you find out you become stronger when you spend money. We've seen Fitzgerald not activate his ability when he causally spends, how the hell did you activate it then???

Muishitaro (The Perfect Crime). I- How does a normal person, commit enough crimes to find out that, no they're not getting away with these crimes because they're lucky, they're actually using a ability that erases their crime.

Ace (Madness of the Jewel Kings). Could just be a me thing but, I don't think I've ever met someone with debt slaves. Much less anyone who can convert their debt slaves lifespan into jewels. You either gotta be insane, or have plot armor to find out about this ability

Mark Twain (Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer). You have to be fucking enlisted to find out you have this ability, because there's no way a normal person's gonna have a sniper with them (unless you're in the United States.... Wait-)

Fukuzawa (All Men are Created Equal). This is the same logic as Dazai, there's probably not that many ability users, as you'd have to collect enough ability users to realize "oh, my subordinates get full control over their abilities", also what qualifies as the agencies entrance exam? Is it even necessary?

Pushkin (A Feast in Time of Plague). How the hell do you manage to "coincidentally" find out that you have an ability that affects 2 people with a virus, and that if one of those 2 people don't die, both the people will die from having their organs eaten. You have to be insane or a serial killer to find that ability.

Yukito (Another). I'm genuinely curious on how many mysteries this guy had to solve to be able to find out that the killer in the mysteries always, 100%, without fail, dies after the mysterys been solved. That is extremely and annoyingly specific.

Kajii (Lemon). The whole ass reason I made this post, who the fuck is "conveniently" creating lemon shaped bombs, there's no way he found out this ability through normal means. Was one of his friends a terrorist with a lemon kink? Because that's the only reasonable explanation that he's finding out this ability. Either that or, he's got a big food kink and makes bombs shaped as food during his spare time. There's no fucking way, a normal guy with an office job is finding out they have an ability like that. Atsushi's the main character? Nah, this man has way more plot armor. Because the stars, universe, solar system, and plantes had to align for him to find out about his ability

Ranpo (✨Ultra Deduction✨) please help im being threatened . I mean, he could always be a genius or whatever but... Sure.

[mnscredit]

Debt Collection in the United States: Most debt collection agencies in USA work on a contingency fee basis, where the cost is usually a percentage of the total amount owed.

[mariacallous]

The United States government’s leading consumer protection watchdog announced Tuesday the first steps in a plan to crack down on predatory data broker practices that the agency says help fuel scams, violence, and threats to US national security.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is proposing a rule that would allow regulators to police data brokers under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a landmark privacy law enacted more than a half century ago. Under the proposal, data brokers would be limited in their ability to sell certain sensitive personal information, including financial data and credit scores, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and addresses. The CFPB says that closing the loopholes allowing data brokers to trade in this data with little to no oversight will benefit vulnerable people and the US as a whole.

“By selling our most sensitive personal data without our knowledge or consent, data brokers can profit by enabling scamming, stalking, and spying,” Rohit Chopra, CFPB’s director, said in a statement. “The CFPB’s proposed rule will curtail these practices that threaten our personal safety and undermine America’s national security.”

Passed in 1970 as the first US privacy law, the FCRA requires “credit reporting agencies” to adhere to certain standards of accuracy and privacy in their dealing with people’s financial information, including credit histories, credit scores, debt payment histories, and other related data. The CFPB’s proposal aims to treat data brokers like credit reporting agencies when they deal in this sensitive data. It would require data brokers to obtain “separate, explicit authorization” before acquiring or sharing people’s credit information, rather than burying these permissions in expansive legal documents that surveys show are often unread or impossible for the average person to parse.

In a conversation with reporters on Monday, Chopra pointed to the recent attacks on US telecommunications systems, which the government has attributed to China, to emphasize the value of personal data to the nation's foreign rivals. “But often, our adversaries don't need to hack anything,” he says. “Data brokers, the outfits that collect and sell detailed information about our personal and financial lives, are making this data available to anyone willing to pay a price.”

The action proposed by the CFPB is aimed, Chopra says, at stopping data brokers from “enabling scammers, stalkers and spies undermining our personal safety and America's national security.”

The CFPB’s idea of using existing US law to regulate data brokers is not novel. In February 2023, a group of consumer-focused nonprofits urged Chopra to enforce the powers the FCRA affords regulators to prevent data brokers from engaging in these potentially damaging practices.

“Protecting the personal information of all people in the US is increasingly urgent in our current political climate,” says Laura Rivera, attorney with Just Futures Law, a nonprofit that supports grassroots activists. “The stakes are too high to continue to let the data broker industry sell our information at their discretion, where the status quo has made it ripe for abuse and targeting from harmful actors.”

In a briefing with WIRED on Monday, CFPB officials declined to comment on whether they believe the regulatory action will be short lived, as president-elect Donald Trump plans to empower a number of Silicon Valley figures to reorganize the federal government with the aim of targeting “waste and fraud.”

Elon Musk, who is coleading an office named after a meme coin—the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—directly attacked the CFPB's work last week, calling for the agency to be “deleted.” Musk's remarks followed an attack on the agency's work by Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who claimed on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that the agency is “terrorizing” banking startups.

The CFBP was founded in 2011 with the aim of protecting consumers from the kinds of fraud and abuse that kicked off the 2008 financial crisis.

A CFPB official tells WIRED that the agency is also concerned about data being transmitted in ways that companies allege protects people's identities but in reality can be "de-anonymized" in simple ways, as studies have repeatedly shown. "As technology advances, we surmise that it will be even easier to de-mask purportedly de-identified data," one official said. The proposed rule thus includes a range of guidelines for credit reporting agencies involved in selling data they alleged has been de-identified.

Asked whether the proposal would extend to US government agencies, an official says that US law sets forth "very clear pathways" for the government to purchase personally identifying data for law enforcement and intelligence purposes. In a recent case, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was discovered by reporters to have purchased access to the personal data of Americans in an attempt to investigate immigrants—data acquired by the media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which it provided to custeroms in contracts the company disclosed were worth more than $100 million. (Thomson Reuters previously denied that the purpose of the data is to track undocumented immigrants and has emphasized that its database does not contain information that normally requires a search warrant to access.)

“We are not disrupting any of those pathways,” a CFPB official says. The agency is requesting comment, however, on the potential impacts of such government purchases to ensure that access is “appropriate.”

Emily Peterson-Cassin, director of corporate power at the nonprofit advocacy group Demand Progress’s Education Fund, commended the CFPB’s proposal and urged the incoming Trump administration to see it through.

“The CFPB is doing something important that will resonate with every single American. Anyone you pick off the street can tell you about the daily scam texts, emails and calls they receive from fraudsters who easily buy our contact information from shady, unaccountable data brokers,” Peterson-Cassin says. “Finally, someone—specifically the CFPB—has stepped in to stop this daily plague affecting hundreds of millions of people by applying real standards to their sale of our sensitive information.”

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #27

July 12-19 2024

President Biden announced the cancellation of $1.2 billion dollars worth of student loan debt. This will cancel the debt of 35,000 public service workers, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters. This brings the total number of people who've had their student debt relived under the Biden Administration to 4.8 million or one out of every ten people with student loan debt, for a total of $168.5 billion in debt forgiven. This came after the Supreme Court threw out an earlier more wide ranging student debt relief plan forcing the administration to undertake a slower more piecemeal process for forgiving debt. President Biden announced a new plan in the spring that will hopefully be finalized by fall that will forgive an additional 30 million people's student loan debt.

President Biden announced actions to lower housing coasts, make more housing available and called on Congress to prevent rent hikes. President Biden's plan calls for landlords who raise the rent by more than 5% a year to face losing major important tax befits, the average rent has gone up by 21% since 2021. The President has also instructed the federal government, the largest land owner in the country, to examine how unused property can be used for housing. The Bureau of Land Management plans on building 15,000 affordable housing units on public land in southern Nevada, the USPS is examining 8,500 unused properties across America to be repurposed for housing, HHS is finalizing a new rule to make it easier to use federal property to house the homeless, and the Administration is calling on state, local, and tribal governments to use their own unused property for housing, which could create approximately 1.9 million units nationwide.

The Department of Transportation announced $5 billion to replace or restore major bridges across the country. The money will go to 13 significant bridges in 16 states. Some bridges are suffering from years of neglect others are nearly 100 years old and no longer fit for modern demands. Some of the projects include the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River which connects Portland Oregon to Vancouver Washington, replacing the Sagamore Bridge which connects Cape Cod to the mainland built in 1933, replacing the I- 83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Wilmington, North Carolina, among others.

President Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at boosting Latino college attendance. The order established the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges with 25% or above Hispanic/Latino enrollment, currently 55% of Hispanic college students are enrolled in an HSI. The initiative seeks to stream line the relationship between the federal government and HSIs to allow them to more easily take advantage of federal programs and expand their reach to better serve students and boost Hispanic enrollment nationwide.

HUD announced $325 million in grants for housing and community development in 7 cities. the cities in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, New York and New Jersey, have collectively pledged to develop over 6,500 new mixed-income units, including the one-for-one replacement of 2,677 severely distressed public housing units. The 7 collectively will invest $2.65 billion in additional resources within the Choice Neighborhood area – so that every $1 in HUD funds will generate $8.65 in additional resources.

President Biden took extensive new actions on immigration. On June 18th The President announced a new policy that would allow the foreign born spouses and step children of American citizens who don't have legal status to apply for it without having to leave the country, this would effect about half a million spouses and 50,000 children. This week Biden announced that people can start applying on August 19, 2024. Also in June President Biden announced an easing of Visa rules that will allow Dreamers, Americans brought to the country as children without legal status, to finally get work visas to give them legal status and a path way to citizenship. This week the Biden Administration announced a new rule to expand the federal TRIO program to cover Dreamers. TRIO is a program that aims to support low income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college transition from high school to college, the change would support 50,000 more students each year. The Administration also plans to double the number of free immigration lawyers available to those going through immigration court.

The EPA announced $160 million in grants to support Clean U.S. Manufacturing of Steel and Other Construction Materials. The EPA estimates that the manufacturing of construction materials, such as concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass, accounts for 15% of the  annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is supporting 38 projects aimed at measuring and combatting the environmental impact of construction materials.

The US announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Sudan. Sudan's out of control civil war has caused the largest refugee crisis in the world with 11 million Sudanese having fled their homes in the face of violence. The war is also causing the gravest food crisis in the world, with a record setting 25 million people facing acute food insecurity, and fears that nearly a million will face famine in the next months. This aid brings the total aid the US has given Sudan since September 2023 to $1.6 billion, making America the single largest donor to Sudan.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new rule that would better regulate popular paycheck advance products. 2/3rds of workers are payed every two weeks or once a month and since 2020 the number of short term loans that allow employees to receive their paycheck days before it’s scheduled to hit their account has grown by 90%. the CFPB says that many of these programs are decided with employers not employees and millions of Americans are paying fees they didn't know about before signing up. The new rule would require lenders to tell costumers up front about any and all fees and charges, as well as cracking down on deceptive "tipping" options.

[ofthehands]

Been thinking about the childhoods of the Sawyers again, this time in particular Drayton, and wondering about how the time period he grew up in might have shaped who he became. Generally I base his age on his actor, Jim Siedow, which just makes sense, we’ve never been given any reason to doubt he’s the same age as his actor. Which would mean Drayton was born in 1920 sometime, and would’ve grown up in part during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. 

Now, of course the Sawyers would’ve been too poor to have a stake in the stock market, and whether or not the Dust Bowl would’ve hit them exactly depends on where Newt, Texas actually is, but for this little piece of analysis I’m going to make the leap and assume Newt would’ve been impacted by the Dust Bowl, and that the Sawyers were impacted by the job loss and industry cutbacks (via the slaughterhouse, most likely) of  the Great Depression, both because it’s interesting and because I think it makes sense. 

We know Drayton was born in 1920, and the twins were likely next, or at least the next surviving Sawyer children, born in 1945 (if you base their age on Edwin Neal’s age). Which is a big age gap, and we’ve discussed lots of reasons for this age gap, but one that isn’t talked about much that I think makes sense is the economic impacts of the times leading the Sawyers to be too afraid to have more children. They had Drayton when things were looking up- the Great War just ended and while many farmers were burdened with debt, the roaring twenties were beginning, and along with that came a boom in industrial production- it could be possible this is when the slaughterhouse came to Newt.  Only for all that to be yanked away when their son is about nine years old. The Great Depression comes first- wages are cut, many people lose their jobs, folks are going hungry. But the Sawyers seem to have at some point lived off the land somewhat, maybe they could raise livestock or grow food. For about a year, until the Dust Bowl starts, nearly a full decade of dust storms so intense they choked the life out of the land and left the Sawyers and many people like them not only in abject poverty, but absolutely starving. Of course they wouldn’t want another child- they probably only barely managed to clothe and feed Drayton. But, eventually the Dust Bowl does end, and the economy of the United States is boosted by the second World War, leading many Americans to feel secure enough to start having lots of kids, causing the Baby Boom. Which started around 1945, birth year of the twins. The birth order and timeline of the Sawyer family makes a lot of sense with these historical events taken into account, and the Texas Chainsaw universe is never shown to be different to ours historically beyond the existence of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I believe it’s entirely reasonable to assume these events did happen and did impact the Sawyer family in this way. 

So, with that out of the way, how did these events impact Drayton? As an adult Drayton seems to be a very anxious and money-conscious man. Which in the first film makes a lot of sense- he and his family are very poor, and he’s their only source of real income that we see. However, at the same time, the family is shown to have a collection of victims’ previous cars. Which is a bit odd. There could be a good bit of money there, which you would think would cross Drayton’s mind.  Of course, it would be important to make sure these cars aren’t traced back to them, so selling them outright would be risky, but selling parts of them as scrap or the whole cars to be scrapped could be a fairly easy way to make some more money. It would’ve been easier to get away with then, without cameras everywhere especially in the middle of nowhere Texas, and with the law caring/ believing as little about the Sawyers as TCM2 showed us they did.  But, the cars are collected anyway. Since Drayton is the head of the household and these cars wouldn’t be easy to hide, it’s reasonable to assume that Drayton allowed these cars to be kept. It could be argued that the Sawyers just aren’t smart enough to figure out how to safely dispose of their victim’s cars, and so they keep them in order to avoid suspicion. However, I would like to posit that these cars are an early sign of Drayton’s tendency to hoard. 

Hoarding is a fairly common behavior in people who lived through the Great Depression, and it can be handed down generationally as well- the children of (or in our case, children raised by) those who lived through the Great Depression often struggle with hoarding too. Hoarding behaviors are commonly associated with anxiety- the fear of not having enough, the fear of needing something and not having it- there is an anxiety around need. Which, of course, is an anxiety that was greatly exacerbated by the Great Depression and Dust Bowl- people in mass didn’t have what they needed, and like many traumas, these events left people with the unending fear of it happening again. Additionally, and notably,  hoarding can also be related to a number of mental health conditions, like severe depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and psychotic disorders. So how exactly does this relate back to Drayton Sawyer? 

To assume Drayton is a hoarder, or takes part in hoarding behaviors, based only on the car graveyard would be quite the stretch. However, this is far from the only time we see hoarding-type behaviors  in the Sawyers that must either be done by him or allowed by him. In the first film the Sawyers don’t seem to have too much of a hoarding problem. They use absolutely everything they get their hands on, which could again be a Great Depression/Dust Bowl influence, but their home seems rather sparsely furnished, and while they have a lot of animal bones laying about, its still easy to move through their home- it’s not particularly cluttered, just filthy. In the second film, however, with greater access to money, the Sawyers have started to collect things. The massive cave system they live in is full of strange items, all throughout the walls, and bodies are kept throughout their ‘home’ even when they aren’t being used- the giblets being stuffed into the walls, where Lefty finds them. They could burn something like that, or find some use for it, or get rid of it in some other way, but Drayton, who is in charge of their cooking operations undoubtedly, does none of this- he keeps all of it. He additionally is still very worried about money- he refuses to take a break or miss out on money for even one night, in spite of his advanced age, the fact that they have enough food to be selling food in mass, and that his business is stable enough for the woman at the chili contest to call him “Dallas’ favorite caterer”. Dallas is a big area- if he’s one of the most popular caterers in Dallas, his family isn’t going to go hungry. But Drayton expresses constant money anxiety anyways, and he keeps or allows the keeping of tons of strange and borderline useless items in their home- Christmas lights, skeletons, giblets, a stop light for some reason. If they lived still in the old farmhouse and not the cave system, their house likely would be full wall to wall. And, with the blood and guts in the very walls of their house, which is a cave and thus a fantastic place to grow all kinds of deadly molds, this behavior is definitely putting the Sawyers at a significant health risk. The Sawyer family, and Drayton specifically, show hoarding behaviors to the extent that it’s putting their health at risk. It may also seem like an odd thing, to keep mentioning the collection of bodies on the Sawyer property as a form of hoarding, but I think for Drayton it very much is. Meat is life for the Sawyers- they were raised in meat- and having it is all they have, often. So a massive collection of bodies and body parts, even when they’re not really being used and are likely rotting their home, soothes Drayton’s fear of needing and not having. If hard times come again, like they did during the Depression, or when the Sawyers could no longer work at the slaughterhouse, they’ve still got something, even if that something is nothing more than viscera in the walls. 

Now, of course, other mental health conditions could be impacting Drayton and causing his hoarding behavior. While Drayton doesn’t display a lot of obvious symptoms, we know psychotic disorders run in the family- Nubbins is heavily coded as schizophrenic, Edwin Neal based his performance off his schizophrenic nephew. Additionally, Drayton could have some type of severe depression. Throughout the end of the second film, Drayton talks about ‘quitting’, and how he’s been thinking about ‘quitting’ lately. Reasonably, it could be assumed he means retirement- he’s 66 after all. However, at the very end of the film, he refers to killing himself and his family in the same terms- “Maybe it’s time to just shut down. Time to shut down the show, yeah.” It’s possible that he did mean retirement originally. And it’s also possible he was always thinking of suicide. Drayton Sawyer may not seem like someone who is depressed, especially with business booming as it is, but depression doesn’t yield to success, and Drayton displays and follows through on suicidal intensions. It’s not a sure thing, but certainly not impossible. Additionally, Drayton could have OCD. Compulsive hoarding was considered a type of OCD, and 1/4th of people with OCD also display compulsive hoarding, and 1/5th of hoarders also display other traits of OCD. 

However, I still think one could argue these hoarding behaviors present in Drayton and his money anxiety are inextricably linked to trauma related to the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl. Especially since in disorders like depression and OCD, trauma- while not necessarily causative of the disorder- is a risk factor for the development of these disorders. So I do believe it could be said that Drayton is a hoarder, or at least shows signs of hoarding behaviors, and that this behavior stems from the impacts of the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl on him. 

I think, additionally, Drayton’s sadism and antisocial behaviors could stem partially from his experiences with the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl as well. I do believe there are other factors at play, ranging from potential generational abuse in the Sawyer family, to Drayton’s own desire for power and control leading him to exert that power as violence over anybody he can hurt and get away with hurting- namely his vulnerable and reliant younger brothers and the victims of his family. However, I think the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl could still have played a substantial part in shaping the way he’s sadistic, and forming within him a need for power and control. 

One of the more prominent ways I think that the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl shaped Drayton’s antisocial behaviors, is the way that it altered his view of people outside his family and the nature of human interaction. One of his snappier lines in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was “It’s a dog eat dog world and from where I sit there just ain’t enough damn dogs!” which gives a pretty solid view into Drayton’s mindset. People can and will tear each other apart, and it’s important to him to be the one doing the hurting instead of being the one getting hurt. Of course, ignoring the cannibalistic implications of this sentence from the mouth of a cannibal would be silly, but taken literally the meaning is much the same. Drayton believes that the people he and his family kills and eats would at least harm and take advantage of him and his family if the shoe were on the other foot- maybe he even thinks its a matter of cannibalize or be cannibalized. And, of course, now that Drayton is on top- now that he’s scrapped out some deal of security by slaughtering others, he only wants more. Which makes sense if he grew up with barely any food on his plate, in a time period where others could pose a real danger, as they’re hungry too. Their neighbors realistically weren’t going to cannibalize the Sawyers in turn, but it was possible they might try to steal from them, or that desperate people might try to hurt them in order to take resources from them. It’s possible this could’ve happened to the Sawyers in Drayton’s lifetime, and it’s possible it never did but Drayton was raised with the idea in his head that it could happen- that the anxieties of older Sawyers before him imparted on him that he couldn’t trust people other than his family and that he should take what he can from other people before they take from him, regardless of whether the Sawyers were even cannibalistic during this time or not. I think that this anxiety around being hurt, baked into Drayton from a young age, manifested in his adulthood as an inward justification for his extreme and violent behavior, and in the way that he raised his younger brothers to continue this cycle- Drayton never breaks the cycle and imposes his beliefs and traumas onto his younger brothers, causing them to become even more isolationist and antisocial than him. 

Another way I think the Great Depression/ Dust Bowl would’ve impacted Drayton as an adult is by impacting how and why he expresses sadism. I believe that Drayton likely expresses sadism the way he does due to feeling helpless or out of control. This is an odd sentiment to apply to Drayton- he’s a very cruel and controlling man when he’s present in the films, and helplessness isn’t particularly befitting of him from the outside. However, despite what Drayton might admit or be willing to believe, he has control over almost nothing. He’s dirt poor, and likely disabled, trying to keep a gas station running in a tiny town when he can’t even always count on having gas. According to signs on the station, he sells barbeque and fishing worms as well, the barbeque sourced from their victims, and the worms likely just dug up out of the ground. He’s doing all he can to make ends meet, but whether or not he makes it really isn’t in his control. Additionally, he can’t keep his brothers under control. It’s not a particularly reasonable thing for him to want- the level of control he wants over his brothers, who are grown men, could certainly be argued to be unhealthy, he treats them quite like children. But it is still something Drayton clearly wants- he punishes them severely for disobeying him, and “I told you and I told you” is a pretty common sentence out of his mouth- he’s always vying for control of his brothers, even to the extent to not teach them about sex and to try and sway them away from ever having connections to people outside of the family, especially of a romantic variety, going so far as to try to make Bubba kill a woman Drayton assumed he had some kind of connection with. But, for all he does, he can’t keep Nubbins in the house, or Chop Top from getting into trouble and messing with Nubbins’ body, or Bubba from developing an interest in women. He wants control of them, desperately, but he can’t have that either. The only time Drayton Sawyer has complete control is when he’s tormenting a victim. It could be argued he torments them for the sake of tormenting them, not to have control, but to hurt someone for the simple enjoyment of causing pain. However, I don’t think this lines up with much of what we know about Drayton. While he is very cruel, he also shies away from violence at odd times. He enjoys poking Sally with the stick when she’s in his truck, but he also doesn’t like hearing her cry. He enjoys watching Grandpa bash her head in with a hammer, but also scolds his brothers for “torturing the poor girl”. Drayton clearly does enjoy violence to some degree, but I don’t think he enjoys violence for the sake of it. I think Drayton enjoys violence as a means to feel in control, and desires that feeling both because of his lack of control in his everyday life, and because of the way his life was suddenly upended by forces beyond his control or his family’s control at a young age.  

Ultimately, I’m not entirely certain that the creators of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would’ve put much thought into the ways that the politics and economics of the time period the characters were born in would affect how the old scary guy who takes a chainsaw up the ass in the second movie thinks and behaves, so take this analysis with a grain of salt, lol, but it was a lot of fun to write, and I think that these factors are certainly something fans could take into account when thinking about and creating content of these characters. I greatly enjoy trying to unravel some of the mystery around the Sawyers with what little information we have, especially since these questions will never be answered in canon. Feel free to add on anything you think I might have missed with this topic, or any other thoughts that come to your mind! I love hearing other people’s theories and thoughts and such.

[workersolidarity]

🇺🇸 🚨

UNITED STATES CONGRESS PASSES SERIES OF ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND PRO-WAR BILLS DESPITE PUBLIC OPPOSITION

The United States Congress and Senate passed a series of bills, including three controversial anti-democratic and pro-war bills, two of which were tied together, on Saturday, bypassing public opinion and popular opposition to the profligate, pro-war, globalist, Neolib/Neocon agenda currently driving United States domestic and foreign policy.

Included in the bills passed was a bill to force TikTok to divest from its connections with China at risk of being banned immediately, which naturally was tied to a Foreign aid bill.

However, as even Republican Senator Rand Paul mentioned in an opinion piece in Reason Magazine, the Bill is almost certain to lead to more power for American political elites and their administrations to pressure companies like Apple and Google to further ban apps and sites that offer contradictory opinions to that of the invented narratives of the American Political class.

Before long, Americans, many of whom are already poorly informed, and heavily misinformed by their mainstream media, could lose access to critical information that contradicts the narratives of the United States government and corporate elites.

Horrifically, this only the start. The US Congress also extended the newly revised FISA spy laws, which gives the United States government the power to spy on the electronic communications of foreigners, while also conveniently sweeping up the conversations of millions of Americans, as we learned years ago thanks to the sacrifices of whistle blowers and journalists like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

The new FISA Law goes further than this, however, granting US Intelligence agencies the power to spy on the wireless communications of Americans in completely new ways.

A recent Jacobin article describes these new powers as a, "radical expansion of government surveillance that would be ripe for abuse by a future authoritarian leader", or it could just be used by the authoritarian leadership we have right now, and have had for decades.

In fact, when one commentator described the new powers as "Stasi-like," Edward Snowden himself replied with a long post in which he remarked, "invocation of "Stasi-like" is not only a fair characterization of Himes' amendment, it's probably generous. The Stasi dared not even dream of what the Himes amendment provides."

The amendment in question just "tweaks" the current law's definition of an "electronic communication provider," which is being changed to "any service provider," something extremely likely to be abused by the government to force anyone with a business, a modem and people using their broadband to collect the electronic communications of those people, while also forcing their victims into silence.

The government could essentially force Americans to spy on other people and remain silent about it. Cafe's, restaurants, hotels, business landlords, shared workspaces all could get swept up into the investigations of the Intelligence agencies.

Worse still, because picking out the communications of a single user would be next to impossible, all of their victim's data would end up being surrendered to the authorities.

Sadly, the assault on Americans by their own political elites didn't end there, to top this historic day in Congress, at time when the United States public debt is growing at an astounding rate of $1 trillion every 100 days, US lawmakers also passed a series of pro-war aid packages to American allies (vassals) totalling some $95 billion.

Included in the foreign aid bill are aid packages totalling $61 billion for the Ukraine scam, $26 billion for Israel's special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific to provoke WWIII with China, at the same time we're also provoking a nuclear holocaust with the Russian Federation.

Also buried in these aid packages is the authorization for the United States government to outright steal the oversees investments of the Russian Federation, and thereby the Russian taxpayers.

Astonishingly, and in direct opposition to the wishes of their own voters, Republican support was won without the possibility of conditioning the aid to any kind of border security, this despite the issue being among the top biggest concerns of Republican voters.

Although much of the money is to be used replenishing the heavily depleted stocks of America's weapons and munitions, it remains unclear where the munitions are expected to come from, as US defense production has remained sluggish and slow to expand despite heavy investments and demand in recent years, despite the rapid urgency with which the policy elite describe the situation.

It bodes poorly for working Americans that only a relatively small handful of lawmakers opposed the bills, producing unlikely bedfellows like Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Mike Lee in the Senate, opposing the FISA bill.

While in the House, the loudest opposition to the foreign aid bill mostly came from populist Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and Paul Goser. Only 58 Congresmembers voted against the Foreign Aid Bill in which the TikTok ban was tucked.

Not one word from American politicians about the need to raise the minimum wage, which hasn't been increased since 2009 despite considerable inflation, nor a word about America's endlessly growing homelessness crises, property crime increases, or the 40-year stagnation of American wages, the deterioration of infrastructure, and precious little was said besides complaints about border security over the immigration crises sparked by American Imperialist adventures and US sanctions.

What we've learned today is that we are highly unlikely to see any changes to the insane behavior of the US and its allies any time soon, neither with regards to the absolutely bonkers Neocon foreign policy leading us to the edge of abyss, nor the spending-for-the-rich/austerity-for-the-poor Neoliberal domestic policy of the last 45 years.

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

Blue: titles are opinion pieces or analysis, and may or may not contain sources.

[whencyclopedia]

Whiskey Rebellion

The Whiskey Rebellion was a violent uprising that occurred in western Pennsylvania in 1794, in opposition to an excise tax on liquor. After anti-tax protestors assaulted federal tax collectors and threatened to march on Pittsburgh, President George Washington (served 1789-1797) raised a federalized militia that swiftly suppressed the insurrection. The incident strengthened the authority of the United States federal government.

Alexander Hamilton had proposed an excise on distilled spirits to fund his ambitious economic program, which was enacted by Congress in 1791. This so-called 'Whiskey Act' proved unpopular, particularly among the small farmers living on the western frontiers of the United States. Liquor was an important commodity in the West, where many farmers operated small stills and used liquor as an informal currency; the new excise tax was something that many of them could not afford. Protests broke out in 1792 and 1793, with much of the rhetoric accusing Hamilton and his nationalist Federalist Party of being aristocrats who sought to use the tax to subjugate the small western farmers and deprive them of their liberties. The Federalists, for their part, accused the protestors of fomenting anarchy and urged President Washington to take decisive action.

The anti-tax protests escalated in the summer of 1794 when protestors attacked the home of a federal tax collector before demonstrating on Braddock's Field outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they talked of attacking the federal garrison in the city. Washington finally yielded to his Federalist advisors and called up a federalized militia to suppress the rebellion. Led by Hamilton and Virginia governor 'Light-Horse' Henry Lee III, the 12,950-man militia army marched through western Pennsylvania in October 1794, with all opposition melting before it. This show of military force ended the Whiskey Rebellion and proved that under the new Constitution, the federal government was strong enough to enforce adherence to its laws. However, the government's aggressive response unnerved many Anti-Federalists, who feared the growing authority of the national government. This controversy contributed to the rise of the Democratic-Republican Party in opposition to the Federalists, ushering in the birth of political partisanship in the United States.

The Whiskey Act

In the aftermath of the American Revolution (1765-1789), the fledgling United States was saddled with a mountain of debt. The national government owed $54 million in debt, while the states collectively owed an additional $24 million – such had been the "price of liberty", as Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury for the Washington administration, remarked in the opening pages of his Report on Public Credit (Chernow, 297). While other men may have balked in the face of such an overwhelming amount of debt, Hamilton smelled opportunity. In his report, submitted to Congress in January 1790, he recommended consolidating national and state debt into a single sum to be paid off by the federal government; this would have the dual effect of establishing public credit while increasing the legitimacy of the federal government. Although the plan sparked fierce debate and was hotly opposed by Anti-Federalists, it was nevertheless approved by Congress in the summer of 1790.

It was now left for Hamilton to figure out exactly how the federal government was supposed to start paying off such an exorbitant sum. The existing duties on foreign imports, which at the time made up the primary source of income for the federal government, were already as high as Hamilton dared raise them but were still insufficient to fund his ambitious financial program. The only feasible solution was to implement some kind of excise tax on domestically manufactured goods. Although the new United States Constitution granted Congress the power to levy excise taxes, it was abundantly clear that such a move would be unpopular; so soon after the Revolution, many Americans still associated direct taxation with tyranny. Still, Hamilton sorely needed the revenue an excise tax would bring. He believed that a tax on distilled spirits would be less objectionable to the public than a similar tax on other goods; to sway the public to his side, he framed it as a 'sin tax' that would reduce Americans' consumption of hard liquors and had physicians speak out on the harmful effects of alcohol. Despite the skepticism in Congress over Hamilton's so-called 'Whiskey Act', the bill was passed in March 1791.

Hamilton had known that the Whiskey Act would be controversial, but he had not anticipated just how outraged many Americans would be, particularly among the settlers along the country's western frontier. The land to the west of the Appalachian Mountains was still sparsely settled by white settlers; indeed, the largest western settlements still had only a few hundred permanent residents, and the few roads that existed were poorly maintained. As a result, small western farmers, who made a living growing crops like corn, rye, and grain, had difficulty bringing their produce to market. Oftentimes, their goods would spoil before they could get to a settlement large enough to find buyers. To combat this, many farmers distilled their grain into liquor, which was much easier to transport and preserve. The practice became so widespread that by the 1790s, most western farmers operated small stills, and liquor was often used as an informal currency.

Alexander Hamilton

John Trumbull (Public Domain)

The Whiskey Act, therefore, was widely viewed as an attack on the livelihoods of western farmers, many of whom could not afford to pay the tax. Critics likened the tax to the hated Stamp Act of 1765, which had been one of the catalysts for the American Revolution. One pamphleteer accused Hamilton and his Federalist followers of "wishing to imitate the corrupt principles of the court of Great Britain" by introducing such an excise tax (quoted in Chernow, 469). Many saw the Whiskey Act as an attempt by the central government to extend its tendrils of power into the West and force the frontiersmen to feel the authority of Congress. Protestors began to accuse the federal government of being run by "aristocrats" and "moneyed men" who sought to deprive them of their liberties (Wood, 136). This kind of rhetoric brewed fear, which in turn led to instances of violence; as had happened to the British stamp distributors three decades before, federal tax collectors became the targets of unruly mobs, which threatened to beat, whip, or tar and feather them. In August 1792, Colonel John Neville, the federal tax collector in Pennsylvania, was accosted by one such mob which promised to "scalp him, tar and feather him, and finally reduce his house and property to ashes" should he go ahead and collect the whiskey tax (Chernow, 469).

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