The National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) finds that Black families are twice as likely to be denied real estate loans as White families.
> Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, told Yahoo News that racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the financial industry and its lack of response to bias and racism. This is exemplified by systemic and discriminatory practices like redlining — which is defined by the Legal Information Institute as the "denial of services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to residents of certain areas, based on their race or ethnicity."
> "We've seen an aggressive redlining strategy that created the current condition the Fair Housing Act was put in place to address," Johnson said.
> The NAREB report also notes that people of color were disproportionately victims of the 2008 housing foreclosure crisis. In the past decade, the report says, the Black community missed out on more than a decade of low mortgage interest rates. Black homeownership fell to a 50-year low in the second quarter of 2019.
This is why we cannot pretend that the current regulators, banks, and insurance companies will change without a complete overhaul, including removing their leaders and replacing them. That is very unlikely, so minorities must look outside the regulated financial system to build their own financing mechanisms.
#USGS reports an #earthquake off the #Oregon coast earlier this morning. Originally rated M5.1 (which is why I got the alert), it is now rated M4.9. No #tsunami expected.
This is unprecedented. Military members routinely receive vaccination for all sorts of illnesses that non-military people do not. In general, military members do not get the option to refuse a vaccine.
I'm in favor of #cryptocurrencies -- in general, not necessarily a specific coin or token -- because I've seen the devastating impact that the self-benefiting actions of financial institutions can have on real people. I've seen that the regulators and the courts exist primarily to protect the financial system and the largest institutions within it (big banks, big insurance companies, etc), and that they only benefit "us folks" en passant as part of their goal of protecting the system.
Just as I support decentralized networks over the centralized ones, I support the idea of decentralized finance ... and I consider cryptocurrencies to be a step in that direction.
You can move to #LiberaChat, to #OFTC, to #Rizon, etc. Or use #Matrix or an #XMPP MUC instead of IRC. Just don't "wait and see" and be surprised when your channel is targeted.