"Last week, I met a girl from Buffalo. Why can’t I meet a girl from normal parents?"—Woody Allen, quoted in Phil Berger, The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics, Updated Edition (2000)
Forty years and counting after his “nightclub years,” when the Woodman cracked these and other jokes, Buffalo is demonstrating the truth of this particular one-liner in a way he could never have imagined.
Exhibit A: an Associated Press article from Tuesday on a burgeoning business in this sad-sack Rust Belt city: debt collection agencies. Tim Russert and beloved dad “Big Russ” must be turning over in their graves right now about what their favorite city has come to.
Reporters Carolyn Thompson and David B. Caruso point out that there are now approximately 110 collection agencies in the metropolitan area in western New York.
Outside of political-economics analyst Kevin Phillips, hardly anyone seems exorcised anymore by the fact that, because of the last three decades’ shift from a manufacturing to a financial-services economy, America has forgotten how to make things.
But maybe the Thompson-Caruso piece on how this has worked out in Buffalo will finally make citizens of this republic as angry as they should be. Consider the implications of this quote from David Polino, president of the Better Business Bureau of Upstate New York, explaining how the debt-collection business "is one of the industries that used to be Bethlehem Steel, the Chevy plant—all the places where you used to get out of high school and find employment 35 or 50 years ago”:
* The financial-services sector has created a parasitic economy through debt-collection agencies. Not only is America not making things anymore, but it’s taking money from its citizens and giving them heartburn in the process.
Forty years and counting after his “nightclub years,” when the Woodman cracked these and other jokes, Buffalo is demonstrating the truth of this particular one-liner in a way he could never have imagined.
Exhibit A: an Associated Press article from Tuesday on a burgeoning business in this sad-sack Rust Belt city: debt collection agencies. Tim Russert and beloved dad “Big Russ” must be turning over in their graves right now about what their favorite city has come to.
Reporters Carolyn Thompson and David B. Caruso point out that there are now approximately 110 collection agencies in the metropolitan area in western New York.
Outside of political-economics analyst Kevin Phillips, hardly anyone seems exorcised anymore by the fact that, because of the last three decades’ shift from a manufacturing to a financial-services economy, America has forgotten how to make things.
But maybe the Thompson-Caruso piece on how this has worked out in Buffalo will finally make citizens of this republic as angry as they should be. Consider the implications of this quote from David Polino, president of the Better Business Bureau of Upstate New York, explaining how the debt-collection business "is one of the industries that used to be Bethlehem Steel, the Chevy plant—all the places where you used to get out of high school and find employment 35 or 50 years ago”:
* The financial-services sector has created a parasitic economy through debt-collection agencies. Not only is America not making things anymore, but it’s taking money from its citizens and giving them heartburn in the process.
* The people who make the debt-collection business go, report Thompson and Caruso, have been frequently sued for methods that include “threatening debtors with phony lawsuits or trying to embarrass them by phoning employers and neighbors, both illegal under federal law.” Sounds to me like one white-collar step removed from loan-sharking.
* The tax dollars of you, me, and our fellow citizens were used to tighten the grip of this beast upon us. Four Buffalo collection agencies received a big boost with $1.2 million in grants from a state development agency. That same agency gave $400,000 this past October to another collection company.
Over the years, when Woody Allen made a joke, it was called a one-liner. When Albany legislators and their counterparts in the other 49 states made jokes, they turned out to be laws. Nobody should be laughing at this one.
Over the years, when Woody Allen made a joke, it was called a one-liner. When Albany legislators and their counterparts in the other 49 states made jokes, they turned out to be laws. Nobody should be laughing at this one.
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