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Polluted Waters

I?m almost surprised that this Los Angeles Times column by Tim Rutten on ?Rep. [Maxine] Waters' troubling ties? hasn?t received more attention. I suspect it would have had it not appeared in the middle of a flurry of fallout over the AIG bailout. In fact, I think what Rutten both reveals and reminds us of is worthy of more anger than the AIG bonuses, but maybe news that minority politicians are more interested in feathering racial nests (including their own) is no longer considered newsworthy in elite political circles.

Rutten?s conclusion is that throughout her career Waters ?has shown a disturbing inability to adequately distinguish her family's interests from those of the public,? including, though Rutten is either too polite or too politically correct so say, what she probably regards as her racial family.

Anyway, take a look at his?s column and see if what he pins on Waters strikes you as outrageous or just business as usual (or both).

?This week,? he reports,

the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported that Waters used her access as a senior member of the [House Financial Services] committee to arrange two meetings between officials of the Treasury Department and a group of banks owned by African Americans.

Ostensibly, the bankers wanted to talk because their institutions had been hard hit by the implosion of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. According to the New York Times, though, Kevin Cohee ? chief executive of OneUnited Bank ? took the opportunity to plead for a $50-million bailout of his institution.

?Here you had a tiny community bank that comes in and they are not proposing a broader policy ? they were asking for help for themselves,? former Treasury aide Stephen Lineberry told the Times. ?I don?t remember that ever happening before.?

Officials told both papers that they were even more taken aback when they discovered that Waters' husband, Sidney Williams ? a U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under President Clinton ? was a former director of One- United Bank, that she herself had once owned as much as $500,000 worth of its stock and that her husband still holds two blocks of its securities, each valued somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000. Waters had arranged the meetings without disclosing any of these facts.

?Whoops,? says Rutten.

Why Whoops? Waters replies to such charges.

Waters sees nothing wrong in any of this. As she said in a statement: ?I have been an outspoken advocate for minority communities and businesses in California and nationally for decades. ... [T]hese articles only revealed one thing: I am indeed an advocate for minority banks.?

?And,? Rutten reports, ?a good one.?

And a good one. OneUnited was one of the first minority-owned institutions to receive bailout money ? $12 million ? from the feds? Troubled Asset Relief Program. This despite the fact that less than six months ago, the FDIC sanctioned the bank for ?unsafe or unsound banking practices,? including Cohee?s excessive compensation, which covered the cost of his 2008 Porsche SUV and the maintenance on his $6.4-million ocean-view compound in Pacific Palisades....

Now that Democrats have joined the chorus of outrage over the excessive bonuses to AIG executives, maybe they could devote a little of it to the ?excessive compensation? taxpayers underwrote to Waters beneficiary/benefactor Kevin Cohee. If there are any efforts underway to retrieve any of the $12 million his bank received, I haven?t seen them.

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 18, 2009 (boomark / email).