With the mechanisms in place, the community organizing groups began developing directed strategies to exert more and more pressure on the lending industry in the cloak of complicity with CRA. Community organizer Barack Obama worked closely with ACORN activists. Employing the radical Alinsky intimidation tactics Obama had learned and was teaching -- "direct action" -- activists crowded bank lobbies, blocked drive-up teller lanes and demonstrated at the homes of bankers to browbeat risky lending in poor and minority communities. Those who resisted were accused of racism to the media and government officials.
The agitators could now stall or hijack bank mergers by filing complaints of non-compliance against the institutions. Lawsuits alleging redlining and racism began flooding the court system. With the prospect of expansions and mergers threatened, banks settled cases and, significantly, increasingly made loans they would not have normally made. The net effect, as ACORN litigation increased, was that credit standards lowered.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/what_really_happened_in_the_mo.html
Ok, I can see this was a tactic used by the COZ. ACORN is an obvious culprit. But this still doesn’t explain what we are facing economically. You just don’t lend money to poor credit risk because in the end you know you’re going to take a bath.
It’s economics 101. We’re talking millions of bad loans here and I’m telling you there may have been a few banks pressured to make loans to the bad risk, but they wouldn’t have been able to make these bad loans without some kind of backing....F&F!