Obama & ACORN Raise Red Flag

Voters need to know about Barack Obama’s strong connection with ACORN, a left-wing organization that agitates for socialist style changes in America. ACORN’s goal (to make America a socialist state) and tactics (including voter fraud) have been exposed recently in the media, but few seem to be paying attention to the bad news. Obama and ACORN are both trying to play down their connection, but they are connected and it is scary.

In 1992, Barack Obama started his connection with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (“ACORN”) by directing Project Vote, a voter registration drive program organized by ACORN. (See: Hank De Zutter, Op-Ed, “What Makes Obama Run?” Chicago Reader, 12/8/95; “Obamacorn,” Investor’s Business Daily (“IBD”), 10/14/08, p. A10.) Afterwards, Obama continued his work for ACORN largely though teaching classes to ACORN’s future leaders. (“What Makes Obama Run?” Id.) He was specifically hired to teach ACORN’s staff and community organizers in “direct action,” using the confrontational and intimidating methods of Saul Alinsky. (See: “ACORN’s Senator,” Investor’s Business Daily, 10/1/08, p. A10.) Alinsky was a well-known Chicago-based socialist revolutionary. (Jerome R. Corsi, The Obama Nation, chapter 5, 2008.) These Alinsky methods included in-your-face protests in bank lobbies and bank managers’ homes to force the banks to make risky loans. (See: M. Jay Wells, “Why The Mortgage Crisis Happened,” www.americanthinker.com/, reprinted by IBD, 10/30/08, p1. This article sets forth a definitive analysis of the mortgage crisis from Roosevelt to the present.) For more on Saul Alinsky, see the end of this article.

ACORN used the Clinton amendments to Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act (the “CRA”) as an excuse to intimidate banks to make “Ninja” loans, standing for “no income, no job, no assets.” Obviously, the recipients of Ninja loans could not repay them. ACORN would unleash agitators using Alinsky in-your-face tactics to pressure banks into making these Ninja loans. ACORN was a driving force behind Clinton’s 1995 regulatory revisions that greatly increased the requirements of the CRA. ACORN also filed law suits under the CRA to prevent banks from expanding or merging, if ACORN thought the banks had not made enough minority loans to meet the requirements of the CRA as ACORN interpreted the law to its own satisfaction. Id.; see also, “Why The Mortgage Crisis Happened,” Id.

In 1995, Obama continued his association with ACORN by being part of a team of lawyers, who sued the State of Illinois for allegedly failing to comply with Clinton’s motor vehicle license voter registration law. (See, e.g. Mike Robinson, “Obama Got Start In Civil Rights Practice”, The Associated Press, 2/20/07.) Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 law suit against “red lining.” “ACORN’s Senator,” Id.

While serving on the Board of the Woods Fund with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, Obama frequently helped obtain grants for ACORN, which grants were available to assist ACORN fund its agitation activities. Id. ACORN received grants of $45,000 in 2000, $75,000 in 2001, and $70,000 in 2002 from the Woods Fund, while Obama served on its Board. (Donors Forum Website, ifs.donorsforum.org.) Obama’s Campaign paid ACORN’s subsidiary Citizens Services, Inc. $800,000, which the Campaign originally reported to the Federal Election Commission as polling, event staging and advance work, when it was actually “get-out-the-vote.” (David M. Brown, “Obama To Amend Report On $800,000 In Spending,” Pittsburgh Tribune Review, 8/22/08.)

Obama’s own words last November to ACORN sum up his long political association with ACORN: “’I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.’” “Obamacorn,” Id. In December 2007, Obama “’promised to implement ACORN’s agenda as president.’” Id. That same month Obama told the Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum that even before he was inaugurated, “’we’ll be calling all of you (community organizers) in to help us shape the agenda.’” Id. Obama pledged, “We’re gonna be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.” Id.

Every true American should be afraid of that pledge. Combining ACORN’s left-wing social change agenda, its in-your-face intimidation tactics and its apparent willingness to be involved with voter registration fraud, with Obama’s far left-wing Socialist redistribution of wealth philosophy, will be dangerous to our free market system. (See, e. g. Investor’s Business Daily, Series “The Audacity of Socialism,” www.ibdeditorials.com), and search under Special Series for a multipart series on Obama’s Socialist Philosophy and his Socialist and Communist mentors.

Obama in the White House with Pelosi and Reid in charge of Congress will be dangerous to our economy and our National Defense. Socialism kills initiative. Obama and the Democrats don’t understand what makes America work and why we have been, up until now, the ‘last great hope of mankind’. McCain/Palin and the Republican Party are our only hope for the future of this great country.

Why aren’t voters paying attention? Please tell your friends and help them understand that our values and progress as a nation are at stake. The liberal press is pointing our country in the wrong direction. I’m amazed that many decent, thoughtful people don’t seem to understand economics and human nature. Don’t let them destroy the freedom and opportunities that made America the envy of the world.
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For more information on Saul Alinsky, who wrote several books including Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971) Random House, google him and/or see below:
Reprinted from www.americanthinker.com/:
“The agitator's job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the "realization" that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations will see imminent "self-interest" in granting whatever it is that will cause the harassment to cease.

In these methods, euphemistically labeled "community organizing," Obama had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he ever got anywhere.”

Bush and McCain Tried to Increase The Regulation of Fannie and Freddie, But the Democrats in Congress Stopped Them

George Bush and John McCain tried repeatedly to reign in and regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but the Democrats, who created and grew these Government sponsored agencies (“GSE’s”), stopped them each time. Under Clinton the GSE’s had been greatly expanding their loans to borrowers, who did not qualify for loans under normal lending standards. On September 30, 1999, The New York Times quoted Franklin Raines, Clinton’s appointee as CEO of Fannie, as saying, “’Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for millions of families in the 1990’s by reducing down payment requirements.” The Times article went on to say, “In moving…into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.” “Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Lending,” The New York Times, 9/30/99, www.nytimes.com.

As a result of the Clinton era extension of risk at Fannie and Freddie, in 2003 and again in 2005, the Bush Administration introduced legislation to increase the regulatory oversight of Fannie and Freddie by increasing the review and control power of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight over the GSE’s. On September 11, 2003, The New Times acknowledged Bush’s efforts by stating, “The Bush Administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.” John McCain was a co-sponsor of the ’05 legislation and stood up in the Senate and fought hard for its passage. The Democratic opposition was led by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, first as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee in’03 and in ’05 as the Chairman of the Committee, and by Barney Frank, in ’03 as the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and in ’05 as its Chairman.

Fannie and Freddie donated millions of dollars to compliant members of Congress and various left-wing groups to make sure that no reform, or at least no meaningful reform, was enacted. “Saddest Thing About This Mess: Congress Had Chance To Stop It,” Investor’s Business Daily, 9/29/08, p. 1, www.ibdeditorials.com. Franklin Raines, Clinton’s appointee as CEO of Fannie stated in 1999, “’We manage our political risk with the same intensity that we manage our credit interest rate risk.’” Id. Since 1989, Dodd has received more campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie than any other member of Congress. Frank came in 5th among Representatives and 16th overall. “Congress Lies Low To Avoid Bailout Blame,” Investor’s Business Daily, 1/19/08, www.ibdeditorials.com. This article, based on contributions from 1989 to 2008, also listed Barack Obama as third overall, but several more recent reports have said Obama had moved into second place in Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions, despite the fact that he has only been in the Senate less than four years. The Dodd and Frank efforts to block regulatory reform of Fannie and Freddie were backed up by most Democrats, including the entire Democratic Black Caucus. See, “Saving Our Economy: What’s Next,” on Fox News Channel, 10/5/08.

When will the liberal press get this story out?

Clinton, Fannie, Freddie and the Subprime Mess

Clinton’s Revisions to The Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie Led to this Subprime Mess

In the beginning of the Bill Clinton administration, Clinton had the Democratic-controlled Congress pass amendments to Pres. Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (the “CRA”). These amendments increased the requirements on banks to make loans into low income neighborhoods and provided for the securitization of mortgages including those to low income persons (“Subprime Mortgages”). Clinton also raised the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac requirements to buy moderate and low income mortgages and securitize them to the public. See, “How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable,” Investor’s Business Daily, 9/25/08, p. 1, www.ibdeditorials.com. With the Clinton amendments, the mortgage backed security (“MBS”) market was launched and it rapidly turned into a multi-billion dollar market. MBS, including Subprime Mortgages, were sold to the public, to mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds here and around the world.

Clinton’s idea of multicultural housing policy was to bring housing ownership to low income persons who could not afford to own a home (i.e. “were bad credit risks”) or in some cases they may have been discriminated against because of race or the poor neighborhood in which they lived. The mechanism was to require all Federally Chartered Banks to make loans into poor neighborhoods, and banks that did not meet the requirements of the CRA could be barred from opening branches or merging with other banks, thus limiting their growth prospects. Four government agencies audited the banks to determine their CRA Rating. Community groups, such as Acorn, could bring lawsuits to enjoin proposed mergers, if Acorn or another community group did not think that the banks involved had made enough loans into poor neighborhoods. It sounded like a noble idea, and anyone who opposed it was usually labeled a racist. Investors Daily Business (IBD) has written a series of articles on how the CRA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to the subprime mess, starting on September 23, 2008 on page 1 with an article entitled “’Crony’ Capitalism Is Root Cause of Fannie and Freddie Troubles,” search: www.ibdeditorials.com.

After the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, Clinton decided to increase the low and moderate income lending requirements of Fannie and Freddie though administrative agencies, rather than dealing with an uncooperative Republican Congress. In 1995 Clinton ordered his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to rewrite the CRA Rules. The rewritten rules increased the numerical quotas and added new measures for “diversity” in the banks’ loan portfolios. Id., “Clinton-Era Rewrite.” After Andrew Cuomo became Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1997-2001), Clinton got Cuomo to raise the low and moderate income lending requirements of Fannie and Freddie again and to reduce the capital requirements to 2.5% vs. 10% for banks. See, e.g. Id.

The stage was set for Clinton’s appointments of Jim Johnson and Franklin D. Raines, sequentially, as the head of Fannie. There are strong indications that both men played fast and loose with Fannie’s books and took out millions of dollars in compensation. Raines stretched the debt-to-equity of Fannie and failed to write off non-performing mortgages to maximize the value of his bonus and stock options. The Fannie and Freddie total portfolio of mortgages exceeded $5.4 trillion. When the mortgages they insured are also considered, they wound up standing behind approximately 90% of the mortgage market. See, Id. “’Crony’ Capitalism.” After Raines finally left Fannie in 2005, multiple audits kept finding more and more financial problems in Fannie’s financial statements. Fannie was not able to file reasonably clean financial statements until early 2008. Both Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines have served as economic advisors to Obama. Id.

NASA Reports Earth Cooled

NASA’s Goddard Institute and three other major agencies that track the Earth’s temperature reported that the Earth cooled 0.7 degrees Celsius in 2007, taking the temperatures to where they were in 1930. This drop was the fastest since modern equipment has been used to measure the Earth’s temperature. Also, NASA’s Ulysses project reported the intensity of the solar wind was at its lowest level since the beginning of the space age. In addition, sunspots are at an extremely low level. For the first time since June 1913, we had a whole month this past August (2008) in which no visible sunspots were generated. Increased solar wind and sunspot activity increases the temperature on Earth, and decreases in these activities result in Earth’s temperature decreasing.

The sun’s intensity changes in fairly regular patterns, causing corresponding cooling and warming periods on Earth. Changes in the sun’s magnetic field appear to cause changes in sunspots in 11-year cycles. Longer cycles, called a Maunder Minimum, can lead to extended periods of extreme cold such as occurred in the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550-1850). For more information on this Global cooling detected by America’s top scientific agencies go to “The Day The Earth Cooled,” at www.ibdeditorials.com and search September 26, 2008.

It is just amazing, but the same IBD article said that as NASA was announcing that Earth is cooling at a rapid rate, ten Northeastern states lead by left-wing liberals entered into a coalition to impose a carbon cap-and-tax system that will wreak havoc with their economies. After the Lieberman-Warner economy-killing cap-and-tax bill died in Congress, these states should not be permitted to try to kill interstate commerce from the Potomac to the Maine-Canadian border. This interstate pact sounds like a violation of the Federal Commerce Clause. Clearly, more scientific information should be gathered and analyzed before making hasty decisions that devastate the economies of the entire Northeast.

[For deep background on long-term climate changes in North America, an interesting recent article you could peruse is “How Dogs Came to Run The World” on page 18 in July-August 2008 Natural History, published by The American Museum of Natural History. For background on long-term climate change in Europe the October 2008 National Geographic, stating on page 34, has an excellent article on how increasing cold weather from an advancing ice age was probably the primary cause of the end of the Neanderthals, due in part because their large bodies required about twice as many calories as modern man.]

Energy Freedom Day

Some people are calling October 1st, Energy Freedom Day, because that is the day the Congressional bans on offshore drilling and the development of oil shale will end. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had every intention of extending the ban. However, with $4 dollar gasoline, about $700 billion being sent overseas each year to foreign exporters of oil, many of whom are hostile to us and large amounts of it going into the hands of terrorists, public opinion changed rapidly. Some opinion polls showed that 67% of Americans are in favor of offshore drilling. The American people expressed outrage that the bans were unnecessarily limiting domestic supply and raising the price of gasoline and heating oil.

At the start of summer driving season, Nancy Pelosi shut down the House of Representatives for a five week vacation, rather than taking up the energy issue. When Republican representatives continued to discuss the issue, Nancy Pelosi turned off the lights. With this type of conduct in the background, grassroots citizen activist groups, such as Americans for Prosperity and many others, went out to the people to raise awareness and put pressure on members of Congress. Inside Congress the effort toward energy freedom was spearheaded by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Congressman Jeb Hensarling of Texas. To find out more about issues involved and the activities these grassroots citizen activist groups do outside of Congress and their battles with Congress to release more of our own domestic energy go to www.americansforprosperity.org and their related blog site. Congress did not add the two ban extensions to a major spending bill recently, but we must be ever vigilant, because they may try to sneak the extensions into another Bill.

Our plentiful domestic energy sources include water, wind, solar, bio-fuels, sugar ethanol, oil, gas, oil shale, gas shale, coal, coal to liquids and gas to liquids. Are you in favor of developing these domestic sources to make our economy strong, provide jobs, improve our balance of payments, and strengthen the dollar, among many other benefits?

Mortgages Generate Cash Every Month

Everybody is forgetting that mortgages generate cash every month. About 95% of mortgages nationwide are performing. That means large quantities of cash are being received by mortgage holders every month. The fact that there is no market for mortgages does not mean mortgages do not have value. Any private financial firm or government entity that does not have to mark-to-market every quarter or meet debt-to-equity requirements, and has deep pockets, can collect that cash flow every month. When and if the market improves, those mortgages can be sold at a profit. There is more value here than just buying low and hoping the market improves to sell high. You are paid as you wait. Some smart people have figured this out, like Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

The method of calculating the present value of a future stream of payments is called a Discounted Cash Flow model and is taught in every business school in the nation. With conservative assumptions on default rates and recovery values, a reasonable present value of a group of mortgages can be estimated. As long as the Federal Government does not pay more than a reasonable value, with a margin for error, the Government should recover its investment in the mortgages it buys under the proposed program. Lawrence Kudlow agrees that between the cash generated each month and the Government's selling after the market improves, the Taxpayers could come out ahead. See, http://www.ibdeditorials.com/, "How The Plan Turns A Profit For Taxpayers," posted 9/29/30, and appearing in the 9/30/08 edition of IBD.

This program should not cost taxpayers anything. That is as long as politicians do not add to the bill any of their pet projects, pork or give-backs to their favorite lobbying groups. For example, the word is out that some Democrats want to set up a fund that would generate money for left wing organizations like Acorn. To read about this ploy, go to http://www.ibdeditorials.com/ and search on September 26, 2008 for "Rescuing ACORN". This discredited group continues to register phony voters, as documented by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal in his recent book "Stealing Elections". There was also a story about Acorn’s voter fraud activities on Fox News today.

What do you think about these issues?