Little Rock   A headline in the Wall Street Journal marked another salvo in the vicious war that the Republicans and the Trump administration has launched on low-and-moderate income and minority families across the country. This time it was not transferring tax subsidies to the rich or attempting to eviscerate their healthcare and kill them. This time they are trying to force them to be permanent renters or homeless in order to transfer more benefits back to banks by trying to further gut the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

CRA, as it is known, coupled with HMDA, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, has been the key tool for forty years in forcing banks to lend to lower income and minority neighborhoods. CRA was critical in ending the governmental sanctioning and encouragement of housing discrimination called redlining, which created zones where banks would not issue mortgages. And, it was – and is potentially about to be – even worse. For those with long memories part of the proof that drove CRA was the statistical evidence that there was a lending and deposit deficit and transfer between lower income communities and higher income ones. Excess money from banking customers’ deposits from low income communities enabled loans vastly in excess of deposits in higher income communities in the same urban area that financed sprawl and suburban development and created blight and abandonment in urban, lower income and minority communities. This was not just discrimination, but devastation triggered by banking disinvestment.

The Treasury Department and the Office of the Comptroller are preparing today to announce proposals to lighten the load on banks. Remember these are the same banks that created the credit deserts before CRA in 1977 and have now intensified desertification in these communities in the wake of their ineptness and reckless speculation that triggered the Great Recession in 2007. If there was any sense of irony in political philosophy and policy, this would be the case study, as Treasury now attempts to “reward” banks for not lending in lower income areas over the last decade, by making it easier for them to, yes, you got it, NOT lend in lower income areas.

They are masking this outright robbing from the poor and racism by hiding under the banner of there being burdensome regulations on the banks that cost “billions” in their words. Billions in banking is the equivalent of their bar bill for the trillions that they collectively handle, hoard, and sometimes lend. If any one needed more regulations, rather than less, it’s banks!

The details are still emerging but the headlines are another battle cry in the ongoing war on the poor.

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Thanks to KABF.