How We’re Being Failed (Part 2)

In part one I talked about how law enforcement is failing us, now I’ll talk about how our government is failing us.

There are so many things in our government that is broken, and this has been getting worse for decades. The question is how? How are the people who are supposed to look after our country, who are supposed to make laws to help everyone, not just the wealthy, have the heart (or lack of) to let things get so bad and unfair for the working class?

We’re going from the land of the free to the land of the free for greedy rich people. Will it ever stop? Will it ever get fixed? Sometimes I wonder. There are things that you hear people in government talk about to help the less fortunate (free college, free insurance) but there are so many issues that get overlooked or put aside. It’s almost like they forgot, or they don’t look at what’s going on in people’s everyday lives. They don’t see what companies and the wealthy are doing to the little people beneath them just to make more profit.

I know this article, this rant, will probably only be read by a few people, and it won’t be seen by the president or anyone in the government that can actually do something about it, or answer the questions that come out of what I’m writing, but part of me writing this blog is to make me feel better, to get things off of my chest and if someone reads it and feels the same anger and disappointment and reading this helps them in some way as well then good.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about our banking system and how it’s more toward doing things to create fees for people than to help them save money. When you put money in a bank account the bank takes it and invests it, they’re making money off of your money. Banks used to give you interest on your money and some do but that interest (at least for poor and middle-class people) has gotten less over the years. Now they give you cashback when you buy stuff instead of interest in most accounts. The money they’re giving back to you is already put into the price of the item or service, you’re buying also the money you make back is way less than the interest you would have accumulated. Also, if you don’t buy, buy, buy, your money is just sitting in the account doing nothing when before it would grow a little bit. Banks make this sound great “We give you money back for the things you need.” The thing is people also buy things they don’t need and they think “hey I’m getting money back so let me buy this thing I want but don’t need.” Money-back sounds good, but in the end, we lose and the banks win.

Another thing banks do to take advantage of us is “overdraft protection”. This is another thing that sounds really good, no one likes to overdraft their account and it’s so nice for the banks to protect us from it right? Nope, wrong! Overdraft protection will allow you to basically borrow money from the bank if your account doesn’t have enough in it for a product you need or want. So, if you go to the store and buy $100 in food but only have $50 in your account, your transaction will still go through, but you’ll have a -$50 in your account. Banks love when you do this because they can charge you a fee for over-drafting your account. I personally always turn this feature off and yes you can tell them to turn it off (sometimes the option is buried in the setting of your bank’s app and worded poorly so you miss it.)

Companies that put their fingers in to many pies. This is something that really bugs me. You have big companies that try and do to many things, like AT&T buying DirecTV, HBO, Turner Broadcasting Systems, Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. (Including WB pictures, TV, and Home Entertainment Groups.) AT&T started out as a phone company, then they moved into cell phones and that’s fine, but then they got into internet and TV service. When a company starts doing things like this, the greed starts to show even more. Their cell phone service used to be really good, now from what I hear it’s horrible, I really haven’t heard much recently about their internet service. Some cable services lost HBO only now to have it come back as a separate service so they can just raise the prices on the customers instead of having to re-negotiate the price to have it on a service.

There are so many companies that are doing the same thing, buying other companies and “expanding themselves.” This just hurts the consumer because then they raise prices because there is less competition.

Talking about competition (or lack of) there is cable and internet. Internet prices in the US are way higher than in other countries. This is due to lack of competition. Where I live, I can only get Spectrum, that’s it. Spectrum touts that their lowest speed of internet was 50mb/s and they were proud of this like they were doing us a favor. You can’t get a lower speed or a cheaper price because there was only one low speed. Then they raised that to 100mb/s and they made it sound like they were doing us a favor again but they also raised the price. Now one day I checked my internet speed and I’m getting 200mb/s, what made me check is the price was raised again and they silently did it this time. I can’t go to another service because there is only one in my area and I can’t bump down to 50 or 100mb/s because they don’t offer that option so if I want internet access I’m stuck until 5G or maybe Starlink comes to my area.

It’s the same with cable…well I am with Dish so I do have options there (and I have cable only because I help take care of my elderly father and he wants cable.) BUT as we know cable keeps getting more expensive. You have these packages that if you want one channel you have to also subscribe to multiple other channels you don’t want which should be criminal. Comcast was looking into letting people pick and choose what channels they wanted and only pay for those, but I guess decided against it when they saw they’d make less money doing so. I know, I could just cut the cord, and I did show my father my Firestick and he thought it was too confusing so we have cable. Everything seems to be going in the way of a service anyway, so to get all the channels he watches, we’d pay almost as much as if we had cable.

Fibbing in advertising. Now I don’t say lying because even though some companies do lie, some just hold back the truth. For instance, T-Mobile saying they’re #1 in 5G. I guess you can say they are, they may have the biggest 5G network, but what they leave out is Verizon’s 4G network is better. I know people who have T-Mobile in my area and they get dropped calls or can’t make calls all the time. I have Verizon and they’re pretty solid, sometimes I hit patches of dead zone, but not that bad. Now also T-Mobile has Mid and Low band 5G and one of them (forgot which one, I think it’s the low band) doesn’t work well in buildings which is why Verizon only has Ultra-Wideband. So, like I said fibbing in advertising. Many other companies do the same thing and it’s not illegal which is why years ago Apple said “We don’t get viruses like Windows.” What they left out is Windows has by far a larger base of users so criminals don’t bother with them…but wait then MacOS did start to get viruses which is one reason they moved to ARM (but give it time, if the ARM Macs start doing well, they’ll start getting virus’ too.) There are some companies that just outright lie (mostly infomercials) and I have no idea how they get away with it.

Advertising drugs on TV, I don’t think any other country does this? This is done so the drug companies can make more money. Someone sees a commercial for an ailment they have and ask their doctor to prescribe it to them. These drugs aren’t generic so the consumer pays full price for it or a high discount price instead of just getting the possibly free generic drug through their insurance. This is crazy and I think wrong.

We also tend to have more additives in our foods. Again, most countries have laws that say a company can’t use certain additives. A lot of countries also have less salt and sugar in their foods. I hate catsup, but I’m told that in other countries it’s less sweet and tastes more like tomato, which I might like. We do have a weight problem in the U.S. and it’s not really the consumer’s fault, it’s because of all of the preservatives that are put in our foods. A lot of other countries that don’t put as much sugar, corn syrup, salt, and other additives in their foods, they’re healthier. We can get healthier foods here, but it costs, plus people like the foods with the additives, we’re trained to like it.

I can go on and talk about how the rich get away to paying few to no taxes while leaving middle-class and poor people to pay more than they should. I touched on above how everything is becoming a service which isn’t good for consumers in the end either.

Housing prices are ridiculous. I live in CA and housing is definitely against the middle class and poor. Prices to buy or rent are astronomical. Sure, they have affordable housing but from what I hear it’s in neighborhoods where you want to stay in after dark or if you make what they consider too much (but you still can’t afford to live in a good area) you’re SOL. There are states in the country where you can buy cheap housing, but again there in states where things aren’t great. There definitely aren’t any middle-class areas anymore where housing is affordable. There are upper-middle-class areas but a regular middle-class person is still out of reach. Maybe you can get a high-interest loan where you’ll pay mostly the interest for the first 10 years, barely hitting the principal, but that’s a scam…remember 2008? Well, that shit is still happening.

Buying a car is a scam as well. If you don’t know what to look and listen for when talking to a salesperson, and if you don’t know what to say, you’ll get screwed and it’s all legal. I’ll give you one hint, there is no such thing as “no-haggle pricing.” I’ll give you another, if they want to do your credit right away, don’t. Just say you’re looking right now. Also, if they ask what you’re looking for and if you want to buy today, say “No, I’m just weighing my options now”. Or even better, get a pre-owned car with a 3–5 year (or more if not to expensive) warranty and low mileage. Just treat it like you’re buying a new car and don’t get screwed.

There are just so many ways in life you can get scammed, and they’re legal. The government should fix this and I think there are people in the government that want to fix many of these (the ones they know of), but you have other people in the government that give push back and block progress. Even now look at what’s happening in Texas (but that’s another subject altogether.) That and how some people are handling Covid poorly (and it’s not our president). These subjects I don’t know if I want to touch right now.

If you’re not wealthy, life is rough and it shouldn’t be as rough as it is. It doesn’t have to be. When I was young, my parents were middle class and we were living well, then at some point, things made a major turn, and here we are. I usually don’t look back and say “the good old days” I like to look forward, but the past few decades we’ve been heading toward a cliff and if we don’t put on the breaks soon, we could go over it. The only thing that can fuck us up more is climate change, bad people in government, and covid. We need more people in government that care for the country as a whole and not just the wealthy. We also need more wealthy people that truly care to make a change instead of just saying they care. In the movie, Wall Street Gorden Gekko said “Greed is good.” Well, the character in that movie (and anyone who believes that statement) is wrong. Greed kills societies and makes a bigger lower class, in reality, the smaller the lower class, the bigger the middle-class and that’s when societies flourish and everyone wins. Until then we’re failing as a society.