The broad scope of this stimulus package covers a wider range of national and state priorities as compared to previous federal government relief efforts. This one is aims to both prepare the country logistically to emerge from the pandemic and to recover from the economic strife of the past year.
Black Leaders and civil rights groups – including the NAACP and the Greenlining Institute — are hailing a memorandum President Joe Biden issued last week directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to “take actions to undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of housing discrimination that afford access to long denied opportunities.”
“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.”
A decade has passed since the housing collapse. In that time, bank profits are back and continue to rise. Despite occasional trading fluctuations, the stock market remains profitable for most investors. Then there’s the low rate of unemployment that is often cited as if economic strides have included nearly everyone.
Today’s increasingly competitive global economy requires and recruits those who are highly-skilled and knowledgeable. People understand and accept that higher education is a means to become employable, marketable, and competitive.