by KArBill

Created on: October 20, 2009

Depending on your religious persuasion, poverty has been with us since the Old Testament with the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to struggle and toil in the soil to survive and with the first recorded crime (biblically) when Cain murdered Able. Pride and jealousy were the first motivations for that crime.

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (RSV)

1:9 What exists now 1 is what will be, 2 and what has been done is what will be done;

there is nothing truly new on earth. 3 1:10 Is there anything about which someone can say, "Look at this! It is new!"? 4 It was already 5 done long ago, 6 before our time. 7

This refers to actions and behaviors of human beings; there is nothing new under the sun..

Poverty alone does not produce crime. Poverty can cause the psychological stresses motivating people to criminal behavior. There are millions in poverty and most do not commit crimes.

Crime is committed by those who become desperate, frustrated, and angry at systems that ignore or deny the basics for survival and respond negatively to those feelings (Bolland, 2003). Worse, they feel hopeless and have nothing to lose by resorting to crime.

Jealousy results from those who desire what others have and combined with hopelessness, frustration and desperation will result in ant-social behavior and criminal behavior.

The sum of these feelings is anger, even rage-rage at those who have much as the source of their frustration. Youth is particularly susceptible to these summed feelings converting those feelings to anger, bias, and hatred. These feelings severe enough can also produce substance abuse, depression, and suicide (Bolland et al., 2001).

Institutions perpetuating poverty...capitalism as an institution while not designed to impoverish; it does through the manipulations of criminal investors and investment institutions to produce illegal or immoral profits through convoluted transactions that produce nothing but paper.

It has become a complicated lottery that; when fails, begs for corporate welfare at the tax payers' expense. Retirements are wiped out. People living off these investments fall into or near poverty and must return to work, if possible, to survive. The failures of Enron, AIG, the major banks, Lehman Brothers are just a few whose failures improvised people.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE57G5KN 20090817

http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2009/Feb/25/SEC_ %27faces_questions%27_over_Lehman_Brothers_insider_t rading.html

Crime born of poverty

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