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Ah ha .... typical organized community.

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Excerpt only:

Vindication for a dearly departed housing advocate
Chicago Defender | June 1, 2004

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Gail Cincotta was a community activist for whom the term fire-brand isn’t strong enough. The founder of the National Training & Information Center (NTIC) boldly named the organization with the intent to strike respect in the hearts of the nation’s bankers.

It did, and once during a demonstration at a Near North Side lending officer’s home she described bank executives at Citigroup, the New York holding company, as morons. That endeared her to thousands of volunteers and advocates.

Last week the Federal Reserve Board announced that it fined a Citigroup lending unit $70 million

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P3-657095101.html

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New Plan to Keep Families in their Homes
Thursday, 19 February 2009

Each day more than 10,000 families face foreclosure in America.

And, after less than thirty days in office, President Barack Obama put forward a bold plan to help keep families in their homes and to restore some stability in our communities. The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan has the potential to prevent 7 to 9 million families from losing their homes.

This plan is the first bold action we have seen from the federal government since the foreclosure crisis started nearly two years ago.

President Obama should be applauded for confronting the rising tide of foreclosures afflicting our communities. While National People’s Action supports this bold action, it could be strengthened with a requirement for the banks that caused this mess to do more. From million dollar bonuses to billion dollar bailouts, the events of the past year have buried the notion that an unchecked market is fair and rational.

The root of the current economic crisis can be found in the failure of the existing regulatory framework to manage risk, maintain transparency and ensure fairness in the financial services market.

The housing crisis continues to cripple our economy and is a symptom of a larger illness – massive deregulation. Made possible by deregulation, financial institutions have destabilized the marketplace by creating and pushing unsustainable and risky products such as subprime loans and mortgage-backed derivatives.

Once the bleeding wound of foreclosures has been addressed, a similarly bold package of regulatory reforms is needed like those put forward by the Congressional Oversight Panel led by Elizabeth Warren. National People’s Action spearheaded passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977.

The CRA was passed to eliminate discriminatory lending practices and to create a partnership between lending institutions and communities to ensure that local credit needs were met.

Over the years, lenders and Wall Street devised creative schemes to get around the law. In 1995 revisions to CRA cut community organizations out of the process, leaving community credit needs exclusively in the hands of the federal regulator and the lenders. As is evidenced by our current housing crisis, we know that does not work.

Most of this plan can be implemented by the Obama Administration, except for the bankruptcy protection provision. Congress must get to work and pass the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009 (HR.1106 and S.61) by March 4th to insure that the Obama plan is fully implemented.

Next on the American economic agenda should be a swift and equally bold effort to address the root cause of the financial crisis with smart regulatory reform and the modernization of the Community Reinvestment Act.

http://www.ntic-us.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=180&Itemid=1

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What twisted people, huh? They threatened and shook down banks and politicians for “affordable housing” and the very subprime mortgages they now have the audacity to blame for their foreclosures !!