From the New York Times:
It is not only the middle class and the wealthy who exploit the poor. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that at times the poor exploit one another. For his doctoral research in 2008 and 2009, Jacob Avery, now a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, spent 17 months with homeless men in Atlantic City. What he found was a hierarchy of exploitation. Avery describes the way that cabdrivers would purchase SNAP food stamp cards – at half their face value – from homeless men desperate for cash to buy liquor or drugs. Other homeless men, who qualify for a meager supplemental-security stipend, took advantage of people with even less money, using their S.S.I. income to buy cartons of cigarettes that they then sold to their fellow homeless men for 50 cents a cigarette.

For the full story, please visit http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/making-money-off-the-poo....