REPORTING FOR DUTY
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Sep
18
Democrats Move To Expand Tools That Made ACORN Famous
September 18, 2009 | 3 Comments
ACORN, and other government funded groups like it, made an art form of shaking down banks using the Community Reinvestment Act. This bank-heist shakedown led directly to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.
Now ACORN has been busted allegedly using government money to counsel people on how to break federal laws (arguably while obtaining CRA related services).
Does that mean Barney Frank and other progressives won’t push to expand the tools neighborhood exploiters like ACORN use to shake down banks? Nah!
…In private conversation, other Republicans were more emphatic. “There is clearly arguable evidence that the CRA is at the root of this financial meltdown,” says one GOP committee member. “So what do they do? They try to expand CRA.”
But Democrats, led by H.R. 1479 sponsor Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, claimed that expansion of CRA is much-needed. “Congress has passed a number of laws designed to combat redlining and eliminate housing discrimination,” Johnson said at the hearing. “Unfortunately, we all know that redlining still occurs.”
Then there is the ACORN angle. Republican critics point out that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has used the CRA to pressure banks to pour money into ACORN and its affiliates, allowing ACORN to facilitate loans to clearly unqualified borrowers. Now, with ACORN under fire after a series of undercover videos showing ACORN workers in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, and California openly encouraging prostitution, tax evasion, and other crimes, Republicans on the committee are citing the CRA-ACORN connection as yet another reason the Act should not be expanded.
Johnson’s bill has 51 co-sponsors, including some of the most liberal members of the House, like Reps. Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Bobby Rush, Steve Cohen, and Barbara Lee. Given the Democrats’ tremendous numerical superiority in the House, if the majority wants to expand CRA, Republicans will be unable to stop it.
Progressive Democrats are engineering future collapses, today.
(h/t Drudge Potato Al)
Comments
3 Comments so far
Uh…that’s counsel, not council.
Uh…thanks Frank.
That’s just not true.
One, CRA doesn’t tell bankers what loans to make. That’s in the original language of the bill. Regulators told the banks to have “CRA your way,” but that is because the law leaves up to banks to allocate credit as they prefer.
About underwriting – the truth is that CRA loans have outperformed their peers. Those loans were only made by banks & thrifts, remember?
It was the subprime lenders that weren’t covered by CRA.
CRA only only looked at the share of LMI loans on a small segment of the mortgage market – one in sixteen mortgage loans according to the University of Chicago.
Here’s some basic explanation for you.
http://bit.ly/hDweT