The Treasury Department is warning that state laws that restrict banks from considering environmental, social and governance factors could harm efforts to address money laundering and terrorism financing.
The Treasury Department is warning that state laws that restrict banks from considering environmental, social and governance factors could harm efforts to address money laundering and terrorism financing.
I don't understand this map, I live very close to the coast and am 20+ feet above sea level. 5 meters is 16' 4.85".
The highest point in Pinellas county is 110', for those who don't know, it's the peninsula on West Coast of Florida.
I'm not under the impression there will be a consistent land mass, but something more resembling new islands, keys and beach fronts makes more sense than showing areas entirely underwater.
Funny how anti-woke is always synonymous with anti-freedom. The government doesn't approve of your opinions, and therefore must use the force of law to punish you.
The good news is, I wouldn't expect these laws to survive in the long term. The federal government could easily preempt them since they obviously involve interstate commerce. And I suspect there's probably some blatant viewpoint discrimination baked into the laws, but that would come down to the specifics of the wording. But even if they are content neutral, I'd argue that they violate the first amendment, which thanks to citizens united would have to be applied to financial institutions too.
And that brings us to the bad news: until congress and/or the courts are no longer held by nutjobs, I wouldn't expect either to do anything to fix this.
Tldr: People were concerned that banks which are critical to most institutions could decide to deny service to those they disfavoured resulting in certain groups effectively being practically outlawed by a collective of private banks.
A few years ago, a friend was telling me about how much access to the financial system is a problem for (legal) sex workers. I wonder if this law protects them too.
It looks like it might to me unless there's a quantitative, impartial, and risk based reason or a "rating, scoring, analysis, tabulation, or action that considers a social credit score" the decision to deny them credit would be illegal for my understanding. Unless there's some justifiable monetary reason for them to deny service legal sex workers should be covered.
From what I was able to ascertain it seems like the law still enables denial of service on risk based standards, which should enable banks the deny service to the criminal enterprises the Treasury fears.
“the risk that international drug traffickers, transnational organized criminals, terrorists, and corrupt foreign officials will use the U.S. financial system to launder money, evade sanctions, and threaten our national security.”
Not that climate change doesn't increase the propensity of events with national security implications. But given the Treasury's examples I think the environmental policy aspects of the regulation aren't their major concern. Their ire seems to be at individuals or groups committing acts that violate established law.