Barbara Ehrenreich: Looting the Lives of the Poor

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



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 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. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175543/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich%2C_looting_the_lives_of_the_poor/

[longship]

1. These arguments will do nothing to persuade the RW

Who will merely say that these people are losers -- blaming the victims, like they always do.

I don't know how we're going to break this cycle.

[phantom power]

2. the thing worse than revolution is the thing that makes revolution necessary

[Odin2005]

3. Rent-seeking behavior. the usual BS of parasitic elites.

[ellisonz]

4. Nailed it...

...that's why I'm voting against the cigarette tax increase on the CA budget. Enough soaking the poor to pay big pharma.