Left-Wing Politician Faces Ethics Charges for Improperly Using Influence to Aid Bank

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is facing ethics charges after she improperly used her influence to get special favors from regulators, and costly taxpayer bailouts, for a mismanaged bank whose executives gave her money and enriched her husband (and then lied about it).

Waters, notorious for her race-baiting and hard-left ideology, earlier praised the Los Angeles race riots that destroyed scores of Korean-owned businesses as an “uprising” against injustice. Waters once told a CEO in a public congressional hearing, “This liberal will be all about socializing . . . would be about, basically, taking over and the government running all of your companies.”

Waters made sure that the financial “reform” law recently signed by President Obama contained costly racial preferences and discrimination.  The bill “imposes race and gender employment quotas on the financial industry — at a time the job market is stalling and economic growth is slowing,” writes economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth.  Its “Section 342 states that race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”  That provision was Waters’ brainchild.

The so-called financial “reform” bill is actually 2,315 pages of special-interest payoffs.  The bill does nothing to reform the biggest bailout recipients, the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even though administration officials admit they were at the “core” of “what went wrong.”  Fannie and Freddie helped spawn the mortgage crisis by buying up risky sub-prime mortgages and repackaging them as prime mortgages, thus creating an artificial market for junk.  Now they are getting a $400 billion bailout.