Community Organizers = Bad Economy???

ACORN links challenge Barack Obama’s credibility


HANK HARWELL; Browns Point
Published: September 22nd, 2008 12:30 AM

Democrats tout Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer at the same time they’re complaining about the state of the economy. Well it’s important to connect the dots between these two topics.

As a community organizer, Obama worked directly for and with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). In 1992, he was hired to run a voter registration effort. He later became a trainer for the group, as well as its lawyer in election law cases.

ACORN has not only been involved in numerous instances of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation and vote-for-pay scams, the organization also took a lead role in pushing for and getting the underwriting standards for mortgages loosened with the support of liberal politicians in Congress. This was in spite of warnings that looser standards could lead to wide-scale defaults.

Once the standards were loosened, liberal politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd pushed financial institutions to make more and more loans to homeowners who had little ability to repay them.

The result: the current economic crises.

So this raises a couple of important questions.

• What has Obama done to clean up the corruption in ACORN or has he just been complicit?
• Why is he so vocal about the weakness in our economy when the organization he worked for and his colleagues have been primary contributors to the current downturn that coincided with the Democrats gaining control of Congress?