Big banks lifted more than $19 million out of the wallets of poor people in California in 2012, by charging them unnecessarily high fees for withdrawing cash from their EBT [Electronic Benefit Transfer] cards.

That’s the conclusion reached by a just-released study of ATM fees charged to Californians who receive benefits under CalWORKS –the state’s public-assistance system. The study was conducted by the California Reinvestment Coalition [CRC], an organization that advocates for the right of low-income communities and communities of color to have fair and equal access to banking and other financial services.

From what I can see by reading the report, the ATM fee structure is bad on two levels: It nickel-and-dimes economically disadvantaged people out of nickels and dimes that are significant in their monthly budgets. And it constitutes a not-so-subtle form of corporate welfare, in which big banks reap undue profits by transferring public money to their private coffers.

Here’s how it works

In California, individuals who qualify for benefits under TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] can opt to receive their assistance via an EBT card, and 96.4 percent of them do. The average TANF allotment per family in California is about $510 month.

TANF recipients can use the cards like cash at supermarkets and convenience stores, or the recipient can withdraw cash from the card by using an ATM machine. Some ATMs charge only minimal fees, such as 50 cents per transaction. Some of the biggest banks—namely Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Rabobank and Union Bank—charge $2,  $3 or even $4 per use. Check cashing stores also charge a fee to withdraw money using EBT cards—usually 1 to percent of the amount withdrawn. [Do the math: For a typical recipient, that can be as much as $5.] The big banks have far more locations than the low-fee outlets, so they are more convenient and therefore are more frequently used by EBT card holders.

Together, these charges totaled over $19.4 million in 2012 going to fees instead of the intended purpose of the benefits.

According to the report:

The amount spent [on ATM fees] in just one month is enough to buy a year of school supplies, estimated at $688, for 2,349 children. In Alameda County alone, families lost $60,000 in CalWORKs funds a month to ATM fees in 2012- enough for over 25,500 round trip bus rides on [public transit]. In Los Angeles County, one month’s worth of ATM fees on EBT cards could cover the co-payment on 90,000 prescriptions.

“For families trying to escape poverty, these fees siphon away money that could be used for school supplies, transportation or medicine,” says Andrea Luquetta, the author of the report. “The current system leads too many people to pay fees just to access the very benefits they need to survive. It is a diversion of taxpayer dollars away from their intended use of supporting families.”

Subtler shenanigans

There’s also a lesser known, behind-the-scenes ripoff that the report doesn’t delve into:  When someone swipes an ATM card—whether it’s a bank card or an EBT card–the machine reads the information on the magnetic strip and knows which bank is the source of the money. If it’s a card from a different bank, Bank A charges Bank B a nominal fee for the money transfer and the cost of communicating. Usually, the charge is 25 cents or so. [This interbank fee is not seen by the customer, and is not part of the visible ATM fee.]

But here’s the twist: In California, all of the CalWORKS money is held by Bank of America. So, if someone goes to a Bank of America ATM to get cash from an EBT card, Bank of America doesn’t have to communicate with any other bank at all. Bank of America handles 12 percent of all EBT withdrawals in the state—making it the largest processor of EBT withdrawals. And yet, the bank is charging the state the interbank fee. Those 25-cent fees add up, too–or should I say subtract?–and it’s all pure profit for Bank of America.

Recommendations

CRC recommends that state and county governments work to increase CalWORKs recipient’s knowledge that they can opt to have their benefits direct-deposited into a bank account, thereby avoiding ATM withdrawal and check-balance fees.

In addition, says CRC, banks should offer inexpensive, safe bank accounts for recipients to receive their benefits via direct deposit without incurring fees, while also building a financial history.

Also, California can and should renegotiate its contract with vendors who provide EBT services so that beneficiaries are not losing money to ATM fees. This outcome is doable, said Luquetta, noting that CitiBank has already agreed to waive its ATM fees for EBT users.

The bottom line—and it’s a big one—is that big banks are reaping free profits by sucking up taxpayers’ dollars via ATM fees on EBT cash withdrawals. The CRC report focuses only on California, but EBT cardholders face similar issues in other states.

It’s another example of the massive, American corporate welfare system that politicians don’t want us to know about, while at the same time deriding public assistance programs and cutting supportive services and financial aid for people who actually need help. Worst of all, this form of corporate welfare is being financed by the poor people it directly affects.

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How low can you go? Ask Republican members of the California legislature. According to Crooks & Liars, Republican members of the California legislature have, for the past two weeks, been “sending out mailings on what appears to be the state’s dime to their constituents about health insurance. Only, they don’t direct those people to CoveredCA.com to sign up. Instead, they send them to their own astroturf version with the url CoveringHealthCareCA.com.”

On their version, there are links to negative articles and twisted messages intended to sour people on signing up for health insurance before they ever land at the official health exchange site.

For seniors, this message:

Seniors on Medicare may not see changes immediately to their benefits or coverage. Down the line, however, the erosion and accessibility of care may become a problem.

To pay for other components of the Affordable Care Act such as expanding Medicaid and creating state health exchanges, Medicare providers will see rate cuts nearing $200 billion over the next decade. These cuts could potentially result in the exodus of doctors from the Medicare system and force Medicare recipients to find new providers, possibly facing longer wait times for care as that pool of doctors shrinks.

Likewise, the tab for “young adults” says this:

Young adults will end up paying for much of federal health care reform by subsidizing the cost of sicker people, or by paying a tax penalty if they do not obtain health insurance under the provisions of the individual mandate, which requires all Californians to have coverage beginning in 2014.

If you click on the “Don’t have health insurance” tab on the front page, you’re taken to a page that puts all the focus on the penalty and none on the benefits. In fact, they have a “penalty calculator” on that page, rather than a premium calculator.

And of course, they also manage to twist what is actually available on the exchange:

Covered California: Covered California offers four qualified health plans similar to those available on the private market today. These plans comply with the Affordable Care Act.

Not so much, Assembly Republicans. There are four levels of coverage, but inside those levels, there are many, many plans available. So many it takes some time to figure out which one works the best.

What we have here are elected officials intentionally trying to make California’s health exchange fail, and using taxpayer dollars to misinform taxpayers, using the standard fear and loathing tactics as their linchpin. While I expect nothing less from Republicans in general, it does gall me that they’re using “official mailings” to misdirect constituents and Assembly resources to register and build the website.

Just more proof Republicans don’t give a damn about anything but their own bad selves.

We’re not talking about the scam sites that have popped up since the October 1 launch of healthcare.gov. Those sites, which look like healthcare.gov, have been created by scammers trying to obtain personal information from unsuspecting people thinking they’re at the government site. The California Attorney General has already ordered dozens of these completely phony sites taken down.  Elsewhere, as many as 700 of these phony cyber-squatter sites–whose only purpose is to glean information for identity theft–have been identified. They’re bad, and the scammers should face legal penalties, but it’s even worse to see elected officials trying to bamboozle their constituents with this strategy of deception, deceit and dishonesty.

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Tragically, we have become accustomed to seeing pictures of deplorable living conditions in many parts of the world:

We pity the people subjected to the hunger, disease and degradation of those places. We thank whatever deity we may believe in, or the stars, or the luck of the draw that we’re not in those pictures. We tell ourselves that, if we ran the world, such places would not exist, and we occasionally fork over a few dollars to international organizations who are doing something about it.  And, of course, we believe that, because we live in a country touted as “the greatest in the world,” we wouldn’t let that happen here.

But we do.

Fresno, California–the American city with one of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the U.S.–is our own, homegrown poster child for the kind of pitiful living conditions we mistakenly think are reserved for third-world countries.  Recently, Fresno city officials began evicting homeless people from encampments that have sprung up around the city. They are fewer in number than the homeless and displaced populations living in tents and shacks in other countries, but they are, in fact, our own economic refugees. Some are being relocated into subsidized rental apartments, but there’s not enough city,state or federal funding to help everyone. The next stop for most is…who knows?

The world has a homelessness problem. And let’s not pretend that America is the exception to that rule.

The post New Delhi? Zaatari? No, this is Fresno, California appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Affordable Care Act is coming. No matter how many times Republicans vote against it (39 and counting!) it’s here to stay. While that’s good news for many workers, it can mean bad news for bigger companies like Walmart. Already, some companies are planning on cutting the hours (and wages) of full-time employees to avoid having to pay for insurance and other benefits. The government of California doesn’t think that’s right. Here’s why.

When a company like Walmart pays dismal wages, its employees turn to government programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing to make ends meet. In some cases, Walmart even encourages employees to seek government assistance. (Occasional Planet ran a great article on this earlier.) While the company makes billions of dollars in profit, it expects the government to foot the bill for services to these impoverished employees. This system has been in place for years, with many companies besides Walmart exploiting workers and the government. The Affordable Care Act is throwing a new complication into this formula by adding thousands of new workers who will become eligible for healthcare. Walmart intends on denying these people that right and shifting responsibility onto the government like it’s always done. But California is saying enough is enough and trying to pass legislation that will fine large corporations $6,000 for every full-time employee that ends up on the state run Medicaid program.

Sonya Schwartz, a program director at the National Academy for State Health policy says, “Accurate and timely data on Wal-Mart’s wage and employment practices is not always readily available. However, occasional releases of demographic data from public assistance programs can provide useful windows into the scope of taxpayer subsidization of Wal-Mart. After analyzing data released by Wisconsin’s Medicaid program, the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that a single 300- person Wal-Mart Supercenter store in Wisconsin likely costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year and could cost taxpayers up to $1,744,590 per year – about $5,815 per employee.”

And that’s just for one Walmart Supercenter. (There are about 120 Walmart stores in Missouri where I live, and about 180 in California.) It’s shocking that government has put up with paying that amount for so long. We can only hope that the legislation in California passes and spreads to other states quickly.

The post California fights Walmart over Medicaid costs appeared first on Occasional Planet.

On the morning of November 7, we may owe the Golden State a great big “thank you” note. Perhaps the almost one million Californians who signed the petition putting Proposition 37 on California’s ballot on November 6 already deserve one.

Proposition 37 is an initiative to require the labeling of raw or processed foods sold in retail stores in California that contain food products produced through genetic engineering (GMOs). As proponents and food activists across the country point out, Proposition 37 is not an outright ban on the sale of any food. What it is, however, is a straightforward, right-to-know about what’s contained in the food Californians (and we) buy.

Food-activist Californians are hoping to succeed where Connecticut and Vermont have failed.  And the stakes are high.  California’s thirty-eight million people consume twelve percent of all food products in the U.S.  That means where California goes so goes the rest of the nation.

What is the controversy about genetically engineered food?

Genetically engineered food is the end product of a technology-based process that does not occur naturally.  That process inserts genetic material from a variety of sources—such as other plants and animals or viruses or bacteria—which would not have been a natural source for genetic material for that particular plant or meat product.  Often the intention is to render a plant resistant to a particular herbicide or pesticide. Custom-designed genes that don’t exist in nature have been inserted as well. An example is Monsanto’s newest experimental GMO sweet corn from which you and your kids may soon be ingesting, as the Center for Food Safety bluntly describes it, “a toxic pesticide in every bite.”

If you think this is an issue that doesn’t concern you, think again.  If you buy processed food from the supermarket, you’ve been consuming and feeding your families GMOs since the 1990s without knowing it. In fact, GMOs are hidden in such commonly purchased items on supermarket shelves as baby formula, soups, crackers, condiments, cereals, and many processed, boxed foods that contain corn oil, corn syrup, corn starch, soy, canola, cottonseed oil, wheat, or sugar beets.  Some experts in the field estimate that more than seventy-five percent of all processed foods contain GMOs. And the long-term health affects are simply not known.

What you don’t know could be hurting you

The Nation has reported that, in 1999, attorney Steven Druker, while combing through 40,000 pages of FDA files, found “memorandum after memorandum contain[ing] warnings about the unique hazards of genetically engineered food.”  At the time, Druker reported that he found information indicating that GMOs could contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.” More recent FDA documents put the safety of GMOs in question as well, such as this one from FDA scientists that reiterated that GMOs could cause “unpredictable, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, and nutritional problems.”

Why can’t we know for sure what foods contain GMOs?  The answer is that the FDA and EPA do not require labeling of GMOs nor studies to determine their safety. Proposition 37 seeks to address the labeling requirement on the state level. Support for such labeling outside the ag-biotech world is overwhelming. Polls indicate that 65% of Californians support the measure. Nationally, support for federally required labeling comes in at 91%.

Let’s consider one of the most common food products: corn.  Here, in the Northeast where I live, the beautiful stands of corn are a reminder of an agricultural heritage from the time before America was America.

What you may not know is the degree to which chemical and pharmaceutical companies, including two of the largest, Monsanto and Syngenta, have altered that heritage.  GMO corn has been altered to resist weed killers and even to produce herbicides within the plant’s own tissues.

Coming soon to a Walmart near you

If you can’t wait to get your hands on some of Monsanto’s creations, you won’t have to wait long. Coming soon to a Walmart near you in the canned and frozen-food aisles is Monsanto’s GMO sweet corn containing the company’s own herbicide, Roundup. In the works is a GMO apple that will not brown when cut.  Don’t hold your breath, though, waiting for Walmart to tout the origin of the corn or the apples in their advertisements, signage, or labeling.  Fortunately, other food companies have decided not to follow Walmart’s example.  Green Giant and Cascadian Farms (both of General Foods), Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods have committed to keeping Monsanto’s sweet corn out of their products and off their shelves.

Those four food companies are sending a message about food safety that more than fifty countries (or forty percent of the world’s population), including members of the European Union, the UK, Japan, China, India, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, Australia, and Russia, who require labeling or have outright bans on GMOs, agree with.

Who’s against Prop 37?

For big ag and big pharma, this is a high-stakes fight. How determined are they to defeat the measure?  If determination is measured in dollars, their commitment is deep.  According to Food Integrity Campaign, to date the No on 37 Campaign has bundled a war chest containing $32 million.  Of that amount, $19 million comes from just six of the biggest and baddest with the most at stake:  Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer, Dow, BASF, and Syngenta. If Proposition 37 passes, GMO producers understand that the required labeling, which will give consumers information they need to make informed choices about what’s in their food and which foods they’ll buy, will sweep in a revolution in food production in this country. And you can bet that’s going to affect the bottom line of some of America’s most powerful corporations.

Keep a close watch on what happens in California. This is going to be one helluva food fight.

The post CA Prop 37: Right to know what’s in your food appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Imagine the United States without California, New York, and Texas. These three states represent close to one-fourth of the population of the country. Yet if we study the focus of the presidential candidates for November’s election, for all intents and purposes, these three states essentially don’t exist. This is because they are not considered “swing states” otherwise known as “battleground states” in the campaign. California and New York (combined populations of 57 million) are considered to be in the Democrats’ pocket and Texas (population 25 million) is regarded as thoroughly red, a certain state for the Republicans. These states have a combined number of electoral votes of 130, nearly half of the 270 required for a candidates to win the presidency.

In comparison, consider Iowa with a population of  slightly more than 3 million. It is a swing state, and the candidates are intensely battling for its five electoral votes. New Hampshire, with a population of less than a million and a half and four electoral votes, is receiving more attention than California. The only meaning to the candidates that the three largest states in the country (CA, NY, and TX) have is that they are good money troughs. For example, a fund-raiser at the home of actor George Clooney raised $15 million for Barack Obama.

Across the country, but particularly in the battleground states, candidates’ campaign committees and so-called Super PACs (organizations that work for candidates but presumably are not connected with the candidates’ campaigns) are not only spending large sums of money, but their ads are primarily negative. The American Crossroads/Crossroads GPS is spending over $52 million on behalf of Republican candidates, and fully 100% are negative ads. So is Americans for Prosperity ($20 million) and the Republican National Committee ($11 million). The Romney campaign is spending 71 percent of its $36 million on negative ads. But the Obama campaign and Super PACs working on behalf of it are also engaging in negative ads. 100 percent of the nearly $20 million spent by the Democratic National Committee and 62 percent of the Barack Obama campaign ($52 million) is directed towards negative ads.

While recently, considerable attention has been paid to the issue of voter suppression (particularly in Ohio and Pennsylvania), the payoff in votes for either party through suppression is considerably less than the impact of negative ads. But it’s possible that the greatest source impacting the election is the Electoral College, which minimizes the incentive to vote in California, New York, and Texas. The same is true for the other thirty-five or more states that are not considered to be battlegrounds. When it comes to the number of votes in the Electoral College to win, they too get little attention from the campaigns and the Super PACs.

Abolishing the Electoral College would mean that the vote of each individual across the country would be of equal value. The vote of the factory worker living in the city of Compton in Los Angeles County, CA would have as much significance as the vote of a farmer living in Calhoun County, Iowa. A voter in Dallas, TX would get the same attention from the candidates as a voter in Montpelier, New Hampshire.

The current system is unfair because geography determines he value of an individual’s vote. This results in a disparity in where campaigns pander for votes, as measured by the number of dollars that they spend.

Without the Electoral College, in the 2000 election, in which  Al Gore clearly had more of the popular vote than George Bush, the issue of who won Florida would have been moot. Yet in the ensuring twelve years, there has been virtually no conversation about abolishing or changing the Electoral College. It’s time to give equal value to everyone’s vote. That means abolishing the Electoral College and leveling the amount of dollars spent to curry that vote equal across the country.

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When large-scale disasters strike, people want to help, and that’s good news. But when crowds of well-intentioned folks show up at a disaster site, the situation can become chaotic and counter-productive. No state knows this better than California—which has experienced it share of disasters, from wildfires and floods to oil spills and earthquakes. And now, California has launched a program designed to professionalize, standardize and coordinate all statewide disaster volunteers

On June 25, California has announced the formation a state-funded volunteer Disaster Corps –the first such group in the US. Under the programs, volunteers will be registered by their local government organization and be required to meet training, certification and security guidelines.

The idea for the corps began in 2007, a particularly eventful year for disasters in California. During the summer, southern California was plagued by wildfires. In November, a container ship—the Cosco Busan—crashed into the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The resulting 100-foot gash in the ship’s hull spewed 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the water, fouling beaches and endangering wildlife in the area.

Thousands of disaster volunteers poured into those areas to assist with evacuations, sheltering, clean-up and a host of other activities supporting response operations. During the Cosco Busan Oil Spill, more than 1,200 volunteers deployed to assist in beach clean-up efforts. During the wildfires, an estimated 10,000 volunteers registered with local volunteer centers in the affected areas; nearly 3,000 spontaneous unaffiliated volunteers were deployed to assist at an information hotline and help at shelters. Additionally, approximately 750 trained, affiliated volunteers were deployed to provide first-responder support in staging areas, base camp, incident command posts and evacuations.

With such an outpouring of volunteers, a clear need evolved to more effectively integrate and coordinate disaster volunteer efforts in all phases of emergency management, from disaster preparedness and extending through disaster response and recovery. Disaster volunteer resources were not integrated into the State Emergency Plan and were spread across a multitude of different organizations and programs, varying in function and mission. CaliforniaVolunteers got the job of developing a framework to help integrate volunteers in to the state’s emergency management system. (CaliforniaVolunteers is the state office that manages programs and initiatives aimed at increasing the number of Californians engaged in service and volunteering.)

The result is the new Disaster Corps, which will have guidelines to help identify volunteers’ strengths and keep their efforts more organized. CaliforniaVolunteers will coordinate the new group’s first major effort. CaliforniaVolunteers has awarded $1.15 million in federal Homeland Security funding to five counties, to provide background checks and first-aid training for the first 1,000 volunteers. Each county also will get an official volunteer coordinator.

As an additional part of the coordination effort, CaliforniaVolunteers is launching the Disaster Volunteer Resource Inventory, an online tool that will coordinate and support volunteer programs statewide. Official Disaster Corps programs and NGOs will be granted free access to the tool. The inventory will also house individual volunteer’s full case history including contact information, training received, availability and past projects, as well as any special skill information.

So far the project has received services and funding from private-sector contributors such as Deloitte LLP, which provided $750,000 in pro-bono consulting and The Home Depot Foundation, which has committed $60,000 for disaster-related supplies.

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