ACORN To Regulate Financial Institutions

The House committee that oversees the nation’s financial services sectors has quietly voted to give regulatory power to a famously corrupt community organization that rakes in millions of dollars from the very institutions it will monitor. 

Weeks after Congress cut the public funding of the fraud-infested Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the House Committee on Financial Services has actually approved an amendment that will give the Chicago-based group a role in setting regulations for the country’s financial institutions. 

Here is the best part; ACORN receives millions of dollars annually—in direct corporate contributions and other arrangements— from the businesses it will supposedly oversee. While this may sound like a bad joke, considering ACORN is a renowned criminal enterprise, it’s very real. Giving this sort of authority to a notoriously crooked organization was the brilliant idea of California Democrat Maxine Waters, currently under investigation for steering federal bailout funds to her husband’s bank.

The veteran congresswoman, considered the Golden State’s most powerful black lawmaker, added the measure to a pending bill that aims to overhaul the country’s financial regulations. That legislation will establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) with the authority to examine, supervise and enforce consumer financial protection laws. The newly created agency would have jurisdiction over mortgages, credit cards, student loans and auto loans. 

The Waters amendment adds an oversight board of five representatives from the fields of “consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgages" to join federal banking regulators in advising the CFPA’s director.

An illicit enterprise that has received tens of millions of tax dollars over the years, ACORN would be among those groups. The nonprofit with offices across the nation has a documented history of embezzlement, fraud and cooking the books and has been criminally prosecuted for voter registration fraud in various elections. Recently, ACORN was exposed in a now world-famous video for advising prostitutes and pimps on how to skirt housing and taxing laws.

It’s pathetic enough that ACORN continues to get tax dollars disguised as Homeland Security grants and it defies logic that federal lawmakers give it any sort of regulatory authority, especially over the companies that pour money into its bulging coffers. 

Click here to see Judicial Watch’s extensive investigation of ACORN, including public records and litigation related to the ongoing probe.