Free Republic

Already facing the loss of federal government funding, the community-organizing group Acorn also has run afoul of one of its big corporate partners, Bank of America Corp. In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has "suspended current commitments" to Acorn Housing, an affiliated group, and "will not enter into any further agreements with Acorn or any of its affiliates," pending assessments by the bank of the organization's operations. Acorn, officially the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been under fire since the recent release of secretly recorded videos...

The wait was long and by midday, the air conditioning had quit. But about 3,000 people found such conditions well worth tolerating Friday because of what else awaited them at an east Charlotte office park: The prospect of a job. One thousand fourteen jobs, to be precise, with Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, a community advocacy and homeownership organization that Thursday announced it planned a mass hiring in Charlotte. On Friday, the Boston-based nonprofit began a job fair, which continues today at its local office off Albemarle Road. The plan is to hire about 550 people immediately, and the rest...

In the unfolding economic crisis, helping borrowers with troubled mortgages has become a growth business, landing Charlotte a dose of good economic news today for its beleaguered financial sector. At an office park in east Charlotte, Gov. Bev Perdue and other government officials gathered to announce an expansion by a non-profit organization that aims to add 1,014 jobs here over the next five years. Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, a nonprofit community advocacy and homeownership organization, plans to hire customer service specialists, mortgage counselors, negotiators and others to help low-income and minority borrowers. NACA, as the organization is known,...

... [Bruce] Marks's nonprofit organization, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, has emerged as one of the loudest scourges of the banking industry in the post-bubble economy. It salts its Web site with photos of executives it accuses of standing in the way of helping homeowners -- emblazoning "Predator" across their photos, picturing their homes and sometimes including home phone numbers. In February, NACA, as it's called, protested at the home of a mortgage investor by scattering furniture on his lawn, to give him a taste of what it feels like to be evicted. In the 1990s, Mr. Marks [...] organized...

Isn’t this how we got into the mess in the first place, making mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them? But in its segment this morning on the stimulus, Good Morning America hailed the work of the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America. GMA portrayed the group simply as mortgage counselors, helping distressed homeowners work out tenable terms. But a trip to NACA’s website reveals that they are also multi-billion dollar lenders themselves, who brag of this very curious lending policy: "Everyone gets the same incredible terms, including the below-market interest rate, regardless of their credit score or other factors."...

Housing: For years, a self-described "bank terrorist" blackmailed banks into making bad home loans in our inner cities. Now those loans are defaulting by the millions, and he's blaming banks.Bruce Marks, founder of the leftist Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, makes a good living shaking down banks for loans to deadbeat borrowers that he thinks are entitled to homes. Last month, he and about 100 urban protesters stormed Fannie Mae's headquarters, demanding it stop foreclosures on subprime houses — the same homes his group pressured Fannie to fund. As usual, the bullying tactics worked: Fannie Mae is now reviewing every...

The Clinton administration has turned the Community Reinvestment Act, a once-obscure and lightly enforced banking regulation law, into one of the most powerful mandates shaping American cities—and, as Senate Banking Committee chairman Phil Gramm memorably put it, a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks. Under its provisions, U.S. banks have committed nearly $1 trillion for inner-city and low-income mortgages and real estate development projects, most of it funneled through a nationwide network of left-wing community groups, intent, in some cases, on teaching their low-income clients that the financial system is their enemy and, implicitly, that government, rather than their...