O'S DANGEROUS PALS; BARACK'S 'ORGANIZER' BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES

NY POST ^ | 9/29/08 | STANLEY KURTZ

[Liz]

ACORN trying to get a cut of the $700B financial-market-rescue bill.

--SNIP--It would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama. When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift......the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

[ChessExpert]

A very good article. It compliments:

An ACORN Falls from the Tree, By Ken Blackwell
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2093294/posts

These articles fill in the details of Democrats, using CRA, using community organizers, using Fannie Mae, forcing banks into making risky loans to low income individuals and minorities.

Democrats created this crisis. They now blame Republicans for de-regulation. But it was Democrats who attacked the Fannie Mae regulators who were simply trying to do their jobs. It is evident in the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs&eurl=http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/09/devastating-dems-refuse-to-reform.html

Democrats are blaming Republicans for not passing the bail-out bill. But they are in the majority and could have passed it all by themselves. 95 Democrats voted against the bail-out bill:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll674.xml

I think someone mentioned that Paulson would be totally in charge of the bail out. I wonder how Democrats would like it if Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich were in complete charge. I’m not sure I trust Paulson.

[WOSG]

http://travismonitor.blogspot.com/2008/09/manufactured-crises-and-leftwing-obama.html

The seed of this crisis was planted by ACORN and their push for sub-prime lending with the CRA. CRA led to massive increases in subprime lending, and massive increases in subprime lending is at the root of this. from the article in The American Thinker:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
“ACORN was represented by Barack Obama when he was a leftwing community activist. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in their effort in the 1990s to loosen lending standards. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining. Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.”

The efforts by ACORN worked. An enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed “the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted.” That lender’s $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003. The company was Countrywide, which became an infamous example of irresponsible subprime lending, and also managed to corrupt Congressmen like Sen Chris Dodd with sweetheart loan deals.

Bad underwriting was getting hidden by corrupt CEOs like Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson at Fanne Mae and hackles were raised. But Democrats turned back the efforts to reofrm Fannie Mae. In 2005, Obama protected Fannie Mae when McCain and Republicans wanted better oversight of them. Fannie Mae underwrote close to a trillion in subprime loans in the past 4 years, inciting the current mortgage crisis.

We come full circle from the current crisis in the financial markets to Obama’s earliest days as a left-wing activist in Chicago. Putting leftwing activist Obama in charge is rewarding incompetence, corruption and bad intentions. It’s like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department. The pro-Obama media will not tell the truth about Obama’s links to ACORN and CRA, and will not point out the serious links.