Sunday, September 28, 2008

Bailout to pass, sans ACORN provision?

It seems an agreement in principle has been reached on the credit bailout bill, minus the detestable ACORN provision. The link may require a login, so here are the relevant paragraphs:
Congressional leaders and the Bush administration this morning said they had struck an accord to insert the government deeply into the nation's financial markets, agreeing to spend up to $700 billion to relieve Wall Street of troubled assets backed by faltering home mortgages.

[ ... ]

Democrats also made a number of concessions, abandoning demands that bankruptcy judges be empowered to modify home mortgages on primary residences for people in foreclosure. They also agreed not to dedicate a portion of any profits from the bailout program to an affordable housing fund that Republicans claimed would primarily assist social service organizations that support the Democratic Party, the official said.
They don't specifically mention ACORN in the article, but they're one of the groups that would have benefited from the profit carve-out.

Since the provision called for a portion (20% !) of any profits realized from the bailout to be allocated, there's no guarantee that ACORN would have seen any money from it. Just the same, this was a spectacularly sleazy effort on the part of congressional Democrats to reward a group with a history of fraudulently registering Democrats to vote over the past 10 years.

Issues of voter fraud aside, ACORN is also involved in helping low income people in securing financing for home purchases, and it's that fund for which the profits were earmarked. And it's those very same high-risk subprime mortgages that caused this mess in the first place.

Update: Just out of curiosity, I went to ACORN's web site to see what kind of bitching and moaning might be going on there, and got this odd error:


3 comments:

Mark said...

I wonder how Laura Richardson - she of the foreclosed homes and unpaid tax and utility bills - shall vote.

Mark said...

Oh - and the lender who foreclosed, then 'rescinded' the foreclosure? None other than WaMu.

Eric said...

Is this another game of "Name That Party"?