Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The Swamp:

ACORN continues to fight back against Republican charges that it’s the cause of, among other evils, the housing meltdown which contributed to the global financial crisis.

We’re heroes, McCain’s a zero on the foreclosure crisis, is the community organizing group’s essential message. It issued a report today to that effect.

Here’s a summary from ACORN’s release:

Senator John McCain’s recent campaign ad, released October 10, 2008, bizarrely claimed,”ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is, ACORN has worked successfully to help tens of thousands of working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks. Over a ten‐year period, ACORN helped families build an estimated $6 billion of wealth through homeownership, and helped save another $6.2 billion in fees and interest by escaping subprime mortgages. At the same time, ACORN has led the fight against predatory lenders. For more than a decade, ACORN members have advocated for regulations to protect homeowners, and ACORN organizers and volunteers have been working day and night to help victims of the GOP economic meltdown to save their homes from foreclosure.

ACORN has a real record on the economy. ACORN organized major class action lawsuits against subrpime lenders (such as Household Finance Corporation and Wells Financial Corporation), winning millions back for consumers. ACORN campaigned nationwide against predatory lenders like New Century and Ameriquest. ACORN community leaders met directly with the head of the Federal Reserve and federal regulators and testified before Congress to warn about subprime lending and urge regulation.

In comparison, John McCain’s record on this is so limited that it is an embarrassment. There is not a single mention of predatory lending on documents from his senate website which date back to 1988. There is only 1 mention of foreclosure, coming recently from a speech he made in March of this year. This is an extremely deficient record from the Senator whose state has the third highest rate of foreclosure in the country. As a point of contrast, a search on acorn.org yields 479 hits about foreclosure, and 737 hits about predatory lending.

A couple of points that jump out from the report:

McCain has barely talked about the serious foreclosure crisis in his own state. As the report states:

Arizona ranks 3rd in the nation in its foreclosure rate, with one in every 182 households currently in foreclosure1. Yet a search of his entire Senate website only shows one throw-away line in a floor speech in which the foreclosure crisis makes an appearance as part of an acknowledgement that Americans were hurting economically. The speech was about earmarks.

Another goes to the heart of questions about McCain’s knowledge about the economy and economics. (McCain himself has famously said that he didn’t know a lot about the economy.)

The housing and financial crises emerged from a complicated combination of factors — the bursting of the tech bubble which led to investors seeking new investments, financial engineering of new and poorly understood financial instruments, home lenders ignoring long-held safe lending practices and very low interest rates over a several years, among other factors.

But McCain has pointed to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, recently taken over by the government, and ACORN as playing major roles in the meltdown.

Experts by and large don’t lay the genesis of the current problems with Fannie, Freddie and ACORN although the mortgage giants certainly contributed to the problem and some of the efforts to expand home ownership obviously went too far.

As ACORN says:

… In casting blame on ACORN, Senator McCain demonstrated a true misunderstanding of the cause of the financial crisis and in so doing belied the notion that he is qualified to solve it. Indeed, in looking at the totality of their work, the only available conclusion is that ACORN fought with all its might for a decade to prevent this crisis while Senator McCain sat on the sidelines and cheered on the deregulation of the financial services industry that paved the way for the nation’s economic collapse.