"Progressives needed a new idea, and Alinsky came up with one: force banks and financial institutions to loan money to unqualified applicants so that they can buy homes. Alinsky's own idea was to terrorize the banks by having thousands of activists walk into banks and open up accounts of one dollar each, in effect paralyzing the bank's normal operations. This became the model for a number of leftist groups that took up the cause of bank intimidation, notably an Alinskyite organization called ACORN. The ideological justification for this tactic was "social justice." Starting in the 1970s, ACORN and other leftist groups protested that banks were "discriminating" against poor and minority home loan applicants. Even though such applicants had less wealth, less income, and less reliable credit histories, these groups insisted that banks should lower their lending standards to accommodate them. According to these activists, home ownership was a "right" and getting a mortgage to buy a home was a matter of "fairness." In 1977, a liberal Democratic Congress obligingly passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed into law, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This law, aggressively promoted by liberal icons like Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator William Proxmire, imposed on banks an "affirmative obligation" to make loans in their own neighborhoods, even if those neighborhoods were poor credit risks."