The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act – Law 101 for People Harassed or Sued by Debt Collectors
Posted by admin in Oppressive Law on August 15, 2011
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) is the centerpiece of legal protections for debtors against debt collectors. The law was passed in its essential form in 1977, and its goal was to protect debtors against the abuses of debt collectors.
Historical Background to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act
Before the act, the debt collection industry was routinely engaging in the most infamous sorts of behavior, from calling debtors at all hours of the day or night and subjecting them to streams of abuse, to discussing their debt with children, neighbors, and employers. Debt collectors frequently misrepresented themselves as attorneys and often threatened legal action which they were powerless to initiate. And they often attempted to, and did, collect debts that either never existed or were long unenforceable because of statutes of limitation or bankruptcy.
Whatever the staid spokespeople of the debt collection industry may say, this is the background of their industry. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 U.S.C. Section 1692, et seq., was enacted to put a stop to these extreme behaviors in 1977. Because the people intended to be protected by the act are underrepresented by lawyers, and because of the explosion of debt litigation over the past decade, many of the old abuses still continue. Read the rest of this entry »
Natural Law and the Bill of Rights
Posted by admin in Natural law on August 15, 2011
Natural Law is the rights and obligations said to be derived from an authority higher than the state. They are arrived at from experience, mans nature and ability to reason. They are the group of ethics that people use to run their individual lives and interactions with other people.They do not necessarily have a connection to government or the courts. In the Judeo-Christian view Natural Law is defined by conscience,common sense and reason. It is said to be an innate way all people have in knowing right from wrong.
Much of the British Common Law contains elements of Natural Law and of course the American Common Law is almost entirely based on British Common Law. Governing a state cannot be done by strict application of laws based only on a common morality.The various different interpretations and emphasizes would make this impossible.It should be used as an asset in running a government and society. The civil laws should conform to the basic tenets and understandings of Natural Law. Read the rest of this entry »
Morality Through Narrative: The Role of Folk and Fairy Tales
As children, we read stories for many reasons:
to have some quality quiet-time with a parent;
to begin to learn how to read;
to expand our capacity for visualization; and
to discover the world-beyond-our-world.
Beyond those rationales, we should also consider the kind of stories we are told – after all, children’s tales have a very distinctive character, as genres go, that are created with a very special goal in mind. Given this design, perhaps the most important reason we are read children’s stories – as opposed to, for example, magazine articles or instruction manuals – is that, through this medium, we are taught two crucial elements of how to get along, those being:
morality; and
our shared constructs of being (also known as archetypes).
Morality through narrative is not a new concept. Young girls and boys have been taught the elementary concepts of right and wrong through the stories that they were told for a very long time. Cautionary tales, such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ do not hide the fact that they are aimed at giving their audience the vicarious learning opportunity to, respectively, avoiding associating with bad people and lying.
The moral sentiments expressed repeated in illustrated stories for the children of the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries are more subtle in content but no less influential in shaping the behaviour of girls and boy by the consequence of their sheer number. One such tale is ‘Rosebud’ collected by the Brothers Grimm – known in modern times as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ – which communicates that every good girl has a prince ‘out there’ waiting to find and save her. Read the rest of this entry »