America’s housing crisis is one of the biggest problems plaguing the economy, as the country’s homes have lost $7 trillion in cumulative value over the last five years. Four million Americans are either behind on their payments or in foreclosure, and a quarter of the nation’s homeowners are underwater on their mortgage. Those foreclosures have driven down home values in communities across the country.

According to a new report by the Center on Responsible Lending, however, the foreclosure crisis isn’t finished yet. In fact, with 3.6 million households at immediate risk of losing homes, we’re not even halfway through it. Even more damning from the report, though, is the fact that the housing crisis has disproportionately affected minority voters. Though more whites — who make up a larger share of homeowners — have been plagued by foreclosure, the percentage of blacks and Latinos affected is nearly twice as high:

Although the majority of affected borrowers have been white, African-American and Latino borrowers are almost twice as likely to have been impacted by the crisis. Approximately one quarter of all Latino and African-American borrowers have lost their home to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent, compared to just under 12 percent for white borrowers. Asian borrowers have fared better as a whole than Latino and African-American borrowers, but they, too, have been disproportionately affected, especially in some metropolitan areas.

Wall Street banks and lenders took advantage of consumers throughout the lead-up to the housing crisis, and this report shows that the lending, at times, was even more predatory when targeting blacks and Latinos. ThinkProgress reported on this disparity in 2009, when bailed-out banks were found to have pushed many minorities who qualified for prime loans into higher-priced subprime loans, which can add more than $100,000 in interest payments over the life of a loan. In fact, 30.9 percent of Latinos and a whopping 41.5 percent of blacks were given higher-priced loans by large banks, compared to just 17.8 percent of white borrowers.

As with almost everything coming out of the banking industry regarding the financial crisis, the report only makes the case stronger for the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency tasked with targeting and ending predatory lending and banking excess. Discriminatory lending is illegal, and yet for years, the banks have largely been able to get away with it. If the CFPB is allowed to operate as it was envisioned, perhaps those days can finally come to an end.

In 2009, 1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million but paid no federal income tax on it, through their use of various tax loopholes and shelters. Tax rates for millionaires have fallen by 25 percent since the mid-’90s, while one quarter of millionaires currently pay lower tax rates than the average middle-class household.

Numbers like these are the driving force behind the Buffett rule, the administration’s proposal aimed at ensuring that millionaires can’t pay lower tax rates than middle-class families. To add to the pile of evidence that such a rule is necessary, Bloomberg News ran a segment today on billionaires who manipulate the tax code to lower their tax rate all the way down to one percent:

Warren Buffett became the de facto face of the effort to increase taxes for the nation’s wealthiest when he proclaimed his secretary had a higher tax rate than he does, his being 17 percent. But the real figure for billionaires is often a lot smaller than that. Sometimes they even have a tax rate as low as 1 percent. That’s because they derive the bulk of their income from stock appreciation, and they use complicated strategies — some of them — to make sure those gains don’t get classified as taxable income. Basically what they do is enter into transactions known as “variable pre-paid forward contracts” and it can enable them to defer paying capital gains tax until a later date…Much of the wealth never converts into income on a tax return.

Watch it:

The tax code is full of provisions that help the very wealthy, like the pernicious carried interest loophole or the preferential treatment of investment income. And the end result is a tax code that advantages the 1 percent over the 99 percent.

Wall Street banks, largely spared from the economic ruin felt by millions of Americans since the financial crisis of 2008, have returned to profitability, generating higher profits in the two-and-a-half years since the crisis than they did in nearly eight years preceding it. But that hasn’t stopped them from seeking new ways to generate revenue — like Bank of America’s proposed $5-a-month debit card fee or the millions banks have made from charging consumers to receive unemployment benefits or food stamps.

If all this makes Americans feel like Wall Street banks only view them as money-making tools, well, that’s because the banks apparently do. According to David Mooney, a former JPMorgan Chase employee, Wall Street banks see consumers as an “income stream” to exploit for profit-making purposes, Reuters reports:

David Mooney, chief executive officer of Alliant Credit Union in Chicago, one of the nation’s larger credit unions, used to work at a one of Wall Street’s top banks, JPMorgan Chase. There’s a vast cultural gap between Wall Street and his new world, he says: Old friends from the Street, he says, now jokingly refer to him as a “socialist.” A credit union is supposed to be run in the interests of all members, he says, while commercial bankers tend to see consumers as customers who can be “exploited” by layering on more fees.

Says Mooney: “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization.”

Mooney’s bluntness may seem shocking, but his assessment shouldn’t. Wall Street banks made millions profiting off shoddy mortgage lending practices, setting the stage for the housing collapse that plunged millions of Americans into foreclosure. They made a mess of the foreclosure process, using robo-signers to speed foreclosures and foreclosing on homes they either didn’t own or that weren’t even in foreclosure. They sold deals to investors that they knew would fail, and took advantage of customers with outrageous overdraft, credit card, and other fees.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis and the horrors it exposed, Wall Street banks spent millions to prevent the passage of financial regulatory reform. Once the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed, they spent just as much trying to shape its rules. They opposed the formation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency tasked with protecting consumers from predatory banking practices, and in concert with their Republican friends in Congress, have fought to shape who will lead the bureau and how it will work.

Unfortunately for Wall Street, it didn’t take blunt assessments like Mooney’s for Americans to take action. In October, 650,000 Americans joined credit unions, which, as Mooney noted, are “supposed to be run in the interests of all members.” 40,000 more joined them on Bank Transfer Day earlier this month.

Wall Street, meanwhile, continues to ignore America’s anger at it, sipping champagne from rooftops while protesters march below.

Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has been meeting with congressional leaders this week, continuing their push to raise taxes on the very richest Americans. “We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google. “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.” The group even told anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist that he should take his extreme positions and “move to Somalia.”

In a speech before the U.S. Council for International Business yesterday, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris joined the tax-me-more crowd, saying, “I can tell you the highest taxpayers, including me, should be paying more“:

“Come on, everyone over a certain threshold of money — and you can define what it is — but I can tell you the highest tax payers, including me, should be paying more,” Liveris said during a speech on Wednesday night…”Come on, we are underpaying for our future.”

CNN Money noted that “while his speech did garner applause a few times, his call to raise taxes was not applauded.”

Poll after poll has shown that the American people favor higher taxes on millionaires, while several ultra-wealthy citizens like Liveris, Edwards, and investor Warren Buffett have all said that they should be paying more to support the country. A survey by the Spectrem Group found that “68% of millionaires (those with investments of $1 million or more) support raising taxes on those with $1 million or more in income.”

We can’t lose sight of the fact that Liveris’ company, Dow Chemical, makes its money flaunting environmental rules and corrupting the EPA. But when it comes to taxing the rich, Liveris is on the right side of public policy, along with a majority of both his income cohort and the American people. In fact, the only ones adamantly standing against such an increase at the moment are congressional Republicans.