First Obama gave one-sixth of all Americans poverty. Then he gutted their median household income. Then he gave them prison for not being able to pay their debts:
Debtors’ Prison Is Back — and Just as Cruel as Ever
By Ross Kenneth Urken
Posted 12:25PM 08/30/12To most of us, “debtors’ prison” sounds like an archaic institution, something straight out of a Dickens novel. But the idea of jailing people who can’t pay what they owe is alive and well in 21st-century America.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, debt collectors in Missouri, Illinois, Alabama and other states are using a legal loophole to justify jailing poor citizens who legitimately cannot pay their debts.
Here’s how clever payday lenders work the system in Missouri — where, it should be noted, jailing someone for unpaid debts is illegal under the state constitution.
First, explains St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the creditor gets a judgment in civil court that a debtor hasn’t paid a sum that he owes. Then, the debtor is summoned to court for an “examination”: a review of their financial assets.
If the debtor fails to show up for the examination — as often happens in such cases — the creditor can ask for a “body attachment” — essentially, a warrant for the debtor’s arrest. At that point, the police can haul the debtor in and jail them until there’s a court hearing, or until they pay the bond. No coincidence, the bond is usually set at the amount of the original debt. As the Dispatch notes:
“Debtors are sometimes summoned to court repeatedly, increasing chances that they’ll miss a date and be arrested. Critics note that judges often set the debtor’s release bond at the amount of the debt and turn the bond money over to the creditor — essentially turning publicly financed police and court employees into private debt collectors for predatory lenders.”
Standing Up for Those Who Can’t Pay
The practice — in addition to putting an additional squeeze on poor people — turns courts and police into enforcers for private creditors, from payday lenders to health care providers. The situation prompted Illinois legislators in July to pass a bill “to protect vulnerable consumers from being hauled to jail over unpaid debts,” in the words of state Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The Debtors’ Rights Act of 2012 requires two “pay or appear” court notices to be sent to debtors before an arrest can be made, and also prevents creditors from calling for multiple examinations unless the debtor’s financial state has significantly changed.
Many of the victims, Madigan noted at the time, were living on funds that are legally protected from being used for outstanding debt judgments, such as Social Security, unemployment insurance or veterans’ benefits. In one case she cited, an Illinois court brought a “pay or appear” order against a mentally disabled man living on legally protected disability benefits of $690 a month. The man told the court of his circumstances but was still ordered to pay $100 a month or appear in court once a month for a three-year period.
“It is outrageous to think in this day and age that creditors are manipulating the courts, even threatening jail time, to extract whatever they could from people who could least afford to pay,” Madigan said. “This law corrects that gross oversight and puts a stop to throwing people in jail for being poor while still allowing fair debt collection when people have the means to pay their debts.”
Illinois notwithstanding, the modern-day debtors’ prison probably isn’t going away anytime soon given the current economic climate: More than a third of U.S. states allow borrowers who can’t or won’t pay their debts to be jailed.
Obama’s going to give his next speech (you know, another version of “I’ll lower the level of the oceans and heal the planet if you re-elect me”) speech that will be fearmongering the terrible things that will happen if Romney is elected. But the terrible things are happening under HIS presidency.
Obama won. God damn America until Obama is gone.
Tags: debtors' prison, God damn America, Obamanomics, poverty
Start Thinking Right 
September 1, 2012 at 6:13 am
How is this Obama’s fault? It sounds like Republican states are allowing this. Your other stats are ridiculous as well. The things you point to as unfair may be legit but your causes are exactly backwards.
September 1, 2012 at 9:19 pm
crazycrawfish,
I wasn’t aware that Illinois was a “Republican state.”
You abject dumbass. The ONLY thing I’m doing is treating Obama the way YOU cockroaches (you call yourself a “crawfish” but you’re a different kind of muck-dwelling bug and we both know it) treated Bush.
I wrote an article titled, “Do Unto Obama As Liberals Did Unto Bush.” It’s your turn to twist in the wind after what you did. And if you don’t like it too bad so sad.
George W. Bush was demonized for Hurricane Katrina by you roaches. He didn’t cause Hurricane Katrina. The two people who far and away were the most guilty of failing in their duties during that disaster were the Democrat Governor of the state of Louisiana and the Democrat Mayor of New Orleans. It wasn’t George Bush who left 2,000 school buses to rot in floodwater instead of using them to save people’s lives. It wasn’t Bush’s fault that virtually all of the failures that led to the levee failures were due to local design problems and poor maintenance. But it didn’t matter to you people. You exploited a picture of Bush flying over the Katrina disaster area in a plane (because if he’d landed a lot of resources he wanted helping victims would have gone into receiving and protecting him) to accuse him of being disconnected and uncaring. And you called him a racist, of course.
Then there’s Gitmo. What was the name of that dishonest lying turd who ran for president in 2008 demonizing Bush for Gitmo and saying that any president who would have such an evil thing must be an evil president? Oh, yeah, that’s right, it was your messiah Obama. He swore up and down to close it within one year of his taking office. But it’s still open because everything your liar-in-chief said was a flagrent, dishonest, demagogic LIE. And the reason it’s still open is because Bush was right and we HAD to have a place like that for terrorists we captured but couldn’t send to their home countries because they would either simply let them go or wouldn’t even take them. That Democrat attack about Gitmo wasn’t exactly valid criticism, as history proves, but I’ll tell you what: there were TWENTY Democrats who joined your messiah in illegitimately demonizing Bush over Gitmo for every ONE who supported Bush. And just where did all that demoniziation of Gitmo go from the left now that Obama has been the president running it for the last four years? Same thing with the Patriot Act that Bush was demonized for; same thing with domestic wiretapping that Bush was demonized for; same thing with rendition that Bush was demonized for. For that matter, same thing with the Afghanistan War that Bush was demonized for. Did you know that more than 70 percent of ALL the casualties in Afghanistan have happened under Obama’s watch??? But where’s all the hate and blame that liberals poured all over Bush for the war deaths??? WHERE??? You snivelling little hypocrite roaches.
You roach Democrats demonized Bush for knowing in advance about the 9/11 attack and doing nothing. More than HALF of you dishonest turds accused Bush of that. There was somethign called “Bush derangement syndrome” going around and every Democrat was rabid, frothing at the mouth insane. And what did your messiah do? He appointed a guy into his administration who was not only a self-acknowledged communist but also a Bush “truther” who believed Bush caused 9/11. So you just stick that crap in your face and you EAT it.
You roaches demonized Bush for gas prices. Now all of a sudden you’re just filled with righteous indignation and saying – and I’ve got plenty of liberals doing it so don’t deny it – “How can you blame the president for gas prices? It’s an international issue and the president has little to do with it,” blah blah blah.
By the way, one of the liberal roaches who demonized Bush for high gas prices was none other than your messiah:
I’ve got all KINDS of examples like that. I could go on forever.
I didn’t know that liberals thought that poverty was “ridiculous.” Thank you for documenting that you Democrats actually DON’T give a damn about poor people, such that the fact that there are more of them than ever and they are suffering more than ever before is “ridiculous” to you. But the fact remains that more people are poor under Barack Obama than have EVER been measured – and certainly poverty is now far worse of an issue than it EVER was under Bush.
I also find it amazing that you would say that Obama gutting household incomes is “ridiculous.” I sure bet most other Americans don’t. But the fact remains that household incomes under Obama’s “recovery” went down by nearly TWICE as much as they did under the recession that Obama keeps blaming Bush for.
How is this Obama’s fault? Isn’t he the guy who told us that he was going to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the damn planet??? Isn’t Obama the man who just took over one-sixth of the entire US economy with his ObamaCare socialism? Isn’t Obama who has SUED Republican states from enforcing illegal immigration laws and voter ID laws so he can steal more votes in November? Why doesn’t this sonofabitch show as much damn concern about poor people??? Isn’t Obama the guy who demonized every bad thing that happened to every poor person when Bush was president and literally CONTINUES to blame everything on Bush today??? And yet here we are at the end of your messiah’s first term and we’ve got freaking debtor’s prisons for poor people who are using the courts and mostly LIBERAL JUDGES to keep an evil system going.
The only thing that’s “backwards” is your head up you know where.
September 1, 2012 at 9:46 pm
You are a sick and sad individual. I hope you get the help you need. God Bless.
September 1, 2012 at 10:29 pm
You are a pathetic little hypocrite who obviously can’t even BEGIN to defend yourself or your party from a “sick and sad” history of doing the very thing you accuse me of. Your “God bless” doesn’t go with your “sick and sad individual” very well, so I’m betting it’s as hypocritical and empty of truth as everything else you say. Go away.
September 2, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Most don’t really know how banks work, or how money is loaned. For those that don’t know, a bank or lending institution is only required to keep around 10% deposit assets against loans outstanding. Technically, a bank could have issued roughly 9 million in loans against just 1 million in deposits or reserves. That said, most of the money that is lent never existed before hand and was, basically, printed out of thin air or created from a keystroke. This money that no one worked for is loaned with interest, of course.
Much of the debt that people default on is money that never existed until the loan was created. Now, I am not suggesting that people not pay back their debts, but, at the same time, I feel no sorrow nor have any sympathy whatsoever for these lending institutions and their usury. Not too mention, some of the larger, TBTF financial institutions w.ere bailed out with tax payer dollars. Other than bankruptcy, there was no bailout for the average joe who was being crushed by personal debt to these nefarious institutions.
It should be apparent to any one with a pulse that the financial crisis we are facing is from debt – from our profligate government, all-the-way down to the credit-card user. My late Grandfather, who built his house with cash, use to say never borrow money and only buy things you can afford with money you have today and always save- debt is bad! As we head toward the fiscal cliff, our massive debt problems are going to smash this once great country to hell!
Financial Armageddon is approaching fast!!!!
September 3, 2012 at 10:37 am
FMC,
Everything you said, of course, plus the fact that most of these giant banking institutions that helped blow America up in 2008 supported Obama and gave him millions for his election in 2008. You look at Jon Corzine and MF Global and you have everything you need to know about big banks and liberals.
One of the problems I think we could both agree on is that the “system” has so subsumed everything that essentially “to work at a big bank” is virtually tantamount “to working for the government.” They are so interconnected and interwoven. The Federal Reserve is theoretically a private entity; and of course bullcrap. And you’ve got finance people moving from this crony capitalist so-called “private sector” into government and then back into the private sector and then back into government. They use the one to leverage their careers in the other. Rahm Emanuel is an example of a liberal who went from a “private bank” to Fannie Mae to government. And his “private bank” wasn’t much less “government” than Fannie Mae before he flat-out worked for the government.
There’s not a hair’s difference between crony capitalism and pure socialism other than the dotting of the i’s.
It was Fannie and Freddie that led America off the cliff in 2008. THEY were the ones who bundled the mortgage backed securities and loaded them with bad martgages such that they were called “toxic assets.” They were the ONLY entity that was authorized to do that, plus they dived head first into subprime loans. But of course the “private banks” danced to the tune of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and big liberal government. And that’s why we’re where we are now.