A couple of years back, a woman I’ll call Kate contacted me to tell me about her job managing an office providing provided blue-collar workers to enterprises in need of short-term [...]

It’s expensive being poor, the writer James Baldwin famously said. And Baldwin uttered those words 50 years ago, long before the working poor became Big Business – long before the [...]

Originally published in the Daily Beast The country’s biggest banks spilled record amounts of cash on D.C.-based lobbyists in 2010, and it’s no wonder why. Congress was debating Do[...]

Originally published on The Daily Beast We all know the drill. Threatening letters that arrive in the mail, a phone that constantly rings. But Alexis Moore needed a job, and needed[...]

Originally posted in The Atlantic There’s a saying popular among those in the business of making small-denomination, short-term loans against a person’s next paycheck. [...]

Originally published in the Huffington Post It was at the end of a long day, the first of two we would spend together, that Allan Jones, the pioneer of the $40-billion-a-year payda[...]