In today’s NYT are two stories about how shabbily the poor can be treated in the US of A.

First, apparently there is now a tracking device that auto lenders can have installed on cars they sell to “subprime” borrowers—i.e. poor people or people with insufficiently high credit scores (below 600).

The whole article is pretty jaw-dropping.

But here’s a section that rather stood out to me—

Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights. Some described how they could not take their children to school or to doctors appointments. One woman in Nevada said her car was shut down while she was driving on the freeway.

(snip)

No middle-class person would ever be hounded for being a day late, said Robert Swearingen, a lawyer with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, in St. Louis. But for poor people, there is a debt collector right there in the car with them.

Ain’t that the truth. You’re poor in America, here’s another indignity for you.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Later in the story is this—

At its extreme, consumer lawyers say, such surveillance can compromise borrowers safety. In Austin, Tex., a large subprime lender used a device to track down and repossess the car of a woman who had fled to a shelter to escape her abusive husband, said her lawyer, Amy Clark Kleinpeter.

The move to the shelter violated a clause in her auto loan contract that restricted her from driving outside a four-county radius, and that prompted the lender to send a tow truck to take back the vehicle. If the lender could so easily locate the client, Ms. Kleinpeter said, what was stopping her husband?

Are you effin kidding me? Auto lenders can insert clauses restricting the car’s usage to a four-county radius? When the f0ck did this shite start?

Oh well, I’m sure the mighty nation of teabaggers who won’t stand for anyone treading on them will rise up in protest against these kind of practices. //

dealbook.nytimes.com

The other article that caught my attention is how long people arrested but not indicted for crimes in Mississippi can languish in prison without facing trial or having access to a lawyer.

Skip Intro has paged it here

littlegreenfootballs.com