Yearly Archives: 2012

This series is by Patrick Sahr, a Naked Capitalism reader and a former debt collector.

[Matt here]: This series is running because it’s important to understand the culture of debt collectors, who are increasingly a form of policing in our society.

Mixed Messages: High Turnover is bad, but it’s Music To the Collection Agency Owner’s Ears

Collection agencies are filled with a variety of people from different backgrounds like any other occupation.  Many are decent and hard-working.  Despite the popular conception that only the hateful and unpleasant seek employment as a debt collector, there are many in the industry who are honorable and kind.  They are capable of eking out a fair living under difficult circumstances in a local economy of dwindling opportunity.

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller

Neil Barofsky’s new memoir Bailout, is not just a great read, it’s also a very important story about what happened after the financial crisis. Barofsky, who was the Special Inspector General for TARP, was in a vantage point to view the entirety of the Obama policy apparatus, from the use of TARP to pad bank balance sheets to Treasury’s PPIP program to the reorganization of the auto industry to the housing crisis. And he doesn’t disappoint, packing the story full of flashy anecdotes which give more than any book I’ve read a sense of what it’s like to be in DC in a powerful position where your goal is not to get along with the actors controlling the status quo. The book paints the atmosphere in DC’s melange of agencies, bureaucracies, and Congressional halls as a mix between the drudgery and petty bureaucracy of Office Space and the world-cleaving tension of Too Big to Fail. As a Congressional staffer, I worked a bit with Barofsky’s office, so I’m going to give a slightly different perspective on the book than what you might have read elsewhere. You see, what very few have picked up on, even those who liked this book, is that it’s essentially a story about the importance of Congressional oversight in reigning in corruption, and the problems of our imperial Presidency.

This series is by Patrick Sahr, a Naked Capitalism reader and a former debt collector.

Admittedly, my perspective on the Great Recession is especially negative.  My excuse is that I’m from Buffalo, the nation’s third poorest city, where I’ve set fire to my career in the miserable business of debt collections.  I have no future business plan in place other than avoiding the grim, dull and brutal world of third party debt collection.    The whole experience has given me a seemingly incurable case of existential paralysis, where the future appears bleaker than the past and the past was pretty bleak.   From this vantage point, while shopping for careers, it appears the entire economy has adopted the characteristics of the collection agency: rude, short-sighted, greedy, corrupt and pathetic.

The clipped nature of customer relations, the constricting focus on short-term profits and the sarcastic vulturing of remaining wealth have long been features of the collections industry in good times and bad.  Now we see these features in the “race to the bottom” with cost-cutting regional airlines and in the arbitrary fees assigned to our cable and electric bills.  Is it only in a recession where these features of corporate behavior divine themselves in other industries?

We are in national political convention season, a strange time where fifteen thousand media, political insiders, and protesters descend on two different cities without any formal reason for doing so. Delegates aren’t going to choose anything of substance – the party platforms are irrelevant and the candidates are selected beforehand. There’s no news being made, […]

By lambert strether.

Nathan Pim of Food Not Bombs (twitter) contacted Naked Capitalism because of the convention coverage we’ve been doing, and thought that Naked Capitalism readers might be interested in hearing from somebody directly on the ground with Occupy about what’s going on in Tampa, so I arranged to interview him. Once again, Stephen Malagodi agreed to handle it, and The Unknown Transcriptionist agreed to transcribe.

We edited the transcript very lightly, because we wanted Nathan’s voice to come through. As I read along, and started tallying all the people Nathan’s been connecting with, it struck me: He’s a… He’s a community organizer, isn’t he? I mean, not a fake one. In so many ways the transcript is one answer to the question asked by several contributors yesterday on this thread: What actions can we take? Well, Nathan’s answer is to feed people (“sharing”). And actions that flow from that.

The transcript isn’t brief, but there’s a lot of local color and great detail from the ground that I haven’t read anywhere else.