Rep. Waters' troubling ties

LA Times ^ | 3/14/09 | Tim Rutten

[NormsRevenge]

Rep. Maxine Waters, the Democratic congresswoman who has represented a swath of South Los Angeles and surrounding communities .. is one of Southern California's toughest and most influential lawmakers.

... But she also has shown a disturbing inability to adequately distinguish her family's interests from those of the public.

Nowadays, Waters is not only an important voice in the Congressional Black Caucus but a ranking member of the Judiciary and Financial Services committees. This week, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported that Waters used her access as a senior member of the latter committee to arrange two meetings between officials of the Treasury Department and a group of banks owned by African Americans.

...

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.

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 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,