Obama's ACORN roots


RE: THE LEFT


’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. 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...

In June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary
Cisneros announced the administration’s comprehensive new strategy for
raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives
from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony. In his remarks, Clinton
emphasized that: ‘Our homeownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers
one extra cent. It will not require legislation.’ Clinton meant that
informal partnerships between Fannie and Freddie and groups like ACORN
would make mortgages available to customers ‘who have historically been
excluded from homeownership.’ In the end of course, Clinton’s plan cost
taxpayers an almost unimaginable amount of money. And it was just around
the time of his 1995 announcement that the Chicago papers started
encouraging bad-credit customers with ‘dog-food’ wages, little money in
the bank, and even histories of bankruptcy to apply for home loans with
the help of ACORN...ACORN is at the base of the whole mess... And Barack
Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s
economic madness every step of the way.   ......Stanley Kurtz

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*Durango b301 #PE*