The Senate Banking Bill Plays an Appalling Shell Game on Race

Banks are required to collect racial data on their loans so that regulators can make sure they aren’t discriminating against blacks and Hispanics. But the banking industry discriminated anyway during the housing bubble of the aughts, claiming that the differences were due to low credit scores, not redlining. So when Dodd-Frank passed in 2010, it required banks to collect more information. This was reasonable: if the real reason is credit scores, then let’s see the credit scores.

Needless to say, banks didn’t like this, and as soon as Mick Mulvaney took over the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, he set about gutting the rule. But that wasn’t enough. Now, in one of the most egregious rollbacks of Dodd-Frank regulations, Congress plans to eliminate this requirement:

For decades, banks have been required under the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to report borrowers’ race, ethnicity and Zip code so officials could tell whether lenders were serving the communities in which they are located and identify racist lending practices such as redlining. But discriminatory practices continued, with the financial industry disproportionately targeting black and Hispanic borrowers with subprime mortgages loaded with high fees and adjustable interest rates that skyrocketed after the stock market crashed in 2008.

….Lenders were supposed to start gathering extra information about borrowers’ ages and credit scores, as well as interest rates and other loan-pricing features in January….But [Mulvaney] said the agency plans to reconsider the new requirements, and that banks would not be penalized for data collection errors in 2018. He also stripped the bureau’s fair-lending office of its enforcement powers. The Senate bill would repeal many of the new reporting requirements, exempting small lenders making 500 or fewer mortgages a year from the expanded data disclosure.

This is ridiculous. Loan data in modern banks is kept on a new invention called a “computer.” All the data is already there, and providing it just means grabbing a few more fields from a database. The real reason for eliminating this requirement has nothing to do with the burden it places on community banks. It’s there so that these banks can continue to discriminate and then pretend that there’s not really any discrimination—and we’d all understand that if we only saw all the other loan data.

What a con. And a dozen Democrats are supporting this.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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