September 29th 2008
Obama’s Deep Ties To Mortgage Meltdown
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any of us have come to believe that the current financial mess can, in large part, be traced back to 1977, when Jimmy Carter’s pen signed the Community Reinvestment Act into law, giving the proud profession of community organizer a new reason for being. (Of course, Wall Street is much at fault to, because of how it handled the highly speculative toxic mortgages that grew out of CRA.)
Following passage of CRA, people like Madeline Talbott – described today by Stanley Kurtz in the NY Post as “a key pioneer in ACORN’s subprime shake-down racket” – began organizing the community to act. As head of ACORN Chicago, she began sit-ins (scream-ins, really) in bank lobbies, demanding home loans for people whose finances were so awful no sane person would consider them. She kept up the pressure using a team of organizers who were trained by … Barack Obama. Writes Kurtz:
IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.
When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.
He returned to Chicago in the early ’90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.
In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.
More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.
That committee’s report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama’s organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott’s ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.
MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN – whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.
Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”
Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?
Troublingly familiar.
There is a great danger to the nation that this deep and insidious scandal will never come to light because the media and Congressional Democrats will conspire to cover it up. The support (including financial) groups like ACORN received from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not be addressed, nor would links between those pushing this scheme and proponents of the Cloward-Priven strategy of chaos manufactured to bring down the Country, nor would we see Obama’s radical background exposed … at least prior to Nov. 3.
There is so much low-hanging fruit for the McCain campaign to pick in this scandal, it’s a wonder that the GOP continues to be on the losing end of the financial crisis. When will they get it and begin using the roots of this crisis to win the election?
