Poverty – Page 8 – Prog Gold

Hey! Trutex! Leave Them Kids Alone

Published on October 21, 2007

Via Archrights: first it was the co-option of teachers into fingerprinting every British child, whether they or their parents agreed or not.

Now even the school uniform suppliers are to be drafted into the suburban stasi:.

The chip connects with teachers’ computers to show a photograph of the pupil, data about academic performance and whether he or she is in the correct classroom. It can also restrict access to areas of the school. The radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Ten pupils began wearing a chip sewn into their uniforms eight months ago.

The scheme has drawn criticism from human rights campaigners. “Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early,” said David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils. “It is appalling.”

It is, but that’s just a science experiment, Chipped uniforms are on the horizon though and a line of chipped uniform items is apparently going into production, made by Trutex. (Anyone British who has children or who has been a child knows Trutex. They’re one of the biggest suppliers of school uniforms and clothing in the country.)

A school uniform maker said yesterday it was “seriously considering” adding tracking devices to its clothes after a survey found many parents would be interested in knowing where their offspring were.
Trutex would not say whether it was studying a spy in the waistband or a bug in the blazer but admitted teenagers were less keen than younger children on the “big brother” idea.

What, you mean they get a choice?

Nope, didn’t think so.

Even leaving aside privacy concerns this will no doubt add to the cost. It cost over 600 pounds to kit my younger son out when he went to senior school, (and that as ten years ago) because you have to buy specific items in specific colours and patterns by specific manufacturers in specific shops: but if he’d turned up at school in the wrong thing, he’d’ve been a laughing stock, as my sister and I were when we had the wrong brand and colour of games skirts. Thirty years and it still rankles.

That kind of snobbery and financial bullying can drive some children, and some parents, to despair and self-harm. That’s bad enough. How much more is obliging parents and children to pay to be spied on going to cost?

To By Those Who Have, Much Shall be Given.Taken

Published on October 11, 20071 Comment

The sick furore created by the self-crowned Bitch-Queen Of All Wingnuttia Michelle Malkin and her legion of flying buttmonkeys over the Frost family’s appearance in a Democrat healthcare policy ad, as ordered by the Republican party, has already coming back to bite her – in the form of her own words. Seems her views were quite different until very recently. Sweet.

Not that this will at all impede her metamorphosis from sloppy dishonest journalist to the La Pasionara of the Fox Brownshirts.

Malkin’s been a good little GOP shocktrooper lately, but in the process of debunking her all sorts of people have been shown to be sucking off the public teat, and guess what, it’s not the poor so much as the comfortably off and those who don’t have to worry about affording things like healthcare because theirs is covered, thanks, and usually by your tax dollars. And that’s without even mentioning corporate welfare. The wingnuts may have opened a can of worms they’d rather have kept closed.

Here’s a couple of cases in point, though there’s no shortage of more. First, via Cliff Schecter’s blog there’s the NY millionaire who has persuaded the courts that the taxpayers should pay for his son’s private school:

Supreme Court: NYC schools must pay private special education for multimillionaire’s son

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Wednesday affirmed a ruling that requires New York City schools to reimburse a wealthy businessman for private special education for his son.

The justices split 4-4 on the case, which means a lower court ruling siding with former Viacom executive Tom Freston remains in place.

Lower courts had sided with Freston against New York City’s board of education, saying the city must pay for educating the learning-disabled student, even though he had been enrolled in private school.

The student’s parents had insisted that public schools were unable to meet the child’s needs. His learning disabilities were diagnosed after he was enrolled in private school.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the link to where this twaddle actually ended up, at the NYT.

I’m not going to link to Malkin, you can find her easily. But here are her words about a family of 6 living on approx 45-55k per year.

The bottom line here is that this family has considerable assets. Maryland’ s S-CHIP program does not means-test (correction: I meant to say assets-test>. The refusal to do assets tests on federal health insurance programs is why federal entitlements are exploding and government keeps expanding. If Republicans don’t have the guts to hold the line, they deserve to lose their seats.

I expect the vilification, stalking and slandering of Viacom Exec Tom Freston to begin immediately.

Don’t hold your breath.

On a less blatant but no less hypocritical note it seems it’s not enough that police on the job have all of their medical expenses covered and workmens’ comp and paid recuperation leave, though no-one begrudges them that becauise many put their lives on the line every day.

But it’s not enough for this greedy Orkando police officer:

Cop who fell on the job sues family of baby who almost drowned
An officer who went to help when a baby fell in a pool says she slipped in a puddle.

CASSELBERRY – In January, 1-year-old Joey Cosmillo wandered into the backyard and fell into the family pool. When his mother hauled him out, he wasn’t breathing. Rescuers were able to bring him back to life, but he suffered severe brain damage and cannot walk, talk or even swallow.

Now, his family faces another burden: One of the rescuers, Casselberry police Sgt. Andrea Eichhorn, is suing, alleging the family left a puddle of water on the floor that afternoon, causing her to slip and fall.

The boy’s grandparents, named in the suit, are mystified and angry.

A family friend today set up an account, hoping to raise funds for the boy’s long-term care. It’s the Joseph “Joey” Cosmillo Assistance Fund. Donors can make contributions at any Wachovia bank branch.

Without the insurance programme that Malkin and her ilk are so vehemently opposing, children like this would have no care at all. This family would have had to sell everything to provide medicine and round-the-clock nursing – and when that money that ran out, what then?

The flying buttmonkeys don’t care. Like the Spartans that they so homoerotically venerate, they think sick children should be considered a societal encumbrance who deserve to be left to die as the obvious defectives they are.

“Eichhorn last week sued Richard Cosmillo; his wife, Maggie Cosmillo; and the boy’s mother, Angela Cosmillo, accusing them of negligence. They were careless, according to the suit, and allowed the home they shared to become unsafe.

As a consequence, Eichhorn broke her knee, something that kept her off the job for two months, according to police Chief John Pavlis.

Joey now lives in a nursing home five miles away, where he gets 24-hour care. He breathes through one tube. He’s fed through another.

“He doesn’t have any abilities — any,” his grandmother said. “He can’t sit. He can’t swallow. He can’t eat. We’re not even sure he can see.”

She and Richard Cosmillo are the boy’s legal guardians. For the first two months after the accident, she remained at his bedside, never once going home.

She has now gone back to work at a furniture store, and her husband keeps watch on the boy. He visits every day.

“This thing,” Maggie Cosmillo said, “has destroyed our lives forever.”

The baby’s mother was the only one home Jan. 9, when the boy slipped out of the house and wound up in the pool, according to a police report.

She plunged in and dragged him out, carrying him inside, down a hallway and into a bedroom. She also called 911.

Eichhorn arrived a few minutes later. As she stepped into the room where rescuers were working on the boy, she slipped and went down on one knee, then stood back up, according to Richard Cosmillo.

Later that day, she went to an emergency care center and eventually to an orthopedist, according to her attorney, David Heil.

While she was on medical leave, Pavlis said, the city’s insurer paid her medical bills and provided disability checks.

Eichhorn, a 12-year department veteran, would not discuss the suit. Her attorney said those benefits, paid by the city’s workers’ compensation carrier, were not enough. The suit seeks an unspecified amount of money.

Eichhorn, he said, is a victim. Her knee aches, and she will likely develop arthritis.

If the Cosmillos had made their pool baby-proof, police would not have been called to the scene, there would have been no water on the floor, and Eichhorn would not have hurt herself, he said.

“It’s a situation where the Cosmillos have caused these problems, brought them on themselves, then tried to play the victim,” he said.

More…

Doesn’t that just about sum up the wingnut attitude?

Anything bad that happens to you must must be your fault, because otherwise that would mean that bad things happen to good people and life is just random – that would never do. After all, weren’t they gifted their own comfortable lifestyles as a reward for being good people? Of course they’re good, mothing bad’s happened to them, QED.

The alternative, that really it’s all just blind chance, not a matter of just deserts and that they’re no better or worse than the rest of us and not exceptional at all is unthinkable.

To admit otherwise is to accept that their God, be it supernatural or the invisble hand of the free market, doesn’t exist. There they stand, they can do no other: the thought that they are not special and beloved, but just ordinary schmucks who got lucky, is just too much for their little heads to cope with.

Climbing The Crest Of A Wave

Published on September 8, 20072 Comments

A slow tsunami of debt misery and homelessness is about to roll over the United States, and consequently the rest of us, if the financial markets do not stabilise soon. It’s already on it’s way and picking up speed.

The Sacramento Bee has an excellent report up that puts a human face on the building subprime lending disaster:

Frustrated borrowers who lenders to try to work things out say it’s a fruitless ordeal

By Jim Wasserman – Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, September 2, 2007
Story appeared in BUSINESS section, Page D1

Tracy Trammell sold the boat, the extra vehicles and tried everything to “find a way to refinance, or do what I could not to lose the house for my children.”

She is in a bind all too common in Sacramento: a home losing value and an adjustable-rate mortgage with payments that jumped $1,000 a month in June.

Thirty days ago, Trammell, a widow and working mother with two daughters, skipped her first payment to Countrywide Financial Corp., a company deep in its own crisis amid a pileup of hardship cases. This month, Trammell will miss a second payment on a refinance loan her late husband handled at the peak of the housing boom in 2005.

After this article was written Countrywide announced the layoff of up to 12,000 employees – most of whom are about to have trouble paying their own home loans too. So it goes, the big wave’s picking up speed.

Bottom line: Neither Trammel nor Calabasas-based Countrywide has yet been able to work out a deal to spare her small house in Citrus Heights from foreclosure. There are no loan modifications. No refinance options. No waiving of a pre-payment penalty that stings a borrower for thousands of dollars to get out of trouble.

“I asked, ‘What’s your solution? Give me some ways I can keep this from happening,’ ” says Trammell of her dealings with the nation’s leading lender. “They said, ‘Get a roommate.’ That’s what she told me. I said, ‘OK. Well, I guess we’re done talking.’ ”

The ceaseless multiplication of this joint impasse helps explain the 617,000 foreclosures during the first seven months of this year in the United States, according to Fair Oaks-based Foreclosures.com, a Web site for real estate investors. Behind those numbers — including 3,756 foreclosures in the Sacramento region during the first six months of 2007, according to DataQuick Informations System — is the often- unbridgeable divide between mortgage lenders and their growing ranks of distressed borrowers.

Read more…

For those distressed borrowers there will be no end to the distress, even if their home is reposessed – because of course it is no longer possible to declare bankruptcy, lose everything and start again . The Bush administration, aided and abetted by both Democrats and Republicans in thrall to finance companies’ campaign donations, pushed through a bankruptcy bill that means that even if the ownership of your house reverts to the finance company or bank you’ll still be paying for it for ever, even if you’re jobless and living on the street.

They don’t just own what you owe them: they own you. There is to be no escape from debt peonage.

One might almost think that the market saw the debt crunch coming and their bubble about to burst and decided to take steps to protect their investments….

The war economy that Bush has built is constructed on the flimsiest of foundations, worthless paper. America’s past and current good times and overconsumption are financed on tick by other nations’ money, particularly Chinese money – now all that paper’s coming due, and they want all of it back.

There’s a lot to be repaid. US business and consumer debt is a tradeable commodity like any other and there’s a full suite of clever sounding derivative debt ‘products’ on the market to be sold to gullible investors, all of which boil down to gambling.on a grand scale: its a punt on whether the money will be paid back and if so, when and how much. The rewards can be huge and so can the losses.

This trade in debt, this new South Sea Bubble, has been rated by companies like Standard & Poor, but some of these companies have, proven to be corrupt and to have been gaming the ratings to their own advantage.

International investment funds and overseas banks have bought huge amounts of US debt and derivatives because there has been huge money to be made in high risk loans: but now, because ratings can no longer be trusted, banks and investment funds don’t know what their paper assets are worth. Because of this there is no confidence in the financial markets; because of this lack of confidence no one will lend anyone any money; and because of that, the market and the whole economy is in danger of collapsing, sending a wave of debt bondage through the US middle classes and threatening another Great Depression.

Phillip R. Robinson, executive director of Civil Justice Inc., a public interest law group in Maryland that helps victims of predatory real estate practices, said much of the data on foreclosure and delinquency rates appears to be conflicting.

But he said it is clear from the deluge of borrowers turning to his group for help that the number of homeowners in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure is increasing steadily.

“There’s a dramatic increase and shift in the kind of homeowner calling us,” Robinson said. Previously, his group saw mostly “a homeowner who’s had a devastating life event and is not able to make payments.”

But now, he continued, “We’re seeing a huge increase of very-good-credit borrowers who got mortgage loans that were unsuitable for them in the first place. The professional they relied on steered them to the highest-cost loan in which the professional could make a profit. They’ve gotten themselves in over their head. These are prime borrowers in subprime loans.”

After the last depression state banks and treasuries became the lenders of last resort – no more would the banks run out of money as people hurried to realise their few remaining assets and drained the banks of cash. Now the Federal Reserve are frantically triying to keep the money supply flowing and lubricating the opposing sprockets of credit and debt that make the whole rickety contraption go round, but the whole thing is grinding to halt faster they they can throw money at it.

Unsurprisingly for organisations whose very existence is predicated on the maximisalisation of profit and the minimisation of loss, with no regard to any potential human consequences, many investment companies and banks are deciding to ~~take the money and run~~ cut their losses by liquidating their assets now.

What that means in practical terms is a lot of people being thrown in the street when their homeloan is called in, or when they can no longer afford accelerating payments and default on the loan. Surprise, surprise, surprise, it’s women, and particularly black women, who are suffering most.

But the wave of foreclosures is spreading fast amd picking up speed: the great American middle class can dismiss the issue when it’s only lone parents, minorities and the poor hurting –them – but when it hits NASCAR Dad and Security Mom – us – will we finally see the rump of what used to be middle America wake up to the fact that they’ve been royally screwed too?

In Citrus Heights, Tracy Trammell said she knew she might have trouble with refinancing the loan her husband took out in 2005. But a Countrywide representative told her early this year not to worry — her loan would only go up a little.

As June approached, she called again. This time a different representative said she faced a major reset on her two-year adjustable loan — the payment would rise $1,000 a month.

“I called the original girl and said, ‘I need to know what’s going on,’ ” Trammell said. “She said, ‘Fax me the stuff, and I’ll get back to you.’ Then her first words were, ‘Oops, I missed that part.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, oops? This is my home.’ ”

Trammel made her new $3,000 payment in June. She made another in July. Then she considered reality. She is bound to lose the house with this loan, a loan with one more year before its pre-payment penalty expires.

When Countrywide suggested a roommate, Trammell felt insulted. She skipped a payment. It is one more foreclosure now in motion.

The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

Published on July 28, 20071 Comment

The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.

About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.

No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.

It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?

I wish I could be that hopeful.

hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..

Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.

The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?

But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.

I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?

Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?

Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.

Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.

But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.

The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.

UPDATE

As if to prove my point….

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez. Pas.

Published on July 12, 20071 Comment

Diaper fetishes, financial shenanigans, brothels, corrupt senators – courtesy of a commenter at Tbogg comes a fascinating New Orleans political blog, Your Right Hand Thief, which lifts the lid on sexual corruption and hypocrisy in the Katrina-devastated city. It’s damned good reading, once you get the cast of characters sorted out in your head, but it’s not for the easily shocked.

In New Orleans not just the infrastructure’s buggered; the politicians are too. The difference is the politicians enjoy it. Take a particularly vile Louisiana Senator named Vitter, whose sexual predilections allegedly include a taste for wearing dirty diapers. (This seems to be becoming a popular pastime amongst politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, if persistent rumours are true. But I digress.)

Vitter’s just been named on the DC Madam’s list (download from cloggie.org here) and is also said to be a customer of the infamous Canal St Madam too:

Tonight I got confirmation from a solid inside source who has no ideological ax to grind. The source said Vitter was a client at Canal Street, and provided some additional details that shed light on Maier’s comment that there was “more to the business than sex”. [Update: Based on her comments about Vitter not having “unusual predilections”, I would interpret this comment to mean something like companionship and social interaction rather than fetishes… etc.] These details are not for the faint of heart, either.

We’re talking about, among other things, Diaper Fetishism. That’s right folks, according to a trusted inside source, Vitter was well known among other Canal Street Brothel patrons to like diapers as well as other bizarre “fetishes”. I don’t have much more info than that from my source, except that some of the other patrons at the brothel included a well known business-minded New Orleans Republican and a well known Democratic ex-governor. There are many other well known patrons who never held public office, too. You’ve probably heard various names floated about.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love that New Orleans has more than its share of sex fetishists and preeverts who can’t come missionary. This ain’t a vanilla town, kids.

But the thought of Vitter prancing around in a dipey is a bit jarring, especially since I’m changing those nasty things every day. I can’t help picturing the scene and wondering about the details. I assume they were adult sized. But were they cloth or disposable? Did they get dirty? Was there a diaper genie available? What about a tube of Boudreaux’s? Were they customized in Vitter Blue? How old were Vitter’s children when this was going on? Did he change diapers in the morning and then wear them at night?

Enquiring minds would like to know – including mine now. I’m hooked.

But although this is a great blog for lovers of the picaresque and of sex scandals in a steamy southern setting, it’s important to remember it’s not fiction. It’s horribly, disgustingly real: Vitter and his friends’ disgusting political, financial and sexual corruption is worsening the lives of families already devastated by nature and poltical negligence. First they were fucked over by nature, the Corps of Engineers and FEMA: now they’re being fucked over even more by people who care only about the money to be made out of their disaster, not about getting people home.

The hurricane season is coming. The Corps of Engineers’ new maps show New Orleans is still not protected, and its elected representatives are out drinking, catting, coming in their shitty nappies and making lucrative deals while doing so.

Click image to download .pdf

Three weeks late, the Army Corps of Engineers released maps today revealing the West Bank’s severe vulnerability to storm surges, a predicament that hasn’t changed in the two years since Hurricane Katrina, given that the region awaits major improvements to its gaping line of levees and floodwalls.

It’s a source of continued surprise to me that there hasn’t been an armed insurrection in New Orleans – but then I guess that’s why they made sure the refugees couldn’t return to see what the bloated vultures are doing to their city.

Only 21 percent of the 77,000 rental units in the five parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area are slated to be rebuilt through government grants and tax credits, according to a recent study by PolicyLink, a nonprofit research institute, with a disproportionate number for families on teacher or police officer salaries, rather than much lower-paid home health aides or hotel clerks. Rents on the remaining units have doubled or even tripled.

Despite pitched opposition, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development is going forward with plans to demolish and redevelop the city’s four largest housing projects, knocking out 3,000 apartments that were occupied by low-income families before the storm and adding middle-income families to the mix. So far, there is money in place to rebuild only about 1,000 units affordable enough for previous residents.

At the state level, officials have allocated $6.3 billion for the Road Home’s assistance program for homeowners, dwarfing the $869 million allocated to the Small Rental Property Program, which housing advocates say is the most likely to replace affordable units quickly.

Clever- no rental homes, no problem with those pesky Katrina refugees. Plenty of room for carpetbaggers and whores though.

What’s happening to New Orleans and its people is a lesson to all of us who think we are safe from natural disaster. I’ll give NOLAnian blogger Gentilly Girl the last word:

[…]

Without our area America would never have come out of the Great Depression, never could have been the liberator in WW II, and never could have placed Humans on the Moon. This Nation would never have achieved the status it has today without using US. WE ARE the major power for this country, and even today, we are the basis of much of what the U.S. is and can be.

We gave willingly as dutiful citizens, but then there came a storm in August, 2005. Our protections against such storms, promised by the same Nation that was destroying our lands, freakin’ damned FAILED, AND MANY OF US DIED OR BECAME HOMELESS. Our world, our little part of it, almost died. Many voices called for our death, but we would not hear them. We are rebuilding OUR land.

Our place almost died. Can you understand that statement? Look around what you perceive as your community being totally gone. Can you stomach that? That your friends, neighbors, shops and eateries are wiped from the face of the Earth? To know that the faces you have known for years are no longer next door or around the corner? To realize that the children (who you hated because of their pranks and noise), are no longer in the place their parents lived in? That they aren’t there to remind you of the continuity of culture? That you are no longer a part of the Dance of Life?
Can you imagine that in the place where you live?

Can you?

More…

UPDATE:

Commenters as Democratic Undergriound have given the good Senator the sobriquet “Vitter The Shitter”.

Wahahahahahahahaha.