Police, protesters far outnumber supporters for racist speaker

Mathew McSweeney Sheard, one of two men who posed as supporters of white supremacist Richard Barret, being arrested for knocking over a speaker.

By Scott Fallon and Yung Kim

Morristown, New Jersey, July 5— Richard Barrett’s followers are disappearing — some of them right before his eyes.

Last year the leader of the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement was accompanied by seven members at his Morristown rally for racial separation, which drew more than 300 angry counter-demonstrators.

On Wednesday, Barrett arrived for his Independence Day march with four supporters. At least he thought they were all supporters.

Two young men who had infiltrated Barrett’s small group helped the self-described “nationalist” set up a podium and loudspeakers. The two eventually showed their true colors, however, by knocking over the speakers and stomping on Nationalist Movement flags to the cheers of almost 400 people protesting the rally in front of the Morris County Courthouse.

The two, identified by the Morris County prosecutor as Joshua Laub and Matthew Sheard, were arrested along with a protester at the mostly peaceful four-hour event, which to the dismay of local officials is becoming an annual affair.

Barrett and his followers were protected by 350 police officers dressed in riot gear and receiving holiday pay. The officers were from 36 municipalities and the Morris County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecutor’s Office.

Last year police protection cost taxpayers about $120,000. This year’s cost, although sure to be higher, was not available Wednesday evening.

Dozens of members of news organizations also attended.

A buffer zone of about 60 feet, two rows of barricades, and a line of officers separated Barrett from angry demonstrators, many of whom were calling for his death.

At times the rally seemed a bit comical.

At one point Barrett marched around the courthouse escorted by a protective cadre of about two dozen police officers, some of them on horseback. While sidestepping mounds of horse manure, he sang “America the Beautiful” through a loudspeaker, but was drowned out by boos from onlookers.

After his one-man march, Barrett spoke from the courthouse steps about noon, offering a prayer for the nation, saluting the American flag, and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the beeping of electronic music from a tiny tape recorder.

Barrett, an attorney originally from East Orange, read a 63-page manifesto for an hour and a half detailing how racial profiling benefits society. But his words were barely audible as demonstrators shouted an array of curses and death threats.

“How many people heard the Gettysburg Address?” said Barrett, unconcerned that demonstrators had drowned him out. “The important thing is that it was given.”

After the speech, Barrett and Gerald McManus, a supporter, held a banner stating: “Profiling Saves Lives.” Demonstrators responded by tearing a Confederate flag to pieces. Barrett’s other supporter declined to give his name.

Security around the courthouse this year was especially tight, a lesson learned from Barrett’s rally last year. Then, 10 demonstrators were arrested for attempting to break through barriers and attack members of the Nationalist Movement. Police barricaded several blocks around the courthouse and searched everyone coming into the area with hand-held metal detectors.

“I’d rather be criticized for having too much security than not having enough,” said Morris County Prosecutor John Dangler. “We’re not happy he’s here, but the court and the Constitution allow it.”

The counter-demonstrators included union members, the National Organization for Women, and individual social activists. Also in abundance were anarchists dressed in black and wearing bandannas over their faces.

Standing only a few feet from police in riot gear, several demonstrators taunted the officers. “Cops are here to defend the Nazis,” one section chanted while another shouted, “The cops, the courts, the Ku Klux Klan; all are part of the boss’s plan.”

Tensions grew when some of the protesters attempted to provoke a clash with the police by pushing their way into their ranks. Although officers surrounded the counter-demonstrators, there was no violent physical confrontation.

“I’m from Morristown, and Richard Barrett is from Mississippi. He doesn’t belong here,” said Pete Spina, dressed in a torn black T-shirt, black pants, and combat boots.

The crowd began to disperse a half-hour after the speech. But Jarrett Seltzer, 19, and a friend, Rocco Burro, 17, stayed and heckled Barrett and McManus as they packed up their gear.

“I’m actually disappointed,” said Seltzer, of Morris Plains. “I was expecting to see idiots in hoods. But this was good enough. It was fun screaming at the cowards.”

Barrett was given a small police escort as he headed out of town, driving his truck from the courthouse to Route 287.

Before the rally, Barrett was setting up his podium and draped an American flag across the ground.

“That flag should not be touching the ground, Barrett,” shouted Daryle Lamont Jenkins of Columbus, Ohio, taunting Barrett and challenging him. “I don’t want to ever hear you talk about patriotism again.”

Source: Bergen Record

Wal-Mart wreaks havoc on environment and local economies

By Jean Marbella

Decorah, Iowa, July 8— Paul Scott can tick off numerous reasons to oppose the building of a Wal-Mart Supercenter on a one-time cornfield here: aesthetic (invites sprawl), environmental (parking lot runoff will pollute the river) and economic (kills off competition).

For all his objections, though, he is no stranger to the checkout lanes of the old Wal-Mart in town, one of those familiar blue-and-gray buildings that have become as recognizable as McDonald’s arches, and seemingly as ubiquitous.

“You pretty much have to shop there,” says Scott, who owns a computer and printing store in this town of about 8,200, in a lush river valley in the northeast corner of the state.

“You get forced into shopping there because other stores close and you lose choice.”

As Wal-Mart winds up its fourth decade -- a time in which it has gone from a single store in Rogers, Ark., in 1962 to more than 4,000 around the world today -- the retailer has achieved a certain inevitability in small-town America.

Where once the distance between small towns was determined by how far a horse could carry you in a day or where the train would stop, today the mile marker is more likely a Wal-Mart.

And whether a town has a Wal-Mart can determine its economic viability.

“Wal-Mart is just all-pervasive,” says Kenneth E. Stone, an Iowa State University economist who has extensively researched the chain’s effects on the state. “The towns that don’t have a Wal-Mart don’t do as well retail-wise as the towns that do have them.”

Stone’s research shows that the town with the new Wal-Mart instead becomes a magnet for the entire area’s dollars, drawing shoppers from neighboring communities who might otherwise spend closer to home. And its presence often attracts similar retailers, notably Kmart and Target, also started in 1962.

Although a number of locales have kept Wal-Mart from opening -- most recently, the Kent County planning board voted down a proposed store in Chestertown, Md., while the town of Belfast, Maine, has banned all superstores -- these fights often seem like the kind of skirmish that flares up long after the war has ended.

Consumers have long since voted with their feet - or rather, with their cars and their wallets. If there isn’t a Wal-Mart in their town, they’ll often drive to the nearest one.

A Wal-Mart opening in an urban or suburban setting generally adds an option to a crowded mix of stores -- and another big box and parking lot to the asphalt-ridden landscape.

When such a store opens in a rural locale, it has a greater impact, tending to turn its host community into a regional retail hub, with other stores and restaurants opening nearby to catch any spillover effect.

For some Iowa towns, hit hard by the farm crisis of the 1980s, retail can bolster a depressed local economy.

But the new development in one town can come at the expense of smaller communities in the surrounding area -- their stores generally wither in the shadow of the giant next door and their Main Streets become ghosts of their former selves.

“Wal-Mart sucks all the oxygen out of an area,” says Karl Knudson, a Decorah lawyer representing residents who have petitioned to block the construction of the proposed supercenter.

Wal-Mart’s drawing power is breathtaking, with more than 100 million people shopping in its stores every week, according to the company, and new ones sprouting up at the pace of about 15 a month. With annual revenue of $166 billion, it is the second-largest corporation in the world, trailing only General Motors.

While the store continues to expand in cities, suburbs, and overseas, rural America remains the heart of Wal-Mart Nation. This is where Wal-Mart started, locating stores where no other national chain would.

In many parts of rural America, Wal-Mart has become the only place to buy any number of things -- books and music, health and beauty aids, clothes and tools -- a troubling specter to those who cite the company’s paternalistic approach to what it chooses to carry. Wal-Mart, for example, will not sell music CDs it finds offensive, or the morning-after birth control pill.

The fight over Wal-Mart here, like others going on across the country, is a second-generation conflict: Decorah has a Wal-Mart, but the company wants to replace it with a store more than twice as large, a so-called supercenter that adds a full-size grocery store to the usual general merchandise that makes up its traditional base.

Having conquered any number of market categories -- Wal-Mart sells more toothpaste and children’s clothing than any other retailer -- it continues to move into additional areas. It entered the full-service grocery business in 1988, when it opened its first supercenter in Washington, Mo., and has since become the No. 1 grocer in the country.

Some of those supercenters also have gas pumps in their parking lots, posing a new threat to yet another category of retailer.

When the first Wal-Mart came to Decorah 14 years ago, area towns experienced the now-familiar domino effect: First, the stores selling the same merchandise that Wal-Mart sells lose business and close. Then, restaurants and other facilities that depend on traffic from those closed stores also shutter. Eventually, business groups falter because no one is opening stores in a dying downtown.

For almost three years, Decorah has wrestled over Wal-Mart’s desire to close this 74,000-square-foot store and build a supercenter about two miles away, on the banks of the winding Upper Iowa River that is considered the state’s most scenic waterway.

The 184,000-square-foot store would be built on the river’s flood plain, but the City Council has voted to rezone the site to allow Wal-Mart to build on it. Wal-Mart says construction will begin this summer and the store will open next July, but opponents are continuing their challenge of city and state permits that have been granted to Wal-Mart to build on the site.

“No one messes with the river,” says Frank Holland, a retired engineer who owns a farm across the river from the proposed site.

Holland fears that if Wal-Mart builds on the flood plain, there will be nowhere for the water to go in the event of a flood but onto his farm.

Others oppose the store for a variety of reasons. Some worry that garbage and runoff from the store will pollute the river, which is beloved for its 100 miles of canoeable waters; others that it will draw business away from Decorah’s pleasant downtown.

As they await the outcome on Wal-Mart, area merchants say they can’t do much more than they’re doing: providing more personalized services, counting on customer loyalty and hoping that, in the end, the bottom line isn’t the only line.

“We bought our son a bike [at a local store] and probably paid $10 more than if we had bought it at Wal-Mart,” Steege, the pharmacist in West Union, says. “He threw off the chain like boys always do, and we took it back to them and they fixed it for us.

“Well, there’s a value to that.”

Source: The Baltimore Sun

Bush plans health coverage for unborn

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, July 7— In a country where 40 million people have no health insurance, the Bush administration is planning to offer publicly funded medical coverage to fetuses, in a move which pro-choice activists feel is a stealthy step towards outlawing abortions.

Under the plan, states would be allowed to redefine the fetus as “a targeted low-income child”. As a result, pregnant women who do not, for any reason, qualify for Medicaid, the state-funded coverage offered to low-income families, could be provided with pre-natal care under the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip).

That legal distinction is important, because the supreme court, in making its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 guaranteeing abortion, based its decision on the judgment that “the unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense."

Pro-choice advocates immediately denounced the Chip plan as a means of preparing the ground for an eventual ban on abortion.

Laurie Rubiner, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, told the New York Times: “This is a backdoor attempt by the Bush administration to perpetuate its opposition to abortion rights. The real goal is to establish a legal precedent for granting personhood to fetuses.”

The plan has been drawn up by the health secretary, Tommy Thompson, who is a longstanding opponent of abortion rights. However, his spokesman, Bill Pierce, denied that the measures concealed an anti-abortion agenda. But he also confirmed that the plan would represent a step forward for those who believe that a fetus is a person with individual rights.

“If the question is, is the secretary pro-life? the answer is yes,” Mr. Pierce said. “So is the administration.”

There are currently 43 million Americans without any form of health insurance, and 10 million of them are children under the age of 18. Medicaid provides basic services for the very poor, but many of the unemployed or low-income workers find that they are disqualified if they own an asset such as a car.

The Chip scheme was set up by President Bill Clinton to try to ensure that fewer children suffered as a result of this loophole, but when he was governor of Texas, George Bush attempted to block efforts to spread Chip coverage in poor Hispanic areas along the Mexican border, for budgetary reasons.

Chip is federally funded, but it was found that poor families who applied for Chip often found that they qualified for Medicaid, which is paid for out of state funds.

The plan currently being considered by Mr. Thompson does not stipulate how old a fetus must be in order to qualify for insurance, but the New York Times reported yesterday that some officials wanted to make the qualification age as early as theoretically possible, soon after conception.

Source: The Guardian (UK): www.theguardian.co.uk

Tracking the CIA through snowdrifts of drugs

By Preston Peet

Eugene, Oregon, June 28— “Economically, America is much more hooked on drug money than it is on drugs,” said the former LAPD narcotics officer. The never-ending, all-American War on Some Drugs, he stressed, “affects everything in our current economic picture.”

There were nine different speakers who addressed the disparate audience at the historic “CIA-Drugs Symposium” at the Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene last weekend. All presented searing accounts and first-hand testimony demonstrating that the CIA and top levels of the US Government have been aware of political drug trafficking for years, and have been complicit in it.

First, Daniel Hopsicker’s shocking, eye-opening film on drug-running and corruption in the US government’s security services, The Secret Heartbeat of America, set the tone of the event. Organizer Kris Millegan welcomed the audience to the Wheeler Pavilion: “I’m just really tired of the situation we’ve got here, and I don’t want my children to have to deal with it.... I am intent on bursting the media bubble of silence surrounding this issue.”

Millegan presented a documented historical review of political drug trafficking by many governments throughout history, focusing on China and the Opium Wars, which Britain forced on it in the 1800s.

The best enemies money can buy

Mike Ruppert, who publishes the seminal From the Wilderness newsletter dealing with CIA-US government-drugs issues, gave a very moving presentation of his own history as a former LAPD narcotics officer, his first-hand experience in the 1980s of CIA drug-running, and the horrid conclusions he has drawn.

“The model of the CIA dealing drugs is exactly like a model wherein a family has a father who is molesting the youngest daughter, and everyone else in the family conspires to keep silent, to keep the family together, to scapegoat one member of the family ‘so Daddy won’t pick on me.’

Ruppert ran down the particulars of why the US War on Some Drugs perpetually continues, using the forthcoming US incursion into the 50-year-old civil war in Colombia as an urgent economic example: “I have information that the FARC guerrillas in Colombia are receiving their arms from the Russians, and they’re paying for it all with cocaine,” related Ruppert. “The cocaine is then sold in Russia, but guess what? The Russians are laundering their money back through the Bank of New York on Wall Street.” US financial interests, he diagnosed, “protect, create, and arm both sides of the conflict so they can profit from both sides. We have the best enemies that money can buy.”

Ironically, the same multi-billion Congressional appropriation to fight the “Drug War” in Colombia also contains millions to support US troops in Kosovo.

“We make money by destroying things, as in Kosovo,” Ruppert noted. “We destroyed all the oil refineries in a 500-mile radius there. They all have to be rebuilt. American companies will rebuild them. We have a search-and-destroy economy.”

Who benefits from crack? The jailers!

“When you think Crack, don’t think Black, think CIA,” admonished Dedon Kamathi, a producer with Motown Records and co-chair of the California-based Crack the CIA Coalition. Kamathi spoke to the US government’s strategic targeting of minority and poor communities, reviewing the FBI’s various generations-long suppression operations against groups and individuals such as the Black Panther Party, Ramparts magazine, Stokely Carmichael and others from the 1960s. Then in the 1980s, crack cocaine inundated poor and minority neighborhoods throughout America when, charges Kamathi, “a conscious decision was made to attack conscious rappers, to destroy African-American strugglers, and music promoting gangsterism began to be promoted by the music industry.”

Ex-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Kamathi noted, “made his name and reputation busting Marcus Garvey, yet denied the existence of the Mafia almost his entire life and career. We have been programmed in this country to think ‘Crime’ equals ‘Black.’”

Kamathi enumerated the aims of the Crack the CIA Coalition, whose “mission statement stresses that we demand full disclosure and prosecution of all CIA officers and assets complicit in drug trafficking; dismantle the CIA, halt all covert wars and operations, all their dastardly deeds; divert CIA funds to domestic programs that benefit all the people, demand reparations, end racial sentencing disparities, and all drug sentences—and end the cover-up of CIA drug-trafficking complicity!”

Speaking of dope-infested LA neighborhoods, Kamathi pointed out that “before crack cocaine was introduced to Compton, Goodyear and Firestone were the two biggest employers of African-Americans in the area. Then the US Government enticed the companies to move operations to Indonesia, leaving thousands unemployed in California. At the exact same time these companies left, crack was introduced as an alternative source of income.”

Not at all coincidentally, he noted, “The most powerful lobbyist group in California now is the California Corrections Officers Union. Every jailed prisoner generates $35,000 a year. Money is being taken right out of education and put into the prison-industrial complex. Profits over people, over spirituality, over Mother Earth and the environment.”

Freed from the rule of law

Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary for Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner under President George Bush from 1989 to 1990, agrees.

Fitts was fired for her outspoken attempts to cut official corruption costing massive amounts of taxpayer money. In Eugene, Fitts spoke of how international drug lords use Wall Street and investment banks to launder massive amounts of drug proceeds. “Who will control our neighborhoods, organized crime or the locals?” Fitts asked. “Whatever system we are living under, it is not a democracy, and we are not protected by the rule of law.”

There was a presentation of another of Hopsicker’s films, titled In Search of the American Drug Lords, about Barry Seal, the infamous CIA dope pilot who flew drugs for the US government from the Bay of Pigs to the heyday of the Nicaraguan contras, before his 1986 assassination.

After a quick presentation regarding the class-action lawsuits against the CIA and others filed in California, Celerino Castillo, a 12-year veteran of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, gave a presentation of his career, which culminated in his assignment as Special Agent in Central America from 1985 to 1990. Castillo’s 1994 book, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War, exposed CIA drug-running out of El Salvador in support of the Nicaraguan contras.

Castillo told the audience, “I hope that when you leave here today you will have a better understanding of what really happened with our government, and the deals they cut with criminals and drug traffickers. I was there and I saw it. I kept journals. I took pictures of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I have them. I found out we were the Bad Guys.” Castillo described some of his close calls and misadventures while in service of the DEA, and explained why more officers do not come forward with accounts of their own eyewitness of corruption: “They’re not about to report anything as they have a wife, kids, house, mortgage, and don’t want to do anything to jeopardize their pensions.”

Castillo also stressed that the War on Some Drugs is essentially political, because “if the Drug War ended now, our whole banking system would collapse.” He was not overly optimistic. “There is no way the US Government is ever going to legalize drugs,” he counseled. “There is too much money being made now. It is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, but we know who did this to us.”

Rodney Stich, who began his attempts to expose US government corruption 40 years ago while workingf as an FAA flight-accident investigator, described his ever-continuing fight to expose official crimes. Author of the books Drugging America (1994) and Defrauding America (1999), Stich has collected case after case of official drug running and corruption, detailed by government insiders and participants. “There are way more agencies and departments involved than just the CIA,” said Stich, “a lot more government insiders and participants.” Ruppert returned to play a video clip of former CIA Director John Deutch at a nationally televised town-hall meeting in August of 1996 with South Central Los Angeles residents who were demanding answers to CIA drug-running allegations. The clip showed Ruppert telling Deutch that he, Ruppert, had information to supply on the topic. After the clip, Ruppert gave a very warm welcome to Peter Dale Scott, the prolific author of Cocaine Politics (1991, with Jonathan Marshall), and Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993). Scott first wrote of US- government-sanctioned drug trafficking in 1970, in his rare book on Vietnam, The War Conspiracy.

The latest crock of lies

Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, UC Berkeley English professor, and co-founder in the 1970s of the Coalition on Political Assassination, was the keynote speaker of the evening. He drew special attention to the report issued on May 11 by the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence, which asserted that the committee had “found no evidence” that employees or assets associated with any US security service, including the CIA, have ever been complicit in running drugs into the US, or in covering up for those who had.

“The May 11th report basically says there is nothing to worry about,” asserted Scott. “This report is full of lies, flat-out lies, in terms of what they’ve already admitted to in other reports.” Scott proceeded to rip the Committee’s findings apart, point by eloquent point, illustrating vividly how many of the US government’s own previously released reports refute the conclusion that there is “no evidence” to connect both the CIA and the US government to drug trafficking.

In a letter offering support for the symposium and its aim to shine a light on officially sanctioned drug running and other corruption, Representative Peter DeFazio, (D-OR) wrote, “I have fought for years to lift the dark veil of secrecy shrouding the US Intelligence bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the intelligence establishment is given vast deference by many of my colleagues, which has led to little accountability and virtually toothless oversight by Congress.”

The massive secret computer spy system Echelon was brought to public attention not by Congressional oversight, but by independent journalists and researchers, DeFazio noted, bemoaning the ability of the CIA to “slap the label of national security on something as innocuous as a budget number.” DeFazio concluded his letter, “Given the low likelihood that enough elected officials will rise to challenge the intelligence bureaucracy, it is up to concerned citizens such as yourselves to reveal possible misconduct. Good luck with your symposium.”

Source: www.hightimes.com

Iran-Contra figure appointed to National Security Council position

Washington, DC, June 30— Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams (pictured right), who pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress and was pardoned by the former President Bush, now has a job under the new President Bush.

Bush appointed Abrams to be senior director of the National Security Council’s office for democracy, human rights and international operations.

As for Abrams’ role in the Iran-Contra scandal during the 1980s, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters: “The president thinks that’s a matter of the past . . . and that he will do an outstanding job in this position.”

Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, announced Abrams’ appointment — which does not require Senate confirmation — on Thursday, three days after he started the job.

Abrams, an assistant secretary of State during the Reagan administration, was a fierce advocate of armed support for Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista counter-insurgents, known as the Contras, despite Congress’ ban on military aid to them.

He pleaded guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. In court, he admitted that he kept information from two congressional committees in 1986 when he testified about his knowledge of the secret Contra supply network and his role in soliciting a $10 million contribution for the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei.

Former President Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992.

Abrams’ new appointment has infuriated some critics of US policy in Latin America.

“It’s a cosmic joke on the part of the administration to appoint to an office on democracy this person who has shown almost unequaled contempt for democratic procedures, both in his own personal behavior as an office holder and in the way he treated societies in Latin America,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.

Source: Associated Press

Pollution protesters target power plant

Nitro, West Virginia, July 9 (ENS)— Citizen groups today put the John Amos Power Plant in West Virginia on notice not to expect a presidential pardon for its pollution violations.

Against a backdrop of the plant’s smokestacks and in front of a mock White House crowned with smokestacks, members of several environmental groups called on President George W. Bush to enforce clean air laws that affect American Electric Power’s (AEP) coal burning power plants, such as John Amos.

“The fact is that every single day, with every ton of poisonous mercury, lead, arsenic and other pollution that it emits, John Amos is breaking the law and endangering our health,” said Denise Poole, a member of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC). “Due to years of weak enforcement, they’ve been able to increase the amount of pollution they belch into the air without using better pollution controls in clear violation of the Clean Air Act. That’s why the US Department of Justice hauled them into court for exactly that offense.”

Last year, the Department of Justice sued AEP for violation of the clean air act because they expanded their plants without installing new emissions control equipment. Under the New Source Review provisions of the Clean Air Act, older power plants that are not covered by modern pollution control requirements must upgrade their emissions equipment if they expand their power production.

The Bush administration is now considering whether to reduce enforcement of the New Source Review provisions. The administration has already ordered the Justice Department to review its ongoing lawsuits against utility companies.

Settlements in lawsuits against three plants similar to John Amos have led to mandatory reductions in emissions of smog- forming nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, which causes fine particle pollution and acid rain.

“If the polluters get their way, the Bush Administration may gut these clean air rules and the charges might be dropped,” Poole said. “All us living downwind of John Amos need to let the President know that we don’t want them to get that pardon.”

Blacks pay more for cars in US, study says

By Robert Tait

Washington, DC, July 6— Black American motorists are charged higher interest rates for car loans than their white counterparts regardless of their credit histories, a major new study says.

An analysis carried out by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN says that, on average, African-Americans pay up to $831 more than whites do.

The survey was carried out using data from Nissan dealers in 33 of the 50 states between September 1993 and last year. It is believed to be the biggest car loan study ever conducted in the United States.

The biggest disparities between the amounts paid by blacks and whites were recorded in Wisconsin ($831) and Maryland, where the difference was $792. But blacks also paid $550 more in Louisiana, $533 more in Florida, $505 more in Alabama, $499 more in Tennessee, $405 more in New York and $364 more in Texas.

The statistics back up lawsuits filed in Nashville against Nissan’s loan unit, and those run by General Motors and several other smaller companies.

None of the firms are being accused of racism. Instead, the plaintiffs are challenging the nationwide practice of allowing car dealerships to impose a discretionary mark-up and decide the final interest rate customers should pay. Dealership mark-ups are a major source of profit for US car showrooms.

Mark Cohen, the academic who carried out Vanderbilt University’s research, found that blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be charged a mark-up in the first place. And among those hit with the extra charge, blacks paid, on average, $362 more than whites.

A spokeswoman for Nissan’s loan unit declined to comment on the study but said Nissan did not tolerate unfair or racial discriminatory treatment of its customers.

Source: The Scotsman: www.thescotsman.co.uk