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Mass
Mass's Journal
Mass's Journal
May 17, 2012
By Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch
This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardts 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 months 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.
..
Its not just the private sector thats 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 garbagea 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 offensehaving a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake lightat 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 its 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.
Preying on the Poor
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 Engelhardts 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 months 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.
..
Its not just the private sector thats 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 garbagea 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 offensehaving a noisy muffler, say, or broken brake lightat 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 its 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
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