Mayor Larry Langford Threatens Banks: Compares Credit Scores To Redlining

The same mayor who:
Who is facing 101 counts on corruption and bribery charges
The man who bankrupted Jefferson County Alabama
Helped increase fees on middle and working class people
The man who did it for designer suits and rolex watches.
Mayor Langford's Culture of Corruption.
Who helped J.P Morgan Chase and other Financial Groups overcharge by 100 million in fees Jefferson County.
The same Mayor who has saddled his constituents with a 3.2 billion dollar debt.

It was sub-prime mortgages and banks lending money to people who couldn't pay back which pitched the economy off a cliff and are practices that the Mayor is calling for Banks to repeat. Of course this is related to his ensuing trial and the fact that the Feds have a witness to use against him.

Langford wants to threaten some local banks

Posted by Thomas Spencer -- The Birmingham News March 02, 2009 3:34 PM

The city should pull its money out of major banks, set up its own credit union or transfer its money into an existing credit union that is actively lending to potential homebuyers in Birmingham, Mayor Larry Langford told a committee of the City Council today.

Langford told council members he was working on a proposal to counter what he claims to be discrimination in lending, and he would provide details soon.

"Today, red-lining has been replaced by a new term: a credit score,"
Langford said. "We need to pull our money out of banks that won't lend in these communities and put them in a lending institution that will."

Redlining is the discriminatory practice where minority homeowners are frozen out of mortgage deals or receive unfavorable terms compared to white home buyers.

Redlining is the practice of arbitrarily denying or limiting financial services to specific neighborhoods, generally because its residents are people of color or are poor. While discriminatory practices existed in the banking and insurance industries well before the 1930s, the New Deal's Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) instituted a redlining policy by developing color-coded maps of American cities that used racial criteria to categorize lending and insurance risks. New, affluent, racially homogeneous housing areas received green lines while black and poor white neighborhoods were often circumscribed by red lines denoting their undesirability. Banks and insurers soon adopted the HOLC's maps and practices to guide lending and underwriting decisions. Further, the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, also used the HOLC's methods to assess locations for federally insured new housing construction

Apperently the central planners of the New Deal didn't know best. Not that this is surpise when one thinks about Henry Wallace's uprooting of sharecroppers in the South as part of his New Deal agenda while working for FDR.