We're Getting Jacked by 'Conservative' Pickpockets

Driving cross-country recently, I tried my best to catch as much local AM radio as possible to find out what was going on as I passed through the states. The biggest surprise for me were the debt-focused radio shows in practically every county.

I listened to debt-beater radio host Dave Ramsey bash the credit card industry for hours as suicidal caller after suicidal caller moaned about staggering interest payments on credit cards. On other shows, callers griped about not being able to see their way out of surging mortgage payments plus higher health care costs plus car insurance payments plus their children's college loans plus the credit card debt that -- temporarily -- alleviated the former monthly bills, only to find that the credit card debts were the hardest and steepest of all to pay.

Author Nomi Prins saw enough of this phenomenon to write a book about the increasing strain that living in a business state has put on the wallets of ordinary Americans. "Jacked: How 'Conservatives' Are Picking Your Pocket" (PoliPointPress, 2006) is Prins' new book, and it gets right at the heart of the economic pain that many of us are feeling. AlterNet caught up with Prins to discuss her book and what she thinks regular people should do to stop getting "jacked."

Jan Frel: In writing this book, you traveled across the country to see how conservative policies in Washington have affected real lives. What made you take that path as opposed to the usual wonk and policy-filled fact book researched out of D.C.?

Nomi Prins: Well, some of my best friends are wonks, but I think they should get out more. Jacked is more about people than policies. You can't understand what anyone's going through without talking to them, meeting them or hanging out in their world. Nonwonks, or most of the public, don't speak in general statistics -- they speak in miles traveled on a tank of gas, in fights with insurance companies over claims after hurricanes, in college tuition hikes.

I have a master's degree in statistics and spent years working with numbers as a banker before becoming a journalist. They are useful, but figures don't cry, or laugh, or bleed, or struggle, or win, or curse, or drive trucks, or balance community college and child rearing, or drink strawberry milk shakes with you in diners. People do. Seemed to me, you can't talk policy without starting with the people that policy impacts. I wrote Jacked about and for the people in it.

Frel: You do your best to show how common activities in regular American life are shaped by D.C.'s positions on foreign policy or corporate welfare. Did the people you spoke with get the connection?

Prins: It was a mixed bag. When I interviewed people, I didn't ask them what they thought of politics, D.C. policy, or corporate power. I let them lead me on a tour through their wallets and hit the issues their cards represented in their own styles. My first question was "What's the most important card in your wallet?" My second was "Why?" It went from there. The top card was the driver's license, then ATM/credit, then health insurance. Employee and student ID's were next.

Most people went from talking about their driver's license to talking about gas prices, which have doubled in the past three years. The first person mentioned in Jacked is a tour guide from New Orleans, Ozzie LaPorte. After Katrina, he balanced highly reduced tour sizes and highly increased gas prices for his vans at the same time. His take on gas company exec profits and D.C. was simply, "I don't happen to have my own lobbyist."

With the health insurance card, people were keenly aware of their jacked premiums and reduced coverage, and the direct link from activities to corporate behavior. With respect to foreign policy, the place where I had the most people bring up the war in Iraq without prompting was the red South, particularly the Gulf Coast. Even for Bush supporters, there was a real dissatisfaction with the way the government handled Katrina when it happened, and a year later, the idea that they could spend so much money on Iraq and not give the same care and focus to their own citizens. With credit and ATM cards, people tended not to see the connection as clearly.