I’ve said this all along: He’s being selectively prosecuted, and it would be a travesty if he was sentenced to jail because of it. But these things happen in New America, don’t they?
Category: Class War
Campbell Brown
Who did she ask, her cleaning lady?
Funny how things change
I used to laugh at people who spelled our country as “Amerika.” Here’s video of cops stopping a car full of video journalists in Chicago last night:
And in related news: At the time of this blog post, there are reports that the City of Chicago website has been DDOS’d. Over the weekend, there were reports of other such DDOSes.
Follow the Chicago protests today as they unfold, with the livestreamers the Chicago police and Homeland Security are following: Tim Pool’s web video stream, Luke Rudkowski’s web video stream. On Twitter: Geoffrey Giraffe (@jiraffa), Tim Pool (@timcast), Luke Rudkowski (@lukewearechange).
Looting the poor
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.
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 to 90 percent 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.
Private equity running dental practices – guess what happens.
This is a rhetorical question, but here it goes, anyway: Is there anything these Wall Street bastards won’t pervert and destroy with their all-important profit motive? Is there any line they won’t cross?
Isaac Gagnon stepped off the school bus sobbing last October and opened his mouth to show his mother where it hurt.
She saw steel crowns on two of the 4-year-old’s back teeth. A dentist’s statement in his backpack showed he had received two pulpotomies, or baby root canals, along with the crowns and 10 X-rays — all while he was at school. Isaac, who suffers from seizures from a brain injury in infancy, didn’t need the work, according to his mother, Stacey Gagnon.
“I was absolutely horrified,” said Gagnon, of Camp Verde, Arizona. “I never gave them permission to drill into my son’s mouth. They did it for profit.”
Isaac’s case and others like it are under scrutiny by federal lawmakers and state regulators trying to determine whether a popular business model fueled by Wall Street money is soaking taxpayers and having a malign influence on dentistry.
Isaac’s dentist was dispatched to his school by ReachOut Healthcare America, a dental management services company that’s in the portfolio of Morgan Stanley Private Equity, operates in 22 states and has dealt with 1.5 million patients. Management companies are at the center of a U.S. Senate inquiry, and audits, investigations and civil actions in six states over allegations of unnecessary procedures, low-quality treatment and the unlicensed practice of dentistry.
Allegations like Gagnon’s “are not representative” of the more than 500 cases handled by ReachOut affiliates in Isaac’s school district, said Mickey Mandelbaum, a company spokesman.
ReachOut is one of at least 25 dental management-services companies bought or backed by private-equity firms in the last decade. Dentists contract with the companies for marketing, scheduling, staff recruitment, supplies and other services. The companies account for about 12,000, or 8 percent, of U.S. dentists, according to Thomas A. Climo, a Las Vegas dental consultant.
Some of them have been riding a boom in Medicaid outlays on dentistry, which rose 63 percent to $7.4 billion between 2007 and 2010, outstripping the 4.9 percent growth in other dental spending. ReachOut and several of its private equity-backed rivals seek patients like Isaac Gagnon, who are covered by Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor and disabled.
On May 2, All Smiles Dental Center Inc., a management company owned by Chicago-based Valor Equity Partners, filed for bankruptcy protection. Its hand was forced in part by a Texas Medicaid action cutting off payment to some of its clinics because of allegedly “excessive” and “inappropriate” orthodontic care, according to an All Smiles executive’s affidavit included in the filing. All Smiles was part of a state audit in which 90 percent of Medicaid claims for orthodontic braces were found to be invalid because they weren’t medically needed, according to Christine Ellis, one of the auditors.
In North Carolina, Senate Bill 655 is under attack. Opponents say it will drive family dentists out of business, while supporters say the state is already underserved and that these new dental management companies will bring dental access to the rest of the state:
North Carolina law says only dentists can own, manage and control a dental practice. The question is what constitutes control. An increasing number of dentists are turning to management companies to operate the business side of the practice, from accounting and human resources to lab work. Others are asking management companies to help build offices and buy equipment.
About 50 dental practices in North Carolina, covering about 150,000 patients, use management companies in a state with 4,600 dentists. But industry trends suggest the number could grow, especially if the legislation is defeated or the current rules are weakened.
The state’s dental examiners board is charged with determining whether the management companies violate the law. It approves all contracts under rules established a decade ago, but the board’s attorney says loopholes give the companies too much latitude.
“What the board has seen over the years with these agreements is that they have morphed from true vendors of services to these really complicated, multiple-page agreements … that would be considered de facto control and ownership,” said Ken Burgess with Poyner Spruill in Raleigh.
[…] The legislation would put the current rules into state law and add provisions to address these recent cases. Among other things, the law would prohibit management companies from owning all the equipment at a practice, determining patients and enforcing non-compete clauses on the dentists, and it would give the board broad authority to investigate management companies.
“Some very good, lawful management companies are doing business, but others are crossing that line,” said Dr. Ron Venezie, an Apex dentist and member of the Dentist Society, which is pushing the legislation. “Only a dentist has the education and the training to make dental care decisions working with the patient.”
Krugman: Occupy movement ‘enormously productive’
Paul Krugman is doing the rounds on his book tour (I saw him speak here Tuesday night – yeah, I’m a dork, I got him to autograph my copy) and here he is on Democracy Now! to pound the drum for government spending. Oddly enough, Krugman’s been accused of supporting austerity cuts, which just isn’t true. For an hour, all he did was talk about how the government needed to spend our way out of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for the remainder of the hour, we’re joined now by one of the world’s leading economists, Paul Krugman. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, also professor of economics at Princeton University and centenary professor at the London School of Economics. His latest book is End This Depression Now!
Paul Krugman, welcome back to Democracy Now!
PAUL KRUGMAN: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: How do we end this depression now?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Spend. I mean, it’s really—it’s actually—the economics is really easy. If we were to spend more money at the government level, and actually, at this point, largely, just rehire the schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks at the state and local level, we would be a long way back towards full employment. Other things to do, we could talk about monetary policy, debt relief for homeowners and students. But the core of it is, right now, there just is not enough spending, and we need the government, which can do it, to step in and provide the demand we need.
AMY GOODMAN: To say the least, you’re going against the accepted dogma on all television among the so-called leaders of our country. Spend? In a time when the government has the debt the size it has?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Right. So you can always say, “Oh, you know, $14 trillion.” Everything about the U.S. economy is huge. Investors don’t think it’s a problem. Investors are willing to lend the U.S. government money at 1.8 percent interest. This is not the time. I’ll be all for worrying about the budget deficit once the—once the economy is off the bottom. But it is not off the bottom. We are in a depression. This is the time to spend.
AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the money?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Borrow it, and then repay it later in better times, which is not at all—that may sound funny, but that’s exactly what we’ve done in the past. That’s exactly—how did we get out of the Great Depression? We got out of it by—actually, we got out of it before World War II, but thanks to the spending that preceded World War II, thanks to the military buildup. A little factoid people may not know, just this morning: Which of the major economies in the advanced world grew fastest in the first quarter of 2012? The surprise answer is Japan. Why is that happening? It’s because Japan is now spending a lot of money reconstructing after the tsunami. And that spending is driving rapid growth in Japan right now. We could all be doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to Mitt Romney for a moment, the presidential candidate’s economic plans and his critique of the Obama White House. This is what he said Wednesday at a campaign stop in Iowa.
MITT ROMNEY: President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, to tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of your dollars to companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt to this country as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are now enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to Mitt Romney, Paul Krugman?
PAUL KRUGMAN: Boy, you know, don’t even know where to start. I mean, Romney’s technique is that—since basically every word he says is a lie, including “a,” “and” and “the,” you never know where to start. But this is—the idea that the—first of all, that Obama is responsible for the large deficits is just not true. It’s overwhelmingly the result of the Bush tax cuts, unfunded wars and a terrible economic crisis that began, of course, under Bush. The idea that the deficits are what’s holding us back is all wrong. The deficits are in fact what’s keeping us afloat. If we had tried to balance the budget, we would now be in a full, full-on replay of the Great Depression. So it’s all nonsense. It’s—and, by the way, the idea of Obama as somebody who governs from the left, I mean, Obama is—Obama’s positions are those of a moderate Republican circa 1992. It’s not—he’s not a leftist. What’s happening now is you have a radical-right Republic Party.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about the Republicans, to House Speaker John Boehner, recently addressed the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2012 Fiscal Summit.
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: The failure of stimulus, a word people in Washington refuse to say anymore, has sparked a rebellion against overspending, overtaxation and overregulation. Americans who take pride in living on a budget recognize that we can’t go on spending money that we don’t have. And our economy is stuck in large part because it is stuck with debt.
AMY GOODMAN: House Speaker Boehner also advocated making long-term changes to programs such as Social Security.
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: We can eliminate all the unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid tomorrow, and the effect on the congressional budget 10-year window could be minimal. That’s because changes to these programs take time and need to be phased in slowly.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s House Speaker Boehner, who has also just revived the debt ceiling—the debt ceiling threat.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah, so—boy, again, let’s leave aside the long-run budget stuff for the moment, and let’s just talk about—the idea that stimulus failed, it was never tried. Take a look at the actual track of government spending in the United States, and take into account the state and local governments as well as the federal, and what you see is, far from actually having a big increase in spending, we’ve actually had much lower. We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession, in a way that we have never had before since the 1930s. So it’s actually been the reverse.
And look, we’ve just done an experiment with what happens if you cut government spending sharply in the face of a depressed economy. That’s what’s been going on in Europe. It’s been going on in an extreme form. I’ve been saying, actually, we’ve basically had a large-scale human experiment, the kind that is banned under Princeton University rules, going on on the people of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. And the results are clear: it’s disastrous. It leads to very, very sharp economic contractions. Here, we’re having a minor version, though still terrible, of the Great Depression; there, they’re having a full-on replay of the Great Depression.
AMY GOODMAN: Contrast it with Argentina.
PAUL KRUGMAN: Ah, Argentina is an interesting story, because they broke all the rules. There are two countries that we talk about now, actually, people like me. One is Argentina. Argentina had something that was a little bit like the euro. They had a supposedly permanent commitment: one peso, one dollar. Became impossible, fell apart. There was a period of about six months of economic chaos, following, to be honest, then a rapid recovery. Argentina bounced back strongly because they were competitive again. The weaker peso made them able to export. You know, and they defied all the predictions of ruin.
The other story, which is more contemporary, is Iceland, which, in effect, did the same thing. Iceland, because of—the funny thing is, Iceland, the sheer scale of the financial disaster meant that they could not be orthodox. It was not possible. So they were forced to allow a devaluation, have some temporary controls on capital, repudiate some of the debt their bankers ran up. Iceland has a lower unemployment rate than we do right now. So, those are the stories that we should be looking to as examples that say this does not have to be happening.
AMY GOODMAN: So, right now, President Krugman—and that’s not making a mistake—what do you do starting today?
Continue reading “Krugman: Occupy movement ‘enormously productive’”
NYPD testimony vs. video evidence — guess which one is reliable
The video recording of a journalist was key to a “not guilty” verdict in the case of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
Robbing the poor
It’s a great way to make big money, but you have to rob them in aggregate, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out. “Payday lenders” are especially effective.
Bill Black on austerity
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Washington.
Bill Black is a white-collar criminologist. He was on the committee that investigated banking fraud in the Savings and Loan crisis, and he’s been an often critic of the media and how it covers the current financial and economic crisis. He recently wrote a piece about The New York Times journalists and how they don’t even read some of their own financial guys, like Krugman. And he now joins us to talk about his critique of The New York Times and the media. Thanks for joining us. Bill joins us from D.C., where he’s now visiting. Bill, I think I did the whole introduction, except to say that you’re also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One. Thanks for joining us again.
WILLIAM K. BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.
JAY: So talk a bit about your piece about The New York Times. And what was your point?
BLACK: Well, there were a series of articles in The New York Times covering the recent elections in Europe, particularly in France and Greece, but also mentioning Germany and England. And the common denominator in each of these elections was that the people rose up against the parties imposing Berlin’s austerity program, which has forced Europe back into recession and forced the periphery of Europe back into depression. And they rejected this soundly in these votes.
But the amazing thing was that The New York Times reporters were treating this like, well, these people must be financially illiterate, because everybody knows austerity is the only thing that can be done, and austerity must be done, and it’s good and such. So the more they destroy the economy, the more the New York Times reporters seem to think that destroying the economy is the objective.
And Paul Krugman has been very good. He is, after all, Nobel laureate in economics. He writes a regular column for The New York Times, and for months he’s been explaining how insane the austerity program is. But apparently the New York Times reporters don’t read their own Nobel prize winning economists.
JAY: Well, the same thing was happening here during the high tide of the super committee and all the focus on the American debt and deficit. The same thing was happening. The media was just presupposing that you need to have these kinds of cuts and they’re good for the economy, and this kind of notion that if you have austerity, it frees up the society for growth. I mean, that’s the argument, and I guess most journalists seem to buy into that. So what’s wrong with that?
BLACK: Well, it’s the opposite is true. If you’re in a recession, the problem is you don’t have sufficient demand to keep people employed. And so that typically means private-sector demand is seriously inadequate. Austerity means that you reduce public-sector demand at the same time that private-sector demand is already inadequate. Well, if you do that, then you have really inadequate demand and you have really severe unemployment, which is why unemployment has shot upward throughout Europe, why it’s over 20 percent in a number of the nations of the periphery, why youth unemployment is over 50 percent, why immigration is a leading strategy of European kids when they get their college degree. And it’s a policy that is tearing the European Union apart politically, and socially as well.
You know, this is the equivalent up bleeding a patient, and then, of course, they don’t get better, because you bled them, so you bleed them some more, and then you yell at them for—you know, what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you recovering? And you bleed them some more. And, you know, pretty soon they’re pretty near death’s door and you’re—can’t understand why they’re not praising you and instead they’re voting you out of office.
Continue reading “Bill Black on austerity”
Oh dear
Very wealthy people are not notable for their patriotism these days:
WASHINGTON — Populist anger at Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship — a move that could save him hundreds of millions in taxes if his Facebook stock gains value after the company goes public on Friday — has inspired two senators to propose legislation that could hit Saverin with heavy taxes and bar him from ever reentering the United States.
Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) are unveiling the Ex-PATRIOT Act, which stands for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy,” on Thursday. The bill would force anyone who “expatriates for a substantial tax purpose — as judged by the Internal Revenue Service” to pay a mandatory 30 percent tax on future capital gains and to be turned back at the border should that person try to return.
“This is a great American success story gone horribly wrong,” Schumer told reporters Thursday. “Eduardo Saverin wants to defriend the United States of America just to avoid paying taxes. We aren’t going to let him get away with it.”
Schumer called Saverin’s behavior “outrageous,” arguing that “Saverin has turned his back on the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him and helped him become a billionaire.”
Schumer also predicted the GOP would go along with the measure.
“Why wouldn’t they?” he said. Casey added, “I’d like to hear the reason why not.”
According to his lawyer, Saverin renounced his citizenship in September, although his name just showed up on an Internal Revenue Service list two weeks ago, and has become a permanent resident of Singapore.
The New York Times on Thursday reported that Saverin said he had been misunderstood when it came to allegations of tax avoidance. “I’m not a tax expert,” he told the Times. “We complied with all the known laws. There was an exit tax.”