Showing posts with label Maxine Waters. Show all posts
Waters Edge: Maxine Waters' Ethics Problems
Charlie Rangel has been generating the bulk of the "ethics cloud" headlines; but, seemingly out of the blue, Maxine Waters has emerged as the target of her own probe and will be facing an ethics trial of her own this fall.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has chosen to go through an ethics trial, like the one lined up for New York Rep. Charles Rangel, rather than accepting charges made by an ethics subcommittee, a source familiar with the process tells POLITICO.
The back-to-back trials of two black lawmakers represent an unprecedented use of an ethics adjudication system that has rarely been used by House members accused of breaking ethics rules.
Waters's case revolves around allegations that she improperly intervened with federal regulators to help a bank that her husband owned stock in and on whose board he once served.
Waters denies any wrongdoing
If there's a more deserving target than Waters, I'd like to know their name. She's a race-card throwing scold who lives to denounce her fellow Americans as "evil" and who blithely votes for every tax and spend initiative that comes along, regardless of the economic damage or unintended consequences that might arise. Worst of all, she is impregnable; gerrymandered into office and cemented in there by the iron laws of inertia and incumbency. If an ethics trial is what it takes to get her out, I'm all for it.
Still, I am unmoved by the effort to make Waters part of some sort of symbol of a culture of corruption. Oh, that's not to say she isn't corrupt. Of course she is! But she isn't *just* part of a culture of corruption. She is a symbol of the two faced nature of the Democratic Party. Waters has long positioned herself as a champion of the oppressed, both among her fellow blacks and poor people in general. Yet one thing that has come out of Water's ethics investigation is the fact that she is a wealthy woman. In fact, she has ties to a number of minority-owned banks and even sat on the board of one located in her district. Maxine Waters running a bank? I'm still incredulous.
And, typically, the MSM, for all its "let's hold the fat cats to account" posturing, has been resolutely incurious about this. Isn't there one media outlet out there that wants to publish a picture of Waters' undoubtedly huge house(s)? More important, Waters' bank - and others she has been tied to - were involved in the sort of abuses that lay at the root of the financial crisis, namely subprime loans and weakened lending standards. We hear a lot about predatory lending. Was Waters' bank involved in any of that? Were they issuing "liar loans?" Were they selling mortgages to poor people that they knew could never be paid back? Were they turning Waters' constituents into debt slaves who could only be freed by foreclosure or bankruptcy?
Those are questions I'd like to see Waters try to answer, rather than legalistic queries about whether or not she disclosed the right relationship to the right bureaucrat.
The Queen of Compton
A couple months ago, I noted a bank that had benefitted from the "intercession" of Barney Frank also had a Maxine Waters connection. Now her connection has appeared on the front page of the NY Times: Congresswoman With Ties to Bank Helped Pave the Way to Aid
Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds.Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.
I have to admit. I always thought Maxine Waters was nothing more than just another loud mouth progressive who liked to play the Race Card at random moments to keep people off balance. I had no idea she had any sort of connection to a bank, let alone once sat on its board of directors. Now that we've learned that Waters is secretly wealthy, can someone please find her undoubtedly huge house?
The business about how her husband made sure to keep his bank business separate from Waters is a classic example of meeting the letter, but not the spirit of, ethics rules. Like Waters didn't benefit from her husband's interests in the bank? She was married to him! What did she do, put him in a blind trust? Certainly, if she and her husband got divorced, the bank stock would be considered community property as community earnings.
I think it's great that we can create such a juicy bit of influence peddling out of this story (especially when the target is so well deserving), but we shouldn't forget the other potential scandal here. This appears to a bank that was heavily exposed to subprime mortgages. Were they issuing "liar loans?" Were they selling mortgages to poor people that they knew could never be paid back? Were they turning Waters' constituents into debt slaves who could only be freed by foreclosure or bankruptcy?
What would Waters' constituents think if they found out that Waters was ripping them off even as she used her ostentatious progressive politics to accrue power and wealth to herself and her family?
