Recently, my mom was bilked out of what was to her a large sum of money - $365.00.  True this is not as much as some people lost in Bernie Maddoff’s ponzi-scheme, but it was a lot to her and she was entitled to it.  You see my mom, who is elderly and lives on a fixed income, moved from her apartment recently because her landlord constantly raised her rent.  The apartment mom moved into was a smaller, cheaper apartment that takes only a fixed percentage of her income.  Mom’s former landlord promised that she would refund her deposit after deducting from it the cost of cleaning the apartment.  The letter they sent showed the deduction for the cleaning cost and the remainder owed mom which was $365.00.  (At this point I should tell you that my mother is a germaphobe and a constant neatener.  I doubt that any germ could have lived through her tenancy.)  At first her former landlord claimed that she mailed my mother a check.  Mom checked -- she did not.  I then wrote the landlord and told her that if she had actually sent a check to simply cancel it and mail another live check.  They did send a check, it bounced and then mom had to pay bank penalty fees as well as having been deprived of the original $365.00.  We contacted them for months and received no answer.  Conclusion:  This company was determined to deprive a little old lady of that extra money.
 
Now I realize that to many of you reading this $365.00 may not seem like a lot of money but to mom it is.  Let’s see --- for her it was several months worth of groceries or a good portion of a month’s rent in her new apartment or travel expenses to visit her grandson, my nephew, in the adjoining state.  (He has multiple sclerosis and does not travel well.)  It would also have defrayed some of the cost of the cocktail of medications that the elderly are often burdened with having to buy.  So I see the money as not an insignificant amount of money.  Her not having the money deprived her of being able to have used it towards those basic necessities.  One can either be weakened by defeat or hardened by it.  I had the feeling that after a lifetime of such defeats in her seventy-eight years my mom felt the like “what’s the use.”  I felt angry and frustrated that I could not protect her from such scumbags.  I could feel for the first time how she must have felt on those occasions when she could not protect me as I was growing up against all of life’s schemers, bullies and leeches.
 
Of course, this sort of thing happens everyday in our society with much greater sums of money and with more at stake than with mom‘s $365.00 but that does not make it right. Fair is fair.  This company made the calculation that the amount was too small for her to retain a lawyer to help.  They gambled that our state’s legal aid service, though free, is under-funded and overworked and would have had hundreds of consumer cases ahead of her of a similar nature.  It knew that the Better Business Bureau has no enforcement powers and that consumer complaints take months to resolve - when they are resolved.  They knew these gambles were likely to pay off for them and they did.

Her situation made me think of all the powers that be, the corporations etc., who know that their size, their ferocity, their teams of lawyers, their political lobbyist and their knowledge of the system will always give them an insurmountable advantage against the little guy or gal.  These are the Maddoffs of the world who laugh at the rest of us and see our fight as quixotic.  These are the companies who move their businesses overseas to improve their profit margin by employing cheap labor.  These are people like my former employer who, knowing that lay offs were imminent, had us working overtime and on weekends to finish up as much work as possible only to spring on 25 of us the news of our layoffs with only two days notice.  These are the health care industry giants who gathered together and shipped people across the country this summer to work against their own interest by disrupting town hall meetings.  They are the ones who turned forums for civil discourse into the equivalent of soccer hooliganism.  They then mask these movements as being populist all in the name of the almighty dollar.  These are the people who exploit the personal fears and prejudices or the vulnerabilities and insecurities of the masses.

They make the bet that we are too stupid or trusting or too preoccupied with life’s other problem’s to fight back.  Or perhaps they know that we each grow a little weaker with every defeat that they or someone like them hands us.  They are the house and they seldom lose.