Housing Crisis: Previously unpublished court documents reveal that as a young lawyer from Chicago, President Obama's lawsuit against big banks started inflating the housing bubble that created the mess he says he inherited.

We have often written that the true roots of our current economic crisis lay in the excesses of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act as redefined under the Clinton administration. We have explained how community outreach by banks, under pressure from groups such as Acorn, was transformed into the mandatory credit issuance based not of creditworthiness, but on the basis of "fairness."

"Redlining," the activists argued, was the antithesis of the American dream of owning a home. Moreover, they insisted, everyone had the "right" to own a home. So the banks were forced to issue loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back. The banking system was forced to inflate a housing bubble that set us up for a near-catastrophic economic collapse.

This did not occur by accident, but by design at the hands of disciples of the Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system, causing it to collapse, then to be replaced by a worker's paradise of redistributed income with the individual totally subservient to the greater good.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama called it the "fundamental transformation" of America, and he was there when the seeds of collapse were planted.

The Daily Caller has obtained and analyzed previously unpublished court documents relating to a class-action lawsuit filed in 1995 by young attorney Barack Obama on behalf of three lead plaintiffs and 180 subsidiary plaintiffs against Citibank for alleged discrimination in lending practices.

As the Daily Caller relates, "Obama's lawsuit was one element of a national 'anti-redlining' campaign led by Chicago's progressive groups, who argued that banks unfairly refused to lend money to people living within so-called 'red lines' around African-American communities."

The discrimination lawsuit was initiated by Chicago progressive activist Fay Clayton in 1994. Obama's employer, lawyer Judson Miner, joined with Clayton to file a class-action lawsuit a year later. Obama later introduced himself to Clayton as an "associate" on the case.

Citibank would settle the case, with $950,000 going to the lawyers, including Obama. But it gave only $20,000 to each of the three named plaintiffs, and included $360,000 in benefits to be divided among the 183 other clients. Their portion of the settlement was not in cash, but in coupons. About half of the 186 African-American clients in Obama's lawsuit have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.

According to a 1998 Chicago Sun-Times report, Obama claimed $23,000 in billable hours for his role in the lawsuit. He would also garner large campaign donations from the mortgage industry, including at least $126,349 between 1989 and 2004, in cash, not coupons.

That settlement was only the tip of the iceberg. When Citibank, in April 1998, sought federal approval for a merger with Travelers Group, it only got OK from the Clinton administration progressives after it promised in May to provide $115 billion for anti-redlining loans. Anti-redlining promises made by other financial institutions added up to $600 billion between 1993 and 1998, according to a 2000 Treasury Department report.

We have heard a lot about the "vampire capitalism" of Bain Capital and its former chief, Mitt Romney. We have heard next to nothing about the "vampire socialism" of Barack Obama in helping to plant the seeds of economic collapse that he would exploit to his own political benefit later.

It was the progressive dreams of Barack Obama that would crash the nation's economy in 2008, wipe out at least $4 trillion in equity and help keep the unemployment rate above 8% for four years.

As president, Obama would blame his predecessor, George W. Bush, and Wall Street. But before the housing market finally collapsed, it was a young lawyer named Barack Obama who helped put the wrecking ball in motion.