Ah, Thanks. I did get that allegation but didn't see the article tying it up to anything. I'll pay attention to the investigation and we'll see what comes out of it.
It is an interesting problem about the role of government that the CRA presents; I can understand the banking industry not wanting to invest in minority neighborhoods or finance mortgages for high risk clients—though they seemed to be happy to package up the derivatives from them—-but I don't see how that's a natural win for society, and I do see how they have to be …encouraged by law to spread their assets around in areas where they might prefer not to in order for cities as a whole to get dragged out of the decay cycle.
Case in point: Here in OKC we've got a traditional black area called the Deep Deuce. A few years ago the city passed a sales tax to redo the are it abuts on, which would be the core downtown area (Bricktown) so that the Bass Proshop and Toby Keith could build businesses there and they could suck in development money. They did do a lot with it, and the area is really booming and yupped out now, despite being previously a run-down slum full of homeless people and crime. A lot of people want to do the same with the Deuce, bu there's no one to front the money, and there's no question of floating a sales tax in a recession for working white people to pay for restoration of a historic black neighborhood. Yet said restoration benefits the whole city, and helps lift the area from being a burned out den of crackheads into a family neighborhood of locallly run small businesses.
So this is where something like the CRA and ACORN would come in, in a perfect world, and improve the ciity against the will of the banks who wouldn't want to be bothered or were not interested in taking the risk.
So in my mind, there's nothing majorly evil about ACORN or some other group working to get banks to do projects in minority areas because only someone with more unicorns and rainbows in their head than myself would assume the banks would do it of their own free will. And I would expect the banks to go to their party of choice and ask someone to raise hell about it if said minority group did hold the CRA over their heads, so I'm going to have to wait for the investigation to pan out before I get too worried about banks being taken for a ride.
The track record of repubs vs ACORN is pretty rocky, but so is ACORN's so I'll try to keep an open mind.
