Obama Sued Citibank Under CRA to Force it to Make Bad Loans - UPDATED
September 30, 2008 — iusbvision
UPDATE V: AUDIO - OBAMA SAID IN 2007 THAT GIVING SUB-PRIME LOANS TO PEOPLE WHO COULDN’T AFFORD THEM WAS A GOOD IDEA!!! Hotair.com comments HERE.
“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.” — Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007
Do you remember how we told you that the Democrats and groups associated with them leaned on banks and even sued to get them to make bad loans by abusing the Community Reinvestment Act (see HERE and HERE)? The abuse of this act by ACORN and officials like Janet Reno was a factor in causing the economic crisis. The harasment suits filed under this act were used to get banks to lower credit standards and hand out high risk loans. Fellow bloggers have dug up the lawsuit below while researching Obama’s legal career. It is a typical example of an ACORN harassment lawsuit.
In these lawsuits, ACORN makes a bogus claim of Redlining (denying poor people loans because of their ethnic heritage). They protest and get the local media to raise a big stink. This stink means that the bank faces thousands of people closing their accounts and get local politicians to lobby to stop the bank from doing some future business, expansions and mergers. If the bank goes to court, they will win, but the damage is already done because who is going to launch a big campaign to get the bank’s reputation back?
It is important to understand the nature of these lawsuits and what their purpose is. ACORN filed tons of these lawsuits and ALL of them allege racism.
Case Name
Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank Fair Housing/Lending/Insurance
Docket / Court 94 C 4094 ( N.D. Ill. ) FH-IL-0011
State/Territory Illinois
Case Summary
Plaintiffs filed their class action lawsuit on July 6, 1994, alleging that Citibank had engaged in redlining practices in the Chicago metropolitan area in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), 15 U.S.C. 1691; the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. 3601-3619; the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; and 42 U.S.C. 1981, 1982. Plaintiffs alleged that the Defendant-bank rejected loan applications of minority applicants while approving loan applications filed by white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories. Plaintiffs sought injunctive relief, actual damages, and punitive damages.
U.S. District Court Judge Ruben Castillo certified the Plaintiffs’ suit as a class action on June 30, 1995. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 162 F.R.D. 322 (N.D. Ill. 1995). Also on June 30, Judge Castillo granted Plaintiffs’ motion to compel discovery of a sample of Defendant-bank’s loan application files. Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 162 F.R.D. 338 (N.D. Ill. 1995).
The parties voluntarily dismissed the case on May 12, 1998, pursuant to a settlement agreement.
Plaintiff’s Lawyers Alexis, Hilary I. (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Childers, Michael Allen (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Clayton, Fay (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Cummings, Jeffrey Irvine (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Love, Sara Norris (Virginia)
FH-IL-0011-9000
Miner, Judson Hirsch (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Obama, Barack H. (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Wickert, John Henry (Illinois)
FH-IL-0011-9000
UPDATE: Hotair.com comments on this story HERE.
New York Post Article HERE:
THE seeds of today’s financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in “subprime” loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America’s financial institutions.
The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards. Yet he supported Talbott in every conceivable way. He trained her personal staff and other aspiring ACORN leaders, he consulted with her extensively, and he arranged a major boost in foundation funding for her efforts.
And, as the leader of another charity, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama channeled more funding Talbott’s way - ostensibly for education projects but surely supportive of ACORN’s overall efforts.
UPDATE II: Fox News gets on the story
UPDATE III: CNS News Analysis
Under the Clinton administration, federal regulators began using the act to combat “red-lining,” a practice by which banks loaned money to some communities but not to others, based on economic status. “No loan is exempt, no bank is immune,” warned then-Attorney General Janet Reno. “For those who thumb their nose at us, I promise vigorous enforcement.”
The Clinton-Reno threat of “vigorous enforcement” pushed banks to make the now infamous loans that many blame for the current meltdown, Richman said. “Banks, in order to not get in trouble with the regulators, had to make loans to people who shouldn’t have been getting mortgage loans.”
This threat combined with the government backing of Fannie and Freddie set the stage for the current uncertainty, because the “banks could just sell the loans off to Fannie or Freddie,” who could buy them with little regard for negative financial outcomes, Richman said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=36048
UPDATE IV: Its about time …
Update VI: Investors business daily reports more on Obama’s work with ACORN
As the New York Times reports, “Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure.” Is the reason the fact that the slush fund for ACORN in the original bill, siphoning off 20% of any future profits for such activist groups, was trimmed from the tree?
Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers’ homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.
In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago’s ACORN to run training sessions in “direct action.” That’s the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called “Ninja” loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn’t afford them.
CRA was designed to increase minority homeownership. Whenever a bank wanted to grow or expand, ACORN would file complaints that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities in providing home loans. Agitators would then be unleashed.
Chicago’s ACORN used Alinsky’s tactics against institutions such as Bell Federal Savings and Loan and Avondale Federal Savings. In September 1992, the Chicago Tribune described the group’s agenda as “affirmative action lending.”
Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda.
In 1995, Kurtz reports, Obama chaired the committee that increased funding of ACORN and other community organizers. The committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and governmental ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.”
The CRA empowered regulators to punish banks that failed to “meet the credit needs” of “low-income, minority and distressed neighborhoods.” It gave groups such as ACORN a license and a means to intimidate banks, claiming they were “redlining” poor and minority neighborhoods. ACORN employed its tactics in 1991 by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA.
As a former White House staff economist writes in the American Thinker, Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 suit against redlining. ACORN was also a driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton administration that greatly expanded the CRA and helped spawn the current financial crisis.
Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. Last November, he told the group, “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.” Indeed he has. Obama was and is fully aware of what ACORN was doing with the money and expertise he provided. The voters should be aware on Nov. 4 of the roles of both in creating the current crisis.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=307667123149723
UPDATE VII: Some on the left are saying that SNOPES.com has debunked this story, this is not so. Snopes is talking about another story that makes a different claim about this same lawsuit. It does not dispute that this lawsuit was one of a series of lawsuits that were filed by ACORN using Redlining and racism allegations to lower credit standards. It does not dispute that all of the ACORN CRA lawsuits claimed redlining and racism. It does not dispute that at other times ACORN used intimidation tactics against bank managers to try and make them give high risk loans. ACORNS activities have been widely reported by many news outfits in the last few days. We are glad that we were one of the first to get this story right.
On CNN today: Acorn engaging in massive vote fraud.
by BurnTheShips 45 Replies latest social current
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skeeter1
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skeeter1
Cigarettes and Money for Voter Registration Signature....a bunch of news articles hitting the street on this one.
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1 Voter, 72 Registrations ... How Do You Spell Voter Fraud? ACORN
The controversial group, ACORN, is being singled out in yet another voter registration scandal. And, as the headline reads, an Ohio man says that he was bribed to register an astonishing 72 times.
Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com
The New York Post is reporting that over the last eighteen months, 19-year-old Freddie Johnson has filled out 72 voter registration cards after being bribed by aggressive activists from the left-leaning group called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
A spokesman for ACORN says that they do not "tolerate" or allow their workers to pay people to sign the voter-registration cards.
ACORN's political wing has endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 federal election. A spokesman for the Obama campaign said that ACORN is not involved in their "get-out-the-vote" drive.
Johnson, who works as a clerk at a cell phone kiosk in Cleveland, claims that he was given cigarettes or cash to go and fill out the registration forms.
Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up. The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?'.
And Mr. Johnson? When asked if he was going to exercise his constitutional right to vote: "Yeah, I've registered enough - I might as well vote." -
still-fading
I keep hearing about 2000/2004 elections, ACORN can be partially responsible of the chaos. If not for the fraud, Bush would have won by a hell of a lot more, eliminating the close margins that raised eyebrows. What is wrong with proving who you are while voting? Why is the left always squashing any attempts to tighten up voting guidelines? People have to recognize, we do not have an individual Constitutional right to vote. The Constitution simply states that voters can not be discriminated against.
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skeeter1
Right on. I am all for EVERYONE voting. I am also for honorable methods of recruiting unregistered voters. Honest vote casting and counting are the central tenants to our representation style government.
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still-fading
I think the certral tenet is individual rights, freedom and liberty.
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frozen one
I fail to understand why the hate filled right is making an issue about ACORN registering the dead. It is not ACORN's fault! It is a documented, scientific fact that the dead are, at best, really forgetful. When the dead are out wandering around and stumble across an ACORN voter registration table they go ahead and register because they forget they are A) dead and B) they can't vote anyway just like convicted felons. If the friendly ACORN people offer the dead a few cigarettes to register, that just sweetens the deal for the dead because the dead also forget that cigarettes kill which is a moot point for the dead anyway, but I digress. My point is that the hateful right should not condemn the dead for registering, they should show some compassion for the dead...and the ACORN people registering them because frankly the dead are stinky to deal with.
I don't even want to raise another possibilty regarding the right making this an issue, but I will. Obama haters have tried to quietly point out that Obama is black. They have also suggested that Obama is a Muslim. Is it possible that by pointing out the dead registered voters the Obama haters are implying that Obama is actually a practitioner of Voodoo and the dead registering are part of Obama's massive Voodoo zombie army that could produce the margin for victory in key precincts? That would be shameless!