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Preying on Poverty
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Dan Clore
May 18, 2012, 9:51:44 PM5/18/12
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Anarchists, libertarians, and progressives should all love this piece
that exposes how corporations and local governments rob the poor.--DC]
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17-4
Thursday, May 17, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Preying on Poverty: 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 30 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 16-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, 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, 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 80%-90% 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 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University found 14 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.
� 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of This Land Is Their Land: Reports
from a Divided Nation. She won the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. Her
seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive
Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been
published. Her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America, 10th Anniversary Edition, has just been released by Picador Books.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[Anarchists, libertarians, and progressives should all love this piece
that exposes how corporations and local governments rob the poor.--DC]
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/17-4
Thursday, May 17, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Preying on Poverty: 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 30 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 16-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, 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, 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 80%-90% 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 15 states, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University found 14 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.
� 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of This Land Is Their Land: Reports
from a Divided Nation. She won the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize. Her
seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive
Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been
published. Her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in
America, 10th Anniversary Edition, has just been released by Picador Books.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/3tyj9cq
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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