About
Frank Salvato
Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of
Terrorism Research for
BasicsProject.org a non-profit,
non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative. His
writing has been recognized by the US House International
Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict
Prevention. His organization partnered in producing the original
national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical
Islamist terrorism. He serves as the managing editor for The New
Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor
on FOX News Channel and is a regular guest on talk radio
including on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent
Radio Network and on The Captain's America Radio Show catering
to the US Armed Forces around the world. His opinion-editorials
have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The
Washington Times & Human Events and are syndicated nationally.
He is occasionally quoted in The Federalist. Mr. Salvato is
available for public speaking engagements.
Obama, ACORN &
Their Starring Role in the Mortgage Crisis October 10, 2008
Barack Obama, congressional Democrats and
Progressive-Left operatives – with the help of the mainstream media –
have done a great job of spinning culpability for the mortgage crisis
onto the Bush Administration, congressional Republicans and, in
particular, John McCain. This is a notable moment in the history of
political spin because as the facts present, Democrats and
Progressive-Leftists – not Republicans –are the ones directly
responsible for the current financial crisis in which our country is
embroiled. At the center of this culpability are Barack Obama and ACORN,
the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
In order to understand how Barack Obama and ACORN are directly to blame
for the mortgage meltdown, we first have to understand what ACORN is and
how Barack Obama was affiliated with them...and make no mistake; Barack
Obama was most definitely affiliated with ACORN.
The Roots of ACORN From a comprehensive and
thoroughly researched piece by Stanley Kurtz in the National Review
titled,
Inside Obama’s ACORN, we come to understand that ACORN has its
roots in the anti-capitalist tenets of the 1960s radical left group the
National Welfare Rights Organization. This
groups’ goal was to force a radical reconstruction of what they
described as “America’s unjust capitalist economy” by forcing the
elimination of eligibility restrictions for those trying to attain
inclusion on the welfare roles, thus creating an overloaded system, a
crisis, so as to affect that reconstruction.
Over the years, ACORN morphed its mission into one that champions a
diverse set of objectives, all with an overriding goal seated in the
tenets of anti-capitalism and the destruction of the US economy. The
group targets privately owned companies in their pursuit of unreasonably
crafted municipal living wage laws that have literally driven said
companies from the areas where jobs are needed. They continue their
campaign to eliminate welfare role eligibility restrictions as they
crusade to roll back welfare reform. And, in an area directly related to
our subject, they actively employ coercive tactics to manipulate
financial institutions into abandoning best business practice by
affording low-interest loans to unqualified borrowers.
It is important to understand this statement fully; “...they actively
employ coercive tactics to manipulate financial institutions into
abandoning best business practice by affording low-interest loans to
unqualified borrowers.”
In 1977, the
Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law by President Jimmy
Carter. This law requires financial institutions to offer credit,
including home ownership opportunities, to under-served populations.
Translated, the Community Reinvestment Act forced financial institutions
to offer credit – mortgages – to unqualified borrowers. To add teeth to
this law, provisions were included to punish financial institutions that
did not embrace the horrific business practice of lending money to those
unable to pay it back.
Because of the Community Reinvestment Act, any financial institution
that wants to expand or merge – any financial institution that has
earned the right to grow because of its utilization of good business
practices – has to prove it has complied with the Community Reinvestment
Act otherwise the growth move can be blocked through regulation set-up
to enforce the law. ACORN, under the guise of affecting “affordable
housing for the poor” routinely employs intimidation tactics (both
physical and verbal), public charges of racism and threatens to use the
Community Reinvestment Act to block business expansion. These actions
have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans
and “organizational contributions” (read: bribes) from America’s
financial institutions.
Indisputably, the actions of ACORN, in their intimidation of financial
institutions that make up the mortgage banking industry, serve as the
chief catalyst for the mortgage crisis and the financial meltdown we are
experiencing today. By coercing the mortgage banking industry into
lending to those who were unqualified to borrow, ACORN instigated the
collapse of the housing market and, as a result, is directly responsible
for qualified borrowers – you and I – being unable to secure legitimate
lines of credit today.
But how does this relate to Barack Obama?
Barack Obama’s Connection to
ACORN When a young Barack Obama was
first starting in his career as a “community organizer,” he caught the
eye of Madeleine Talbot, the Chicago chapter head of ACORN. Talbot was
so impressed with Obama’s organizational skills in his effort to
attain asbestos abatement at a low-income housing project that she
invited Obama to help train her own staff in the art of community
organizing.
In an article by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of
ACORN’s National Association Board, published in
Social Policy titled, Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama
Campaign, Barack Obama is cited as being a key figure in ACORN’s
yearly leadership-training seminars. Foulkes also exposes the fact that
the much-touted Project Vote campaign which Obama takes credit for
organizing was, in fact, in direct partnership with ACORN.
Barack Obama was retained to represent ACORN in a legal action regarding
an Illinois law addressing what has come to be known as “motor-voter”
voter registration. He was intentionally and specifically sought because
of his days working with Madeleine Talbot.
After Obama officially left ACORN and began to craft his political
career he tapped into his time at ACORN to field his volunteer staff.
Having trained many of the ACORN leaders in Chicago there was a
well-spring of enthusiasm for his candidacies throughout the
organization, candidacies that include his 1996 congressional campaign,
his 2000 State Senate campaign, his 2004 US Senate campaign and today’s
2008 presidential campaign. It should be noted here that Obama sought
and received endorsements from ACORN’s political arm for his political
contests.
A minimal effort into researching then Illinois State Senator Barack
Obama’s pet projects reveals that on several occasions he introduced
legislation complimentary to ACORN’s goals including legislation
addressing the municipal living wage and the financial sector. And when
Obama sat on the boards of the Woods Foundation and the Joyce Foundation
he was afforded the wherewithal to
direct grants to ACORN, which he did.
Putting Two-and-Two Together There are many, including
HotAir.com’s Ed Morrissey, who will
rightly point out that,
“It’s important not to get too
carried away with the ACORN connection in the collapse. The real trigger
came when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up all of these loans
and converting them into securities.”
But a gun doesn’t shoot without
bullets and ACORN’s manipulation of the mortgage banking community in
securing low-interest loans for unqualified borrowers manufactured the
“bullets” that were shot by the gun owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Every crisis begins with a single act but most often that act remains
hidden in the shadows of the crisis. It took years to uncover the
mechanics of the September 11th, 2001 attacks yet we understood all
those years of planning and training in a single moment. Hitler’s rise
to power didn’t begin with his ascension to chancellor, it began in a
Munich beer hall years before. And the movement that is incrementally
facilitating the encroachment of socialist democratic ideology in the
United States didn’t start in the 1960s, it started circa World War I.
In the case of the mortgage crisis and the subsequent financial meltdown
that has caused hundred-point slides in the stock market in recent days,
it started with training people – community activists and their
coordinators – how to coerce financial organizations into employing bad
business practices by providing loans to people who could never, ever
pay them back.
Barack Obama trained Madeleine Talbot’s budding ACORN staff how to
organize people to action. He returned yearly to provide
leadership-training seminars. And after ACORN employed the practice of
coercing financial institution into providing low-interest loans to
unqualified recipients Obama served as their legal counsel.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have acted as the mechanism for the
initiation of today’s financial crisis, but ACORN and Barack Obama exist
as the genesis, the single act that morphed into financial catastrophe
for our country and, very likely, the world. To deny this elementary
fact is to employ the math that got us into this mess.
And Barack Obama wants us to trust him with leading our country?
