Dirty Democrats

ACORN’s Foreclosure Fraud & Obama’s Part: “
 

Banks have to be evaluated and given CRA report cards that are drawn up by government examiners. The law had nebulous criteria originally but this changed when the Clinton administration promulgated a 1995 regulation requiring those assessing a bank’s CRA compliance to seek out the opinions of housing and consumer advocates.

Enter ACORN.

This regulatory change allowed the community organizers of ACORN to pressure banks to lend money to their constituencies whether they were creditworthy or not. Instead of taking a principled stance banks caved in and wrote loans they shouldn’t have while paying out millions of dollars in protection money to ACORN as the cost of doing business.

Around the same time that banks began to ramp up their risky subprime lending, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under intense political pressure to service the subprime market, created a new investment vehicle in the secondary market known as the mortgage-backed security (MBS). Banks were less choosy about borrowers because they knew they could offload their risky loans on MBS investors.

So, ACORN helped to cause the mortgage bubble by strongarming banks into making loans they shouldn’t have. And cheering them on was ACORN’s lawyer, Barack Obama, who contributed to the increasingly hostile environment for banks when he represented plaintiffs in the 1995 class action lawsuit Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank. The suit demanded that Citibank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. The bank settled the case three years later and reportedly agreed to beef up its lending to unqualified applicants.

ACORN refuses to acknowledge the role that it and the CRA played in the current crisis on Wall Street, and now President Obama supports stronger enforcement of the disastrous law.

That’s ACORN’s involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis in a nutshell.

 Case Profile of Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank

94 C 4094 ( N.D. Ill. )                Fair Housing/Lending/Insurance                 FH-IL-0011

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.

This case has received a good deal of press and blogger attention because one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers was Barack Obama, then just a couple of years out of law school.

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 settled the case on May 12, 1998, with an agreement that provided for waiver of some fees for class members, should they reapply for a loan, and also for various procedures to ensure that Citibank followed its own loan policies in a race neutral way.

Andrew Nash – 06/02/2008

The court papers are at the links below. 
http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/detail.php?id=10112

1:94-cv-04094 (N.D. Ill.) 05/12/1998
FH-IL-0011-9000 | PDF | Detail  http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-9000.pdf

FH-IL-0011-0010 | PDF | Detail Document Source: District Court

http://clearinghouse.wustl.edu/chDocs/public/FH-IL-0011-0010.pdf

Check out the rest of this page.  Has some rather interesting links.  I have not had a chance to review them  yet, this bears more investigation by the people of the United States, namely you and me. 

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(Via Conservative Thoughts.)

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