Category: Fuck the Poor

Making a living

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I’m glad the Philadelphia Inquirer is doing this series of stories on poverty in the city, but I’m sorry that the same bunch of racist clowns are filling the comments section:

On a windy sidewalk in Kensington one day, Walter Licht, a University of Pennsylvania historian, stood near the site of the factory at Lehigh Avenue and Fourth Street to explain how this part of Philadelphia was once a fertile incubator of jobs.

“Imagine it’s 7 a.m. in the 1920s,” said the distinguished-looking professor with a gray beard and smiling eyes. “There are 10,000 people or more walking these streets, streaming into factories to go to work. And generations of young people saw their fathers go to work each day, knowing that they would get jobs, too, when their time came.”

Beginning in 1820, North Philadelphia was the premiere manufacturing site in America, Licht said. What made the area great was its ability to churn out specialty, niche products. North Philadelphia made the world’s best dental instruments, rugs, locomotives, textiles, book bindings, saws, cigars, hats, leather shoes and silk hosiery. It drew a disproportionately high number of English and German workers with well-developed skills in various trades.

Not so much a city with huge industries – like Pittsburgh’s steel and Detroit’s automobiles – Philadelphia thrived as an amalgam of humming, small to medium-size workshops.

That made the city special. Ultimately, it helped cast Philadelphia as the poorest big city in America.

By the 1920s, problems already started to develop, Licht said. That’s when consumers began craving the cheaper, standardized products being sold by Sears, the Wal-Mart of the age. Mass-marketed goods cost one-tenth the price of North Philadelphia’s artisan-made, quality merchandise.

“The shift turns to buying schlock, instead of a more expensive saw, rug or coat that could last three generations,” Licht said.

One by one, North Philadelphia firms started to lose their markets, and the disintegration of industry here was well under way.

The manufacturing demanded by World War II staved off the decline for a while. But afterward, “we go into a massive slide,” Licht said.

Meanwhile, African Americans continued the great migration from the South, moving into the area at the precise time the industrial district in and around North Philadelphia was collapsing.

Riots in 1964 helped hasten white flight toward Northeast Philadelphia, and Latino people started moving in.

There was a brief hope that industry could resurge in the 1950s and 1960s, as Philco TVs were being manufactured in the district. But the Japanese ended that dream with the first Panasonics and Sonys. By 1970, not a single TV was being made in the city.

Other places in the country managed to hang on to industry longer than Philadelphia because they had bigger corporations employing thousands, Licht said. But this city had no U.S. Steel or General Motors.

“It explains why this congressional district is worse off than others,” Licht said. “This collapse of fragile small and medium firms was much more enduring than any place else.”
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Down the spiral

~ susie

This will be repeated all over the country:

HAMTRAMCK, Mich. — Leaders of this city met for more than seven hours on a Saturday not long ago, searching for something to cut from a budget that has already been cut, over and over.

This time they slashed money for boarding up abandoned houses — aside from circumstances like vagrants or obvious rats, said William J. Cooper, the city manager. They shrank money for trimming trees and cutting grass on hundreds of lots that have been left to the city. And Mr. Cooper is hoping that predictions of a ferocious snow season prove false; once state road money runs out, the city has set nothing aside to plow streets.

“We can make it until March 1 — maybe,” Mr. Cooper said of Hamtramck’s ability to pay its bills. Beyond that? The political leaders of this old working-class city almost surrounded by Detroit are pleading with the state to let them declare bankruptcy, a desperate move the state is not even willing to admit as an option under the current circumstances.

“The state is concerned that if they say yes to one, if that door is opened, they’ll have 30 more cities right behind us,” Mr. Cooper said, as flurries fell outside his City Hall window. “But anything else is just a stop gap. We’re going to continue to pursue bankruptcy until the door is shut, locked, barricaded, bolted.”

Bankruptcy, increasingly common among corporations and individuals, remains rare for municipalities. Local leaders who want to win elections find it unappealing and often have other choices for solving financial woes. Besides, states have a say in whether a municipality may pursue bankruptcy at all, and they have every reason to avoid such an outcome, not least of all for fear of a creating a ripple effect that could cripple the municipal bond market and drive up the cost of borrowing.

Yet with anemic property tax revenues and forecasts of more dire financial times ahead, some experts and elected leaders fear that more localities may have to at least consider bankruptcy.

“There could be many cities in this position next year,” said Summer Hallwood Minnick, director of state affairs for the Michigan Municipal League, who added that in this state, cities had already struggled with billions less than expected in state revenue sharing. “All our communities have done is cut, cut, cut. They’re down to four-day workweeks and the elimination of parks, senior centers, all of that. So if there’s anything else that happens, they will be over the edge.”

If you’ve been reading me for a long time, you already know what I think of bond dealers and the politicians who play footsie with them. These deals are where politicians hide all the really big kickback money, and the fact is that ordinary people will now suffer to keep bond deals profitable.

Bank whistleblower

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Yeah, I guess the SEC regulators are right — we “wouldn’t understand” and we’d just take this information “out of context,” wondering why no bankers have been indicted:

Linda Almonte, a former employee of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) who is suing the bank for wrongful termination, has just upped the ante: She has now also filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The core allegations add context to her lawsuit, and they charge Chase with grotesque and illegal practices involving its credit card debt processes, including robo-signing. Chase denies her claims.

—–

Almonte’s allegations are detailed in the Nov. 30 letter sent to the SEC. In the letter, she says:

1. Chase Bank sold to third party debt buyers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit card accounts. . .when in fact Chase Bank executives knew that many of those accounts had incorrect and overstated balances.

3. Chase Bank executives routinely destroyed information and communications from consumers rather than incorporate that information into the consumer’s credit card file, including bankruptcy notices, powers of attorney, notice of cancellation of auto-pay, proof of payments and letters from debt settlement companies.

4. Chase Bank executives mass-executed thousands of affidavits in support of Chase Banks collection efforts and those Chase Bank executives did not have personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavits.

5. When senior Chase Bank executives were made aware of these systemic problems, senior Chase Bank executives — rather than remedy the problems — immediately fired the whistleblower and attempted to cover up these problems.When I reached Almonte’s lawyer, George Pressly, for comment, he was shocked that I had the letter because it was supposed to be confidential. While Pressly was willing to confirm Almonte was a client, beyond that he had no comment. Pressly, who was clearly trying to figure out how to handle the letter’s disclosure, said he was suddenly getting a “firestorm” of calls and seemed unprepared for the onslaught. While he has filed many SEC complaints before — he operates the websitehttp://www.secwhistleblowerprogram.org/, which is how Almonte found him — her letter is the first one he’s filed that went public.