The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

All this extraordinary behavior never took place a few decades ago. Credit card companies almost never sued delinquent cardholders, particularly those with small balances. It simply wasn’t economical for companies to devote any resources at all to chasing after a thousand dollars here and there. But as time passed, and the machinery of collections became more streamlined and brutal, we reached the current state of affairs. Now a Chase bank executive can sit in an office in San Antonio and with a few brief keystrokes transfer the right to seize the salary and automobile of a stranger in Chicago or Newark to some random company in Louisiana. At one point in time that process also required significant legal due diligence and the transfer of documentation, but executives soon realized that in the overwhelmed modern court system, simply attesting to having the right documentation works just as well as really having it. This is the same realization that struck Bank of America when it found that saying it had foreclosure documents was almost as good as having them—and the same one that touched process servers at American Legal Process, who found that claiming to have delivered a summons was almost as good as (and certainly cheaper than) actually doing it.