Masters of Death

by Evan

History is replete with cruelty, yet we seem incapable of shocking one another with its mention. The impact of a specific story of undue suffering leaves a mark, but on whom, and under what circumstances, remains uncertain—uncertain in any way that might guide us toward clear resolutions or the avoidance of suffering in some moral form. I take this to be true of humanity, or of any population within a district, city, or collective we might belong to. I don’t yet know how to properly assess the importance of Greek tragedy, its cathartic effect, or the social function it served, any more than I feel compelled to comment on its counterpart in the perverse spectacle of public capital punishment, or the codes, glee, or grim necessity driving prison guards and military personnel to inflict beatings or torture in relative privacy. The point is that, outside of artistic redemption or intentional extremes, most of us are agents of death—often, but also mere facilitators of it. We all have a job to do. The closer that job aligns with our immediate goals, the farther we are from that death or suffering, padding our own bank accounts to avoid the same destruction—or perhaps, the closer to it. It would be unfair to label a grocery clerk an agent of death for ringing up food that might clog a customer’s arteries and contribute to their demise. There is an element of choice, but also the indirectness of facilitating death. Of entropy. What can we say of the owner of a liquor store in the heart of an urban hellscape? I’m sure it depends.

I pay tribute to Moloch in my own compartmentalized way. I help compensate eligible claimants in class action lawsuits. You could call this a good deed, or at least better than bad. That would be fair, perhaps even true, to an extent. But once a settlement or judgment is reached, the defendant is obligated to hire us to fulfill the claims. At this point, one notices the larger machinery at work. Ultimately, I work for the clients, not their claimants. I am employed by a company called Claims Fulfillment, serving hundreds of clients—banks, corporations, and companies across industries. These clients have either been ruled against in court for wrongdoing or deny all allegations of misconduct, liability, or fault, yet agree to pay a settlement. My job at Claims Fulfillment is to service these claims, mailing checks to households, arranging digital payments like PayPal or Venmo, or providing benefits such as gift cards or credit monitoring in cases like data breaches.

For several years, I was the specialist for a client, Big Bank, handling seven or eight active cases at a time, each with distinct case names. One amusing overlap between two contracts stood out for the confusion it could generate. One was a voluntary remediation effort by Big Bank to compensate consumers while a legal case was ongoing; the other was the settlement reached in the actual case. One might speculate that the remediation was partly to curry favor with the judge, but ultimately, both voluntary and court-ordered payments were issued. Many claimants were due compensation from both initiatives. How many understood that these were separate efforts, arising from both extra-legal and legal causes? No one could know for sure, but I suspect most didn’t grasp the distinction, beyond eventually realizing they had to send two different emails to secure their full due.

Across all our clients, I’ve sifted through tens of thousands of emails and digitized correspondence from claimants, once customers caught in their nets of predation. The pool of those eligible for compensation is always smaller than those nets, due to data-entry errors, untraceable addresses, or claimants who die before receiving payment. Sometimes their heirs can be compensated, if they have the necessary documentation—which they often don’t. Many casualties get stuck in the bureaucratic machinery, hindered by the literacy and resources it demands. Unlike real pipes, this does not halt the flow of correspondence. Some of that correspondence has arrested me, and some still does. The two Big Bank contracts I mentioned involved car purchases financed by the bank, where Big Bank added its own affiliated car insurance to the deal—unknown, unrequested, and excluded from the monthly payment prospectus. I received letters from mothers detailing years of horror after their cars were repossessed due to payments they never agreed to make, forcing them to walk their children to school, lose their jobs for repeated tardiness, and endure further tragic cascades of events I can’t fully recall. I read letters from those whose family relationships were destroyed or deeply damaged because co-signers—siblings, sons, or daughters—were assumed to have betrayed them, when it was the bank’s doing. There were also cases where desperation stemmed not from the violation itself but from the broader economic crisis, with claimants needing compensation urgently—whether for a child’s brain surgery or to avoid eviction—but unable to wait for Claims Fulfillment’s processing time.

Processing this work is a mundane task. The lubrication of mundane tasks lies in prioritizing their function, whether that’s speed, completing as many tasks as possible, or focusing on the singular goal of each task. One couldn’t get through them efficiently without these overriding goals, which exist because of the quotas tied to our wages. Of course, I know you understand this, because I’m writing to you, and because I’ve talked to you. I’ve talked to many.

I’ve even talked to Joy, whom I met at a bar called Momo’s in Portland, Oregon. She, too, has served Moloch, but more directly. She now works in collections for a community credit union and recently expressed that she’s sick of it all—perhaps the collections work, perhaps banking in general. She once worked for Big Bank, as I learned when we met again. Working in Big Bank’s collections department is no easy psychological task. If reviewing claimants’ correspondence for compensation is challenging, I can’t imagine what it was like working for Big Bank during the height of their lawsuits. But I don’t need to speculate.

Joy did what she could for Big Bank. She predated. This included calling neighbors of delinquent borrowers to ask them to leave notes on their cars, urging a call to the collections line. It seems outrageous that a bank would instruct its staff to breach such boundaries, but given that Big Bank also created false accounts under members’ names, it’s not surprising. One debtor Joy pursued had taken out a loan on their mortgage. Given it was a loan, not the mortgage itself, and considering Joy’s broader testimony, it’s likely Big Bank pressured the loan’s initiation. This occurred in 2010, well after the General Financial Crisis began. The husband in the household lost his job in the downturn and could have continued making both mortgage and loan payments had the crisis—partly precipitated by banks like Big Bank—not cost him his employment.

Joy’s employment context adds further clarity. With a roster of collections to handle and considering the volume of Big Bank’s violations—evidenced by Claims Fulfillment’s multiple cases, each involving 3 to 8 million dollars across millions of claimants—Joy was likely collecting on hundreds of debtors weekly in 2010. She called one particular debtor each week, inquiring about selling personal possessions, like records and CDs. But one call ended all conversation. The husband had just killed himself—perhaps the day before, perhaps that very day. After the call with the grieving wife, Joy went across the street, bought a bottle of liquor and a pack of cigarettes, drank and smoked on the sidewalk for an hour, vomited, then walked back into Big Bank and quit.

Eventually, she found another job in collections, this time with a community bank, which she says is far less predatory. But by all accounts, things move in cycles—employment, debt, wealth accumulation. Unless we can confront those cycles, or precisely because we can, most of us will remain agents of death, often, but also mere facilitators of it. We all have a job to do.