How Obama Bankrupted Black Homeowners

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Investors Business Daily:

The Obama Record: The Obama camp's running a new ad reminding African-Americans of all he's done for them as they weather an economic crisis he "inherited." Left out is his own role in their predicament.

The press has never questioned the president about his involvement. But his fingerprints are there.

Before the crisis, Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn't afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.

Many are now in foreclosure. In fact, the lead client in one of his class-action suits has since lost her home and filed bankruptcy.

First some background: Obama focused on "housing rights" when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — was the father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term "redlining" to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.

McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, he worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight's radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People's Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.

At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.

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They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank's headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.

The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton's top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.