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Chase Bank has abruptly stopped a pro-Trump coffee company from using its payment processing service, WePay, and is currently preventing them from withdrawing any funds.Covfefe Coffee, founded in 2018, brands itself as “Coffee For Deplorables By Deplorables.” The company, which says their goal is to “provide proud to Americans access to world-class coffee without having to fund your political and cultural opponents,” was informed via email on Wednesday that they would no longer be able to use their payment processing service because payments were “for one or more of the activities prohibited by” their terms of service.“Unfortunately, you will no...

WASHINGTON — At the height of the 2008 economic collapse, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the elimination of a discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” was responsible for instigating the meltdown. “It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone,” Bloomberg, now a Democratic presidential candidate, said at a forum that was hosted by Georgetown University in September 2008. “Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor, they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages,...

Minority residents in the Twin Cities are much more likely than white people of similar incomes to be rejected for a mortgage, whether they’re buying a home or refinancing. If the home sits in a diverse or mainly nonwhite neighborhood, the application is also more likely to get the boot. Those are the findings of a new study from the University of Minnesota Law School suggesting that mortgage redlining remains alive and well in the Twin Cities. The report suggests that while banks may have justifiably tightened up credit standards, they have swung so far that they are cutting off...

The U.S. Justice Department plans to bring mortgage fraud cases against several financial institutions early in 2014, using as a template the case that ended last month in JPMorgan Chase & Co's $13 billion settlement, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Wednesday. In an interview with Reuters, Holder would not say which companies or how many could face lawsuits but said the Justice Department was in contact with them and it was hard to say whether the talks would lead to settlements. "We have a number of investigations that are coming to a head at the same time," he...

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan gave an interesting speech at the NAACP meeting in Orlando on July 16th. To be sure, inner city poverty is a serious problem. The public policy question is how to best address this problem. But HUD Secretary Donovan lays the blame on racial discrimination. The key phrases in his speech are: “Bottom line: people are being denied their freedom of choice and the benefits of full citizenship. Yet because of the subtle nature of this discrimination, often times, they don’t even know they have been subjected to this abuse.” “That’s why HUD is enhancing its enforcement...

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan gave an interesting speech at the NAACP meeting in Orlando on July 16th. To be sure, inner city poverty is a serious problem. The public policy question is how to best address this problem. But HUD Secretary Donovan lays the blame on racial discrimination. The key phrases in his speech are: “Bottom line: people are being denied their freedom of choice and the benefits of full citizenship. Yet because of the subtle nature of this discrimination, often times, they don’t even know they have been subjected to this abuse.” “That’s why HUD is enhancing its enforcement...

Racist 'Retail Redlining' Is Still A Big Problem In America Emily Badger, The Atlantic CitiesApril 18, 2013 David Mekarski, the village administrator for the south Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields, told a startling story this week at the American Planning Association's annual conference about a debate he recently had with a restaurant official. Why, he wanted to know, wouldn't quality restaurants come to his mixed-race community, where the average annual household income is $77,000, above the county average? The reply: "Black folks don’t tip, and so managers can’t maintain a quality staff. And if they can’t maintain a quality staff,...

Housing Crisis: Previously unpublished court documents reveal that as a young lawyer from Chicago, President Obama's lawsuit against big banks started inflating the housing bubble that created the mess he says he inherited. We have often written that the true roots of our current economic crisis lay in the excesses of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act as redefined under the Clinton administration. We have explained how community outreach by banks, under pressure from groups such as Acorn, was transformed into the mandatory credit issuance based not of creditworthiness, but on the basis of "fairness." "Redlining," the activists argued, was the...

The Justice Department is beginning a major campaign against banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority applicants in lending, opening a new front in the Obama administration’s response to the foreclosure crisis. Tom Perez, the assistant attorney general for the department’s Civil Rights Division, is expected to announce Thursday in New York that the administration is creating a new unit that will focus exclusively on unfair lending practices. “We are looking at any and every practice in the industry,” Mr. Perez said in a recent interview. As part of an expansion of the Civil Rights Division approved by...

Democrats claim their sweeping financial-sector reforms will guard against the kind of problems that triggered the recent economic meltdown. But if they really wanted to do that, they would've focused on how so many US officials were simply . . . bought. Fat chance. Nonetheless, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform, is demanding just such a review -- and, for the sake of the nation, he should get one. Last week, Issa wrote to Alfred Pollard, general counsel to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,...

Government plans new credit, mortgage programs By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer 19 mins ago WASHINGTON – The government introduced a pair of new programs Tuesday that will provide $800 billion to help unfreeze the market for consumer debt and to make mortgage loans cheaper and more available.

Washington--The government is working on a new loan facility to help companies that issue credit cards, make student loans and finance car purchases. The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve will unveil the program Tuesday, according to people familar with the plan. They spoke on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement has yet to be made. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has said he plans to use a "relatively modest share" of the $700 billion financial bailout money to pay for the new program. It's the latest effort by the government to break through a dangerous credit clog that has...

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  Assault on the mortgage lenders: in the name of racial justice, the Clintonites want the power to decide who gets a home of his own - efforts to impose regulations on banks to make loans even if applicants are not creditworthy Robert Stowe England QUIETLY, behind the scenes, the Clinton Administration is preparing for the biggest regulatory crackdown of recent years. Attorney General Janet Reno is linking up with banking regulators and with HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to end the supposed epidemic of discrimination against minorities in making home loans. The implications for society at large are ominous. Here,...

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Bill Clinton Fibbing on Fannie ... Posted by: Matt Lewis at 8:56 AM Bill Clinton has been getting a lot of press lately for trashing his own party’s handling of the mortgage mess. Last Thursday, he told Good Morning America, “I think that the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by the Republicans in Congress, or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Unfortunately, he was fibbing. He actually set the “standards” that forced Fannie and...

Financial Affirmative Action By Matthew Vadum Published 9/29/2008 12:08:01 AM When the history of the Great Economic Meltdown of 2008 is written, in-your-face shakedown groups like the Greenlining Institute will be held to account. Greenlining, headquartered in Berkeley, California (where else?), is a left-wing pressure group that threatens nasty public relations campaigns against lenders that refuse to kneel before its radical economic agenda. Its principal goal is to push politicians and the business community to facilitate "community reinvestment" in low-income and minority neighborhoods. snip Activist groups were encouraged to agitate by the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act, which enshrined in law...

Viewpoint: Minorities a convenient scapegoat for U.S. financial woes By Cynthia Tucker September 28, 2008 In the midst of a severe financial crisis - a meltdown fueled by clueless homebuyers, greedy lenders and money-grubbing financiers - some observers have decided to blame "minorities" for the mess. Though wiser heads have proclaimed the emergency too serious for partisan gamesmanship, some in the conservative commentariat still can't resist playing the race card. Several days ago, Neil Cavuto, host of Fox News' Your World, proclaimed, "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster." On WorldNetDaily, a compendium of loopy half-truths, pundit Drew...

Following a landmark lending discrimination settlement, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno recently issued a stern warning to all banks which practice red-lining--you're breaking the law and face possible litigation. Reno's warning came on the heels of a recent settlement of an unprecedented lending-bias case against Chevy Chase Federal Savings Bank, a suburban Washington, D.C., bank that was accused of bias in marketing services to predominantly Black and minority areas. It was revealed that until recently, Chevy Chase had no branches located in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles City Council has approved a one-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in a low-income area of the city.</p> <p>The moratorium unanimously approved Tuesday is a bid to attract restaurants that offer healthier food choices to residents in a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles.</p>

A leading U.S. consumer group Monday accused Geico Corp. of using consumers' education backgrounds and occupations as criteria in setting auto insurance rates, resulting in discrimination against minorities and lower-income people. The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) charged that the No. 4 U.S. auto insurer, has adopted rating methods and underwriting guidelines in 44 states that directly tie rates to education and occupation. Geico, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK), the insurance and investment company controlled by billionaire Warren Buffett, rejected the charges. It called them "an offensive attempt to link fundamentally fair and actuarially sound industry practices with...