Will Maxine Waters Tax OneUnited Bank Out of Business?

If Maxine Waters has anything its chutzpah; she went on a rant about how the banks are shafting the “little people”, and if they don’t start shaking the money tree for the black community, than the big bad banks should be taxed until they go out of business.

Maxine Waters helped cause this financial disaster. Maxine Waters is part of the problem. She helped to spearhead the concept of no down payment loans. Countrywide ran with this concept and look at the mess we’re in because of it. She stood beside Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were under fire by critics and regulators for some of the most creative accounting since Enron. Now, the American taxpayers are on the hook for billions, if not trillions of dollars.

And to top it off, Maxine Waters’s husband held stock and served on a board of a bank that got bailed out by a congressional committee that she served on:

WASHINGTON AND LOS ANGELES — Rep. Maxine Waters, one of Los Angeles' most enduring liberal politicians, has come under scrutiny because of bailout funds that went to a bank in which her husband had owned stock and served on the board.

Waters was a senior member of the congressional committee dealing with the financial crisis when OneUnited Bank -- one of the nation's largest minority-owned institutions -- received $12 million in bailout funds.

Her husband, Sidney Williams, served on the bank board until early last year and held at least $500,000 in investments in the bank in 2007, the most recent year for which public financial disclosure statements are available.

A month before Congress enacted the bailout program, Waters helped set up a meeting between the chief executive of the bank, representatives of other financial institutions and Treasury officials.

"When a member of the financial services committee calls, you pay special attention," said Jeb Mason, who was a high-ranking Treasury official last fall.

He said that the September meeting was billed as a broad discussion by minority-owned banks of the problems they faced but that it ended up a discussion of one bank's problems. He said he only recently learned of Waters' husband's ties to OneUnited and would have liked to have known about them. He added, however, that the connection didn't influence the department.

OneUnited did not receive any federal money at that time, but by mid-December, it had received $12 million in bailout funds.

Waters did not respond to requests for comment.

But she sure as hell will comment on the dealings of others.

Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/13/nation/na-maxine-waters13