New Orleans 

            How can this be possible?  

According to the Wall Street Journal, the problems allowing these kinds of insurance scams can be uncovered in the glaring light of a close reading of the regulations.  Where most employers, experts, and government officials have seen the ACA as a mandate for “robust” insurance, the Journal reports that “…the rules make it clear that those mandates only cover plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm.”  Citing a Citigroup Inc report, the Journal says, “That affects only 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers….Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.”

            The hope for workers shackled to these cheap rate employers is that though the company might avoid the $2000 per worker penalty for offering no coverage, if the worker opts out of the company bare-bones plan and goes to the state health exchange to buy fuller coverage they would have to be subsidized $3000 annually by the employer.  To take advantage of the subsidized exchange plans a worker would pay about $70 per month for so-so midlevel coverage and if they were making more than $12 per hour their costs could go up to $140 for the full package.   That’s still a good deal for full health coverage, but a lower waged worker would still have to be able to afford it, and that could be tough for many.

            The employers who are thinking about stiffing their workers on these low-to-no coverage skinny plans are betting the odds favor them.  Knowing how little they pay their workers, especially in the hospitality and food service industry, they think so few of them will be able to pony up the money to go the exchange route, that the few times they will have to fork over $3 grand will make it worth the bet for them.  Companies in Texas like El Fenix, the Tex-Mex chain with 1200 workers, and San Antonio-based Bill Miller Bar-B-Q with 4200 workers are already indicating they are going with the bottom of the barrel options.  For unions like Local100 or organizations advocating workers’ rights, I can already see the faces of workers coming in our offices to report being fired for having signed up for the exchange and costing their bosses an extra $3000.  If credit card histories can disqualify people from jobs now, health care problems and health care coverage decisions will no doubt lead to firings of workers throughout the country.  There may be some protections for such blatant discrimination, and surely there must be, but there are protections for firing workers for labor law violations, union activity, reporting EEOC and health and safety issues, and workers still get fired for such activity every day, as companies and the government essentially say, “Prove it!” 

            We are in for a hard, rough fight in the trenches to try to win good, affordable healthcare coverage for Americans, because the ACA is just the beginning, and it may not be as good a beginning as we either need or had hoped for.

Crummy Care

New Orleans 

            World Acceptance operates a big niche business of lending at high interest rates and predatory terms to largely lower income and working families in the South and Mexico, where they have more than 1100 offices handling a portfolio of about 800 loans per location.  They are huge in Texas, but Texas is huge, too, with 245 offices, Louisiana with 45, South Carolina, where they are headquartered, Georgia, and other states that don’t do much for their citizens in keeping the wolves away from the doors.  Arkansas where there are still remnants of what were once the most aggressive anti-usury laws in the country has no World Acceptance offices, nor does North Carolina where pay day lending was outlawed years ago.  Not that such prohibition stops World Acceptance since they are thriving in Georgia where payday lending is also prohibited.

            In negotiating with subprime lenders while with ACORN, I would frequently begin the session by conceding that our members used subprime lenders and needed them, since banks ran away from direct lending of small sums and often our members did not have pristine credit histories.  Forbes in a glowing report on World Acceptance at the end of 2012 was giddy about World Acceptance’s 327% stock price increase since the recession meltdown, as well as the soaring increases of their competitors Cash America and First Cash Financial, all of which are ubiquitous in lower income, minority neighborhoods on my daily journeys.  As Forbes reported without a hint of irony, “Left to its own devices, it’s hard on customers but potentially kind to investors.”  And, as I have often argued, the $2 billion in loans put out by World Acceptance would not be possible without the huge, and lucrative, lines of credit extended to them by in this case their bankers, Wells Fargo and Bank of America.

            Reports from ProPublica, the nonprofit foundation funded investigative news shop, were more revealing about World Acceptance’s business methods.  Routinely, they bundled in all kinds of different credit insurance products in the loans as a primary part of their business model.  The hedge manager, admittedly trying to short the stock, argued that 50% of the company’s net profit came from the various insurance scams.  Furthermore, he called the fact that 30% of their repayments every month are late, a “giant ponzi-accounting scheme,” which certainly stirs the pot hotter.   The “ponzi” part comes partially from what some former World workers described as the operating motto, “pay and renew, pay and renew,” meaning that they were constantly refinancing the original loans to lard them up with higher rates, meaning higher returns, when ever fulfilled.  Ex-workers descriptions of “chasing” where they visited borrowers homes and workplaces to implicitly threaten them about their loan status, are more reminiscent of the common practices of big lenders, including Citibank and others, using gangs to force collection of small loans in India where it is standard operating procedure.

            Interest rates between 200% and 400% are not uncommon on the World Acceptance schemes. Abuses of the Military Lending Act are rampant as the company exploits loopholes.  Meanwhile the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is vilified for its efforts at the federal level to issue regulations and guidelines attempting to curb the industry.

            When people inside the finance world are grossed out by the business model, interest rates, and predatory practices of payday lenders like World Acceptance, there’s hope, but they may be as isolated inside that world as we are, banging on the front door for change, drowned out by the voices in Forbes and elsewhere, essentially saying “buy,” but hold your nose while doing so.

World Acceptance Audio Blog

New Orleans 

• The men’s bathroom in the basement of our meeting rooms at the stately, revered University of Edinburgh were decorated in dazzling blue lights that were so distinctive that I couldn’t help snapping a picture.  Later I found out that there was a less than decorative reason.  The blue lighting made it difficult for heroin users to locate a vein, thereby discouraging addicts from using the university water closets as a shooting gallery.
• Virtually all of the public buses in Edinburgh are double-deckers, which locals cite as a claim to fame for the city compared to elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
• In Prague there are no workers in the toll booths for the Metro.  On buses and the subway, no one pays tolls except for the occasional tourist I would see trying to navigate how to use the ticket machines.
•  At the end of the reception after I arrived in Prague, the organizer Michal Ulver encouraged people to enjoy the food and eat hardily as they were doing and then mentioned that all of the food was “recycled,” as it was translated to me.  What he meant was that the food had been collected by him with the help of a friend at a local grocery store from the rubbish bins after closing.  I stayed with Jon Black and his roommates in Edinburgh my last few days in Scotland, and they generously offered me to enjoy any food I saw handy.  Jon told me later that they practiced what they called “skipping,” which turned out to be the same dumpster diving routine that Michal had mentioned in Prague.  He and one of his roommates alternated every other week going to the local grocery store at 11:30 PM after it closed and “shopping” for what they needed from the bins, washing it off later, and voila.  If there is a breakfast of champions, skipping seems to be setting the dinner table for ACORN organizers in Europe.
• At a community kitchen in the Edinburgh housing complex I let the volunteer worker convince me to have a “stovie” for lunch, which he described as a local Scottish dish.  Turned out it was corned beef and “mash” (mashed potatoes) all mixed together with no vegetables allowed.
• The most ubiquitous retail establishment I saw in Edinburgh anywhere near where we were organizing as well as everywhere downtown and elsewhere were “charity shops” featuring 2^nd hand clothing and other goods, run by all manner of nonprofits as a way to develop resources to support their work from Save the Children to the Salvation Army.  Incidentally, I also was taught the term “chuggers” which stands for “charity muggers” and describes street canvassers that highjack debit and credit card information for fake causes.
• A vote on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom is upcoming but polls are saying that currently voters are 60-40 against.
• A scheme to privatize social or public housing has foundered in many parts of the UK.  My colleagues favorite paradox was a picture we all took of a vast track of land in Pilton, where we are planning an organizing drive for ACORN Scotland, promising development, which has not happened, on vacant land where social housing was torn down for private interests whose plans didn’t develop anything due to lack of financing.
• In a humbling cross cultural note, I learned that the choice of cold or warm beer that I have often noted in Kenya and speculated that it came from lack of refrigeration facilities, actually comes from colonization by the British there and the fact that some of them prefer warm ales.  More embarrassingly, when our folks were talking at a pub about the different ways that some things were pronounced in various parts of Scotland, I cited the example from India of urinal being pronounced by ACORN India organizers as ur-i-nal.  Calmly, they informed me that they all pronounced the term ur-i-nal.  Whoops!
• My father used to enjoy a bottle of Glenfiddich for Christmas, but over in Scotland they claim that they grow fonder over time for scotches with a stronger taste of peat.   They gave me a bottle of Aberlour.  Cheers!

Stories for My Father Audio Blog

New Orleans  

Interestingly, I interviewed Andrew Marcus, the director of a documentary about Breitbart, called Hating Breitbart, yesterday on my weekly “Wade’s World” show on Friday morning’s at 9AM, since the movie was appearing at the Little Rock Film Festival.  Marcus’ route to the movie had been circuitous.  Coming out of film school in Chicago he became fascinated with filming protests because of the “human drama” that always emerged through the camera.  He created a blog on protest films, and next thing he knew he was filming Cindy Sheehan, the Iraq war casualty’s mother, protesting at President George Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch, and in the process the experience radicalized him as he witnessed what he saw as a double standard of lax reporting by the national media about the protests and the infrastructure that made them possible.  From there it was a short leap to catching the Tea Party as it grew and to then bonding with Breitbart, who he met while filming him speaking at a tea party, and gathering the footage that becomes Hating Breitbart.

Marcus confirmed in our conversation that Breitbart was in many ways apolitical.  He liked a good fight and wanted to build his business, so he was a happy warrior in some ways who became a conservative darling.  Certainly Breitbart’s real passion, shared by the director, was poking the rest of the media in the eye.  All of which seems natural to me, because he wanted to make his web-voice stand out in the herd.  Marcus, and perhaps Breitbart and many on the right, see the media’s indifference not as incompetence, but conspiracy, not as laziness, but bias and design.  Ironically, this view would find much common cause on the left as well, where victimization can also be a common complaint.  Marcus’ “hating” theme comes from his perspective that the antipathy stirred by Breitbart discolored the true man, but Marcus is surely aware that the “hating” from the right as well and the demonization of politics, politicians, and organizations, like ACORN, is equally obscuring.

Marcus seemed defensive about questions concerning James O’Keefe and his relationship with Breitbart, wanting to define O’Keefe as a “freelancer” and ignore the factual history of Breitbart’s dissembling about his financial and professional relationship with O’Keefe for months before admitting to it, which is anything but something described in the common vernacular of publisher to freelance journalist.  Marcus wanted to have questions about O’Keefe and his plummeting credibility around fake presentation of video on ACORN, legal settlements in San Diego for harm he inflicted on an ACORN worker, and the fiasco he was involved with in tampering with phones in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans field office, referred to O’Keefe directly.  At one point he even offered to give me O’Keefe’s phone number on the air, which would have been a huge privacy breach that I declined.  He was disturbed that people didn’t understand that the final settlement on the Landrieu case was for a misdemeanor and not a felony, which is hardly the point.  I asked if O’Keefe had any questions now about how stupid a stunt it was, but the answer was again a phone number for O’Keefe.  He also expressed amazement that people saw O’Keefe’s fake pimp video promo getup on his ACORN assault as “racist.”   Wow!

All of which inevitably leads to the conclusion that he got so close to the subject that he lost perspective.  What in some situations might have been an interesting and nuanced film about contradictions often missed by participants but shared by activists on both sides of the line, seemed increasingly to have been an attempt to hoist a banner on a battleground now abandoned by a warrior for another lost and forgotten cause.

Hating Breitbart Audio Blog

Edinburgh    

             First, there’s the matter of certain fees that are being charged to this group of tenants by the leasing agency (letting agency, as they call it) for the large landlord, which is ironically a giant cooperative enterprise with many far flung operations called Scottish Mid.  These fees for certain basic services add up to more than 100 pounds (roughly $150), and there is no question that they have been outlawed by the National Government, yet by either habit or design, many real estate leasing companies around the city continue to collect them as routine, leaving tenants in private housing no choice but to pay.  The EPTAG task is straightforward.  Introduce the organization, explain the fees and the plan to get a refund from the agency, enroll members into the organization and the fight, and away they go by setting a meeting, filling out the forms, taking action, and then inevitably collecting a 100 pound reward for their collective action.  Sweet!

             Perhaps an even larger organizing handle looming within EPTAG’s reach has to do with rental deposits, that can be quite hefty for first and last month’s rent and so forth.  Deposits are legal certainly, but in Scotland they have to be held, essentially in trust, by a 3^rd party to ensure that when a tenant leaves the property there is a fair settlement and refund of the deposit when appropriate after the 3^rd party satisfies everyone that the terms of the lease have been met.  Not surprising to anyone who has ever been a tenant and certainly predictable for anyone who has ever organized tenants, surveys in Edinburgh indicate that perhaps only one-third of the local private landlords are actually turning over the deposits to a third party, while the vast majority are just pretending it is business as usual and hanging on to the money. 

             There’s a kicker though that creates a great organizing tool for EPTAG, not totally dissimilar to the kind of campaign that ACORN Italy has run in Rome and elsewhere.  If the tenant determines that the landlord is holding the deposit and not turning it over as required and moves to initiate that transfer, when successful the tenant collects a refund of three times the level of the initial deposit.  Jon Black, one of the EPTAG leaders and one of our ACORNistas, as they sometimes jokingly call themselves, collected over 800 pounds or $1200 in exactly that way, all of which indicates to me and excitingly to EPTAG increasingly, that there are not only rights that have to be won, but gold in those hills for sustaining and expanding the organization.

             All of this is just a warmup, since there will undoubtedly be a laundry list of issues that tenants have with their landlords, which will keep the members active and organizing, while EPTAG and hopefully the emerging ACORN Scotland, keep pulling more benefits for our members out of our organizing bag of goodies.  And, building power, too?  It doesn’t get much better than this!

Edinburgh Tenant Organizing Audio Blog

Prague  

             The gallery itself was a new venture.  A combination art space, coffee house, and meeting area for activists, young artists, and passersby, that they had opened within the last month and were staffed between 10 in the morning and 6 in the evening.  It gave them a presence without giving them a deeper base.  In the first month it was, predictably, a fledgling affair, where hopes were high, but revenues still meager and the rent coming due.

             Three women had been active in Occupy Prague and similar efforts.  They had experience going door-to-door, but had not had any success with it, and blamed the system, fear, apathy, and in general the people themselves for not taking action.  None of that was unusual, but their Occupy time had hardened their skepticism once they were down to 20 people and holding onto one tent space near the square.  I wasn’t sure that I was able to convince them that another way was possible.

             One man told an interesting story of the US-funded National Democracy Institute (NDI) and its funding of a community organizing experience.  There were paid organizers, there was doorknocking, there were many meetings, and even a few small actions of a sort.  People responded well to the systematic methodology.  There was optimistic and concrete results, typical of any solid community organizing experience.  Then the project pulled the organizers out and the organization and activity quickly dissipated.  I’m not sure what the NDI was trying to do.  Their mission is supposedly to promote civic participation and engagement.  The notion of sustainable organization that might have been an empowering tool for people in the Czech Republic didn’t seem to have fit in their scope, or at least so it seemed in this telling.  The sum product was to intrigue those who knew of the effort, but frustrate them as well, all of which made my job harder.

             One man wanted to talk about how to reclaim a factory that he had lost.  There was interest in translating my books into Czech and how that could be done.  There was interest in seeing if more support could be gained from local churches.  It was that kind of evening.

             We had a long conversation with a number of the organizers after the general meeting about a project they were trying to promote in Guinea in western Africa around “agro-circles,” a technology developed in Slovakia, many here felt to be more affordable, environmentally adaptable, and critical to increased food production in that country.  We have been going back and forth on these questions for months between English, Czech, and French with great confusion.  The project would be difficult under any circumstances, and finally there was agreement on who was doing what, when, and how, and the very limited role that ACORN International could really play in a rural development project outside of our expertise.

             The hard part of all of these discussions was moving people to act and go forward, rather than dwell on the great movements and disappointments of the past.  Getting people to try something different is never easy, and at the end of the evening, I would have to say that a stalemate is different than a decision to move forward, and I’m not sure people were yet ready to really change their organizing process in order to see something different happen here.

Pushback in Prague Audio Blog

Edinburgh      

The first thing to understand is that in the usual way of understanding a “tax,” the “bedroom tax” is not a tax at all but a cut in the amount of benefits for recipients with a clawback of 14% for the first “extra” bedroom and 25% for the second “extra” bedroom for those living in social or public housing.  The program was proposed over the last six months and implemented within the last six weeks and organizers and housing residents are trying to make it through the muddle since there are no clear regulations that seem to be guiding application of the “tax” at all.  What is the definition of an “extra” bedroom?  No one seems clear. 

Some council authorities left with administering these new national cutbacks are including storage rooms and workspaces.  If a family has 5 children, then where there are two to a room, no problem, but the odd child out in a room would lead to application of the bedroom tax because the child is in a room alone, unless the child is over 16 in which case that’s OK according to the government.  Huh?  What?  Are you still with me.  And, of course if you are over 65, no problems how many bedrooms you might have, because the government didn’t want the political opposition from the elderly.  Exemptions in some cases also exist for recent veterans, families with recent deaths, and in some cases for the disabled.  The parliament in Scotland has stopped evictions, but what happens to the debt and how long can they hold out against Westminster?

The price of all of this local discretion is that if local authorities are pushed to be more liberal, and the national government in Westminster is unyielding, then they are stuck with the bill.  If the “tax” is misapplied, then the local council’s can get some of the money back of course, but they will have to be pushed into that position.  Virtually everyone in the room where we were meeting at Edinburgh University saw this as a concerted national campaign to starve social housing of funds, divide residents, and force councils to accelerate privatization schemes for social housing for private landlords.

With this much discretion, organizers seized on the notion of developing a “minimum standards” campaign, mobilizing the anger and demands of the housing residents to bend the discretionary authority towards the clarity of entitlements rather than one off favors for specific people in various places.  Local benefits offices in Scotland are still located in the communities themselves making them easily accessible for quick organizing and direct mobilization and actions to turn in the forms and demand exemptions from the “tax” based on already acknowledged exceptions people have seen and exemptions that have not been clarified.

Before we broke for the day local tenants organizers were sketching plans to target specific neighborhoods for doorknocking next week, UNITE, a large UK union, was volunteering resources and capacity, community educators were offering to lend a hand and put in time for the organizing.  There was excitement.  A campaign seemed to be moving from anger to action, and old ACORN membership buttons and banners were being passed out.  Something big could happen here with organizing in Scotland leading the way and becoming the tail wagging the dog throughout the country.

Bedroom Tax Audio Blog

Edinburgh  

What should we make of all of this this?  Worth the worry or a tempest in a tea party…I mean tea pot?

Next to the military and the CIA, there are few more inscrutable and opaque government outfits than the IRS, making it pretty easy to believe both Kentucky Senator Mitch O’Connell’s accusations about their “thuggish” practice and the Tea people’s lawyer’s cry about McCarthyism.  The Republicans  don’t much like the IRS or anyone involved in tax collection given their project of dismantling the government dollar by dollar, so it’s not like they are going to budget more money for better supervision of nonprofits or anyone else, so it will be even easier to believe the IRS apologists that they were sorry because they were incompetent and didn’t supervise their agents well in sort of a “guys gone wild in Cincinnati” storyline.

And, of course we all have our own stories on this side of the divide as well.  This year I’ve had to pay for a tax certificate requested by nonprofits in Japan to pay for speaking over there.  Six months, no word, and no way to track it down.  In another incident this year, I had to pay for a new copy of an exemption letter sent to me at the wrong address and lost without me knowing it was sent for several years, and suddenly got a call from an IRS investigator saying my letter and the results of an audit were held up because filing and paying for the letter as instructed by Cincinnati had confused them in Fort Worth into thinking someone else was trying to file for a new exemption under the ACORN International c3 number.  One the other hand I had a great conversation with the IRS several weeks ago about waiving penalties and fines for KABF in Little Rock, and thanks for that guys!  My point is simply that there is no way to figure the IRS out.  And, I don’t want to get into how long it took them to start paying attention to the predatory nature of refund anticipation loans or the way they handle volunteer or VITA sites and their so-called “partnerships” there.  They move at their own chosen speed without explanation or transparency, and it’s luck of the draw every time Joe Citizen ends up dealing with them, so basically the only good strategy is avoiding them completely and hoping they lose your name in the files somewhere.  In short, we should all feel lucky it’s not worse.

As for the Tea people and Public Citizen’s positions, most of the Tea groups will shrivel and die anyway so it hardly matters at some level, and Karl Rove and his lawyers could tie the IRS up for years and might argue that stopping Obama from being elected is their definition of contributing to the public’s “social welfare.”  Both sides are no doubt right even for both right and wrong reasons, all of which adds up to the likelihood that with less staff and less funding and no improvements in supervision or transparency, the only sure bet is that our experiences with the IRS will get a lot worse before they get any better.

IRS & Tea Party Audio Blog