Over the last several weeks, opponents of fair lending and naive others looking to blame something other than deregulation, lax regulation and excessive risk-taking by Wall Street for the worldwide financial crisis have ginned up a sometimes mean and manifestly undocumented and false campaign that seeks to place the blame for the entire global economic collapse on one small, but important, obligation of banks. A law known as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, or CRA, imposes reasonable obligations on banks to make loans in the communities where they take deposits. It does not require that those loans be subprime nor does it allow community groups to hold banks hostage, let alone control the world economy. The Center for Responsible Lending has more; so does an editorial Misplaced Blame in today's New York Times.