Gerard Sarnat, 1/2/2017

Current Occupation: Seeker
Former Occupation: Physician
Contact Information:Sarnat authored HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man, Disputes and 17s. Melting The Ice King  (2016) poems were accepted by over seventy magazines including Gargoyle, Lowestoft Chronicle and The American Journal of Poetry. For Huffington Post and other reviews, reading dates, etc., visit Gerard Sarnat.com. Gerry’s built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Medical School professor. Gerry and his wife have three children and three grandkids with a fourth on the way.

 

#

Growth Industry

 

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

— from Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, whom President Obama

invited to The White House to discuss America’s current state of affairs.

 

Converted from a government-run into the ground institution

to a for-profit cash cow conglomerate milked by the very rich,

prisons market to attract right-on bottom-line demographics

which have recently been extended beyond colored over white

after our green-visor titans of industry rewarded blue meanie

cops to go after blue chip young petty criminals who are then

given life sentences — thus all but guaranteeing above benchmark

green arrow return-on-investments by oy veh judges with hands

in the public tiller since granted humungous stock options gratis.

 

Human Rights Watch reports that an unintended consequence

is aging “tenants” with much greater needs for medical care

(which their corporate overseers often avoid to defray costs),

have become the most rapidly increasing incarcerated groupies:

inmates can wait years to even to see a nurse before the hearse.

 

The scales of justice are tipped further by a dirty little secret

embedded in the Social Security Administration’s SSR 83-21:

Title II: Persons Convicted Of A Felony: “No monthly benefits

shall be paid by reason of being under a disability to any individual

for any month during which such individual is confined in a jail,

prison, or other penal institution or correctional facility.”

 

Adding more than insult to injury, Uncle Jack’s 91 year-old wife

got a startling Dear John dunning letter from SSI requiring her

to return $8000 of checks that she received on hubby’s behalf —

each penny of which’d already been paid out for rent or buy food.

 

And when the longtime postman who made one bad mistake is done

in the slammer, furloughed to a halfway house, 25% of  his earnings

from a Federal Bureau of Prisons-arranged job flipping burgers at

a McDonald’s in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — where the state minimum

wage’s $7.25/ hour before holdbacks — will be deducted every month.