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A Pandemic of Consumer Plagues

By James R. Hood
ConsumerAffairs.com

January 30, 2006

• Attoneys General Pick Their Favorites • Our Top Consumer Plagues • Identity Theft Leads FTC's Top 10 List • Internet, Telemarketing Scams Over the Top in 2005

This is the time of the year when consumer organizations, attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission rummage around in their complaint files from the previous year and announce that -- horrors! -- identity theft, Nigerian scams and auction fraud are big problems.

It's hard to disagree with this but, on the other hand, it doesn't really address the root cause of the financial, physical and emotional turmoil inflicted on consumers in recent times.

Rather than flip through the roughly 150,000 complaints in our database, we decided to gaze out the window and pretend to smoke a cigar while pondering what we'd say are the companies, institutions and human inclinations responsible for giving the hot-foot to so many of us.

Here's what we came up with -- our list of the top 10 scourges confronting those of us still sentient:

1. Congress

A dome full of monkeys would do a better of job of protecting the rights of Americans than the buffoons currently haunting Capitol Hill. These clowns have weakened or downright repealed vital consumer protections in virtually every corner of modern life and are now embarking on a new War of Northern Aggression aimed at gutting state laws which provide some small measure of comfort to the afflicted.

Personally, we think Congress has forgotten that it is there to protect the interests of what the Constitution quaintly refers to as "the people." Last time we looked, Pfizer, AT&T and MBNA were corporations, not people.

2. Rebates

Rebates are, very simply, fraudulent. They are based on the assumption that most consumers won't bother to send in the rebate forms and are engineered to frustrate and hog-tie those who have the audacity to actually try to collect what is legally theirs. The practice of promising rebates that are not paid on the spot should be outlawed. Legislators lacking the guts to do so should be voted out of office, stripped of their retirement benefits and made to work for a living.

3. Usury

Every now and then, an Ameriquest or Cross Country Bank is prosecuted for taking advantage of low-income consumers. This is similar to the practice, common in totalitarian countries, of executing some poor soul at random every day or two: it looks good on the evening news but doesn't accomplish anything. Even "legitimate" lenders think nothing of charging their good customers 29% interest. Is it surprising less well-heeled clients are stripped and left for dead?

4. Ford Motor Co.

A true American institution, Ford has produced such icons as the Windstar's weak-gasketed V-6, the self-immolating F-150 and the top-heavy and rollover-prone Explorer, among many other fatally-flawed products. Not content with this, it has ignored each problem, refusing to lift a finger to help its stranded, maimed or killed customers and has trained its customer-service reps to deny ever hearing of any such thing despite the thousands of examples that come easily to hand.

5. Extended Warranties

The best you can say about many extended warranties is that they're not worth the paper they're written on, never mind the hundreds or thousands of dollars consumers spend on them. While there may be exceptions, most extended warranties do nothing but line the pockets of those dispensing them. As they say in the MBA mills, revenue from extended warranties, a/k/a/ service contracts, "goes straight to the bottom line." Translation: all price, no product.

6. Federal Agencies

Don't even get us started on this one.

7. Our Health Care "System"

Actually, there is no health care system in this country. There is instead an odd form of anarchic socialism, in which everyone pays exorbitant fees to insurers and drug companies in exchange for which group practices and hospitals render impersonal care of wildly varying quality. And then there are the elderly. Abandoned by their supposed advocates who refuse to use the word "elderly" and instead portray their members as "vitally aging" post-pubescents eternally riding their bicycles on the beach, America's old people are driven into insolvency by the high cost of long-term care, even though they receive very little of it.

8. Disability Insurance

This is perhaps the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on a large population. Earnest, hard-working people pay hefty premiums for years, thinking their families will be provided for should they have the misfortune to become disabled. Instead, all too many wind up homeless and bereft. Back in the day, they would have been driven into bankruptcy but Congress has spared them this misfortune by making it unavailable to all but airlines, energy companies and other big contributors (see #1 above).

9. TV Talk Shows

We don't watch these but now and then we're trapped in an airport lounge, trauma ward, Jiffy Lube or other torture chamber where an inaccessible television is blasting away. Apparently, when the mental hospitals were phased out a few decades ago, the most hopeless patients were given suits and fancy hair cuts and then turned loose in the nearest TV studio. No wonder our government has been taken over by corrupt loonies. Look what passes for political discourse.

10. Beef

Though some might disagree, there's probably nothing inherently wrong with eating animal flesh. The problem is that the production of beef, pork, veal and other meat has become so industrialized that it's no longer possible for us to know whether what we're eating contains mad-cow-inducing prions, harmful hormones or exotic bacterial contamination. Personally, our 2006 resolution is to learn a lot more about the joys of tofu.

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