The editorial page of the New York Times recently weighed in on an important but underappreciated aspect of the financial crisis: The systematic targeting of communities of color for risky and unfair loans. As the Timesput it:
Pricing discrimination — illegally charging minority customers more for loans and other services than similarly qualified whites are charged — is a longstanding problem. It grew to outrageous proportions during the bubble years. Studies by consumer advocates found that large numbers of minority borrowers who were eligible for affordable, traditional loans were routinely steered toward ruinously priced subprime loans that they would never be able to repay.
Rampant lending discrimination during the housing bubble exposed black and Latino communities to the harshest consequences of the economic crisis. The link between race, subprime lending, and devastating rates of foreclosure has been crystal clear for some time. Researches at Princeton have found, for example, that "the greater the degree of Hispanic and especially black segregation a metropolitan area exhibits, the higher the number and rate of foreclosures it experiences." That same study found that these disparities are due in large part to the disproportionate chance that minority borrowers will receive subprime loans.
Derby, Kansas, high school sophomore Jonathan Villarreal was walking to the bus after school when a police officer ordered him to pull his pants up above his hips. Jonathan refused, on the grounds that the school day was over. As reported in the Wichita Eagle, here’s what happened next:
The economic crisis of 2008, which was devastating for the nation’s economy as a whole, was nothing short of disastrous for communities of color. Much of the decades of progress toward full inclusion in the American dream which was ushered in by the landmark civil rights laws of the 1960’s disappeared virtually overnight, stripping communities of color of their homes and their financial futures. These enormous setbacks were not the result of a natural disaster but were instead the easily foreseeable consequences of forces set in motion by banks eager to realize enormous profits without regard to the impact upon vulnerable communities.
Last week the New York Timesbroke a story that came as no surprise: when armed with expansive dragnet surveillance authority that lacks meaningful safeguards, the government will intercept huge numbers of private, domestic communications between Americans. What’s worse, the government seems to acknowledge the likelihood of such overreaching surveillance, but believes that through trial and error it will eventually solve the problem — notwithstanding the constitutional violations committed in the meantime.
In pushing for ever-expanding and unaccountable surveillance authority, the Bush Administration has assured the public that it aims its spying capabilities at serious security threats. But as two government whistleblowers recently revealed to ABC News, surveillance programs touted as critical to protect national security have in fact been used to monitor the private communications of innocent Americans abroad, including humanitarian workers and U.S. service-members. While disturbing, ABC's report confirms a core contention of the ACLU's lawsuit challenging Congress's recent expansion of governmental spying powers: unchecked surveillance authority invades the privacy of innocent Americans, and in doing so, fundamentally undermines the efforts of human rights workers, journalists, and attorneys doing important work around the globe.
Two former military intercept operators — the people who actually intercept, monitor, and collect international telephone and email communications — told ABC News that "hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home." The operators worked for the National Security Agency ("NSA"), the spy agency chiefly responsible for international surveillance. They report that NSA routinely listened in on the innocent, and sometimes intimate, conversations of Americans abroad. There were apparently no effective procedures in place to filter out these kinds of communications.
Derby, Kansas, high school sophomore Jonathan Villarreal was walking to the bus after school when a police officer ordered him to pull his pants up above his hips. Jonathan refused, on the grounds that the school day was over. As 