Why does the USA have so few legal protections for ordinary people, and how can we change that?
I'm just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I've recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
The entire justice system rests on how much money you have.
It's capitalism, capitalism is the core of the problem.
It treats people who have wealth as good people who always have a chance to appeal injustice and people without wealth as never having an opportunity to fight injustice.
You would literally need to tear it all down and start over because the US Consitution is kind of a piece of garbage and we spend way too much time jerking off the old dead white slave-owners who wrote down that "All men are created equal... as long as they're white and own land."
In some more civilized countries, they do things like peg criminal fines to the wealth of the person who committed the crime? Poor person? Small fine. Rich person? Huge fine. It's decided based on a percentage of their wealth. So the wealthier criminals literally pay more because of their financial influence.