The Poverty Industry

"Hatcher [posits that] state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social safety net, turning America's most vulnerable populations into sources of revenue"--

The shocking truth about how state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social programs meant to support disadvantaged Americans Government aid doesn’t always go where it’s supposed to. Foster care agencies team up with companies to take disability and survivor benefits from abused and neglected children. States and their revenue consultants use illusory schemes to siphon Medicaid funds intended for children and the poor into general state coffers. Child support payments for foster children and families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. And the poverty industry keeps expanding, leaving us with nursing homes and juvenile detention centers that sedate residents to reduce costs and maximize profit, local governments buying nursing homes to take the facilities’ federal aid while the elderly languish with poor care, and counties hiring companies to mine the poor for additional funds in modern day debtor’s prisons. In The Poverty Industry, Daniel L. Hatcher shows us how state governments and their private industry partners are profiting from the social safety net, turning America’s most vulnerable populations into sources of revenue. The poverty industry is stealing billions in federal aid and other funds from impoverished families, abused and neglected children, and the disabled and elderly poor. As policy experts across the political spectrum debate how to best structure government assistance programs, a massive siphoning of the safety net is occurring behind the scenes. In the face of these abuses of power, Hatcher offers a road map for reforms to realign the practices of human service agencies with their intended purpose and to prevent the misuse of public taxpayer dollars. With more Americans than ever before seeking unemployment benefits, it is essential to remedy the nefarious practices that will impede them from receiving the full government support they are due. The Poverty Industry shows us the path to rectify this systemic inequality to ensure that government aid truly gets to those in need.

WINNER of the BISA IPEG Book Prize 2015 http://www.bisa-ipeg.org/ipeg-book-prize-2015-winner-announced/ Under the rubric of ‘financial inclusion’, lending to the poor –in both the global North and global South –has become a highly lucrative and rapidly expanding industry since the 1990s. A key inquiry of this book is what is ‘the financial’ in which the poor are asked to join. Instead of embracing the mainstream position that financial inclusion is a natural, inevitable and mutually beneficial arrangement, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry suggests that the structural violence inherent to neoliberalism and credit-led accumulation have created and normalized a reality in which the working poor can no longer afford to live without expensive credit. The book further transcends economic treatments of credit and debt by revealing how the poverty industry is extricably linked to the social power of money, the paradoxes in credit-led accumulation, and ‘debtfarism’. The latter refers to rhetorical and regulatory forms of governance that mediate and facilitate the expansion of the poverty industry and the reliance of the poor on credit to augment/replace their wages. Through a historically grounded analysis, the author examines various dimensions of the poverty industry ranging from the credit card, payday loan, and student loan industries in the United States to micro-lending and low-income housing finance industries in Mexico. Providing a much-needed theorization of the politics of debt, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry has wider implications of the increasing dependence of the poor on consumer credit across the globe, this book will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of Global Political Economy, Finance, Development Studies, Geography, Law, History, and Sociology. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315761954, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lU6PHjyOzU

"This volume is an excellent overview of the dimensions and sources of American poverty. John Iceland combines statistical data, theoretical arguments, and historical information in a book that is highly readable and will very likely become a standard reference for students of poverty."—William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears "In just a few short pages, Iceland brings anyone--lay reader, student, professional researcher--up to speed on the major issues and debates about poverty in America. With succinct and engaging prose, Poverty in America covers the gamut--from theoretical issues to measurement to history to public policy--better than any other book out there right now."—Dalton Conley, author of Honky "Must reading on a tough and important topic. With some answers that may surprise, Iceland sorts out competing theories of why people are poor in the richest country in the world. His book should motivate every reader--policy maker, researcher, citizen-- to think hard about what it means to be poor today and how our society can best reduce the hardship and poverty still with us."—Constance F. Citro, National Research Council of the National Academies, Washington, D.C.

"This is a terrific book. Lyon-Callo's descriptions shatter stereotypes about homeless people and focus instead on the dysfunction of the system that allegedly serves them." - Susan Greenbaum, University of South Florida

Winner of the International Studies in Poverty Prize awarded by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books. Poverty has become the central focus of global development efforts, with a vast body of research and funding dedicated to its alleviation. And yet, the field of poverty studies remains deeply ideological and has been used to justify wealth and power within the prevailing world order. Andrew Martin Fischer clarifies this deeply political character, from conceptions and measures of poverty through to their application as policies. Poverty as Ideology shows how our dominant approaches to poverty studies have, in fact, served to reinforce the prevailing neoliberal ideology while neglecting the wider interests of social justice that are fundamental to creating more equitable societies. Instead, our development policies have created a 'poverty industry' that obscures the dynamic reproductions of poverty within contemporary capitalist development and promotes segregation in the name of science and charity. Fischer argues that an effective and lasting solution to global poverty requires us to reorient our efforts away from current fixations on productivity and towards more equitable distributions of wealth and resources. This provocative work offers a radical new approach to understanding poverty based on a comprehensive and accessible critique of key concepts and research methods. It upends much of the received wisdom to provide an invaluable resource for students, teachers and researchers across the social sciences.

Conventional wisdom says that Europe’s crisis is a financial crisis. But is this really the case? In Industrial Poverty, economist Sven R. Larson, challenges this view and suggests instead that Europe is in a state of permanent economic decline. Using Sweden in the 1990s as an example, he shows how a welfare-state crisis combined with the wrong kind of austerity policies replaces prosperity with industrial poverty. Today, Europe is going through the same transition into industrial poverty. Tomorrow, it could be the United States, unless Congress and the President take decisive action against the runaway budget deficit.