Bookmarks: Trevon Green • Miss Cleo, TV “psychic,” passes at 53 • Why shouldn’t I get food stamps? •
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Watch the video.
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Phone psychics and their world
• Famed infomercial psychic Miss Cleo dies at 53 – Andrea Mandell, USA Today • Miss Cleo – Wikipedia • It Happened To Me: I Was a Telephone Psychic For Miss Cleo – Rebecca Barthel, xojane.com • On Welfare and Not Psychic? New York Provides Training – Nina Bernstein, New York Times
”I’ve been a clairvoyant all my life,” Ms. Cannizzaro said. ”If I could get the lottery numbers, would I be working as a telephone psychic?”
Apparently Miss Cleo never was a telephone psychic; she merely played one on TV.
The firm she worked for, Psychic Readers Network, is still in business, albeit they paid multi-million dollar settlements in the early 2000s for fraud, principally that they led callers to believe calls were free that actually cost $3.99 or more per minute.
Judy Ann Cannizzaro and Rebecca Barthel both worked for Psychic Readers Network, which provided scripts for phone personnel to use with callers; such as, visualizing winning lottery numbers.
Ms. Cannizzaro’s remark, quoted above, corresponds well to my own experiences of clairvoyance.
That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t consider employment opportunities in this field myself.
Many years ago, an article appeared in Venture Inward, the journal of the Edgar Cayce organization, written by a woman who had worked as a phone psychic for a different firm; they provided her no scripts. Apparently one does not need to have any specially apparent skills to succeed at this: she said she merely would imagine things about the caller, and would turn out most of the time to be correct. It is notable that she was empathetic and prayerful about her work.
That author left the field, with the same complaint as Ms. Barthel and Ms. Cannizzaro: the employer put tremendous pressure on the phone workers, to keep callers on the line as long as possible, so that the firm could keep raking in its $3.99+ per minute, regardless of the caller’s needs.
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Why shouldn’t I get food stamps?
• Welfare Is the New Work • These States Added Work Requirements for Food Stamp Recipients: Here’s How It’s Working Out • How Intentional Design Increased Dependence on Food Stamps and Undermined Work
Maybe the problem is that I don’t have an answer to my question.
I can’t dispute the facts presented, but it seems to me there must be much more to the picture. The perspectives set forth here do not line up with what I see happening around me. Did someone wave a magic wand, and suddenly all these men have jobs?
The authors talk as if food stamps were these individuals’ sole support. Who’s paying the rent? How do they have suitable clothes to get a job? (At my last contact with the prospective employer, he directed me that my shirt was not acceptable work attire and I should dress differently when I return.) How do they pay for transportation to and from prospective jobs?
How are they not on the street, not homeless?
And why should the whole thing entail any scandal?
It’s not clear to me how much the taxpayers saved by the reduction or elimination of benefits for these me. It’s not clear to me how much of a burden their benefits were on the taxpayers to begin with. I am far more concerned about (1) the families I see who, food stamps or no food stamps, run out of food at mid-month every month, month after month; and (2) the families I know who, food stamps or not, are becoming homeless.
Reblogged 03/07/24.
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