Poor but Not Poor Enough: Life among the working poor in FL

[BY CARLA K. JOHNSON AND KELLI KENNEDY
ASSOCIATED PRESS

MIAMI -- Sandra Pico is poor, but not poor enough.

She makes about $15,000 a year, supporting her daughter and unemployed husband. She thought she'd be able to get health insurance after the Supreme Court upheld President Barack Obama's health care law.

Then she heard that her own governor won't agree to the federal plan to extend Medicaid coverage to people like her in two years. So she expects to remain uninsured, struggling to pay for her blood pressure medicine.

"You fall through the cracks and there's nothing you can do about it," said the 52-year-old home health aide. "It makes me feel like garbage, like the American dream, my dream in my homeland is not being accomplished."

Many working parents like Pico are below the federal poverty line but don't qualify for Medicaid, a decades-old state-federal insurance program. That's especially true in states where conservative governors say they'll reject the Medicaid expansion under Obama's health law.

In South Carolina, a yearly income of $16,900 is too much for Medicaid for a family of three. In Florida, $11,000 a year is too much. In Mississippi, $8,200 a year is too much. In Louisiana and Texas, earning more than just $5,000 a year makes you ineligible for Medicaid.

Governors in those five states have said they'll reject the Medicaid expansion underpinning Obama's health law after the Supreme Court's decision gave states that option. They favor small government and say they can't afford the added cost to their states even if it's delayed by several years. Some states estimate the expansion could ultimately cost them a billion dollars a year or more.

Many of the people affected by the decision are working parents who are poor - but not poor enough - to qualify for Medicaid.]
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/08/14/2951034/anti-medicaid-states-earning-11000.html#storylink=misearch

Real People With Underwater Mortgages

And the beauty part?

Reports have Timothy Geithner, chief high poobah of American capitalism, knew the HAMP program would only provide a band aid for broken bones and thus would serve to stretch out time when foreclosures to hit the market, not for actual mortgage relief.

[The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after {Neil, former Inspector General of Troubled Assets Recovery Program} Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.

This is a classic “extend and pretend” scheme; banks can extend the time frame for their losses, and pretend they were financially strong in the meantime.]

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/20/barofsky-book-geithner-confirmed-in-2009-that-hamp-was-designed-for-banks-to-spread-out-foreclosures/

http://america-underwater.tumblr.com/

Unions in the US: 12 July 2012

[The workers of the just-formed New Era Windows cooperative in Chicago—the same workers who sat in and forced Serious Energy to back down on a hasty shutdown of their Goose Island plant a few months ago, and famously occupied the same factory for six days in December 2008—are doing more than putting together a bold plan for worker ownership. They are likely to move the entire subject into national attention, thereby spurring others to follow on. Though they have a powerful start, if the past is any guide they will need all the help they can get—financial as well as political...

They also have the backing of the United Electrical workers (UE), an independent and fiercely democratic union; and the support of the Working World, a nonprofit that has helped make hundreds of loans toArgentina’s thriving network of “recuperated” worker-owned businesses.

Above all, their own track record of bold and brave action to defend their jobs is promising in itself, and stirring in terms of public response: Many more people are rooting for this company than your average small manufacturing startup.

The workers are taking this very seriously—after all, it’s their livelihoods on the line. For the past few months, they have been engaged in intensive trainings in cooperative management, building the skills they’ll need to not just make windows but market their product and secure and fulfill contracts. They’ve been scraping together a thousand dollars each to buy into the newly formed cooperative. And they’ve been exploring city programs—like a Midway airport noise insulation project and a city-wide energy retrofit effort that could generate significant contracts.]
http://agonist.org/matttbastard/20120712/a_new_era_of_worker_ownership 



http://www.theworkingworld.org/us/ex-republic-windows-and-doors/