In an article in The National Review, Stanley Kurtz explains how ACORN was, in large part, responsible for planting the seeds that led to the current economic disaster, and that Barack Obama played a roll in that.
‘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.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.
Militant ACORN
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.
A few more excerpts:
Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.
and
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.”
The tactics of ACORN and its radical supporters are just now coming to the light of day, but this is a radical leftist organization that operates, if not outside the law, outside the norms of respectable behavior.
It is about time the activities of ACORN were fully investigated, along with its lobbyists and supporters in Washington. Barack Obama consistently says that he is not influenced by “special interests” and lobbyists, yet his campaign has given over $800,000 this year to ACORN and when he was in Chicago he represented this questionable organization.
Read the entire article.
Update: Read Stanley Kurtz’ article of last May, “Inside Obama’s Acorn” Much more information about ACORN and Obama.
BEAR TO THE RIGHT 