Bankers’ Greed Reason Behind Housing Crisis
October 31, 2009 by Guest Contributor
Filed under From the Left
No one has ever accused Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann of paying too much attention to facts or common sense. Yet it is still disheartening to see in “Time To Stop Amuck Acorn’s Bank Enablers” her peddling debunked myths about the Community Reinvestment Act and Acorn while her constituents suffer in the worst foreclosure crisis in generations.
Rep. Bachmann’s district has the single highest rate of foreclosure in all of Minnesota, higher even than the urban, low-income, multicultural district of neighboring Rep. Keith Ellison. She sure doesn’t act like it, though, casting votes against every piece of legislation that would aid homeowners suffering in this crisis, including allowing judicial modifications of mortgages and reining in abusive lending practices.
Rep. Bachmann thinks the CRA’s efforts at promoting minority and middle-class homeownership caused the crisis, so how does she explain her district’s severe crisis, when it is 93% white, only 6% poor — not exactly the kind of place the CRA aims to help? She doesn’t say.
The reality, of course, is that the explosion of bad loans in the last decade wasn’t driven by the 30-year old law, but by the exorbitant profits to be made from securitizing high-interest, subprime loans. It was greed, not good intentions, that paved this path to ruin.
Read the rest of this column by Austin King at Investor’s Business Daily.
Austin King, the director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center, needs to “mop up” his own organization currently under federal investigation for fraud in 14 states, with federal indictments in Nevada and Ohio before laughably blaming Bachmann and Wall Street for the current financial crisis. King fails to mention legislation pushed by Rep. Frank (D-MA) which encouraged practices that began and fostered the subprime mess. This would seem in ACORN’s best interest as Frank is also the congressional cheerleader for ACORN funding.
Trying to focus attention on Bachmann is a classic debating tactic, deflecting attention from widespread ACORN fraud. Bachmann’s legislation against taxpayer funds for CRA is protection for the American taxpayer, not disregard for the unfortunate circumstances of the foreclosures in her district. King’s article is a clear example of the inherent political bias of ACORN at taxpayer expense. The American taxpayer is tired of political hacks not interested in right and wrong but funding their own political greed.