Inner City Press

Inner City Press is a non-profit public interest organization best known for its investigations of the banking industry's treatment of low-income communities of color, at first within the United States and more recently around the world.

History

Inner City Press was founded in 1987 in the South Bronx of New York City. Its first projects involved under-housed people fixing up abandoned buildings.

By the 1990s, Inner City Press began working on issues of exclusion of financial services, overburdening with environmental toxins, and lack of accountability by government and corporations to low-income areas. In 1994, Inner City Press' challenges using the Community Reinvestment Act resulted in four banks opening new branches in the South Bronx. By 1998, Inner City Press' challenges had resulted in over $7 billion of commitments in new lending to low income people. Some in the banking industry opine that Inner City Press' challenges are indiscriminate.

In 1998, Inner City Press took the lead in opposing the merger of Citicorp and Travelers to form Citigroup. Inner City Press spoke at both companies' shareholders' meetings, commented to the Federal Reserve, and ultimately initiated litigations against the merger, the largest in the financial services industry. Since then, Inner City Press has pursued Citigroup as it has made acquisitions in Mexico and elsewhere, while initiating similar campaigns regarding HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wachovia, General Electric, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, AIG, Wells Fargo and others. The global work is done through the Fair Finance Watch. Inner City Press' executive director is Matthew Lee, who is the author of the non-fiction book Predatory Lending: Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City and the novel Predatory Bender and an accredited journalist at the United Nations.

Present

In mid-2006, investigative journalism at the UN by uncovered and led to the United Nations Development Programme halting its disarmament programs in the Karamoja region of Uganda in response to human rights abuses exposed in the parallel forcible disarmament programs carried out by the Uganda People's Defense Force. See also the Ugandan newspaper.

In 2006 in U.S. journalism, Lee and Inner City Press were engaged in litigation to deem the "citizens-only" provision of the Freedom of Information Act of Delaware (and ten other states) to be unconstitutional.

On February 13th, Google removed Inner City Press from Google News, allegedly due to pressure from the UN.

Notes

External links

• InnerCityPress.org
• "Wading through the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Muck," US Banker, November 2005
• Review of Predatory Bender
• Another review of Predatory Bender