Subprime bubbles aren’t just for housing. Financiers are lining up to make questionable car loans, too:

Rodney Durham stopped working in 1991, declared bankruptcy and lives on Social Security. Nonetheless, Wells Fargo lent him $15,197 to buy a used Mitsubishi sedan.

“I am not sure how I got the loan,” Mr. Durham, age 60, said.

Mr. Durham’s application said that he made $35,000 as a technician at Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton, N.Y., according to a copy of the loan document. But he says he told the dealer he hadn’t give car loans that he hadn’t worked at the hospital for more than three decades. Now, after months of Wells Fargo pressing him over missed payments, the bank has repossessed his car. [NYT]

The number of subprime car loans has risen an astonishing 130% in the five years since the financial crisis. The New York Times combed through bankruptcy filings to learn about the dubious dealings of lenders. Interest rates ran as high as 23% and the average loan was for double the value of the used car. Sellers often hid mechanical defects from buyers. 

Many people need a car to hold a job, and unscrupulous lenders know that people with damaged credit are a desperate and readily-exploited clientele. 

Immigration rights activist, and 2011 Sidney Award-winner, Jose Antonio Vargas has been released from the custody of the U.S. Border Batrol. Vargas was detained on Tuesday at the airport in McCallen, Texas, when he tried to use his Philippines passport to board a flight for Los Angeles. 

Workers at a foam plant in Selma, Alabama that makes headrests for Hyundais suffer from a high incidence of respiratory disease. Are OSHA standards tough enough to protect them from chemicals like toluene diisocyanate? Hillman Prize-winner Seth Freed Wessler investigates for NBC.

[Photo credit: aidenjewell, Creative Commons.]

Esther Kaplan wins the July Sidney Award for “Losing Sparta:The Bitter Truth About the Gospel of Productivity,” a feature in the Virginia Quarterly Review about a Philips fluorescent lighting plant in Sparta, TN, which the company offshored to Mexico, even though Philips had rated it the top plant in the company’s entire global lighting division. Politicans and economists promise that productivity will save American jobs, but Kaplan’s analysis shows that even the most productive workers aren’t safe from offshoring, because the decision to ship jobs overseas rarely results from a rational economic calculus. Companies aren’t accountable to their shareholders or government regulators to justify these decisions, and typically, little attempt is made to defend the move on economic grounds.

For many multinationals, offshoring has become a performance to impress shareholders, and a reflexive union-avoidance tactic, rather than a strategic decision. Companies think nothing of shutting down highly-efficient, conveniently located plants in the United States and relocating to less-efficient, lower-performing facilities far from suppliers and clients. Wages may be lower overseas, but the savings don’t necessarily offset the costs of the move, including the loss of the human capital of an experienced and dedicated workforce, like the staff of the Sparta plant. 

“Kaplan’s account – at once deeply moving and brilliantly analytical – of how a multinational conglomerate shuttered a lighting factory, taking the work to Mexico and destroying the economy of a small Tennessee county in the process, is one of the best articles anywhere on what’s befallen American workers in recent decades,” said Hillman Judge Harold Meyerson.

Learn more about the reporting of “Losing Sparta” in our Backstory interview with Esther Kaplan.