An interesting bit of history
Did not know this but it makes perfect sense. From
The Daily Caller:
With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago�s African-Americans
President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.
As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans.
The startling failure rate among Obama�s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller�s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama worked on as an attorney for the lead plaintiff.
A bit more -- Obama does the blame-game:
Obama�s Role
The Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1998 that Obama claimed $23,000 in billable hours for his role in the lawsuit. That role was limited, partly because he was networking his way toward his 1996 election to the Illinois Senate. But he stayed with the firm until 2004, and it was his lawsuit.
Obama also won massive campaign donations from the mortgage industry, including at least $126,349 between 1989 and 2004.
He sought public credit for the lawsuit: His employer submitted a docket to the court that listed him as an attorney for the three named plaintiffs in the case. The docket bound Obama�s name to the lawsuit � and to the 186 clients who would soon follow.
Obama also used his courtroom work to win a keynote speaking slot at an important conference of Chicago housing groups in 1996. Friends said ��he�s really thoughtful, [and] he�s done some work as an attorney in these communities,�� Joel Bookman, director of programs for the influential Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which organized the event, told TheDC.
Obama endorsed the national subprime policy, telling a Wall Street audience in September 2007 that �subprime lending started off as a good idea: Helping Americans buy homes who couldn�t previously afford to.�
But by then, the disastrous impact of the top-down subprime policy was obvious, so Obama so tried to push the blame on the banks. �They began to lower their standards. � Most everyone knew that some of these deals were just too good to be true,� he told his Wall Street audience, �but all that money flowing in made it tempting to look the other way.�
It's a big article -- six pages -- but lots of info and links. Obama was at the heart of this lawsuit and the lawsuit was at the heart of the housing bubble and subsequent recession.
Posted by DaveH at September 13, 2012 2:37 PM