What’s wrong with organizations like ACORN? The voter registration fraud pales in comparison to the other wrongs they have committed against society. You have to understand the Community Reinvestment Act [CRA or “the Act”] to understand how ACORN and ACORN-like organizations hurt people.
From and article in City Journal in 2000:
“The Act, which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977, grew out of the complaint that urban banks were ‘redlining’ inner-city neighborhoods, refusing to lend to their residents while using their deposits to finance suburban expansion. CRA decreed that banks have ‘an affirmative obligation’ to meet the credit needs of the communities in which they are chartered, and that federal banking regulators should assess how well they do that when considering their requests to merge or to open branches. Implicit in the bill’s rationale was a belief that CRA was needed to counter racial discrimination in lending, an assumption that later seemed to gain support from a widely publicized 1990 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston finding that blacks and Hispanics suffered higher mortgage-denial rates than whites, even at similar income levels. [Note: Were their default rates considered? If their default rates were about the same as whites, then their loan applications were being rated the same. Any lowering of the standards for minorities would increase their default rates.] …
“The Clinton administration has turned the 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 own striving, is the key to their well-being. …
“The CRA’s premise sounds unassailable: helping the poor buy and keep homes will stabilize and rebuild city neighborhoods. As enforced today [2000], though, the law portends just the opposite, threatening to undermine the efforts of the upwardly mobile poor by saddling them with neighbors more than usually likely to depress property values by not maintaining their homes adequately or by losing them to foreclosure. The CRA’s logic also helps to ensure that inner-city neighborhoods stay poor by discouraging the kinds of investment that might make them better off.” – Howard Husock,
city-journal.org/html/10_1_the_trillion_dollar.html
These organizations processed loan applications and got about $2,000 for each one. One was making over $10,000,000 a year doing just that alone. No wonder they fought tooth and nail against reform of the Act in the ‘90s. Now consider that the government is going to have to guarantee all these bad loans and who ultimately will have to pay. It won’t be ACORN and their ilk; it will be the taxpayers like you and me, and those who met their loan payment obligations only to see their property values drop. These are financial losses no matter how you look at it and is why giving these groups control of wealth is like handing control of the farm over to the pigs was done in Orwell’s
Animal Farm.
Is this sort of thing in line with Catholic teaching? The USCCB didn’t think so and suspend their financial support for ACORN. [USCCB had given them $7,000,000 over a ten-year period.]
