A rousing body of evidence in favor of activist reform of financial practices, from ordinary loans to reparations.
Damning exposé of the essential racism of the American financial system.
There’s a racial wealth gap in America, with numerous hurdles placed in the way of minorities—especially Black men and women—who must contend with differential rates of pay, discriminatory lending, and the inability to accumulate intergenerational wealth. In her debut book, New York Times reporter Flitter examines that story in numerous insightful ways. One reason Black people have trouble getting loans is that there are so few Black financial advisers and bank officers to serve their needs. As the author notes, even Sheila Johnson, one of the wealthiest Black people in America, “with a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” was denied a loan when she tried to launch a luxury resort. Banks routinely issue memos headed “Please Use Caution” that target Black customers, who, it’s seemingly assumed, should not possess large checks. That’s one reason, Flitter points out, that check-cashing businesses flourish in Black neighborhoods, as well as the fact that those businesses are transparent about fees rather than layering on unadvertised charges, as banks do. The fact that there are Black neighborhoods to begin with connects to lending practices that discriminate against Black borrowers, “redlining” mortgages and charging higher rates than those for White customers, and to the fact that Black bank employees who want to track over to the wealthier “private client” side of the house are shunted off to lower-income neighborhoods without high-ticket accounts. Unfortunately, as the author shows, discrimination is everywhere. “It is common knowledge that insurance companies routinely look for reasons to deny claims,” she writes, “and that poor customers’ cases are the easiest to dispose of because those customers are the least likely to fight a denial.” Everywhere the dollar extends, by her searing account, minority communities are excluded.
A rousing body of evidence in favor of activist reform of financial practices, from ordinary loans to reparations.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982183-24-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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