What does Martin Luther King Jr. Have to Do With Payday Loans?
Recently, the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Charles Steele Jr., penned an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, bemoaning the damaging effects of the credit crisis on minority homeowners. But, he didn't voice support of pending legislation that would create seriously overdue regulation of the credit industry - particularly the nasty and unethical practice of predatory lending involving sub-prime loans to persons whom it is obvious cannot afford them. (Just look around you. It's an ugly business model that saturates mostly low-income neighborhoods. It takes advantage of people in need and profits off of leaving them in financial devastation.)
No, Steele Jr. invoked the SCLC's founder, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., claiming that attempts to regulate the credit industry would cause minorities to be denied.
Strange bedfellows, right?
Not when you consider that late last year, subprime credit card and payday loan company CompuCredit formed a partnership agreement with the SCLC.
The news isn't all bad though -
Not everyone in the civil rights establishment has signed on with the payday lenders. The NAACP has been active in fighting the industry. In 2003, NAACP chairman Julian Bond told a Utah newspaper, "A drive through any low-income neighborhood clearly indicates people of color are a target market for legalized extortion. Visits to payday stores—which open their doors in low-income neighborhoods at a rate equal to Starbucks opening in affluent ones—are threatening the livelihoods of hardworking families and stripping equity from entire communities." But Corbett says that the industry has succeeded in diluting the black community's response to predatory lending. "Their strategy is to divide and conquer," he says. "If you've picked off Al Sharpton, you've won."
We are going to have to keep a closer eye on liberal institutions.
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Minorities deserve a piece of the shitpile too
We're all subprime now.
Isn't it wonderful that everyone can everyone can be a victim of predatory lending practices, without regard for race, sexual orientation, religion or gender?
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“But hysteria is all the rage these days, I guess” - gqm
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“I don't belong to any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.” - Will Rogers
It's the funding model for modern "civil rights" organizations
and of course for the legislative "black caucuses" on state and federal levels. The money comes from corporations, who pay to seat their execs on "roundtables" and such. The SCLC is hardly a pioneer in this regard.
Bruce Dixon
www.blackagendareport.com
Bruce Dixon
www.blackagendareport.com
Do 'liberals' still exist?
The legalized theft that is subprime lending continues to astonish. Thank you for calling attention to the complicity of "liberals" in this debacle.
And while you are telling us about the complicity of the very people we counted on to oppose this extortion, I wonder whether you could expose the complicities that have led to other instances of legalized theft we live with, perhaps less heinous than subprime lending interest rates, but nonetheless awful, each in their own way..
I am speaking about complicities regarding corporate malfeasance at all levels: "credit rating" companies’ control of people’s financial futures; corporations that take money for services they ultimately don’t provide (using expiry dates on phone credit, gift cards, etc.); medical professionals and companies’ profiteering on ill health, insurance companies’ multi-form filing requirements and refusals to pay; corporations' treating people as guilty until guaranteed innocent by multiple id's from other corporations and government... I wish there were a complete online list.
I suppose we can expect continued complicity as long as our "leaders" believe that "moving to the center" (a center which has pulled FAR to the RIGHT since the Reagan-Thatcher years began in 1979) is the only way to get elected, and once elected, to stay in power.
Empowered by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of any international opposition to trickle-down capitalism, I think it is fair to say that vocal old-style liberals became an endangered species. Witness the centrist games played by pragmatist Bill Clinton (bless his heart), and Tony Blair.
I wonder whether our brave new-style "progressives" will succeed in engineering a viable, non-complicitous program for the left before the surveillance state attains Orwellian reach?
I'm an amateur blogger
I wonder whether you could expose the complicities that have led to other instances of legalized theft we live with,
no
I just do copy and paste blogging
humble pie
and just when I thought that amateurs that were doing the best job of investigative reporting...