Love the Financial Crisis? Thank Your Local "Community Organizer"

And yes, the one running for President has his hands all over it:

IT would be tough to find an "on the ground" community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early '90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama's legal services for a "motor voter" case and partnered with him on his 1992 "Project VOTE" registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN's up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott's drive against Chicago's banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago's Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation's board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers - and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee's report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama's organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott's ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report acknowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN - whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public's eye. The Woods Fund's claim to be "nonideological," it says, has "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government 'establishments' without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship."

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

Oh, it sounds all too familiar.

The one constant of Barack Obama's rise to power is his ability to funnel money to radical groups without drawing undue attention to himself.

As chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama directed educational monies meant for elementary and secondary school improvement into a series of grants to radical organizations bent on activism and ideological indoctrination. You'll be shocked—shocked!—to find out that those millions were directed to groups identified by the Chicago School Reform Collaborative—headed by domestic terrorist and Obama fundraiser Bill Ayers.

Obama has also used the Woods Fund (as noted in the article above) and the Joyce Foundation to launder money from grant-giving organizations into funding for radical groups and causes that were too politically controversial to directly raise funds on their own. He's great for the economic welfare of radicals.

And don't you love the mess he's helped get us all into now?