A cadre of racialists bent on achieving social justice via reparations from banks to minority communities has been installed by Eric Holder in the Department of Justice. They are using legal bullying tactics to intimidate banks into once again loaning mortgage money to people who have no ability to pay it back. Banks have even been forced to post signs in the facilities informing customers that welfare payments can count as income to apply to mortgage applications.

In a  stunning article from Investor's Business Daily, Paul Sperry lays out how the DoJ activists work, and how they think.

Most damning of all, the DoJ bullies hide their flimsy legal reasoning behind confidentiality agreements they include in out of court settlements

As part of settlement deals, prosecutors have required banks to sign "nondisclosure agreements" barring them from talking about the methods used to allege discrimination. Bank lawyers contend the prosecutors are trying to hide the shaky legal grounds on which the cases are built. "It's horrible what they're doing at the civil rights division," said Reginald Brown, a partner at Wilmer Hale in Washington, who has represented banks in connection to recent race-bias investigations. "They don't have any proof, just theories."

He added, "They want you to sign something saying you agree, under the condition of any settlement with them, that you won't disclose what their theories were. That's because their theories are loopy and wouldn't stand the light of day."

The activists are inventing new theories as to the guilt of those racist, establishment capitalist bankers.

For the first time, prosecutors are judging banks for the secondary impact their policies have on entire minority communities, not just households. And they're ordering reparations accordingly.

In announcing a recent $2 million settlement with Dallas-based PrimeLending, Civil Rights Division chief Tom Perez said, "We will require lenders to invest in the community that they've harmed."

There is a new cohort of racialists at Justice

...Perez has compared bankers to Klansmen. Only difference is, he said, bankers discriminate "with a smile" and "fine print." He said this kind of racism, though more subtle, is "every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood."

He's appointed a special lending cop to run it - Special Counsel for Fair Lending Eric Halperin, who also worked for Reno. Before returning to Justice, Halperin was chief Washington lobbyist for the Center for Responsible Lending, an anti-redlining group that urged banks to relax lending standards for low-income urban borrowers before the crisis.

Perez has put in place an infrastructure to enforce "fair lending" - including a first-of-its-kind Fair Lending Unit staffed with more than 20 lawyers, economists and statisticians.

My favorite name, of the activists quoted, is Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa, though.  

Bankers are a cowardly lot when confronted by the power of the State. Nobody in a highly regulated busines wants the government publicly charging racism. A comparatively small group within the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department has thus assumed the role of national bank regulators with the intent of favoring groups they support.  It's a corruption of the legitimate role of government.