[A-List] Fwd: [New post] Looting the Lives of the Poor

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

An idea in order to claw back some of the old laws of privacy:  Start a
group interested in removing the airport naked scanners and target your
local airport. Look up "Chertoff, Alan" the first head of the US Homeland
Security Agency and take notes of his involvement in the spread of the
scanners.  Use them, they are dynamite.  Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Totten's Weblog <donotreply at wordpress.com>
Date: Sat, May 19, 2012 at 12:58 AM
Subject: [New post] Looting the Lives of the Poor
To: suzannedk at gmail.com


**
          New post on *Bill Totten's Weblog*
<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>  Looting the Lives of
the Poor<http://billtotten.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/looting-the-lives-of-the-poor/>
by
Bill Totten <http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>

*by Barbara Ehrenreich*

*TomDispatch (May 17 2012)*

*Gordon Gekko, the infamously cutthroat capitalist and lead character in
Oliver Stone's *Wall Street*, captured the heady years of the 1980s with a
single, indelible line: Greed is good. Today, it is Edward Conard, a friend
and former colleague of Mitt Romney's at the private equity firm Bain
Capital, who has offered a new mantra for the one percent, *a cri de
coeur*for the Gekkos of the twenty-first century: Inequality is good.
*

*In his new book *Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told
About the Economy Is Wrong* (2012), Conard argues that gaping income
inequality is an indication of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The more
unequal we are, Conard told the *New York Times Magazine*, the better off
we all will be. Why? Because economies grow and thrive when smart people
devise solutions to our thorniest problems by inventing or perfecting goods
and services. Conard singled out a group of twentysomethings sitting at a
Manhattan coffee shop one afternoon, deriding them as lazy "art-history
majors". Those people should be out creating businesses and taking risks,
he insisted, because that's how societies prosper. And the way to encourage
that risk-taking is the promise of obscene wealth for those who succeed
(and, implicitly, dismal poverty for those who don't).*

*How obscene should that wealth be? In 2008, the top one percent commanded
21% of all income in America. Conard says our society would improve if only
that figure were doubled.*

*Needless to say, there is no shortage of Conard critics. The more
respectful ones ask: Teachers do not fit Conard's entrepreneurial ideal -
are they no use to society? What about judges? Government regulators?
Others dismiss Conard as an out-of-touch millionaire living in a fantasy
land. For instance, Conard claims that wages for American workers have
climbed in recent decades; in fact, as liberal economist Dean Baker notes,
wages have barely kept pace with inflation. "We'll leave it to his shrink",
Baker quipped, "to determine whether the problem is that Conard is deluded
or dishonest".*

*It's not hard to imagine how members of the working poor would react to
Conard's message. Here he is urging them to take the leap and design more
efficient soda cans or search engines, when, as TomDispatch regular Barbara
Ehrenreich makes strikingly clear, the working poor who dare share food
with the down-and-out or kick up their feet on a subway seat can land in a
debtor's hell created for them by state and local governments and law
enforcement agencies. Unlike Conard, Ehrenreich, the author of the
bestselling *Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America* (2001), had
an actual urge to help those in trouble.  She's just launching the Economic
Hardship Reporting Project, which will "will pay laid-off and/or
underemployed journalists who are themselves caught in the maw of economic
hardship to produce compelling stories". -- Andy Kroll*

*_________________________________________________________*

*Preying on the Poor*

*How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks*

*by Barbara Ehrenreich*
*_________________________________________________________*

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons.
Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a
janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime
scene. But as *Business Week* helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in
aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a
business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and
almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for
example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each
paycheck, or they can require workers to show up thirty minutes or more
before the time clock starts ticking.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have
taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging
the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees
(themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can
be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.

It's not just the private sector that's preying on the poor. Local
governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining
tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent
defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a
suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money,
given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions
have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price
of occupying a jail cell.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have
to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for
failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her
sixteen-year-old son's incarceration. When she received a back paycheck,
she thought it would allow her to pay for her son's jail stay. Instead, it
was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

*Government Joins the Looters of the Poor*

You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the amounts
that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there are no
official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn to
independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of *Wage Theft in
America*(2008), who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least
$100 billion
a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the lending
industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote *Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc
- How the Working Poor Became Big Business* (2010), says the poor pay an
effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year for the financial products
they consume and more than twice that if you include subprime credit cards,
subprime auto loans, and subprime mortgages.

These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of
magnitude as major public programs for the poor. The government distributes
about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single
cash-transfer program for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the
same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more,
through wage theft.

And while government generally turns a blind eye to the tens of billions of
dollars in exorbitant interest that businesses charge the poor, it is
notably chary with public benefits for the poor. Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families, for example, our sole remaining nationwide welfare program,
gets only $26 billion a year in state and federal funds. The impression is
left of a public sector that's gone totally schizoid: on the one hand,
offering safety-net programs for the poor; on the other, enabling
large-scale private sector theft from the very people it is supposedly
trying to help.

At the local level though, government is increasingly opting to join in the
looting. In 2009, a year into the Great Recession, I first started hearing
complaints from community organizers about ever more aggressive levels of
law enforcement in low-income areas. Flick a cigarette butt and get
arrested for littering; empty your pockets for an officer conducting a
stop-and-frisk operation and get cuffed for a few flakes of marijuana. Each
of these offenses can result, at a minimum, in a three-figure fine.

And the number of possible criminal offenses leading to jail and/or fines
has been multiplying recklessly. All across the country - from California
and Texas to Pennsylvania - counties and municipalities have been
toughening laws against truancy and ratcheting up enforcement, sometimes
going so far as to handcuff children found on the streets during school
hours. In New York City, it's now a crime to put your feet up on a subway
seat, even if the rest of the car is empty, and a South Carolina woman
spent six days in jail when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for the crime
of having a "messy yard". Some cities - most recently, Houston and
Philadelphia - have made it a crime to share food with indigent people in
public places.

Being poor itself is not yet a crime, but in at least a third of the
states, being in debt can now land you in jail. If a creditor like a
landlord or credit card company has a court summons issued for you and you
fail to show up on your appointed court date, a warrant will be issued for
your arrest. And it is easy enough to miss a court summons, which may have
been delivered to the wrong address or, in the case of some bottom-feeding
bill collectors, simply tossed in the garbage - a practice so common that
the industry even has a term for it: "sewer service". In a sequence
that *National
Public Radio* reports is "increasingly common", a person is stopped for
some minor traffic offense - having a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake
light - at which point the officer discovers the warrant and the unwitting
offender is whisked off to jail.

*Local Governments as Predators*

Each of these crimes, neo-crimes, and pseudo-crimes carries financial
penalties as well as the threat of jail time, but the amount of money thus
extracted from the poor is fiendishly hard to pin down. No central agency
tracks law enforcement at the local level, and local records can be almost
willfully sketchy.

According to one of the few recent nationwide estimates, from the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 10.5 million misdemeanors were
committed in 2006. No one would risk estimating the average financial
penalty for a misdemeanor, although the experts I interviewed all affirmed
that the amount is typically in the "hundreds of dollars". If we take an
extremely lowball $200 per misdemeanor, and bear in mind that eighty to
ninety percent of criminal offenses are committed by people who are
officially indigent, then local governments are using law enforcement to
extract, or attempt to extract, at least $2 billion a year from the poor.

And that is only a small fraction of what governments would like to collect
from the poor. Katherine Beckett, a sociologist at the University of
Washington, estimates that "deadbeat dads" (and moms) owe $105 billion in
back child-support payments, about half of which is owed to state
governments as reimbursement for prior welfare payments made to the
children. Yes, parents have a moral obligation to their children, but the
great majority of child-support debtors are indigent.

Attempts to collect from the already-poor can be vicious and often, one
would think, self-defeating. Most states confiscate the drivers' licenses
of people owing child support, virtually guaranteeing that they will not be
able to work.  Michigan just started suspending the drivers' licenses of
people who owe money for parking tickets.  Las Cruces, New Mexico, just
passed a law that punishes people who owe overdue traffic fines by cutting
off their water, gas, and sewage.

Once a person falls into the clutches of the criminal justice system, we
encounter the kind of slapstick sadism familiar to viewers of *Wipeout*.
Many courts impose fees without any determination of whether the offender
is able to pay, and the privilege of having a payment plan will itself cost
money.

In a study of fifteen states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University found fourteen of them contained jurisdictions that charge a
lump-sum "poverty penalty" of up to $300 for those who cannot pay their
fees and fines, plus late fees and "collection fees" for those who need to
pay over time. If any jail time is imposed, that too may cost money, as the
hapless Edwina Nowlin discovered, and the costs of parole and probation are
increasingly being passed along to the offender.

The predatory activities of local governments give new meaning to that
tired phrase "the cycle of poverty". Poor people are more far more likely
than the affluent to get into trouble with the law, either by failing to
pay parking fines or by incurring the wrath of a private-sector creditor
like a landlord or a hospital.

Once you have been deemed a criminal, you can pretty much kiss your
remaining assets goodbye. Not only will you face the aforementioned court
costs, but you'll have a hard time ever finding a job again once you've
acquired a criminal record. And then of course, the poorer you become, the
more likely you are to get in fresh trouble with the law, making this less
like a "cycle" and more like the waterslide to hell.  The further you
descend, the faster you fall - until you eventually end up on the streets
and get busted for an offense like urinating in public or sleeping on a
sidewalk.

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the
poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously
even when it's committed by millionaire employers. No one should be
incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting
their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any
long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net.
Before we can "do something" for the poor, there are some things we need to
stop doing to them.

*Links:*

The original version of this article, at the URL below, contains several
links to further information not included here.
_____

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of *Nickel and
Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America* (now in a tenth anniversary edition
with a new afterword). She is most recently the founder of the
just-launched Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports
innovative journalism on poverty and economic hardship.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich

(c) 2012 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175543/
  *Bill Totten <http://billtotten.wordpress.com/author/shimogamo/>* |
2012/05/19 at 07:58 | Categories:
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