How Much Is Enough For Bank Shakedown Groups?

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Investors Business Daily:

Activism: Bank shakedown groups whine that a proposed $25 billion mortgage settlement doesn't do enough to repair damages to homeowners — damages that they themselves helped cause.

These Obama-tied community organizers, who demanded banks lower underwriting standards before the crisis, now say banks are getting "off too easily" — even though the payoff would be the biggest for a single industry since the 1998 multistate tobacco shakedown.

Five major banks — Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Ally Financial — have agreed to terms with federal and state officials that include cutting the mortgage principal for delinquent homeowners, sending checks of up to $2,000 each to borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure, and funding more government housing programs.

National People's Action, a Chicago-based housing-rights group, calls it a "paltry down payment." How much is enough for NPA, whose war cry is "Housing is our right, and we gonna take it!"? "Anything less than $300 billion is a win for the 1% that lets the banks off too easily and falls short of helping both middle-class families and communities targeted most by big bank fraud," said NPA spokesman George Goehl.

NPA led the charge with Acorn against "conservative" mortgage lending standards in the run-up to the mortgage crisis. While President Clinton and his regulators attacked bankers in their boardrooms, NPA dispatched bus loads of goons to their doorsteps, where they trashed their yards and frightened their children. All to extort more loans for bad credit risks.