FREE THOUGHTS

OPINIONS WE
COULDN'T KEEP
TO OURSELVES




Reach Out and Scam Someone

It all began innocently enough. A dinner-time call from an MCI telemarketer asking me if I was "totally satisfied" with my current long-distance company and wouldn't I like to switch? (Well, come to think of it, the heavy breathing on my phone-sex calls did sound a bit fuzzy.)

She asked me where I called the most and promised to send me a list of comparative rates for those cities. Since one of the few liberties we enjoy as citizens of this fair land is the power of the purse in the commercial marketplace, I asked how much she would pay us to switch. She responded coyly, "Boy, you get right down to business don't you?"
Several weeks later the list of comparative rates arrived. Few of the rates were for cities that we call, and I had no idea how those rates compare per minute with our current carrier. I threw it away. So much for surfing the free-market tel-com wave.
Several more weeks passed. We then got a call from our long-distance carrier telling us we had been switched to MCI - and would we please switch back? In industry parlance, we had been "slammed." I know this happens all the time and MCI did this to us before in another city. I got pissed. We switched back and when the bill arrived from US West with the MCI portion attached, I refused to pay the MCI calls. (Strangely, the MCI portion listed my calls, but the mysterious name "Awse A Furiah" appeared on top.)
I called US West, which acts as MCI's "billing agent," and said that we would not pay MCI. Not our problem, said US West. Call MCI. I called MCI and demanded that they eat the charges since they stole our business without proper authorization. No-can-do, said MCI, but we'll re-rate the calls as per your other carrier's rates. Could be higher, could be lower, who knows? I got more pissed. "But you stole our business!" I protested. She got a US West representative from Portland on the line, who backed me up, and reminded her - "Isn't this all about making the customer happy?" The MCI rep checked with her supervisor: Sorry, can't credit the charges. The US West woman told me that she would give me the name of the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission and I should take my complaint there. I did.
Several weeks later I got a call from the commission. The complaint was all too familiar, she said, but according to Federal Communications Commission rules, the consumer must still pay for their charges regardless of how their business was obtained. In other words, tough luck.
Meanwhile, we began to worry that MCI would "slam" our credit. The calls still appeared on our US West bill. MCI sent us a letter saying, "Through our investigation we have denied your request for credit..." We paid the bill. The credit houses are not understanding in this respect; they don't care how you get a ding. Once you get a ding, no student loan, no house loan, no happy middle-class life on credit.
The moral of the story: It ain't a free market. Your business can be legally stolen. Just hang up on telemarketers. Deregulation is a scam and the FCC needs to be slapped around so that it holds the carriers financially responsible for their incompetence and malfeasance.

-Eric Nelson

New Hope for Battered Women

What would you do in a STATE OF EMERGENCY? Drink extra sips of the water you stored in the basement after the San Francisco earthquake? Share with your neighbors, hoard it all for yourself? What if a STATE OF EMERGENCY were to be declared, one that had been determined to be necessary for the "immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety" and you didn't know because newspapers and TV programs failed to let you know it? Here's how it could, and did, happen:
Substitute House Bill 1343, voted into law, would ensure that any woman convicted of murdering her spouse before July 1989 could petition for a reduced prison sentence - if she could prove a pattern of physical and/or sexual abuse by her spouse against her or her children and the murder was in response to that abuse.
The bill was, in its own language, "declaring an emergency" in the epidemic of wife and child abuse in this country - a declaration of emergency largely unacknowledged by city media.
HB 1343 passed on March 16, 1993. A March 7, 1993, Seattle Times article on the status of major bills before the Legislature mentioned that the bill would allow battered women convicted of murder before July 23, 1989, to receive reduced sentences. In a May 9, 1993, "List of Winners," HB 1343 merits a sentence, and that without mention of the bill's emergency status.
A mere 5-1/4 pages long, this remarkable bill provides the legal groundwork for the battered person defense, deemed "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety ... and shall take effect immediately."
The nation's first case to use the premise of a battered-person syndrome was in Yakima. Peter Schneider, 25, received a reduced charge and sentence in the murder of his former employer, whom Schneider claims he killed because he forced Schneider into unwanted oral and anal sex. The February 1993 verdict predates the acquittal of penis-lopping abused wife Lorena Bobbitt.
She had that PMS: Putting up with Men's Shit. Ms. Bobbitt was sentenced to an insane asylum for observation, evaluation, treatment and/or an attitude adjustment. Mr. John Wayne Bobbitt was not sentenced in similar fashion, probably because of the general sentiment that he'd already paid for his crime. There's all kind of sniggering jokes about it and people seem to think it's some kind of feminist wet dream.
The Bobbitt verdict had nothing to do with any of that. Fed up with the abuse, a battered woman struck back, ultimately, at the lack of existing public concern over the fate of women in such desperate circumstances - failure compounded by a borderline cover-up regarding the one piece of legislation offering a way out for these women.

- Andrea Helm

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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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