From Harper’s: Daniel Brook on payday lending
From “Usury Country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending,” by Daniel Brook in the April 2009 Harper’s Magazine
During the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, the race-based
legal oppression of slavery was replaced with the economic bondage of
sharecropping—a race-neutral system that ensnared blacks and whites
alike. In his short lifetime, King helped lay waste to more legal
barriers, those of racial segregation, but in the past twenty years a
new, race-neutral form of economic exploitation has arisen in their
place. This twenty-first-century sharecropping is called payday
lending; and each indentureship under it begins, fittingly enough, with a bad check.
From the Web
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