The National Community Reinvestment Coalition held public rallies, forums and other educational events at 54 locations around the country as part of its Day of Action calling for Jobs and Homes Now and urging participants to get involved in the national effort to reform the broken financial system.

“We are seeing a blossoming effort to [reform] Wall Street, Nancy Cleeland, director of the Bailout Analysis Project at the Economic Policy Institute, tells an NCRC forum in Washington June 11. She says several organizations next week will announce the formation of a broad-based national coalition to pressure the White House and Congress to end a system which allowed large financial institutions to take reckless risks and bring down institutions which had nothing to do with causing the crisis.

EPI hosted a meeting the day before at which community bankers they are feeling the brunt of a crisis they did not create and are now being left to fail while the large institutions that were the cause of it are being bailed out. Thirty-seven independent banks have failed thus far in 2009 and 300 others are on the watch list of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

“We have just passed the one million mar in foreclosures,” notes Cleeland. “We must make sure this never happens again.”

James Carr, chief operating officer of NCRC, says the plan put forward by the Obama administration to deal with foreclosures is an improvement over the actions taken in the Bush administration but they still don’t deal with principal reduction on mortgages or when foreclosures are caused by unemployment and a loss of income.  He said the new coalition will have as a major goal the passage of the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009 (HR 1479) that aims to end the practices that led to the foreclosure crisis.