Why does the USA have so few legal protections for ordinary people, and how can we change that?
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?
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The unfortunate fact is it is a dog eat dog world, and corporations can and will fuck you over. Maintain a budget, maintain an emergency fund of $10k or 6 months living expenses (whichever is bigger) and be prepared to be screwed over so that when it does happen you don't find yourself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
On top of this, as an additional safety net, build a friend group and build a culture within your friend group of helping each other. One friend getting a surgery? Offer to cook for them, or bring them some precooked meals. A friend stuck on the side of the road, offer to come help, even if it's just as emotional support.
I started this process a few months ago so I'm in a better position now that my work has announced that they're relocating across the country and basically everyone is losing their jobs over the next 3-9 months. It would've been more convenient if this happened a year later, but it is what it is so now I have to shape my next steps and move forwards
The unfortunate fact is it is a dog eat dog world
No it's not, that's zero sum owner class propaganda designed to force us to waste energy competing with our peers instead of fighting the rich bastards
Humans have created a haven away from 'nature red in tooth and claw' where we DON'T have to compete with each other, and mutualism without profit is possible, it is literally the greatest achievement of our species, to short circuit natural selection.
In human culture, the weak and sick don't have to be sacrificed for the good of the whole, and we can support a wide and diverse service and goods structure BECAUSE we have moved on from natural selection.
The problem is, predatory practices are often more rewarding short term than cooperative practices, and humans are geared for short term planning.
You get more food now for killing the farmer and taking his cattle, but you get more food for everyone forever if you let that farmer prosper.
Bandits kill the farmer, they are the ones telling you it is a dog eat dog world.
The farmer will tell you that the world is full of bounty if you put the effort in to cultivate it.
Yes a bandit uses less energy, and has more short term profit, but degrades the entire total outcome of the system by their greed.
This doesn't change the fact that when no social safety net exists one must construct their own safety nets. That's my point. We can talk all we want about how broken the systems are and how we would fix them if given the power to, but ultimately we have to live and survive. Use the good times to better prepare yourself to weather the bad, because good luck getting help from the government or corporations to do so
Which is why I support food shoplifting and radical community cooperation.
Also why it's a tragedy that so much of this site is anti-religious, because churches were the original social safety net.
Religion has an organizing and empathizing trend, and I think it is a mistake to consider a secular society as better for the average human.
A $10k emergency fund? Even banks don't carry enough cash these days for a working class person to be able to rob a bank to have that kind of money.
The point of an emergency fund is it will get you through whatever unexpectable large expense without taking on debt. Car needed a repair and you had a health procedure plus your water heater went out all in the same year? 10k might not cover all of that but it will give you the options to manage those emergencies as they come up
Edit to add: banks also may carry more cash on hand than you might think. I worked IT at a bank fairly recently and I could see in the teller software as I remoted in to assist them that they'd have around 3-500 on their individual tills, and when I'd stop by branches to help out with things, sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of the stacks of cash kept in the on-site vault, or one time saw the teller pull out a $10k bundle of 100s to fulfill a customer request of a couple hundred bucks while I was assisting with something else. I don't know exactly what goes into how a bank determines how much cash to keep at a given branch, but it's certainly more than the couple thousand or so that people say branches only keep on hand