Legal Services of New Jersey in Severe Crisis

Word is coming quickly that Legal Services may be in jeopardy of losing nearly half of its IOLTA funding. Half. IOLTA is funded through lawyer trust accounts and is a complicated formula of which is ebbs and flows with the housing market that is tumbling and the projections are that Legal Services could face severe cuts soon.

This is bad news for poor people in New Jersey, while not a perfect organization without Legal Services hundreds of thousands of poor people would not get the civil legal help they deserve. From evictions, consumer law, family and more expansive law such as voting rights, environmental justice, family representation, New Jersey residents will be at a severe disadvantage if the recession continues to spiral.

Here is a hoping a democrat gets elected, that we end this disastrous war that costs Americans $12 Billion dollars a month, that we stop allowing corporations to leech from us. The latest: “A sweeping five-month investigation into the collapse of one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders points a finger at a possible new culprit in the mortgage mess: the accountants.” New Century Financial, whose failure came at the start of the credit crisis, “engaged in ’significant improper and imprudent practices’ that were condoned and enabled by auditors at the accounting firm KPMG.”

We need justice now for the people, not for the corporations.