(Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) speaks on the Congressional Floor in support of The American Housing Rescue & Foreclosure Prevention Act, H.R. 3221. He slammed the Bush Administration's poor handling and deregulation of the Mortgage Industry. Yet NACA CEO Bruce Marks (supposedly Foreclosure Prevention Guru) appears to have actually praised Bush's handling of the Mortgage Industry. I wonder why I haven't heard of Mr. Marks praising Pres. Obama's HAMP program. I also wonder if there were perhaps any type of possible "Non-Profit group rivalry" between NACA and ACORN's Housing programs. Why isn't the Media, Democrats and G.O.P. going after other Non-Profits with Political ties receiving Big Taxpayer $$$ like NACA, United Way, etc. Why only ACORN?, Interesting theory. Very interesting indeed.)
(Here is video of ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis appearing on Fox News Sunday recently, where she was questioned by Chris Wallace. GOP Rep. Darrell Issa also appeared on the show.)
(The President speaks after Housing Refinance Roundtable with real people who have benefited from renegotiating their mortgages and explains how millions of others can take advantage of his Making Home Affordable plan.)
NACA's "Save the Dream" Tour
President Obama: ACORN Videos "Inappropriate", Warrants Investigation
President Obama said in an interview aired Sunday that the community organizing group ACORN should be investigated for offering tax help to a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute in widely watched videotapes.
But in the interview on ABC's "This Week," Obama did not say who should conduct such an investigation and played down the importance of the controversy.
"What I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated," he said, but he declined to say whether he supported action by Congress to cut off federal funding for the group.
"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Obama said, adding he had not been aware that ACORN received much federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.
ACORN has come under fire in the wake of videotapes showing field office employees giving tax advice to two conservative activists who posed as a pimp and prostitute. Congress voted last week to cut off federal funding for the organization. House Republicans are pursuing investigations of the group's financial activities.
ACORN -- which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has long been a target of GOP criticism over its role in mounting voter-registration drives benefiting Obama and other Democrats. Obama's infrequent ties to the group extend to his days as a community organizer in Chicago, including representing the group as a lawyer in 1994 and helping in a local voter-registration effort in 1992.
Internal ACORN documents obtained by House Republicans show that the organization has been in financial turmoil for years, with a board torn over how to handle embezzlement by the founder's brother and growing concern that donor money and pension funds had been plundered in the insider scheme, which occurred in 1999 and 2000.
Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Obama's call for an investigation "further legitimizes what many of us in Congress have been saying for months."
"Whether it be Congress's oversight committee, the Justice Department or the IRS, we need to take seriously the question of whether or not ACORN has been abusing its receipt of taxpayer dollars to further a political agenda and whether its status as a not-for-profit corporation is appropriate or not," Issa said in a statement.
ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis said the group agrees that "issues raised by the videos need to be investigated," and she said the group plans to name "a person of standing" to conduct an independent review of the events.
Lewis said the group has stopped accepting new families into its housing and tax assistance programs until an outside review is complete.
"Over the next several weeks, you will see us working triple time to get this review right so that we can refocus attention on ACORN's critical work for low- and moderate-income families," Lewis said.
Lewis and Issa also appeared on "Fox News Sunday," on which the ACORN director vowed to fire anyone who is "too stupid to understand that they are not reaching professional standards."
Activist Financier "Terrorizes" Bankers in Foreclosure Fight But Won't Open Books
Despite receiving Taxpayer money, NACA doesn't provide public reports on either its loan-brokerage business or its campaign to modify mortgages. Jim Campen, an economics professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says he tried in the 1990s to analyze the performance of loans arranged by NACA, but Mr. Marks refused to provide data.
Mr. Marks says he feared the data would be used by another nonprofit to discredit his group. NACA does provide information to lenders that work with it, he says, but sees no duty to disclose it to the public.
"He's been very effective in shaking money out of the banks," says Mr. Campen, but "he's not one to open up his records to public scrutiny."
NC Dispute ends in $3.5 million to financial nonprofit (NACA)
N.C. Commerce Secretary Keith Crisco said Tuesday the state will honor its commitment to provide $3.5 million in incentives to a nonprofit group that helps struggling homeowners, settling a mix-up that emerged last week.
Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) chief executive Bruce Marks also announced plans to double the number of workers he expects to hire in Charlotte to about 2,000 by the end of next year.
Marks met with Crisco in Charlotte to resolve a dispute over how much on-the-job training assistance Boston-based NACA was eligible for as it ramps up its work force. Marks said he didn't leverage the 1,000 extra jobs to get higher incentives, saying he sprang the news at the end of his meeting with Crisco, an account confirmed by state officials.
Crisco called Marks' additional hiring plans “wonderful news” and an affirmation that the incentives were a good investment. “There will be a great return on that investment,” he said.
The hiring gives a boost to Charlotte's beleaguered financial sector and highlights a continued growth spurt for NACA. The nonprofit, founded in 1988, helps low-income homeowners prevent foreclosures and get new loans.
The $3.5 million incentives package is far higher than what the Commerce Department announced June 11, when it issued a news release saying the nonprofit could receive $1 million over five years from the One North Carolina Fund. That's a program controlled by the governor that requires companies to meet certain job creation requirements before receiving any money. That grant was “contingent upon local matches,” the news release said without providing any dollar amount.
The local match turned out to be on-the-job training assistance, which subsidizes the wages of unemployed workers hired by companies during a training period. The program is administered here by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Workforce Development Board, but the money comes from the federal government through the state. In this case, the state could pay NACA $2,560 per eligible worker – half of their average $16-per-hour wage over two months.
The Observer reported last week that the state had promised NACA a total of $2.5 million in on-the-job training assistance in June, but last week officials said $1 million was the appropriate amount. At the time, Crisco said he had mistakenly extrapolated an early estimate of the grant amount.
On Tuesday, Crisco said the mechanics for the grant were still being worked out last week. At the time, the state didn't have the funding figured out, but now it does, he said. “We live up to our word,” he said.
NACA still needs to finalize details with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Work Force Board, but Crisco said he expects the group to qualify for the $2.5 million over three years. “Everything is great,” Marks said of the talks with the state.
NACA is growing as the nation struggles with a rise in Foreclosures following the subprime boom in the 1990s and early this decade that left homeowners with unaffordable mortgages. In the recession, homeowners are also struggling with job losses.
According to a 2007 filing with the IRS, NACA had revenues of about $9.4 million, and expenses of $6.7 million. Now Marks says the group has a budget of around $45 million, which includes government funding for its counseling.
The nonprofit has about 1,100 workers nationwide, with about half of those in Charlotte. Marks said the nonprofit has added about 450 workers here since it announced in June plans to hire 1,014 here over the next five years. He now expects to reach that total by the end of this year. Marks said the newly announced 1,000 could be on board by the end of 2010.
Many of the Charlotte workers are helping with NACA's “Save the Dream” tour, where homeowners can get loans modified at events around the country in one stop. As the tour heads to New York and the West Coast, NACA needs at least another 150 workers in coming weeks, Marks said. Prospective employees should apply at www.naca.com.
His goal is to have employees on the road with the tour for a month at a time before being relieved by another wave. So far, NACA says about 180,000 homeowners have come to events and thousands have had their loans modified.
The hiring binge comes as Charlotte's big banks and other mortgage lenders have been laying off workers. The Charlotte area had about 56,300 finance and insurance workers in July, down 2,800 from December but up 1,200 from April, according to Labor Department statistics.
NACA said in June that its new hires would make about $36,000 annually. The average wage for a finance and insurance worker in Mecklenburg County in 2008 was $100,169.
Marks acknowledged the foreclosure boom won't continue forever, but he said NACA can sustain the added 2,000 positions in Charlotte by transitioning workers to its home-purchase lending business, which offers borrowers low-interest, no down-payment loans. That business declined when subprime lenders offered low teaser rates, but he still has commitments from major banks to fund new loans, he said.
“We've always been conservative in our estimates for the project,” Marks said. “We definitely have exceeded them.”
Davetta Davis is one of the new hires. She joined NACA in July as she faced the loss of a teaching job. She has already counseled borrowers at a Save the Dream event in Atlanta, where she said the work included a lot of crying with struggling homeowners and long hours.
“It's well worth it,” she said, “when you know someone saved their home.”
Court Voids Campaign Spending Limits for Nonprofits
Emily’s List, which backs the candidacies of Democratic women who support abortion rights, gained a victory in federal court on Friday in a fight with the Federal Election Commission.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the commission exceeded its authority several years ago when it created rules restricting how nonprofit groups spend their money to support state and local candidates. Reversing a federal district court ruling, the appeals court agreed with Emily’s List that the F.E.C. rules violated the First Amendment.
Will the Supreme Court look at the case? Perhaps. In any event, the appeals court ruling is surely not the last word in the long-running, multi-faceted debate over the place of money in politics.
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Sources: Washington Post, House.gov, Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Observer, NY Times, Huffington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC, C-Span, Emily's List, AJC.com, Charmeck.org, United Way, ACORN, NACA, Youtube, Google Maps
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