This story is being put out today as if it were fresh, but … it’s not quite. Kenneth J. Conner is stating that the FBI questioned him regarding appraisals of the Obama – Rezko properties, there’s a new story in the Washington Times. There are a few things to consider here before you go over the top with this breaking story:
First, Conner is portrayed as a whistle-blower, but he also has a financial stake in this story with a multi-million dollar lawsuit in the works.
So this could be opportunistic timing that turns out to be nada, or maybe we will see some arrests or new indictments. Was there something fishy about the Obama land deal? My nose leads me to believe that something smells in the state of Illinois, but time will tell this tale.
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.
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.
The real impact of all of this will go against the taxpayers, the thrifty, those who have thought of their future and saved. This will impact your pension, your 401K, your life savings. Meantime Jamie Gorelick, Democrat operative, is waltzing away with a cool 26 Million.
The friends of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac in government turn out to be the usual cast of culprits. We have Obama, Gorelick, Johnson, Raines, Dodd, Frank, and the Congressional Black Caucus who all fought reforms even though this speech in 2005 clearly indicated they were needed. McCain was campaigning for reforms (see enough is enough) but they were beat down.
The real impact of all of this will be felt by the taxpayers, the thrifty, those who have thought of their future and saved. This will impact your pension, your 401K, your life savings. Meantime Jamie Gorelick, Democrat operative, is waltzing away with 26 Million. Special shame should also be attached to the Republicans who assisted the lobbyists and Democrats who fought these needed reforms, and we will be hunting those names down in the future as well.
Meantime this is definitely not leadership, this is definitely not change, it’s despair:
Lawmakers say they are unlikely to take action before, or to delay, their planned adjournments — Sept. 26 for the House of Representatives, a week later for the Senate. While they haven’t ruled out returning after the Nov. 4 elections, they would rather wait until next year unless Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who are leading efforts to contain the crisis, call for help.
One reason, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday, is that “no one knows what to do” at the moment.
At a campaign rally in Elko Obama had this to say:
“I will crack down on predatory lenders — who all too often target the African-American community, target the Hispanic community — with tough new penalties that treat mortgage fraud like the crime that it is,” he said.
Obama and his compadres in the Democrat caucus have been “cracking down on predatory lending” since 2000 1990’s, and that’s exactly what has led to this mess. They systematically took away the profit from high risk loans, making it a losing, giveaway business backed by your tax dollars. They cut options to have high risk loans credit insured and rolled into loan cost, which led directly to increased foreclosures.
A visibly annoyed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected suggestions that Democrats share blame for the meltdown. “No,” she snapped at reporters who dared ask.
Stick to our narrative, she scolded: The bursting of the housing bubble was another story of market failure and deregulation.
“The American people are not protected from the risk-taking and the greed of these financial institutions,” she said, while calling for investigations of the industry.
Only, the risk-taking was her idea — and the idea of all the other Democrats, along with a handful of Republicans, who over the past 30 years have demonized lenders as racist and passed regulation after regulation pressuring them to make more loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of diversity.
They were the ones who screamed — “REDLINING!” — and sent banks scurrying for cover in low-income neighborhoods, where they have been forced to lower long-held industry standards for judging creditworthiness to make the subprime loans.
If they don’t comply, they are threatened with stiff penalties under the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, a law that forces banks to make home loans to people with poor credit risks.
Here’s an example of one of these shakedown programs that started way back, under guise of fighting predatory lending Chuck Schumer and Jesse Jackson fight to have Freddy and Fannie lower standards:
Also from IBD :
The [CRA] revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical “housing rights” groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama.
Capitalism is the fairest system of commerce there is. It doesn’t care what color you are, what books you read, or what views you hold. If you offer something of value at reasonable price you will profit, if you invest in businesses worthy of trust you will profit. Not always overnight, not always this year, but over time solid investments pay off.
When that system is short circuited and there is no consequence for investing in business unworthy of trust then that fair system falters. President Bush is making exactly the right choice with the threat to veto the housing bill. We trust in banks to invest money in people worthy of trust; when they don’t then taxpayers should not pay for their bad business practices. That’s pretty simple.
This bill doesn’t help anyone who had their house foreclosed on, it helps the banks who shouldn’t have made that investment.
