Category: Class War

Debtors prison

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

It’s unbelievable that credit card companies were allowed to do this :

Some lawmakers, judges and regulators are trying to rein in the U.S. debt-collection industry’s use of arrest warrants to recoup money owed by borrowers who are behind on credit-card payments, auto loans and other bills.

More than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can’t or won’t pay to be jailed. Judges have signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties with a total population of 13.6 million people, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal of filings in those counties. Nationwide figures aren’t known because many courts don’t keep track of warrants by alleged offense. In interviews, 20 judges across the nation said the number of borrowers threatened with arrest in their courtrooms has surged since the financial crisis began.

“I wish I could do it more,” said Piatt County Circuit Judge Chris Freese, who has heard hundreds of debt-collection cases. “It’s often the only remedy to get people into court and paying their debts.”

In one of those cases, Emmie Nichols, 26 years old, was arrested in June at her mother’s house after lawyers for Capital One Financial Corp. won an arrest warrant against her for skipping a court hearing about $1,159.87 she owed on a credit card from the company. The $500 bond that freed Ms. Nichols from the county jail was turned over to Capital One as a partial payment of the debt, court filings show. A Capital One spokeswoman declined to comment on Ms. Nichols.

Some judges are worried that the jump in debt-related arrest warrants is creating a modern-day version of debtors’ prison. The practice ended in 1833 after decades of controversy, since borrowers owing as little as 60 cents could be held indefinitely in squalid jails until they paid off their debt.

Not so fast, Chris

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Funding schools through local property taxes is a really stupid system, and while I’m happy that Christie’s not getting away with these school cuts, the fact remains that the system left in place is a really bad one:

TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie’s deep cuts to state school aid last year left New Jersey’s schools unable to provide a “thorough and efficient” education to the state’s nearly 1.4 million school children, a Superior Court judge found today.

Judge Peter Doyne, who was appointed as special master in the long-running Abbott vs. Burke school funding case, today issued an opinion that also found the reductions “fell more heavily upon our high risk districts and the children educated within those districts.”

“Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase in spending levels from 2000 to 2008, our ‘at risk’ children are now moving further from proficiency,” he said.

Gov. Chris Christie’s office said that Judge Doyne himself acknowledged that the Supreme Court limited his inquiry by excluding consideration of the state’s budget crisis.

“Critically, he also noted that, despite the fact New Jersey meets or exceeds all other states in spending for ‘at-risk’ students, many of those students continue to fail to meet basic educational proficiency,” said spokesman Michael Drewniak. “The Supreme Court should at last abandon the failed assumption of the last three decades that more money equals better education, and stop treating our state’s fiscal condition as an inconvenient afterthought.”

The Abbott vs. Burke case landed back in court after the Education Law Center, a Newark-based school advocacy group, filed a motion charging that Christie’s aid cuts violated the state’s school funding formula.
Christie slashed state aid by $820 million last year, and Doyne found that altogether, the state would have needed twice that much — $1.6 billion — to fully fund the School Funding Reform Act formula.

Separate and unequal

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Bob Herbert:

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

“Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who specializes in education issues.

The current obsession with firing teachers, attacking unions and creating ever more charter schools has done very little to improve the academic outcomes of poor black and Latino students. Nothing has brought about gains on the scale that is needed.

If you really want to improve the education of poor children, you have to get them away from learning environments that are smothered by poverty. This is being done in some places, with impressive results. An important study conducted by the Century Foundation in Montgomery County, Md., showed that low-income students who happened to be enrolled in affluent elementary schools did much better than similarly low-income students in higher-poverty schools in the county.

The study, released last October, found that “over a period of five to seven years, children in public housing who attended the school district’s most advantaged schools (as measured by either subsidized lunch status or the district’s own criteria) far outperformed in math and reading those children in public housing who attended the district’s least-advantaged public schools.”

Studies have shown that it is not the race of the students that is significant, but rather the improved all-around environment of schools with better teachers, fewer classroom disruptions, pupils who are more engaged academically, parents who are more involved, and so on. The poorer students benefit from the more affluent environment. “It’s a much more effective way of closing the achievement gap,” said Mr. Kahlenberg.

About 80 school districts across the country are taking steps to reduce the concentrations of poverty in their schools. But there is no getting away from the fact that if you try to bring about economic integration, you’re also talking about racial and ethnic integration, and that provokes bitter resistance. The election of Barack Obama has not made true integration any more palatable to millions of Americans.
Continue reading “Separate and unequal” →

Paternal prison

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Thank God someone’s looking after those stupid womenfolk, who schedule abortions on a goddamned whim. And thank God some rich rightwinger organization will be picking up the tab for this:

PIERRE, S.D. — South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed a law Tuesday requiring women to wait three days after meeting with a doctor to have an abortion, the longest waiting period in the nation.

Abortion rights groups have already said they plan to file a lawsuit challenging the measure, which also requires women to undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortions.

Daugaard, who gave no interviews after signing the bill, said in a written statement that he has conferred with state attorneys who will defend the law in court and a sponsor who has pledged private money to finance the state’s legal costs.

“I think everyone agrees with the goal of reducing abortion by encouraging consideration of other alternatives,” the Republican governor said the statement. “I hope that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices.”

You mean, like having the women who voted for you reconsider their choice?

Supporters of the measure say South Dakota’s only abortion clinic, Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls, gives women little information or counseling before they have abortions done by doctors flown in from out of state. The bill would help make sure women are not being coerced into abortions, they said.

Opponents say the law forces women to go to pregnancy help centers that harass them, rather than providing sound medical advice. They also say the waiting period and the counseling are an undue burden for women who have a constitutional right to have an abortion.

Michigan

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Give us your money or lose everything! I wonder if Republicans used to be bank robbers in a past life.

Why do I suspect that workers will make significant concessions – and end up losing their collective bargaining rights, anyway? Because that’s how Republicans roll!

Michigan’s new Emergency Manager Law is already forcing major concessions from unions. The law gives the governor the power to declare a city insolvent and appoint an emergency manager with virtually unlimited power to reorganize every aspect of city business, including dissolving the city entirely. The emergency manager even has the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements.

As a result of these expanded new powers, public employees unions in some Michigan municipalities are already making large preemptive concessions to keep their cities from tripping any of the “triggers” in the new law that might give the governor an opening to send in a union-bustingemergency manager, Eartha Jane Melzer reports in the Michigan Messenger.

In Flint, the firefighters’ union agreed to increase contributions to health insurance and give up holiday pay and night shift differentials. Flint Firefighters Union President Raul Garcia told the Wall Street Journal that these concessions were driven by fear of a state takeover of Flint. “I would rather give concessions that I would like than have an [emergency financial manager] or something of that magnitude come in and say this is what you are going to do,” Garcia said.

The new law also gives the Emergency Manager the power to privatize prisons, Melzer notes.

Upping the ante

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

This is a good sign. Instead of sitting around and waiting for leadership from the White House, liberal Congress members are taking the initiative to push tax legislation that will clearly draw the lines between the rich — and everybody else. From The Hill:

In an interesting development, liberals are calling for taxes to be raised on people making more than $1 million annually while Obama and other party leaders have embraced $250,000 or more per year. The left-leaning lawmakers stress that while they still support what Obama wants to do, the president wasn’t able to convince the Democratic-led Congress to pass his tax blueprint last year.

The group of legislators, which includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), argue that poll numbers suggest the public is on their side and that added revenue is needed to narrow deficits and keep programs such as Head Start from being placed on the chopping block.

But they downplayed the dollar figure differences between their plans and the president’s.

“I don’t think there’s anything magical about 250,000 or a million. It’s how much money do you need,” said Sanders, whose proposal would set a 5.4 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year. “In my view, the Democrats and the president should be very strong on this issue: that our goal is shared sacrifice and let’s not balance the budget on the backs of the working and middle class.”

Schakowsky signaled that her legislation – which would create a 45 percent bracket for income between $1 million and $10 million a year, with a top rate of 49 percent for income of $1 billion a year and above – could work in concert with a plan to return rates to Clinton administration levels. The current top individual tax rate of 35 percent would rise to 39.6 percent at the end of next year, unless Congress again extends existing high-income rates.

“I certainly don’t see it as a counter to the real and specific debate on the Bush tax cuts,” Schakowsky said. “The fact is, Republicans don’t want to do anything to take away tax breaks from the richest Americans, and we want to stimulate that debate.”

Food for thought

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Matt Taibbi on the bank bailouts:

I have no doubt there were mountains of improprieties committed before and during these transactions. I think in the end we’re going to find out that the emergency bailouts of 2008 were really a wide-scale government-aided effort at consolidating financial power, in which the taxpayer was asked to fund a series of lucrative mergers that greatly limited consumer choices and made the entire financial system markedly less transparent. To me there’s a dangerous precedent involved when you have one group of investors who get all their news from the papers, and another group of active traders who are on the phone with the Treasury and the Fed in real-time as they marionette the economy.