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Page 2 The Skanner Portland & Seattle September 21, 2022 Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now Opinion Financial Fairness at Risk With Proposed TD Bank-First Horizon Merger Bernie Foster Founder/Publisher Bobbie Dore Foster Executive Editor Jerry Foster Advertising Manager A Patricia Irvin Graphic Designer Saundra Sorenson Reporter Aurora Hernandez Digital Content Monica J. Foster Seattle Office Coordinator Susan Fried Photographer The Skanner Newspaper, established in October 1975, is a weekly publication, published every Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc. 415 N. Killingsworth St. P.O. Box 5455 Portland, OR 97228 Telephone (503) 285-5555 Fax: (503) 285-2900 info@theskanner.com www.TheSkanner.com The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Association and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicited. ©2021 The Skanner. All rights re served. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission prohibited. s banks grow larg- er through mergers and focus on grow- ing online and mobile services, serious concerns emerge on how fair and how accessible banking will be to traditionally underserved Black and Latino communi- ties. In most cases, consumers and small businesses alike view bank branch accessibil- ity and convenience as key to serving their communities. Consumer advocates cur- rently are urging bank regu- lators to thoroughly examine a proposed TD Bank merger, particularly in light of the lender’s record with home loans and overdraft fees. Earlier this year, TD Bank announced its plan to ac- quire First Horizon Bank and its $85 billion in assets and 417 locations, largely in the South. If approved by federal regulators, the merger would create the sixth-largest bank in America. TD Bank already has more than $1.3 trillion in , 27 mil- lion customers and over 1,100 locations spread across 15 states and the District of Co- lumbia. In Atlanta and Dal- las, the bank does business as TD Ameritrade. Its largest number of branches by state are located in New York (367), Florida (355), and New Jersey Charlene Crowell Guest Columnist (367). According to its website, “Black experiences, in all their diversity, are at the heart of our drive for posi- tive, sustainable change.” But as Sportin’ Life, a char- acter in the immortal folk op- era, Porgy and Bess, said: “It “ Indeed, TD’s business re- cord sends a different mes- sage ain’t necessarily so.” Indeed, TD’s business record sends a different message. Earlier this year, WHYY, the National Public Radio station serving the Philadelphia met- ro area, reported that in its re- gion between 2018 and 2020, “TD Bank was more likely to approve a mortgage loan for a low-income white applicant than a high-income Black ap- plicant….” TD Bank had the lowest Nikes on a Wire T Local News Pacific NW News World News Opinions Jobs, Bids Entertainment Community Calendar LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS LOCAL EVENTS Updated daily online. d ay ! • L i ke u s o n F ebo m me • nts TheSkannerNews o k • learn • co in y o u r c o m m u n to y • ac it Hear about it first. Sign up for Breaking News and Events at here they were again. The dangling irony of memorial Nikes . . . I was walking home from my neighbor’s house. They’d just had a piano recit- al and I was still full of music when I saw the pair of tennis shoes flung over the tele- phone wire that crosses my street – instantly redefining, at least for me, this moment, this piece of earth and sky. Oh my God. I don’t believe it. Here? In front of my house? Every now and then I see a pair of tennis shoes flung over a telephone wire – that wire stretching through a nearby McDonald’s parking lot, for instance– and every time I do, I think about a 12-year-old boy named Jose, who shoved a bit of reality in my face 20 or so years ago. He did so as a stu- dent of mine. I was a volunteer writing teacher at the time. This was part of my decade-long strug- gle with the Chicago Public Schools, which my daughter attended. One day, when she was in third grade – this is when the school system be- gins the farce known as stan- dardized testing, and “educa- tion” started to mean teaching to the test – she came home angrily and declared: “Dad, I hate writing!” Robert C. Koehler PeaceVoice Writing had become noth- ing more than spelling and grammar, plus an opening sentence, yada yada, con- clusion. The writer’s actual knowledge and life experi- “ I learned that teaching flows in both directions ences – the writer’s voice, the writer’s soul – were irrele- vant. Writing was not about saying something. All that mattered was conforming to the test format. Students’ words were emptied of mean- ing. That no longer mattered. In fact, it was a nuisance, since meaning was determined by the writer herself and often went off in its own direction; it couldn’t easily be reduced to a number. No wonder she hated writ- ing! I was beside myself with frustration. I believed in the public schools. But their (po- mortgage approval rate for Black applicants in its entire metro area. During this time, “the institution denied 20 per- cent of all purchase mortgag- es, but denied nearly 40 per- cent of all Black applicants,” according to the data, which was culled from Home Mort- gage Disclosure Act data. By comparison, the denial rate among white applicants was 20 percent.” A similar finding appeared in a 2018 investigative arti- cle by Reveal News: “African American and Latino bor- rowers are more likely to get turned down by TD Bank than by any other major mort- gage lender. The bank turned down 54 percent of black homebuyers and 45 percent of Latino homebuyers, more than three times the industry averages.” Then there’s TD Bank’s poor record on overdraft fees. Just two years ago the Con- sumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) entered into a consent order with TD Bank that provided $97 million in restitution to 1.42 million consumers, and the CFPB charged the firm a $25 million civil penalty. The bank had illegally charged customers overdraft fees without first obtaining their consent be- fore enrolling them in its op- tional overdraft . Overdraft fees often exploit consumers’ short-term cash needs. The vast majority of overdraft fee revenue comes from people with account bal- ances that average less than $350. TD Bank’s business model relies far more on overdraft fees than other large banks. While some of its peer insti- tutions eliminated overdraft fees, TD charges a $35 over- draft fee as many as three times a day. Fortunately, consumer ad- vocates are registering their serious concerns with federal regulators. “TD Bank cannot serve the needs of low-income com- munities while insisting on maintaining this large stream of revenue that, by definition, depends on consumers who lack funds,” testified Nadine Chabrier, Senior Policy and Litigation Counsel with the Center for Responsible Lend- ing (CRL), at a recent hear- ing on the merger proposal. She noted that in deciding whether to approve a merger, government regulators, by law, must consider whether community needs would be served. litically forced) conformity to standardized testing – good numbers meant adequate funding – was just plain wrong. As a writer myself, there was no way – no way! – I could allow my own kid to be robbed of her developing writer’s voice. This was a long struggle, but the beginning was here at Franklin Elementary School. I wound up having a conver- sation with the school’s prin- cipal, who actually listened to my concerns and got my point. While she had no pow- er to change the system, she suggested, if I was interested, that I could do some teaching at the school. I wasn’t working fulltime at that point and had some free time in my week, so she arranged with one of the teachers for me to work with a small group of kids once a week. Well, what the heck. It was better than nothing. At that point I had done a little bit of teaching, at the college level – just enough to know how difficult it was. I was anything but confident that I knew what I was doing, but I did have a game plan. Back when I was in college, I’d had a fab- ulous writing teacher and mentor who helped me shat- ter my own long-established self-censorship with a process he simply called “free writ- ing.” Step one: Sit down and write without stopping for 10 minutes, 20 minutes or what- ever. Let it flow. If you can’t think of anything to say, write “I can’t think of anything to say,” and keep going! This was the essence of it. Writing starts to become an internal process. Later one’s words can be clarified and re- organized, but first you have to hear yourself and learn to let your truth emerge. OK, so suddenly there I am, sitting in a circle – yes, definitely a circle, we’re all equals – with a small group of 12-year-olds. We talk for a while, then, yeah, start writing! They go for 10 min- utes, then everyone reads his words aloud to the group. How much difference, if any, did it make in their lives? I have no idea. And my daugh- ter wasn’t part of the group (but eventually, over the years, overcame the “I hate writing” curse and became a poet) – but I know for sure that one participant in that group learned something of value. Me! I learned that teaching flows in both directions. As a teach- er, you can know that you’re accomplishing something if the students start becom- ing your teachers – which leads me to Jose and the dan- gling tennis shoes. We’d been talking about gang life, a re- Read the rest of this commentary at TheSkanner.com See NIKES on page 10 nt • lo c a l n e w s • eve
