Preying on the Poor

[Mass]

Please, note the use of the word "poor". This is a word you do not see that often used by Democratic candidates, as if they did not exist. One of the many reasons why I like Ehrenreich.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/preying_on_the_poor_20120517/

By Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch

This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction here.

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 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

..

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.
...
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.
...
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 lon

g 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.

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[hifiguy]

2. K and R!!

[Uncle Joe]

3. This is pretty much about the only direction a nation; that worships the almighty dollar above

all else and willing to allow an evil for profit prison industry to exist can head for.

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.

Given enough time without changing the above mentioned adverse dynamics, governmental/private looting will increase in size, scope and duration to eventually include most Americans as the Middle Class withers, the numbers of poor greatly expand and the U.S. morphs into a nation dependent on a 21st century version of slavery/new Gilded Age hybrid economy.

Thanks for the thread, mass.

[Snarkoleptic]

4. I wonder if there's a study showing what portion of late charges are paid by the poor.

Between payday loans, late charges and NSF fees, it's a wonder the poor can hang on at all.
Add to that the fact that the poor can't easily buy in bulk and you get a permanent underclass.