Click here to listen to the talk I gave on Friday, October 29th.

But now I'm a different kind of fan-- a grateful one. Here's the story (and here's the (7-minute!) clip to give away the ending):

Reid Cramer at the New America Foundation invited me to Washington, D.C. to talk about BROKE (click here for the webcast).   Reid is director of the foundation's Asset Building Program.  For the better part of two years, I was hanging out with all these people getting rich draining the working poor of their hard-earned money.  I understood the point of view of the entrepreneurs behind the payday loan and rent-to-own but they were also ensuring that all those waitresses and welders and warehouse workers among their customers could never build up a savings account.  The saddest part is that if  people had just $500 or $1,000 in the bank, they'd never need to  use a pawn broker  (and borrow money at annual interest rates of between 60 to 300 percent, depending on the state) or a payday lender (fees that make a pawnbroker seem like a bargain).   And here New America has been thinking of creative ways to help people build assets (read here about the Foundation's nifty idea a lifelong savings account that every American would receive at birth).  My time on the economic fringes convinced me that financial education might be the most formidable weapon against the more abusive side of these businesses--and that was a thrust of New America's approach as well.   Yeah, a  group talking about financial education and innovate ways of encouraging asset building among those of modest means?  I'm there.

I go down a day early because I'm hustling a new book and who knows who might be on the other end when the phone rings. Luck had me in Washington just as Barack Obama was about to sign a high profile financial reform package.   Ray, who knew my work from our younger  days working as political reporters in Chicago, had read BROKE and liked it and recommended me as a guest.  My first morning in Washington, a very friendly producer (I'd give his name but I don't want him mad at me for publishing it here on the Internet) calls to deliver the bad news but offer me a consolation prize:  I pitched it for tonight, he told me, and they said no. But would I mind coming in to do the web extra they offer viewers each night?   At the risk of being repetitive, I'm an author slogging his latest.  Of course.

Friendly producer calls while I'm having lunch.  Why don't I come in a little later, he suggests.  That way we can put you in one of the NewsHour studios and we'll have the "flexibility" in case we want to use any of the interview on the air.  I'm not exactly sure what he means but in this context "flexible" sounds like a good thing.  I meet the interviewer,  Hari Sreenivasan (pictured).  We talk a bit about the book while we're waiting for studio space (that darn Judy Woodruff was using it to interview some high-ranking Obama official), I feel like a tourist watching the interview wide-eyed from the producer's command post.  We do the interview at 5:00, it's over before I know it, and as we walk off set, there's Friendly Producer telling me something else had fallen through, they're airing the segment on that night's NewsHour. It was a real thrill to be on a show I've been watching for so long I'm one of those people who instinctually  still wants to call  it the McNeil-Lehrer show.

Well, I'm not sure what Mayor Mike thinks of BROKE but it was sweet to log on Twitter a few days back and read this tweet posted by the book review editor at Bloomberg News: "Bloomberg's Jim Pressley, master reviewer of all finance books, loves 'Broke USA' by @grivlin"

Even now I would have said I'm ambivalent on the issue of payday loans -- but then I read this review of BROKE in the Washington Post this past Sunday (6/27/10).   Reviewer Justin Moyer writes, "Rivlin, a former New York Times reporter ...tries to remain objective as he interviews the usurious architects of payday-lending (one, who operates 1,300 outlets, complains that making $10,000 an hour isn't enough) and the activists trying to protect impoverished communities from their influence. Eventually, however, he must take a side. 'I began to liken the entire Poverty, Inc. industry to those energy companies whose strip-mining destroyed vast tracts of wilderness areas,'  Rivlin writes. 'Short of government intervention, the consumer advocacy side didn't stand a chance.'"  Interesting to be reminded of my own words.

I don't think payday should be outlawed. But there need to be serious restrictions placed on the business.  And for that reason it was hard to write with much objectivity this piece appearing in today's Huffington Post. Legislative bodies  have made their wishes clear.  The voters have spoken in several states.  And basically the industry flips everybody the bird.

But, Mr. Dodd, hats off -- and to you, too, Barney Frank  and also the president's people.   I spent two years on the economic fringes talking to victims of predatory loans and their advocates.  People like Martin Eakes, founder of the Center for Responsible Lending, and Bill Brennan, an Atlanta Legal Aid attorney who has dedicated most of the past two decades of his life to fighting the spread of predatory mortgage lending.  The new Dodd-Frank bill does pretty much everything they wanted it to do, including the creation of an independent consumer protection bureau.  Consumer champions are happy and throwing around terms like "landmark legislation."  My take here at TheAtlantic.com.'

TheAtlantic piece: 1,200 words, which is where posts on its site tend to max out.   Here's some of the 1,700-word version I had originally handed in:

The too-big-too-fail crowd – those for whom meaningful financial reform reduced  down to cutting down the country’s biggest banks to size –chimed in to express their discontent.  Congress had failed to reinstate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that, until it was tossed in the deregulation frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, had prevented the corner bank from risking its federally-insured deposits by playing investment banker or getting into the insurance game.  After months of political wrangling, our financial system will still be dominated by a cluster of interconnected monsters that threaten to take down a big chunk of the economy if one goes bust.

But then I’m not sure which is more dangerous to the American public.  A small coterie  of $200-billion banks in possession of a  new gimmick for getting rich or a dozen, each worth $20 billion and each  feeling quarterly pressures to raise earnings.

I’ll confess to disappointments in some of the last-minute horse-trading, much of which played out on CSPAN.  The watering down of the rules governing derivates was a byproduct of a New York delegation looking out for Wall Street’s interests (and by extension, they would argue, the states’) and I wish the imminently sensible Volcker Rule, formulated by the imminently sensible former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, had been codified as law untouched.  It’s insane that the big banks (and their federally-insured deposits) can play both the house and make side bets in its own casinos but the spirit of the Volcker Rule lives on, even if not his precise proposal.  At least now the big banks will be able to wager just 3 percent of its capital and own no more than 3 percent of any hedge fund or private equity pool.

The review in The Washington Post.  The Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune.  The Wall Street Journal.

Here's the link to the Lopate show.   And to the link to "The Michael Eric Dyson Show"  ("Poverty, Inc." is up first).   And here's the Henwood/"Behind the News" link.

Also, two other really fun shows to tell you about.  One was a sit down in a cafe near where I live with the incomparable  Bat Segundo.  Segundo, a one-man traveling recording studio, is a sharp interviewer who did  his homework and made for a very interesting and challenging hour.  Click here to listen.  Also,  I'd call this a college homecoming of sort given I was on WNUR, my old college radio station, except the host, Chuck Mertz,  does a show called "This is  Hell," and I don't remember anything like that in my time in Evanston.  "Four hours of completely uninterrupted unedited blah blah blah," Mertz says of his show, and then he quote Noam Chomsky.  "THIS IS HELL is a voice of sanity on talk radio."  Responds Mertz: "After you listen, you'll know why we think Noam's gone insane." Click here for a listen.

It had been nearly ten years since my last appearance so it was a thrill to learn that "Marketplace" wanted me on the show to talk about BROKE, USA.  Click here to listen to Kai Ryssdal (pictured), he of the mellifluous voice and ultra-smooth on-air style,  talk to me about my new book.  "How the Working Poor Became Big Business" aired on June 15th.

Also, a real thrill to see my name in a smart column by Joe Nocera, pictured, one of my favorite business writers.  In his weekly "Talking Business" column for The New York Times, Nocera describes BROKE as an "important, scathing book" and then quotes me as the fellow whose ideas on reforming our home lending system he finds most appealing.

Click here to read the column. 

Also, this wonderful review from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.   Highlights: "What makes BROKE, USA so readable is Rivlin's skill at telling a complex story through engaging characters...[an] incisive, important new expose."  I also appreciate that the reviewer, Karen R. Long, credits me for all those hundreds of hours I spent with those part of the poverty industry for their side of the story.  "Rivlin's work is scrupulously fair," Long writes.

The strangest  development of the week, though, was becoming semi-famous in Cleveland, Tenn.  I had spent the better part of a week in Cleveland at the start of 2009 for research on my book, including two days with Allan Jones, the founder of the modern-day payday industry.  I took some outtakes from the book and wrote a piece about Jones for The Huffington Post.  And then suddenly I'm hearing from all sorts of people living in the southeast corner of Tennessee, including a newspaper reporter in Chattanooga and a reader linking me to this piece from "News Channel 9."  The local NAACP president voiced his protest.  And Allan Jones made a public statement about me.

Actually, Jones released a written statement through a spokesman.   He didn't deny anything I quoted him as saying, only that I had "rearranged" some of his remarks.  But he also knew I had tape recorded our conversations.  He then went on to say, "I deeply regret if any comments attributed to me have offended anyone."

My favorite line from the Jones statement has him describing payday's customers as "middle-income working" people.   Studies show that the typical payday customer has a household income of about $30,000 a year.  Only a guy who spends money like Jones (read the HuffPo piece or click on this link to his home while it was still under construction)  would be so clueless as to sum up as "middle class" someone earning $30,000 a year and so desperate for quick cash they'd be willing to pay fees that work out to an annual interest rate of 390 percent.