America’s Captains of Industry, Poverty Baron Edition

How to get very rich off the backs of the working poor.

Meet the megalenders, payday loan inventors, and pawnshop popularizers behind the logos.

ROSS LONGFIELD, former executive VP, Beneficial Corp.
INNOVATION: Invented the refund anticipation loan.
FINE PRINT: Longfield bet that low-income customers would pay dearly to get their tax refunds right away. “Everything we did suggested people would love it—love it to death,” he said.
UPSHOT: Now retired, Longfield has the leisure to race around Patagonia in his prized 1969 E-Type Jaguar SII coupe.

ALLAN JONES, CEO, Check Into Cash.
INNOVATION: Pioneered payday lending.
FINE PRINT: A small-town debt collector from Tennessee, Jones made a killing by making small loans—at 400 percent interest or more—against a person’s next paycheck, Social Security payment, or unemployment check.
UPSHOT: Jones clears some $20 million a year from his 1,000-plus stores. He owns a pair of jets and a 650-acre estate, complete with stables and a football stadium.
VIDEO:

WikimediaWikimediaERNIE TALLEY, CEO emeritus, Rent-A-Center.
INNOVATION: Fathered the rent-to-own industry.
FINE PRINT: Talley started the first store in the 1960s. He and his imitators figured out that the rent-to-own customer would spend $2,000 to buy the same TV set that a person with ready credit could buy outright for $800.
UPSHOT: The industry booked $7 billion last year; Rent-A-Center’s 3,000 stores boast profit margins twice as large as Best Buy’s.
VIDEO:

JACK DAUGHERTY, founder and chairman, Cash America.
INNOVATION: Took pawnshops mainstream.
FINE PRINT: Investment banks snubbed Daugherty back in 1983, when he first sought to strike it rich as a pawnbroker. But they changed their tune when they saw the killing he made charging 60 to 300 percent interest. “Merrill Lynch, now Dean Witter, now Goldman Sachs,” he told one reporter. “We get letters from all of them.”
UPSHOT: His 700-plus pawnshops earned $1 billion in revenue last year.
VIDEO:

TERRENCE MURRAY, former CEO, Fleet Bank.
INNOVATION: Megalenders got into subprime only after Murray, a working-class kid from Providence, R.I., who attended Harvard on a scholarship, showed them the way.
FINE PRINT: In the 1980s, Providence-based Fleet began targeting areas that had fallen on hard times, peddling subprime home loans, often at interest rates exceeding 20 percent a year.
UPSHOT: By 1991, Fleet was New England’s largest bank. “It was these huge profits that got the rest of the mainstream banking industry involved,” says attorney and subprime expert Bill Brennan.
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Henry McGee/Zumapress.comHenry McGee / ZumaSANDY WEILL, former CEO, Citigroup.
INNOVATION: In 1986, Weill, a Wall Street dealmaker looking for his next big thing, bought Commercial Credit Corp.—a second-rate peddler of loans with rates as high as 23 percent—and used the profits to snap up Smith Barney, Travelers Insurance, Salomon Brothers, and, ultimately, Citigroup.
FINE PRINT: Weill’s personal assistant had tried to talk him out of the Commercial purchase, calling it a loan-sharking biz. She was being a snob, Weill retorted. Under his leadership, Citigroup became a top-five subprime lender.
UPSHOT: What mortgage meltdown? Weill still owns a yacht; a $42 million Manhattan apartment; and homes in Greenwich, Conn. and the Adirondacks.
VIDEO:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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