ACORN, Obama, and the Subprime Disaster

01 Oct, 2008 by Van Helsing

Print this article Font size -16+

In light of Democrats’ incredibly audacious attempt to use the massive bailout bill to funnel a fortune into the pockets of ACORN, Mona Charen provides a little background on this hard-left activist group:

ACORN is where 1960s leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up. […] Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren’t especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington state. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the “worst case of election fraud in our state’s history.” As Fox News reported:

The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter registration forms. They made up names, addresses and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms.

ACORN explained this was an “isolated” incident, yet similar stories have been reported in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio and Colorado — all swing states by the way. ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com)

But the outrage isn’t just that Dems have tried to divert bailout money to an extremely pernicious, ultra-radical organization primarily devoted to pushing America to the Left through election fraud. ACORN helped cause the crisis in the first place:

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted “affirmative action” lending, and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an “adviser” to banks seeking regulatory approval.

Guess which famous “community organizer” worked for ACORN for years?

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community-organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff — the very people who would later descend on Chicago’s banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Mr. Obama was not just sympathetic — he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

He also represented ACORN as a public-interest lawyer while ACORN was exploiting the Clinton Administration’s deranged revisions to the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to make bad loans.

Now he’s out there yelling that we need a massive bailout so as to keep mortgages affordable to those who can’t afford them. Obviously, if a bailout occurs, another will follow, and another after that, until our economy collapses in accordance with the Cloward-Piven Strategy.