Thanks to a number of settlements, we now know that some companies got many of those new signatures via intentional strategies targeting black and Hispanic customers. The most infamous example was Wells Fargo, which paid a $175 million settlement for systematically overcharging black and Hispanic borrowers.
It came out that a Maryland office of the bank referred to subprime loans as “ghetto loans,” and pushed its loan officers to unload as many as possible on the “mud people” of Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs. A crucial element involved pushing expensive and dangerous subprime loans on people who qualified for the safer, lower-interest prime loans.
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In conjunction with better-known offenses in 1960s & 70s] like blockbusting (i.e., clearing neighborhoods of white residents through scare tactics), the misdeeds of companies like Eastern Services helped destroy black neighborhoods practically overnight. They did so in much the same way the modern foreclosure crisis has now left deserts of blighted homes in cities all over the country, from Trenton to Fort Wayne to Fayetteville to Rochester to Port St. Lucie and beyond.
Likewise, the “interest-only” or “negative amortization” loan of the subprime era, which allowed people to jump into new houses with little or no money down, was little more than an homage to the “contract mortgage.” The latter was an infamous type of zero-equity real estate loan-sharking that targeted black homeowners throughout the pre-Civil Rights era.
All election long, I’ve seen post after post from rabid “Bernie Bros” ecstatically trumpeting the enlightened policies of Senator Bernie Sanders. You can find them in every corner of the internet spewing impassioned diatribes against anybody who dares criticize their presidential candidate. Well, I’m sorry, Bernie Bros; it’s not working on me. Bernie has a couple nice economic pipe dreams, but he simply does not have the foreign policy experience necessary to prop up a pro-Western dictatorship.
As a trained defense attorney who once represented clients for violent crimes, Clinton has been long aware of how the criminal justice system works in theory versus reality. That she continues to defend the death penalty given everything we know about it now does not so much betray ignorance as indifference — or else just plain unwillingness to expend political capital on this issue, at least until the moment is right.
This, of course, is at odds with her grand promise to end the era of mass incarceration. In a CNN op-ed the day after he stood to ask his question in Columbus, [Ohio death row exoneree] Ricky Jackson pointed out this contradiction. “The fact that Clinton continues to hang on to this antiquated relic confuses me,” he wrote. “She touts ‘criminal justice reform’ — and much reform is needed — but she misses one of the lowest hanging pieces of fruit.”
Perhaps it is true that Clinton will “breathe a sigh of relief” if and when the death penalty finally ends. But that statement alone speaks volumes about her leadership — and the kinds of reforms she will be willing to deliver in the end. A vow to feel relieved when others finally win the fight against capital punishment is not exactly a profile in courage. Clinton knows full well that the death penalty — as it actually exists — is wrong. She’s just not going to waste any power doing anything about it.
After Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields was beaten up by one of Donald Trump’s aides while covering a Florida campaign event, the company’s senior management sided with Trump, ordering staff to cease communicating about their colleague’s treatment.
Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro have both resigned in protest, penning scorching statements condemning their employer and naming Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon as specifically culpable, accusing him of betraying founder Andrew Breitbart’s “mission.”
Shapiro accused Bannon of turning the news site “into Trump’s personal Pravda.”
This kind of policing toward Muslim Americans exists because the public has countenanced it. Our tax dollars fund it. In many ways, Americans have acquiesced to the idea that “our safety” requires vigilance, which means more monitoring, more investigations, more preemptive prosecution. While many people have decried the indiscriminate surveillance of Muslim communities, there remains a widespread willingness to see certain kinds of ideas as dangerous. Armed with our fears, we allow this aggressive law enforcement, rarely having to look the consequences or these young people in the eye when we do.
