With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago’s African-Americans
...Fay Clayton, a Chicago progressive activist, initiated the discrimination lawsuit in 1994. Obama’s employer, a lawyer named Judson Miner, allied with Clayton to file a class-action lawsuit a year later.

Obama appeared at Clayton’s office “saying he was the new associate on the case,” Clayton said in a statement to The Daily Caller. “I remember Barack arriving — he was industrious, he enjoyed the work, he was clearly smart and dedicated.”...

...For example, when the 186 clients submitted their names for compensation in 1998, it turned out that least 19 had bankrupted or received foreclosure notices even before December 1997. Another 18 of the 186 clients would go under within three years because of financial pressures....

...Before striking its deal with the federal government progressives, Citibank got rid of the Chicago lawsuit by paying off the Chicago lawyers.

While the settlement provided $950,000 for the lawyers, it provided $20,000 for each of the three named plaintiffs, and $360,000 in benefits to be divided among the 183 other clients....

Bankruptcies

At least 46 of Obama’s 186 clients have declared bankruptcy since 1996, often multiple times.

That’s a far higher bankruptcy rate than the rate for all Americans, for Chicagoans and even for African-Americans in Chicago.

In a 2011 report, the left-of-center Woodstock Institute reported that just 4.25 percent of African-Americans living in Chicago’s mostly black neighborhoods went bankrupt between 2006 and 2010.

By contrast, 11 of Obama’s 186 clients — or 6.6 percent — went bankrupt during the same five-year period.

That bankruptcy is 50 percent higher than the rate among Cook County’s African-American population, and almost three times the bankruptcy rate of all Cook county residents, according to data in the Woodstock report, titled “Bridging the Gap II.”

Foreclosures

At least 55 of Obama’s 186 clients received foreclosure notices after 1998 — many of them multiple times. Foreclosures were finalized for at least 39 homeowners, or 20 percent.

That’s at least 20 times the rate at which prime loans foreclose over their lifetimes, and roughly three times the lifetime foreclosure rate of subprime loans.

Ten more of the 55 foreclosures are in process according to PACER, the federal government’s judicial records database.

The number of foreclosures may be near 70. That’s because the court database shows foreclosures by 16 people who share full names with his clients, including Donald Young and James E. Jones.

The clients’ foreclosure rate was far higher than that of other homeowners. In 2009, for example, at least seven of Obama’s former clients got foreclosure notices. That’s roughly twice the rate of completed 2009 foreclosures in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods, according to a 2010 report by the left-wing housing activist group National People’s Action.

That 2009 rate is also roughly eight times the nation’s post-bubble foreclosure rate of 0.5 percent per year, according to a report by the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

2009 wasn’t an aberration: Obama’s client list had averaged 5.3 foreclosure notices a year during the 1990s....