Fact Check: Obama Had More to Do With 2008 Economic Meltdown Than Bush Ever Did

Here’s something you’ll never read about in the liberal media. Barack Obama played a leading role in the mortgage crisis of 2008 that sunk the US economy.

In his early activist days, Barack Obama the community organizer sued banks to ease lending practices.

State Sen. Barack Obama and crackpot priest Michael Pfleger led a protest in Chicago in January 2000. (NBC 5 Week of January 3, 2000)
In 1994, Barack Obama was one of the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit, alleging that Citibank had engaged in practices that discriminated against minorities. The lawsuit forced the bank to ease its lending practices.
The Daily Caller reported:

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…
…Obama has pursued the same top-down mortgage lending policies in the White House.
Obama’s lawsuit was one element of a national “anti-redlining” campaign led by Chicago’s progressive groups, who argued that banks unfairly refused to lend money to people living within so-called “redlines” around African-American communities. The campaign was powered by progressives’ moral claim that their expertise could boost home ownership among the United States’ most disadvantaged minority, African-Americans.

Then there’s Bush…
On the flip side, President George W. Bush warned the Democratic Congress 17 times in 2008 alone about the systemic consequences of financial turmoil at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and also put forward thoughtful plans to reduce the risk that either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would encounter such difficulties.
Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President’s repeated attempts to reform the supervision of these entities were thwarted by the legislative maneuvering of those who emphatically denied there were problems.
To this day Barack Obama blames Bush for the 2008 economic meltdown.
The truth is, it was Obama not Bush who destroyed the economy.

Posted by Jim Hoft on Wednesday, September 5, 2012, 2:02 PM