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.
Maybe that’s the point.
Florida is a fucking existential risk
“Anti-woke banking laws”. That is the most meaningless description.
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.
Small government right there folks.
they’re too busy outlawing porn and forcing the 10 commandments into classrooms to deal with any actual problems
Because they made the real problems and love the real problems. Fixing them would tave away their moneyand power.
Even that lie is something they only ever say after they fail to pass legislation at the national level.
Okay so wtf does woke mean then? I thought woke was when Spider-Man is black. What does that have to do with banking?
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.
Well that sounds fucked up.
That already happens with credit cards and certain online businesses, though. E.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pornhub-crackdown-credit-card-companies-170053200.html (from 2020 but there are other instances of it happening with sites like Backpage)
Why would Patriotic Pro Life Republicans care about National Security? National Security is WOKE!
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.
HB 3 Florida 2023 session
I would love to hear Treasury Department’s definition of Woke and Anti-Woke.
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.
Climate change is a national security risk in and of itself.
“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.
