The NAACP, of all places, is standing up for banks and credit card companies against the federal government's effort to impose a cap on debit card interchange fees. The Wall Street Journal reports:
In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) NAACP Washington bureau director Hilary Shelton said the civil-rights group believes the proposed rule "should be further examined fully to ensure that it does not have a negative impact on the communities it was meant to help." Specifically, Mr. Shelton raised concerns that the rule could unintentionally make it harder for poor and minority consumers to afford checking accounts and other basic financial services.
The Journal doesn't mention it, nor does a Bloomberg dispatch about the same topic, but NAACP's 2008 annual report, the most recent available on the group's Web site, lists six corporations as donors at the top level, $500,000 and above. Two of the six are Bank of America Corporation and Wachovia Corporation. It looks as though they got to the NAACP before another of the six corporations, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., did.
