Maxine Waters Blames Bush for Ethics Woes

Maxine Waters, following the strategy of Charlie Rangel, held a rambling 90-minute press conference at a time when the House of Representatives is on hiatus. Waters is defending herself on charges of inappropriately intervening with the U.S. Treasury on behalf of her husband and OneUnitedBank in which he owns stock. Waters said she had to do it because the Treasury (in the Bush administration) would not schedule the appointment without her influence.

Maxine Waters

Waters' defense:

"The question at this point should not be why I called Secretary Paulson, but why I had to," she said. "The question at this point should be why a trade association representing over 100 minority banks could not get a meeting at the height of the crisis."

OneUnitedBank received $12 million of the requested $50 million TARP bailout.

Maxine's grandson, Mikael Moore, is her Chief-of-Staff and it seems his emails are a point of contention with the Ethics Committee. 

The report highlights e-mails Moore sent and received from OneUnited executives and suggests Waters should not have allowed him to send them when her family had a specific financial stake in the bank. The congresswoman has said she was aiding a group of minority banks that includes OneUnited.

Waters did not attend the eventual meeting between Treasury and the National Banking Association, but here grandson and Chief-of-Staff did.

The Washington Post wryly says (or maybe not so wryly) this scandal is "not expected to affect her ability to win reelection in her heavily Democratic district." Can we blame her habitual presence in The People's House on George W. Bush?

More on Maxine Waters:
Bulldoze Maxine Waters and her Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee
The Genius of Maxine Waters

Bulldoze Maxine Waters and her Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee

An ethics watchdog is calling for Maxine Waters to give up her chairmanship of the Housing and Community Opportunity subcommittee. The House Ethics Committee says they will charge Waters with ethics violations for her cozy relationship with U.S. Treasury officials and the National Bankers Association involving the minority-owned bank, OneUnited Bank. Waters' husband served on the bank Board of Directors, was a "significant" shareholder. OneUnited received $12 million in TARP monies and donated $12,500 to Maxine's election campaign war chest.

Maxine Waters

Maxine is the Chairwoman of the Housing and Community Opportunity subcommittee of the House Banking and Finance Committee. She controls a type of housing affirmative action. Here is a portion of what Maxine's subcommittee does:

Committee Democrats place a high priority on fighting discrimination and expanding homeownership opportunities for minorities, low-income families, and those living in rural, urban and under-served areas. They support strong fair housing enforcement, the preservation of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA),

The CRA, a program mainly devised to make home loans to people perceived to have been discriminated against, and to force lenders to make loans considered riskier than usual, is the direct line to the housing market crisis. CRA likes to be known as enforcing fair lending standards. As Maxine crowed that Fannie Mae, especially, was as sound as could be, the house of cards came tumbling down, and none of it affected Ms. Waters and her husband Sydney Williams.

From Michelle Malkin via The Wall Street Journal:

Waters (along with Rep. Frank) participated directly in pressuring the feds for OneUnited’s piece of the bailout pie. She personally contacted the Treasury Department last December requesting $50 million for the company– and failed to disclose her ties to the bank to them. The government ended up coughing up $12 million in TARP funding for OneUnited — despite another government agency rapping the bank in October 2008 for “operating without effective underwriting standards and practices,” “operating without an effective loan documentation program” and “engaging in speculative investment practices.”

And directly from Malkin:

Oh, and get this: The favored bank of Maxine Waters was also penalized for alleged excessive executive compensation. The FDIC ordered the bank to “sell all bank-owned automobiles,” require reimbursement for executives’ car purchases (according to the Boston Business Journal, OneUnited CEO Kevin Cohee was cruising around in a 2008 Porsche SUV), and cease payments on a $6 million Santa Monica beachfront home purchased by Cohee, his wife who served as bank president, and others.

Responding to scrutiny of the bank’s special treatment, Cohee is now accusing critics of — yep, you guessed it — racism.

From LewRockwell.com 

The thousands of mortgage defaults and foreclosures in the "subprime" housing market (i.e., mortgage holders with poor credit ratings) is the direct result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers. The policy in question is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which compels banks to make loans to low-income borrowers and in what the supporters of the Act call "communities of color" that they might not otherwise make based on purely economic criteria.

The original lobbyists for the CRA were the hardcore leftists who supported the Carter administration and were often rewarded for their support with government grants and programs like the CRA that they benefited from. These included various "neighborhood organizations," as they like to call themselves, such as "ACORN" (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). These organizations claim that over $1 trillion in CRA loans have been made, although no one seems to know the magnitude with much certainty. A U.S. Senate Banking Committee staffer told me about ten years ago that at least $100 billion in such loans had been made in the first twenty years of the Act.

While the House Ethics Committee makes a shallow show of determining whether Maxine Waters, her relationships and receipts were illegal, let us think about razzing the Housing and Community Opportunity subcommittee. If we take back the House, can we do that? The first video below shows the timeline of the housing meltdown and the second is Maxine Waters saying "we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae...."See links to background below the video.



Financial and Housing Meltdown Timeline (video)


Maxine Waters No Crisis at Fannie or Freddie Under the leadership of Barney Frank's boyfriend, Franklin Raines (video)

Related and Background:

Tracking the Mess of Fannie and Freddie
Three Ways the CRA Pushed Countrywide to Lower Lending Standards

The above article says CRA regulators believed the lax lending practices were the wave of the future, democratizing the glories of home ownership. 

Video of Maxine Waters saying the government will take over and run all the oil companies

Michele Bachmann Dylan Ratigan: Someone Named Dylan Ratigan Doesn't Like Michele Bachmann or Her Tea Party Caucus

Someone named Dylan Ratigan doesn't like Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn-6th), or her Tea Party Caucus or her talk of "fiscal responsibility."  I'm searching for info on Mr. Ratigan as I "word process." Oh, here it is...oh my, he's a TV host on MSNBC and has a little show titled the Dylan Ratigan Show. Let me see... he averaged 330,000 viewers a day in May 2010! No wonder he's such a snark. See the video below.

 Michele Bachmann

Putting "Fiscal Responsibility" in the face of a liberal is like holding up a cross in the face of a vampire. "Fiscal Responsibility" is death to a Liberal. Without mad spending you can't create voters.

More on Ratigan's embarrassing ratings below. In the video, the obviously frustrated Ratigan and friends say Bachmann is "full of crap...soooo full of crap, she might be the Queen of Crap," the talking heads opine. Ratigan quotes Congresswoman Bachmann saying the Tea Party Caucus will be "dedicated to promoting Tea Party ideals like "fiscal responsibility and limited government...

"...then again, says Ratigan, Republicans were nowhere in the mass extraction on Wall Street."

For starters, Ratigan obviously views a House Caucus as 'big government,' even though the Caucus members are dedicated to the ideals of small government. This Caucus will not create government programs. If anything, they will be working to repeal, rework and trash existing legislation.

Ratigan doesn't touch Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Democrat criminal "mass extractions" that will never be paid back to taxpayers - orchestrated by Democrat legislators, Senator Chris Dodd (D-, and Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mich) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) . Fannie and Freddie were nowhere in the Democrat financial reform bill.

A Yale economics professor, Robert J. Shiller, says taxpayers who do not even own a home are forced to support others struggling to stay in their homes. Astonishingly, Shiller thinks that Fannie and Freddie should be severely cut back:

"so that they're not helping middle-class homeowners, [but] they're helping poor people get into the housing market."

That's a fine example of academia ignoring everything known about economics. How about making Fannie and Freddie successful and then helping the less fortunate?

Shiller tells the truth, though, about the woes of the evil Democrat twins, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and why the government took them over:

...to avert possible massive losses for banks, money-market funds and, perhaps, most importantly, foreign institutions that purchased billions of Fannie and Freddie debt because of its implied government guarantee.

Remember this when you plan to walk away from your home, and perhaps file bankruptcy. Don't blame Wall Street. Fannie and Freddie are what all the housing bankruptcies are about.
That's why some of your neighbors had to turn their homes over to the bank. The bank had to sell them for peanuts, and that's why your house is undervalued today. That's why you owe more on your mortgage than the house is worth in today's market.

Democrats are solely...solely to blame for the housing crisis. They bought votes and favorability with risky home loans, are still trying to buy votes today...and what they have done should be criminal. 

Before winding this up, Ratigan's show airs at 4 p.m. EDT. If 330,000 viewers are not embarassing enough, he averaged only 325,000 viewers in the preceding 6 months, and only 83,000 in the golden  demographic of 25-54 years old. The 83,000 most desirable demographic was down from 107,000 a year earlier. Check this out for a comparison of television success rates.

For the time slot, Ratigan comes in third behind first place Your World with Neil Cavuto. The headline for these statistics: Dylan Ratigan's Ratings Show a Loss for MSNBC.

So here's the thing about Dylan Ratigan and his cronies: he/they are terrified at the words "fiscal responsibility," and they are disturbed that Michele Bachmann insists on pounding home the importance of it.

Bachmann and the House Tea Party Caucus can promote fiscal responsibility while Ratigan tries to live-down his failures at MSNBC. Watch as Ratigan and his idiots, without a single fact about Michele Bachmann, stoop to kindergarten name calling. (Yes, I called Ratigan an "idiot," did some name calling myself, but I've offered-up the facts.)












Dylan Ratigan on Michele Bachmann (video)

The Genius of Maxine Waters: Is Maxine Waters as Dumb as She Seems?

CBS asks "is Maxine Waters Really as Dumb as She Seems?

CBS? Did they really ask this? Did they really say the following? Is CBS racist? Is this a hallelujah moment?

Please watch this video of Congresswoman Maxine Waters - in it, she demonstrates that there is obviously NO intelligence requirement necessary to be named to the House Financial Services Committee.

Maxine Waters and Ben Bernake

I actually pitied Bernanke as he attempted to remind Ms. Waters the difference between the discount rate and the fed funds rate. Doesn't she have anyone on her staff who could have prepped on the material? It's not as if these are difficult concepts.

The more Waters talked, the worse it got. These are the very people who think they are better equipped to want to be entrusted with auditing the Fed. Now that's a scary concept.

H/T Hot Air