At 2:30 today Americans for Prosperity North Carolina will hold a protest at the offices of the Center for Responsible Lending. AFP maintains that it was lending institutions like the CRL that browbeat banks into providing mortgages to people who had no hope of paying them off, thus precipitating the current credit crisis and financial meltdown, which made millions for billionaire speculators like John Paulson.
The unsavory connection between the CRL and national corruptocrats like Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd is Eric Stein, who now works for the Obama administration, and who would be in a position to reward the CRL if named head of the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency:
“It looks like John Paulson made a fortune based on a scheme in which he paid the Center for Responsible Lending $15 million to shake down and harass banks into making bad loans, which Paulson then bet against with the help of Goldman Sachs.
“Now Treasury official Eric Stein, who for years worked for the Center for Responsible Lending, is expected (if the bill he helped design passes) to be installed as the head of the so-called Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a huge new bureaucracy with sweeping powers to reward CRL donors and supporters while punishing competitors who aren’t in on the scheme.”
If there is any doubt in your mind about the CRL’s role in shaking down banks to provide risky loans, and the line that runs from it to the corrupt Fannie Mae, read this from Stein’s testimony in 2008 to Sen. Dodd’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (my emphasis):
Self-Help’s lending record includes our secondary market program, which encourages other lenders to make sustainable loans to borrowers with blemished credit. Self-Help buys these loans from banks, holds on to the credit risk, and resells them to Fannie Mae.
