The Times reported the following:

The company’s collectors also failed to inform consumers that paying [...]]]> New Orleans    The Federal Trade Commission stepped up to the play in behalf of citizens/consumers yesterday and finally put a boot on the butt of scumbag, lying debt collection operations with a $2.5 million fine levied on Asset Acceptance of Warren, Michigan.

The Times reported the following:

The company’s collectors also failed to inform consumers that paying even a small portion of the amount owed would revive the debt — in other words, making a payment would extend the amount of time the collector could legally sue.

Among other things, the complaint also contended that the company reported inaccurate information about the consumers to the credit reporting agencies.  It also said that Asset Acceptance failed to conduct a reasonable investigation when it was notified by one of the credit agencies that a debt was being disputed. Moreover, the complaint says that the company used illegal collection practices and that it continued to try to collect debts that consumers disputed even though the company failed to verify that the debt was valid.

The proposed settlement with Asset Acceptance requires the company to tell consumers whose debt may be too old to be collected that it will not sue.  It also requires the company to investigate disputed debts and to ensure it has a reasonable basis for its claims before going after the consumer.  It is also barred from placing debt on credit reports without notifying the consumer.

We’ve discussed this before.  These are citizen wealth issues.

Debt expires and becomes uncollectable in some states as early as 2 years and in others after 15 years.  If you live in a state which has a long timeline for debt (like I do – Louisiana can run 10 years!), then it’s worth thinking about moving!  According to the CreditInfoCenter.com:

The Midwest is some rough country but there’s definitely not much love for someone with more mouth than money in Kentucky, South Carolina, or Louisiana!

The point is when the needle goes past the limitations, collection companies cannot come after you or threaten to sue.  Hear, hear!  I mean it!

Now did you realize that if you even cough up a partial payment, you then extend the time for them to come after you?   Talk about no good deed going unpunished!  Seems the only sure fired protection if you are in a jam is:  HANG UP!

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of [...]]]> New Orleans  The Times ran a story that tried to put a face on the 1% and encourage us to embrace our inner percentage.

There are two ways to approach looking at these numbers around the country, and both perspectives can offer some insight to US political views.

On the one hand it lends some vague sense of understanding of why such whacky percentages of Americans sometimes respond that they are richer than anyone factually might believe them to be or in other words why so many modest income American families still identify with the rich.  There are some people who might look at the household income figures in their communities where $200000 or $300000 or even $400000 might indicate the upper elite of the 1%, and say to themselves and to others like pollsters and Republican politicians, “hey, I can get there too with some luck or a break or two.”

On the other hand people like me are amazed that that the real meaning of such numbers proves how widespread relative poverty is in these same communities.  If you can be a one-percenter in Laredo at hardly $200,000, since it is a percentage that means people on the whole are desperately poor in Laredo and something should be done about it!  In my New Orleans $362,000 puts you there, and that’s a lot of money, and I’m not sure how folks would be making that here.  Little Rock is only a bit over $300,000, similar to Billings, Montana or Albuquerque or Boise or Panama City, all of which speaks a bit to the slightly more populist nature of some (much?) of the South and West.

The real story is not in the shading of the percentages but in the gap as the Times story indicates, as well as advantages that come from both chance (birth) and structural rigidity (access to job networks):

The top 1 percent of earners in a given year receives just under a fifth of the country’s pretax income, about double their share 30 years ago. They pay just over a fourth of all federal taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center. In 2007, they accounted for about 30 percent of philanthropic giving, according to Federal Reserve data. They received 22 percent of their income from capital gains, compared with 2 percent for everybody else.   Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1 percent is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75 percent of the money, compared with 64 percent of the income in other households.

As interesting to me was playing with the formula that allowed a family to find their “place in the percentage.”   For example $100,000 family income puts a family in the top 21%, and if that family were fortunate enough to be living in New Mexico, where I have long thought about living such a family could be in the top 12% or in Montana, where we like to camp and wet a line, you would be in the top 14%.  Of course you still have to figure out how to bring $100,000 into your family, but I’m just saying…

When I left ACORN in 2008, starting wages were about $26,500 for a field organizer, which even today in 2012 would put an organizer ahead of the bottom 25%.  If they were living with another organizer or bunking in and sharing household costs, boom, they would have been in the top 50%!  We always would hear about how low our wages were, but mostly we were hearing from funders who lived in places like New York, where more than a half-million puts you in the 1%, or San Francisco where that starting wage would have put you in the bottom 17%, or Boston in the bottom 20%.

I can remember starting ACORN in Arkansas and finding that 70% of the people made less than $7500 in 1970.   Now to get to that 70% for household income, you would be knocking on the doors of families making about $100,000 around the USA.  A lot has changed in 40 years, and it’s not just inflation.

As I say, embracing your “percentage,” really depends on where you stand and how far up or down you gap is huge and growing, and the distribution is way out of plumb.

Ps.  Want to figure your place in the percentage?  Here’s the link to the calculator.

Ottawa ACORN opens another year of our Remittance Justice Campaign picketing Western Union for predatory pricing of transfers from working, immigrant families back to their [...]]]> New Orleans   This report almost writes itself, especially since the pictures virtually tell the story as various organizations in the ACORN International global federation step up to turn on the heat.

Ottawa ACORN opens another year of our Remittance Justice Campaign picketing Western Union for predatory pricing of transfers from working, immigrant families back to their relatives back home.  As we posted our demands on the front door of the Western Union office, a spokesperson for Western Union in a Denver suburb was talking to the Ottawa Citizen and conceding that they are not necessarily “the lowest priced service provider.”  Sorry, Daniel, that just isn’t good enough for ACORN International and ACORN Canada!

This weekend the report from ACORN India’s Bangalore organizer, Suresh showed the same spirits when he included the pictures of the hawkers we organized who were protesting the attempt to modify foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail which could threaten millions and millions of informal jobs in that sector currently employing 20 million workers.  The hawkers hit the streets wearing gunny sacks as part of the protest march.  ACORN International and our affiliates ACORN India and the India FDI Watch Campaign are pretty clear that unilateral action by the government had to be stopped and a mere suspension isn’t enough to make us happy until there are real protections for workers and communities.

2012 is off to a fast start!

            According to a Jason DeParle piece in [...]]]> New Orleans    The lack of social mobility has finally gotten so bad that it seems even Republicans have noticed it.  Horatio Alger and the “rags to riches” trajectory of the American dream are dead.  The new narrative is best expressed as “rags to rags, and riches to riches.”

            According to a Jason DeParle piece in the New York Times, there is essentially no longer an argument about whether or not this is the case.  The lack of social mobility is now a settled question, joined at the hip to the huge inequality that has now emerged in the country.

“At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.

Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.

Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.

By emphasizing the influence of family background, the studies not only challenge American identity but speak to the debate about inequality. While liberals often complain that the United States has unusually large income gaps, many conservatives have argued that the system is fair because mobility is especially high, too: everyone can climb the ladder. Now the evidence suggests that America is not only less equal, but also less mobile.”

            It now turns out that when the Brits and other EUers turn their noses up, it’s largely for a better view of how much more rigid our class structure has become.

            Among the many reasons cited are the structural intensity of poverty and the concrete ceiling crushing the poor from cradle to grace under the weight.  Another one mentioned was the high cost of education and the rigid class structure that has increasingly segregated the elite, which gives huge advantages to family resources and connections.

            What seemed clear from the article was not only has the lack of social mobility become so obvious that Republicans from Rick Santorum to Paul Ryan are having to concede the issue, but there is clearly no program or plan to correct this problem in any meaningful way.

            Rags to rags and riches to riches:  get used to it.

Robert Schiller from Yale gave props to Richard Green of USC for his recommendation that there be a targeted tax credit to encourage homeownership.  Green and Andrew Reschovsky of Wisconsin have studied the data closely are clear that the real benefit of existing tax policy allowing a standard deduction for interest on mortgages is for [...]]]>

Robert Schiller from Yale gave props to Richard Green of USC for his recommendation that there be a targeted tax credit to encourage homeownership.  Green and Andrew Reschovsky of Wisconsin have studied the data closely are clear that the real benefit of existing tax policy allowing a standard deduction for interest on mortgages is for more wealthy homeowners who itemize their taxes.  They have concluded that this primarily encourages them to build bigger houses, rather than distributing the benefits as real incentives to home ownership.  The multi-billion dollar tax loss of interest deductions is the largest US investment in citizen wealth, and despite the fact that this investment has created homes as the single largest source of citizen wealth for many working families, the recent recession has now wiped out wealth for such families and destroyed confidence without offering an alternative for low-and-moderate income families to create wealth.  I’m not sure that these professors are right, but at least it is a way to go until we can right-size solutions to our current predicament and the emerging future.

Robert Frank of Cornell helped defined challenge to the middle class by creating what he called a “toil index” to puzzle out a problem he had recognized from Elizabeth Warren and her daughter’s book about the “two income trap.”  That problem was essentially that middle income families were being pushed into buying houses past their means in order to secure good schooling for their children.  He notes that, “The increase in the toil index has been spectacular.  From a postwar low of 41 hours a month in 1970, it rose to more than 100 hours in 2005.”

If a family is lucky, and it takes a lot of luck these days, to have two breadwinners working fulltime 100 hours of work would still be almost one-third of their income going to put a roof over their heads.  That doesn’t work under any calculation either for a family or for the entire economy which despite the failures of HAMP, Treasury, and the Obama Administration to address, is still very important to the US economy and the recovery from neighborhood to neighborhood around the country.

No better example can be found in the automatic increases in [...]]]>             New Orleans               ACORN was a great organization and some of the gifts from its membership to their neighbors and co-workers keep on giving, despite the fact that the organization shut its doors 13 months ago in the United States.

No better example can be found in the automatic increases in a number of state minimum wage programs that are triggered by automatic inflation escalators at the beginning of each year.  The New York Times noted that this was coming in another week in eight states:  Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.  In the largest of these states Ohio and Florida, ACORN was the driving force in organizing the ballot initiatives that won the change.  ACORN members did the same in Arizona and Colorado.  Of the more than 1.4 million workers that will directly or indirectly receive wage increases, probably more than 1 million of these come from the ACORN initiatives.

The National Employment Law Project (a great outfit!) estimated the increases would range between $0.28 and $0.37 per hour which for a full-time worker (if there are any still out there?) would mean a boost from $582 to $770 per year.  Let’s low ball it and say that the increases for the ACORN-million will only be $400 per year.  This is simple math but that adds up to $400,000,000 in additional wages that lower wage workers would get from ACORN’s work this year alone.  But, let’s not quibble, whether it’s a quarter of a billion dollars or half a billion, it’s a whole lot of money that employers (not the government!) will pay hard working, lower wage workers in one of the few ongoing programs increasing citizen wealth for the 99%.

NELP told the Times that labor was planning on doing this again in some other states in 2012.  That’s welcome news that I had not heard, and, truthfully, I don’t want to Grinch it, but I’m almost doubtful that it’s true.  These are big efforts and much needed, but they take deep commitments, huge organization, and not insubstantial resources.  Without ACORN around to put some of these pieces together, organizers may find this is an even more difficult task this time around.  Furthermore, employers in a weak economy will be crying “foul!” every chance they get and high unemployment may confuse some workers who otherwise might go to the polls to “vote themselves a raise” as the employers used to argue in our campaigns.   Add to that the strenuous efforts of the Republicans to restrict access to the voting booth with new identification procedures and other voter suppression methods that ACORN used to fight, but few others have stepped up to stop, and the road could be tough.

Speaking for lower wage workers, such efforts in many other states would be a Christmas present that would keep on giving just has it has in these states!