While I am a big fan of the film, the last samurai, while watching it, there were a lot of parallels between history and real life, I was curious about the link and dug a little further. The Meji restoration in Japan was an interesting historical point in Japan’s history. The story of the last samurai also draws on those parallels.
I found the story of Jules Brunet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Brunet
Jules Brunet was sent to Japan to train their military in Western tactics before fighting for the samurai against Meiji Imperialists during the Boshin War.
Not many people know the true story of The Last Samurai, the sweeping Tom Cruise epic of 2003. His character, the noble Captain Algren, was actually primarily based on a real person: the French officer Jules Brunet.
Brunet was sent to Japan to train soldiers on how to use modern weapons and tactics. He later chose to stay and fight alongside the Tokugawa samurai in their resistance against Emperor Meiji and his move to modernize Japan.
But how much of this reality is represented in the blockbuster?
The True Story Of The The Last Samurai: The Boshin War
Japan of the 19th century was an isolated nation. Contact with foreigners was largely suppressed. But everything changed in 1853 when American naval commander Matthew Perry appeared in Tokyo’s harbor with a fleet of modern ships.
Wikimedia CommonsA painting of samurai rebel troops done by none other than Jules Brunet. Notice how the samurai have both western and traditional equipment, a point of the true story of The Last Samurai not explored in the movie.
For the first time ever, Japan was forced to open itself up to the outside world. The Japanese then signed a treaty with the U.S. the following year, the Kanagawa Treaty, which allowed American vessels to dock in two Japanese harbors. America also established a consul in Shimoda.
The event was a shock to Japan and consequently split its nation on whether it should modernize with the rest of the world or remain traditional. Thus followed the Boshin War of 1868-1869, also known as the Japanese Revolution, which was the bloody result of this split.
On one side was Japan’s Meiji Emperor, backed by powerful figures who sought to Westernize Japan and revive the emperor’s power. On the opposing side was the Tokugawa Shogunate, a continuation of the military dictatorship comprised of elite samurai which had ruled Japan since 1192.
Although the Tokugawa shogun, or leader, Yoshinobu, agreed to return power to the emperor, the peaceful transition turned violent when the Emperor was convinced to issue a decree that dissolved the Tokugawa house instead.
The Tokugawa shogun protested which naturally resulted in war. As it happens, 30-year-old French military veteran Jules Brunet was already in Japan when war broke out.
Wikimedia Commons Samurai of the Choshu clan during the Boshin War in late 1860s Japan.
Jules Brunet’s Role In The True Story Of The Last Samurai
Born on January 2, 1838, in Belfort, France, Jules Brunet followed a military career specializing in artillery. He first saw combat during the French intervention in Mexico from 1862 to 1864 where he was awarded the Légion d’honneur — the highest French military honor.
Wikimedia Commons Jules Brunet in full military dress in 1868.
Then, in 1867, Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate requested help from Napoleon III’s Second French Empire in modernizing their armies. Brunet was sent as the artillery expert alongside a team of other French military advisors.
The group was to train the shogunate’s new troops on how to use modern weapons and tactics. Unfortunately for them, a civil war would break out just a year later between the shogunate and the imperial government.
On January 27, 1868, Brunet and Captain André Cazeneuve — another French military advisor in Japan — accompanied the shogun and his troops on a march to Japan’s capital city of Kyoto.
The shogun’s army was to deliver a stern letter to the Emperor to reverse his decision to strip the Tokugawa shogunate, or the longstanding elite, of their titles and lands.
However, the army was not allowed to pass and troops of the Satsuma and Choshu feudal lords — who were the influence behind the Emperor’s decree — were ordered to fire.
Thus began the first conflict of the Boshin War known as The Battle of Toba-Fushimi. Although the shogun’s forces had 15,000 men to the Satsuma-Choshu’s 5,000, they had one critical flaw: equipment.
While most of the imperial forces were armed with modern weapons such as rifles, howitzers, and Gatling guns, many of the shogunate’s soldiers were still armed with outdated weapons such as swords and pikes, as was the samurai custom.
The battle lasted for four days, but was a decisive victory for the imperial troops, leading many Japanese feudal lords to switch sides from the shogun to the emperor. Brunet and the Shogunate’s Admiral Enomoto Takeaki fled north to the capital city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) on the warship Fujisan.
Living With The Samurai
Around this time, foreign nations — including France — vowed neutrality in the conflict. Meanwhile, the restored Meiji Emperor ordered the French advisor mission to return home, since they had been training the troops of his enemy — the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Wikimedia Commons The full samurai battle regalia a Japanese warrior would wear to war. 1860.
While most of his peers agreed, Brunet refused. He chose to stay and fight alongside the Tokugawa. The only glimpse into Brunet’s decision comes from a letter he wrote directly to French Emperor Napoleon III. Aware that his actions would be seen as either insane or treasonous, he explained that:
“A revolution is forcing the Military Mission to return to France. Alone I stay, alone I wish to continue, under new conditions: the results obtained by the Mission, together with the Party of the North, which is the party favorable to France in Japan. Soon a reaction will take place, and the Daimyos of the North have offered me to be its soul. I have accepted, because with the help of one thousand Japanese officers and non-commissioned officers, our students, I can direct the 50,000 men of the confederation.
The Fall Of The Samurai
In Edo, the imperial forces were victorious again largely in part to Tokugawa Shogun Yoshinobu’s decision to submit to the Emperor. He surrendered the city and only small bands of shogunate forces continued to fight back.
Wikimedia Commons The port of Hakodate in ca. 1930. The Battle of Hakodate saw 7,000 Imperial troops fight 3,000 shogun warriors in 1869.
Despite this, the commander of the shogunate’s navy, Enomoto Takeaki, refused to surrender and headed north in hopes to rally the Aizu clan’s samurai.
They became the core of the so-called Northern Coalition of feudal lords who joined the remaining Tokugawa leaders in their refusal to submit to the Emperor.
The Coalition continued to fight bravely against imperial forces in Northern Japan. Unfortunately, they simply didn’t have enough modern weaponry to stand a chance against the Emperor’s modernized troops. They were defeated by November 1868.
Around this time, Brunet and Enomoto fled north to the island of Hokkaido. Here, the remaining Tokugawa leaders established the Ezo Republic that continued their struggle against the Japanese imperial state.
By this point, it seemed as though Brunet had chosen the losing side, but surrender was not an option.
The last major battle of the Boshin War happened at the Hokkaido port city of Hakodate. In this battle that spanned half a year from December 1868 to June 1869, 7,000 Imperial troops battled against 3,000 Tokugawa rebels.
Wikimedia Commons French military advisors and their Japanese allies in Hokkaido. Back: Cazeneuve, Marlin, Fukushima Tokinosuke, Fortant. Front: Hosoya Yasutaro, Jules Brunet, Matsudaira Taro (vice-president of the Ezo Republic), and Tajima Kintaro.
Jules Brunet and his men did their best, but the odds were not in their favor, largely due to the technological superiority of the imperial forces.
Jules Brunet Escapes Japan
As a high-profile combatant of the losing side, Brunet was now a wanted man in Japan.
Fortunately, the French warship Coëtlogon evacuated him from Hokkaido just in time. He was then ferried to Saigon — at the time controlled by the French — and returned back to France.
Although the Japanese government demanded Brunet receive punishment for his support of the shogunate in the war, the French government did not budge because his story won the public’s support.
Instead, he was reinstated to the French Army after six months and participated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, during which he was taken prisoner during the Siege of Metz.
Later on, he continued to play a major role in the French military, participating in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.
Wikimedia CommonsJules Brunet had a long, successful military career after his time in Japan. He’s seen here (hat in hand) as Chief of Staff. Oct. 1, 1898.
Meanwhile, his former friend Enomoto Takeaki was pardoned and rose to the rank of vice-admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, using his influence to get the Japanese government to not only forgive Brunet but award him a number of medals, including the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun.
Over the next 17 years, Jules Brunet himself was promoted several times. From officer to general, to Chief of Staff, he had a thoroughly successful military career until his death in 1911. But he would be most remembered as one of the key inspirations for the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
Brunet’s daring, adventurous actions in Japan were one of the main inspirations for the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
In this film, Tom Cruise plays American Army officer Nathan Algren, who arrives in Japan to help train Meiji government troops in modern weaponry but becomes embroiled in a war between the samurai and the Emperor’s modern forces.
There are many parallels between the story of Algren and Brunet.
Both were Western military officers who trained Japanese troops in the use of modern weapons and ended up supporting a rebellious group of samurai who still used mainly traditional weapons and tactics. Both also ended up being on the losing side.
But there are many differences as well. Unlike Brunet, Algren was training the imperial government troops and joins the samurai only after he becomes their hostage.
Further, in the film, the samurai are sorely overmatched against the Imperials in regards to equipment. In the true story of The Last Samurai, however, the samurai rebels did actually have some western garb and weaponry thanks to the Westerners like Brunet who had been paid to train them.
Meanwhile, the storyline in the film is based on a slightly later period in 1877 once the emperor was restored in Japan following the fall of the shogunate. This period was called the Meiji Restoration and it was the same year as the last major samurai rebellion against Japan’s imperial government.
Wikimedia Commons In the true story of The Last Samurai, this final battle which is depicted in the film and shows Katsumoto/Takamori’s death, did actually happen. But it happened years after Brunet left Japan.
This rebellion was organized by the samurai leader Saigo Takamori, who served as the inspiration for The Last Samurai‘s Katsumoto, played by Ken Watanabe. In the true story of The Last Samurai, Watanabe’s character who resembles Takamori leads a great and final samurai rebellion called the final battle of Shiroyama. In the film, Watanabe’s character Katsumoto falls and in reality, so did Takamori.
This battle, however, came in 1877, years after Brunet had already left Japan.
More importantly, the film paints the samurai rebels as the righteous and honorable keepers of an ancient tradition, while the Emperor’s supporters are shown as evil capitalists who only care about money.
As we know in reality, the real story of Japan’s struggle between modernity and tradition was far less black and white, with injustices and mistakes on both sides.
The Real Motivations Of The Samurai
According to history professor Cathy Schultz, “Many samurai fought Meiji modernization not for altruistic reasons but because it challenged their status as the privileged warrior caste…The film also misses the historical reality that many Meiji policy advisors were former samurai, who had voluntarily given up their traditional privileges to follow a course they believed would strengthen Japan.”
You can read more here: https://allthatsinteresting.com/last-samurai-true-story-jules-brunet
In 1961, it officially became illegal to give someone a tattoo in New York City. But Thom deVita didn’t let this new restriction deter him from inking people. This ban existed till 1997.
What is the earliest evidence of tattoos?
In terms of tattoos on actual bodies, the earliest known examples were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of the Iceman from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old.
Can you describe the tattoos on the Iceman and their significance?
Following discussions with my colleague Professor Don Brothwell of the University of York, one of the specialists who examined him, the distribution of the tattooed dots and small crosses on his lower spine and right knee and ankle joints correspond to areas of strain-induced degeneration, with the suggestion that they may have been applied to alleviate joint pain and were therefore essentially therapeutic. This would also explain their somewhat ‘random’ distribution in areas of the body which would not have been that easy to display had they been applied as a form of status marker.
What is the evidence that ancient Egyptians had tattoos?
There’s certainly evidence that women had tattoos on their bodies and limbs from figurines c. 4000-3500 B.C. to occasional female figures represented in tomb scenes c. 1200 B.C. and in figurine form c. 1300 B.C., all with tattoos on their thighs. Also small bronze implements identified as tattooing tools were discovered at the town site of Gurob in northern Egypt and dated to c. 1450 B.C. And then, of course, there are the mummies with tattoos, from the three women already mentioned and dated to c. 2000 B.C. to several later examples of female mummies with these forms of permanent marks found in Greco-Roman burials at Akhmim.
What function did these tattoos serve? Who got them and why?
Because this seemed to be an exclusively female practice in ancient Egypt, mummies found with tattoos were usually dismissed by the (male) excavators who seemed to assume the women were of “dubious status,” described in some cases as “dancing girls.” The female mummies had nevertheless been buried at Deir el-Bahari (opposite modern Luxor) in an area associated with royal and elite burials, and we know that at least one of the women described as “probably a royal concubine” was actually a high-status priestess named Amunet, as revealed by her funerary inscriptions.
And although it has long been assumed that such tattoos were the mark of prostitutes or were meant to protect the women against sexually transmitted diseases, I personally believe that the tattooing of ancient Egyptian women had a therapeutic role and functioned as a permanent form of amulet during the very difficult time of pregnancy and birth. This is supported by the pattern of distribution, largely around the abdomen, on top of the thighs and the breasts, and would also explain the specific types of designs, in particular the net-like distribution of dots applied over the abdomen. During pregnancy, this specific pattern would expand in a protective fashion in the same way bead nets were placed over wrapped mummies to protect them and “keep everything in.” The placing of small figures of the household deity Bes at the tops of their thighs would again suggest the use of tattoos as a means of safeguarding the actual birth, since Bes was the protector of women in labor, and his position at the tops of the thighs a suitable location. This would ultimately explain tattoos as a purely female custom.
Who made the tattoos?
Although we have no explicit written evidence in the case of ancient Egypt, it may well be that the older women of a community would create the tattoos for the younger women, as happened in 19th-century Egypt and happens in some parts of the world today.
What instruments did they use?
It is possible that an implement best described as a sharp point set in a wooden handle, dated to c. 3000 B.C. and discovered by archaeologist W.M.F. Petrie at the site of Abydos may have been used to create tattoos. Petrie also found the aforementioned set of small bronze instruments c. 1450 B.C.—resembling wide, flattened needles—at the ancient town site of Gurob. If tied together in a bunch, they would provide repeated patterns of multiple dots.
These instruments are also remarkably similar to much later tattooing implements used in 19th-century Egypt. The English writer William Lane (1801-1876) observed, “the operation is performed with several needles (generally seven) tied together: with these the skin is pricked in a desired pattern: some smoke black (of wood or oil), mixed with milk from the breast of a woman, is then rubbed in…. It is generally performed at the age of about 5 or 6 years, and by gipsy-women.”
What did these tattoos look like?
Most examples on mummies are largely dotted patterns of lines and diamond patterns, while figurines sometimes feature more naturalistic images. The tattoos occasionally found in tomb scenes and on small female figurines which form part of cosmetic items also have small figures of the dwarf god Bes on the thigh area.
What were they made of? How many colors were used?
Usually a dark or black pigment such as soot was introduced into the pricked skin. It seems that brighter colors were largely used in other ancient cultures, such as the Inuit who are believed to have used a yellow color along with the more usual darker pigments.
What has surprised you the most about ancient Egyptian tattooing?
That it appears to have been restricted to women during the purely dynastic period, i.e. pre-332 B.C. Also the way in which some of the designs can be seen to be very well placed, once it is accepted they were used as a means of safeguarding women during pregnancy and birth.
Can you describe the tattoos used in other ancient cultures and how they differ?
Among the numerous ancient cultures who appear to have used tattooing as a permanent form of body adornment, the Nubians to the south of Egypt are known to have used tattoos. The mummified remains of women of the indigenous C-group culture found in cemeteries near Kubban c. 2000-15000 B.C. were found to have blue tattoos, which in at least one case featured the same arrangement of dots across the abdomen noted on the aforementioned female mummies from Deir el-Bahari. The ancient Egyptians also represented the male leaders of the Libyan neighbors c. 1300-1100 B.C. with clear, rather geometrical tattoo marks on their arms and legs and portrayed them in Egyptian tomb, temple and palace scenes.
The Scythian Pazyryk of the Altai Mountain region were another ancient culture which employed tattoos. In 1948, the 2,400 year old body of a Scythian male was discovered preserved in ice in Siberia, his limbs and torso covered in ornate tattoos of mythical animals. Then, in 1993, a woman with tattoos, again of mythical creatures on her shoulders, wrists and thumb and of similar date, was found in a tomb in Altai. The practice is also confirmed by the Greek writer Herodotus c. 450 B.C., who stated that amongst the Scythians and Thracians “tattoos were a mark of nobility, and not to have them was testimony of low birth.”
Accounts of the ancient Britons likewise suggest they too were tattooed as a mark of high status, and with “divers shapes of beasts” tattooed on their bodies, the Romans named one northern tribe “Picti,” literally “the painted people.”
Yet amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or “stigmata” as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as “belonging” either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to “disfigure that made in God’s image” and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373).
We have also examined tattoos on mummified remains of some of the ancient pre-Columbian cultures of Peru and Chile, which often replicate the same highly ornate images of stylized animals and a wide variety of symbols found in their textile and pottery designs. One stunning female figurine of the Naszca culture has what appears to be a huge tattoo right around her lower torso, stretching across her abdomen and extending down to her genitalia and, presumably, once again alluding to the regions associated with birth. Then on the mummified remains which have survived, the tattoos were noted on torsos, limbs, hands, the fingers and thumbs, and sometimes facial tattooing was practiced.
With extensive facial and body tattooing used among Native Americans, such as the Cree, the mummified bodies of a group of six Greenland Inuit women c. A.D. 1475 also revealed evidence for facial tattooing. Infrared examination revealed that five of the women had been tattooed in a line extending over the eyebrows, along the cheeks and in some cases with a series of lines on the chin. Another tattooed female mummy, dated 1,000 years earlier, was also found on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, her tattoos of dots, lines and hearts confined to the arms and hands.
Evidence for tattooing is also found amongst some of the ancient mummies found in China’s Taklamakan Desert c. 1200 B.C., although during the later Han Dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220), it seems that only criminals were tattooed.
Japanese men began adorning their bodies with elaborate tattoos in the late A.D. 3rd century.
The elaborate tattoos of the Polynesian cultures are thought to have developed over millennia, featuring highly elaborate geometric designs, which in many cases can cover the whole body. Following James Cook’s British expedition to Tahiti in 1769, the islanders’ term “tatatau” or “tattau,” meaning to hit or strike, gave the west our modern term “tattoo.” The marks then became fashionable among Europeans, particularly so in the case of men such as sailors and coal-miners, with both professions which carried serious risks and presumably explaining the almost amulet-like use of anchors or miner’s lamp tattoos on the men’s forearms.
What about modern tattoos outside of the western world?
Modern Japanese tattoos are real works of art, with many modern practioners, while the highly skilled tattooists of Samoa continue to create their art as it was carried out in ancient times, prior to the invention of modern tattooing equipment. Various cultures throughout Africa also employ tattoos, including the fine dots on the faces of Berber women in Algeria, the elaborate facial tattoos of Wodabe men in Niger and the small crosses on the inner forearms which mark Egypt’s Christian Copts.
What do Maori facial designs represent?
In the Maori culture of New Zealand, the head was considered the most important part of the body, with the face embellished by incredibly elaborate tattoos or ‘moko,’ which were regarded as marks of high status. Each tattoo design was unique to that individual and since it conveyed specific information about their status, rank, ancestry and abilities, it has accurately been described as a form of id card or passport, a kind of aesthetic bar code for the face. After sharp bone chisels were used to cut the designs into the skin, a soot-based pigment would be tapped into the open wounds, which then healed over to seal in the design. With the tattoos of warriors given at various stages in their lives as a kind of rite of passage, the decorations were regarded as enhancing their features and making them more attractive to the opposite sex.
Although Maori women were also tattooed on their faces, the markings tended to be concentrated around the nose and lips. Although Christian missionaries tried to stop the procedure, the women maintained that tattoos around their mouths and chins prevented the skin becoming wrinkled and kept them young; the practice was apparently continued as recently as the 1970s.
Why do you think so many cultures have marked the human body and did their practices influence one another?
In many cases, it seems to have sprung up independently as a permanent way to place protective or therapeutic symbols upon the body, then as a means of marking people out into appropriate social, political or religious groups, or simply as a form of self-expression or fashion statement.
Yet, as in so many other areas of adornment, there was of course cross-cultural influences, such as those which existed between the Egyptians and Nubians, the Thracians and Greeks and the many cultures encountered by Roman soldiers during the expansion of the Roman Empire in the final centuries B.C. and the first centuries A.D. And, certainly, Polynesian culture is thought to have influenced Maori tattoos.
As reports and images from European explorers’ travels in Polynesia reached Europe, the modern fascination with tattoos began to take hold. Although the ancient peoples of Europe had practiced some forms of tattooing, it had disappeared long before the mid-1700s. Explorers returned home with tattooed Polynesians to exhibit at world fairs, in lecture halls and in dime museums, to demonstrate the height of European civilization compared to the “primitive natives” of Polynesia. But the sailors on their ships also returned home with their own tattoos.
Native practitioners found an eager clientele among sailors and others visitors to Polynesia. Colonial ideology dictated that the tattoos of the Polynesians were a mark of their primitiveness. The mortification of their skin and the ritual of spilling blood ran contrary to the values and beliefs of European missionaries, who largely condemned tattoos. Although many forms of traditional Polynesian tattoo declined sharply after the arrival of Europeans, the art form, unbound from tradition, flourished on the fringes of European society.
In the United States, technological advances in machinery, design and color led to a unique, all-American, mass-produced form of tattoo. Martin Hildebrandt set up a permanent tattoo shop in New York City in 1846 and began a tradition by tattooing sailors and military servicemen from both sides of the Civil War. In England, youthful King Edward VII started a tattoo fad among the aristocracy when he was tattooed before ascending to the throne. Both these trends mirror the cultural beliefs that inspired Polynesian tattoos: to show loyalty and devotion, to commemorate a great feat in battle, or simply to beautify the body with a distinctive work of art.
The World War II era of the 1940s was considered the Golden Age of tattoo due to the patriotic mood and the preponderance of men in uniform. But would-be sailors with tattoos of naked women weren’t allowed into the navy and tattoo artists clothed many of them with nurses’ dresses, Native-American costumes or the like during the war. By the 1950s, tattooing had an established place in Western culture, but was generally viewed with distain by the higher reaches of society. Back alley and boardwalk tattoo parlors continued to do brisk business with sailors and soldiers. But they often refused to tattoo women unless they were twenty-one, married and accompanied by their spouse, to spare tattoo artists the wrath of a father, boyfriend or unwitting husband.
Today tattooing is recognized as a legitimate art form.
Today, tattooing is recognized as a legitimate art form that attracts people of all walks of life and both sexes. Each individual has his or her own reasons for getting a tattoo; to mark themselves as a member a group, to honor loved ones, to express an image of themselves to others. With the greater acceptance of tattoos in the West, many tattoo artists in Polynesia are incorporating ancient symbols and patterns into modern designs. Others are using the technical advances in tattooing to make traditional tattooing safer and more accessible to Polynesians who want to identify themselves with their culture’s past.
Humans have marked their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. These permanent designs—sometimes plain, sometimes elaborate, always personal—have served as amulets, status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs, adornments and even forms of punishment. Joann Fletcher, research fellow in the department of archaeology at the University of York in Britain, describes the history of tattoos and their cultural significance to people around the world, from the famous ” Iceman,” a 5,200-year-old frozen mummy, to today’s Maori.
It was interesting to learn about the etymology of “Daylight Robbery”- it really prompted me to dig deeper.
When William III was short of money, which he attempted to rectify by the introduction of the much-despised Window Tax. As the name suggests, this was a tax levied on the windows or window-like openings of a property. The details were much amended over time, but the tax was levied originally on all dwellings except cottages. The upper classes, having the largest houses, paid the most. Some wealthy individuals used their ability to pay as a mark of status and demonstrated their wealth by ostentatiously building homes with many windows.
What the Cavendish family, who owned Hardwick Hall (built 1590s), thought about it isn’t recorded. On the one hand, they had cause for complaint – the property was famous for its many windows and light and airy interiors, as celebrated in the rhyme: “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall”. On the other hand, they were extremely rich and well able to pay.
Taxes are rarely popular, but the Window Tax, which was considered to tax the very stuff of life, that is, light and air, was singled out for particular loathing. People went to great pains to avoid paying it and many windows were bricked up for that reason. Many examples of buildings with brick window panels, sometimes with painted-on trompe l’oeil windows, still survive.
The sight of such windows is so much part of the English architectural folk memory that the example pictured, of a recently built property in Poundbury, Dorset, appears to have been built with fake bricked-up windows, even through the tax itself is long since abolished.
So, that’s the case for the prosecution: the English were robbed of their daylight by the Window Tax. That’s daylight robbery in anyone’s book, so do we need to look any further for the origin of the phrase? Well, yes we do.
Let’s move to the 20th century for the case for the defence. The phrase isn’t known in print until 1916 in Hobson’s Choice, a comic play by Harold Brighouse. Even there the context doesn’t explicitly link it to unfair overcharging or the like. We have to wait until 1949 for a citation that is clearly related to a purchase, in Daniel Marcus Davin’s Roads from Home:
“I can never afford it, said his sister. It’s daylight robbery.”
The ‘Window Tax’ was a tax devised by King William III in the 1690s. It was levied on the windows or openings of a building.
The more windows a building had, the more tax they paid. It was essentially a progressive tax whereby the wealthier member of society paid the most as they tended to have larger houses and more windows on those houses.
Indeed, many rich individuals took paying the tax as a badge of honour. The greater tax they paid meant that they were seen as having more wealth and status. In fact, some houses were built with more windows for that specific purpose.
Theobroma Cocoa, food of the gods, had been consumed in Latin America since the Aztec and Mayan times in liquid form, it was the making of the milk chocolate bar that brought it into every person’s reach. Spanish colonisers got chocolate to Europe in 1528 from Mexico and it spread across the continent to reach England by the 1650s. It took another 200 years and an industrial revolution to make the first chocolate bar. J.S. Fry & Sons of Bristol, England made the first solid chocolate bar in 1847 and some 100 miles away in Birmingham, John Cadbury made his eponymous solid chocolate bar, by 1849. It took yet another two and a half decades for milk chocolate to be made, which made chocolate more palatable and pocket friendly. That development took place in Vevey, Switzerland.
Vevey too had become a hub for chocolate factories by the early 1800s. Francois-Louis Cailler started his factory in 1820. Kohler started his factory in 1830. Cailler’s son-in-law Daniel Peter started his factory in 1867, around the same time that his neighbour and friend Henri Nestle started his infant milk food business. Henri Nestle had a hand in the development of milk chocolate in 1875 by Daniel Peter, providing him with condensed milk.
Eventually, all three of them – Cailler and Peter and Kohler – became part of Nestle in 1929. Lindt initially worked at Kohler’s and then set up his chocolate factory in 1879, establishing his own brand. One of Lindt’s initial customers, Jean Tobler, opened his factory in 1899, which eventually launched ‘Toblerone’. Thus, by the turn of the 19th century, the Swiss had taken the lead in milk chocolates, helped in no small measure by a burgeoning dairy industry and the Swiss cow.
Cadbury made milk chocolate only in 1897. Its defining milk chocolate – Cadbury Dairy Milk – came out in 1905. Fry merged with Cadbury in 1919. Elsewhere in Europe, Cacao Barry (France) and Callebaut (Belgium) got into the chocolate business in 1911, while Godiva started in Belgium in 1926.
Across the pond, Milton S. Hershey developed his own formula for milk chocolate and made the Hershey bar in 1900. Frank Mars started his milk chocolate bar in the 1920s and his son, Forrest Sr, started M&M in 1940. Meiji in Japan launched its milk chocolate in 1926.
In the absence of non-disclosure agreements then, because milk chocolates were an innovative product, these food tech startups relied on secrecy and family ties to keep their formulae from being copied. Spying on each other was rampant as portrayed in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Even today Ferrero (started 1946) doesn’t allow cameras or tours in its factory. More than a century later, these brands and companies continue to dominate the $106 billion chocolate market.
Even as the world consumes chocolates worth $106 billion annually, the countries producing cocoa bean get only $8.6 billion – less than 10% of the consumer dollar. In fact, 60% of the worlds cocoa bean is produced in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Farmers growing cocoa beans there struggle for an income of $2/ day and are too poor to eat chocolates that are made from their crops. About 80% of the world’s cocoa, from the top five producing countries, flows to Europe and North America. The inequality in trade is complicated by the presence of middlemen known as trader-grinders. Out of the 4.6 million tonnes of annual cocoa beans production, just three companies – Cargill, Olam and Barry Callebaut – control 60% of the flow. Eight companies control more than 90% of it.
Half a century later, there is a trend of Fairtrade chocolates in the western world. European brands like Divine chocolates, in which a Ghanian farmer’s cooperative Kuapa Kokoo has a 20% stake, represent heart-warming initiatives.
Originally, John Doe was a sham name used to indicate any plaintiff in an action of ejectment (a legal action to regain property) in civil court. Richard Roe was the counterpart, to indicate the defendant. These fake names were used in delicate legal matters, a practice that was abolished in English law in 1852. Since then, John Doe has been used to indicate any man of unknown name, with Jane Doe used for females.
Under the legal terminology of Ancient Rome, the names “Numerius Negidius” and “Aulus Agerius” were used in relation to hypothetical defendants and plaintiffs.
The name “John Doe” (or “John Do”), “Richard Roe”, along with “John Roe”, were regularly invoked in English legal instruments to satisfy technical requirements governing standing and jurisdiction, beginning perhaps as early as the reign of England’s King Edward III (1327–1377).[8] Though the rationale behind the choices of Doe and Roe is unknown, there are many suggested folk etymologies. Other fictitious names for a person involved in litigation in medieval English law were “John Noakes” (or “Nokes”) and “John-a-Stiles” (or “John Stiles”). The Oxford English Dictionary states that John Doe is “the name given to the fictitious lessee of the plaintiff, in the (now obsolete in the UK) mixed action of ejectment, the fictitious defendant being called Richard Roe”.
This usage is mocked in the 1834 English song “John Doe and Richard Roe”:
Two giants live in Britain’s land,
John Doe and Richard Roe,
Who always travel hand in hand,
John Doe and Richard Roe.
Their fee-faw-fum’s an ancient plan
To smell the purse of an Englishman,
And, ‘ecod, they’ll suck it all they can,
John Doe and Richard Roe …
This particular use became obsolete in the UK in 1852:
As is well known, the device of involving real people as notional lessees and ejectors was used to enable freeholders to sue the real ejectors. These were then replaced by the fictional characters John Doe and Richard Roe. Eventually the medieval remedies were (mostly) abolished by the Real Property Limitation Act of 1833; the fictional characters of John Doe and Richard Roe by the Common Law Procedure Act 1852; and the forms of action themselves by the Judicature Acts 1873–75.” Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs v Meier and others (2009).
In the UK, usage of “John Doe” survives mainly in the form of John Doe injunction or John Doe order (see above).
8.02 If an unknown person has possession of the confidential personal information and is threatening to disclose it, a ‘John Doe’ injunction may be sought against that person. The first time this form of injunction was used since 1852 in the United Kingdom was in 2005 when lawyers acting for JK Rowling and her publishers obtained an interim order against an unidentified person who had offered to sell chapters of a stolen copy of an unpublished Harry Potter novel to the media.
The first word that I learnt from this research – sartorialists – derived from the word Sartorial (adj) that of or relating to clothing or style or manner of dress.
Textured, solid, striped, botanical, jacquard, geometric, 52 to 58 inches long, alternately withering or widening from 3112 to 5 inches, costing anywhere from three for $10 to $100 or more.
Why has this apparently useless piece of silk, or wool, or rayon, or polyester or even rubber (yes, there are Rubber-Necker Ties, “a recycled fashion statement for the eco-executive”) survived the swings of fashion for more than three centuries? Why is it still fit to be tied?
Fashion observers say the necktie survives because it is the one formal accessory in the male wardrobe that expresses personality, mood or inner character. The tie is that splash of color, that distinctive pattern, that statement of individuality that a man can make in the world of uniform pinstripes and plaids.
The tie has been seen as a form of male chest display, recalling the chest-pounding and puffing of our prehistoric ancestors. Or it can be viewed as the noose around the neck of the conformist white-collar worker, or the symbolic leash held by women who purchased more than 50 percent of the 105 million ties sold in the United States last year. Although most American men do not wear ties daily, U.S. neckware sales totaled $1.6 billion last year, with 70 percent made by American companies.
The necktie originated in the 17th century, during the 30 year war in France. King Louis XIII hired Croatian mercenaries who wore a piece of cloth around their neck as part of their uniform. While these early neckties did serve a function (tying the top of their jackets that is), they also had quite a decorative effect – a look that King Louis was quite fond of. In fact, he liked it so much that he made these ties a mandatory accessory for Royal gatherings, and – to honor the Croatian soldiers – he gave this clothing piece the name “La Cravate” – the name for necktie in French to this day.
International Necktie Day is celebrated on October 18 in Croatia and in various cities around the world, including in Dublin, Tübingen, Como, Tokyo, Sydney and other town
The Evolution of Modern Necktie
The early cravats of the 17th century have little resemblance to today’s necktie, yet it was a style that stayed popular throughout Europe for over 200 years. The tie as we know it today did not emerge until the 1920s but since then has undergone many (often subtle) changes.
In the 2nd century A.D., Roman legionnaires probably didn’t think of themselves as reflecting a trend when they tied bands of cloth around their necks. Most likely, they were just looking for protection from the weather.
Some historians have called the legionnaires’ adornments the first neckwear. But others cite the excavation near the Chinese city of Xi’an of 3rd century B.C. terra-cotta statues of warriors who wore neck scarves in the belief that they were protecting the source of their strength, their Adam’s apples.
Most experts, however, date the initial appearance of the modern precursor of the tie to 1636. Croatian mercenaries, hired in Paris by King Louis XIV, wore cloth bands around their necks to ward off natural elements, which in their line of work included sword slashes.
Parisians quickly translated the Croats’ scarf into a new clothing accessory, and, voila!, the cravate was born. The French term cravate is derived from Croates, French for Croatian. Not to be outdone, the English adapted the cravat, dropping the final “e”, and the American colonies soon stepped in line.
Once launched, the cravat and its styles and knots proliferated. Early cravats looked like lace bibs with bows backing them up, some reaching two yards in length.
Among emerging varieties in the late 17th century was the Steinkirk, a corkscrew-like wrap, originating from the Battle of Steinkirk where startled French officers hastily twisted their ties as they fled their tents to turn back the British onslaught.
During the early 18th century and into the 19th century, cravats had major competition: the stock. While a cravat generally was a long piece of cloth that wound around the neck and tied in front, the stock resembled collars worn today for whiplash or other neck injuries.
Made of muslin, sometimes with cardboard stiffeners inside, stocks were fastened in back by a hook or knot. In front, they had what looked like a pretied bowtie or sometimes a wide cravat covering the stock and swathing the neck like a poultice. Stocks forced men to stand upright in a stiff posture.
American revolutionaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Adamses (John and John Quincy) can be seen in contemporary portraits by Gilbert Stuart and Charles Willson Peale, wearing swath-like cravats, although the American versions were less radical than those of their counterparts in France.
In the mid-1800s, the “solitaire” appeared — attached to the wig in the back, wrapped around the neck and brought to a bow in the front over a cravat.
Some other bizarre dress and tie styles emerged in the mid-18th century. In England, the so-called “Macaronis” were dandies affecting an Italian style, coloring their cheeks with rouge and wearing diamond-studded pumps and cravats with huge bows. The fashion may be alluded to in the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
Yesterday, Eddie Van Halen Passed after an unsuccessful fight with Cancer. He was 65. It’s 2020! enough said!
I was introduced to his music in 1996, by my brother, back in India. It was fitting that the first song I heard was Right Now.
After that I heard the entire string of hits including Jump & top of the world.
The introduction to “God Level” guitaring in Eruptions propelled him to the top of my book in terms of best guitarists and I actually introduced my 5 year old son to Van Halen to have him now almost daily say “Hey Google, Play van halens jump”.
In a fitting tribute, last night, when my son asked for “relaxing music” instead of Jazz by coltrane, he wanted Jump!
Rest in peace Eddie! Thank you for introducing me to Rock!
When more than 30% of your employees are debt collectors, you have to question – are you a lender or a collector. The following article came in Jalopnik – Read the original article here
When Don Foss started his career as a car salesman, he recognized early on that most of his prospective customers had shaky credit, leaving them with few options for financing to buy a vehicle. So in 1972, he started subprime auto lending company Credit Acceptance Corporation to fill that void. He knew lending money to buyers with low credit posed an inherent risk, and he knew the business couldn’t solely be focused on closing sales. It had to excel at collecting loan payments too.
Indeed, over time, the collections side of the business has transformed into a fundamental pillar of the Credit Acceptance model, sparking numerous government investigations and lawsuits over alleged deceptive practices, while exposing some of its customers to ceaseless debt.
But it’s even worse than many know. The extent of Credit Acceptance’s well-oiled debt collection machine is perhaps best illustrated in the company’s backyard: Detroit.
In 2017, one out of every eight civil lawsuits filed in Detroit’s 36th District Court, the largest district court in the state of Michigan, was a collection case brought by Credit Acceptance, according to an analysis of publicly available court records by Jalopnik. Credit Acceptance alone—a company meant to service subprime car loans under the cheerful motto of “We change lives!”—absolutely dominates the civil case volume of one of the country’s busiest courts.
The issue was raised in three reports by a legal transparency nonprofit group called PlainSite over the last year. PlainSite had the idea to scrape court records from Detroit’s 36th District court to obtain information about CAC. It also made its source code for analyzing the Detroit court records publicly available; Jalopnik independently verified and expanded on PlainSite’s methods by building our own software to scrape the records data, and conducting additional interviews.
Jalopnik’s analysis also raises the specter that Detroit’s court system, which teetered on insolvency just five years ago, is now staying financially afloat with help from the fees it collects in cases filed by Credit Acceptance’s debt collectors. The nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending, in a study earlier this year on debt collection suits clogging Oregon courts, pointed out that consumers there have to pay an appearance fee to the court before they can file a response to contest the debt, or other court fees.
“It costs to file a case in the first place, it costs to file a complaint, and then—as we found in Oregon—it costs a decent amount of money, a couple hundred dollars, to file a response,” said Lisa Stifler, deputy director of state policy at the Center for Responsible Lending. “It’s not all cases, but it’s money that, yes, if courts were funded by states more fully, then perhaps some of those fees wouldn’t need to be as high, because they have operating budgets that are covering some of those expenses. There’s some sense that court filing fees do end up paying for running the courts.”
Reached by phone, Foss deferred comment to Credit Acceptance. The lender didn’t respond to a request for an interview, and did not answer a list of detailed questions sent by Jalopnik.
In other words, the number of debt collection suits makes a bad situation in Detroit even worse. The loosely regulated auto lending market lets dealers arrange loans with exorbitantly high interest rates, financed by companies like Credit Acceptance.
High interest is associated with a higher chance of default, and if a low-income driver falls into default, loses their car to repossession, and then gets hit with a collections suit, they run the risk of Credit Acceptance garnishing up to 25 percent of whatever wages they’re earning, and possible insolvency. A study published in July found a borrower who loses their vehicle to repossession is twice as likely to file for bankruptcy.
“The real concern should be that borrowers who are unaware of the consequences of default/repossession are taken advantage of,” said Erik Mayer, a finance professor at Southern Methodist University and co-author of the study. “In some cases, lenders may know the borrower won’t be able to repay the loan in the end, but it may still be profitable to make the loan due to high interest rates, fees, and the ease with which they can repossess the car in the case of default.
By analyzing publicly available records from Detroit’s 36th District Court dating back to 1995, Jalopnik found:
Credit Acceptance filed at least 32,799 collection suits against 39,714 Detroit car buyers, more than 4 percent of all available civil cases.
In 2017, the company’s collection suits represented 12.18 percent of all 32,660 publicly available civil cases in Detroit, up from just 1.45 percent in 2007. (The court reports that it handled more than 43,000 civil cases last year, and says it’s “not responsible” for any omissions in the online 36th District Court Case Inquiry System. At that rate, Credit Acceptance still comprised over 9 percent—or nearly one in 10—of the court’s caseload last year).
Jalopnik counted a “case” as an action against one or more defendants; in some instances, two or more defendants are named in the same suit.
The company secured judgments against 6,556 defendants that were eventually paid off in full. 6,150 of these judgments were default judgments—meaning cases when the car buyer didn’t show up to defend themselves. Defendants sometimes didn’t show up in court because they weren’t even notified to appear, several consumers told Jalopnik. In those cases, Credit Acceptance garnished at least $27.5 million in wages and income-tax refunds.
Lawsuits against at least 33,158 Detroit car buyers remain pending. In those cases, Credit Acceptance has secured 22,802 default judgments worth at least $162.6 million. It’s unclear how much has been garnished and collected from those suits to date, but records show that 40 percent have been ongoing for at least 10 years, and at least 2,200 have been pending for more than 20 years.
The chart below represents Open Credit Acceptance Debt Collection cases (cases in which the defendant(s) has not yet satisfied the judgement(s) against them). The numbers on the left indicate how long the cases in that category have been open. The numbers at the bottom indicate how many defendants there are in all cases in a given category. The numbers atop each bar indicate how much money has been secured in judgements against all the defendants in all the cases in that category.
Each individual defendant is represented as a dot placed within the category that that defendant’s case belongs to. If you’re viewing this on a PC, hover your mouse over the dots to see the current status of Credit Acceptance’s case against this particular defendant.
It’s unclear exactly what led to the situation in Detroit, although the tough economic situation for the city and its residents in recent years has certainly contributed. The company has been investigated by regulators for potential wrongdoing, and it has faced accusations in cases across the U.S. of duping car buyers into taking on untenable loans, however no current probes in Michigan against Credit Acceptance appear to exist.
But what’s clear is that, in recent years, Credit Acceptance has sharply increased the number of debt collection cases it has filed in the Motor City—and in a state where its practices have been called into question before. Credit Acceptance’s main debt-collection attorney was indicted in 2005 for falsifying hundreds of court documents, claiming he’d notified consumers to appear in court when he hadn’t.
Credit Acceptance had also been accused in the past by a suburban Detroit court of providing insufficient documentation to support its requests to garnish borrowers’ wages. The court’s clerk had discovered reams of errors in its filings, but when Credit Acceptance sued the court for subjecting its garnishment requests to more scrutiny, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with the lender, leaving courts barely any leeway to substantively review the accuracy of its filings.
“With the Michigan Supreme Court case, it makes it very easy for them to do this,” Stifler said. “It’s like a lawsuit mill. They don’t need to make sure they have the paperwork in order or be absolutely sure that what they say is owed is actually owed. They have pretty free rein to file what they want.”
The company has long portrayed itself as a do-gooder, a lender of last resort for consumers who otherwise had no other options. But consumer advocates characterized Jalopnik’s findings about Detroit as alarming, and say it calls into question whether Credit Acceptance is even providing its customers with a sound loan product.
The figure “is pretty striking in terms of numbers,” Stifler said. “If you’re not putting out an affordable product, or if you’re putting out a predatory product and/or not looking at whether people can actually repay it,” she went on, “the fact that high collection lawsuits is not all that surprising.”
“It’s entirely structured to be about collection,” said Missouri attorney Bernard Brown, who has waged legal battles against Credit Acceptance since the 1990s. “That’s fundamental to their model.”
Drew Millitello didn’t start out his bankruptcy law career by filing cases on behalf of consumers who went broke. After graduating law school in 2009, with the economy in tatters, he initially worked on behalf of creditors looking to recoup whatever they could from bankrupt companies.
“Which is the opposite side of what I do now,” he said.
A few years on, the caseload from representing clients of auto lenders and the county treasurer’s office took a toll.
“When you’re sitting behind a desk and you’re signing motions you don’t really see the first-hand accounts of it,” Millitello said. “But when you are in front of the judge… that’s when you begin to see the human aspect of it.”
“That’s what drew me back to the other side,” he said. Millitello linked up with a few friends from high school and launched a consumer debtor bankruptcy firm called Detroit Lawyers, PLLC.
Shortly thereafter, the firm put up a brief blog post about Credit Acceptance for consumers who’d faced a repossession, a garnishment, or simply dealt with a high interest car loan for a vehicle that broke down. Immediately, Millitello said, potential clients started reaching out.
“It drives a lot of our clients into bankruptcy,” Millitello said of Credit Acceptance collection cases. Today, at least 25 percent of the firm’s active garnishment cases deal with Credit Acceptance, he said.
“Their whole business model is based on this,” he said.
Don Foss (middle), founder of Credit Acceptance, accepts award from National Alliance of Buy Here Pay Here Dealers
A number of Millitello’s case files, provided to Jalopnik, offer insight into the characteristics of loans consumers who wind up in bankruptcy.
There’s a 2001 Ford Expedition, financed with a total $11,000 loan just last year, at 22.99 percent. A 2005 Mercury went to a Detroit resident with a $16,000 loan carrying a 24.99 percent interest rate. A 2009 Ford Escape went to another resident, also for a $16,000 loan at an interest rate of 23.99 percent.
(Keep in mind those numbers reflect the total cost of the loan including Credit Acceptance’s finance charges, not the base price for the car itself, which speaks to how egregious these financing offers can be.)
One example from court documents of a Credit Acceptance loan.
Low-credit buyers have few options to turn, and that’s why they’re stuck with loans that carry sky-high interest rates. If they fall behind, and their car gets repossessed, the effect can bury them, especially if Credit Acceptance takes them to court, Millitello said.
“When you’re being garnished the debt puts you in the corner,” he said. “They have families to support. Twenty-five percent of their wages, they cannot survive.”
Denita Anderson knows how hard it can be. The 24-year-old bought a 2005 Chevy Impala last year with a loan from Credit Acceptance, at 22.99 percent, so she would pay $15,300 in total over the course of five years.
Anderson bought into the Credit Acceptance motto. She’d had a car repossessed before, and the lender gave her a second chance at redeeming her credit score. Working for a janitorial service in metro Detroit, she needed a car, too. Her grandmother co-signed on the loan.
The Impala didn’t last long, she said. It got repossessed twice, the second time voluntarily because the car broke down on Interstate 94 outside of Detroit and repairs were unsuccessful afterward.
Even after voluntarily repossessing her car, Anderson continued making payments. Her work shifts were sporadic at the time, so if she couldn’t pay in full for a month, she immediately called the lender and worked out an arrangement. Still, she said she vowed to pay something—even for a car she no longer even had.
That apparently wasn’t enough. In December 2017, she received a letter in the mail notifying her that Credit Acceptance had secured a court order to have her wages garnished. The company started having nearly 25 percent of her wages docked per check.
“I was paying them,” she said. “Why even garnish me if I’m still giving you the money? I’m not even driving the vehicle.”
After talking it over with her mother, she decided to declare bankruptcy and reached out to Millitello.
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to file bankruptcy this young,’” she said. “But at the same time I can’t have them garnishing my check.”
In the cases that are still open, at least 171 defendants have filed for bankruptcy. The 36th district court has received 1,696 orders for bankruptcy stays from defendants in these cases.
Following the Great Recession, the rate of auto delinquencies continued to increase, as lenders loosened the purse strings for low-credit buyers to access credit for a car. Sales increased to new heights, but delinquency rates have jumped in tandem, hitting a record 6.3 million people are 90 days or more behind on their auto loan—an increase of 400,000 car buyers from a year prior.
Mayer, the professor from Southern Methodist University, said he and his colleagues were surprised by the lack of prior research on the consequences of repossessions for borrowers.
Using credit reports, court records, and demographic data, Mayer and his colleagues arrived at a pointed conclusion: in states with laws that make it easier for cars to be repossessed, subprime borrowers are more likely to get approved for a loan.
“Increased credit access for borrowers is essentially the ‘bright side’ of making auto repossession easy for lenders,” Mayer told Jalopnik.
Michigan didn’t meet all the criteria for the researchers definition of a state that makes repossessions “easy,” but that’s only because it requires a repo agent to obtain a license. It’s smooth-sailing otherwise. The study’s findings crystallized just how much of an impact of repossessions can have on buyers who wind up defaulting on their loan payments: approval rates on credit applications are reduced for two to three years. The same for mortgage credit, by up to five years.
Making auto repossession easy for lenders, Mayer said, “takes away some of their incentive to screen borrowers and only lend to those who can really afford the loan.”
“This puts the onus on borrowers to understand whether they will benefit from the loan and be able to repay it,” he said. “Weighing the benefits of an auto loan against the potential costs associated with default is a challenging task for many subprime borrowers. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that prospective borrowers often don’t know the full scope of the consequences of auto repossessions.”
If dealers aren’t aiding buyers in finding a car that fits their budget, that compounds an already difficult situation. If their bill gets sent to collections, the effects can be severe. And a study earlier this year found more and more consumers are trying to stick it out and deal with debt collectors instead of turning to a bankruptcy court for relief.
Lawless, the University of Illinois law professor who co-authored the study, called the period when someone’s struggling before filing bankruptcy the financial “sweatbox.” Those who endure more than two years of this, he said, are called the “long strugglers.” Their time in the sweatbox is “particularly damaging,” according to the study.
“During their years in the sweatbox, long strugglers deal with persistent collection calls, go without healthcare, food, and utilities, lose homes and other property, and yet remain ashamed of needing to file,” the study said. “For these people in particular, though time in the sweatbox undermines their ability to realize bankruptcy’s ‘fresh start.’”
There’s one feature that stands out the most among this particular crowd, Lawless told Jalopnik. “They’re most likely to have a debt collection filed right before bankruptcy,” he said.
“Obviously,” he went on, “nobody wants to file bankruptcy. Nobody wants to go to the hospital either, but if you’re sick or need an operation, you need to go to the hospital.”
One of the reasons debt collection suits have become more commonplace in recent years is partly due to the so-called information revolution, he said.
“It’s just easier to bring these lawsuits,” Lawless explained. “It’s easier to find the people, it’s easier to track the debt, it’s easier to keep the records, it’s easier to generate the paperwork that you need to process these lawsuits.”
More than 75 percent of consumers who responded to the researchers’ survey said they agreed to some extent that “pressure from debt collectors” contributed to their findings. At the same time, over the last decade, the study found that in-court debt collection has increased.
“No one’s trying to argue there should be an easy way to walk away from your obligations,” Lawless said. “But at some point you just can’t pay the debt.”
The standard line from the subprime lending world is that low-credit buyers receive financing with high-interest rates to compensate for the purported risk they pose. But the higher the rate, the higher chance of default, and so critics have taken to assert the system is wholly designed to set up consumers for failure.
Now, Americans hold more than $1.2 trillion in auto loan debt, and with delinquencies at a high rate, critics point to the lending practices and loan terms themselves as the main driver of defaults.
“While debt collection is an important way creditors recoup their losses, when a creditor such as Credit Acceptance relies on debt collection for such a significant portion of its loans, that is an indication that there are problems with the lending practices and loan terms,” Stifler, of the Center for Responsible Lending, said. “When borrowers are set up to fail by the unaffordable terms of a car loan, of course we will see many folks who are already struggling unable to keep up with the payments.”
Credit Acceptance’s debt collection efforts in Michigan ran into a roadblock in 2005, when a local Metro Detroit court returned “numerous” garnishment requests “loaded with apparent mistakes to the attorney who had filed them” on behalf of the lender, according to Human Rights Watch.
“He filed 60 or 70 garnishment requests in a single day,” William Richards, former chief judge of the 46th District Court in the City of Southfield, told the group. “There were thousands of dollars’ worth of errors.”
Richards’ clerk asked the lender’s attorney to correct errors and provide additional supporting documentation to support their requests. Instead of doing just that, Credit Acceptance sued the court, arguing the clerk had no right to request additional documentation.
When the case eventually made its way to the Michigan Supreme Court, the state’s highest-ranking judges ultimately sided with Credit Acceptance. In an opinion, the court noted that, “We recognize that [the district court] has an understandable interest in the rights of judgment debtors and in protecting them from writs of garnishment that are baseless or inflated.
“Nonetheless,” the judges went on, “the court rules do not allow the imposition of additional filing requirements on judgment creditors seeking writs of garnishment.”
Richards, who couldn’t be reached for comment, was unequivocal in explaining the impact of the decision at the time.
“We’ve got to have some role here,” he told Human Rights Watch. “We can’t just be rubber stamps.” But the ruling effectively stymied any efforts to apply scrutiny to the lender’s garnishment requests.
That might’ve been an especially tough pill to swallow for Richards, since Credit Acceptance’s main attorney got caught up in a scandal just a few years prior. In 2005, prosecutors indicted Howard Alan Katz on 308 counts of criminal contempt of court for falsifying hundreds of court records. Katz eventually struck a “no contest” plea deal on 136 of the counts that required him to spend six months under house arrest.
Katz, according to a news report at the time, filed fraudulent court documents that stated he’d notified a person when to appear in court, but in fact, he hadn’t.
When the accused defendant never showed up, Katz “sought and often got a default judgment from a judge,” the report said, “allowing him to collect the past-due money by garnisheeing the person’s wages.” Katz even had vehicles seized belonging to defendants before they even knew they’d been sued.
Katz, who couldn’t be reached for comment, denied any knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing and blamed the issue on a hired gun failing to properly attempt to serve the defendants with a suit.
Following Howard Katz’s indictment, records show a local attorney named Jason Michael Katz started routinely representing the lender in debt collection cases. Jason Michael Katz deferred comment to Credit Acceptance and wouldn’t say whether he’s related to the lender’s former attorney.
“I’m not going to answer any more questions about this,” he told Jalopnik.
Once the Howard Katz case was squared away, records show Credit Acceptance started filing more debt collection suits each year against Detroit residents. In 2007, the lender represented 1.45 percent of the 36th District Court’s total caseload. Five years later, it jumped to 5.21 percent. By last year, it reached 12.18 percent.
It’s a potentially startling reality for a court that, just five years ago, nearly became insolvent. The court that year posted an operating deficit of $4.5 million, leaving it facing “extraordinary challenges,” a report found.
In response, the Michigan Supreme Court appointed a state appellate judge, Michael Talbot, to address the issues. Talbot spent a year and a half making staff cuts and reclassifying positions, so workers would handle expanded duties, before turning the court back over to the local administrator.
Former Michigan Judge Michael Talbot
Photo: Michigan Court of Appeals
The court is in better financial shape today, and it still handles one of the largest case volumes in the U.S.—including a significant amount of filings from Credit Acceptance. Talbot had no comment, when asked about Jalopnik’s findings and the implication that fees from the lender’s cases are helping 36th District stay afloat.
Nancy Blount, chief judge of 36th District, told Jalopnik by email only that: “Our court exists to resolve disputes and to do so in a neutral and just way. We are not a revenue generating organization. Our funding unit, the City of Detroit, has a statutory obligation to fund us whether we realize revenue or not.” (A spokesperson for the mayor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
A 2017 report on Credit Acceptance, which first highlighted the number of debt collection suits filed in Detroit, suggested that 36th District Court generated as much as $2 million in fees from the lender’s garnishment requests alone. The report from PlainSite was commissioned by an investor betting that Credit Acceptance’s stock price would tank. It suggested the company generated $2 million in fees for the court. (Blount disputed the finding, and said the figure would be much lower.)
Still, the fact Credit Acceptance’s cases now represent such a significant portion of the court’s total civil filings should be concerning to court officials, said Aaron Greenspan, PlainSite’s founder.
“From the court’s perspective, there’s no way this should be permissible,” Greenspan told Jalopnik. “It uses an immense amount of government resources to simply process the cases for this company.”
There are countless stories from across the U.S. of consumer experiences with Credit Acceptance.
But the personal toll a debt collection case can take on someone’s life—and how extreme the situation can get—is perhaps best exemplified several hundred miles away from Detroit, through Missouri resident Carrie Peel.
As gas prices skyrocketed during the throes of the economic crisis of 2008, Peel visited a dealer called Car Time and put down $1,000 for a used Ford Taurus, financing the remaining costs with a nearly $11,000 Credit Acceptance loan. With a low credit score, she had few options, so she accepted the loan at 24 percent interest, meaning she’d wind up paying a total of $17,850.
It made sense, as Peel described it to Jalopnik. Amid the worst months of the recession, Peel and her husband both lost their jobs, their house ended up in foreclosure, and with gas at $4 per gallon, they needed a more fuel efficient car.
“We were trying to reestablish our credit, and, unfortunately, because our credit scores were so low, we didn’t really have too many other options other than to go to a second-chance finance company,” Peel, 40, said in an interview.
That day, Peel signed a sales agreement to purchase the vehicle and drove off with the car, but Car Time never sent the vehicle’s title. When she headed back a few weeks later to get a copy, she discovered Car Time had closed up shop. Unable to afford another car, Peel was stuck in a frightening predicament.
Peel reached out to Credit Acceptance for help. But as a lengthy court record later demonstrated, she perhaps shouldn’t have bothered.
“As Peel continued to drive the unregistered car, she was stopped multiple times by the police and received tickets and penalties,” a judge wrote in a 2013 opinion. “She also became anxious and embarrassed over the situation, especially after being pulled over with her son and his friend in the car.”
Credit Acceptance said she’d need to file suit and secure a declaratory judgment to win back her title. But it wasn’t until Peel lost her job and she qualified for Legal Aid that she learned, under Missourilaw, “if a buyer is not provided with a title to the vehicle, the sale is void and the buyer is relieved of the obligation to make payments on the debt,” the judge wrote.
Operating in Missouri since 1992, one might expect Credit Acceptance would’ve known this. But after speaking with no less than 111 Credit Acceptance employees, Peel got nowhere. Instead, the lender insisted she had to continue paying the full amount of each payment as stipulated in her sales agreement.
“Never once was she permitted to speak to a supervisor even though she was promised many times,” Bernard Brown, her attorney, told Jalopnik.
When Peel finally connected with Brown, they dug in and took Credit Acceptance to court. What they learned was just how much debt collection means to the company.
Testimony from Credit Acceptance showed the company employs more than 400 collectors—about one-third of its total staff—to make calls and chase down defaulted buyers for loans. Buyers hamstrung by obviously difficult situations like Carrie Peel.
Jurors ultimately found Credit Acceptance had violated state laws in its handling of Peel’s situation, and awarded her $1.1 million in compensation. Judge Gary D. Witt, the appellate judge who wrote an opinion that later upheld the decision, was unequivocal about the lender’s actions.
“CAC contends that it is difficult to ascertain any harm that Peel suffered. CAC asserts that when the whole picture is taken into account, the only ‘real loss’ Peel sustained was the difference between driving a titled car and driving an untitled one,” Witt wrote. “This argument shows CAC’s continued indifference to Peel’s plight.”
The case perhaps explains why attorney Brown wasn’t surprised by the amount of cases filed in Detroit’s district court.
“This kind of stuff has been done across the country,” Brown told Jalopnik. “It’s an anomaly that [Brown’s co-attorney on the case] Dale Irwin and I were in Missouri and happened to fight this battle.”
Throughout the ordeal, Peel said she made her payments on time, each month.
“They’re such terrible people, they really are,” she said. “They tried to destroy me. They thought I was going to go away.”
Attorneys in the Detroit area said that conditions in the city are ripe for Credit Acceptance to mount such a high number of cases.
“When you live in Michigan, the roads are shit, so it’s expensive to keep a car from falling apart,” said Adam Taub, a Detroit-area attorney who handles auto loan-related cases. “This disproportionately affects the poor.”
Millitello, the bankruptcy attorney, called the increased number of collection cases a growing “crisis.”
“They know when they’re giving out these subprime loans that some of this income is going to come in from wage garnishments collections,” he said. “These cars are crapping out on [consumers]. They’re junk.”
It’s hard to say how Credit Acceptance’s founder Don Foss feels about the stories some of his consumers have shared. Foss retired in 2017.
Today, the small lender he took public 25 years ago is enjoying a warm reception from Wall Street, with its stock price jumping from $286 per share a year ago to the current price of $415 per share. The 74-year-old’s success allowed him to purchase a 13,000 square foot mansion in the Detroit suburb of Franklin. Across 3.5 acres, the Foss residence has nine bedrooms and six bathrooms.
He built his empire off a business that routinely drags residents in neighboring Detroit into court day in and day out, over cases that time and again are shown to be dubious at best, over cars like Denita Anderson’s busted Chevy Impala.
And so goes the cycle of Credit Acceptance.
“When the car falls apart, the consumer can’t afford to get to a job, school etc., and must abandon the vehicle and seek other transportation,” attorney Taub said. “CAC repos the vehicle, sells it at auction for what it’s worth… less repo and other fees, and this results in a judgment of at least the full amount financed along with any force placed insurance charges that accrued before the repo.”
“So it’s no wonder that there are so many CAC judgments in 36th District Court,” Taub lamented. “This is one way in which our society keeps people in economic servitude.”
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Please find the original article here: https://jalopnik.com/how-a-subprime-auto-lender-consumed-detroit-with-debt-a-1829527899
My son asked me yesterday “why are the oceans salty” and I literally didn’t have an answer as to why they are salty and where their salt comes from- so decided to do some research. This is why the oceans are salty
Ocean salt primarily comes from rocks on land
Some areas of the ocean are saltier than others. This image shows methane mussels living at the edge of a underwater brine pool in a cavern at a depth of 650 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. The pool of brine in the foreground is nearly four times as salty as seawater and is so dense that a submarine can float on the pool (in fact, this photo was shot from a submarine).
Salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land.
The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid (which forms from carbon dioxide and water).
As the rain erodes the rock, acids in the rainwater break down the rock. This process creates ions, or electrically charged atomic particles. These ions are carried away in runoff to streams and rivers and, ultimately, to the ocean. Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. Others are not used up and are left for long periods of time where their concentrations increase over time.
Two of the most prevalent ions in seawater are chloride and sodium. Together, they make up over 90 percent of all dissolved ions in the ocean. Sodium and Chloride are ‘salty.’
The concentration of salt in seawater (salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand, on average. Stated in another way, about 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts.
By some estimates, if the salt in the ocean could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth’s land surface it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick, about the height of a 40-story office building.
In the beginning, the primeval seas were probably only slightly salty. But over time, as rain fell to the Earth and ran over the land, breaking up rocks and transporting their minerals to the ocean, the ocean has become saltier.
Rain replenishes freshwater in rivers and streams, so they don’t taste salty. However, the water in the ocean collects all of the salt and minerals from all of the rivers that flow into it.
It is estimated that the rivers and streams flowing from the United States alone discharge 225 million tons of dissolved solids and 513 million tons of suspended sediment annually to the ocean. Throughout the world, rivers carry an estimated four billion tons of dissolved salts to the ocean annually.
About the same tonnage of salt from ocean water probably is deposited as sediment on the ocean bottom and thus, yearly gains may offset yearly losses. In other words, the ocean today probably has a balanced salt input and output (and so the ocean is no longer getting saltier).
I just finished a book by a friend, which contained his life as a government official in my home state of Kerala, India. It was an interesting book which captured life in India and the functioning of the government in the early 80’s. In one story he talked about how we remember those people who die young more than those who die old and it really got me thinking about my friend Venky. Venky passed away in September of 2012, I still remember the day, with my friend texting me over google chat and I couldn’t believe it. I broke down, crying so hard. It hit me so close for a multitude of reasons.
Venky and I were classmates during our MBA. everyone knew him as Gymbody, and he was just that. His goal was to hit a 2%body fat ratio, while I on the other hand was happy with a 2% muscle mass ratio. Venky managed to get the college to not only build out a gym in the school, but also got the gym ready for all of us. He spent time there and made sure everyone exercised correctly and set up routines. He would’ve been an excellent trainer, but he was an amazing person as well. He was always open to talk and a good listener. He made friends easily and always came with with a smile attached.
We worked on our first startup together at his house, iFarm. It was an ambitious exercise born out of his house in kotturpuram, Chennai. He joined Cognizant around the same time as I did and so we both ended up meeting everyday for lunch. He kept tabs on my food intake and ensured I ate healthy. I learnt so much from him and I was his sounding board for new ideas and he made a big impact with those who worked because he built a great network of folks who would listen to him and be willing to help.
When I got married, he made the trip over for my wedding, promising to come and keeping the promise. During the journey back, he met someone and I remember him telling me “maddy, I can’t explain it man, but I was getting butterflies in my stomach talking to her”. It was nice hearing him talk like this. He actually met someone really nice after that and she made him really happy.
I moved out from Cognizant to setup my own firm www.virtu.in and was constantly talking to him about what to do. He actually invited me to talk at Cognizant about Knowledge Management in startups. I still have that presentation (https://www.slideshare.net/madanmenon/cognizant-presentation-by-virtu-technologies-presentation)
After I sold my company in 2012 and moved in Bangalore. I was in touch with him and met him every time I came to Chennai.
He was healthy and so when I was told he suffered a massive heart attack at 530am and didn’t recover, a part of me died. I won’t he hearing “Hi Maddy”, “Are you sure you want to be eating that” and many more venkyisms, anymore.
It’s been more than 8 years, but I still miss him. My lunch companion for 3 years, my Knowledge Management guru, my health instructor and most importantly my friend.
I’m sure you are making everything better whereever you are and smiling your 10,000W smile!
