You can always score political points banging on black welfare moms on meth. The amounts of money spent in these kinds of welfare programs are very small, but the levels of political capital involved are mountainous. For three hundred dollars a month, she was about to become more heavily scrutinized by the state than any twelve Wall Street bankers put together. Markisha entered the financial fraud patrol zone when she walked through those doors at the FRC.

This is the kind of person at whom the weight of the state’s financial fraud prosecution apparatus tends to be trained in America. She was barely sober, emotionally a wreck, literally penniless, and her entire ambition in life was to keep and maintain a room and a half in a rundown section of west San Diego without having to sell her body to pay the rent. So she went to the local welfare office-a “Family Resource Center,” known as an FRC-and walked inside. CalWORKs meant three hundred dollars a month, plus food stamps. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with a barber in her neighborhood, and she needed some help paying for it. “It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. But morally and politically, they’re worlds apart. Legally, there’s absolutely no difference between a woman on welfare who falsely declares that her boyfriend no longer lives in the home and a bank that uses a robo-signer to cook up a document swearing that he has kept regular records of your credit card account. Plenty of people-consumers and merchants both-are probably glad that so much credit is available, but they don’t realize that systematic fraud is part of what makes it available.

So techniques like robo-signing and sewer service are essential to the profitability of the business. “In a mass society where obtaining credit is as easy as it is, there’s probably no way to efficiently collect on delinquent accounts by writing real affidavits, filing legitimate, error-free lawsuits, and serving legitimate summonses in each and every individual case.

The divide by matt taibbi