Blog Action Day--Climate Change

Today is blog action day.
In the CNMI, what is supposed to happen according to our laws, is that once a person owes a debt and the court renders a judgment in the creditor's favor, then the creditor can execute on the judgment either by getting a writ of attachment of particular, identifiable, non-exempt property, or the court can enter an order in aid of judgment based on ability to pay.

If the debtor has non-exempt property to satisfy the debt, there are no problems. The real issues come up when the debtor doesn't have property or income to pay off the debt.

The court is supposed to fashion an order to pay based on a debtor's ability to pay, which, under our statutes, recognizes that people need to be able to keep whatever income is needed to support themselves and their family.

And in fact, there are debtors who do not have the ability to pay--either because they are unemployed, have jobs paying low wages, have large families to support, or face a combination of these factors.

What our Courts assume is that every person who works has the ability to pay, regardless of income and regardless of size of family and responsibilities of support. This directly undermines the Legislative balance of creditor and debtor rights and creates onerous orders for poor people to pay.

A legitimate debt does not cancel the law that protects a debtor's income for the purpose of supporting himself and his family. But it does in the eyes of the Courts.

And we need a climate change in the courts to recognize that debtors' rights exist, and some do not have the ability to pay.

Another issue, even more serious, is the repeated efforts by the court to order unemployed debtors to get work; and to make these orders under threat of jail. If an unemployed debtor doesn't go look for work to the court's satisfaction--usually 10 applications every reporting period, which could be a month or 2 or 3 (even if he's looked for work for years!), he will be put in jail for contempt.

You can read some good posts on MLSC's recent work trying to stop this practice at our DAY IN COURT blog.

It's all about climate change. It's about a change in attitude and mindset that recognizes the fundamental beauty of the U.S. Constitution's protections of liberty and freedom from involuntary servitude.

Should people be working? Yes. Should they look for jobs? Yes. But should the power of the state be used to enforce private interests and lock people up because they don't work? No.

Small encroachments lead to bigger encroachments. There is no good reason to be ordered to work to pay off creditors: this is debt bondage and it needs to be stopped.

We also need a better climate for employment that provides jobs, provides incentives to work, and balances human dignity and rights with economic gain and activity. Ordering people under threat of jail to go get jobs because they owe money won't take us in the right direction.

It's all about climate change.

On Poverty

October 15, 2008 is Blog Action day, committed to the discussion of poverty.

Where to begin? Causes? Resultant problem? Solutions?

These are just my random thoughts.

I've been a poverty lawyer for more than 30 years. I help low income (and no income) clients get access to justice by having me, a free lawyer, represent them in court. I only handle civil cases, and I work for a private non-profit agency that is one of hundreds of such organizations funded in part by the U.S. government's Legal Services Corporation.

Lawyers are not the first line of defense for poor people. They need food, shelter, clothing, medical care. The children also need free, public, appropriate education. These are critical needs.

But lawyers can help poor people use what little they have to get their basic needs met; can advocate for them to get benefits from programs that may help; and can try to protect them from being cheated out of the basic fairness of being heard when they are involved (or need to be involved) in some litigation.

As with all goods and services needed by the poor, there aren't enough poverty lawyers to do the job. And so we get put into the horrible position of deciding what is a "priority" and whose case isn't important enough for our limited resources.


Some have no sympathy for the poor. They view poverty as a result of laziness or stupidity or personal fault (criminal conduct, bad health habits). There is no doubt that there are lazy and stupid, the criminal and those who don't take care of themselves, among the poor. But these same attributes can be found among the middle class and the rich. These individual traits do NOT explain poverty.

The successful do not want to believe that the system that has allowed them to progress is somehow unfair. There is a resentment by people of means toward the indigent because, if the system is wrong, then their success isn't as meaningful; and a change in the system could also change their own personal fates.

Poverty exists throughout the world, and has existed throughout the centuries. In hindsight, we can easily see that the feudal system kept the masses in poverty and illiteracy --as a system. But we are blinded to the faults of our current economic system.

Our current capitalist system is definitely an improvement over feudalism. We have a larger middle class and some protections for the poor. But there is a staggering discrepancy between those at the top of the economic ladder and those at the bottom, and there is no real way to eliminate the bottom rungs. If those at the bottom manage to move up, someone in the middle will be moving down.

I don't have answers. I don't know what are solutions. (I'm not embracing socialism here because I'm not all that knowledgeable about the ins and outs of such an option.)

I only know that we must keep trying. We must recognize that poverty is with us, not because individuals are weak or bad, but because our system needs improving.