By Redfin

Nearly 16% of Black Americans who apply for mortgages are rejected nationwide, compared with just 7% of white Americans, according to a Redfin analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The gap is widest in Milwaukee, San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis, where denial rates for Black homebuyers are more than 10 percentage points higher than they are for white homebuyers. In Milwaukee and San Francisco, specifically, Black loan seekers are more than three times as likely to be denied a mortgage.
“Getting denied a loan serves a huge blow to a person’s self esteem – especially for people of color, who often feel like the world is already falling on them,” said Brittani Walker, a Redfin agent in Chicago. “My mother has been a renter since she moved out of her parents’ house. I tried to get her pre-approved for a mortgage a couple of years ago, but she was rejected because she had some blemishes on her credit. She broke down in tears and hasn’t tried again since. When people of color are stuck in this cycle of renting; their children often meet the same fate, missing out on thousands of dollars worth of home equity. If your parents never owned a home, where do you learn the value of homeownership?”

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Posted on July 8, 2020

By Cory Doctorow/The Electronic Frontier Foundation

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.” – President George W Bush
Anti-monopoly enforcement has seen a significant shift since the 1970s. Where the U.S. Department of Justice once routinely brought suits against anticompetitive mergers, today, that’s extremely rare, even between giant companies in highly concentrated industries. (The strongest remedy against a monopolist – breaking them up altogether – is a relic of the past).
Regulators used to go to court to block mergers to prevent companies from growing so large that they could abuse their market power. In place of blocking mergers, today’s competition regulators like to add terms and conditions to them, exacting promises from companies to behave themselves after the merger is complete.
This safeguard continues to enjoy popularity with competition regulators, despite the fact that companies routinely break their public promises to safeguard users’ privacy and rarely face consequences for doing so. (These two facts may be related!)
When they do get sanctioned, the punishment almost never exceeds the profits from the broken promise. “A fine is a price.” Today, we’d like to propose a modest, incremental improvement to this underpowered deterrent:

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Posted on July 4, 2020

By The Center for Inquiry

The Center for Inquiry condemns Tuesday’s Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue for forcing American taxpayers to pay for religious indoctrination, gutting the protections in both the United States Constitution and in No Aid Provisions of three-quarters of state constitutions that forbid the use of taxpayer dollars for religious purposes.
“This Court has been opening a hole up in Thomas Jefferson’s Wall of Separation between church and state,” said Nick Little, Vice President and Legal Director of the Center for Inquiry, an organization that advances reason, science, and secularism. “Now they’ve built a two-lane highway through that hole, inviting churches to raid the public treasury and drive gleefully away with taxpayer money.”

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Posted on July 1, 2020