As this financial debacle has unfolded over the past few days, I keep hearing about the controversial group ACORN. I'm no student of economics but I've been trying to read up on some of these issues because I think it's important to be informed. So I decided to read up on ACORN.
ACORN is an acronym for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Their official function is to register voters and support housing. They are all-out Democratic supporters yet have been plagued by charges of voter fraud. Ken Blackwell, writing for "National Review" reports that ACORN personnel "are facing criminal charges in over a dozen states."
As it turns out, this is one of the groups that pushed banks into making bad housing loans. This whole process goes back to Carter and the Community Reinvestment Act, which was revived by Clinton. The short version is that this legislation required banks or mortgage lenders to make loans to folks for homes that would not normally be able to afford them; if they failed to do so they would face harsh penalties. ACORN pushed to get these folks into homes that they actually could not afford. Now the irony: this group was set to receive money from the originally proposed Democratic bailout plan. And guess which famous community organizer went to work for ACORN after graduating from Harvard?
Now that Mrs. Pelosi has given her inflamatory, partisan speech before the vote today, the speech in which she blamed Republicans for the whole mess, the bailout vote is once again off the table. But Mrs. Pelosi is wrong in blaming the Republicans wholly for the whole thing. As I've said before, there is plenty of blame to go around but consider this quote from Blackwell's article (and which I have stated here before, as well):
"Republicans have tried to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Republican attempts to reform them in 1999 failed. In 2003, when Alan Greenspan testified about how Fannie and Freddie’s loose practices could endanger our financial system, it was Democrat Barney Frank who said these institutions were fundamentally sound, and should be more aggressive in getting loans to low-income people. In 2005, a Republican reform passed the Senate Banking Committee on a party-line vote, only to be blocked by Democrats from passing the full Senate. And in 2006 when John McCain spoke on the Senate floor of the need to reform Fannie and Freddie immediately, Democrats (including Barack Obama) would not respond."
My bottom line is this: those folks in Washington need to put silly partisan politics behind them and get this mess straightened out. There's lots of time later for the blame-game, but meanwhile, the stock market dropped nearly 800 points today. Quit grandstanding and take care of business!
