Rep. (Maxine) Waters denies wrongdoing in bank bailout

Source: The Hill

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is lashing back at newspaper investigations that accuse her of exerting undue influence in securing bailout money for a bank. Waters says she did nothing improper and didn’t even attend a meeting at the center of the controversy.

“Although both my supporters and detractors often refer to me as influential, the truth is that I had no influence on what Bush administration officials in the Treasury Department or other departments did,” Waters said in a statement Friday.

The New York Times reported Friday that Waters helped arrange a meeting last fall at which an executive of OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks, sought $50 million for his own bank. The meeting was supposed to be on behalf of the National Bankers Association (NBA), an association that represents minority banks, and address problems that minority banks were having because of the failure of Fannie Mae.

The officials said they were later surprised to learn that Waters had family ties to the bank. 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. The Wall Street Journal ran a story Thursday reporting Waters’s financial connections to the bank.

...

Waters’s supporters also see partisanship at play, noting that the main on-the-record source for the story was a Bush administration political appointee, Jeb Mason, who once worked for former Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

Read more: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/rep.-waters-denies-wrongdoing-in-bank-bailout-2009-03-13.html

She's too outspoken for them.

I like Waters response: I wish I had that much influence...

Personal integrity included avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

try to neutralize, the January 23 Huffpo story about Cantor's role in the bailout vis a vis Cantor's wife's bank.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aram-roston/gop-congressman-cantors-w_b_160420.html

the mortgage meltdown on Blacks and Latinos, so that they can divide and conquer the working class, white versus everyone else. This is all about keeping the middle class down by telling us that we are the enemy.

Did this to the nation's economy. I think that meme is being taken apart in a most delicious fashion by people like Jon Stewart.

There were not enough poor people holding sub prime mortgages in the Universe to cause this crisis.
It was the unregulated specualtion that destroyed the economy.

This story doesn't hold water.

And, if the writers were really serious, they could compare it to McCain's Keating Five -- where there was a real exertion of influence.

Here's Wikipedia's write up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five

Nothing more here except for encouraging a meeting, which even the writers say that any request for help was not on the agenda or an endorsed talking point.

inside that toilet paper last week? It's Murdock thrash, and until there is evidence rather than conjecture, I would not put any stock in it.

Really, when are we gonna learn about this?

Maxine Waters is one of the primo leftists they want to take down.

AND, they need to smear some leftists in order to confuse people about THE CORPO/FASCISTS WHO HAVE DESTROYED OUR COUNTRY.

Never, ever forget who pushed WMDs in Iraq every day, every week, every month of the leadup to the Iraq War--non-stop front page LIES!

Never, ever forget who pushed Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman as demi-gods, and "deregulation" and "welfare for the rich" for months and years and decades, leading up to this disaster!

And don't tell me they're not getting feeds from Bushwhack domestic spy "dossiers." Eliot Spitzer taught us that. This is traitorous, massively criminal bullshit--the whole fuckwad corpo/fascist press. And the NYT and the WSJ are the worst of the lot.