Indeed, Mr. Obama has extensive connections with the granddaddy of activist groups, Acorn (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has gotten millions in government grants for its low-income housing programs. In 1992, Acorn hired Mr. Obama to run a voter registration effort. He later became a trainer for the group, as well as its lawyer in election law cases.
I heard the Acorn woman say yesterday, that Obama had NEVER worked for Acorn...........
I agree that Obama worked for ACORN, or at least for their subsidiary, Project Vote. I was commenting that Fund didn't offer any evidence to back up the charge. That page at AZ Central doesn't offer any evidence either, unless they got their data directly from Team Obama.
Your'e right that Fund and AZ did not cite their sources.
It doesn't take too much digging to confirm it though.
Here's another link to a web page that has been taken down but the cached version is still there.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:laje-GneRIEJ:renaissancelady48.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/obamas-acorn-revisited-once-more/+"project+vote"+subsidiary+acorn+"Madeleine+Talbott"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us
Roots of the Housing Problem
Don’t be just a reader. Be a doer armed with information. Take the time to read Stan’s work. I have tried to preface and follow his most recent writing below. The most important thing you can do to keep Obama from being your next ruler is to learn as much about him as you can. Know Obama and warn your neighbors.
Obama may or may not go to jail for his Rezko involvement. But he should never be respected as a leader of this country. Do not make it even a remote possibility that Obama will organize your own kids against you.
Do you have a sign in your yard that says Anyone But Obama?
Read this, then Make a Sign and put it in your yard.
A highly respected international journalist, Stanley Kurtz, has put the “goods on Obama” in a tight package that we should all memorize and repeat. Two days ago, Stanley Kurtz wrote an op-ed for the New York Post, “O’s Dangerous Pals” with the subtitle, “BARACK’S ‘ORGANIZER’ BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES”, listed at Memorandum and featured at other blogs.
Listen to Stanley Kurtz in this video:
(For a more thorough understanding of Kurtz’s to-date examination of Obama’s ties to radical organizers, through “community organizer” activities, read both of Kurtz’s articles on Obama and Acorn: “Inside Obama’s Acorn: By their fruits ye shall know them” and “Obama’s ACORN Problem.”)
We have been concerned that this “community organizer” should not have risen above that title. Kurtz’s revelations offer up more reasons for that concern, including the troubling realization that Obama’s and his associates’ style of “community organizing” involves radical direct-action confrontations and intimidation techniques as well as radical political agendas.
In this latest article, Kurtz returns to Chicago, the scene of the crime, so to speak, and focuses on Madeleine Talbott, a mentor to Obama and a “key pioneer” in “ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket”:
ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies.
Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” - organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.
Kurtz describes Talbott’s militant actions in detail:
In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA. The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by Talbott. Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an “affirmative-action lending policy.” The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans.
IN April 1992, Talbott filed an other precedent-setting complaint using the “community support requirements” of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first “bank fair” at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.
Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank “summit” in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on downpayments and underwriting - for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.
By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott’s program as “affirma- tive-action lending” and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.
And Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks “kicking and screaming” into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were “participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories.”
And most recent pieces covering Obama, The Annenburg Challenge and Bill Ayres of Weather Underground fame. The Annenburg research required Kurtz flying to Chicago to complete his research. The University of Chicago and the Illinois University system attempted to block Kurtz’s access to the Annenburg papers and covered in the following article: Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown? There is more on that shutdown from Steve Diamond in Obama/Ayers Update: Chicago Annenberg Challenge Donor Revealed published at NoQuarter. Once he finally accessed those papers, he wrote the following article: Founding Brothers:What’s behind Obama’s early rise?.
According to the American Thinker, Obama represented ACORN in a housing court challenge concerning “redlining”. Read more on that challenge:
In 1994 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.
Returning to Kurtz’s article, we learn that Obama returned to Chicago in the 90s to meet up with Madeleine Talbott again:
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.
What do community organizers do? They often pressure banks and their executives, and not just at their places of employment. The more radical organizers hold demonstrations outside executives’ homes.
[C]ommunity organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at their homes - and thereby force financial institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers. In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
Obama took his connections to ACORN a step further while he was with the Woods Fund. Obama actually presided over who received funding from the Woods Fund, managing to funnel funds to ACORN, in a “you pat my back I’ll pat your back” relationship. Read on:
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 (He continues to support ACORN by making payments to them through a front company. Read more on that at ACORN – CSI – OBAMA by Eastan McNeal. Someone else noticed!) 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.
That committee’s report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama’s organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott’s ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.
MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges 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.
Kurtz was able to look at the committee’s report. He covered comments made in the report about where the Fund members “bragged” about pulling the wool over the public’s eyes. The public who donated to the Fund did not really know where their money was going. Kurtz on that:
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.” Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?
The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.
Obama did not end his funding for ACORN with The Woods Fund, he even managed to funnel money through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge as a leader with them. Steve Diamond educated us on CAC in this article, “Annenberg-Gate” - It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up here at NoQuarter. Obama:
…channeled more funding Talbott’s way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN’s overall efforts.
In return, Talbott proudly announced her support of Obama’s first campaign for state Senate, saying, “We accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”
Make no mistake the additional funding assisted ACORN with its efforts. It allowed them to feed the subprime mortgage meltdown. And that meltdown lay within the groundwork of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA), that I covered in Consumer Rights League, Obama, ACORN and The SubPrime Mortgage, here at NoQuarters. More can be found in that article.
The CRA was meant to help minorities in attaining affordable housing not in helping them into housing they could not afford. It was good legislation but it left the door open to abuse by groups like ACORN. Kurtz has more on that:
CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
ACORN is very good at intimidation tactics. Kurtz believes this had consequences:
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.
Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets. Read more from Larry Johnson at NoQuarter on Obama, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
The problem is the CRA legislation, expanded under the Clinton legislation while meant to be a “good thing” was not. It fueled riskier and riskier loans by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Kurtz on that:
Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor. However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.
Kurtz had this to say:
Well, the pilot program “worked,” and Fannie Mae’s message that risky loans to minorities were “OK” was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.
And he added the following urgent message about Talbott and Obama:
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. IN short, to understand the roots of the subprime-mortgage crisis, look to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.
Little else needs to be said. Obama has dangerous friends and they are at the root of his “leftist radicalism”. Be wary folks, this man is not who he says he is!
