Comrades, you are hereby ordered to keep piling up those empty cans and bottles in the garage or the mudroom or wherever, because the Reich is in no hurry to reopen the vast majority of redemption centers.
It’s not as bad as Charlie Parker costing you your job (38,000 more unemployed Thursday). Nor is it as exasperating as the plague of officious Mask Police, or the kids underfoot at home, or watching 24/7 panic porn about a virus that has killed all of 78 people in the state under the age of 50.
But watching those “redeemables” pile up unreturned in overflowing bags and bins is just another little slap in the face by these smug mandarins who are so gleefully bullying us while they continue to collect their six-figure salaries.
No bottle redemptions – you’ll take it and you’ll like it!
Here’s the typical jive Thursday from our embarrassingly corrupt, incompetent state administration, and stop me if you’ve heard this kind of BS over and over and over again:
“As part of the Baker-Polito Administration‘s comprehensive reopening strategy, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) is finalizing a plan to resume enforcement of the bottle and can redemption regulations and ensure customers can redeem bottles and cans at locations throughout the Commonwealth, and will include guidelines to protect the safety of all retail employees and the public.”
“Finalizing” — what a weasel word. The hacks shut down the redemption centers March 18, more than two months ago. You have to keep paying them the nickels, and they keep not giving you your money back.
But don’t worry, Charlie Parker and Pay to Play Polito are “finalizing” their plans to “resume” something. It’s all part of the “comprehensive reopening strategy,” probably designed to ensure “hygiene protocols” in all “sectors.”
Imagine if a private company were leasing or selling a product that required a deposit. And suddenly, they stopped returning the deposits when the contract was completed and in fact refused to accept returns.
And, oh yeah, if you had to buy any more of the product, they’d make you pay another deposit.
And then they would refuse to return that additional money too.
You’d be calling 911, and the local bunco squad would be all over these grifters. The feds describe this sort of crime as a “racketeering enterprise.”
How is this any different than, say, Bernie Madoff’s racket? He took your money and promised something in return and you didn’t get it and in the end you lost your original investment too.
Pay to Play Polito calls this the “new normal.” They steal your money and laugh in your face when you ask them to give it back. It took me two days to pry that pointless statement out of them. I wonder if the payroll patriots could keep a straight face while they were composing it.
And by the way, if you complain about being robbed, you’re a bad human being who doesn’t care about human life.
This represents a major source of money for the hacks — so far this fiscal year, according to DOR numbers, they’ve grabbed $50,017,152 in “abandoned deposits (bottles)” including $5,117,997 last month alone … when the state was under what amounted to martial law.
Would it really kill them to suspend collection of money they obviously have no intention of ever returning? The answer is, yes. It’s like keeping the restaurants shuttered — it makes them feel virtuous to hurt people who work for a living.
Here’s how the redemption scam works. You pay your nickels to, say, Market Basket or Total Wine or whoever, and eventually you get it back, when you return the cans or bottles. But if you don’t bring back your bottles or cans, the money reverts to the Commonwealth.
It’s the medieval principle of “escheatage” — the power of the state to acquire title to property for which there is no owner. That’s the dictionary definition.
How appropriate that the hackerama would be reaping untold millions under a concept called escheatage, the derivative of which must be “cheat.”
The bottle bill was always a con, a way for the state to steal ever more money from its citizens. That’s why you see periodic efforts to jack up the deposit to a dime — twice as much escheatage! That’s why the hacks sometimes try to expand it to bottled water.
Sure it was a scam, but until March 18, they at least gave you the option of breaking even, if not beating the house. No longer.
It’s the new normal. Heads they win, tails you lose. The state is now run under Mafia rules: what’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is theirs.
Will the last non-hack leaving Massachusetts please turn off the lights?