By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Lately, I’ve been dealing with yet another corporate giant in an effort to break through yet another stone wall of the sort that has been constructed in the last few decades to protect corporations, like the mighty fiefdoms they’ve become (if not downright empires). Before getting to the subject at hand, here’s a little bit of history. Let’s start with the following quote:

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Does this sound like Al Gore, perhaps? Or maybe Ralph Nader?

Guess again. That quote is from Abraham Lincoln; in 1864 when he was also fighting to save the Union as well as fighting the railroad monopolies he had once represented himself, as a young lawyer. He would still have been living, but for Booth, in 1886 to see possibly the most devastating court decision in American history: the ruling called Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific. Until then, only “We the People” were protected by the Bill of Rights, and the governments the people elected could regulate corporations as they wished. But with this ruling in the Supreme Court, corporations gained personhood. And as “persons” they were given all the rights of “We the People,” and were thus able to demand all the rights of any “person” and thus end government restraints on their behavior—and on their growth (there’s no law against being fat and greedy, for example. Or even against being the neighborhood bully, so long as nobody catches you, and who will if you have your own army, air force and marines?). Then in the 1970s, more Supreme Court rulings awarded corporations Fourth Amendment safeguards against warrantless regulatory searches, Fifth Amendment double jeopardy protection, and the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury. Then they went further: the executives of these corporations became essentially exempt from the very same restraints that we common people are under, such as being held liable for our actions. All these new corporate “civil rights” blunted the impact of the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Act, which were enacted to protect workers, consumers, and the environment from these same corporations, but now those corporations were essentially above the law. (Courtesy of Tom Stites in UUWorld, 2003)

Since then they have also won court battles that awarded them First Amendment guarantees of political speech, commercial speech, and the negative free speech right not to be associated with the speech of others. So they can spend $10 million to say anything they want, true or false, and not be held accountable (and feel free to shout back all you want, as if they care). Which brings me to the corporation of the week, Sprint.

I chose Sprint back in early 2007 because they had the best deal of any cell phone company at the time, at least for my purposes: free calls after 7 p.m. (the competition all had free calls only after 9 p.m.). But I had other problems with them: strange charges on my bills for services I didn’t want or use like text messages I didn’t send (I don’t use them at all) and internet browsing, which wasn’t even an option on my phone. Dealing with them was like shouting at a stonewall, an increasingly common complaint when it comes to customer service nationwide, which also matches my current ongoing frustrations in dealing with Wells Fargo, a corporation that was around in Lincoln’s time.

Earlier this year, I had had enough. I had been getting overtures from another wireless server, which happens to support causes I believe in, particularly the environment, called Credo. Credo offered to pay the cancellation penalty if I would switch servers, and then sweetened the deal with a $10 a month discount the first year. I took the bait. All I had to do was cancel my Sprint service.

If only it was so easy. Sprint doesn’t like people who cancel their service, it seems. So breaking up with them is like breaking up with a girlfriend (or boyfriend) who refuses to take no for an answer. Finally I turned to Credo and said, “you do it,” meaning they should be my divorce lawyer if they wanted my business. They weren’t pleased. The upshot of it all is that Sprint sent me a “final” bill with no detail and no itemization, for $318. This was supposed to include a $200 cancellation fee.

So I paid the $200 and asked Sprint to please send an itemized bill showing what was for what (apparently there were surcharges to the cancellation fee, sort of like a tax on a tax, but they wouldn’t tell me exactly what they were).

No itemized bill was in the offing. Instead, came a nice letter from a collection agency, demanding the “balance due” of $218, with a friendly threat of new penalties. Again I called Sprint and asked for an itemized final bill, without which I couldn’t get my reimbursement from Credo. After a 40-minute runaround I got someone who promised to send one, for an additional $5 “copying charge.” I protested. “I never got it in the first place, so it’s not a copy,” I insisted.

I’m still waiting. I hope the collection agency is as patient as I am. At least I’ve got Credo, though. If not their $200 reimbursement.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.