Poverty Incorporated

The cost of everything is going up. Even the cost of poverty. It costs a lot to be poor. It costs so much to be poor, that you may as well be rich. The price tag is the same, anyway.

How can this possibly be? Is this an illusion? A mirage? Some think so. Look beneath the numbers, and the real story begins to appear.
You see, financiers and lenders everywhere have clued in to the way things are. Anyone with real money out there - is broke. They've borrowed themselves into a stupor. Nothing left. The credit cards are maxed, and the banks are no longer sending new invitations to their party. The home equity is all tapped out, and the appraisal value of the house is dropping like a barometer in a hurricane. Unless rich uncle Joe just died and left a bundle, there is no more cash forthcoming.

So where are the lenders to look for revenue? Easy. Poor people. I'll give just two examples:

Consider payday loans. These are loans of small amounts....Three hundred bucks is the average.
The cost of the loans? Some people out there are paying more than 600% interest.
Consider that number.
The very best deals on Wall Street would have long since died and gone to heaven - for a tiny fraction of that number. But those are the multi-billionaires, who would be quite happy with 10%, thank you very much.
Only the poorest pay usury rates.

How about rent-to-own? Can't afford that $650 TV up front? No problem. Just sign here on the dotted line, and by the time you finally get that tv paid off, it will have cost you over $3000. If you're really lucky, by the time it's actually yours, it will still be working!

Poverty Incorporated is the new business model for a cowardly new world. (The brave new one somehow got lost somewhere inside the last dozen or so financial meltdowns.)
Poverty Inc. makes its money from predatory lending. Predatory. As in the big bad grizzly bear that got loose inside the sheep pen. As in the great white shark in the midst of a school of tunafish. Voracious. Swollen appetites of such famished hunger as to swallow an entire neighborhood whole, and spit out the wishbones.
Wishes.
Poor folks have wishes, too. Especially when they're surrounded by overt and extravagant displays of affluence - (afluenza....or "swine" flu, considering the porkish oinks and grunts overheard in corporate boardrooms.)
Ah....but I digress.

Like an overfished ocean, once you have worked your way down the food chain, eventually there's nothing left but the minnows. Tasty morsels to some....hardly noticed by others. Enough left to fill a dinner plate, all the same.

Ah - the poor fish. "Hooked" while trying to live some kind of life. Looked upon by some as fools and charlatans.
Victims of this crowd of fat, greasy, oily, overstuffed bottom-feeders, many of whom actually sample the smorgasbord all up and down the food chain, yet not too proud to slum it with a little bit of dumpster-dining.

I'll leave you with one little fact. (they're frantically waving at me from backstage)

In 1933, when money had dried up and blown away, and half the population was living in the twilight zone, a decent meal in a diner ran about twenty cents. That was a reasonable, fair sum.
A gallon of gas cost you a nickel. Consequently, the car often got fed, before the people.
Apply those economics to this time in history.
A pair of Nikes makes it to the sports store for less than a ten-dollar bill. Some kid pays $150 to bring home that little bit of joy. The difference between those two numbers? (they call it, um - profit margin.)

oink, people.

oink....oink......oink.