Fascist Friday: Community Organizer or Mafia Thug?

This is great propaganda. Then we offer them "protection" to go away!!

Well, Fascist Friday actually gets posted on Friday!  Will the wonders ever cease?  Anywho, his week’s feature takes a look at the forces of “tolerance” and “diversity” and how they  meet their goals of “fairness and equality.”    We’ll be referencing this article from the Wall Street Journal, by James R. Hagerty and Ruth Simon.

Bruce Marks doesn’t bother being diplomatic. A campaigner on behalf of homeowners facing foreclosure, he was on the phone one day in March to a loan executive at Bank of America Corp.
“I’m tired of borrowers being screwed!” Mr. Marks yelled into the phone. “You’re incompetent!” Before hanging up, he threatened to call bank CEO Kenneth Lewis at home to complain about the loan executive.

Mr. 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.

Hmm.  Who would be the “predator here??”  But wait!  There’s More!

In the 1990s, Mr. Marks leaked details of a banker’s divorce to the press and organized a protest at the school of another banker’s child. He says he would use such tactics again. “We have to terrorize these bankers,” Mr. Marks says.

Terrorize?  You mean the forces of “tolerance and diversity” engage in terrorism?  I thought the only terrorists in the US were Conservatives?  Just as Janet Napolitano, her report said it all!

“We have the opportunity to change how lending gets done in this country,” says Mr. Marks, whose group is itself a mortgage broker and has 40 offices staffed with housing counselors. He favors a return to more traditional standards, with full documentation of income and the same fixed interest rate for everyone.

Whoa Thar! These bankers are ONLY DOING WHAT THE FEDS TOLD THEM TO DO!  The CRA changed how the lending got done in this country.  Sub-prime mortgages (read: “predatory lending” in lib-speak), was the only way to get the CRA to work.  Please consult the “Libs Did it” page to see the info that shows where this was mandated!

Now, let’s take a look at the fact that herr Marks and his “associates” are themselves mortgage brokers.  How might they negotiate with the banks for their clients.  I think it might go something like this….

Banker: Hello there herr Marks, How can we help you today.

Herr Marks: Thank you.  Say, this is a nice bank.  It’d be a shame if something “unfortunate” would happen to it.
Banker: What are you trying to say?

Herr Marks: Well you see, we’d like this bank to “play along” with our reputable and clearly legal organization of helpful mortgage brokers.  It would be good for you and your bank if you did.

Banker: And if we didn’t?

Herr Marks: Well then, we’d have Vinny the Icepick here show you all the pictures we have of your family.  You have nice kids, and that school they go to is very expensive.  It’s be a shame if Vinny had to go there and be “unpleasant.”  Yeah, that’s it, real “unpleasant.”    That bank the next block down, they didn’t want to play ball.  They had all sorts of “unfortunate trouble” until they changed their minds.  You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?

Banker: Uh, I guess not.

Barbara and Joseph Green feed M&M’s to their granddaughter while waiting to speak with a counselor at an NACA event in Columbia, S.C.
Instead of relying on credit scores, he thinks lenders should look into the reasons for any late payments in prospective borrowers’ past and prepare renters for the responsibilities of home ownership. Then, if people are given a loan they can afford, they shouldn’t be required to make a down payment, he argues.

These are some of the changes that the CRA brought about.  That same CRA has been supported by people just like Mr. Marks.  ACORN, as well as others, fought for the CRA, and then committed “acts of terror” similar to the ones attributed to Mr. Marks, to obtain the banking industry’s “cooperation.”

Erick Exum, a NACA official, told those present: “What happened is not your fault. The mortgage crisis is the result of abuses and exploitation by Wall Street.”

What happened is not their fault.  It’s the fault of the libtards, including Mr. Marks, that supported the CRA, which eliminated many of the safeguards that were in place to prevent mortgage crises, JUST LIKE THIS ONE!    And these guys were writing mortgages?  Were they writing subprime mortgages?  Were they writing mortgages for people that couldn’t pay them and then blaming the banks when the crisis hit?  One wonders.

In 1988 he launched NACA. It soon began arranging loans for Boston-area banks that were eager to show they were serving poor neighborhoods, in compliance with the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act.

The organization has been allocated $34.5 million from a new federal program to counsel distressed mortgage borrowers, to be paid to groups such as NACA little by little as they provide counseling. NACA’s slice is nearly 10% of the program’s funds; the rest goes to more than 100 other nonprofits and state agencies. Besides these grants, most income to cover NACA’s roughly $40 million annual budget comes from the fees lenders pay it for arranging new mortgages, typically $2,500 per loan.

They get a “piece of the action!”  That’s how Vinnie the Ice Pick got that pool!

Another NACA event is the “predator’s tour.” In February, it sent hundreds of protesters to the homes of bankers and investors in posh New York suburbs such as Rye, N.Y., and Greenwich. One stop was the home of William Frey of Greenwich Financial Services, a broker-dealer specializing in mortgage-backed securities. He was a target because he resisted some aspects of a settlement that called for modifying loans.

State attorneys general had accused Countrywide Financial Corp. of predatory lending, and Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America, settled the suit last year by agreeing to modify many mortgages. A fund Mr. Frey controls then sued the bank. The suit didn’t take issue with the settlement but complained that the bank had passed on most of the cost of it to buyers of securities backed by Countrywide’s loans.

Mr. Frey was the target of the protest in which NACA dumped furniture on the lawn. “They had hundreds of people trespassing on my property,” he says.

“I have a difference with Bank of America. I have a substantial amount of assets with them,” Mr. Frey says. “We take them to court. This is how we do it in this country….It’s a civilized society.” The response from NACA, he adds, “is a mob showing up at someone’s house to intimidate them to drop this suit. At what point do people say, ‘This is starting to be uncomfortable’?”

That’s the point!  The libtards use intimidation to get what they want.

“It should be uncomfortable,” says Mr. Marks. “You win a campaign by being relentless. Everybody has a breaking point….At some point they say, ‘How do I get these crazies off my back?’ ”

And this libtard even admits it.

Some lenders have refused to sign contracts to work with NACA, among them HSBC Holdings, Barclays and Credit Suisse Group. All declined to comment. Mr. Marks says some banks that won’t sign agreements do negotiate individual cases with NACA. Even so, NACA sometimes pictures their executives and the executives’ homes on its Web site.

It recently added a photo of William Gross of Pacific Investment Management Co., the big bond house known as Pimco, along with pictures of his home and other information. Mr. Marks says his contacts in banking and government tell him Pimco doesn’t support the administration’s push to modify mortgages. “We’re exposing them,” Mr. Marks says. A spokesman for Pimco said neither it nor Mr. Gross would comment.

Ehhh, he won’t give us a ‘piece of the action.”  We’ll have to show him what’ll happen if he declines our “protection!”

Mr. Marks says financial executives should be held personally responsible for actions that affect people’s lives, and “if they interpret that as intimidation, so be it.” He says that “we’re not talking about violence. We don’t do violence.”

No you idiot, you just suggest it, hint at it, and harass and intimidate people until they do what you want.  You’re the equivalent of a school-yard bully.  What will you do if people fight back?

Despite receiving taxpayer money, NACA doesn’t provide public reports on either its loan-brokerage business or its campaign to modify mortgages. Jim Campen, an economics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says he tried in the 1990s to analyze the performance of loans arranged by NACA, but Mr. Marks refused to provide data.

Duh, this idiot doesn’t even have a set of cooked books to show the authorities.

Mr. Marks says he feared the data would be used by another nonprofit to discredit his group.

…or have it used as “Exhibit A” at his trial?  Or is what he say the truth?  What if some other group, say, a rival mafia family, decided to take over his territory?

“He’s been very effective in shaking money out of the banks,” says Mr. Campen, but “he’s not one to open up his records to public scrutiny.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  Yet another exaple of the “transparency”  of the libtards!

How ya likin that change?