Barack Obama, ACORN, and the Killing of the Economy

September 30, 2008 · Filed Under ACORN, Economy, News ·  

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Barack Obama has been talking a big game over the past week about his concerns for Main Street, but he actually played a key roles in an organization that contributed significantly to the financial crisis.

No, I’m not talking about the Democratic Party, though the Democrats were certainly prominent in this mess with the Community Reinvestment Act.

I am talking about a group called ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), an activist group that pressured banks into lending money to high-risk applicants, in addition to voter fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Acorn, one of America’s most militant left-wing “community activist groups,” is spending $16 million this year to register Democrats to vote in November. In the past several years, Acorn’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Washington, while several of their employees have been convicted of voter fraud.

That same ACORN group with close ties to Barack Obama since his storied community organizer days, and the group he represented ACORN as a lawyer.

Anyhow, Stanley Kurtz wrote an insightful article on ACORN and Obama in the New York Post, “O’s Dangerous Pals, Barack’s ‘Organizer’ Buds Pushed for Bad Mortgages.”

What exactly does a “community organizer” do? Barack Obama’s rise has left many Americans asking themselves that question. Here’s a big part of the answer: Community organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor credit.

In the name of fairness to minorities, community 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.

The seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

More on Obama and ACORN from CBS News.

I am not sure what is more troubling… how deep Obama is in with this fringe group that helped implode our economy, or the lack of coverage by the mainstream media about what Obama was actually doing as a community organizer.