Private credit reporting is failing for all of us who must rely on credit reports produced by for-profit companies to navigate financial transactions. For communities of color, credit scores evoke the decades of bank redlining and unequal access to credit whose impact persists to this day.
Demos strongly supports the Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA) that will protect and strengthen climate-impacted Latinx communities by reducing climate pollution and targeting clean energy investment based on principles of equity and racial justice.
If we want to pass climate policies that could actually help reverse the climate crisis, then we also need to fix our democratic system that gives too much power to wealthy donors and big polluters.
As part of an effort to reshape rules around debt and lending to reduce racial wealth inequality, we propose establishing a public credit registry to gradually replace the current for-profit credit reporting system.
Today, Demos proposed establishing a public credit registry, housed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as an essential part of a larger effort to reshape rules around debt and lending in order to reduce racial wealth inequality.
On Friday, February 15, Lew Daly, Senior Policy Analyst at Demos, testified in support of New York State’s Climate and Community Protection Act. Following is Daly’s statement on the bill:
New York State’s Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA) is a bold and necessary climate action policy for the people of New York. It will establish the strongest mandate for economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the country, requiring a 50 percent reduction by 2030 and set a timeline for achieving a 100 percent renewable energy economy by 2050.
Climate change poses an existential challenge to the planet. But the effects of climate change have fallen disproportionately on communities of color and working families. And the reality is that climate change has been accelerated by a coalition of corporations, donors, and policymakers who have adopted a willful blindness toward these dangers to our communities and our planet.
The Green New Deal is a vision for comprehensive national policy that addresses climate change at the scale and scope we need, creates living-wage jobs, and addresses racial and economic inequity by investing in communities.
The Trump administration’s latest attack on immigrants, a proposed rule that would punish families for accessing public benefits, has rightfully come under fire for its potential to threaten children’s health and impose financial hardship on households and communities.
In disasters, vulnerable communities face an environmental apartheid, absorbing the disproportionate burden of the impact. In recovery, they face discrimination.