• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Republican War on the Poor

"...They had a warrant for my arrest and I asked them for what, he didn’t say what it was for. He said, ‘He’ll tell you later,’” recalled Tracie Mozie of Dickinson, Texas. Two armed U.S. marshals had entered her bedroom in 2014 to arrest her for failing to appear in court over a $1,500 federal student loan she took out in 1986 to pay for truck driving school. The loan had grown to more than $13,000 with interest and fees, an amount Mozie can’t afford because she is unemployed and subsists on disability benefits. She has a prosthetic leg that she wasn’t wearing, but the marshals shackled her feet and waist after she put it on. She was jailed overnight. “I’m scared someone is going to come to my door and get me again.”

“A Pound of Flesh” includes dozens of stories of people who, like Mozie, have been jailed or threatened with jail by the debt collection industry with help from prosecutors and judges, including:

A mother of three in Indiana was jailed for missing hearings over medical bills for her cancer treatment. She was physically unable to climb the stairs to the women’s section of the jail, so she was held in a men’s mental health unit.A Georgia woman was arrested while caring for her terminally ill mother. A debt collection company had bought a 6-year-old rental debt her landlord claimed she owed after evicting her from her trailer home. She was jailed overnight. Her mother died two days later.In Missouri, a single mother of a toddler took out a high-interest payday loan of $425. She wasn’t able to pay it back, and the creditor sued. She didn’t go to court and was arrested and jailed for three days.A Utah man committed suicide while jailed for failing to appear in court over an unpaid ambulance bill. He killed himself shortly after he was asked whether he had the money to post bail.

“The tyranny of the private debt collection industry causes financial ruin for people already struggling to make ends meet, and courts are willing to routinely violate people’s due process rights to do debt collectors’ dirty work,” said Turner. “Our courts have become mills for these companies, approving without evaluating scores of arrest warrants, wage garnishments, property seizures, default judgments, and other legal actions against consumers accused by debt collectors of owing money.”

By analyzing more than 1,000 cases in which judges issued arrest warrants for alleged debtors, the ACLU identified the particular ways that the courts enable the debt collection industry to coerce alleged debtors to pay up, even when there’s no evidence the debt is owed or when the person isn’t legally required to pay. For example, many judges issue the requested warrants without checking whether the person has the ability to pay.

More than 90 percent of consumer debt litigation ends with a default judgment in favor of the debt collection company because the defendant didn’t contest the case. Most don’t appear in court to defend themselves, often because they don’t know how or because they never received notice of the suit.

“The debt collection industry’s exploitation of the courts and law enforcement impact Black and Latino people most harshly because of longstanding gaps in poverty and wealth,” said Turner. “The impact of predatory debt collection practices falls most heavily on minority communities, who often lack the savings, financial assets, or inherited wealth to avoid financial disaster. And some studies show there are marked racial disparities in which communities debt collectors choose to target for lawsuits.”

The report also documents arrangements between debt collection companies specializing in bounced checks and more than 200 district attorneys’ offices. The offices allow the companies to use the district attorneys’ letterhead and official seals to send consumers letters threatening legal action. These letters often falsely claim that a person will be prosecuted and jailed for up to a year, when the amount owed is too low to meet the standard for prosecution in that jurisdiction. The bounced check collection companies pay district attorneys’ offices a portion of the fees they charge the consumers who receive the letters.

“We must stop the suffering and injustice caused by the private debt collection industry’s cozy relationship with law enforcement and the courts,” said Turner. “Almost all of the people targeted by debt collectors can’t afford attorneys. The right to counsel often doesn’t apply in such cases, but it should. A lawyer can make all the difference when people are facing powerful debt collectors in league with prosecutors and judges.”..."
 
Well they’ve got to take a “pound of flesh” when the poors don’t put “skin in the game.”
 
Yea, that’s why I put it here. The signature accomplishment of Pub/Trump only accelerates and exacerbates the disparity.

In a way, the answer to the policy question is almost as easy as “whatever the Republicans favor, do the opposite”.
 
Here is an article with links to several studies disproving the myth that welfare makes people lazy and proving that cash transfer programs improve the health and economic productivity of children whose families receive them. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/ It's too bad JHMD isn't here to engage in several pages of denialism and goalpost moving around these studies.
 
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/arti...couldnt-make-bail?utm_source=broadlytwitterus

I Was Locked Away from My Children for 14 Months Because I Couldn't Make Bail

Lavette Mayes
MAR 30 2018, 12:52PM

Because I couldn't afford to pay $250,000 in bail, I had to languish behind bars for over a year while awaiting trial—without being convicted of a crime.

...One by one, we’d step up, and the judge would announce the price for our freedom. It was like being at an auction. I could not afford to pay my $25,000 bond, which was the ten percent deposit on my full bail amount needed to secure my immediate release. As a result, I was locked up behind bars for over a year awaiting trial. All that time, I didn’t see or touch my children once. Our family was devastated. When you incarcerate a mother, you incarcerate the whole family.

...My story, however, isn’t unique. Right now, there are about 3,000 people incarcerated at the same Cook County Jail where I was held because they cannot afford to pay their money bails. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, there nearly 500,000 people currently incarcerated throughout the US while they await trial—many of whom are there simply because they can’t afford to post bail. These are people who are losing their livelihoods, their families, and who knows what else, all because they cannot buy their freedom.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/mass-incarceration/smart-justice/lavettes-choice

Up until that moment Mayes had no criminal history, no experience with the criminal system. She was running a small, school-van transport business out of their home. It was her pride. One evening a physical fight with her 67-year-old mother-in-law sent both women to the hospital.  Mayes was charged with aggravated battery against a senior. Three days in a freezing cell would turn into 431 days of imprisonment because neither she nor her family could afford $25,000 in cash or credit.
 
If the gun nuts truly thought they needed guns to oppose a tyrannical government, stories like this would piss them off.
 
Took me three pages to find a more-or-less relevant thread to post this. most of the first two pages is covered up in Trump scandal-of-the-day threads. Sad.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-antipoverty-20180507-story.html

The official measurement indicated that the poverty rate fell by a scant 4.4 percentage points from 1960 to 2010, ending at 15.1%. Adjusting for flaws in the measurement however, Meyer and Sullivan determined that the percentage of Americans living in poverty had fallen by more than 26 percentage points, to about 4.5%.

"The claim that poverty hasn't gone down since the start of the war on poverty is nonsense," Meyer says. "You can see there were big reductions in poverty over time due mainly to two things — all the transfer programs we've added such as SNAP, TANF, SSI, expanded Social Security, and housing benefits — and because the economy has grown."
 
Wonder why we specifically need $1.5 trillion in cuts? This was the plan all along.
 
Wonder why we specifically need $1.5 trillion in cuts? This was the plan all along.

Yep. They're following the same plan that the NC GOP legislature has used the last several years. Cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations, and make up the difference via cuts to public services, cutting parts of public ed (like teaching assistants, textbook funds, etc.), raising taxes on sales and other consumer items (a poor tax). Congress makes a much-ballyhooed tax cut aimed at the wealthy and corporations, then a few months later announces "Hey, we've got a much bigger budget deficit than we thought! We'll have to cut Social Security and Medicare to make up the gap!" And, they expect their Trumpite base - many, many of whom rely on these two programs - to go along with it. Which they probably will. This is Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand fantasy come to life.
 
Also unsurprising...


G.O.P. Wants Hungry Kids to Fund Tax Cuts


After tearing apart immigrant families until shamed by international outrage, President Trump and his party have now turned to endangering vulnerable American children.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, if House Republicans get their way, more than two million people, many of them young children, will lose access to the food stamp program known as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). The farm bill that passed by a two-vote margin on Thursday includes tougher work requirements and new eligibility restrictions that would make it much more difficult for families who need food assistance to get it.

The Agriculture Department administers SNAP. If the president gets his way, SNAP would be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services. And the name of that department, which already oversees other social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, would be changed to include the word “welfare,” which holds about the same amount of appeal for Republicans as “Communists” once did.

The goal of these maneuvers is twofold: to stigmatize such programs — racially stigmatize them for white voters — and to make them easier to cut or eliminate.

Let’s be clear. Welfare usually refers to a type of cash assistance that has all but disappeared. SNAP, by contrast, is a legally mandated benefit program. Just like Social Security and Medicare, it provides crucial assistance through a provision that’s been written into law.

Some 42 million poor and working-class Americans use SNAP benefits to buy groceries. A vast majority of them are elderly, disabled or children. Of the people who are both of working age and able-bodied, most do have jobs. They simply don’t earn enough to feed themselves consistently.

These working-age adults already face several requirements and restrictions on how much SNAP aid they can receive. For example, they must register with SNAP and accept any job offered to them, or any training program that they are assigned to. Unless they are older than 49 or raising children, they must also verify, on a monthly basis, that they are working or in job training at least part time (after a three-month grace period).

The new bill would expand these work requirements to include people up to the age of 59, and those with children older than 6. It would also tighten the rules so that anyone who fails to comply loses coverage for a full year the first time, and for three years each subsequent time.

Proponents say the point of such policies is to nudge people into full employment.

Helping the unemployed and underemployed obtain jobs that can support them is a laudable goal. But the fact that Republicans have chosen such a widely debunked approach to achieve this goal undermines the party’s credibility. History and research have shown that stringent work requirements are good at forcing people off benefit rosters but terrible at lifting them out of poverty.

To help figure out what does work, Congress funded 10 pilot projects in individual states four years back, when it last renewed the farm bill. Those programs are testing different approaches to job training and job creation.

They are an example of exactly the kind of evidence-based policy that House Speaker Paul Ryan says he wants. If he and his colleagues were truly interested in lifting people out of poverty, they would wait, just a couple years more, until the data from those pilots were in before creating additional barriers to food assistance for vulnerable families.

Saving money is also a worthy aim. But let’s be honest about what we’re saving it for, especially if we’re going to take food out of children’s mouths to do it.

The Republicans’ recent tax cut made the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans wealthier, did little or nothing for average workers and added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. The party that passed that law is now using the resulting debt to rationalize taking grocery money, health care and other essentials from the disabled, retirees, and families with children.

Fortunately, there is some hope on the horizon. The president’s proposal is likely to be a very long shot. And the Senate’s farm bill — which, unlike the House’s, has bipartisan support — takes a much more palatable approach to food assistance. It would expand the SNAP pilot programs and streamline existing work requirements so that fewer eligible people are inadvertently denied benefits. It would also increase funding for another farm bill provision known as the Emergency Food Assistance Program.

That bill is expected on the Senate floor next week. Let’s hope that common sense and basic human decency prevail when it arrives.
 
Back
Top