1) People who are out of work or who can only get irregular work, and who can't keep up with the ridiculous surge in rents, are falling back on Social Services. There they discover that if you aren't disabled, you can get $336month in General Assistance for 3 months out of a year...and that's just a loan...and even though that's only a fraction of what real rent is for a ROOM in the area, if you try to earn or otherwise get money for basic necessities above that $336 a month, it will be deducted from that paltry $336 in rent money (see my sig for details). Caseworkers have 900 cases apiece to process, which they regularly screw up: this defaults to stopping benefits: the onus is on the welfare recipient to go through the hassles of appeal and absorb the shocks and problems of delayed funds.
2) Recipients of General Assistance regularly receive forms which demand they report and document any form of work they are doing. These forms have a 2-3 day turn-around time, making it almost impossible for someone doing work to cope with. A person who is not working, and thus has 0 income, is expected to absorb the costs of the stamp and copies for dealing with these forms. Anyway, these forms warn of the dire penalties of failing to report any work you do.
3) Under the circumstances listed above, anyone who is not living as a dependent under someone else's roof and who is trying to avoid homelessness, is going to somehow have to supplement this $336 under the table. Since the government will know if you get paid via check, this probably means people are mostly forced into petty crime and prostitution to not just pay the difference on their rent, but to pay for utilities, bus tickets, medicine, basic necessities like light bulbs, toilet paper, and other non-food items you can't acquire with food stamps.
4) When you apply for General Assistance, Social Services makes it clear to you that there is a platoon of Fraud Investigators who are watching you, following you, interviewing your neighbors, etc. The State can afford to pay these Fraud Investigators even though they can't offer a survivable amount of General Assistance money. Therefore, after putting poor people in a position where they will be forced to cheat to survive (even the 3-day paperwork is designed to be impossible to return properly!), Fraud Investigators are sent to catch and arrest them.
In other cases it may not be the welfare recipient Grandma who went out to boost a few bikes to support the family, but the grandson. He will pay the price for the State's "set up".
5) After the people who were just trying to avoid homelessness are herded into prison, they get the "opportunity" to show they are reforming themselves by working at $2/hr prison labor jobs. This is close to slave labor since the pressure is so high on prisoners to "prove themselves" and to be able to earn a little canteen money. Also, these jobs can be very dangerous. In California, prisoners have died fighting forest fires.
So there you have it: California's welfare-prison-slave-labor complex. It's just the "disposal of the poor" that Alternet describes. And it's not a conspiracy theory at all. I've seen the Social Services part personally. I'm just lucky enough to be categorized as disabled, so I'm not on that wtf crazy, trauma-inducing 3-month out of the year plan. Seriously, no one who has never been in that system would understand how frakked up that is due to the hairball of paperwork, delays, appeals, and return trips to Social Services that this "3 months" would involve. And at a level of society where people are often taking irregular work that only last a few days or a few weeks, it's just madness to add that many tons of bureaucracy to those peoples lives.
Anyway: Disposal of the poor to welfare-prison-slave-labor complex in Oakland verified. No wonder a local pastor said much of the black population is too traumatized to even join the protests on their own behalf.
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