Confronting corporate impunity: consumers’ rights
Consumer activism, confronting corporatocracy, predatory lending, corporate scams, etc
With the rapid consequences of global warming in some places, like my home town São Paulo, a formerly mild weather location, I had to move north. I landed in the USA which was an obvious choice: after all, I lived on and off here most of my life. I know the country, right? WRONG.
The college town USA for visiting scholars is one country — the violent, predatory, scamming and perverse-individualistic USA of non-college towns for true residents/citizens is a whole different country. One I’d rather I hadn’t even known, let alone live in.
But here I am and I can’t leave. There are two reasons for that: my home country’s climate is now incompatible with my non-pathological, genetic heat intolerance. The problem is that it was made worse by an attack I suffered from a “proud deplorable” which, in one of those absurd chain of reactions, pushed hypothalamic damage beyond any chance of aclimatation to warmer humid weather. The second reason is that I’m broke: I have been scammed, robbed and manipulated here because I didn’t know how to navigate this “new country”.
At first, when I was here with Brazilian credit cards and still not a resident, I was a victim of the “perfect hack” by American thieves and I lost all my assets. ALL of them. As I said, it is perfect: the credit card managing agencies are in another country and the police is here. That doesn’t work: they took everything and I never saw it again.
Then there were “mistakes” made by shady insurance companies, the current Capital One breach of information fraud epidemic and other issues that showed me consumers, here, are mostly powerless. It’s easy to fall prey of a predatory loaning/lending organization, it’s easy to get scammed by your own bank, it’s easy to get overcharged, underserviced, etc.
It is very easy to get scammed. Too easy. There is no developed country in the world that beats the USA in corporate impunity.
So I decided to educate myself and participate in consumer rights advocacy. I also decided that although there’s no much I can do, I’ll add my voice to the undermining of these corporations reputations, file class actions, file complaints everywhere and fight to not get 100% screwed.
The USA is the world leader in sad indicators: it is the country that has the highest number of incarcerated people per capita (just because it is profitable), the highest number of health-care related bankruptcy, the highest number of debt-related homelesness, etc. Bottom line, corporate impunity will destroy this country’s economy is nothing is done.
This is not called “socialism”. It’s called “mature market economy”.
I’m in this fight.
