And yes, I understand that retweets do not necessarily mean endorsements

Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

-- James Baldwin

The masses .... They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die. If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

-- Malcolm X

I have not checked with them about their motives, but I'll hazard the guess that council members Emily Evans and Carter Todd retweeted the following because they plan to vote against regulating predatory lenders in less affluent neighborhoods as supported by other council members:

Check the bottom for the diminutive council member retweets.

Interesting to see that a couple of council members may support the idea of hiring African American women to bolster the income line of a company that charges a disproportionately minority, working-class clientele 600% interest. The legacy of usury is littered with the lives of people locked into cycles of debt and poverty worse than when they entered thanks to the paternalistic opportunism of lenders who claim they are providing the masses with options.

In many places it is like a house ablaze:

Of the consumers who frequented the payday store fronts, most were women. People who were divorced or separated were 103% more likely to use the loans, while African-Americans were also 103% more likely to take out the often predatory loans.

“Based on the location of these lenders, it is clear they target minority and low-to-middle income groups, mostly in highly diverse populated areas,” the report states. “If this trend continues, these areas will no doubt be pushed into poverty.”

So, do CM Evans and CM Todd support the idea of barring obstacles to a wealthy lending corporation hiring women of color to help it push other women of color into poverty? The creation of jobs in a business that preys on widespread dislocation (Nashville's poverty level is a crushing 19%) seems like integration into a burning house. And it takes the pressure off the predominately white business elite, who perpetuate a cruel and pitiless finance system, while marketing Nashville as an attractive "it city" on the make.

What about the claims that predatory lenders are doing African American women favors by hiring them? Do we have any stories of Nashvillians, deeply in payday lender debt, who were able to climb out of it after being hired by payday lenders on the salaries at the work hours they pay? Does the news media bother to talk to former employees of payday lenders to get relevant information?

Meanwhile, regulation or not, the lenders will weather whatever comes. They will live to continue to set blazes to peoples' lives and stay free from crushing risk themselves. The absence of meaningful federal, state and, yes, local regulations on lending constitutes wide latitude to for high-interest, self-serving loans that inundate good people made desperate by an unforgiving economy.

The stick in Advance Financial 24/7's craw is the ding their "24/7" brand is going to take by limiting their perpetual operating hours. That is it. The only thing at risk is their marketing brand. This is not a fight over people. It is a company defending their brand.

Otherwise, if they authentically cared about African American women, as their founder shamelessly claims, why not offer them low-interest loans to begin with?

Why not? Because if they did, they could not make huge campaign donations to Tennessee politicians, including some who come through the Metro Council.

Why not? Because if they did, then they would risk engulfing their own houses in financial risks in an unforgiving market. And, on their way down, they might not get too much pity from people they once used on their way up.


UPDATE: Yesterday the lobbyists at the Nashville Chamber of Commerce started flexing their muscle in support of predatory lending companies. Here is part of the letter they sent to the entire Metro Council:

The Chamber opposes this bill [to limit the operating hours of payday lenders] because it is an excessive over-regulation of business .... Regardless of the function of the business, we believe that this type of legislation sets a worrying precedent in restricting the hours in which any business can operate. Furthermore, this becomes even more ominous when legislation appears to target one specific company that operates 24/7. Our members include businesses in this industry; we would not recommend hour be restricted for any of them.

This is another thinly veiled attempt on the Chamber's part to leverage the least amount of resistance to do whatever in the world their members want to do. The majority of Nashvillians who are not members can go to hell as far as the Chamber is concerned.

Where hell lies for many is on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Chamber lobbyists posture as if their member companies are fighting poverty by providing jobs and services that people cannot get elsewhere. But for a group so dedicated to business models they fail miserably to count the actual costs of lending jobs that empower lenders to push Nashvillians farther into poverty. They don't want to discuss the poverty that is generated by the jobs provided. At best they remain willfully self-ignorant of Nashville poverty. At worst the Chamber is running a confidence game so their member companies can continue pimping poor people out of their cash flow.

Over-regulation of business? When has the Chamber championed any regulation of business?

The writers of the letter completely ignore the fact that certain businesses in Nashville are already regulated as to times and even days that they sell their products. There is a precedent already set in Nashville.

It is reasonable to assume that just like payday lenders have paid vast sums to finance political campaigns, they have likely donated a chunk to special interest lobby groups like the Nashville Chamber of Commerce. They're just continuing to fan the flames.


UPDATE: There is an online petition you can sign to tell Metro Council (which votes on February 3) that you support the ordinance limiting the hours of payday lenders. Jump to: http://www.limitpaydayloans.com/

CM Carter Todd, TFA donor, expresses his support for Karl Dean on education

There are many avenues of education reform, but I want to address one in particular: high-quality public charter schools .... we have to create and recruit more great charter schools. And I will stand in support of any reasonable measure that helps make that happen.

-- Mayor Karl Dean in last Sunday's Tennessean

It is noteworthy that CM Todd agrees with Hizzoner's conservative embrace of charter schools and has donated a large sum of money to Teach for America. TFA is a "teacher's pet" of corporate venture philanthropy that strives to remake public education on market-based models and business strategies irrespective of the views of veteran education professionals.

It is also noteworthy that TFA has its own problems. Witness just a snippet of the comments from a TFA alum to NPR last year:

the biggest thing is that politicians hear these inflated successes, and then they buy into the current myth that we've got these old, lazy teachers that need to be replaced with these young go-getters. And that's also not the way it works.

But the huge issue - and the thing that got me, about a year ago, writing on this almost weekly - is the TFA alumni who, after two or three years, leave the classroom and go into a leadership pipeline. Now, there are some great Teach for America alumni that became leaders. They taught for a lot of years, and they became principals and things like that.

But I'm talking about a certain, small class of them. They taught for maybe two or three years, and then they were given the reigns to take over a district - and they have not done a very good job. A prime example is Washington, D.C., where Teach for America alumni are sort of at all levels, including the very top, and they haven't succeeded there. They have a policy of shutting down schools, firing teachers, given bonuses based on what I consider to be inaccurate metrics. And they've sort of bought into the whole corporate reform movement.

Gary Rubenstein points out elsewhere that the corporate push behind TFA and education reform consistently renders those of us who are its opponents (many of whom, like me, do not make enough to offset CM Todd's big donation of $5,000) as "defenders of the status quo". Hardly. Both Mayor Dean and CM Todd are established, powerful politicians who rely on corporate donations in a Republican red state, by definition conservative. Calling themselves reformers in the sense of agents of change, is far from expressing truth in advertising.

The status quo in Tennessee is that poor students and students of color generally end up with poor education while students from wealthy, mostly white families are handed better opportunities. In fact, that is the status quo in America. Neither charter schools nor TFA do anything to change that status quo. On the contrary, charter schools "cream" the best performers from public schools and can move poor performers out. Moreover, education reformers defend the status quo themselves by drawing the discussion away from economic inequalities that keep some students down in the dust while lifting a few others to obscene heights. I certainly understand why: conservative corporate donors do not want to support anything that rocks the boat that brings them their wealth in the first place.

And consistent with the corporate status quo, it is not students who are the primary beneficiaries of school reform, but the few wealthy white guys bankrolling it with their investments; the kind of guys on whom Karl Dean and Carter Todd rely on to keep their powerful positions in Nashville. The Mayor and the Council Member may cheerlead the flipping of education away from public, but at the end of the day let's hope that they are honest enough to admit that it really will not amount to any real positive change for the vast majority of Nashville's students.