If you subscribe to Netflix please watch the Payday episode of Dirty Money. It features loan shark race car driver Scott Tucker. I just watched the entire episode while on the treadmill. I was so pissed off I did not feel the pain. In short, this man was a Payday lender.
Before I get into my rant – If you are a good corporate executive who cares about ALL of your stakeholders (customers, employees, debt holders, and shareholders) and you ensure that no one is taken advantage of, my ire is not directed at you. The role of the executive in a free enterprise system is to do just that. BTW, I have issues with the basic shareholder structure but that is beyond the scope of this short rant.
And now my rant
Scott Tucker made over a $400 million profit by stiffing poor people. The thing is he is the typical inhumane unfeeling corporate executive that follows the tenets of the mythical Wall Street Gordon Gekko. He commanded his employees to extort people for their last dollar in deceptive fees and interest on small payday loans. People would end up paying many times the loan amount.
As usual, the documentary told more of Tucker’s story to make him seem sympathetic and gave him a platform to make it seem the government bullied him. They gave the poor people some time but not as much as they did to this criminal. How many of those poor people committed suicide from the stress? How many lost their automobiles and trucks used for their income? How many could not send their kids to college?
Instead, we worried about Tucker losing his jet, race cars, $8 million Aspen home. Remember that it was all bought with extorted money. He got a 16-year sentence. He should have been put away to rot for the damage he caused to millions of Americans.
Ironically, I could make the same case for most executives in oil companies, retailers like Walmart, and many others. Because they live by the tenets of “whatever the market will bear,” “profit maximization for the employer,” and “bonus maximization for the executive,” many do just what Tucker did if only in ways that are legally based on the laws they commanded the politicians to write. What they do to those with the least as they enjoy the money of the people who they extorted (most times legally) should make the blood of good people boil.
As we rebuild from the current catastrophe, I hope that we get some “pelotas” and not allow neither the Republicans nor Democrats get away with passing corporate-centric laws. Some already must pay for the structure of the stimulus.
I need to get a bit technical here. We can use Modern Monetary theory to re-inflate the economy ensuring that we create socio-economic policies that put the average person first. Our spending then determines which corporations stay in business because they cater to us and not the other way around. If we open our minds and stop believing the patriarchal antiseptic slave indoctrination we are all living through we would acknowledge our worth and demand what we have all created. It is time for more than a rant.