Month: October 2008

How Obama Supports Acorn

Senator Obama has worked hand in glove with ACORN, the group under investigation for voter fraud in many states, for many years. You won’t find our press reporting these connections, so if you want the true facts on Barack Obama sometimes you have to read foreign papers, strange as it seems. Here you seen an article at Canada Free Press that outlines those recent legislative ties:

Not only did Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign pay more than U.S. $800,000 to a front of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform, Now, ACORN, currently under investigation in a dozen States for voter registration fraud and bribery schemes, for “get-out-the-vote-efforts”; Obama co-sponsored legislation called the “Helping Families Save their Homes in Bankruptcy Act of 2007”– that was supported by ACORN and protects them.

On the surface the goal was noble, but like his record with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack’s efforts on the housing front led to zero results, unless you want to look at the monumental meltdown of financial companies from choking on sub prime loans forced down their throats, which is a very bad result. If you go to the areas Obama organized in, if you look at housing in his state, you see people no better off or worse off. See Here.

Acorn has fought foreclosures but also supported legislation that enabled this credit market meltdown for almost two decades. They are particularly responsible for helping raise the caps on permissible loan to values, lowering of the standards at Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (FNMA & GMAC,) as well as legislation that increased the percent of subprime loans they had to carry. So in a way Acorn helped open the subprime floodgates and helped create a whole new class of victims to feed into their political causes.

You won’t see the McCain campaign bring this up for a few reasons. Even though Acorn and Democrat legislators created the sub-prime valley of vultures that poor people were fed into, even though they profited with donations from the very predatory lenders that they trailblazed the market for, it’s a no go simply because the defense will be to show America a non stop calvacade of poor people getting foreclosed upon. Poor people who were sold a dream that was really a nightmare by pernicious legislators who would rather crush our economy than lose an election.

See previous articles here and here.

UPDATE: From their 2002 Brochure you can see Acorn lobbying for money for their “credit counseling groups”:

  •  
    • Congress should increase funding for the HUD Housing Counseling program from $50 million to
      $75 million, with some of the increase earmarked for foreclosure prevention counseling.
    • Cities, Counties, States, and the Mortgage Industry should provide funding for community outreach to
      borrowers in danger of losing their homes and to housing counseling programs to help homeowners
      avoid foreclosure.
    • States and the Federal Government should set up and provide the start-up money for Rescue Funds (such as the state of Ohio is doing), but these funds should be fully financed by the Mortgage Industry.

What this amounts to is creating victim classes and then using them to shake-down the mortgage industry – it took 20 years, but recently Acorn got what they really wanted through their support of regulations in Congress that led to this very debacle, and they are profiting by it just as much as those fat cats at Countrywide.

Design?

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

— Robert Frost

Barack Obama and William Ayers: Monumental Failure

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama also spoke at at educational forum together, and they were invited by Michelle Obama to participate. Barack Obama gave an endorsement blurb on Bill Ayers education book, and their key initiatives together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were all in the education sector. Are these the sort of people Barack will look to for shaping the education policy in America if he’s elected?

New footage of Bll Ayers speaking in this Ad:

Bill Ayers and Barack Obama also spoke at at educational forum together, and they were invited by Michelle Obama to participate. Barack Obama gave an endorsement blurb on Bill Ayers education book, and their key initiatives together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were all in the education sector. Are these the sort of people Barack will look to for shaping the education policy in America if he’s elected?

More on the AYERS OBAMA connections and past education bills here.

More on Obama’s ties to ACORN here.

More on how the Obama Campaign is trying to sweep all of this under the carpet at the Chicago Tribune

More on the Annenberg Challenge at NY Post:

As The Wall Street Journal has reported, Ayers and Obama worked for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. “CAC translated Mr. Ayers’ radicalism into practice,” notes the Journal. “It required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners’ ” for their funding.

“Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead, CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers,” such as ACORN.

Ayers seemed to envision schools as “sites of resistance” and for teaching kids to oppose “oppression,” with a focus on America’s evil and racist past – and an eye toward “social transformation.”

This is the swamp in which Obama operated: The Journal notes that Obama was chairman of the CAC board, which handled fiscal matters.

All told, Ayers and Obama won more than $150 million to ladle out.

McCain, to be sure, has never accused Obama of sharing Ayers’ terrorist views.

He’s merely questioned the Democrat’s judgment in having worked with Ayers – and having launched his political career from the ex-terrorist’s living room.

It’s a fair point.

Incredibly, an Obama aide suggested that the senator didn’t know about Ayers’ terror past – which is a little disquieting, if true.

But he had to know what Ayers was

The biggest scandal in all of this is that the CAC was Barack Obama’s biggest executive achievement – about the only one. As Chairman he oversaw the dispersement of 150 million in grants, matching funds and donations which became a monumental failure:

The results of an August 2003 final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Research Project by the Consortium on Chicago School Research “suggest that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on school improvement and student outcomes, with no statistically significant differences between Annenberg and non-Annenberg schools in rates of achievement gain, classroom behavior, student self-efficacy, and social competence.”

Even without the Ayers connection you can see why presidential candidate Barack Obama wanted to leave this off his thin resume.

McClatchey Tries to Cover Barney Frank’s Fannie

Loan officers didn’t care, they got commission good or bad. Underwriters across the country were browbeaten until they learned to hold their nose and look the other way. In the meantime to keep up banks were sending out people with cameras to take pictures of huge sums of money laid out bill by bill on kitchen floors because there were “cultural differences” and some cultures didn’t trust banks

The notoriously liberal McClatchey papers are trying to cover up some of the guilt of Fannie Mae and by the secondary effect, some of their legislative supporters in Washington like Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd.

They print a few facts about the industry, but gloss over the real problems created by the loosy-goosey Government Sponsored Enterprises. Specifically these bullets from the article are somewhat factual, but leave out things:

_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. [ true, but they wouldn’t do it if they didnt’ think a market was there – without Fannie and Freddie Securitizing these no sane lending instition would have dumpster dived the bad credit market the way they have the past decade.]

_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. [Of course they did, see comment above]

_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that’s being lambasted by conservative critics. [ no, companies like Greentree, Canseco, Countrywide and others who created the chain of processing, sales, and servicing firms tried to comply with those federal guidelines because if they didn’t they couldn’t expand or compete with the big-box banks in products in some states and it was all about volume as well as secondary goals like selling contractor homes.]

Basically Fannie was worse than Freddy, Freddy had higher standards, and higher fees. By leading the way to the bottom in standards and raising their caps the highest Fannie led directly to this mess. If you had some toxic waste on the books you had to carry because no loan servicer would buy it who cared? Fannie or Freddy were securitizing it right?
This atmosphere of churn and burn and increasing volume led to a cuthroat business in refinancing and sales where overnight mortgage giants were racing each other to see who could dive the deepest in the credit barrel the fastest to cut into the big box bank’s turf.

Loan officers didn’t care, they got commission good or bad. Underwriters across the country were browbeaten until they learned to hold their nose and look the other way. In the meantime to keep up banks were sending out people with cameras to take pictures of huge sums of money laid out bill by bill on kitchen floors because there were “cultural differences” and some cultures didn’t trust banks (meanwhile on the counter there were labratory quality scales and packaging material…) Processing was outsourced to third parties with even lower standards because the onboard staff couldn’t keep up with the glut, and automated online processing raised their profit margins.The processing outfits got paid by number of loans processed, so it was rare to reject. Non-Traditional lenders were knife-fighting to gain major contractor’s business, and in some offices on the same computer that held the loan forms you would find the home office software to print up fake W-2’s. If you needed more money than your home was really worth on a refi package, there were specialty appraisers who would inflate the value to meet the needs.

Fly by nights came and went, and their loans got sold, repackaged, sold again. Massive fraud started occurring in some rescue agencies, some sponsored by ACORN. Straw buyer schemes, fractional deeds, and rescue angels who turned demonic all flourished. It all floated downstream to Fannie in the end because they blazed the path to lower standards and larger subprime loans. You only have to think about it a minute: Have you ever seen the government do anything where there wasn’t massive fraud and bilking? The GSE’s have been the loss leaders in today’s financial crisis, and it was truly congress and the GSE’s who led down that path into vallies of vultures by opening markets that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Do you think Obama isn’t neck deep with the community organizations who led to the lowering of standards and the raising of caps? Do you think Urban Democrats didn’t use these groups to increase their vote blocks?

In the wow, do we have an update department, Check out this confirmation of Obama’s ties to Acorn at LGF.