OBAMA AND ACORN: A CORRUPT, UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Obama Worked for ACORN
In the early 1990s, Barack Obama worked for Project Vote, the voter-mobilization arm of the pro-socialist community organization ACORN. Moreover, Obama was the attorney for ACORN's lead election-law cases, and he worked as a trainer at ACORN's annual conferences, where he taught members of the organization the art of radical community organizing.
All of You [Will] Help Us Shape the Agenda
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was a featured speaker at one particularly notable political event in which ACORN played a prominent rolea December 1, 2007 forum exclusively for thousands of community organizers from across the United States. He was introduced to the crowd by Deepak Bhargava, ACORN's leader of community reinvestment and fair housing. In his introductory remarks, Bhargava characterized America as a society that is still deeply structured by racism and sexism. In his subsequent remarks, Obama said: efore I even get inaugurated, during the transition we're gonna be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're gonna be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.
I've Always Been a Partner with ACORN
In a 2007 interview with ACORN representatives, candidate Obama said the following: You know you've got a friend in me. And I definitely welcome ACORN's input. You don't have to ask me about that. I'm going to call you even if you didn't ask me.... When I ran Project Vote, the voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.... Once I was elected, there wasn't a campaign that ACORN worked on down in Springfield that I wasn't right there with you.... Since I have been in the United States Senate I've been always a partner with ACORN as well.... I've been fighting with ACORN, along side ACORN, on issues you care about my entire career.
ACORN and Corruption in Obama's 2008 Campaign
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign furnished the ACORN affiliate Project Vote with a list of donors who had already contributed (to the campaign) the maximum amount of money permitted by law. Anita Moncrief, a former Washington, DC staffer for Project Vote, later revealed that her organization had contacted these big donors and urged them to give money to Project Votemoney which could then be funneled directly into the Obama campaign coffers, thereby evading election-law limits on campaign contributions.
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front group known as Citizens' Services Inc, whose headquarters were located at precisely the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans, Louisiana, for voter-registration services.
As the 2008 presidential campaigns progressed, ACORN began to make headlines for two major reasons. First, the organization was under investigation in 14 separate states for massive voter-registration fraud. Strongly pro-Democrat, ACORN claimed to have registered 4 million new voters during the preceding four years. Many tens of thousands of these registrations already had been found to be fraudulentthey bore phony names, fake or nonexistent addresses, inaccurate personal information, duplicate signatures, etc. The full extent of the fraud, however, was impossible to determine.
Obama Deceptively Minimizes His Ties to ACORN
In an October 15, 2008 presidential debate, Republican John McCain raised the issue of Obamas ties to ACORN. Obama replied to McCain as follows: The only involvement Ive had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.
Obama also stated that his presidential campaign had not used ACORN's voter-registration servicesdeceptively omitting the fact that it had paid $800,000+ to the ACORN subsidiary Citizens' Services Inc. for voter-registration services.
OBAMA & THE POLICIES THAT LED TO THE HOUSING & ECONOMIC CRISIS
Obama Litigates in Favor of Pressuring Banks to Make Risky Loans to Minorities
In 1993, attorney Barack Obama took a job as a litigator of employment and voting-rights cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. In a 1994 class action lawsuit known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow Davis Miner lawyers represented ACORN in pressuring Citibank to make more mortgage loans to marginally qualified black applicants.
As author Jerome Corsi points out: ACORN Housing, then a nationwide organization with offices in more than 30 cities, used the Citibank litigation to push the groups radical agenda to get subprime homebuyers mortgages under the most favorable terms available.
Four years later, a beleaguered Citibankanxious to put an end to the incessant smears (charging racism) that Obama and his fellow litigators were hurling in its direction (to say nothing of its mounting legal bills)settled the case by agreeing to increase its lending to minority applicants who failed to meet traditional loan criteria. Thus was a veneer of legal legitimacy given to the disastrous lending practices that eventually mushroomed into the subprime-mortgage debacle and, ultimately, the housing-market crisis of 2008a crisis Obama blamed largely on the greed of Wall Street bankers and the excesses of free market capitalism.
Obama's stance in favor of lending practices like those promoted in Buycks-Roberson were consistent with the dictates of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Put in place by the Carter administration in 1977 and reinforced aggressively by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, the CRA mandated that banks, in the spirit of social justice, make special efforts to seek out and lend to mortgage applicantsparticularly nonwhite minoritieswho failed to meet traditional loan criteria. As Forbes magazine points out, Obama has been a staunch supporter of the CRA throughout his public life.
Obama commonly takes issue with opponents who would prefer to permit the banking industry to function without a meddlesome federal government forcing it to engage in lending practices that defy common sense. He routinely accuses those adversaries of seeking to repeat the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place. But in fact, the policies that created the mess were precisely those government-imposed measures that Obama himself supported.
Seeking to Revive and Strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act
Notwithstanding the economic calamity brought about by the CRA and similar policies, in the latter part of June 2009 the Obama administration sought to strengthen the CRA. Specifically, the administration laid out its position in a Treasury Department white paper titled Financial Regulatory Reform: A New Foundation, which called for the creation of a new super-regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, whose core function would be, among other things, to promote rigorous application of the CRA.
Along the same lines, Obama also supported the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009, which was introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and 50 other co-sponsors (all Democrats). This bill called for expanding the CRA to include not just banks but also credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders.
In July 2011 it was reported that the Obama Justice Department was again pressuring banks to either increase the number of risky loans they made to minority applicants, or face charges of discrimination. Justice Department prosecutors had already wrested more than $20 million in set-asides from lending institutions fearful of being branded as racist for maintaining common-sense loan standards.
In April 2013 the Washington Post reaported that the Obama administration was pushing banks to make more loans to people with weak credit ratings; that Obama and his economic advisers had concluded that the housing rebound was leaving too many people behindmost notably, undercapitalized first-time homebuyers and nonwhite minorities with low credit scores. To remedy this situation, the administration instructed banks to rely less on the time-tested, race-neutral lending criteria that historically had served as reliable barometers of credit-worthinessincome, net worth, credit history, etc.
Instead, the administration said that banks should use more subjective judgment in determining whether to offer a loan because, as Obama's Federal Housing Administration (FHA) commissioner put it, there are lots of creditworthy borrowers ... all the way down the credit-score spectrum. And if this policy ultimately caused borrowers to default on their loans, taxpayer-backed programsincluding those offered by the FHAwould pick up the tab.