Alliance One sent me a writ of garnishment ordering me to garnish wages from a person that I never employed. I had several recorded phone discussions with their staff about the matter. Each time trying to convince them that I had no financial relationship with the person they were after. The business that was named on their writ of garnishment was never started--it was simply a state license application for a new concept I was planning on starting later this year. They did not believe me and ruddily accused me of hiding the debtor. I urged them to simply check with the state public records to see that I have never had a payroll and that I have filed "no business" on my tax returns each quarter so far. I further explained that I had only known of the person they were after as a vendor at a non-profit farmers market the Sumer before. I hadn't seen him in several months nor had I planned on ever seeing him again.

That didn't matter. They filed a lawsuit anyway to try and collect a nearly $8,000 debt that the debtor had racked up in parking and/or traffic ticket fines in the city of Seattle. The tickets were issued many years before I had ever met the person. According to the court records my attorney later found, they had been after this person for many years.

They decided that because my name and his name (along with many other vendors) were on the same community facebook page promoting the market, that he must be an employee of mine. They simply did not want to accept that vendors at farmers markets were not employees of each other. Nor did they have the common sense to know that community farmers markets don't operate in the winter when nothing is growing around here (The writ of garnishment was issued in January). Nowhere could they find any real evidence that I had any financial relationship with their target debtor. Yet, I became the subject of their aggressive collection tactics for several months because someone at Alliance One was hell-bent on making my life miserable in an attempt to intimidate me into paying this person's debt.

I ended up with a default judgement against me and my wife with threats of garnishing our own wages and bank accounts to pay for someone else's debt. They would not even tell me what the debt was for until I hired an attorney to find out--(Alliance One will not disclose the original source of the debt to third parties they go after on a failed garnishment scheme). Once I discovered who was behind the debt collection (the City of Seattle Municipal Court), I contacted them directly to see if there was anything they could do. What I found out is that the Seattle Municipal Court really does not care who pays as long as they get their money. The situation has caused immense problems for me including stopping my home mortgage refinancing and disrupting my income.

Alliance One could not operate the way they do without corrupt government support. The idea of arbitrarily transferring one persons debt to another unrelated person was once thought of as unconscionable in this country. The City of Seattle has put an intense focus on increasing revenues through their parking and traffic citation program anyway they can as a way to fund government expansion. I believe that the actions of Alliance One may be in violation of the City of Seattle vendor ethics rules--but I doubt anyone is going to do anything about it. It has become chillingly apparent that big business and big government run this country now.

I urge anyone reading this to do what they can to stop this madness by becoming informed about how your local government works and hold your elected representatives responsible for making sound ethical decisions that support individual liberty. If you have kids, please teach them about the founding principals of our constitution before it's too late.