Left-Wing Pork in Bill for Homeowners
The bill fashioned by Senate leaders to supposedly “help” homeowners struggling with their mortgages contains tons of left-wing pork, such as money for “mortgage counseling” by left-wing groups. When the economy goes sour and borrowers with bad credit have difficulty paying their mortgages, the left-wing housing groups claim that they should be able to get out of their mortgages because they were victims of “predatory lending.” But if the banks had refused to make those very same loans, they would have been accused of “discrimination” or “red-lining.” Left-wing housing groups specialize in extortion and bait-and-switch.
A classic example is the self-described “bank terrorist” Bruce Marks, a sanctimonious thug who harasses the children of bank managers at their schools to force the banks to agree to deals giving his left-wing housing group, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, money to “assist” borrowers with bad credit in obtaining loans.
The Boston Globe’s contemptible Neil Swidey celebrated this extortion in declaring Marks his “Bostonian of the Year“:
“Marks and his yellow-T-shirted followers have swarmed shareholders’ meetings with enough force to shut them down. They have picketed outside the schools attended by the children of bank CEOs, pressing the youngsters in signs and chants to answer for the actions of their daddies. And they even once distributed scandal sheets to every house in one CEO’s neighborhood, detailing the affair he was allegedly having with a subordinate. In time, that CEO, like most of the others that NACA targeted, sat down with Marks and signed a deal.”
Bruce Marks belongs in jail, but given the politically-correct legal climate in the northeast, he’ll probably be able to get away with his thuggery for quite a while.