Preying on the Poor: How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks | Barbara Ehrenreich
tomdispatch.comIndividually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.
The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son’s incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son’s jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration. [READ]
Predatory Lending in Inner City Communities: Payday Loans, Check Cashing Joints, and Other Unscrupulous Loan Practices
theblackbottom.com
Walk, bike, or drive around your ‘hood and see how many of these pay lenders you can identify.
Sam Black woke up one morning not long after retiring to Charleston, South Carolina, with chest pains he didn’t realize would change his life. He took a shower and ate breakfast before his wife, Elsie, got him out the door to see his heart doctor. Within hours, the doctor cracked Sam’s chest open to do a triple bypass.
“They had the surgery early that morning,” Elsie recalls, piecing together the fragmented memory of someone who has survived a sudden trauma. Sam made it through the first operation all right, but later that night the hospital called Elsie. “We gonna have to take your husband back to surgery,” she says they told her. “Something went wrong.”
For the next seven weeks, Sam lay in a coma in the intensive care unit. Elsie says the doctor told her that when Sam comes to, “he might not know nobody. He ain’t gonna be able to drive.”
A Movement Grows in Brooklyn
jacobinmag.com
“The entrance to the building was surrounded by a high wrought iron fence, reinforced by a dense lattice of chicken wire. Its porch was almost completely enclosed by high wooden panels painted an imposing dark gray. The home of Mary Lee Ward at 320 Tompkins Avenue, in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, looked more like a heavily-fortified bunker than the dwelling of a kindly 82-year-old great grandmother.
In a sense, that’s exactly what it was last Friday morning, when a New York City marshal was scheduled to evict Ms. Ward from the home that she has lived in for the last 44 years. She would have become the latest elderly, African-American victim of predatory lending if a crowd of about 200 people from around the city hadn’t shown up to stop the marshals from carrying out the eviction notice and putting her on the street.
Ms. Ward’s years-long battle with a subprime lender called Delta Funding is illustrative of the many ways in which real estate speculators have targeted, manipulated, and victimized countless homeowners, particularly the elderly and people of color, across the country in recent years. As the New York Times tells the story,
Fifteen years ago, Ms. Ward says, she needed money for a lawyer to help keep her great-granddaughter from being put up for adoption. Like many others in her neighborhood, she turned to a subprime lender.
She signed a contract with Delta Funding, a company she found advertised on a flier tucked in her mailbox. She borrowed $82,000 against her house, but claims she only ever received a payment of $1,000. Ms. Ward still displays a faded portrait of her great-granddaughter as a baby, even though she was unable to prevent the adoption and has long since lost contact with her.”
Convenience fees and other unexpected charges await CTA and Pace Ventra fare card customers who sign up for an optional prepaid debit card account - redeyechicago.com
redeyechicago.comHoly crap. I thought such ham-fisted, confusing, predatory, user-unfriendly, private-public partnerships only existed in dystopian novels. What is the point of even offering the debit card if it is so costly?
Yahoo Finance: Bank of America to pay $335M in settlement with DOJ over discriminatory lending
finance.yahoo.comFinally. Some measure of punishment to the banks that have caused so much pain for low income People of Color. Again, it’s sad that this has to even be news, but it’s a good thing such atrocities are being brought to light.
Did racist lending practices set minorities up for foreclosure?
A new report from the Center for Responsible Lending finds that most people who lost their homes to foreclosure have been middle- to upper-class whites.
But Latino and African-American families have suffered a disproportionate share of the losses.
Among mortgages made between 2004 and 2008, 2.7 million or 6.4 percent ended in foreclosure, and 3.6 million, or 8.3 percent, remain at immediate, serious risk of going under.
Of homes lost to foreclosure during the period, 1.5 million belonged to whites, 635,000 to Latinos and 397,000 to African-Americans.
The report’s findings also reveal:
· African-Americans and Latinos across the credit-score spectrum were more likely to receive a high-cost mortgage with risky features.
· African-Americans and Latinos with good credit (a 660+ FICO score) received a high-cost loan more than three times as often as white borrowers.
· The foreclosure rate for low- and moderate-income African-Americans is about 80 percent higher than for comparable white households.
· Foreclosure rates for higher-income Latinos is more than three times that of higher-income whites.
What do you think? Were minorities set up for foreclosure?
Bus Shelters Tranformed into Foreclosed Homes in Boston #occupy boston
Activists transform Boston bus shelters into foreclosed homes in lead-up to MASS ACTION against BoA Published Sep 29 2011, 04:11 PM by Chris Faraone 1
As chronicled in today’s Boston Phoenix, the organizers at MassUniting - along with activists from a number of other groups - have been ramping up their artful and aggressive actions in the lead-up to tomorrow’s BIG RALLY (which starts at 2pm at the Boston Common gazebo/bandstand).
What wasn’t mentioned in that article, but that went down this morning, are the kickass visuals that local artists have contributed to bring this message to the streets. To raise awareness about the havoc that Bank of America has wreaked on Greater Boston families, today they outfitted bus shelters across the Hub like abandoned homes (locations below).
From MassUniting:
Concerned citizens launched a city-wide “art attack” in Boston today, converting a host of bus shelters into Bank of America foreclosures to showcase the devastating results of the financial giant’s predatory practices. Life-size images of boarded houses, squatter occupied bedrooms and empty nurseries now dot high-traffic areas from Hyde Park to Revere – including many of the communities hardest hit by foreclosure and eviction. Each installation includes a large realty sign reading “This foreclosure brought to you by Bank of America.”
Locations:
Brookline – Intersection of Brookline and Longwood
Cambridge – Massachusetts Ave at Dawes Island
Chelsea – Chelsea City Hall
Dorchester – Outside of JFK/UMASS T Station
Financial District – Intersection of Court, State and Washington (near Citizens Bank)
Franklin Park Zoo – Intersection of Columbia and Blue Hill
Hyde Park – Cleary Square (Opposite police station)
Revere – Revere City Hall
Medford – Medford Senior Center
Mission Hill – Huntington Ave & Parker Hill
Roxbury – Intersection of Tremont, Malcolm X and Columbus
South Boston – Intersection of E. Concord and Albany
Waterfront/South Boston – Outside of South Station
READ TODAY’S FEATURE STORY ABOUT THE LEAD-UP TO THIS FRIDAY’S MASS ACTION
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Blogs/phlog/archive/2011/09/29/activists-transform-boston-bus-shelters-into-foreclosed-homes-in-lead-up-to-mass-action-against-boa.aspx#ixzz1ZbigcsQO
States to decide this week on mortgage deal
reuters.comState and federal officials are close to a settlement with the largest U.S. banks over mortgage abuses, with states facing an end-of-the-week deadline to decide whether they will sign on, people close to the talks said.
