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
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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
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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