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HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS

Name: HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS
Author: Mehrsa Baradaran
ISBN: 978-0-674-28606-1

EXCLUSION, EXPLOITATION, AND THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY

by Mehrsa Baradaran ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2015

A comprehensive addition to the ongoing discussions of both inequality and the financial system.

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In this debut, Baradaran (Univ. of Georgia School of Law) charges that nearly half of the American population has been deprived of access to financial services at a fair price thanks to financial deregulation.

The author spotlights the situation of “the other half” who are denied access to banking services or credit, and she cites government statistics showing that “over half the households in the United States could not come up with just $400 to cover a medical emergency without having to borrow, and 60 percent lacked enough money to get by for three months.” They also have to spend about 10 percent of their annual income just to access their own money. This makes them vulnerable to payday and other predatory lenders. People who use payday lenders, writes the author, do not do so out of “irresponsibility or ignorance.” In fact, “many people need small loans.” Baradaran argues that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 is a perfect demonstration of how widespread deregulation has replaced the previous social contract between government, banks, and citizens. The author identifies “the pivotal transformation” as the banks' successful campaign over decades to be freed of regulation and treated like any other for-profit corporation. When Barack Obama's administration attempted to make the bailout conditional, the banks refused. The previous recognition that banks are a public service, and should be treated as such (Supreme Court Justice Brandeis called them “public utilities”), no longer figured in the balance. Now, the continuing profitability of the large banks, which hold more than 50 percent of financial assets, comes first. The author also discusses alternate forms of private banking, which were intended to address this public need, and Baradaran points to the pre-1970 role of the U.S. Postal Service in promoting communication and access to finance for small businesses and citizens.

A comprehensive addition to the ongoing discussions of both inequality and the financial system.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-674-28606-1

Page Count: 324

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.