Jack & Jill Politics

Thanks to dNA for the tip on this. Apparently the nation’s big banks decided that Jim Crow needed a comeback during the Bush administration. Wells Fargo actually targeted the emerging black middle class, folks making much higher than the median income – even as they called them “ghetto loans”. Putting morality aside for a second, what’s telling about this is that racism is market-inefficient and dangerous to the economy. It’s just not smart business strategy not matter how you feel about us “mud people.” Ignorant mofos. Wells Fargo will never see a dime from me, if I can help it. This article made me physically ill, y’all. Worth a read. These banks do not deserve a bailout but their victims sho nuff do, yeah. Some of these banks deserve to fail. The NAACP, making themselves useful for once, has filed a class-action lawsuit charging systematic racial discrimination by more than a dozen banks. Wells Fargo, thank goodness, is among them. From the NYT:

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

Wells Fargo, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.”

“We just went right after them,” said Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally. “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”