The Daily Caller released an interesting report yesterday that alleges Barack Obama was one of the lead attorneys in a 1995 lawsuit against Citibank for discriminating against blacks in Chicago by denying them mortgage loans. According to the report, “nearly half of the 183 clients have defaulted or received foreclosure.”
I wonder if these poor oppressed people are better off now that they have received loans for which they were unqualified? I’m sure that Mr. Obama’s intentions were of the highest order.
Once again we face the disgusting underbelly of good intentions… consequences.
It is a very laudable goal for everyone to own their own house, but sadly you cannot issue such directives. Mr. Obama and his crowd have settled for the next best thing, intimidation with a hint of bribery. With the favors flowing out of Washington during the boomtimes, how could a bank such as Citi afford to be on the wrong side of public opinion? If everyone supports the underprivileged owning a home, only a monster would stand in their way. Enter the dragon-slaying community activist to level the playing field and force Citi to recognize the underprivileged of Chicago as not only human beings, but human beings with credit scores worthy of being loaned enough money to afford a house of their very own.
Well, all’s well that ends well. The underprivileged get a loan and Barack Obama feels good about himself, as well as a sizable check for his efforts on the community’s behalf.
Despite what may have happened throughout history, I feel that we would be hard pressed today to find a genuinely racist bank, even back in the Jim Crow era of the mid 1990s. Banks are in the business of making money and all money is the same color. If banks aren’t loaning money to black people in the poorer areas of Chicago, I would venture a guess that there is a slightly better reason than because they are black.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that it is a poor area. People looking to live in a poor neighborhood generally wouldn’t choose that neighborhood if they had the means to live elsewhere. If they don’t have the means to move elsewhere, they probably don’t have the means to pay off a relatively heavy mortgage. I suspect there is also a slightly higher crime rate in those types of neighborhoods. Low income and high crime are not the golden factors in securing a loan.
I don’t think I need to detail the many factors that go into the decision on the fate of a loan application, I think we all have had some experience in that trying event.
Now that we have some perspective on the consequences of forcing banks to loan money to people they didn’t trust to pay it back, I think we can all agree it didn’t work out well. Eventually the federal government was forced to bail out Citibank with 45 billion dollars. But if that is what it takes to defeat racism in the mortgage loan industry, I think it was well worth it.
If the leaders of our government have made it their life mission to secure loans for the undeserving with other people’s money, they might as well live up to their goal and just go ahead and start handing out other people’s money to the undeserving people who specialize in giving money to the undeserving.
You would think that Mr. Obama would be able to recognize that the cause he worked so hard on has resulted in the biggest disaster since the Great Depression.
Did it really benefit the plaintiffs? Most of them received no reward for their lawsuit except for a mortgage. Now half of them are losing those homes. I don’t know the situation of the ones who haven’t lost their home yet, but my gut tells me that they aren’t a whole lot better off. This is what happens in a world where consequences can be ignored. Sure you have a bad credit rating, but that doesn’t matter, that’s not your fault, you need a house. There is a reason why we have credit scores and it’s not just for the catchy jingles on the TV. They let the people with the money to loan know the likelihood of receiving their money back. Forcing a bank to loan those people money doesn’t change the fact that they were not up to the challenge of taking on such a large debt.
These loans have collapsed the economy even if the people have enjoyed their houses in the meantime. I think we would all be better off if they had waited until someone was willing to loan them money instead of forcing them to.
If this problem was isolated in Chicago it might not be as bad. But we all know it wasn’t.
All around the country, young Barack Obamas set forth to cure the nation’s ills. What they didn’t realize is that by taking the responsibility away from the people seeking the loans, they also removed the responsibility from those issuing them. Now the entire nation is bogged down as we continue to experience the consequences of these recklessly idealistic people.
It seems that despite the evidence Obama has not grasped his role in creating the crisis. He continues to insist on using other people’s money to try and make some people’s lives live up to what he thinks they should be.
Citibank failed because it loaned out too much money to people who couldn’t repay it. The federal government is following the same path. If Citibank and GM were too big to fail, I wonder if the same goes for the federal government?
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Stovepipe Sentinel 
Us credit rating has been down-graded and could be again soon. The National debt is calculated using today’s interest rates. If our credit rating falls further, The National debt could increase geometrically without borrowing another dime.