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Banks expanded at a breathtaking pace over the past five years, adding more than 10,000 full-service branches, but barely 1 in 10 were in inner-city, minority neighborhoods, another sign the financial spending spree skipped over substantial parts of the country.
As the effects of the economic collapse began pouring down Main Street, the government last year was left holding a record $2.1 billion in write-offs of small business loans it had guaranteed. Officials expect the number of defaults to rise as the nation continues to climb out of the recession.
For weeks, Greg Noel roamed the spine of the Green Mountains with a handheld GPS unit, walking dirt roads and chatting with people as he helped create a map of every housing unit in the United States.
The Senate voted Friday to restrict the hiring of foreign workers by banks that are receiving government bailout funds while undergoing vast layoffs.
Even as the economy collapsed last year and many financial workers found themselves unemployed, the dozen U.S. banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages requested visas for tens of thousands of foreign workers to fill high-paying jobs, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.
Major U.S. banks sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers into the country for high-paying jobs even as the system was melting down last year and Americans were getting laid off, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.
Banks that have their hands out in Washington this year were handing out multimillion-dollar rewards to their executives last year.
The government mounted a vigorous defense Friday of its massive bank bailout, responding to an Associated Press analysis showing that stock in the program intended to eventually earn taxpayers a profit has lost almost one-third of its value — nearly $8 billion — in barely one month.
Small firms that want to do business with the federal government must keep three cardinal rules in mind: Location, location, location.
The Bush administration now acknowledges it is trying to recover nearly $500 million from people who improperly received federal aid money intended to help victims of two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf Coast two years ago. It said the amount may increase further.
People in the United States are living in a world of pain and they are popping pills at an alarming rate to cope with it.
In the neighborhood President Bush visited right after Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. government gave $84.5 million to more than 10,000 households. But Census figures show fewer than 8,000 homes existed there at the time.
Some of the nation's largest news media companies, including The Associated Press, were counted last year by the government as small businesses for contracting purposes, inflating the Bush administration's record of help to small companies.
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings says her agency must do more to make sure huge numbers of minority students are not excluded under the No Child Left Behind law. But she rejects any state complaint that the law is hurting school integration.
Betty Sternberg is in charge of two school systems. One, scattered throughout the state, is rich and white. The other, isolated in seven large towns, is poor and minority.
Previously public intelligence documents, some more than 50 years old, have been sealed under a secret agreement between the National Archives and three federal agencies, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
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