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How Obama Bankrupted his Black Clients Before He Bankrupted America

Daniel Greenfield

There are things that Obama doesn’t do well, like run a country. But there are things that he does well and first and foremost 0f those is taking care of Number One. The 1 percent of the 1 percent that is him.
The Daily Caller’s extended article on Obama’s loan discrimination lawsuits and their consequences show us once again the two faces of the left, the face of the social activist battling injustice and the other face of the professional con artist who exploits the greed of his marks to wreck their lives and extract money from the system.

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.

Should Obama’s clients have gotten their loans or were they discriminated against? The track record is pretty hard to argue with.

Even before the 2007 crisis, at least 48 of Obama’s 186 African-American clients bankrupted or received foreclosure notices… The stalled economy was exacerbated by the Wall Street crash, and by July 2012, Obama’s 186 clients had received at least 188 bankruptcy and foreclosure notices.
At least 46 of Obama’s 186 clients have declared bankruptcy since 1996, often multiple times… There were 186 client-enrollees in Obama’s class-action lawsuit. Of those, at least 88 got foreclosure notices or went bankrupt. As few as 19 of the 98 remaining clients own homes today

And the consequences weren’t just limited to the unqualified borrowers on whose behalf the class action lawsuit was filed. The consequences of the “victory” rebounded on black communities and the city as a whole.

At least 55 of Obama’s 186 clients received foreclosure notices, likely costing the city taxpayers roughly $12.5 million.
Each foreclosure cost neighbors, most of whom are African-Americans, up to $220,000 in lost property value, according to a study of Chicago foreclosures in 2003 and 2004 by the left-of-center Homeownership Preservation Foundation.

That led to a rise in crime and the usual domino effect of declining neighborhoods. But Obama was always ahead of the game.

While the settlement provided $950,000 for the lawyers, it provided $20,000 for each of the three named plaintiffs, and $360,000 in benefits to be divided among the 183 other clients. 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 made more money off the lawsuit than the named plaintiffs did, forget the unnamed ones. Before too long the named and unnamed plaintiffs were all in trouble, but Obama had already used his participation in the lawsuit as a springboard to a political career. And that’s not a unique skill… this is a game that the left plays all the time. Their activists don’t help people, they exploit people.
And nationally the disaster spread.

Progressive activists’ ambition instead contributed greatly to a housing bubble that burst in 2007, crashed the nation’s economy in 2008, wiped out at least $4 trillion in equity, kept unemployment above 8 percent for four years, and damaged the intended beneficiaries of looser mortgage lending standards.

But it’s a given that once in office, Obama would do his utmost to worsen the disaster. And he has.

n the White House, Obama has continued to intensify regulatory pressure on banks to provide more risky loans to African-Americans and Latinos. He has used lawsuits to fund his allies. And taxpayers are now unwittingly contributing to a re-inflation of housing prices.