Killing Civilians

One of the best articles I’ve read recently about the history of the economic crisis is available in this month’s Harper’s: “Infinite debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy” by Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer from Chicago.

It’s not freely available online at the moment (although it may be in the relatively near future), so you might have to do something crazy like actually buy the magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

One day in late 2000, I got a call from Monsignor John Egan, a labor priest and civil rights activist who had marched with Saul Alinsky. When he hit old age with his bad heart, he’d try to get people to join committees by saying, “Oh, Sue”—or Bill or Jean or Tom—“it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.” He made these requests for years. But in what was really the last time, he wanted me to help him fight a new kind of loan—payday loans at rates of 100 percent or 500 percent or 700 percent, which were increasingly on offer in Illinois. I was astonished. For a guy like Jack Egan, who had marched with Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr., this seemed like such a minor issue. Who’d even take out a payday loan?

Now, years later, when there are well over a thousand of these loan agencies in Illinois, and Jack Egan has long since died, I wish I could say: “O Monsignor, you were right.” He could see, years before the rest of us: this fight against the banks was like the fight to unionize, it was like the civil rights movement. He knew, as the rest of us did not, where an Alinsky, a Reuther, a King would be—they’d be marching on the banks.

For those of you who’d prefer an 800 word distillation of one of the article’s main points, you can always check out yesterday’s Krugman article.

I know this phenomenon isn’t entirely Ronald Reagan’s fault, but nonetheless: