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Predatory Lending Sellout Watch: Rep. Luis Gutierrez Edition
Seems we’ve got yet another sell-out (literally) in the effort to rid the world of predatory lenders who swarm working-class and low-income neighborhoods. Earlier this year we learned that Magic Johnson is shilling for scammers who rip off low-income working people with tax-return anticipation loans. Now, Mike Illis reports for the WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT that the…
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Obama Launches First HIV Media Blitz in a Decade
The Obama administration has made quiet but significant HIV prevention news. At a White House ceremony, officials announced two new initiatives: one supporting new black leadership on AIDS, and a media blitz aiming to “refocus national attention” on the epidemic. From a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statement: “In the United States, every 9…
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Can Public Boarding Schools Make Education Equal?
With the usual caveat emptor on me and education policy, I point you to an interesting article my friend Steve Gray wrote for TIME recently. Steve’s piece introduced me to a new idea: Public boarding schools for students from poor communities. I so often hear that the complexity of educating kids from neglected neighborhoods and…
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The Hippest Band You Don't Know
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are unlikely pop stars. They’re a middle-aged couple from Mali’s capital city, Bamako, who started playing together in a house band for the city’s Institute for Young Blind People, where Amadou was a music teacher and Mariam a Braille student. Thirty years later, they’ve emerged as global pop’s band to…
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Magic Johnson Shills for Predatory Loans
You’d think by now anybody with sense would feel ridiculous promising fast cash through easy loans. Alas, not Magic Johnson. It’s tax season, and he’s shaking his enchanted moneymaker for one of the oldest, most predatory lending scams in the business: high-priced payday loans. “It’s money like Magic,” Johnson beams in TV and web ads…
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Freedom Usually Isn't Free–But What About Iraq?
I’m one of those Rep. Charlie Rangel has complained about from the outset: I haven’t had to sacrifice much for George Bush’s war. I’m an East Coast, college-educated, yuppie, liberal gay. My friends don’t join the armed forces. The last family member to do so fought in Korea. Sure, I’ve marched, I’ve declaimed, I’ve voted…
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Telling Southern Govs to Take the Money
Web advocacy group ColorOfChange.org has its members hounding South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his band of Southern-guv rebels over their refusal to use stimulus cash. (I’ve worked for ColorOfChange.org as a consultant.) More than 600 of the group’s members bombarded Sanford’s office with calls earlier this week, and 28,000 had signed a petition demanding…
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Young Blacks and Broken Hearts
The New England Journal of Medicine has an arresting study that finds blacks under the age of 50 are 20 times more likely to develop heart disease than whites. Here’s the abstract, for geeks, and an AP digest for everybody else. I’ll repeat what the researchers stress here: the finding is based on a small…
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Why Sanford vs. Obama is a Defining Political Feud
Michael Steele’s mania gets the airtime, but South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is shaking out as the real Republican nemesis for Barack Obama’s effort to redefine government as hero rather than villain. Both Obama and the Democratic National Committee know this, which is why they’re picking a fight on his home turf. Sanford, who is…
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HIV in D.C. Worse Than in West Africa
That’s right, it’s official: Chocolate City has a developing world AIDS epidemic. Three percent of the population is HIV positive, city officials are announcing today. And that’s just counting the people who have actually been tested—federal health officials believe anywhere from a quarter to a third of people living with HIV in the U.S. don’t…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
