Although a New Year has begun, many American consumers and small businesses continue to feel a financial hangover from the challenges of 2020. As the global pandemic reveals a still-soaring American infection rate, the nation has also surpassed 350,000 related deaths, added more workers to the ranks of unemployed, and growing debts place millions more in financial crisis.
With the freeze placed on student loan repayments set to end December 31, Biden has gotten behind the Democrat-led House’s HEROES Act, which calls on the federal government to pay off up to $10,000 in private, nonfederal student loans for economically distressed borrowers. “People having to make choices between paying their student loan and paying the rent … debt relief should be done immediately,” Biden stated during a news conference on Monday, November 16.
For over 40 years, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D), who represents California’s 43rd Congressional District, has fought for marginalized groups and communities like African Americans, women, families and the poor. Now, less than 20 days away from the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Waters, who is running for reelection, reminds us that there’s more work to be done and she’s putting on her boxing gloves and stepping into the ring to finish.
“Yet even today, with all those credentials and as one of the leading executives on Wall Street,” wrote Raymond J. McGuire, Citi’s Vice Chairman and Chair of its Global Banking and Capital Markets, “I am still seen first as a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Black man wherever I go — even in my own neighborhood. I could have been George Floyd. And my wife and I are constantly aware that our children could have their innocence snatched away from them at any given moment, simply for the perceived threat of their skin color.”
“And so this march must go beyond this historic moment. We must support the strong. We must give courage to the timid. We must remind the indifferent, and we must warn the opposed. Civil rights, which are God-given and constitutionally guaranteed, are not negotiable in 1963.” – National Urban League President Whitney M. Young, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice
On July 25, the federal government’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program ended for most states, leaving millions of Californians without the extra cash many of them had been relying on for months to make ends meet.
The non-profit research and policy organization is targeted towards the education surrounding predatory lending, a practice commonly directed towards minority communities. The virtual town hall, moderated by White House Correspondent and CNN Political Analyst April Ryan, focused primarily on the areas of small businesses, housing and student loans with a particular emphasis on minority and Black communities.
With the House’s passing of HEROES Act on May 16, a bill created in effort to start negotiations on the next relief effort to the COVID-19 pandemic, many questions arise on how the legislation will aid in federal relief and assist to combat COVID-19.
“Today, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gov. Newsom released a somber budget proposal that reflects California’s $54 billion deficit as a result of the virus.