"This call is being recorded or monitored ..."

Those of you in debt trouble know the drill. Lender computer calls you and makes you wait several seconds before human filth pick up the phone, confirm you are who you are supposed to be and then feed you the Big Brother line: "This call is being recorded or monitored for quality-assurance purposes. This is an attempt to collect a debt."

Someone I know got one of those calls today from Chase Financial. Here's how it went.

CF: Mr. So-and-so?
Acquaintance: Yes.
CF: Mr. So-and-so, this is Ms. So-and-so at Chase Financial. I need to inform you that this call is being recorded or monitored for ...
A: Mine, too.
CF: Excuse me?
A: I'm recording this, too. Figured I might as well, in case you guys say something I can take you to court for.
CF: Uhm, Mr. So-and-so, our policy does not allow us to talk with you if you are recording the conversation.
A: So you guys can record the call, but I can't? (laughing sarcastically)
CF: Yes.
A: OK, bye. (click)

High-fives! I'm all for people paying their debts, but when their debts or capacity to pay debts is caused or hampered by the very people whom they owe money to, the morality of it gets pretty damned foggy.

The last two years have been an immoral farce of grand proportions. The financial institutions colluded with government to barge through rational boundaries on risk and make easy trillions and eventually wreck the economy. The government then gives the financial institutions hundreds of billions (possibly trillions in the end) from the grand larceny the government has committed on the very people the institutions made money off of. The financial institutions then irrationally tighten credit, throwing more people out of work and cutting off access to previously available credit that could've been used as a cushion for a rainy day.

And then the bailout-begging financial institution hounds those who can't get bailouts, insults them on the phone and tells them that they can't do something else the financial institutions do: record a conversation.

Click. ... Click ... Click ... Click ... Click.