October 09, 2008
ACORN, Obama and The Meltdown
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(I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work. — Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007. [Project Vote is a subsidiary of ACORN.] At http://www.newsmax.com/politics/obama_voter_fraud/2008/09/22/133091.html )
(Image from blog.nola.com)
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ACORN was at the core of the meltdown.
(At http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjRjYzE0YmQxNzU4MDJjYWE5MjIzMTMxMmNhZWQ1MTA=&w=MA==, "Planting Seeds of Disaster: ACORN, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party," Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 10-7-08.)
ACORN did far more to cause the meltdown than merely intimidating local banks into making bad housing loans. ACORN was getting resistance from local bankers because Freddie/Fannie's rules kept them from accepting most such loans.
So what did ACORN do? It got Freddie/Fannie's rules changed. ACORN successfully pressured Congress into changing those rules. Before then, Freddie/Fannie had been rejecting most bad housing loans. Then ACORN used its expensive lobbyists and Democratic friends in the Senate and Congress to change those rules. The new rules forced Freddie/Fannie to accept such loans.
Thus began the Great Meltdown.
Freddie/Fannie bundled the bad loans - which Congress forced them to accept - and sold them on the market. The market took off. The bubble swelled. And swelled and swelled. Until the price of houses stopped rising. Then the bubble burst.
What was Obama's role in this?
Back in 1995 ACORN was struggling to generate more sub-prime housing loans under CRA rules, and running desperate ads like this one in April 1995 in the Chicago Sun Times, saying:
"You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.”
The article directed such prospects to a group of far-left community organizers called ACORN for assistance.
What was Obama's connection to ACORN then?* Kurtz continues:
At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis. (Emphasis added.)
Just who is ACORN?
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”
ACORN's outside-inside strategy:
Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” ACORN has long employed Washington-based lobbyists who understand very well how the legislative game is played. ACORN’s national lobbyists may encourage and benefit from the militant tactics of their base, but in the halls of congress they play the game with smooth sophistication. The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy.
Using its expensive lobbyists and its friends in Congress, ACORN even got the government to fund it massively, with tens of millions of dollars a year! Along with other "housing experts" like La Raza.
That was why Democrate put into the $700 billion Bailout Bill the part about ACORN and La Raza getting some 20% of the total! The rationale - to use ACORN as its representative with sub-prime borrowers. Imagine how that would have worked out! Fortunately, public outrage got that part of the Bailout stopped.
Obama's present links with ACORN?
Well, for one thing, he hired one of their subsidiaries to help with voter registration and turnout. Perhaps a small matter - even though ACORN's past and present problems with voter fraud are not small matters! But it does illustrate that Obama's ACORN connections have not ended.
But please - read both the above articles for yourself.
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* Upon his return to Chicago after Harvard Law School, Obama provided legal representation for ACORN and for Tony Rezko (recently convicted of bribery and money laundering), who was Obama’s main money man during his years in the Illinois State Senate. Rezko had helped the Obamas purchase a home in Chicago’s politically correct Hyde Park. Obama sat on the boards of the philanthropic Woods Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, both of whom funneled millions of dollars to ACORN. (At http://www.newsmax.com/politics/obama_voter_fraud/2008/09/22/133091.html )
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Great Post! I'm going to steel it OK.
Meanwhile...Just got back (last Saturady evening) from a 5,060 mile trip. We were looking at properties (for a second home) and I also attended my fiftieth class re-union (high school - whow! a bunch of old folks showed up...LOL). Get back with you later...got a lot of catching up to do.
Meanwhile, What's your take on the Bill Clinton de-regulation (1999)(getting rid of the earlier laws that were designed to prevent just what is happening now. He said they were antiquated) ...my take is he deliberately knew what he was doing to further his Socialist cause.
Posted by: Norm October 09, 2008 at 06:03 PM