A hard-hitting and persuasive indictment of the American banking system and a compelling defense of credit unions.
A pair of insiders explore the complex racial and class dynamics of the credit union movement.
Credit unions first emerged in the early 20th century as an alternative banking option for low-income communities and nonprofits; they now serve more than 130 million members with more than $2 trillion in assets. Rosenthal and McCray assert that credit unions are unambiguously the “good guys” in a fiscal system plagued by greed, predators, and unethical leadership. Their book, which is divided into four parts, starts with 11 chapters by Rosenthal, who provides a historical overview of community development and credit unions. If anyone knows this history, it’s Rosenthal, who served for years as the executive director of the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions in the 1980s and wrote Organizing Credit Unions: A Manual (1995). Rosenthal’s chapters also explore his own personal journey as a white man who led an organization whose largest stakeholders were people of color; there is also commentary on how the banking system has perpetuated racial disparities into the 21st century. While Rosenthal is the credit union’s “historian,” according to the text, coauthor McCray is the movement’s “whistleblower.” As a graduate of Georgetown University Law School and a public policy expert, he centers his chapters in Part II on in-depth look at his role in the defense of the Kappa Alpha Psi Federal Credit Union (KAPFCU), organized by a historically Black fraternity, against the federal government. In an extended metaphor based on Alice in Wonderland, McCray highlights the surreal absurdities of the National Credit Union Administration capriciously closing and liquidating KAPFCU, due in part to policies that unfairly target institutions that serve low-income communities.
The book’s more hopeful third part emphasizes the ways that Black churches and other organizations can navigate a treacherous banking system and find ways to provide capital access to their communities. In the book’s final section, McCray provides readers with a nearly 80-page collection of original documents written by the NCUA and other parties during their case against the KAPFCU. Both authors are impassioned regarding ideals of Black self-sufficiency and the need for community-centered credit unions, but their differing perspectives and approaches create a well-balanced, thoroughly convincing book. Rosenthal, who also served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board, effectively provides an insider’s account of the industry with an emphasis on historical context, whereas McCray, whose activism includes work with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, provides an engaging grassroots perspective on the ways in which Black communities and organizations are victimized by a regulatory system that disregards their needs. Both men are experts in their fields, but the book’s intended audience aren’t only fellow insiders, but also lay readers; Rosenthal and McCray are both careful to provide consistently accessible descriptions of the intricacies of the financial sector. This effort is assisted by the inclusion of ample textbox vignettes, graphs, charts, and other visual aids, and the authors’ firsthand perspectives are helpfully accompanied by more than 100 research footnotes.
A hard-hitting and persuasive indictment of the American banking system and a compelling defense of credit unions.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780984690633
Page Count: 408
Publisher: American Banner Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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