Looking "Community Organizing" In The Face...And It Ain't Pretty

A few things that need to be cleared up right away:

I work for a very large financial institution in downtown Manhattan. I, needless to say, work in finance. I'll say no more on that, and only mention it to give the proper shading to the story I'm about to post. And so the story is this....

'Round about twelve o'clock today, a group of about 300 people appeared on the plaza of my building, chanting, yelling, and generally making a ruckus. Having lived and worked in Manhattan for the better part of my professional life (actually, ALL of my professional life), I've grown accustomed to this kind of unorthodoxy, as it is a daily part of being a part of this city. But this was no ordinary day, you see. The minions of ACORN, the scandal-ridden "community organization" descended up on my beloved financial institution, heaping scorn and ridicule on my CEO. (Note: They've changed their name to some other snappy acronym, but it's the same people.) One particularly amusing placard read that the CEO of my financial institution "hates puppies"; another amusing one stated that my financial institution should be "foreclosed" upon. Strangely, furniture was parked on the plaza. (Some of it was actually pretty nice.) The mob found their way into the lobby of my building, chanting, whistling, and generally disrupting an otherwise pleasant business day. They were summarily expelled from the indoors, but did manage to stick around the plaza for about another forty-five minutes.

Now, this is what really annoys me about this whole exercise. What we're talking about here are people who are demanding that my bank, which is a privately held institution, should be loosening its lending standards to accommodate low-income, high-risk borrowers. Their theory, and also President Obama's contention, is that these financial institutions should loosen their credit since they took money from the federal government to get themselves out of a jam. All fair, were it not for the fact that the reason these financial institutions got themselves into a jam is because they had loose lending standards, due in no small part to the federal government prevailing upon them through moral suasion and outright threats to do so vis-a-vis the Community Reinvestment Act. When Obama's economic advisors say things like "we need to get the banks to start lending like crazy" (attributed to Christine Romer), I'm rendered speechless. That was the very reason why financial institutions got themselves into this jam in the first place. The government forced them to make sub-prime loans, which caved the whole industry. The Fed and the Treasury subsequently bailed them out, but now they're BLAMING them for making bad loans, while at the same time admonishing them to make MORE bad loans, this time to small businesses, because unemployment is going up and Obama's "stimulus" package failed to stop unemployment from going up. (Unemployment was at 7.4% when it was passed; it is now at 10%.)

It is a mad, mad world.

For more on ACORN:

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/23/acorn-scandal-part-2-the-evidentiary-phase/