Monday, November 21, 2011
Poet and the Police
by Robert Haas, University of California Berkeley, US Poet Laureate, NY Times.
Life, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.
The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.
It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent undergraduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”
Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.
Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.
Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.
My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.
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Life, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.
The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.
It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent undergraduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”
Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.
Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.
Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.
My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.
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With a Little Help From Your Friends
If you’re a professional musician, however, with a little bit of luck you'll land in a safety net provided by MusiCares, a sophisticated national foundation supported by the likes of Lady Gaga, crooner Steven Tyler and guitarist (and onetime Jack Daniels devotee) Slash.
Founded in 1989 and run by The Recording Academy (best known for throwing the Grammys), MusiCares came about when a brilliant jazz clarinetist and band leader named Woody Herman died homeless and alone. According to MusiCares Executive Director Debbie Carroll, the circumstances of his passing led “a number of musicians, including Bonnie Raitt, to come together and say no one in our music family should end up in this type of situation.”
The fact is that musicians often have no insurance—a significant issue if you combine that with bouts of unemployment, a depressed economy, and, as is often the case, addiction. Though there are similar programs for writers and other artists, including Writers in Treatment, few share the breadth and scope of MusiCares.
Out of offices in LA, Nashville and New York, MusiCares has eight full-time employees serving over 2700 clients a year—as well as consultants in Austin, Fort Collins, and New Orleans. According to Carroll, addiction recovery services comprise about 30% of what they do—the other 70% is dedicated to helping people through the other bumps in the road: financial, medical, and other needs.
While the needs of the community grow every year, MusiCares is—thanks to their fundraising efforts—able to grow with it. “In the last year, we've served 2,700 clients with $2.9 million in aid,” says Carroll. “The year before, it was roughly 2,500 with $2.7 million. As people become more aware of us, they want to help.”
by Kristen McGuiness, The Fix | Read more:
Photo via: AeroNewsDaily
Do Nothing?
The ongoing collapse in Europe, and the increasing possibility of a “Fall 2008″-like series of events there has the Eurozone trading under pressure.
In the US, its supposedly the SuperCommittee that is the source of our woes — but I somehow doubt that is the problem. Their inability to accomplish anything was telegraphed a long time ago, and it was all but inevitable that failure was a high probability outcome.
Those folks truly concerned about the long term debt of the United States, and not merely deficit peacocks playing politics, consider what E.J. Dionne wrote last week:
If you really believe the deficit is a problem for investors (and the Bond Markets sure don’t) then you need to find another boogieman. A huge swath of the federal debt is about to go away, courtesy of political dysfunction and committee failure.
via: Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture | Read more:
In the US, its supposedly the SuperCommittee that is the source of our woes — but I somehow doubt that is the problem. Their inability to accomplish anything was telegraphed a long time ago, and it was all but inevitable that failure was a high probability outcome.
Those folks truly concerned about the long term debt of the United States, and not merely deficit peacocks playing politics, consider what E.J. Dionne wrote last week:
“Here is a surefire way to cut $7.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Do nothing.
That’s right. If Congress simply fails to act between now and Jan. 1, 2013, the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush expire, $1.2 trillion in additional budget cuts go through under the terms of last summer’s debt-ceiling deal, and a variety of other tax cuts also go away.”The savings, as detailed here, are as follows:
• $3.3 trillion from letting temporary income and estate tax cuts enacted in 2001, 2003, 2009, and 2010 expire on scheduled at the end of 2012 (presuming Congress also lets relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax expire, as noted below);
• $0.8 trillion from allowing other temporary tax cuts (the “extenders” that Congress has regularly extended on a “temporary” basis) expire on scheduled;
• $0.3 trillion from letting cuts in Medicare physician reimbursements scheduled under current law (required under the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate formula enacted in 1997, but which have been postponed since 2003) take effect;
• $0.7 trillion from letting the temporary increase in the exemption amount under the Alternative Minimum Tax expire, thereby returning the exemption to the level in effect in 2001;
• $1.2 trillion from letting the sequestration of spending required if the Joint Committee does not produce $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction take effect; and
• $0.9 trillion in lower interest payments on the debt as a result of the deficit reduction achieved from not extending these current policies.Total deficit reduction from utter Congressional failure? $7.1 trillion dollars over the next decade.
If you really believe the deficit is a problem for investors (and the Bond Markets sure don’t) then you need to find another boogieman. A huge swath of the federal debt is about to go away, courtesy of political dysfunction and committee failure.
via: Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture | Read more:
I-eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse
[ed. A new biography about Ahmet Ertegun, the former head of Atlantic records, has just been released. It reminded me of this extensive profile piece that appeared in the New Yorker back in 1978. What a life, what a character.]
Ahmet Ertegun, the head man at Atlantic Records, sat in a restaurant, put one hand on the table in front of him, and snapped his fingers. He looked across the room abstractedly. Across the room, there was a brown velvet wall punctuated by English hunting prints. The prints showed an understanding of the traditional order. The brown velvet, participating in a very contemporary chic, prevented the traditional order from penetrating too deeply into the atmosphere of the restaurant. The atmosphere of this room (at the Carlyle Hotel) was sympathetic to Ahmet Ertegun. The room was impeccable without having reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. The room had, in fact, been decorated by his wife. “Mica did this, you know,” Ahmet said to me after a moment.
At lunch, Ahmet was not entirely comfortable with me, or I with him. We had known each other for several years. I first met him at a time when his hegemony in the music business had reached a climax. For some time after that, I tried to find the locus of his authority and could not. I was by turns infatuated and disappointed. In time, I learned that this was appropriate—that Ahmet was himself always infatuated and always disappointed, and that at the heart of his achievement there was no answer stated or question posed but, rather, only this: the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed. Then I found that to notice the manifestations of infatuation (which I had perceived at the start as ephemeral) was instructive. At the moment when I met Ahmet, at the beginning of this decade, it was assumed that the style of the years to come would derive from the principal styles of the nineteen-sixties—and this expectation has not been disappointed entirely—but then as I saw Ahmet together with important custodians of the style of the nineteen-sixties and noted his greater power and presence, I began to understand that it would be his style (eclectic, reminiscent, amused, fickle, perverse) that would be the distinctive style of the first years of the new decade, that Ahmet would achieve this new importance as exemplar precisely because he lacked the inflexible center I had confusedly looked for, and that he would achieve it through his intuitive, obsessive mastery of the modes of infatuation, this mastery having made it possible for him to absorb into himself the power of several archetypal American styles that had fallen into disuse among Americans but still had great power when they were expressed in a manner that the contemporary public could accept, which is to say when they were expressed in a manner that divorced style from substance and had no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. There was something moving about this—that so much was possible through restlessness—but there was something disturbing about it, too, and the fact that my approach to Ahmet had become as unstraightforward as his own mode (to which I had adapted myself) made it difficult for the two of us to see one another without some embarrassment.
Ahmet’s business involves negotiated relationships—courtships, separations, estrangements, reconciliations. At lunch, there were several of these to discuss. Ahmet had signed the Rolling Stones to a new contract (for the distribution of their records in the United States and Canada, and paying an advance against royalties said to be near seven million dollars). “Mick came to me,” Ahmet said. “I mean, Mick is at this point a very good personal friend, you know? And I told him that the Stones should make a killing, you know, on this contract, because, to be realistic, by the time of the next contract they’ll be near forty, and one can’t be sure what will happen then. So I advised him. And what happened was that they got so much for the European rights, and so forth, that they could stay with Atlantic in America.” Ahmet had brought the group Crosby, Stills & Nash back to an active career at Atlantic. “They only recorded one album for us as Crosby, Stills & Nash, you know, before they added Young. And then there were some things that they thought might be the company’s fault, and they wanted a change, and I said go ahead, and I released them from the contract with the understanding that when they recorded together again they would be with us,” Ahmet said. “And so they called me, and last week I went down to Miami. We met at Criteria Sound, and they prepared a place for me to sit, and they all sat around and they played the album for me and it is a very powerful album. Stephen Stills plays some of the best guitar . . . Stephen and I have been together, you know, since 1966.” And Ahmet had begun to negotiate with Ray Charles, the powerful rhythm-and-blues singer, who had given Atlantic Records its first real eminence, in the late nineteen-fifties, and who upon the expiration of his contract in 1959 signed with ABC-Paramount without consulting Ahmet or his partners. “We’ve always kept in touch, you know?” Ahmet said. “And B’nai B’rith asked him to be their Man of the Year, and Ray told them that he would only do it if I were chairman. That was about a year ago. I paid a visit to Ray. He has a very well-kept modern building in Los Angeles, on West Washington Boulevard. He owns it, and a government agency rents a part, I think. And he said that he wanted to come back to Atlantic, and we reached an agreement—the outline of an agreement. But then things got bogged down, you know, with the lawyers. And it began to take a while. So one day Ray called and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you and I do it? Not through the lawyers—just you and me.’ And we did that. And it was amazing how much he knew, you know, about contracts—returns, free goods, records shipped as opposed to records sold, and so on. And so I think we have a deal, you know, and he is going to send me a tape this week.”
by George W. S. Trow, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Julie Jacobson/APAt lunch, Ahmet was not entirely comfortable with me, or I with him. We had known each other for several years. I first met him at a time when his hegemony in the music business had reached a climax. For some time after that, I tried to find the locus of his authority and could not. I was by turns infatuated and disappointed. In time, I learned that this was appropriate—that Ahmet was himself always infatuated and always disappointed, and that at the heart of his achievement there was no answer stated or question posed but, rather, only this: the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed. Then I found that to notice the manifestations of infatuation (which I had perceived at the start as ephemeral) was instructive. At the moment when I met Ahmet, at the beginning of this decade, it was assumed that the style of the years to come would derive from the principal styles of the nineteen-sixties—and this expectation has not been disappointed entirely—but then as I saw Ahmet together with important custodians of the style of the nineteen-sixties and noted his greater power and presence, I began to understand that it would be his style (eclectic, reminiscent, amused, fickle, perverse) that would be the distinctive style of the first years of the new decade, that Ahmet would achieve this new importance as exemplar precisely because he lacked the inflexible center I had confusedly looked for, and that he would achieve it through his intuitive, obsessive mastery of the modes of infatuation, this mastery having made it possible for him to absorb into himself the power of several archetypal American styles that had fallen into disuse among Americans but still had great power when they were expressed in a manner that the contemporary public could accept, which is to say when they were expressed in a manner that divorced style from substance and had no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. There was something moving about this—that so much was possible through restlessness—but there was something disturbing about it, too, and the fact that my approach to Ahmet had become as unstraightforward as his own mode (to which I had adapted myself) made it difficult for the two of us to see one another without some embarrassment.
Ahmet’s business involves negotiated relationships—courtships, separations, estrangements, reconciliations. At lunch, there were several of these to discuss. Ahmet had signed the Rolling Stones to a new contract (for the distribution of their records in the United States and Canada, and paying an advance against royalties said to be near seven million dollars). “Mick came to me,” Ahmet said. “I mean, Mick is at this point a very good personal friend, you know? And I told him that the Stones should make a killing, you know, on this contract, because, to be realistic, by the time of the next contract they’ll be near forty, and one can’t be sure what will happen then. So I advised him. And what happened was that they got so much for the European rights, and so forth, that they could stay with Atlantic in America.” Ahmet had brought the group Crosby, Stills & Nash back to an active career at Atlantic. “They only recorded one album for us as Crosby, Stills & Nash, you know, before they added Young. And then there were some things that they thought might be the company’s fault, and they wanted a change, and I said go ahead, and I released them from the contract with the understanding that when they recorded together again they would be with us,” Ahmet said. “And so they called me, and last week I went down to Miami. We met at Criteria Sound, and they prepared a place for me to sit, and they all sat around and they played the album for me and it is a very powerful album. Stephen Stills plays some of the best guitar . . . Stephen and I have been together, you know, since 1966.” And Ahmet had begun to negotiate with Ray Charles, the powerful rhythm-and-blues singer, who had given Atlantic Records its first real eminence, in the late nineteen-fifties, and who upon the expiration of his contract in 1959 signed with ABC-Paramount without consulting Ahmet or his partners. “We’ve always kept in touch, you know?” Ahmet said. “And B’nai B’rith asked him to be their Man of the Year, and Ray told them that he would only do it if I were chairman. That was about a year ago. I paid a visit to Ray. He has a very well-kept modern building in Los Angeles, on West Washington Boulevard. He owns it, and a government agency rents a part, I think. And he said that he wanted to come back to Atlantic, and we reached an agreement—the outline of an agreement. But then things got bogged down, you know, with the lawyers. And it began to take a while. So one day Ray called and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you and I do it? Not through the lawyers—just you and me.’ And we did that. And it was amazing how much he knew, you know, about contracts—returns, free goods, records shipped as opposed to records sold, and so on. And so I think we have a deal, you know, and he is going to send me a tape this week.”
by George W. S. Trow, New Yorker | Read more:
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Crying Man
by Roger Angell, New Yorker
Walking my dog last week, I came upon a man crying in the street. He was sitting on the raised stone ledge of a back-yard fence separating two small apartment houses, his back against the iron bars, with one hand up to his face. The dog gave him a glance and we moved on by, but when I stopped after a decent distance and looked back he’d bent forward in his misery and I could hear sobs. A thin, tall man, perhaps in his late forties, his pale face now glistening with tears. Black jeans, gray shirt, some sort of jacket. My first thought was to go back and ask if there was anything I could do. My dog is a young fox terrier, and I thought that his charm might perk up the poor guy for a moment. I held back, though, immobilized by New York’s code of privacy and because I was embarrassed. He hadn’t noticed us, and the soft sounds of his grief now seemed to be the main event on the block we were on. What had happened? What rotten news had come his way? His mother had died. His girlfriend—they’d have been together for three years, come January—had gone away to São Paulo for good, leaving a note on the kitchen table and a longer message on his e-mail. His cat Max unaccountably fell down the airshaft. His lover, who runs an art-moving business, had been hit by a bicycle on Greenwich Avenue and required neurosurgery. His job—he was a furniture restorer; an anesthesiologist; an associate curator; a cloud-computer analyst and designer; a private-school gym teacher—had been terminated by budget considerations. His father, the retired oboist, urgently needed a live-in companion with experience in dementia. I didn’t know or need to know. The dog and I resumed our tour, and I was surprised by unexpectedly remembering what crying is like.
Read more:
The Godfather Wars
“I never met a real, honest-to-god gangster,” Puzo added in his memoir. Neither had Coppola. “Mario told me to never meet them, never agree to, because they respected that and would stay away from you if they knew you didn’t want contact.”
But as word spread that The Godfather was being developed into a major motion picture, one Mafia boss rose up in defiance. While most mobsters shunned the spotlight, Joseph Colombo Sr., the short, dapper, media-savvy head at 48 of one of New York’s Five Families, brazenly stepped into it. After the F.B.I. took what he considered to be an excessive interest in his activities—which included loan-sharking, jewel heists, income-tax evasion, and control of a $10-million-a-year interstate gambling operation—he turned the tables on the bureau, charging it with harassment not only of him and his family but also of all Italian-Americans. In an outrageously bold move, he helped create the Italian-American Civil Rights League, claiming that the F.B.I.’s pursuit of the Mob was in fact persecution and a violation of civil rights. A top priority of the league’s was to eradicate “Mafia” from the English language, since Colombo contended that it had been turned into a one-word smear campaign. “Mafia? What is Mafia?” he asked a reporter in 1970. “There is not a Mafia. Am I the head of a family? Yes. My wife, and four sons and a daughter. That’s my family.”
What began with the picketing of F.B.I. offices on March 30, 1970, soon grew into a crusade with a membership of 45,000 and a $1 million war chest. An estimated quarter of a million people showed up at the league’s inaugural rally in New York City in order to put the feds and everyone else on notice. “Those who go against the league will feel [God’s] sting,” said Colombo.
The film The Godfather quickly became the league’s No. 1 enemy. “A book like The Godfather leaves one with a sickening feeling,” read a form letter the league addressed to Paramount and many elected officials, following a rally in Madison Square Garden that raised $500,000 to stop production.
“It became clear very quickly that the Mafia—and they did not call themselves the Mafia—did not want our film made,” says Al Ruddy’s assistant, Bettye McCartt. “We started getting threats.”
The Los Angeles Police Department warned Ruddy that he was being tailed. He became so concerned that he began swapping cars routinely with members of his staff to avoid recognition. One night, after he had traded his late-model sports car for McCartt’s company car, she heard the sound of gunfire outside her house on Mulholland Drive. “The kids were hysterical,” McCartt recalls. “We went outside to see that all the windows had been shot out of the sports car. It was a warning—to Al.”
On the dashboard was a note, which essentially said, Shut down the movie—or else.
by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Pain Compliance
[ed. If you haven't seen the video of this fiasco, please take a minute. It's attached to this article. Then ponder, as Digby does, the use of "pain compliance" as a method of asserting police authority (and her account of a similar situation against environmental protesters in Humbolt County in the 90s who had chained themselves to a tree and had their eyes swabbed with liquid pepper spray). For other reactions to the U.C. Davis incident see: Glenn Greenwald, James Fallows, Peter Moskos. From tasers to rubber bullets, tear gas to pepper spray, water cannon to body scanners, and, recently, even the use of drones, we're now living in a para-militarized society increasingly hostile to its citizens' First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.]
Police dressed in riot gear at U.C. Davis on Friday afternoon used pepper spray to clear seated protesters from the university quad where they had set up a small Occupy encampment, pro-actively and repeatedly dousing the passively-resisting students with a chemical agent designed to cause pain and suffering in order to make it easier to remove them.
It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America.
And yet it is all too American. America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century. It is a common fantasy among people born in the years since the great protests movements -- and even some not so great ones -- that they would have stood on the bold side of history had they been alive at the time and been called to make a choice. But the truth is that American protest movements in real time -- and especially in their early days -- often appear controversial, politically difficult, out-of-the-mainstream, and dangerous. And they are met with fear.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Current Events: USDA Targets Stores in Food Stamp Trafficking
by Laura Crimaldi, AP
A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores around the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.
Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer funds annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stories and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.
Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International, Inc., to step up the technology used to combat fraud.
"It's misuse of the program. It's a misuse of taxpayer dollars at a tough time. Not only the people who need the program are having a tough time, but the people who are paying for the program are having a tough time, too," said Kevin Concannon, USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.
The fraud is almost always found among the 199,000 smaller stores that process 15 percent of the nation's total food stamp transactions, Concannon said. (...)
The modern food stamp program was created in 1977 to help low-income families. Benefits are loaded onto plastic debit cards that can only be redeemed at authorized stores. More than 45 million people were receiving benefits as of August, according to program figures, nearly half of them children.
Nationwide, 234,000 stores are authorized to accept food stamps, including 35,000 supermarkets where 85 percent of benefits are redeemed, Concannon said.
Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated. A March USDA report found more than 8 percent of the large and small stores, 210,000 in all, allowed people to cash in their benefits between 2006 and 2008.
The analytical tools officials are turning to have paid off, they say. Even though food stamp spending has ballooned from $22.7 billion to $64.7 billion since 1995, the misuse of benefits has dropped from four cents to a penny on every dollar spent, said Food and Nutrition Service spokesman Aaron Lavallee.
Read more:
A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores around the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.
Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer funds annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stories and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.
Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to Fairfax, Va.-based SRA International, Inc., to step up the technology used to combat fraud.
"It's misuse of the program. It's a misuse of taxpayer dollars at a tough time. Not only the people who need the program are having a tough time, but the people who are paying for the program are having a tough time, too," said Kevin Concannon, USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.
The fraud is almost always found among the 199,000 smaller stores that process 15 percent of the nation's total food stamp transactions, Concannon said. (...)
The modern food stamp program was created in 1977 to help low-income families. Benefits are loaded onto plastic debit cards that can only be redeemed at authorized stores. More than 45 million people were receiving benefits as of August, according to program figures, nearly half of them children.
Nationwide, 234,000 stores are authorized to accept food stamps, including 35,000 supermarkets where 85 percent of benefits are redeemed, Concannon said.
Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated. A March USDA report found more than 8 percent of the large and small stores, 210,000 in all, allowed people to cash in their benefits between 2006 and 2008.
The analytical tools officials are turning to have paid off, they say. Even though food stamp spending has ballooned from $22.7 billion to $64.7 billion since 1995, the misuse of benefits has dropped from four cents to a penny on every dollar spent, said Food and Nutrition Service spokesman Aaron Lavallee.
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