Free Republic

Before “subprime” became a crisis, ACORN was active in the mortgage market, fighting in support of the policies that helped lay the groundwork for the banking collapse of 2008. ACORN lobbied legislators and banks to ensure that any person, regardless of credit history, income, or assets, would qualify for a mortgage. They mastered the art of pressuring banks – often through radical and controversial methods – to provide subprime loans to all comers. President Obama acted as a lawyer for ACORN in a lawsuit against Citibank forcing it to provide subprime loans. It was many of these “toxic” loans that...

John W. Courtney's world collapsed at dinnertime on a Friday in July 2001. That's when he learned from a television newscast that much of the $200,000 that he had saved from his construction job over a 30-year period was lost when his Chicago-area bank was shut down after pursuing a failed strategy of subprime loans. Seven years later, the Vietnam War veteran has yet to recoup $85,000 of his uninsured losses from Superior Bank's failure. And he watches in disbelief as one of the bank's former top officials, billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, leads the record-breaking fundraising machine of Democratic...