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The sharks must be beginning to wonder what hit them.

They've been more than on the defensive ever since April, when we rolled into the National Association of Mortgage Brokers conference at the L'Enfant Plaza hotel in Washington and showed up at the home of a Lehman Brothers board member. Coverage in the media, hits in Cleveland, downstate Illinois and elsewhere, as well as getting our city anti-predatory lending ordinance passed are just the highlights of the action over the past six months.

But the foreclosures are still going on and it's hardly time to settle back and comfort ourselves with victories. As they say on TV, here's a quick review of the action for those who are just joining the program.

A lot of cash went looking for opportunities even as more people became homeowners in the 1980s and 1990s. A few investors who would stop at nothing to win profits and didn't care if a few hundred thousand families lost their homes and got ruined credit realized that mortgages on homes across America represented an untapped source of profits.

The bucks weren't in a readily convertible form like a sack full of cash. They were tied up inside the house--the most valuable asset most families own. How to get it? Investors realized that they could turn a loan into a lure.

In communities without access to credit, borrowers who were already stretched thin would pay almost any terms for a loan, investors realized. The key would be to get homeowners to agree to 'borrow' some money in order to get at the funds tied up in their properties. Not too hard, they reasoned. Borrowing is easy to sell to someone whose roof or porch needs work, whose only income is Social Security but whose house is paid off, to someone whose kids need braces or college tuition.

Once the homeowners signed on the dotted line, they lost control of the equity in their own homes. In cases across the country borrowers, such as seniors with paid-off homes, agreed to loans for relatively small projects like fixing up the garage, roof, or porch and a modest amount of cash to use as they saw fit.

Investors realized they were on to a good thing. Once they got borrowers to sign on the dotted line, it was like turning on a vacuum cleaner with a direct connection to the dollars tied up in the value of the house. That's when Wall Street came into the picture and started pouring big bucks into the mortgage lenders who specialized in what was becoming known as 'subprime' lending--because the borrowers, supposedly, had less than perfect credit. By the way, no-one has proved that this is true but plenty of studies suggest the reverse: in fact subprime borrowers often deserve better loans than they receive based on their credit.

A trend that has become clearer and clearer since then began to emerge: 'subprime' wasn't based on people's personal credit, but where they lived. Today, there are subprime neighborhoods and prime neighborhoods. Thus we can start to call the new trend by its real name: just the newest kind of redlining. Back in the day we called it redlining because people in certain neighborhoods couldn't get loans. Today we are talking about reverse redlining because the loans people receive are so bad they might as well never have gotten a loan in the first place! We never could have imagined things would get this bad, back in the 1970s.

Just around the time this was happening we were negotiating the reforms to the FHA abandoned building problem that seem--and there's still work to do but at least we've made a great start on reforms--to be lowering the foreclosures among government-backed loans. So now, we had a problem with these high interest subprime loans.

That's when we hit NAMB because the brokers are the ones who make the big profits up front even though the lenders are the big problem. We also went to the Lehman Brothers guy's house because it's been documented that big Wall Street bucks that started flowing to the sharks around 1993 had a major impact on the business.

Since then, HUD has held hearings, the Federal Reserve has held hearings--all of these have been more talk than action. In fact just today I got a four-inch thick binder of the 'results of the HUD hearings on predatory lending." The results were about a million words.

They haven't gotten action, but we have. Local groups have done hits, other groups are studying the problem, and we're sponsoring our own hearings in seven cities with the Federal Reserve and other banking regulators that will result in action. In Chicago we won an ordinance banning banks that want to do predatory lending from taking city deposits to make it just a little harder for some of the supposed good guys to look the other way while they put their hands in our pockets.

Meanwhile The Money Store, the most infamous subprime lender in the country, went belly up. Other bad guys like Green Tree are getting bought out or like First Alliance or Delta are getting sued, fined, and raked over the coals in the media for their bad business practices.

The momentum is on our side. We, like others around the country, are tackling the problem head on by seeking a countywide moratorium on foreclosures--but that's going to have to wait until the next issue for more details.

Nationally, we are getting into what will be one of the fights of our lives against former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now one of the top three bankers at Citibank, which wants to buy the single most infamous loan shark now that The Money Store is gone, the Associates. This deal would create the largest shark in the country.

What next? THE NEXT MOVE is to fight every way we can to stop that deal--and every unjust foreclosure throughout the land!