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Byllye Y. Avery has fought for the health care needs of women for over three decades. She’s been a stalwart for reproductive health dating back to the 1970s when she co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace, a midwifery birthing center in Gainesville, Florida.

In 1983 she founded the National Black Women’s Health Project, which today is known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the first nonprofit created by Black women focusing on the health and wellness of Black women. 

Avery received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Social Contribution in 1989 and in 2002 she launched the Avery Institute for Social Change, focusing on health care reform.

She’s spent much of her 84 years on the planet devoted to reproductive justice and addressing the health needs of people who can become pregnant—particularly Black women.

RELATED STORY: ‘The day I found Harvey Milk’s dead body was the moment I knew’: Cleve Jones, famed LGBTQ activist

We spoke to Avery to get her thoughts about the current onslaught of policies attacking reproductive rights in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida—policies that severely impact women of color.

“It’s very sad to me. I can remember when Roe v. Wade was passed, and I remember Judy Levy, who was one of the women I founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center and Birthplace with, said to me, ‘Byllye, we’re going to have to fight the rest of our lives to keep this right,’” Avery says. “I thought once the Supreme Court declared something that we had it forever. She said, ‘No, this can be taken away from us.’”

The truth is from the day Roe v. Wade passed in 1973 Republicans have been working to dismantle it.

Referring to the many appointments of conservative federal judges and most recently Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition and a campaign adviser to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush told The Washington Post, “Evangelicals developed a strategy, stuck with it, and it paid off. … The significance of this moment for that constituency is that they bet on a long-term, historical, multi-decade transformation of the federal courts in a way that would no longer be hostile to their values.” 

Avery says it’s up to those who she calls the “bleeding women,” meaning anyone of reproductive age, to figure this one out—but warns that it might take another 30 years to unravel these state laws once they pass.

She says when she speaks to groups of women, she tells them to “get their heads out of the sand,” and “make a plan.”

“Don’t think you can’t just not talk to your daughters (or anyone who may get an abortion) about this, because women don’t like to talk about abortion. And part of my conviction, whenever I stand in front of them, I know that 50% of women have had abortions. So I just speak to the issue,” Avery says.

Avery says it’s not going to be enough to carry signs; people today need to come up with their “coat hanger” for this issue. Avery is talking about the coat hanger as a symbol of why abortion rights and access matter. Women often used coat hangers to self-induce an abortion before the passage of Roe v. Wade.

Avery’s idea is for pro-choice activists to begin to “politicize birth,” essentially forcing states to pay to “support a baby up through at least the 12th grade. That’s what I would do if I was a young person.”

What a novel idea. If states want to refuse to allow abortion, then those same states need to ensure that for example, free universal high-quality daycare is available through pre-K to anyone who wants or needs it. In fact, health care should be free universally to anyone who needs it, particularly from pregnancy through adulthood. Of course, education should also be free through college, and programs such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) that offer food subsidies, pediatric nutrition, and breastfeeding education to help families and children through age five, should also be free and universal.

“Texas has no know idea the kind of problem they’re creating. They have absolutely no idea of the numbers of unwanted children the state’s going to have to take care of,” Avery says.

The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists around the nation battling injustice in underserved and brutalized communities by a system that often overlooks them.

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Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the violent attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people and injured 680 others. The domestic terror attack was carried about by two white supremacist, anti-government, right-wing extremists in the Michigan Militia.

As the nation reeled in horror at the specter of homegrown and deadly political terrorism, one teenager in Missouri decided to step up to defend the terrorists: 15-year-old Josh Hawley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator who is using his vaunted position to achieve the aims of those terrorists from the inside. Hawley wanted to explain the terrorists, and to defend the mindset of the militia movement that led the two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to murder.

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

He described these militia members as “Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society.” That alienation, he said, leads them to “become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them.” And by the way, he continued, the Los Angeles police detective whose racism was exposed during the OJ Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman, should be called a racist. “In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,” he wrote.

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Seems like 15-year-old Josh Hawley has a lot in common with Sen. Josh Hawley, the man who raised his fist in solidarity with the terrorists who swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the deaths of five people.

That same day, Jan. 6, Hawley went on to vote to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results. He was one of the eight Republican senators attempting to subvert the voters and the Constitution. Seven Democratic senators called for an ethics probe of both Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz over their apparent enthusiasm for the insurrection.

Hawley responded to that with yet another column, this one claiming he was the victim of cancel culture for what he called “representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.” He insisted he was defending the “basic principles that join all Americans together—the right to speak freely, to debate openly, and to address our differences graciously without fear of being silenced or punished for dissenting views.”

A little over a year later, the same Hawley who seemed to imply that the violent attack on the Capitol was somehow addressing differences “graciously” is still pandering to the extreme conspiracy theorists. Hawley twisted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s experience as a judge and member of the Sentencing Commission to imply that she was somehow a protector of pedophiles, that she was somehow complicit in the sexual abuse of children.

That’s another conspiracy theory that nearly resulted in mass bloodshed when a North Carolina man shot up Comet Ping Pong restaurant in northwest Washington in December 2016 because he was convinced that the restaurant was a hub of child sex slavery. Edgar Maddison Welch is one of those “alienated from society” people Hawley empathized with as a teen. He, by some miracle, didn’t harm anyone when he fired three shots inside the restaurant, surrendering after he found no evidence that children were being held at or trafficked from the pizzeria. He was sentenced to 36 months of probation by Jackson, the same judge Hawley has tried to smear. Coincidence?

It’s all enough to make you wonder how many white hoods Josh Hawley keeps hidden way in his closet.

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Days after Michigan’s Grand Rapids Police Department released footage of how they fatally shot 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya, a Black man, an autopsy report related to the incident has confirmed that Lyoya was shot in the back of the head. According to Daily Kos, the department’s official autopsy report was expected to be released in 60 days as the medical examiner is awaiting toxicology and tissue test results. That will be shared with state police and will not immediately be released to the public.

However, lawyers with Lyoya’s family said Tuesday that an independent autopsy showed that he was fatally shot in the back of the head.

“There’s no question what killed this young man. … It was a powerful bullet,” Dr. Werner Spitz, a 95-year-old forensic pathologist and former medical examiner who performed the autopsy, said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

The autopsy confirms what was depicted in the video footage released last week. In it, an unidentified Michigan police officer is seen lying on Lyoya’s back before shooting him. “The only injury on this body was a typical bullet wound of entrance,” Spitz said.

According to CNN, the shooting was described by a representative of the family who saw it as “execution-style.” In the roughly 20-minute long video, Lyoya can be seen struggling with the officer who at one point tells him “stop resisting” as body camera footage shows him knee Lyoya.

Requests for the video followed protests across the state demanding justice and transparency for what happened to Lyoya. Lyoya, who was unarmed, was killed after a traffic stop in western Michigan on April 4 after being pulled over for having an unregistered license plate.

“This independent autopsy report confirms what we all witnessed in the horrifying video footage: Unarmed Patrick Lyoya was conscious until the bullet entered his head, instantly ending what could have been a long and fruitful life,” attorney for the family Ben Crump said, according to the Associated Press.

“My heart is broken to see an officer being on top of my son and to shoot him in the back of his head, my heart is really broken,” Peter Lyoya, Patrick’s father, said during a press conference last week, according to Reuters. “I’m asking for justice for Patrick.”

While Crump and the family are demanding “that the officer who killed Patrick not only be terminated for his use of excessive and fatal force, but be arrested and prosecuted for the violent killing of Patrick Lyoya,” police officials have said the name of the officer who shot and killed Lyoya will only be released if the officer is charged. As investigations continue, findings will be given to the Kent County prosecutor for consideration of any charges.

According to the AP, Lyoya’s funeral is planned for Friday at Renaissance Church of God in Christ in Grand Rapids. Costs are expected to be covered by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

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GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may be trying to move on from his disastrous stunt, but he remains the target of international ire. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador called Abbott’s failed policy forcing commercial vehicles to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections “a very despicable way to act,” NBC News reports, adding that the right-wing governor was only thinking of reelection. Fact check: true.

Abbott has also touted supposed agreements with a number of Mexican governors as part of ending his redundant checks, but The Texas Tribune reported that three of these agreements already existed. Abbott and the governors did not have the authority to sit down together in the first place, López Obrador said.

RELATED STORY: Greg Abbott ends disastrous stunt that cost fruit and vegetable producers an estimated $240 million

“With all due respect, states have no legal authority to do agreements with a foreign country,” López Obrador said according to The Dallas Morning News. “Instead of thinking—and I say this respectfully—‘How will I fix the problem of inflation?’ He is politicizing and even violating international rights.”

But this is Abbott we’re talking about, a man who has shown no shame or hesitation in violating his own state’s laws by illegally jailing hundreds of asylum-seekers with no formal charges as part of Operation Lone Star, another border scheme. Advocates first noted the unlawful detention of hundreds of migrants last fall. Months later, these illegal imprisonments have continued. But the abusive treatment of asylum-seekers too often gets ignored, or minimized as normal. Among Republicans, it’s encouraged.

However, it’s been quite a different story for Abbott’s policy of redundant checks, which were announced on April 6 and gone by April 15. The reason? Economic losses, and lots of them.

“Ray Perryman, president of the Waco-based economic research firm Perryman Group, estimates that the delays cost the U.S. $4.2 billion for the period from April 6 to April 15 based on the economic impact of previous border slowdowns, including in 2019,” The Dallas Morning News continued. Fresh Produce Association of the Americas President Lance Jungmeyer previously told CNN that the losses to vegetable and fruit producers alone were estimated at over $240 million. Perryman told The Dallas Morning News that the firm plans to release more details on its findings this week.

The Dallas Morning News reports that López Obrador said he thinks Abbott “aspires to be a (2024 presidential) candidate for the Republican Party, and so he thinks that with this action he will win support,” even if it does fuck up the economy. But we already know that when confronted on his own failings, Abbott likes to point the finger at the president.

“In theory, this might seem like a drastic political blunder, especially for a governor in an election year,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen wrote this week. “It’s easy to imagine Abbott paying a high political price for a debacle of this magnitude. But in practice, the governor released a video via social media over the weekend boasting about what a great job he did. In other words, Abbott seems to think this should be a political winner for re-election campaign.” Of course Abbott will boast that he did a good job, and maybe his supporters will convince themselves he was right because all they care about is owning the libs. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep repeating the truth, which is that it was a fucking shit show.

“It’s great that it has been resolved,” López Obrador continued in The Dallas Morning News report. “I just hope (Texas) will not act this way again. It doesn’t help them. … How can a person who aspires to be president of a great nation like the United States act this way?”

RELATED STORIES: Facing international blowback over unnecessary checks, Abbott stages photo-op with Mexican governor

Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food

Texas refuses to be transparent about Operation Lone Star. Probably because it’s all a scheme

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Greg Sargent, talking to Way to Win’s Jennifer Fernandez Ancona:

“Every story has a hero and a villain,” Ancona said. “You have to paint Republicans as the villain. Connecting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol with how extreme they are on covid is a powerful combination.”

And who is the hero of the story? The group recommends Democrats explicitly name the coalition that beat Trump in 2020 — by saying, for example, that White, Black, Latino and Asian voters came together against him, and should do so again in 2022 …

“The voter is the hero of the story,” Ancona told us, suggesting messaging along these lines: “We all came together across all our differences before. We can do it again.” After all, everyone says they hate our current divisive politics; this tells them whom to blame, and how to overcome it.

Jennifer is our guest on this week’s Daily Kos’ The Brief, our weekly show about politics. The topic? Messaging, why she thinks this message would help defuse Republican culture war attacks, and what the chances are of Democrats adopting this—or any—unified message.

You can watch the show live right here on Tuesdays at 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, while the podcast version goes live Wednesday mornings at all the usual places, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A full list of places to download the show is available here.

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Michigan Sen. Lana Theis, apparently feeling the heat in a primary race against Republican real estate manager Mike Detmer, took multiple shots against Democratic State Sen. Mallory McMorrow in a fundraising email campaign. According to screenshots of the emails shared on Twitter, Theis called Democrats like McMorrow “trolls” and “groomers” and accused them of sexualizing children for supporting education on systemic racism and LGBTQ+ rights. Theis introduced legislation to block transgender athletes from competing with the high school sports teams that correspond with their gender, according to the news nonprofit Michigan Advance.
“These are the people we are up against,” Theis stated in her email. “Progressive social media trolls like Senator Mallory McMorrow [D-Snowflake] who are outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year olds are responsible for slavery.”

Many a Democrat, McMorrow included, has called out this kind of cheap politicization of American history education. And after seeing McMorrow’s response to Theis’ attempt at it, it’s safe to say the Republican senator picked the wrong Democrat to try to make an example out of.

RELATED STORY: Michigan state senator: GOP lawmaker who made sexist remark to reporter sexually harassed me, too

Republicans have misrepresented Black history education as an outgrowth of critical race theory, a framework for interpreting law that maintains racism’s reach has had particularly harmful effects on the legal system and laws that govern our society. The theory would be almost exclusively confined to law school courses and the like if not for Republican fearmongers randomly asserting that it is being used to indoctrinate K-12 students.

McMorrow’s speech, initially made before her state Senate colleagues and shared on Twitter Tuesday, reinforced progressive Democrats’ message that attempting to eliminate the histories of people of color and other marginalized citizens of this country will not be tolerated. 

Because it’s worth it, read every word:

Thank you, Mr. President,

I didn’t expect to wake up yesterday to the news that the senator from the 22nd district had overnight accused me by name of grooming and sexualizing children in an email fundraising for herself. So I sat on it for a while, wondering why me, and then I realized, because I am the biggest threat to your hollow hateful scheme, because you can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of quote, parental rights if another parent is standing up to say ‘no.’ So then what? 

Then you dehumanize and marginalize me. You say that I’m one of them. You say, ‘she’s a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.’

Well, here’s a little bit of background about who I really am. Growing up, my family was very active in our church. I sang in the choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations and that she was disappointing. My mom asked why. Among other reasons, she was told it was because she was divorced and because the priest didn’t see her at mass every Sunday.

So where was my mom on Sundays? She was at the soup kitchen with me. My mom taught me at a very young age that Christianity and faith was about being part of a community; about recognizing our privilege and blessings; and doing what we can to be of service to others, especially people who are marginalized, targeted, and who had less often unfairly.

I learned that service was far more important than performative nonsense, like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing Christian in your Twitter bio and using that as a shield to target and marginalize already marginalized people. I also stand on the shoulders of people like father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, who was active in the Civil Rights Movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution. And who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten and reached out to lock arms with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching, alongside them to say, ‘we’ve got you.’ To offer protection and service and allyship to try to write the wrongs and fix injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slave slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense. No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery, but each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. Each and every single one of us decides what happens next and how we respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We all also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen or deny people their very right to exist. I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom. I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that healthcare costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight white and Christian. We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives. And I know that hate will only win, if people like me stand by, let it happen.

So I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.

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An implausible, fraudulent, and unconstitutional legal scheme to reverse the 2020 election has become the most recent rallying cry of Donald Trump’s allies, even as some of them have attracted federal scrutiny for their initial attempts to overturn the election.

The new scheme is a familiar one, revolving around the notion that state lawmakers hold the authority to choose alternate electors—even after certification of the Electoral College—if they find irregularities sufficient enough to have affected the outcome. But while the effort is conceivably aimed at overturning 2020, the real target is providing a framework that can be quickly implemented in case of a Republican loss in 2024.

“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, told The New York Times. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”

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John Eastman, the fringe lawyer who convinced Donald Trump the election could be overturned, once clerked for Luttig and is now actively pushing state lawmakers in several swing states to act on the retroactive plan. At the same time, a federal judge last month declared Eastman’s scheme “a coup in search of a legal theory,” said Trump “likely” committed crimes trying to overturn 2020, and ordered Eastman to turn over a tranche of emails to the select committee investigating Jan. 6. Eastman, however, is still withholding some 37,000 pages of coup plotting from the panel.

Despite his potential legal liabilities from 2020, Eastman is also central to the ongoing effort to keep his theory of the coup alive in the hearts and minds of Trump cultists and lawmakers across the country. The fellow hucksters hawking Eastman’s fraudulent plan are also a familiar band: pillow guy Mike Lindell; disgraced former national security adviser and right-wing icon Mike Flynn; former White House aide who’s also withholding information from the Jan. 6 panel, Steve Bannon; and former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn.

Eastman’s latest handiwork is perhaps most evident in the battleground state of Wisconsin, where his fringe theory has taken hold and absolutely no one can disabuse Trump cultists of it.

Wisconsin Assembly GOP Speaker Robin Vos has been all but swallowed alive by Eastman’s plot. Vos originally sought to appease Trumpers last year by launching an Arizona-style fraudit of 2020 with an estimated $680,000 price tag for taxpayers. But the sham audit only served to foster more conspiracy-fueled distrust among Trump supporters.

A couple months ago, Vos spent nearly an hour on a conservative radio show trying to deflect callers’ claims that state lawmakers could decertify the 2020 election.

“It is impossible—it cannot happen,” Vos told listeners. “I don’t know how many times I can say that.”

The state legislature’s attorneys have likewise affirmed, “There is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress.”

Still, “Toss Vos” has now become a rallying cry on the right. Vos was also held in contempt of court late last month for withholding documents related to the Assembly’s supposed investigation of 2020 voter fraud.

Vos, who met last month with Eastman and decertify activists, is a classic lesson in appeasement of Trump’s corruption: It quickly turns one dying rose into a thicket of thorns down the road.

But Wisconsin isn’t alone. Similar schemes are being promoted in some form or another in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. The chances of any of them ever overturning the 2020 election are zero, but that’s not the point. The point is keeping that frothy dream alive among Trumpers.  

“We are on a full, full freight train to decertify,” Epshteyn told Bannon in January on his War Room podcast. “That’s what we’re going to get. Everyone knows. Everyone knows this election was stolen.”

The long-term consequences of that fringe-favorite fever dream will likely haunt U.S. elections for years, if not decades. The short-term electoral impact in a place like Wisconsin, however, remains to be seen. At least some reality-based voters who lean conservative could be turned off by a Republican Party divided against itself over yet another Trump-fueled controversy.  

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It appears Wells Fargo is starting to reap what it sows. New York City announced on April 8 that it is refusing to open new accounts with the financial company after a Bloomberg News study showed that the bank rejected more than half of its Black applicants looking to refinance their homes in 2020.

City Council Member Justin Brannan, chair of the committee on finance, called the disparity “indefensible” and “outrageous” in a news release from the mayor’s office. “In a world where we already expect big banks to flout the law and make their own rules, Wells Fargo really outdid themselves,” he said. “Over the past two years – of all the major mortgage lenders – Wells Fargo was alone in rejecting more Black homeowners than it accepted. These brazen and illegal discriminatory actions have no place in New York City.”

RELATED STORY: Wells Fargo is back with even more abuse for would-be customer

Brannan’s remarks were on par with many of the comments from city officials included in the release.

In a letter to Wells Fargo CEO & President Charles Scharf, Mayor Eric Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander stated:

“As the Mayor and Comptroller of New York City, a diverse community where Black homeowners own and are the primary residents of more than a quarter of two-to-four person homes, we are both gravely concerned about the recent report in Bloomberg that Wells Fargo rejected over half of Black applicants seeking to refinance their homes in 2020 while approving over 70% of white applicants.

“These disparate mortgage practices, layered upon a checkered history of steering homeowners of color into subprime mortgages, rejecting mortgages in redlined neighborhoods, and numerous outstanding consent decrees pertaining to mortgage practices, require a swift response by both your bank and stakeholders.

“In light of this persisting track record of discrimination, New York City will not be opening any new depository accounts with Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. as we continue to investigate these troubling findings.”

Wells Fargo’s history of discriminatory lending accusations is not recent.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in May 2017 that he and then-Comptroller Scott Stringer would vote to “prohibit New York City from entering into new contracts for deposits with Wells Fargo, as well as suspend the bank’s role as a senior book-running manager for NYC General Obligation and Transactional Finance Authority bond sales.”

That year, Wells Fargo earned federal feedback that the company “needs improvement.” The Federal Community Reinvestment Act requires the Federal Reserve and other regulators to encourage banks to meet the credit needs of those earning low and moderate incomes in the communities those banks do business in.

“The rules are very clear: if you fall below ‘satisfactory,’ we will no longer do banking business with you,” de Blasio said at the time. “I encourage Wells Fargo to quickly clean up its act and do right by the millions of customers who trust the bank with their savings. Until then, we will not be entering new contracts with the bank.”

Wells Fargo apparently didn’t change enough to halt years of continued allegations of discriminatory lending. 

In 2020, the same year that Wells Fargo agreed to pay $7.8 million in back wages and interest to resolve allegations of hiring discrimination, the company approved only 47% of refinancing applications launched by Black homeowners, according to the Bloomberg News report. That approval number for white homeowners was 72%.

In a statement emailed to Daily Kos last month, Wells Fargo said the “recent media story ignored critical information known to the authors about Wells Fargo’s strong track record of lending to Black homeowners and the full range of our efforts underway to help meet the homeownership needs of diverse customers.” The company accused Bloomberg of relying “on an analysis designed to present a skewed picture” of its lending efforts.

“The same data source used in the reporting—from lenders’ Home Mortgage Disclosure Act filings—shows that Wells Fargo originated more home loans to Black and Hispanic customers than any other bank over the last 10 years,” the company claimed. “The approximately 8,400 mortgage refinances we provided to Black homeowners in 2020 were more than any of the largest banks—a crucial fact never mentioned in the story—and in 2021 we increased that total by 88% and provided more than 15,700 mortgage refinances to Black homeowners.”

Wells Fargo touted programs aimed at making homes accessible to low- and moderate-income families and a goal to pursue more than $185 billion in “diverse lending commitments.”

The company did not detail how many Black applicants specifically were approved to participate in the programs compared to white applicants. Nor did it address the question of why a greater disparity exists at Wells Fargo between white and Black customers looking to refinance.

The business didn’t immediately respond to Daily Kos’ latest request for comment.

Tuesday, Apr 19, 2022 · 7:38:20 PM +00:00 · Lauren Sue

Wells Fargo released this statement in response to Mayor Adams’ announcement:

“We are deeply disappointed that Mayor Adams and Comptroller Lander would publish a press release like this based solely on a news report. More specifically, we are deeply disturbed by irresponsible allegations of discrimination that we believe do not stand up to scrutiny. We are confident that we follow relevant GSE guidelines in our decision making and that our underwriting practices are consistently applied regardless of a customer’s race or ethnicity. We do not believe that these claims are based on factual analysis. We welcome the opportunity to correct the record with city officials.

In 2020, Wells Fargo was the largest bank lender of purchase and refinances to Black families and this is consistent with our performance over the last decade (2011 – 2020), in which Wells Fargo helped as many Black families purchase homes as the next three largest bank lenders combined.

In addition:

• Wells Fargo helped more Black homeowners refinance their mortgages in 2020 than any other bank.
• The 83% increase in the company’s refinance loans to Black homeowners in 2020 compared with 2019 also was by far the biggest gain among the largest banks.
• In 2021, Wells Fargo increased that total by 106% compared to 2020.
• In 2020, if you include loans originated and loans purchased from correspondent sellers, Wells Fargo funded twice as many loans overall to Black customers as the next largest bank funder.

Unfounded attacks on Wells Fargo by the city stand in stark contrast to the significant long-term investments Wells Fargo has made including $1.3 billion through the New York City Housing and Development Corporation to finance more than 92 affordable housing projects; $33 million in Open for Business Fund grants to Community Development Financial Institutions and non-profits; and $19 million to support nonprofits in all five boroughs. While some other large companies have been shrinking their New York presence, Wells Fargo has meaningfully increased its headcount over the past 12 months.

Minority home-ownership and access to financing is a significant problem in this country, and Wells Fargo has been and remains committed to being a leader in taking action to help close this and other racial equity gaps.”

RELATED STORIES: 

Despite outstanding rating, banks still aren’t lending to black business owners like they should be

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Repeated errors cost hundreds of people their homes—now Wells Fargo wants to buy their silence

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The news has been terrible of late, full of war and bloodshed and an unending series of American meatheads and godbotherers combing through libraries to find new books to ban, so here’s a moment of actual good news to bask in for a moment. Remember Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again PAC,” aka the remnants of his campaign fundraising committee? It reported yet another loss this last fundraising quarter, and at the rate things are going, it will run dry of cash in just a few more quarters.

Instead, Trump’s MAGA PAC has been reduced to that most primal of all Donald Trump-adjacent schemes. It’s an entity that pays Donald’s legal bills so that Donald doesn’t have to. The people still donating to Donald Trump can be assured that little to none of their money will be going to Make America Great Again. Nope! They’re just acting as Donald’s walking checkbooks.

The Daily Beast reports that MAGA PAC lost $1.2 million in 2022’s first quarter, the third straight quarter of deficit. $1.1 million of that loss was “legal fees.” The PAC now has roughly $5.5 million of remaining cash on hand, which means that if their fundraising efforts continue to (ahem) suck, they won’t have any cash left to pay Donald’s legal bills around this time next year. That’s assuming that Donald does not start ordering his lawyers to screw around with challenges to whatever midterm voting totals his most devoted suck-ups convince him are “suspicious.” We all know the chance of Donald not ordering spurious election challenges is approximately zero, so long as he personally doesn’t have to write the checks.

It may be a way to the 2024 presidential season, but these aren’t the fundraising numbers of someone who’s trying to retain his status as the King of Republicanism. This is just Donald scraping up whatever’s left in the cash barrels to throw towards his lawyers.

Trump continues to have a whole lot of legal expenses for a whole lot of things. He has to defend himself against evidence-gathering probes of his role in a violent assault on Congress. He’s got New York investigators breathing down his neck for that whole lifetime-of-financial-crimes bit. But he’s also got to pay all the lawyers filing asinine claims disputing the results of his election losses.

So yeah, there you go. It’s not so much a Make America Great Again fundraising PAC as it is a Pay Donald’s Legal Defenses PAC, and while there are apparently still enough Trump allies around to have given the PAC $1.4 million in donations last quarter, that’s … not a lot, right? It feels conspicuously like the whole thing’s coasting on Trump voters who forgot to uncheck the “donate this amount every month” box on one of Trump’s dodgy fundraising sites and now don’t even know they’re being charged.

There you go, then. Some genuinely good news. Donald Trump’s Pay My Legal Bills PAC is running so dry that it will soon not be able to pay Donald’s legal bills, all the money it is raising is coming from pro-Trump Americans who we don’t have to feel bad for because they chose to be scammed of their own free will, and Donald will have to spend actual effort coming up with a new grift. Maybe he’ll form a new PAC, one with blackjack and overpriced drinks. Maybe he’ll turn Mar-a-Lago into an unlicensed casino.

He’s fortunate he’s turned the whole Republican National Committee into a cash machine for the rest of his legal bills, because with all the criminal and civil probes poking at him those bills will be going away approximately never. And maybe the even the Republican National Committee will at some point figure that out, and maybe they won’t. It’s no skin off our noses. If they want to spend less money on getting Republicans elected and more money on Donald Trump’s personal legal grooming, who are we to object.