Explosive Treasury Emails Put Barney Frank in the Ethics Hot Seat
www.judicialwatch.org/weeklyupdate/2010/13-barney-franks-ethics-mess
When Barney Frank was asked about intervening on behalf of a home state bank for Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds, the Massachusetts Democrat admitted he spoke to a “federal regulator” but according to the Wall Street Journal, “he didn’t remember which federal regulator he spoke with.”
According to explosive new Treasury Department emails uncovered by Judicial Watch, it appears this nameless bureaucrat is none other than then-Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson!
These documents, which we obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, indicate that Frank personally called former Secretary Paulson regarding a TARP cash infusion for the Boston-based OneUnited Bank. And it worked. On November 25, 2008, following Frank’s intervention, the Treasury Department awarded $12,063,000 in bailout funds to OneUnited, which is located in Frank’s district.
Moreover, according to these documents, Frank is not the only Democratic Congressman with dirty hands in the OneUnited bank scandal. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), whose husband, Sidney Williams, served on the OneUnited Board of Directors, also intervened on behalf of the Massachusetts Bank. (Williams resigned shortly after Waters approached federal regulators regarding the OneUnited TARP grant.)
Among the key documents is an October 17, 2008, email from former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Banking and Finance King Mueller to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari and other Treasury officials referencing the contact between Frank and Paulson:
Just spoke w/ Jim [Segel] in BF's [Barney Frank’s] office. This is about One United Bank (a minority owned bank in BF's district). Maxine Waters is interested in the bank as well, Treas[ury] and others met w/ them (minority bankers assoc) last month per the Water's request. They were a big holder in f/f preferred. BF is interested and may call HMP [Henry Paulson] again about this. FDIC is their primary federal regulator. [Emphasis added.]
And there is also this October 16, 2008, email from Kashkari to former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Appropriations and Management Peter Dugas: “Peter, Jim Siegel [sic] from Frank’s office called a few times-can one of you follow-up with him?” (Segel serves as Frank’s Chief Counsel.) Paulson’s October 2008 calendar, which has been released separately, details calls from Frank on October 2, 3, 7, 9, 13, and 17.
With respect to Rep. Waters, the documents include a January 13, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, expressing surprise at Waters’ apparent conflict of interest: “Further to email below, WSJ [Wall Street Journal] tells me: …Apparently this bank is the only one that has gotten money through section 103-6 of the EESA law. And Maxine Waters’ husband is on the board of the bank. ??????”
The fact that Frank and Waters improperly intervened to score some TARP cash for OneUnited does not shock me. This is exactly the kind of corrupt deal-making I expected when the federal government decided to throw massive amounts of taxpayer dollars at private institutions. But I have to say, it is a rare case indeed when the documented evidence of impropriety is so clear.
CORRUPTION CHRONICLES
•Mexican Cartels Expand To All U.S. Regions
•More Gitmo Prisoners Return To Terrorism
•Govt. Wastes Millions To Keep Empty Buildings
•Fifth Anniversary Of Terri Schiavo’s Death
•Supreme Court Blocks Drug Dealer’s Deportation
•Obama Uses Recess Appointments To Hires More Lobbyists
•AG Helps Illegal Alien Gangbangers Charged With Murder
These documents indicate that Barney Frank has been flagrantly dishonest about his role in lobbying for OneUnited. I mean, who is Frank kidding trying to suggest he didn’t remember calling Hank Paulson? It’s early but this looks to me like it could mushroom into another Keating Five-type scandal. And it certainly calls into question whether Rep. Frank should remain head of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
No wonder the Obama Treasury Department stonewalled the release of these documents.
As I’ve mentioned previously, without the intervention of Frank and Waters, OneUnited would seem an unlikely recipient of TARP funds. As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide funds to healthy banks in order to jump-start lending. Not only was OneUnited Bank in massive financial turmoil, but it was also “under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives' use.” The bank continues to flounder and is one of the few financial institutions to have not paid dividends to the federal government in exchange for the TARP cash infusion.
The good news is that the media is beginning to cover this scandal. The Fox Business Channel highlighted our work just last night. To view the segment, go to our YouTube channel here.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2010/JW_treas_barneyfrank_unitedone_tarp_2010_Part1.pdf
http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2010/JW_treas_barneyfrank_unitedone_tarp_2010_Part2.pdf
Sunday, September 26, 2010
New Waters/Frank Scandal Documents Uncovered by Judicial Watch
New Waters/Frank Scandal Documents Uncovered by JW: OneUnited Bank Received “Less than Satisfactory” Assessment Prior to Bailout
September 15, 2010
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2010/sep/new-waters-frank-scandal-documents-uncovered-jw-oneunited-bank-received-less-satisfact
Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Evaluation: OneUnited “Ineffective” “Needs to Improve” “Less than Satisfactory” “Has Done a Poor Job”
Washington, DC -- September 15, 2010
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has received new documents from the U.S. Department of Treasury related to the controversial $12 million bailout grant provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank. The documents, obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against Treasury, include internal Treasury Department emails describing the substandard condition of OneUnited prior to the taxpayer-funded bailout, which allegedly occurred at the behest of Reps. Maxine Waters and Barney Frank.
For example, a September 15, 2008, email from former Treasury Senior Advisor Michael Scott to Director of the Office of Financial Institutions Mario Ugoletti, includes a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) evaluation administered by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) noting serious issues with OneUnited’s lending practices:
2004 CRA Public Evaluation: While the institution received a CRA rating of “Low Satisfactory” on an overall basis, OneUnited Bank’s CRA rating for Massachusetts was “Needs to Improve” for both the Lending Test and the Investment Test. Under the Lending Test, the report stated that “OUB has done a poor job of meeting the credit needs of its [Boston, MA] assessment area. A review of the 2002 and 2003 HMDA data revealed a total of one loan. There were no reported Community Development Loans (CDL) and any innovative or flexible lending programs were apparently ineffective.” For the Massachusetts Investment Test, the report stated that ‘the level and complexity of investments within the Boston assessment area is less than satisfactory there were no equity investments or qualified deposits within the assessment area. The low volume of qualified investments within the assessment area is a concern.
In Florida, the institution received a CRA rating of “Substantial Noncompliance” which also represented the subordinate rating for the Lending Test…”
A subsequent 2007 CRA evaluation noted continued problems with OneUnited’s lending program, particularly in Florida.
The documents also include a January 3, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari highlighting Barney Frank’s intervention in the OneUnited Bank bailout and calling attention to significant concerns about the OneUnited transaction:
According to the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] Barney Frank told them that he specifically put section 103-6 in the bill in order to help this particular bank. Apparently this bank also had an issue with a Porsche that the regulators had made them get rid of. The story will run later this week and will highlight three banks that they think raise questions and are not “healthy” banks…
As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending.
The Treasury documents also include a memorandum entitled “Regulatory Financial Highlights” that contains detailed financial information related to OneUnited as well as a summary of information collected by Treasury during its investigation of the bank. According to these documents OneUnited sought government assistance in part because the company owned $52 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock which was “irrevocably impaired” when the government seized control of the two GSEs. However, as noted by one Treasury email from Michael Scott, OneUnited “purchased their Fannie/Freddie stock in the first quarter of 2008,” long after the problems cited in the government’s two CRA assessments. The official commented, “Interesting, huh?”
“These emails suggest that without the corrupt intervention of Barney Frank and Maxine Waters OneUnited would not have gotten a $12 million taxpayer bailout,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And these documents show that this so-called community bank wasn’t actually lending much to the ‘community’ that Frank and Waters were purporting to help.”
The Obama administration has thus far produced 639 pages in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA investigation of the Waters/Frank bailout scandal, but is withholding in full 203 pages.
September 15, 2010
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2010/sep/new-waters-frank-scandal-documents-uncovered-jw-oneunited-bank-received-less-satisfact
Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Evaluation: OneUnited “Ineffective” “Needs to Improve” “Less than Satisfactory” “Has Done a Poor Job”
Washington, DC -- September 15, 2010
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has received new documents from the U.S. Department of Treasury related to the controversial $12 million bailout grant provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank. The documents, obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against Treasury, include internal Treasury Department emails describing the substandard condition of OneUnited prior to the taxpayer-funded bailout, which allegedly occurred at the behest of Reps. Maxine Waters and Barney Frank.
For example, a September 15, 2008, email from former Treasury Senior Advisor Michael Scott to Director of the Office of Financial Institutions Mario Ugoletti, includes a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) evaluation administered by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) noting serious issues with OneUnited’s lending practices:
2004 CRA Public Evaluation: While the institution received a CRA rating of “Low Satisfactory” on an overall basis, OneUnited Bank’s CRA rating for Massachusetts was “Needs to Improve” for both the Lending Test and the Investment Test. Under the Lending Test, the report stated that “OUB has done a poor job of meeting the credit needs of its [Boston, MA] assessment area. A review of the 2002 and 2003 HMDA data revealed a total of one loan. There were no reported Community Development Loans (CDL) and any innovative or flexible lending programs were apparently ineffective.” For the Massachusetts Investment Test, the report stated that ‘the level and complexity of investments within the Boston assessment area is less than satisfactory there were no equity investments or qualified deposits within the assessment area. The low volume of qualified investments within the assessment area is a concern.
In Florida, the institution received a CRA rating of “Substantial Noncompliance” which also represented the subordinate rating for the Lending Test…”
A subsequent 2007 CRA evaluation noted continued problems with OneUnited’s lending program, particularly in Florida.
The documents also include a January 3, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari highlighting Barney Frank’s intervention in the OneUnited Bank bailout and calling attention to significant concerns about the OneUnited transaction:
According to the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] Barney Frank told them that he specifically put section 103-6 in the bill in order to help this particular bank. Apparently this bank also had an issue with a Porsche that the regulators had made them get rid of. The story will run later this week and will highlight three banks that they think raise questions and are not “healthy” banks…
As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending.
The Treasury documents also include a memorandum entitled “Regulatory Financial Highlights” that contains detailed financial information related to OneUnited as well as a summary of information collected by Treasury during its investigation of the bank. According to these documents OneUnited sought government assistance in part because the company owned $52 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock which was “irrevocably impaired” when the government seized control of the two GSEs. However, as noted by one Treasury email from Michael Scott, OneUnited “purchased their Fannie/Freddie stock in the first quarter of 2008,” long after the problems cited in the government’s two CRA assessments. The official commented, “Interesting, huh?”
“These emails suggest that without the corrupt intervention of Barney Frank and Maxine Waters OneUnited would not have gotten a $12 million taxpayer bailout,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And these documents show that this so-called community bank wasn’t actually lending much to the ‘community’ that Frank and Waters were purporting to help.”
The Obama administration has thus far produced 639 pages in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA investigation of the Waters/Frank bailout scandal, but is withholding in full 203 pages.
Da Gunny says: Vote Sean Bielat for Congress
http://www.seanbielat.org/Da Gunny says: Vote Sean Bielat for Congress
508-622-0066
Brookline Post Office Box
PO Box 1143
Brookline, MA 02446Freetown Office
1 Chace Plaza
Freetown, MA 02717Norton Office
250 E Main Street
Norton, MA 02070Newton Office
381 Elliot Street
Newton, MA 02464
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic Growth and Job Creation
Basic economic theory shows that government spending can, if targeted correctly, provide some positive economic outcomes. Unfortunately, it is beyond the powers of economists to forecast how much spending is enough or how much spending is too much. Stimulus spending under this Administration and Congress has put politics over policy, and the result has been handouts to special interests, inefficient spending, and far too much debt.
Real economic growth is driven by businesses working to compete and grow in the free market. Government cannot create jobs (aside from government jobs); only business can create jobs and sustainable economic growth. We need policies that enable small businesses to thrive and large businesses to grow and hire more employees. Reducing the burden of corporate income tax rates, employer mandates, and unnecessary regulation will create the conditions for businesses and the economy to grow.
Unfortunately policies are set by politicians and bureaucrats who far too often have never had to answer to shareholders, never struggled to meet a payroll, and never worked to grow a business. We need to revisit the current regulatory burden and reduce it wherever practical. At the same time, we need to return capital to businesses and individuals to spur job creation, innovation, and investment in future growth.
It’s time to elect leaders who bring a business mindset to Washington.
http://www.seanbielat.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs
Jihadist use Ground Zero Background Photo
Photograph of MEHANNA at Ground Zero in New York City smiling at you!
Democrat Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
For years, Frank was a staunch supporter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government housing agencies that played such an enormous role in the financial meltdown that thrust the economy into the Great Recession.
President Obama signed off on $42 million in bonuses for the top twelve Fannie and Freddie executives, including $6 million apiece for the two CEOs.
Vote 836: S 1927: This amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978passed 227-183 on August 4. The bill gives U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. The bill gives the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General authorization for periods up to one year, to information concerning suspected terrorists outside the United States.
voted: NO
9/28/06 Vote 502: H R 5825: Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act. voted: No
1/4/05 Vote 6: H RES 5: Instituted a number of changes in the ethics rules that govern the conduct of individual members of Congress. voted: No (wolf guarding hen house)
Obama Scraps 'Global War on Terror' for 'Overseas Contingency Operation'
March 25, 2009 FOXNews.com
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
V.
TAREK MEHANNA
http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/1122.pdf
GOVERNMENT’S PROFFER AND MEMORANDUM IN SUPPORT OF DETENTION
The United States Attorney hereby respectfully submits this
memorandum and written proffer of evidence in support of the
argument that the defendant TAREK MEHANNA (“MEHANNA”) should be
detained pending trial because there are no conditions or
combination of conditions that will reasonably assure the
appearance of the defendant or the safety of the community.
Mehanna conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, and others to provide material support and resources for use in carrying out a conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country and extraterritorial homicide of a U.S. national.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Our Children are now salves to Chinese Labor Camp Laogia
You thought the politicians you supported and defended cared about the issues you do. Then you began to realize you were wrong - they only care about themselves and their careers.
America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen.
You have worked hard for what you have. You go to bed exhausted each night, knowing you have to get up the next day and do it all over again.
While you worked hard and saved your money, those who did the opposite are now being bailed out at your expense. We have elected people into office that we wouldn't invite into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children in their care. Yet, we leave our country and our children's future alone in their care. Why? What are we thinking?
Open your eyes! These people are robbing us blind. The people we have elected have set our house on fire all the while telling us they are the fire department. When will you realize you must think of not the present but of the future of this nation and your children and vote these arsonists out. Vote them out! The elected office should NOT BE A CAREER.
We work hard, play by the rules and we are tired of being angry, tired of being lied to, and, frankly tired of being tired.
We are the current guardians of freedom and it is now our duty to face the truth and do the right thing - no matter the personal cost.
1. Do you trust those in power to tell the truth - expecially if it would hurt them at election time?
2. How is it possible that ever president since Carter promised to lower dependence on foreign oil, but now we import more oil than ever from countries that would do us harm?
3. Are we to believe that a country that could take the idea of having an American walk on the moon and turn it into reality within eight years could not build a 670 mile fence on our southern border since 2005?
4. Do you believe you elected representative see your face when they vote or those faces who richly contribute to their campaigns? Vote them out!
Honest debates will pull back the curtain on the scam they've done. Passing a ten-thousand-page bill before it is even read or move quickly under cover of darkness to further themselves not thinking of you or your money they spend freely after you have worked so hard for it.
These parasites have fed undetected for years, but our present economic crisis has laid bare just how badly the members of our political elite - career politicians - have squandered our wealth while failing to prepare us for rough times. Now, the true extent of their looting of the national treasury and pillaging of our paychecks has been exposed!
Unfortunately, our financial security is directly related to our national security. What our elected congressmen and senators have done to us and the country we love is borderline treasonous. We trusted them and this is what happened. WELL NO MORE... Vote them out!!!
Each of us know that debt should be avoided and we have lived within our means hoping to give our children a better life.
Thomas Jefferson knew that govenment debt was unacceptable because it makes your children responsible to pay for what you bought. They have effectively branded our children as future slaves to our creditors (Chinese Labor Camps or LAOGIA).
WELL NOT MY KID...I am voting these crooks out!
Our elected officials forced us into economic servitude. It is our fault. We kept electing them term after term. We are past Democrat or Republican party. It is NOW ALL ABOUT SAVING THIS NATION. Vote them out!
Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for seventy years and bill me $100 trillion while I sit by and accept more of the same? Then shame on all of us for being ignorant and powerless Americans.
Samuel Adams said: Those who perfer the "tranquility of servitude" had best be prepared to "crouch down and lick the hands which feed you."
May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!"
Info from Glenn Beck's Common Sense book.
America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen.
You have worked hard for what you have. You go to bed exhausted each night, knowing you have to get up the next day and do it all over again.
While you worked hard and saved your money, those who did the opposite are now being bailed out at your expense. We have elected people into office that we wouldn't invite into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children in their care. Yet, we leave our country and our children's future alone in their care. Why? What are we thinking?
Open your eyes! These people are robbing us blind. The people we have elected have set our house on fire all the while telling us they are the fire department. When will you realize you must think of not the present but of the future of this nation and your children and vote these arsonists out. Vote them out! The elected office should NOT BE A CAREER.
We work hard, play by the rules and we are tired of being angry, tired of being lied to, and, frankly tired of being tired.
We are the current guardians of freedom and it is now our duty to face the truth and do the right thing - no matter the personal cost.
1. Do you trust those in power to tell the truth - expecially if it would hurt them at election time?
2. How is it possible that ever president since Carter promised to lower dependence on foreign oil, but now we import more oil than ever from countries that would do us harm?
3. Are we to believe that a country that could take the idea of having an American walk on the moon and turn it into reality within eight years could not build a 670 mile fence on our southern border since 2005?
4. Do you believe you elected representative see your face when they vote or those faces who richly contribute to their campaigns? Vote them out!
Honest debates will pull back the curtain on the scam they've done. Passing a ten-thousand-page bill before it is even read or move quickly under cover of darkness to further themselves not thinking of you or your money they spend freely after you have worked so hard for it.
These parasites have fed undetected for years, but our present economic crisis has laid bare just how badly the members of our political elite - career politicians - have squandered our wealth while failing to prepare us for rough times. Now, the true extent of their looting of the national treasury and pillaging of our paychecks has been exposed!
Unfortunately, our financial security is directly related to our national security. What our elected congressmen and senators have done to us and the country we love is borderline treasonous. We trusted them and this is what happened. WELL NO MORE... Vote them out!!!
Each of us know that debt should be avoided and we have lived within our means hoping to give our children a better life.
Thomas Jefferson knew that govenment debt was unacceptable because it makes your children responsible to pay for what you bought. They have effectively branded our children as future slaves to our creditors (Chinese Labor Camps or LAOGIA).
WELL NOT MY KID...I am voting these crooks out!
Our elected officials forced us into economic servitude. It is our fault. We kept electing them term after term. We are past Democrat or Republican party. It is NOW ALL ABOUT SAVING THIS NATION. Vote them out!
Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me for seventy years and bill me $100 trillion while I sit by and accept more of the same? Then shame on all of us for being ignorant and powerless Americans.
Samuel Adams said: Those who perfer the "tranquility of servitude" had best be prepared to "crouch down and lick the hands which feed you."
May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!"
Info from Glenn Beck's Common Sense book.
Friday, September 24, 2010
"tingles" voters felt is gone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6smXinWzos
Women at Town Hall: I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for," a woman told President Obama at a town hall.
"My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?," she added.
"tingles" voters felt is gone and reality is setting in.
See Discoverthenetwork.org on Harry Reid:
In a 1998 real estate deal engineered by Jay Brown (a former casino lawyer and a longtime friend of Reid), the senator purchased two undeveloped residential-property lots on Las Vegas’ rapidly growing outskirts for approximately $400,000. Reid bought one of the parcels on his own, and the second one jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap supported by Reid. In 2001 Reid sold both of his lots for $400,000 to a limited liability corporation created by Jay Brown, but he never disclosed the sale on his annual public ethics report. Nor did he inform Congress that he held any stake in Brown's company. As far as Congress knew, Reid was still the owner of the two lots he had purchased three years earlier.
In 2004 Brown's company, having negotiated with local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, sold the land to other developers in a deal that earned Reid $1.1 million -- a $700,000 profit on his initial investment. Reid falsely reported the transaction to Congress as a personal land sale.
In 2001 Reid paid cash for a $750,000 condominium at the Washington, D.C. Ritz-Carlton where he resides. When he subsequently gave Christmas bonuses (in 2002, 2004, and 2005) to the doorman and other support staff at his building, he used $3,300 in campaign donations rather than his own separate funds -- in contravention of federal election law. Reid’s campaign falsely listed the bonuses as campaign “salary” expenditures for two of the years in question, and as a “contribution” for the other year. When news of Reid’s misappropriation of campaign funds became public in 2006, the senator’s office said the listing as salary had been a “clerical error.” Added Reid: “I am reimbursing the campaign from my own pocket to prevent this issue from being used in the current campaign season to deflect attention from Republican failures.”
In a $286 billion federal transportation bill passed by Congress in 2005, Reid secured $300 million in earmarks for projects in his home state, including $18 million to fund the construction of a bridge spanning the Colorado River. On the Arizona side of that bridge, Reid owned 160 acres of undeveloped land around which many new housing units were being built. Noting that the new bridge would cause the value of Reid’s property to skyrocket, Norman Ornstein, co-author of a book that examines earmarking, said: “It's a really bad idea for lawmakers to earmark projects when they have a financial interest that could in any way be affected by it.” Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted: “Unwittingly, the taxpayer may have helped inflate the value” of Reid's land.
Between 2002 and 2006, Reid intervened to gain monumental government concessions on behalf of a powerful Nevada land developer, Harvey Whittemore, who wished to build thousands of homes and numerous golf courses on 43,000 acres of barren land in an area called Coyote Springs, an hour northeast of Las Vegas. This land had a number of federal restrictions on its use: One-fourth of it was off-limits to developers because of federal protections for an “endangered” species of desert tortoise that dwelt there; another one-fourth was government-owned and was subject to a federal power-line right of way; and the territory overall was rife with streams and washes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated as crucial to the health of the desert’s ecosystem, and was therefore generally off-limits to construction.
Thanks to Senator Reid’s intercession, however, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to relocate the tortoises to an adjacent federal preserve, thereby opening that portion of Coyote Springs to developers.
In 2002 Reid inserted some obscure provisions into a land-management bill that relocated the aforementioned power corridor, thereby apparently freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500-acre parcel he coveted. But the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee balked at the deal, and Reid in turn negotiated an alternate arrangement where Whittemore was permitted to purchase the land at a fair market rate while the government relocated the corridor.
Finally, in 2005 Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign used their influence with the EPA to eliminate the environmental-impact obstacle.
In return for Reid’s efforts, Whittemore gave tens of thousands of dollars to the senator’s political campaigns and to his leadership fund (which Reid used to help bankroll the campaigns of fellow Democrats). In addition, Whittemore gave $5,000 to each of Reid's two sons, to finance their efforts to win local political offices. The developer also hired one of those sons as his personal lawyer to represent him in his dealings with federal officials.
Between 2001 and 2004, Reid wrote at least four letters pressing the Bush administration to take action on certain issues of importance to Indian tribes that were clients of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, whose staff was in regular contact with Reid’s office, lobbied on behalf of tribes involved in the gambling casino industry; he would later be convicted in federal court for defrauding those tribes. Each time Reid wrote a letter on behalf of the Indian tribes, he collected donations from Abramoff and his lobbying partners and clients around the same time period. All told, these donations totaled nearly $68,000. Also between 2001 and 2004, Reid received more than $50,000 directly from four Indian tribes that were clients of Abramoff.
Reid has been one of the Senate’s most vocal critics of the Iraq War. In April 2007, shortly after President Bush had initiated a “surge” that sent 21,000 additional troops to combat the insurgent violence in Iraq, Reid, counseling American surrender, stated publicly: “I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.”
On the environmental front, Reid strongly believes that human industrial activity is destroying the planet. In June 2008, he said, “Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. And this global warming is ruining our country. It’s ruining the world.”
Also in 2008, Reid advocated a ban on all oil exploration in the massive shale depositories of America’s western states, which are estimated to hold between 800 billion to 2 trillion barrels of oil.
In 2008, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a non-partisan government watchdog group, named Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as its “Porkers of the Year” because of what CAGW viewed as their consistent record of fiscal irresponsibility.
Reid supports the passage of an immigration-reform bill that would create a path to citizenship for all illeal immigrants currently residing in the United States. In June 2009, he said:
"I'm going to do comprehensive immigration reform. I'm not going to do it piecemeal. That's an excuse for everybody to do too little. We're going to do it all at once, and we're going to have comprehensive immigration reform that will include taking care of our borders, a decent guest-worker program, bringing the 11 million people out of the shadows, doing something that's so important with the employer sanctions bill that really is a catch-22 for everyone and a number of other things. We're going to do it all in one piece of legislation, not give people an excuse that they voted for one thing and think that they're through with it."
In December 2009, Reid likened Republicans who opposed the implementation of government-run healthcare, to those who opposed the abolition of slavery in centuries past. In a December 7th speech on the Senate floor, Reid said:
“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ‘Slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough.’”
In January 2010, it was reported that a forthcoming book -- Game Change, by Mark Halperin -- quoted Senator Reid as having said during the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama stood a good chance of winning because he is "light-skinned" and has "no negro dialect -- unless he wants to." Reid quickly issued a public apology for his remarks, saying: "I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments."
In August 2009, Newsmax.com reported that Rangel had "failed to report at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form." Newsmax added:
"[A]mong the dozen newly disclosed holdings revealed in the amended forms are a checking account at a federal credit union with a balance between $250,0000 and $500,000; three vacant lots in Glassboro, N.J., valued at a total of $1,000 to $15,000; and stock in PepsiCo worth between $15,000 and $50,000. The new [disclosure] forms report that Rangel’s total net worth is between $1,028,024 and $2,495,000 — about twice the amount listed in the original disclosure statement, filed in May 2008, which declared assets totaling between $516,015 and $1,316,000."
Charles Rangel AKA Punta Cana villa was also accused of: taking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center at City College from a wealthy businessman whose company sybsequently received a lucrative tax break; and accepting a Citigroup-funded trip to the Caribbean in November 2008, when the bank was in the midst of squandering much of the bailout money it had received from the federal government.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ Rep. Charles Rangel's scandal woes began three years ago, when The Post disclosed that he was soliciting massive donations from companies with interests before Congress in a bid to bankroll a center in his name at CCNY.
The July 23, 2007, bombshell by Washington correspondent Geoff Earle detailed how Rangel, then the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had attempted to quietly secure close to $25 million from a slew of private companies and foundations for the Charles Rangel Center for Public Service. Those ponying up cash included AIG, the Verizon Foundation and Eugene Isenberg, the CEO of the energy firm Nabors Industries.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ#ixzz10XIBqkLN
Another Post exclusive, on Aug. 31, 2008, by reporters Isabel Vincent and Susan Edelman, revealed that Rangel owned a luxurious beachfront villa in the Dominican Republic for 20 years, but declared income on it only sporadically.
He later admitted he had failed to disclose $75,000 in rental income since 1988, and amended his tax returns.
There were further disclosures in a series of Post stories in late August of 2009. Washington Bureau Chief Charles Hurt showed that Rangel had failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside assets and income on financial-disclosure forms he filed between 2002 and 2006.
The New York Times broke the story that the Harlem Democratic lawmaker had four rent-stabilized units in the Lenox Terrace building, and was improperly using one of them as a campaign office.
Punta Cana villa
CHARGE: “Failed to report rental income” and pay taxes on the villa he owned in the Punta Cana region of the Dominican Republic on income-tax returns for nine years.
EVIDENCE: Bought the villa in March 1987 and didn’t “report any rental income from Punta Cana on his original federal income-tax returns for calendar years between 1998 through 2006.” Also failed to report or misreported the income on his annual financial-disclosure forms. In amended tax returns for 2004 to 2007, Rangel reported villa-related income ranging from $5,030 to $8,467 a year.
Financial disclosure
CHARGE: Violated federal law for 10 years by failing to report and misreporting “numerous items required to be reported” — including over $600,000 in assets and income — under the Ethics in Government Act.
EVIDENCE: Neglected to report his large holdings of various stocks, including Bell Atlantic, Verizon and Pepsico, several mutual funds and the Congressional Federal Credit Union. Also owned a brownstone at 74 W. 132nd St. but didn’t disclose its rental income in four years and grossly underreported it in two other years.
CCNY center
CHARGE: Violated the US code barring members of Congress from soliciting or accepting “anything of value” from a person with interests before Congress, and misusing his “official resources” and letterhead. Also broke the House gift rule against soliciting lobbyists.
EVIDENCE: Began raising money in 2005 for the “Charles Rangel Center at the City College of New York,” which would have a “well-furnished office” for himself. Ordered his staff to prepare a fund-raising appeal to more than 100 fat-cat foundations. Rangel signed all the letters, which bore “United States Congress” letterhead.
Rent-stabilized apartments
CHARGE: Ran afoul of the Code of Ethics for Government Service when he got an improper benefit from a New York firm, the Olnick Organization, in the form of a rent-stabilized residential apartment that was used as office space.
EVIDENCE: Signed a “living purposes only” lease in 1996 for an apartment in Olnick-owned Lenox Terrace, saying his son would live there. But it was occupied solely by his campaign committee and a political-action committee. Rangel was put on a “special handling list” at the apartment complex because he was a member of Congress.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ#ixzz10XIWHdSo
Maxine Waters
Discoverthenetwork.org
Also in 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) named Waters as one of the 13 "most corrupt" members of the U.S. Congress. The CREW report cited a December 2004 Los Angeles Times investigation disclosing how a number of Waters’ relatives had made more than $1 million during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had helped. Waters declined to be interviewed about this matter, saying only that her family members “do their business, and I do mine.”
In a May 2008 congressional hearing on gasoline prices, Shell Oil President John Hofmeister stated: “I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress, ever-increasing prices, unless the demand comes down, and that $5 [per gallon] will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new [oil] reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.” Waters replied: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing – would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
During the national financial crisis that struck in the autumn of 2008, Waters was lobbied by representatives of OneUnited Bank, a black-owned depository institution that was seeking a federal government bailout after having squandered almost $52 million of its bank capital on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock. These lobbyists were longtime friends, donors, and fundraisers of Rep. Waters.
Meanwhile, Waters' husband had a long history as an investor in one of the banks that had previously merged into OneUnited; he had once served on OneUnited's board of directors; and he owned large amounts of stock in OneUnited. In fact, both he and Rep. Waters had owned six-figure sums of OneUnited stock at various times during the preceding six years.
In response to OneUnited's lobbying, Rep. Waters intervened to arrange a meeting where representatives of the bank could plead their case to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and 20 of his subordinates. As a result of that meeting, Paulson et al secretly engineered a special federal rescue of the floundering bank. This bailout cost American taxpayers $12 million in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) cash.
On August 2, 2010, the House Ethics Committee filed three charges against Waters, alleging that she had used her influence to gain special favors (from the federal government) for OneUnited.
Following is an overview of Waters’ congressional voting record over the course of her political career, as per key pieces of legislation covering a wide array of issues.
Criminal Justice
In October 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to replace the death penalty with a life imprisonment sentence in certain federal cases. In April 1994 she voted in favor of substituting life imprisonment for the death penalty in all cases.
Also in April 1994, she voted against a bill requiring a mandatory life sentence in prison for anyone convicted of three violent or drug-related felonies; reducing the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults for violent crimes; allocating $13.5 billion for the development and operation of prisons; and earmarking $3.45 billion to hire and train more police officers nationwide. In August 1994 she voted against another very similar bill.
Waters believes that the American justice system is thoroughly infested with racism and discrimination against nonwhite minorities. She has stated that “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, or receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.”[5] Further, she warns that by imprisoning a disproportionate number of black males, “we are risking an entire generation of African American young men because of an unjust justice system.”[6]
Welfare
In February 1995 and December 1995, Waters voted against a welfare-reform bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. This bill replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with block grants to states; it increased those grants after two years for states wherein the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies had declined; it barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; it prohibited states from providing additional cash assistance to families that gave birth to additional children while on public assistance; it required states to limit their aid to five years per family; it denied assistance for ten years to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain assistance in more than one state; it denied assistance to fugitive felons and parole and probation violators; and it denied assistance to alcoholics and drug addicts.
Military Commissions
In September 2006 Waters voted against a bill authorizing the President to establish military commissions to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror. In Waters’ view, such tribunals trample on the civil rights and liberties of defendants who, she contends, should be entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the American criminal court system—where the standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals.
Counter-Terrorism & Homeland Security
In May 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to terminate the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, which called for the development of a missile defense system.
In June 1991 she voted to cut $260 million in funding related to the development of the MX missile rail garrison.
In June 1992 she voted to decrease defense spending by 10 percent in the ensuing fiscal year. That same month, she voted to prohibit the production of any new B-2 aircraft by cutting $2.7 billion. In yet another June 1992 vote, she supported a $937.5 million funding cut for the SDI program (a 22 percent reduction).
In April 1996 she voted against a bill to increase the number of explosive-detection agents; to expand the deportation of criminal illegal aliens and suspected terrorists; to make it easier for the U.S. to deny asylum to suspected terrorists; and to bar terrorist organizations from fundraising in the United States.
In March 1999 she voted against a bill “to declare it to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.”
In September 2001 she voted in favor of a joint resolution “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent [9/11] attacks launched against the United States.”
In October 2001 she voted against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which proposed to ease restrictions on government wiretap and surveillance operations; to permit government officials to share with one another the information they obtain from such surveillance operations; to strengthen security along the U.S./Canadian border; and to deny U.S. visas to suspected money-launderers.
Also in October 2001, she voted against the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measure known as the Patriot Act.
In July 2002 she voted against a bill permitting airline pilots to carry firearms for the purpose of defending the aircraft against acts of violence or terrorism.
In July 2005 she voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
In September 2006 she voted against an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978; this amendment called for allowing the government to use electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorist operatives.
In August 2007 she voted against a bill permitting the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to monitor foreign electronic communications which are routed through the United States—provided that the purpose of such monitoring was to obtain "foreign intelligence information" about suspected terrorists. In June 2008 she voted in favor of a bill specifically prohibiting this type of surveillance.
From 1998 to 2005, the Center for Security Policy, which is committed to "promoting international peace through American strength," gave Waters ratings that ranged from 8 percent to 12 percent.
In 2003-2004, the American Security Council, which "serves as educational secretariat of the Congressional Caucus on National Security," gave Waters a 10 percent rating.
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/04/obama-file-72-obama-appoints-former.html
In May 1992 Waters put her name to a supplement in the Communist Party‘s newspaper, the People’s Weekly World which called for readers to “support our continuing struggle for justice and dignity.” Virtually all other signatories were known Communist Party members or supporters.
In October, later that year, she was the keynote speaker at a Coalition of Black Trade Unionists meeting in St Louis Missouri. The Coalition began as a Communist Party front.
In June 1996, the Communist Party’s People’s Weekly World held a tribute event for Southern California labor unionists Jerry Acosta and Gil Cedillo. Presentations to the honorees were made on behalf of Maxine Waters and (now U.S. Secretary of labor), Hilda Solis, by their staffers who were present at the event.
In 1997 Waters put her name to a “Jobs Bill” which had been originally introduced to Congress at the request of over 50 prominent labor leaders – many of whom were known members or supporters of the Communist Party.
Waters has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – linked Congressional Progressive Caucus from as early as 1998 up til the present. Her mid 1990s press secretary and speech-writer, Patrick Lacefield was a former National Director of the D.S.A.
Waters also serves on the Advisory Board for Progressive Democrats of America, an activist network within the Democratic Party, which is led by several D.S.A. connected activists, including National Director Tim Carpenter.
In May 2008, Waters made an embarassing tongue-slip during her televised questioning of a Shell Oil Executive. She queried, “…And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing, uh, umm – will be about, basically. taking over, and the Government running all of your companies.” The video of this incident can be viewed here.
If Maxine Waters is found guilty of ethics violations, it will one more example of the corruption/socialism connection
Barney Frank
Discoverthenetwork.org
In 2004 Frank and 75 other House Democrats (including such notables as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel) took exception to George W. Bush's public expression of concern about the risky loans that Fannie Mae and and Freddie Mac were making. They sent the President a letter warning that "an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing."
In June 2005, Frank said the following about his – and the House Financial Services Committee's – efforts to promote home-ownership for low-income people:
"Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue now that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership. Homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we've seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation, where you had problems when people invested in a business plan where there was no reality. People building fiber optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see ebb and flow of price at a certain percentage level, but you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. So those of us on our committee will continue to push for home ownership."
When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or OFHEO (the agency responsible for overseeing Fannie and Freddie), in 2004 issued a 211-page report condemning irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting, Frank said: "It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue."
In 2007 Frank became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That same year the mortgage crisis first began to manifest itself, resulting from the large number of defaults on the subprime loans which Frank had long advocated. Yet the congressman attributed the crisis not to the lending policies he had been espousing, but rather to the allegedly greedy practices of banks and inadequate regulatory oversight. "The subprime crisis," he said, "demonstrates the serious economic and social consequences that result from too little regulation." In 2008 Frank similarly blamed the crisis on "excessive deregulation" and "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best."
New Maxine Waters and Barney Frank Scandal Documents
By Tom Fitton
Biggovernment.com
http://biggovernment.com/tfitton/2010/09/20/new-maxine-waters-and-barney-frank-scandal-documents/
Remember at the outset of the financial crisis when the government told us only “healthy banks” were going to receive bailout funds? Well apparently that requirement does not apply to banks with friends in high places.
Judicial Watch received new documents from the U.S. Department of Treasury about the controversial $12 million bailout grant provided to Boston-based OneUnited Bank.
We got the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed against Treasury. Included are internal Treasury emails describing the substandard condition of OneUnited prior to the taxpayer funded bailout, which allegedly occurred at the behest of Reps. Maxine Waters and Barney Frank.
Here’s what we found out in a nutshell: OneUnited Bank was in deep trouble due to incompetence and mismanagement. Government officials knew all about it. And yet, they bent the rules for Waters and Frank and “invested” taxpayer funds in the floundering enterprise.
Consider this September 15, 2008, email from former Treasury Senior Advisor Michael Scott to Director of the Office of Financial Institutions Mario Ugoletti. It includes a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) evaluation administered by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) noting serious issues with OneUnited’s lending practices:
2004 CRA Public Evaluation: While the institution received a CRA rating of “Low Satisfactory” on an overall basis, OneUnited Bank’s CRA rating for Massachusetts was “Needs to Improve” for both the Lending Test and the Investment Test. Under the Lending Test, the report stated that “OUB has done a poor job of meeting the credit needs of its [Boston, MA] assessment area. A review of the 2002 and 2003 HMDA data revealed a total of one loan. There were no reported Community Development Loans (CDL) and any innovative or flexible lending programs were apparently ineffective.” For the Massachusetts Investment Test, the report stated that “the level and complexity of investments within the Boston assessment area is less than satisfactory there were no equity investments or qualified deposits within the assessment area. The low volume of qualified investments within the assessment area is a concern.”
In Florida, the institution received a CRA rating of “Substantial Noncompliance” which also represented the subordinate rating for the Lending Test…
A subsequent 2007 CRA evaluation noted continued problems with OneUnited’s lending program, particularly in Florida.
The documents also include a January 3, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari highlighting Barney Frank’s intervention in the OneUnited Bank bailout and calling attention to significant concerns about the OneUnited transaction:
According to the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] Barney Frank told them that he specifically put section 103-6 in the bill in order to help this particular bank. Apparently this bank also had an issue with a Porsche that the regulators had made them get rid of. The story will run later this week and will highlight three banks that they think raise questions and are not “healthy” banks…
(As I’ve noted previously, according to the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, Treasury indicated it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending.)
CORRUPTION CHRONICLES
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•Prosecutor Kept Cash From Hillary’s Jailed Chinese Swindler
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•Congressman’s Two-Front War Against Gold, Glenn Beck
Judicial Watch also uncovered a memorandum entitled “Regulatory Financial Highlights” that includes detailed financial information related to OneUnited as well as a summary of information collected by Treasury during its investigation of the bank.
According to these documents, OneUnited sought government assistance in part because the company owned $52 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock that was “irrevocably impaired” when the government seized control of the two GSEs. However, as noted by one Treasury email from Michael Scott, OneUnited “purchased their Fannie/Freddie stock in the first quarter of 2008,” long after the problems cited in the government’s two CRA assessments. The official commented, “Interesting, huh?”
Yes, it certainly is…
In light of these documents, I do not think there is any question that, if not for the corrupt intervention by Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, OneUnited would not have gotten a $12 million taxpayer bailout. And this so-called community bank wasn’t actually lending much to the “community” that Frank and Waters were purporting to help.
Today’s Washington Post adds more devastating detail to this scandal (and references documents first obtained by Judicial Watch). The paper reports that regulators knew that OneUnited could not get aid under law. So Frank, for Waters, inserted a provision into the TARP legislation designed to help OneUnited. But that wasn’t enough because the bank was so poorly run. And the rules were bent further:
Still, OneUnited did not meet the normal threshold for obtaining TARP money. As the inspector general for the TARP program, Neil M. Barofsky, said in a 2009 report that referred to OneUnited’s troubles without citing its name, the bank had not met five metrics, indicating it was not adequately capitalized.
Moreover, the FDIC, in a memo to the Treasury Department analyzing its TARP application, warned explicitly that the bank was in a “precarious financial position”…
But a committee of regulators and a group of top Treasury officials then departed from customary practices. They did so even though one Treasury member said that “he was very concerned about this bank,” according to Barofsky’s report.
The report said these reviewers decided that the bank’s viability could be assessed “with applied-for TARP funds taken into account” as an existing capital asset on its balance sheet. In short, the reviewers assessed the bank as though it already had the money, to make it eligible for the aid.
The resulting $12 million boost to OneUnited’s bottom line – again without a penny moving anywhere – finally allowed it to look healthy enough to win the loan…
The Obama administration has thus far produced 639 pages in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA investigation of the Waters/Frank bailout scandal. But they’re still keeping 203 pages under lock and key. It is not hard to see why.
For politicians, reporters, and political consultants trying to figure out the Tea Party and why so many Americans are angry at Washington corruption – they might want to look at this corrupt mess in TARP uncovered by Judicial Watch.
Women at Town Hall: I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for," a woman told President Obama at a town hall.
"My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot dogs and beans era of our lives, but, quite frankly, it's starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we're headed again, and, quite frankly, Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?," she added.
"tingles" voters felt is gone and reality is setting in.
See Discoverthenetwork.org on Harry Reid:
In a 1998 real estate deal engineered by Jay Brown (a former casino lawyer and a longtime friend of Reid), the senator purchased two undeveloped residential-property lots on Las Vegas’ rapidly growing outskirts for approximately $400,000. Reid bought one of the parcels on his own, and the second one jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap supported by Reid. In 2001 Reid sold both of his lots for $400,000 to a limited liability corporation created by Jay Brown, but he never disclosed the sale on his annual public ethics report. Nor did he inform Congress that he held any stake in Brown's company. As far as Congress knew, Reid was still the owner of the two lots he had purchased three years earlier.
In 2004 Brown's company, having negotiated with local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, sold the land to other developers in a deal that earned Reid $1.1 million -- a $700,000 profit on his initial investment. Reid falsely reported the transaction to Congress as a personal land sale.
In 2001 Reid paid cash for a $750,000 condominium at the Washington, D.C. Ritz-Carlton where he resides. When he subsequently gave Christmas bonuses (in 2002, 2004, and 2005) to the doorman and other support staff at his building, he used $3,300 in campaign donations rather than his own separate funds -- in contravention of federal election law. Reid’s campaign falsely listed the bonuses as campaign “salary” expenditures for two of the years in question, and as a “contribution” for the other year. When news of Reid’s misappropriation of campaign funds became public in 2006, the senator’s office said the listing as salary had been a “clerical error.” Added Reid: “I am reimbursing the campaign from my own pocket to prevent this issue from being used in the current campaign season to deflect attention from Republican failures.”
In a $286 billion federal transportation bill passed by Congress in 2005, Reid secured $300 million in earmarks for projects in his home state, including $18 million to fund the construction of a bridge spanning the Colorado River. On the Arizona side of that bridge, Reid owned 160 acres of undeveloped land around which many new housing units were being built. Noting that the new bridge would cause the value of Reid’s property to skyrocket, Norman Ornstein, co-author of a book that examines earmarking, said: “It's a really bad idea for lawmakers to earmark projects when they have a financial interest that could in any way be affected by it.” Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted: “Unwittingly, the taxpayer may have helped inflate the value” of Reid's land.
Between 2002 and 2006, Reid intervened to gain monumental government concessions on behalf of a powerful Nevada land developer, Harvey Whittemore, who wished to build thousands of homes and numerous golf courses on 43,000 acres of barren land in an area called Coyote Springs, an hour northeast of Las Vegas. This land had a number of federal restrictions on its use: One-fourth of it was off-limits to developers because of federal protections for an “endangered” species of desert tortoise that dwelt there; another one-fourth was government-owned and was subject to a federal power-line right of way; and the territory overall was rife with streams and washes that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated as crucial to the health of the desert’s ecosystem, and was therefore generally off-limits to construction.
Thanks to Senator Reid’s intercession, however, the Bureau of Land Management agreed to relocate the tortoises to an adjacent federal preserve, thereby opening that portion of Coyote Springs to developers.
In 2002 Reid inserted some obscure provisions into a land-management bill that relocated the aforementioned power corridor, thereby apparently freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500-acre parcel he coveted. But the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee balked at the deal, and Reid in turn negotiated an alternate arrangement where Whittemore was permitted to purchase the land at a fair market rate while the government relocated the corridor.
Finally, in 2005 Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign used their influence with the EPA to eliminate the environmental-impact obstacle.
In return for Reid’s efforts, Whittemore gave tens of thousands of dollars to the senator’s political campaigns and to his leadership fund (which Reid used to help bankroll the campaigns of fellow Democrats). In addition, Whittemore gave $5,000 to each of Reid's two sons, to finance their efforts to win local political offices. The developer also hired one of those sons as his personal lawyer to represent him in his dealings with federal officials.
Between 2001 and 2004, Reid wrote at least four letters pressing the Bush administration to take action on certain issues of importance to Indian tribes that were clients of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Abramoff, whose staff was in regular contact with Reid’s office, lobbied on behalf of tribes involved in the gambling casino industry; he would later be convicted in federal court for defrauding those tribes. Each time Reid wrote a letter on behalf of the Indian tribes, he collected donations from Abramoff and his lobbying partners and clients around the same time period. All told, these donations totaled nearly $68,000. Also between 2001 and 2004, Reid received more than $50,000 directly from four Indian tribes that were clients of Abramoff.
Reid has been one of the Senate’s most vocal critics of the Iraq War. In April 2007, shortly after President Bush had initiated a “surge” that sent 21,000 additional troops to combat the insurgent violence in Iraq, Reid, counseling American surrender, stated publicly: “I believe ... that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.”
On the environmental front, Reid strongly believes that human industrial activity is destroying the planet. In June 2008, he said, “Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. And this global warming is ruining our country. It’s ruining the world.”
Also in 2008, Reid advocated a ban on all oil exploration in the massive shale depositories of America’s western states, which are estimated to hold between 800 billion to 2 trillion barrels of oil.
In 2008, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a non-partisan government watchdog group, named Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as its “Porkers of the Year” because of what CAGW viewed as their consistent record of fiscal irresponsibility.
Reid supports the passage of an immigration-reform bill that would create a path to citizenship for all illeal immigrants currently residing in the United States. In June 2009, he said:
"I'm going to do comprehensive immigration reform. I'm not going to do it piecemeal. That's an excuse for everybody to do too little. We're going to do it all at once, and we're going to have comprehensive immigration reform that will include taking care of our borders, a decent guest-worker program, bringing the 11 million people out of the shadows, doing something that's so important with the employer sanctions bill that really is a catch-22 for everyone and a number of other things. We're going to do it all in one piece of legislation, not give people an excuse that they voted for one thing and think that they're through with it."
In December 2009, Reid likened Republicans who opposed the implementation of government-run healthcare, to those who opposed the abolition of slavery in centuries past. In a December 7th speech on the Senate floor, Reid said:
“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ‘Slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough.’”
In January 2010, it was reported that a forthcoming book -- Game Change, by Mark Halperin -- quoted Senator Reid as having said during the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama stood a good chance of winning because he is "light-skinned" and has "no negro dialect -- unless he wants to." Reid quickly issued a public apology for his remarks, saying: "I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments."
In August 2009, Newsmax.com reported that Rangel had "failed to report at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form." Newsmax added:
"[A]mong the dozen newly disclosed holdings revealed in the amended forms are a checking account at a federal credit union with a balance between $250,0000 and $500,000; three vacant lots in Glassboro, N.J., valued at a total of $1,000 to $15,000; and stock in PepsiCo worth between $15,000 and $50,000. The new [disclosure] forms report that Rangel’s total net worth is between $1,028,024 and $2,495,000 — about twice the amount listed in the original disclosure statement, filed in May 2008, which declared assets totaling between $516,015 and $1,316,000."
Charles Rangel AKA Punta Cana villa was also accused of: taking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center at City College from a wealthy businessman whose company sybsequently received a lucrative tax break; and accepting a Citigroup-funded trip to the Caribbean in November 2008, when the bank was in the midst of squandering much of the bailout money it had received from the federal government.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ Rep. Charles Rangel's scandal woes began three years ago, when The Post disclosed that he was soliciting massive donations from companies with interests before Congress in a bid to bankroll a center in his name at CCNY.
The July 23, 2007, bombshell by Washington correspondent Geoff Earle detailed how Rangel, then the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had attempted to quietly secure close to $25 million from a slew of private companies and foundations for the Charles Rangel Center for Public Service. Those ponying up cash included AIG, the Verizon Foundation and Eugene Isenberg, the CEO of the energy firm Nabors Industries.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ#ixzz10XIBqkLN
Another Post exclusive, on Aug. 31, 2008, by reporters Isabel Vincent and Susan Edelman, revealed that Rangel owned a luxurious beachfront villa in the Dominican Republic for 20 years, but declared income on it only sporadically.
He later admitted he had failed to disclose $75,000 in rental income since 1988, and amended his tax returns.
There were further disclosures in a series of Post stories in late August of 2009. Washington Bureau Chief Charles Hurt showed that Rangel had failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside assets and income on financial-disclosure forms he filed between 2002 and 2006.
The New York Times broke the story that the Harlem Democratic lawmaker had four rent-stabilized units in the Lenox Terrace building, and was improperly using one of them as a campaign office.
Punta Cana villa
CHARGE: “Failed to report rental income” and pay taxes on the villa he owned in the Punta Cana region of the Dominican Republic on income-tax returns for nine years.
EVIDENCE: Bought the villa in March 1987 and didn’t “report any rental income from Punta Cana on his original federal income-tax returns for calendar years between 1998 through 2006.” Also failed to report or misreported the income on his annual financial-disclosure forms. In amended tax returns for 2004 to 2007, Rangel reported villa-related income ranging from $5,030 to $8,467 a year.
Financial disclosure
CHARGE: Violated federal law for 10 years by failing to report and misreporting “numerous items required to be reported” — including over $600,000 in assets and income — under the Ethics in Government Act.
EVIDENCE: Neglected to report his large holdings of various stocks, including Bell Atlantic, Verizon and Pepsico, several mutual funds and the Congressional Federal Credit Union. Also owned a brownstone at 74 W. 132nd St. but didn’t disclose its rental income in four years and grossly underreported it in two other years.
CCNY center
CHARGE: Violated the US code barring members of Congress from soliciting or accepting “anything of value” from a person with interests before Congress, and misusing his “official resources” and letterhead. Also broke the House gift rule against soliciting lobbyists.
EVIDENCE: Began raising money in 2005 for the “Charles Rangel Center at the City College of New York,” which would have a “well-furnished office” for himself. Ordered his staff to prepare a fund-raising appeal to more than 100 fat-cat foundations. Rangel signed all the letters, which bore “United States Congress” letterhead.
Rent-stabilized apartments
CHARGE: Ran afoul of the Code of Ethics for Government Service when he got an improper benefit from a New York firm, the Olnick Organization, in the form of a rent-stabilized residential apartment that was used as office space.
EVIDENCE: Signed a “living purposes only” lease in 1996 for an apartment in Olnick-owned Lenox Terrace, saying his son would live there. But it was occupied solely by his campaign committee and a political-action committee. Rangel was put on a “special handling list” at the apartment complex because he was a member of Congress.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/host_of_post_exposes_got_ball_rolling_frE69lWonJRJz4dduAKXZJ#ixzz10XIWHdSo
Maxine Waters
Discoverthenetwork.org
Also in 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) named Waters as one of the 13 "most corrupt" members of the U.S. Congress. The CREW report cited a December 2004 Los Angeles Times investigation disclosing how a number of Waters’ relatives had made more than $1 million during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had helped. Waters declined to be interviewed about this matter, saying only that her family members “do their business, and I do mine.”
In a May 2008 congressional hearing on gasoline prices, Shell Oil President John Hofmeister stated: “I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress, ever-increasing prices, unless the demand comes down, and that $5 [per gallon] will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new [oil] reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.” Waters replied: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing – would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
During the national financial crisis that struck in the autumn of 2008, Waters was lobbied by representatives of OneUnited Bank, a black-owned depository institution that was seeking a federal government bailout after having squandered almost $52 million of its bank capital on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock. These lobbyists were longtime friends, donors, and fundraisers of Rep. Waters.
Meanwhile, Waters' husband had a long history as an investor in one of the banks that had previously merged into OneUnited; he had once served on OneUnited's board of directors; and he owned large amounts of stock in OneUnited. In fact, both he and Rep. Waters had owned six-figure sums of OneUnited stock at various times during the preceding six years.
In response to OneUnited's lobbying, Rep. Waters intervened to arrange a meeting where representatives of the bank could plead their case to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and 20 of his subordinates. As a result of that meeting, Paulson et al secretly engineered a special federal rescue of the floundering bank. This bailout cost American taxpayers $12 million in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) cash.
On August 2, 2010, the House Ethics Committee filed three charges against Waters, alleging that she had used her influence to gain special favors (from the federal government) for OneUnited.
Following is an overview of Waters’ congressional voting record over the course of her political career, as per key pieces of legislation covering a wide array of issues.
Criminal Justice
In October 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to replace the death penalty with a life imprisonment sentence in certain federal cases. In April 1994 she voted in favor of substituting life imprisonment for the death penalty in all cases.
Also in April 1994, she voted against a bill requiring a mandatory life sentence in prison for anyone convicted of three violent or drug-related felonies; reducing the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults for violent crimes; allocating $13.5 billion for the development and operation of prisons; and earmarking $3.45 billion to hire and train more police officers nationwide. In August 1994 she voted against another very similar bill.
Waters believes that the American justice system is thoroughly infested with racism and discrimination against nonwhite minorities. She has stated that “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, or receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.”[5] Further, she warns that by imprisoning a disproportionate number of black males, “we are risking an entire generation of African American young men because of an unjust justice system.”[6]
Welfare
In February 1995 and December 1995, Waters voted against a welfare-reform bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. This bill replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with block grants to states; it increased those grants after two years for states wherein the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies had declined; it barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; it prohibited states from providing additional cash assistance to families that gave birth to additional children while on public assistance; it required states to limit their aid to five years per family; it denied assistance for ten years to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain assistance in more than one state; it denied assistance to fugitive felons and parole and probation violators; and it denied assistance to alcoholics and drug addicts.
Military Commissions
In September 2006 Waters voted against a bill authorizing the President to establish military commissions to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror. In Waters’ view, such tribunals trample on the civil rights and liberties of defendants who, she contends, should be entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the American criminal court system—where the standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals.
Counter-Terrorism & Homeland Security
In May 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to terminate the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, which called for the development of a missile defense system.
In June 1991 she voted to cut $260 million in funding related to the development of the MX missile rail garrison.
In June 1992 she voted to decrease defense spending by 10 percent in the ensuing fiscal year. That same month, she voted to prohibit the production of any new B-2 aircraft by cutting $2.7 billion. In yet another June 1992 vote, she supported a $937.5 million funding cut for the SDI program (a 22 percent reduction).
In April 1996 she voted against a bill to increase the number of explosive-detection agents; to expand the deportation of criminal illegal aliens and suspected terrorists; to make it easier for the U.S. to deny asylum to suspected terrorists; and to bar terrorist organizations from fundraising in the United States.
In March 1999 she voted against a bill “to declare it to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.”
In September 2001 she voted in favor of a joint resolution “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent [9/11] attacks launched against the United States.”
In October 2001 she voted against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which proposed to ease restrictions on government wiretap and surveillance operations; to permit government officials to share with one another the information they obtain from such surveillance operations; to strengthen security along the U.S./Canadian border; and to deny U.S. visas to suspected money-launderers.
Also in October 2001, she voted against the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measure known as the Patriot Act.
In July 2002 she voted against a bill permitting airline pilots to carry firearms for the purpose of defending the aircraft against acts of violence or terrorism.
In July 2005 she voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
In September 2006 she voted against an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978; this amendment called for allowing the government to use electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorist operatives.
In August 2007 she voted against a bill permitting the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to monitor foreign electronic communications which are routed through the United States—provided that the purpose of such monitoring was to obtain "foreign intelligence information" about suspected terrorists. In June 2008 she voted in favor of a bill specifically prohibiting this type of surveillance.
From 1998 to 2005, the Center for Security Policy, which is committed to "promoting international peace through American strength," gave Waters ratings that ranged from 8 percent to 12 percent.
In 2003-2004, the American Security Council, which "serves as educational secretariat of the Congressional Caucus on National Security," gave Waters a 10 percent rating.
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2009/04/obama-file-72-obama-appoints-former.html
In May 1992 Waters put her name to a supplement in the Communist Party‘s newspaper, the People’s Weekly World which called for readers to “support our continuing struggle for justice and dignity.” Virtually all other signatories were known Communist Party members or supporters.
In October, later that year, she was the keynote speaker at a Coalition of Black Trade Unionists meeting in St Louis Missouri. The Coalition began as a Communist Party front.
In June 1996, the Communist Party’s People’s Weekly World held a tribute event for Southern California labor unionists Jerry Acosta and Gil Cedillo. Presentations to the honorees were made on behalf of Maxine Waters and (now U.S. Secretary of labor), Hilda Solis, by their staffers who were present at the event.
In 1997 Waters put her name to a “Jobs Bill” which had been originally introduced to Congress at the request of over 50 prominent labor leaders – many of whom were known members or supporters of the Communist Party.
Waters has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – linked Congressional Progressive Caucus from as early as 1998 up til the present. Her mid 1990s press secretary and speech-writer, Patrick Lacefield was a former National Director of the D.S.A.
Waters also serves on the Advisory Board for Progressive Democrats of America, an activist network within the Democratic Party, which is led by several D.S.A. connected activists, including National Director Tim Carpenter.
In May 2008, Waters made an embarassing tongue-slip during her televised questioning of a Shell Oil Executive. She queried, “…And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing, uh, umm – will be about, basically. taking over, and the Government running all of your companies.” The video of this incident can be viewed here.
If Maxine Waters is found guilty of ethics violations, it will one more example of the corruption/socialism connection
Barney Frank
Discoverthenetwork.org
In 2004 Frank and 75 other House Democrats (including such notables as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel) took exception to George W. Bush's public expression of concern about the risky loans that Fannie Mae and and Freddie Mac were making. They sent the President a letter warning that "an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing."
In June 2005, Frank said the following about his – and the House Financial Services Committee's – efforts to promote home-ownership for low-income people:
"Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue now that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership. Homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we've seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation, where you had problems when people invested in a business plan where there was no reality. People building fiber optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see ebb and flow of price at a certain percentage level, but you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. So those of us on our committee will continue to push for home ownership."
When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or OFHEO (the agency responsible for overseeing Fannie and Freddie), in 2004 issued a 211-page report condemning irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting, Frank said: "It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue."
In 2007 Frank became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That same year the mortgage crisis first began to manifest itself, resulting from the large number of defaults on the subprime loans which Frank had long advocated. Yet the congressman attributed the crisis not to the lending policies he had been espousing, but rather to the allegedly greedy practices of banks and inadequate regulatory oversight. "The subprime crisis," he said, "demonstrates the serious economic and social consequences that result from too little regulation." In 2008 Frank similarly blamed the crisis on "excessive deregulation" and "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best."
New Maxine Waters and Barney Frank Scandal Documents
By Tom Fitton
Biggovernment.com
http://biggovernment.com/tfitton/2010/09/20/new-maxine-waters-and-barney-frank-scandal-documents/
Remember at the outset of the financial crisis when the government told us only “healthy banks” were going to receive bailout funds? Well apparently that requirement does not apply to banks with friends in high places.
Judicial Watch received new documents from the U.S. Department of Treasury about the controversial $12 million bailout grant provided to Boston-based OneUnited Bank.
We got the documents through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed against Treasury. Included are internal Treasury emails describing the substandard condition of OneUnited prior to the taxpayer funded bailout, which allegedly occurred at the behest of Reps. Maxine Waters and Barney Frank.
Here’s what we found out in a nutshell: OneUnited Bank was in deep trouble due to incompetence and mismanagement. Government officials knew all about it. And yet, they bent the rules for Waters and Frank and “invested” taxpayer funds in the floundering enterprise.
Consider this September 15, 2008, email from former Treasury Senior Advisor Michael Scott to Director of the Office of Financial Institutions Mario Ugoletti. It includes a Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) evaluation administered by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) noting serious issues with OneUnited’s lending practices:
2004 CRA Public Evaluation: While the institution received a CRA rating of “Low Satisfactory” on an overall basis, OneUnited Bank’s CRA rating for Massachusetts was “Needs to Improve” for both the Lending Test and the Investment Test. Under the Lending Test, the report stated that “OUB has done a poor job of meeting the credit needs of its [Boston, MA] assessment area. A review of the 2002 and 2003 HMDA data revealed a total of one loan. There were no reported Community Development Loans (CDL) and any innovative or flexible lending programs were apparently ineffective.” For the Massachusetts Investment Test, the report stated that “the level and complexity of investments within the Boston assessment area is less than satisfactory there were no equity investments or qualified deposits within the assessment area. The low volume of qualified investments within the assessment area is a concern.”
In Florida, the institution received a CRA rating of “Substantial Noncompliance” which also represented the subordinate rating for the Lending Test…
A subsequent 2007 CRA evaluation noted continued problems with OneUnited’s lending program, particularly in Florida.
The documents also include a January 3, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Neel Kashkari highlighting Barney Frank’s intervention in the OneUnited Bank bailout and calling attention to significant concerns about the OneUnited transaction:
According to the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] Barney Frank told them that he specifically put section 103-6 in the bill in order to help this particular bank. Apparently this bank also had an issue with a Porsche that the regulators had made them get rid of. The story will run later this week and will highlight three banks that they think raise questions and are not “healthy” banks…
(As I’ve noted previously, according to the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, Treasury indicated it would only provide bailout funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending.)
CORRUPTION CHRONICLES
•Stimulus Funds African Genital Washing Study
•Clinton Judge Breaks Senate Impeachment Trial Dry Spell
•Napolitano: Border “As Secure As It Has Ever Been”
•Michelle Obama Declares War Against French Fries
•Defense Bill To Include Illegal Immigrant Amnesty Measure
•Prosecutor Kept Cash From Hillary’s Jailed Chinese Swindler
•U.S. Ignores Threat Of Islamic Shariah Law
•Congresswoman Hits Lobbyist Up For Cash In Voicemail
•Congressman’s Two-Front War Against Gold, Glenn Beck
Judicial Watch also uncovered a memorandum entitled “Regulatory Financial Highlights” that includes detailed financial information related to OneUnited as well as a summary of information collected by Treasury during its investigation of the bank.
According to these documents, OneUnited sought government assistance in part because the company owned $52 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock that was “irrevocably impaired” when the government seized control of the two GSEs. However, as noted by one Treasury email from Michael Scott, OneUnited “purchased their Fannie/Freddie stock in the first quarter of 2008,” long after the problems cited in the government’s two CRA assessments. The official commented, “Interesting, huh?”
Yes, it certainly is…
In light of these documents, I do not think there is any question that, if not for the corrupt intervention by Barney Frank and Maxine Waters, OneUnited would not have gotten a $12 million taxpayer bailout. And this so-called community bank wasn’t actually lending much to the “community” that Frank and Waters were purporting to help.
Today’s Washington Post adds more devastating detail to this scandal (and references documents first obtained by Judicial Watch). The paper reports that regulators knew that OneUnited could not get aid under law. So Frank, for Waters, inserted a provision into the TARP legislation designed to help OneUnited. But that wasn’t enough because the bank was so poorly run. And the rules were bent further:
Still, OneUnited did not meet the normal threshold for obtaining TARP money. As the inspector general for the TARP program, Neil M. Barofsky, said in a 2009 report that referred to OneUnited’s troubles without citing its name, the bank had not met five metrics, indicating it was not adequately capitalized.
Moreover, the FDIC, in a memo to the Treasury Department analyzing its TARP application, warned explicitly that the bank was in a “precarious financial position”…
But a committee of regulators and a group of top Treasury officials then departed from customary practices. They did so even though one Treasury member said that “he was very concerned about this bank,” according to Barofsky’s report.
The report said these reviewers decided that the bank’s viability could be assessed “with applied-for TARP funds taken into account” as an existing capital asset on its balance sheet. In short, the reviewers assessed the bank as though it already had the money, to make it eligible for the aid.
The resulting $12 million boost to OneUnited’s bottom line – again without a penny moving anywhere – finally allowed it to look healthy enough to win the loan…
The Obama administration has thus far produced 639 pages in response to Judicial Watch’s FOIA investigation of the Waters/Frank bailout scandal. But they’re still keeping 203 pages under lock and key. It is not hard to see why.
For politicians, reporters, and political consultants trying to figure out the Tea Party and why so many Americans are angry at Washington corruption – they might want to look at this corrupt mess in TARP uncovered by Judicial Watch.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Mad as Hell - Big story is our leader sends men into battle with no intention of winning
Mad as Hell
Big story is our leader sends men into battle with no intention of winning. (Listen to Mark Levin Show Audio Rewind of Sept 22, 2010)
Bob Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars."
This is our leader. Generals who have studied military tactics their whole lives are not being listened to because our leader thinks he is a general. Political survival is on our leaders mind and not the safety and success of our men putting their lives on the line for us.
Why would a president send men into combat and not to win the battle? I say destroy and turn the battle ground into giant gravel pits, grid by grid.
Look folks. They started it, horribly murdering 3,000 of our fellow Americans someone’s family member who was innocent. We will now stop only at a time of our own choosing. Ladies and gentlemen: We are in this until hell freezes over! We will not come home until victory.
Open up the rules of engagement so we can kick the crap out of the enemy and keep these scums of the earth to always look over their backs to see who is reaching out to grab them by the throat and kick them in the ass.
Absorb an attack. Whose wife, daughter or son would you like to see jump out of a window to their death or burn to death in agony after some coward rams another plane into a building.
And which building would he be willing to absorb? Your sons or daughters house or a city building and in which city would he pick? No Mr. President you make the enemy absorb your attack.
Say no to the building of the mosque on our hollowed ground.
------
OBAMA says "We can absorb a terrorist attack."
Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war
President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.
Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday.
According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives. "This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."
Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."
Woodward's book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."
But most of the book centers on the strategy review, and the dissension, distrust and infighting that consumed Obama's national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction, goals, timetable, troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.
Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.
Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.
Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama's political aides as "the water bugs," the "Politburo," the "Mafia," or the "campaign set." Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president's senior adviser David Axelrod to be "a complete spin doctor."
During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy." Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.
Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, "How could you trust Hillary?"
'Can't afford any mistakes'
"Obama's Wars" marks the 16th book by Woodward, 67, a Washington Post associate editor. Woodward's reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book "All the President's Men."
Among the book's other disclosures:
-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.
-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.
-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.
-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.
-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."
-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.
'The cancer is in Pakistan'
Obama campaigned on a promise to extract U.S. forces from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he described as the greater threat to American security. At McConnell's top-secret briefing for Obama, the intelligence chief told the president-elect that Pakistan is a dishonest partner, unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban, Woodward writes.
By the end of the 2009 strategy review, Woodward reports, Obama concluded that no mission in Afghanistan could be successful without attacking the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens operating with impunity in Pakistan's remote tribal regions.
"We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan," Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009. Creating a more secure Afghanistan is imperative, the president said, "so the cancer doesn't spread" there.
The war in Iraq draws no attention in the book, except as a reference point for considering and developing a new Afghanistan strategy. The book's title, "Obama's Wars," appears to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflicts among the president's national security team.
An older war - the Vietnam conflict - does figure prominently in the minds of Obama and his advisers. When Vice President Biden rushed to the White House on a Sunday morning to make one last appeal for a narrowly defined mission, he warned Obama that a major escalation would mean "we're locked into Vietnam."
Obama kept asking for "an exit plan" to go along with any further troop commitment, and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session, the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the military's open-ended approach.
In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise between the military command's request for 40,000 and Biden's relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20,000 as part of a "hybrid option" that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room, one by one, asking each participant whether he or she had any objections - to "say so now," Woodward reports.
The document - a copy of which is reprinted in the book - took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy's objectives, what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail, according to Woodward, to make sure that the military wouldn't attempt to expand the mission.
After Obama informed the military of his decision, Woodward writes, the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision, peppering the White House with new questions. Obama, in exasperation, reacted by asking, "Why do we keep having these meetings?"
Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, they kept pushing for their 40,000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.
The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: "In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, 'We're doing fine, Mr. President, but we'd be better if we just do more.' We're not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we're talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011."
Big story is our leader sends men into battle with no intention of winning. (Listen to Mark Levin Show Audio Rewind of Sept 22, 2010)
Bob Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars."
This is our leader. Generals who have studied military tactics their whole lives are not being listened to because our leader thinks he is a general. Political survival is on our leaders mind and not the safety and success of our men putting their lives on the line for us.
Why would a president send men into combat and not to win the battle? I say destroy and turn the battle ground into giant gravel pits, grid by grid.
Look folks. They started it, horribly murdering 3,000 of our fellow Americans someone’s family member who was innocent. We will now stop only at a time of our own choosing. Ladies and gentlemen: We are in this until hell freezes over! We will not come home until victory.
Open up the rules of engagement so we can kick the crap out of the enemy and keep these scums of the earth to always look over their backs to see who is reaching out to grab them by the throat and kick them in the ass.
Absorb an attack. Whose wife, daughter or son would you like to see jump out of a window to their death or burn to death in agony after some coward rams another plane into a building.
And which building would he be willing to absorb? Your sons or daughters house or a city building and in which city would he pick? No Mr. President you make the enemy absorb your attack.
Say no to the building of the mosque on our hollowed ground.
------
OBAMA says "We can absorb a terrorist attack."
Bob Woodward book details Obama battles with advisers over exit plan for Afghan war
President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward.
Frustrated with his military commanders for consistently offering only options that required significantly more troops, Obama finally crafted his own strategy, dictating a classified six-page "terms sheet" that sought to limit U.S. involvement, Woodward reports in "Obama's Wars," to be released on Monday.
According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives. "This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan," Obama is quoted as telling White House aides as he laid out his reasons for adding 30,000 troops in a short-term escalation. "Everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint. It's in our national security interest. There cannot be any wiggle room."
Obama rejected the military's request for 40,000 troops as part of an expansive mission that had no foreseeable end. "I'm not doing 10 years," he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. "I'm not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars."
Woodward's book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger."
But most of the book centers on the strategy review, and the dissension, distrust and infighting that consumed Obama's national security team as it was locked in a fierce and emotional struggle over the direction, goals, timetable, troop levels and the chances of success for a war that is almost certain to be one of the defining events of this presidency.
Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.
Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.
Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama's political aides as "the water bugs," the "Politburo," the "Mafia," or the "campaign set." Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president's senior adviser David Axelrod to be "a complete spin doctor."
During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was "[expletive] with the wrong guy." Gates was tempted to walk out of an Oval Office meeting after being offended by comments made by deputy national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon about a general not named in the book.
Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, "How could you trust Hillary?"
'Can't afford any mistakes'
"Obama's Wars" marks the 16th book by Woodward, 67, a Washington Post associate editor. Woodward's reporting with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup in the early 1970s led to their bestselling book "All the President's Men."
Among the book's other disclosures:
-- Obama told Woodward in the July interview that he didn't think about the Afghan war in the "classic" terms of the United States winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?" he said.
-- The CIA created, controls and pays for a clandestine 3,000-man paramilitary army of local Afghans, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams. Woodward describes these teams as elite, well-trained units that conduct highly sensitive covert operations into Pakistan as part of a stepped-up campaign against al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens there.
-- Obama has kept in place or expanded 14 intelligence orders, known as findings, issued by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The orders provide the legal basis for the CIA's worldwide covert operations.
-- A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. "They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally," then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president.
-- A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here "a potential game changer." He said: "When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one where you can't afford any mistakes."
-- Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. "He's on his meds, he's off his meds," Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.
'The cancer is in Pakistan'
Obama campaigned on a promise to extract U.S. forces from Iraq and focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which he described as the greater threat to American security. At McConnell's top-secret briefing for Obama, the intelligence chief told the president-elect that Pakistan is a dishonest partner, unwilling or unable to stop elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from giving clandestine aid, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban, Woodward writes.
By the end of the 2009 strategy review, Woodward reports, Obama concluded that no mission in Afghanistan could be successful without attacking the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban havens operating with impunity in Pakistan's remote tribal regions.
"We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan," Obama is quoted as saying at an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009. Creating a more secure Afghanistan is imperative, the president said, "so the cancer doesn't spread" there.
The war in Iraq draws no attention in the book, except as a reference point for considering and developing a new Afghanistan strategy. The book's title, "Obama's Wars," appears to refer to the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflicts among the president's national security team.
An older war - the Vietnam conflict - does figure prominently in the minds of Obama and his advisers. When Vice President Biden rushed to the White House on a Sunday morning to make one last appeal for a narrowly defined mission, he warned Obama that a major escalation would mean "we're locked into Vietnam."
Obama kept asking for "an exit plan" to go along with any further troop commitment, and is shown growing increasingly frustrated with the military hierarchy for not providing one. At one strategy session, the president waved a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, which put a price tag of $889 billion over 10 years on the military's open-ended approach.
In the end, Obama essentially designed his own strategy for the 30,000 troops, which some aides considered a compromise between the military command's request for 40,000 and Biden's relentless efforts to limit the escalation to 20,000 as part of a "hybrid option" that he had developed with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In a dramatic scene at the White House on Sunday, Nov. 29, 2009, Obama summoned the national security team to outline his decision and distribute his six-page terms sheet. He went around the room, one by one, asking each participant whether he or she had any objections - to "say so now," Woodward reports.
The document - a copy of which is reprinted in the book - took the unusual step of stating, along with the strategy's objectives, what the military was not supposed to do. The president went into detail, according to Woodward, to make sure that the military wouldn't attempt to expand the mission.
After Obama informed the military of his decision, Woodward writes, the Pentagon kept trying to reopen the decision, peppering the White House with new questions. Obama, in exasperation, reacted by asking, "Why do we keep having these meetings?"
Along with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan at the time, they kept pushing for their 40,000-troop option as part of a broad counterinsurgency plan along the lines of what Petraeus had developed for Iraq.
The president is quoted as telling Mullen, Petraeus and Gates: "In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, 'We're doing fine, Mr. President, but we'd be better if we just do more.' We're not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we're talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011."
Mourning in America
CFTR Mourning in America HD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YXqf_6ug54&feature=player_embedded
Chris Coons: 'I Studied Under A Marxist'
By Jeffrey Lord on 9.22.10 @ 10:08AM
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/09/22/chris-coons-i-studied-under-a
Amherst College.
May 23, 1985.
The campus newspaper: the Amherst Student.
The much dismissed article written by now Delaware Senate candidate Chris Coons that bore the title: "Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist."
(A serious hat tip to Dan Riehl over at Riehl World View.)
Now the title of this article has been bandied about in a few media quarters, only to be laughed at and dismissed. Coons himself leads us to believe that he was just joshing.
The problem? No one is taking the time to really read the contents of the article and connect it to what's going on right this minute in American politics.
As mentioned earlier this week, if what Christine O'Donnell did in high school is important, than what we have here is a very disturbing look at the mind of a man who now thinks he's entitle to a seat in the United States Senate.
Here's Chris Coons on Chris Coons:
"The point that others ignore is that I was ready to change. Experiences at Amherst my first two years made me skeptical and uncomfortable with Republicanism…"
"Kenya provided a needed catalyst; …I studied under a bright and eloquent Marxist professor at the University of Nairobi…"
"Some of the 'Leftists' that I met were terrifyingly persuasive, although I never admitted that."
"…several professors challenged the basic assumptions about America and world relations with which I had grown up…and undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West."
"I came to suspect…that the ideal of America as 'a beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world' was not exactly based on reality."
"What do other nations think of us? Can private enterprise and democracy solve the problems of developing nations? Is Marxism an evil ideology, leading millions into totalitarian slavery? These were some of the questions in the back of my mind…"
"I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America might be largely untrue."
In short then, Chris Coons the Senate candidate is determined to get to the Senate and be an agent of the Obama radical redistributionist agenda.
And the person that stands in the way is Christine O'Donnell.
Any questions?
I almost feel sorry for the Left. They were on top of the world with Obama being elected. What they didn't realize is that the change people wanted in 2008, is not what obama had in mind. So that energy for change in 2008 is greater than ever today, but the Left, this time, will not be the beneficiary of it, but its victim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YXqf_6ug54&feature=player_embedded
Chris Coons: 'I Studied Under A Marxist'
By Jeffrey Lord on 9.22.10 @ 10:08AM
http://spectator.org/blog/2010/09/22/chris-coons-i-studied-under-a
Amherst College.
May 23, 1985.
The campus newspaper: the Amherst Student.
The much dismissed article written by now Delaware Senate candidate Chris Coons that bore the title: "Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist."
(A serious hat tip to Dan Riehl over at Riehl World View.)
Now the title of this article has been bandied about in a few media quarters, only to be laughed at and dismissed. Coons himself leads us to believe that he was just joshing.
The problem? No one is taking the time to really read the contents of the article and connect it to what's going on right this minute in American politics.
As mentioned earlier this week, if what Christine O'Donnell did in high school is important, than what we have here is a very disturbing look at the mind of a man who now thinks he's entitle to a seat in the United States Senate.
Here's Chris Coons on Chris Coons:
"The point that others ignore is that I was ready to change. Experiences at Amherst my first two years made me skeptical and uncomfortable with Republicanism…"
"Kenya provided a needed catalyst; …I studied under a bright and eloquent Marxist professor at the University of Nairobi…"
"Some of the 'Leftists' that I met were terrifyingly persuasive, although I never admitted that."
"…several professors challenged the basic assumptions about America and world relations with which I had grown up…and undermined the accepted value of progress and the cultural superiority of the West."
"I came to suspect…that the ideal of America as 'a beacon of freedom and justice, providing hope for the world' was not exactly based on reality."
"What do other nations think of us? Can private enterprise and democracy solve the problems of developing nations? Is Marxism an evil ideology, leading millions into totalitarian slavery? These were some of the questions in the back of my mind…"
"I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America might be largely untrue."
In short then, Chris Coons the Senate candidate is determined to get to the Senate and be an agent of the Obama radical redistributionist agenda.
And the person that stands in the way is Christine O'Donnell.
Any questions?
I almost feel sorry for the Left. They were on top of the world with Obama being elected. What they didn't realize is that the change people wanted in 2008, is not what obama had in mind. So that energy for change in 2008 is greater than ever today, but the Left, this time, will not be the beneficiary of it, but its victim.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Democrats need to go Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, Barney Frank
Foreclosures Rise; Repossessions Set Record
Thursday, 16 Sep 2010 By: Joseph Pisani, CNBC News Associate
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39192246
US foreclosure activity rose in August from the previous month, and banks and lenders took ownership from homeowners at a record pace, according to a new report released Thursday.
Bank repossessions, often the final step in the foreclosure process after a home fails to sell at auction, increased about 3 percent from the month before to 95,364, a record high. At the same time the number of properties that received default notices—the first step in the foreclosure process—decreased 1 percent from a month ago and fell 30 percent from a year ago, a sign that lenders are focusing on their backlog of foreclosure inventory before tackling new distressed loans, according to foreclosure listing website RealtyTrac, which released the report.
Overall, foreclosure fillings rose 4.18 percent in August from the previous month, and were down 5.48 percent from a year ago. In all, 338,836 properties were in the foreclosure process. One in 381 U.S. households received a foreclosure notice in August. (Foreclosure notices are defined as a default notice, auction sale notice or bank repossession.)
“There is a buildup in delinquent loans that are not in foreclosure,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, adding that banks and lenders are slowing the process to avoid a drop in home prices. “It’s a managed slowdown more than anything else,” he said. “The underlining conditions haven’t improved,” Sharga added, referring to high unemployment and falling home prices in certain markets.
The ten states with the highest foreclosure rates were little changed from the previous month, according to the RealtyTrac report. For the 44th straight month, Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate in the country with one in every 84 properties in the state getting a foreclosure notice. (Nevada also has the highest unemployment in the country.)
Florida ranked second with one in every 155 households receiving a notice, followed by Arizona (one in 165 households), California (one in 194 households) and Idaho (one in every 220 households.) (See the full list in our slideshow.)
Vermont had the lowest rate, with one in every 18,389 properties receiving a foreclosure notice.
The RealtyTrac report comes a day after the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that demand for home loans fell even though mortgage rates were at record lows. Also on Wednesday, real estate website Trulia.com reported that homeowners nationally slashed more than $29 billion from their asking prices in August, as they tried to lure buyers stalled by unemployment.
Charles Rangel
Longtime Democratic congressman from New York
Admirer of Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba
Commonly levies baseless charges of racism for political advantage
Helped to author the largest tax increase in American history
Was involved in income-tax scandal and real-estate corruption
Born in Harlem, New York in June 1930, Charles Rangel is a Democratic congressman who represents the 15th Congressional District of New York, located in upper Manhattan. He has served in the House of Representatives since 1971.
Rangel, who is black, has a long history of levying charges of racism against his political and ideological adversaries. For example, when the Republican-led Congress pushed for tax relief in 1994, Rangel denounced the plan as a form of modern-day racism. "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' anymore," he raged. "[Instead,] they say, 'Let's cut taxes.'"
Similarly, when Republicans sought to reform a bloated and abused welfare system through budget cuts, Rangel remonstrated that the planned reforms were beneath even the standards of Nazi Germany: "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things," he insisted.
Racism is likewise Rangel's chosen explanation for the disproportionate number of blacks arrested for breaking drug laws, which he has condemned as "racist."
In 2001, while campaigning for Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer in New York, Rangel suggested that racism would be to blame were the Hispanic Ferrer to lose to his white rivals in the party primary. Speaking before a Democratic audience, Rangel asked, "How do you feel our hurt when you go to apply for a job and you see three whites there and you know before the interview that you're not going to get it?"
When President George W. Bush announced a plan to partially privatize Social Security, Rangel charged that Republicans were seeking to shortchange "African American workers" by providing them with reduced benefits "based on their race."
Following the much-criticized federal response to Hurricane Katrina, a powerful storm that ravaged the Gulf coast in August 2005, Rangel attributed the delayed response to anti-black sentiment within the federal government: “If you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience -- it's a death sentence."
In the course of addressing the Congressional Black Caucus in September of 2005, Rangel, still exploiting the aftermath of Katrina, likened President Bush to Bull Connor, the Alabama police commissioner notorious for his racist opposition to the early civil-rights movement.
In May 2009, Rangel joined activist Al Sharpton in calling for a federal probe into a recent deadly shooting -- by a white New York City plainclothes police officer -- of a black plainclothes officer who was brandishing a weapon and chasing a criminal suspect on a Harlem street. Said Rangel: "If you become an officer and you have a pistol and you are of color, in or out of uniform, your chances of getting shot down by a police officer are a lot heavier than if you were not of color." The congressman again alluded to the shooting when a reporter asked him what President Barack Obama, who came to New York for a personal matter shortly after the incident, ought to do during his stay in the city. Rangel replied, “Make certain he doesn’t run around in East Harlem without identification.”
In February 2005, Rangel proclaimed that it was inappropriate for Americans to characterize groups like Hezbollah as "Islamic terrorists." "To call it Islamic terror is discriminating, it's bigoted, it is not the right thing to say," Rangel declared.
Rangel is an avowed admirer of the former Cuban President Fidel Castro. In April 1993, the congressman introduced legislation to repeal the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, which ended U.S. assistance to the Castro government, and to lift the American embargo against Cuba. When Castro toured Harlem in October of 1995, Rangel greeted him with a bear hug at an event in a local church, where the congressman joined in a prolonged standing ovation for the visiting dictator.
Rangel is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives. For an overview of key votes he has cast during his legislative career, click here.
In January 2007 Rangel became chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the U.S. tax code. In October 2007, Rangel and this Committee unveiled a proposal for the single largest tax increase -- on all income strata -- in American history. Dubbed the “mother of all tax bills” by Rangel, the legislation not only contained $1.3 billion in new taxes, but it also called for the repeal of the major tax cuts that Congress had enacted in 2001 and 2003; all told, the bill would have resulted in a tax hike of $3.5 trillion.
In September 2008 the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Rangel's failure to report (and pay taxes on) $75,000 in rental income which he had earned from his beach property in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, Rangel owed back taxes for at least three years, and he was illegally renting four rent-subsidized apartments in New York City -- at less than half of their market value -- while claiming his Washington, DC home as his primary residence for tax purposes. Though Rangel's income was too high to legally qualify him for any rent-subsidized units, he nonetheless rented three adjacent 16th-floor apartments which combined to make up his 2,500-square-foot home in New York, as well as a fourth unit on the 10th floor of the same building, which served as his campaign office. State and city laws stipulated, however, that rent-subsized apartments could only be used as primary residences.
In December 2008, reporters learned that Rangel had paid $80,000 in campaign funds to an Internet company run by his son for the creation of the congressman's Political Action Committee website.
In August 2009, Newsmax.com reported that Rangel had "failed to report at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form." Newsmax added:
"[A]mong the dozen newly disclosed holdings revealed in the amended forms are a checking account at a federal credit union with a balance between $250,0000 and $500,000; three vacant lots in Glassboro, N.J., valued at a total of $1,000 to $15,000; and stock in PepsiCo worth between $15,000 and $50,000. The new [disclosure] forms report that Rangel’s total net worth is between $1,028,024 and $2,495,000 — about twice the amount listed in the original disclosure statement, filed in May 2008, which declared assets totaling between $516,015 and $1,316,000."
Rangel was also accused of:
taking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center at City College from a wealthy businessman whose company sybsequently received a lucrative tax break; and
accepting a Citigroup-funded trip to the Caribbean in November 2008, when the bank was in the midst of squandering much of the bailout money it had received from the federal government.
When "Hot Air TV" producer Jason Mattera asked Rangel, on hidden camera, to comment about his continuing tax issues, the congressman replied angrily, "Why don't you mind your own goddamn business?"
On March 3, 2010, Rangel stepped down from his post as the Ways
and Means Committee chairman. The move, which Rangel said was "temporary," came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the congressman that he did not have enough votes to survive an expected Republican challenge to his chairmanship.
In April 2010, Rangel condemned Arizona's Republican governor, Jan Brewer, for having signed into law a bill deputizing state police to check with federal authorities on the immigration status of any individuals whom they had stopped for some legitimate reason, if the behavior or circumstances of those individuals led the officers to suspect that they might be in the United States illegally. Said Rangel: "The racism in this country is well known. Arizona has just pulled the sheets off of it."
On July 29, 2010, House investigators accused Rangel of 13 violations of congressional ethics standards, including, in addition to those listed above, such transgressions as:
use of congressional staff and stationery to raise money for the New York City college center named in his honor;
acceptance of favors and benefits from donors that may have influenced his votes in Congress; and
misuse of the congressional free mail privilege.
Said Rangel in response to the allegations: "Even though they are serious charges, I'm prepared to prove that the only thing I've ever had in my 50 years of public service is service. That's what I've done and if I've been overzealous providing that service, I can't make an excuse for the serious violations."
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BARNEY FRANK
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org
In 1980 the Democrat Frank ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts' 4th congressional district and won narrowly. In 1982 the 4th District was reconfigured geographically, and Frank won re-election by a full 20 percentage points. Since then, he has been re-elected every two years, by wide margins.
Upon joining the House of Representatives, Frank developed a reputation for consistently voting to slash funding for the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military. He also advocated the loosening of immigration-law exclusions that previously had served to prevent people holding totalitarian or anti-American ideologies from entering the country, and to facilitate the deportation of legal aliens who had caused unrest or engaged in subversive activities on American soil. Frank derisively categorized such exclusions as "relics of the McCarthy era" and as manifestations of "the anti-gay, anti-free-speech McCarthyite hangover." (In fact, ideological exclusions originated from the Alien Registration Act of 1940, signed into law by President Roosevelt as a national security measure on the eve of World War II.)
Aiming to eliminate ideological exclusions from American immigration policy, Frank crafted a comprehensive immigration-exclusion amendment which became temporary law in 1987, over the objections of the State Department. This amendment made it illegal for the government to prevent, on the basis of their beliefs alone, immigrants or other foreign nationals with radical views from entering the United States. It also became nearly impossible to deport them once they were in the U.S.
Three years later Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990, wherein Frank’s ideological-exclusions amendment remained intact except for a single word. The final amendment said that an alien could not be excluded from entry into the U.S., nor deported once there, "because of any past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution.” Frank had also wanted to prevent the U.S. from denying entry to immigrants based on past “activities,” but under pressure from the Bush State Department, he was forced to drop “activities” from the amendment’s final wording.
James R. Edwards of the Hudson Institute sums up the overall effect of Frank’s elimination of ideological exclusion from immigration policy: "History teaches that foreign ideologues have long sought to promote their beliefs and advance their causes on American soil. Alien subversives have spied, spread propaganda and stolen state and industrial secrets. Foreign anarchists, communists and other radicals have sought to make converts, raise funds, organize followers and otherwise exploit American freedoms.... In short, the 1990 Immigration Act’s revision of exclusion grounds ... made it much easier for aliens who hold radical, dangerous, anti-American or subversive political beliefs to enter and remain in the United States. This perversion of the First Amendment means the guy who preaches hatred, pollutes hearts and minds, steeps persuadable people in reasons to harm Americans and wage war from within against America ... gets a free pass."
In January 2000, while Frank was a member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Claims, terrorism expert Steven Emerson appeared before that Subcommittee and gave detailed testimony about the threat posed by the many foreign Islamic radicals who were entering the U.S. each year.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals, the Patriot Act became law and Congressman Frank’s ideological exclusion amendment was effectively suspended; visa laws were significantly tightened and the enforcement of immigration laws was increased. Frank did not approve of these changes. “When 3,000 Americans were murdered by illegal immigrant terrorists on September 11,” he said, “that was the end of rational immigration policy in the United States.”
Sex Scandal:
In 1987 Frank publicly announced that he was a homosexual. Three years later the House of Representatives, acting on the recommendation of the House Ethics Committee, voted by a 408-18 margin to reprimand the congressman for having "reflected discredit upon the House." At issue was the fact that Frank had paid for sex from a male prostitute named Steve Gobie, whom he subsequently hired as a personal "aide." Frank also had paid for Gobie's psychiatric treatments; had used his political influence to dismiss 33 parking tickets which the prostitute had been issued; and had written, on congressional stationery, letters on Gobie's behalf to Virginia probation officials. Gobie, for his part, had used Frank's Capitol Hill apartment as a house of prostitution for 18 months. The congressman later claimed that he had been unaware of Gobie's illegal activities inside the apartment, and that he had fired the aide upon learning of them.
Reflecting later on the nature of his relationship with Gobie, Frank characterized himself as an unwitting "good liberal" who had gotten "suckered" and "victimized" while "trying to help" the young sex worker. "Thinking I was going to be Henry Higgins and trying to turn him into Pygmalion was the biggest mistake I've made," Frank said at a news conference. In a 2004 retrospective discussion about the Gobie affair, Frank accused Republicans and conservative media outlets of "plotting to ruin my social life," and suggested that he, like the sex-scandal-plagued former President Bill Clinton, was fighting a "fundamental battle for the soul of America."
Congressman Frank and the Housing / Financial Crisis of 2008:
Barney Frank has had numerous close ties to the mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which suffered economic collapse in 2008 as a result of government policies mandating that they lower their lending standards in order to ensure that larger numbers of undercapitalized borrowers -- particularly nonwhite minorities -- were approved for mortgage loans (so-called "subprime loans"). Frank, who between 1989 and 2008 received campaign contributions totaling $42,350 from Fannie and Freddie, actively promoted these policies.
Starting in the early 1990s, Frank sought to stifle efforts by regulators, Congress, and the White House to place some oversight over Fannie and Freddie's risky lending practices. In 1991, when Frank was just beginning a seven-year personal relationship with Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses (who helped develop many of Fannie’s housing-related lending programs), the congressman pushed for reduced restrictions on two- and three-family home mortgages.
When Republican Congressman Jim Leach sought to impose stronger regulation on Fannie and Freddie in 1992, Frank worked to block the move. In 2000 Frank rejected yet another attempt to regulate the Fannie-Freddie loans, calling such regulation unnecessary because there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."
In 2001, White House chief economist N. Gregory Mankiw warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, coupled with loans to unqualified borrowers, was placing the entire American financial system at great risk. Frank, who wielded immense influence as the ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services (which oversees the housing and banking industries), denounced Mankiw and declared that he (Frank) had no "concern about housing."
Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives had inflated their earnings statements by some $10.6 billion in order to boost their own bonuses, and after President Bush called for what the New York Times described as the housing-finance industry's "most significant regulatory overhaul" in a decade, Frank maintained: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis.... The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
Also in 2003, Frank lauded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for having "played a very useful role in helping make housing more affordable." Critics of their lending practices, he said, "exaggerate a threat of safety" and "conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see."
Because he saw no threat that financial calamity might result from the subprime loans that had become so commonplace in the mortgage industry, Frank pushed for Fannie and Freddie to make even greater numbers of those loans. "I believe that we, as the Federal Government," the congressman said, "have probably done too little rather than too much to push [Fannie and Freddie] to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals." "I would like to get Fannie and Freddie more deeply into low-income housing and possibly moving into something that is more explicitly a subsidy," said Frank. "... I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing." Moreover, Frank worried that critics of lower lending standards might create "pressure" to tighten the standards, which would, in turn, lead to "less ... affordable housing."
In 2004 Frank and 75 other House Democrats (including such notables as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel) took exception to George W. Bush's public expression of concern about the risky loans that Fannie Mae and and Freddie Mac were making. They sent the President a letter warning that "an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing."
In June 2005, Frank said the following about his – and the House Financial Services Committee's – efforts to promote home-ownership for low-income people:
"Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue now that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership. Homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we've seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation, where you had problems when people invested in a business plan where there was no reality. People building fiber optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see ebb and flow of price at a certain percentage level, but you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. So those of us on our committee will continue to push for home ownership."
When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or OFHEO (the agency responsible for overseeing Fannie and Freddie), in 2004 issued a 211-page report condemning irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting, Frank said: "It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue."
In 2007 Frank became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That same year the mortgage crisis first began to manifest itself, resulting from the large number of defaults on the subprime loans which Frank had long advocated. Yet the congressman attributed the crisis not to the lending policies he had been espousing, but rather to the allegedly greedy practices of banks and inadequate regulatory oversight. "The subprime crisis," he said, "demonstrates the serious economic and social consequences that result from too little regulation." In 2008 Frank similarly blamed the crisis on "excessive deregulation" and "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best."
Frank has defended ACORN and other, likeminded activist groups that have spearheaded the movement demanding that underqualified minority borrowers be given access to subprime loans and lower eligibility standards. According to the congressman, these activist organizations are composed of "people who are trying very hard to preserve some equity and some social justice," and "people whose only crime was to offend powerful political interests because they cared about equity."
Frank approved of the massive government bailouts of the banking industry in 2008 and 2009, saying: "This is equivalent to what FDR had to do ... to save capitalism from its own excesses."
In 2008 Frank was asked how the U.S. government ought to address the nation's financial crisis. He replied:
"I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending, and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat. I do think this is a time for a very important kind of dose of Keynesianism. Yes, I believe later on, there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of this money."
In 2006 Frank was one of only three members of the House of Representatives to oppose the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act, which restricted political protests -- most notably those led by the anti-gay, anti-war activist Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church -- at U.S. soldiers' funerals. Frank opposed the bill, which the Senate passed unanimously, on civil liberties and constitutional grounds.
In 2008 Frank called for a 25 percent reduction in U.S. military spending. "The math is compelling," he wrote. "If we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity."
Frank is a member of the socialist-leaning Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives.
'Communist Front' in the United States was the Progressive Party
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MAXINE WATERS
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org
Democratic Member of Congress
Member of the radical Progressive Caucus
Chief Deputy Minority Whip in the House of Representatives
Voted against the 1991 Gulf War after it began, and in March 2003, was one of 11 who voted against the resolution to support our troops after the Iraq War commenced
Has traveled to Cuba and has praised Marxist dictator Fidel Castro
Rationalized and justified the actions of the 1992 Los Angeles rioters
Maxine Waters is a Democratic Member of Congress who represents the 35th District of California. She was born in 1938 in St. Louis, Missouri, the fifth of thirteen children raised by a single mother in a home that was visited regularly by welfare and social workers.
Waters moved to Southern California in 1961, worked in a garment factory, raised two children and was employed for a year as a Head Start social worker following the 1965 Watts riots. In 1970 she earned a degree in sociology from California State University in Los Angeles.
Waters entered politics in 1973 as deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman David Cunningham. Three years later she ran successfully for a seat in the California Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature. She became a member of the Democratic National Committee in 1980 and helped design California's gerrymandered redistricting in 1982. In 1984 she was co-chair of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. When longtime Democratic Congressman Augustus Hawkins retired in 1990, Waters was anointed as his successor by Democratic Party bosses and easily won election. She has served in the U.S. House of Representatives ever since.
As a Member of Congress, Waters belongs to the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, the latter of which she formerly headed. In June 2005 she co-founded and chaired the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus (OICC), an entity dedicated to agitating for a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Iraqi theater of war -- alleging that the American invasion in 2003 had been launched on a pretext of lies and deliberately manipulated intelligence. Waters’ fellow OICC co-founders included Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Barbara Lee, Jan Schakowsky, William Delahunt, and John R. Lewis.
Prior to every primary and final election, Waters publishes her own Progressive Connection mailer for her constituents; Democrat politicians eager for votes from her district pay Waters anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000 to be included in the slates of candidates her mailer endorses.
Waters’ political rhetoric is often demagogic. In 2001 she depicted the retiring moderate Republican Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, as a "plantation owner." On another occasion, while addressing the allegedly pervasive problem of police brutality against African Americans, Waters said that she had never seen Los Angeles police officers abuse "little white boys."
During the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the infamous 1992 Rodney King trial, Waters described the violence (in which 58 people were killed) as "a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice." She held “economic, social, cultural and political” factors responsible for the disorder.[1] She dismissed the mass black looting of Korean-owned stores by saying: "There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes…. They are not crooks." Chanting the radical slogan "No justice, no peace," she attributed the rioters’ underlying rage to the federal government’s allegedly longstanding “neglect” of America’s inner cities.[2]
Waters further asserted that racial injustice was rampant in America. She claimed that the L.A. tumult could rightly be called a “rebellion” or “insurrection,” but not a riot. “Riot implies to me wild, crazed, uncalled-for actions,” she explained, “and I’m not so sure that’s quite appropriate for what took place in Los Angeles.”[3] It was “unfortunate,” she said, “that “it takes things like this rebellion to wake people up.”[4]
Waters co-sponsored Rep. John Conyers' bill calling for reparations for slavery to be paid to African Americans.
Waters blames illicit drugs for the rampant crime that plagues her congressional district, and she has blamed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the presence of those drugs. In the 1980s she accused the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods. However, the San Jose Mercury-News eventually retracted the story on which Waters had based her allegations for lack of evidence. Undeterred, Waters told the Los Angeles Times in 1997: "It doesn't matter whether the CIA delivered the kilo of cocaine themselves or turned their back on it to let somebody else do it. They're guilty just the same."
Waters has traveled several times to Cuba, where she praised dictator Fidel Castro and called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against the Castro government. In a letter to Castro (quoted during an October 2, 1998 newscast on Radio Havana), she wrote that Castro had a perfect right to grant "political asylum" to U.S. citizens fleeing "political persecution."
In 1999, when six-year-old Elian Gonzalez requested asylum in the U.S. after his mother had drowned during their escape from Cuba, Waters pressured President Bill Clinton to return the boy immediately to his homeland. During the controversy over the matter, Waters flew to Cuba and met with the boy's father and grandmothers, thereby giving political and propaganda support to Castro.
In 1998 Waters voted in favor of a measure calling on Castro to turn over (to U.S. authorities) a female fugitive named Assata Olugbala Shakur, who had received refugee status in Havana after escaping from a U.S. prison -- where she had been serving time for her role in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper. After having cast the aforementioned vote, Waters learned that Shakur was actually the former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard, who had taken a new name in the early 1970s. Once Waters was aware of the fugitive's actual identity, the congresswoman penned a letter of apology to Castro and urged the Cuban dictator to continue safeguarding the convicted killer -- because the latter been "persecuted for her civil-rights work" in the United States.
Organized labor is by far Waters’ biggest campaign contributor and has supplied more than two-thirds of her Political Action Committee (PAC) donations. Her largest labor support comes from the Laborers' International Union of North America and the Service Employees International Union. Other Waters campaign donors include the American Association for Justice (formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) and Viacom, which owns CBS and many cable networks.
In August 2005 Waters threw her support behind Cindy Sheehan’s campaign to discredit President Bush and the Iraq War effort.
Also in 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) named Waters as one of the 13 "most corrupt" members of the U.S. Congress. The CREW report cited a December 2004 Los Angeles Times investigation disclosing how a number of Waters’ relatives had made more than $1 million during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had helped. Waters declined to be interviewed about this matter, saying only that her family members “do their business, and I do mine.”
In a May 2008 congressional hearing on gasoline prices, Shell Oil President John Hofmeister stated: “I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress, ever-increasing prices, unless the demand comes down, and that $5 [per gallon] will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new [oil] reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.” Waters replied: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing – would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
During the national financial crisis that struck in the autumn of 2008, Waters was lobbied by representatives of OneUnited Bank, a black-owned depository institution that was seeking a federal government bailout after having squandered almost $52 million of its bank capital on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock. These lobbyists were longtime friends, donors, and fundraisers of Rep. Waters.
Meanwhile, Waters' husband had a long history as an investor in one of the banks that had previously merged into OneUnited; he had once served on OneUnited's board of directors; and he owned large amounts of stock in OneUnited. In fact, both he and Rep. Waters had owned six-figure sums of OneUnited stock at various times during the preceding six years.
In response to OneUnited's lobbying, Rep. Waters intervened to arrange a meeting where representatives of the bank could plead their case to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and 20 of his subordinates. As a result of that meeting, Paulson et al secretly engineered a special federal rescue of the floundering bank. This bailout cost American taxpayers $12 million in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) cash.
On August 2, 2010, the House Ethics Committee filed three charges against Waters, alleging that she had used her influence to gain special favors (from the federal government) for OneUnited.
Following is an overview of Waters’ congressional voting record over the course of her political career, as per key pieces of legislation covering a wide array of issues.
Criminal Justice
In October 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to replace the death penalty with a life imprisonment sentence in certain federal cases. In April 1994 she voted in favor of substituting life imprisonment for the death penalty in all cases.
Also in April 1994, she voted against a bill requiring a mandatory life sentence in prison for anyone convicted of three violent or drug-related felonies; reducing the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults for violent crimes; allocating $13.5 billion for the development and operation of prisons; and earmarking $3.45 billion to hire and train more police officers nationwide. In August 1994 she voted against another very similar bill.
Waters believes that the American justice system is thoroughly infested with racism and discrimination against nonwhite minorities. She has stated that “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, or receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.”[5] Further, she warns that by imprisoning a disproportionate number of black males, “we are risking an entire generation of African American young men because of an unjust justice system.”[6]
Welfare
In February 1995 and December 1995, Waters voted against a welfare-reform bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. This bill replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with block grants to states; it increased those grants after two years for states wherein the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies had declined; it barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; it prohibited states from providing additional cash assistance to families that gave birth to additional children while on public assistance; it required states to limit their aid to five years per family; it denied assistance for ten years to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain assistance in more than one state; it denied assistance to fugitive felons and parole and probation violators; and it denied assistance to alcoholics and drug addicts.
Military Commissions
In September 2006 Waters voted against a bill authorizing the President to establish military commissions to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror. In Waters’ view, such tribunals trample on the civil rights and liberties of defendants who, she contends, should be entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the American criminal court system—where the standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals.
Counter-Terrorism & Homeland Security
In May 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to terminate the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, which called for the development of a missile defense system.
In June 1991 she voted to cut $260 million in funding related to the development of the MX missile rail garrison.
In June 1992 she voted to decrease defense spending by 10 percent in the ensuing fiscal year. That same month, she voted to prohibit the production of any new B-2 aircraft by cutting $2.7 billion. In yet another June 1992 vote, she supported a $937.5 million funding cut for the SDI program (a 22 percent reduction).
In April 1996 she voted against a bill to increase the number of explosive-detection agents; to expand the deportation of criminal illegal aliens and suspected terrorists; to make it easier for the U.S. to deny asylum to suspected terrorists; and to bar terrorist organizations from fundraising in the United States.
In March 1999 she voted against a bill “to declare it to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.”
In September 2001 she voted in favor of a joint resolution “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent [9/11] attacks launched against the United States.”
In October 2001 she voted against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which proposed to ease restrictions on government wiretap and surveillance operations; to permit government officials to share with one another the information they obtain from such surveillance operations; to strengthen security along the U.S./Canadian border; and to deny U.S. visas to suspected money-launderers.
Also in October 2001, she voted against the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measure known as the Patriot Act.
In July 2002 she voted against a bill permitting airline pilots to carry firearms for the purpose of defending the aircraft against acts of violence or terrorism.
In July 2005 she voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
In September 2006 she voted against an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978; this amendment called for allowing the government to use electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorist operatives.
In August 2007 she voted against a bill permitting the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to monitor foreign electronic communications which are routed through the United States—provided that the purpose of such monitoring was to obtain "foreign intelligence information" about suspected terrorists. In June 2008 she voted in favor of a bill specifically prohibiting this type of surveillance.
From 1998 to 2005, the Center for Security Policy, which is committed to "promoting international peace through American strength," gave Waters ratings that ranged from 8 percent to 12 percent.
In 2003-2004, the American Security Council, which "serves as educational secretariat of the Congressional Caucus on National Security," gave Waters a 10 percent rating.
Iraq War / War on Terror
In October 2002 Waters voted against a joint resolution to authorize the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In June 2006 she voted against a resolution which stated that it was not in America's national security interest to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, and that a better course of action would be to withdraw the troops only upon the "completion of the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure and united Iraq."
In February 2007 she voted to disapprove of President Bush's decision to move ahead with the so-called troop "surge"—the deployment of some 21,500 additional U.S. soldiers in an effort to quell the violent insurgents in Iraq.
In July 2007 she voted to begin dramatically reducing the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq by April 1, 2008.
Immigration/Nationality Issues
In July 1994 Waters voted against barring illegal aliens from receiving benefits and aid under the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) emergency food and shelter programs.
In March 1996 she cast no vote on a bill to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving public assistance.
In August 1996 she voted against a proposal “to declare English as the official language of the Government of the United States.”
In September 1996 she voted against a bill to increase border patrol personnel and to adopt other measures designed to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.
In May 2004 she voted "No" on requiring hospitals to report (to the federal government) illegal aliens who receive emergency medical treatment. That same month, she cast no vote on a separate proposal to deny public education to illegal aliens.
In February 2005 she voted against the Real ID Act, which proposed to: set minimal security requirements for state driver licenses and identification cards; require asylum applicants suspected of affiliating with terrorist groups to prove that they are indeed seeking to escape persecution in their homeland; and ensure that physical barriers to prevent illegal immigration would be expeditiously constructed where needed along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In December 2005 she voted against a bill calling for: the construction of some 700 miles of fencing along America's southern border; the establishment of a system requiring business owners to verify the legal status of all their employees; the detention of any person attempting to enter the U.S. illegally after October 1, 2006; an increase in the penalties on anyone attempting to smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S.; the annual provision of $250 million to pay state and local police agencies for their assistance in enforcing federal immigration laws; and funding for a program to deport "removable criminal aliens" in prison following the completion of their sentences, rather than releasing them into American communities.
In September 2006 she again voted against a bill authorizing the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. That same month, she voted against a proposal to grant state and local officials the authority to investigate, identify, and arrest illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Border Control, which "is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation's borders and reforming our immigration policies," gave Waters a rating of 0 percent in 2005-2006.
Abortion and the Rights of the Unborn
In November 1995, September 1996, March 1997, July 1998, April 2000, June 2003, and October 2003, Waters voted against legislation to ban the late-term abortion procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion (a.k.a. "intact dilation and extraction"). According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, in the year 2000 this procedure was performed approximately 2,200 times in the United States.
Thursday, 16 Sep 2010 By: Joseph Pisani, CNBC News Associate
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39192246
US foreclosure activity rose in August from the previous month, and banks and lenders took ownership from homeowners at a record pace, according to a new report released Thursday.
Bank repossessions, often the final step in the foreclosure process after a home fails to sell at auction, increased about 3 percent from the month before to 95,364, a record high. At the same time the number of properties that received default notices—the first step in the foreclosure process—decreased 1 percent from a month ago and fell 30 percent from a year ago, a sign that lenders are focusing on their backlog of foreclosure inventory before tackling new distressed loans, according to foreclosure listing website RealtyTrac, which released the report.
Overall, foreclosure fillings rose 4.18 percent in August from the previous month, and were down 5.48 percent from a year ago. In all, 338,836 properties were in the foreclosure process. One in 381 U.S. households received a foreclosure notice in August. (Foreclosure notices are defined as a default notice, auction sale notice or bank repossession.)
“There is a buildup in delinquent loans that are not in foreclosure,” said Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, adding that banks and lenders are slowing the process to avoid a drop in home prices. “It’s a managed slowdown more than anything else,” he said. “The underlining conditions haven’t improved,” Sharga added, referring to high unemployment and falling home prices in certain markets.
The ten states with the highest foreclosure rates were little changed from the previous month, according to the RealtyTrac report. For the 44th straight month, Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate in the country with one in every 84 properties in the state getting a foreclosure notice. (Nevada also has the highest unemployment in the country.)
Florida ranked second with one in every 155 households receiving a notice, followed by Arizona (one in 165 households), California (one in 194 households) and Idaho (one in every 220 households.) (See the full list in our slideshow.)
Vermont had the lowest rate, with one in every 18,389 properties receiving a foreclosure notice.
The RealtyTrac report comes a day after the Mortgage Bankers Association reported that demand for home loans fell even though mortgage rates were at record lows. Also on Wednesday, real estate website Trulia.com reported that homeowners nationally slashed more than $29 billion from their asking prices in August, as they tried to lure buyers stalled by unemployment.
Charles Rangel
Longtime Democratic congressman from New York
Admirer of Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba
Commonly levies baseless charges of racism for political advantage
Helped to author the largest tax increase in American history
Was involved in income-tax scandal and real-estate corruption
Born in Harlem, New York in June 1930, Charles Rangel is a Democratic congressman who represents the 15th Congressional District of New York, located in upper Manhattan. He has served in the House of Representatives since 1971.
Rangel, who is black, has a long history of levying charges of racism against his political and ideological adversaries. For example, when the Republican-led Congress pushed for tax relief in 1994, Rangel denounced the plan as a form of modern-day racism. "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' anymore," he raged. "[Instead,] they say, 'Let's cut taxes.'"
Similarly, when Republicans sought to reform a bloated and abused welfare system through budget cuts, Rangel remonstrated that the planned reforms were beneath even the standards of Nazi Germany: "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things," he insisted.
Racism is likewise Rangel's chosen explanation for the disproportionate number of blacks arrested for breaking drug laws, which he has condemned as "racist."
In 2001, while campaigning for Democratic mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer in New York, Rangel suggested that racism would be to blame were the Hispanic Ferrer to lose to his white rivals in the party primary. Speaking before a Democratic audience, Rangel asked, "How do you feel our hurt when you go to apply for a job and you see three whites there and you know before the interview that you're not going to get it?"
When President George W. Bush announced a plan to partially privatize Social Security, Rangel charged that Republicans were seeking to shortchange "African American workers" by providing them with reduced benefits "based on their race."
Following the much-criticized federal response to Hurricane Katrina, a powerful storm that ravaged the Gulf coast in August 2005, Rangel attributed the delayed response to anti-black sentiment within the federal government: “If you're black in this country, and you're poor in this country, it's not an inconvenience -- it's a death sentence."
In the course of addressing the Congressional Black Caucus in September of 2005, Rangel, still exploiting the aftermath of Katrina, likened President Bush to Bull Connor, the Alabama police commissioner notorious for his racist opposition to the early civil-rights movement.
In May 2009, Rangel joined activist Al Sharpton in calling for a federal probe into a recent deadly shooting -- by a white New York City plainclothes police officer -- of a black plainclothes officer who was brandishing a weapon and chasing a criminal suspect on a Harlem street. Said Rangel: "If you become an officer and you have a pistol and you are of color, in or out of uniform, your chances of getting shot down by a police officer are a lot heavier than if you were not of color." The congressman again alluded to the shooting when a reporter asked him what President Barack Obama, who came to New York for a personal matter shortly after the incident, ought to do during his stay in the city. Rangel replied, “Make certain he doesn’t run around in East Harlem without identification.”
In February 2005, Rangel proclaimed that it was inappropriate for Americans to characterize groups like Hezbollah as "Islamic terrorists." "To call it Islamic terror is discriminating, it's bigoted, it is not the right thing to say," Rangel declared.
Rangel is an avowed admirer of the former Cuban President Fidel Castro. In April 1993, the congressman introduced legislation to repeal the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, which ended U.S. assistance to the Castro government, and to lift the American embargo against Cuba. When Castro toured Harlem in October of 1995, Rangel greeted him with a bear hug at an event in a local church, where the congressman joined in a prolonged standing ovation for the visiting dictator.
Rangel is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives. For an overview of key votes he has cast during his legislative career, click here.
In January 2007 Rangel became chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the U.S. tax code. In October 2007, Rangel and this Committee unveiled a proposal for the single largest tax increase -- on all income strata -- in American history. Dubbed the “mother of all tax bills” by Rangel, the legislation not only contained $1.3 billion in new taxes, but it also called for the repeal of the major tax cuts that Congress had enacted in 2001 and 2003; all told, the bill would have resulted in a tax hike of $3.5 trillion.
In September 2008 the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into Rangel's failure to report (and pay taxes on) $75,000 in rental income which he had earned from his beach property in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, Rangel owed back taxes for at least three years, and he was illegally renting four rent-subsidized apartments in New York City -- at less than half of their market value -- while claiming his Washington, DC home as his primary residence for tax purposes. Though Rangel's income was too high to legally qualify him for any rent-subsidized units, he nonetheless rented three adjacent 16th-floor apartments which combined to make up his 2,500-square-foot home in New York, as well as a fourth unit on the 10th floor of the same building, which served as his campaign office. State and city laws stipulated, however, that rent-subsized apartments could only be used as primary residences.
In December 2008, reporters learned that Rangel had paid $80,000 in campaign funds to an Internet company run by his son for the creation of the congressman's Political Action Committee website.
In August 2009, Newsmax.com reported that Rangel had "failed to report at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form." Newsmax added:
"[A]mong the dozen newly disclosed holdings revealed in the amended forms are a checking account at a federal credit union with a balance between $250,0000 and $500,000; three vacant lots in Glassboro, N.J., valued at a total of $1,000 to $15,000; and stock in PepsiCo worth between $15,000 and $50,000. The new [disclosure] forms report that Rangel’s total net worth is between $1,028,024 and $2,495,000 — about twice the amount listed in the original disclosure statement, filed in May 2008, which declared assets totaling between $516,015 and $1,316,000."
Rangel was also accused of:
taking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center at City College from a wealthy businessman whose company sybsequently received a lucrative tax break; and
accepting a Citigroup-funded trip to the Caribbean in November 2008, when the bank was in the midst of squandering much of the bailout money it had received from the federal government.
When "Hot Air TV" producer Jason Mattera asked Rangel, on hidden camera, to comment about his continuing tax issues, the congressman replied angrily, "Why don't you mind your own goddamn business?"
On March 3, 2010, Rangel stepped down from his post as the Ways
and Means Committee chairman. The move, which Rangel said was "temporary," came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the congressman that he did not have enough votes to survive an expected Republican challenge to his chairmanship.
In April 2010, Rangel condemned Arizona's Republican governor, Jan Brewer, for having signed into law a bill deputizing state police to check with federal authorities on the immigration status of any individuals whom they had stopped for some legitimate reason, if the behavior or circumstances of those individuals led the officers to suspect that they might be in the United States illegally. Said Rangel: "The racism in this country is well known. Arizona has just pulled the sheets off of it."
On July 29, 2010, House investigators accused Rangel of 13 violations of congressional ethics standards, including, in addition to those listed above, such transgressions as:
use of congressional staff and stationery to raise money for the New York City college center named in his honor;
acceptance of favors and benefits from donors that may have influenced his votes in Congress; and
misuse of the congressional free mail privilege.
Said Rangel in response to the allegations: "Even though they are serious charges, I'm prepared to prove that the only thing I've ever had in my 50 years of public service is service. That's what I've done and if I've been overzealous providing that service, I can't make an excuse for the serious violations."
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BARNEY FRANK
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org
In 1980 the Democrat Frank ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Massachusetts' 4th congressional district and won narrowly. In 1982 the 4th District was reconfigured geographically, and Frank won re-election by a full 20 percentage points. Since then, he has been re-elected every two years, by wide margins.
Upon joining the House of Representatives, Frank developed a reputation for consistently voting to slash funding for the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military. He also advocated the loosening of immigration-law exclusions that previously had served to prevent people holding totalitarian or anti-American ideologies from entering the country, and to facilitate the deportation of legal aliens who had caused unrest or engaged in subversive activities on American soil. Frank derisively categorized such exclusions as "relics of the McCarthy era" and as manifestations of "the anti-gay, anti-free-speech McCarthyite hangover." (In fact, ideological exclusions originated from the Alien Registration Act of 1940, signed into law by President Roosevelt as a national security measure on the eve of World War II.)
Aiming to eliminate ideological exclusions from American immigration policy, Frank crafted a comprehensive immigration-exclusion amendment which became temporary law in 1987, over the objections of the State Department. This amendment made it illegal for the government to prevent, on the basis of their beliefs alone, immigrants or other foreign nationals with radical views from entering the United States. It also became nearly impossible to deport them once they were in the U.S.
Three years later Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990, wherein Frank’s ideological-exclusions amendment remained intact except for a single word. The final amendment said that an alien could not be excluded from entry into the U.S., nor deported once there, "because of any past, current or expected beliefs, statements or associations which, if engaged in by a United States citizen in the United States, would be protected under the Constitution.” Frank had also wanted to prevent the U.S. from denying entry to immigrants based on past “activities,” but under pressure from the Bush State Department, he was forced to drop “activities” from the amendment’s final wording.
James R. Edwards of the Hudson Institute sums up the overall effect of Frank’s elimination of ideological exclusion from immigration policy: "History teaches that foreign ideologues have long sought to promote their beliefs and advance their causes on American soil. Alien subversives have spied, spread propaganda and stolen state and industrial secrets. Foreign anarchists, communists and other radicals have sought to make converts, raise funds, organize followers and otherwise exploit American freedoms.... In short, the 1990 Immigration Act’s revision of exclusion grounds ... made it much easier for aliens who hold radical, dangerous, anti-American or subversive political beliefs to enter and remain in the United States. This perversion of the First Amendment means the guy who preaches hatred, pollutes hearts and minds, steeps persuadable people in reasons to harm Americans and wage war from within against America ... gets a free pass."
In January 2000, while Frank was a member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Claims, terrorism expert Steven Emerson appeared before that Subcommittee and gave detailed testimony about the threat posed by the many foreign Islamic radicals who were entering the U.S. each year.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals, the Patriot Act became law and Congressman Frank’s ideological exclusion amendment was effectively suspended; visa laws were significantly tightened and the enforcement of immigration laws was increased. Frank did not approve of these changes. “When 3,000 Americans were murdered by illegal immigrant terrorists on September 11,” he said, “that was the end of rational immigration policy in the United States.”
Sex Scandal:
In 1987 Frank publicly announced that he was a homosexual. Three years later the House of Representatives, acting on the recommendation of the House Ethics Committee, voted by a 408-18 margin to reprimand the congressman for having "reflected discredit upon the House." At issue was the fact that Frank had paid for sex from a male prostitute named Steve Gobie, whom he subsequently hired as a personal "aide." Frank also had paid for Gobie's psychiatric treatments; had used his political influence to dismiss 33 parking tickets which the prostitute had been issued; and had written, on congressional stationery, letters on Gobie's behalf to Virginia probation officials. Gobie, for his part, had used Frank's Capitol Hill apartment as a house of prostitution for 18 months. The congressman later claimed that he had been unaware of Gobie's illegal activities inside the apartment, and that he had fired the aide upon learning of them.
Reflecting later on the nature of his relationship with Gobie, Frank characterized himself as an unwitting "good liberal" who had gotten "suckered" and "victimized" while "trying to help" the young sex worker. "Thinking I was going to be Henry Higgins and trying to turn him into Pygmalion was the biggest mistake I've made," Frank said at a news conference. In a 2004 retrospective discussion about the Gobie affair, Frank accused Republicans and conservative media outlets of "plotting to ruin my social life," and suggested that he, like the sex-scandal-plagued former President Bill Clinton, was fighting a "fundamental battle for the soul of America."
Congressman Frank and the Housing / Financial Crisis of 2008:
Barney Frank has had numerous close ties to the mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which suffered economic collapse in 2008 as a result of government policies mandating that they lower their lending standards in order to ensure that larger numbers of undercapitalized borrowers -- particularly nonwhite minorities -- were approved for mortgage loans (so-called "subprime loans"). Frank, who between 1989 and 2008 received campaign contributions totaling $42,350 from Fannie and Freddie, actively promoted these policies.
Starting in the early 1990s, Frank sought to stifle efforts by regulators, Congress, and the White House to place some oversight over Fannie and Freddie's risky lending practices. In 1991, when Frank was just beginning a seven-year personal relationship with Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses (who helped develop many of Fannie’s housing-related lending programs), the congressman pushed for reduced restrictions on two- and three-family home mortgages.
When Republican Congressman Jim Leach sought to impose stronger regulation on Fannie and Freddie in 1992, Frank worked to block the move. In 2000 Frank rejected yet another attempt to regulate the Fannie-Freddie loans, calling such regulation unnecessary because there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."
In 2001, White House chief economist N. Gregory Mankiw warned that the government's "implicit subsidy" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, coupled with loans to unqualified borrowers, was placing the entire American financial system at great risk. Frank, who wielded immense influence as the ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services (which oversees the housing and banking industries), denounced Mankiw and declared that he (Frank) had no "concern about housing."
Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives had inflated their earnings statements by some $10.6 billion in order to boost their own bonuses, and after President Bush called for what the New York Times described as the housing-finance industry's "most significant regulatory overhaul" in a decade, Frank maintained: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis.... The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
Also in 2003, Frank lauded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for having "played a very useful role in helping make housing more affordable." Critics of their lending practices, he said, "exaggerate a threat of safety" and "conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see."
Because he saw no threat that financial calamity might result from the subprime loans that had become so commonplace in the mortgage industry, Frank pushed for Fannie and Freddie to make even greater numbers of those loans. "I believe that we, as the Federal Government," the congressman said, "have probably done too little rather than too much to push [Fannie and Freddie] to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals." "I would like to get Fannie and Freddie more deeply into low-income housing and possibly moving into something that is more explicitly a subsidy," said Frank. "... I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing." Moreover, Frank worried that critics of lower lending standards might create "pressure" to tighten the standards, which would, in turn, lead to "less ... affordable housing."
In 2004 Frank and 75 other House Democrats (including such notables as Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel) took exception to George W. Bush's public expression of concern about the risky loans that Fannie Mae and and Freddie Mac were making. They sent the President a letter warning that "an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing."
In June 2005, Frank said the following about his – and the House Financial Services Committee's – efforts to promote home-ownership for low-income people:
"Obviously, speculation is never a good thing. But those who argue now that housing prices are now at the point of a bubble seem to me to be missing a very important point. Unlike previous examples we have had, where substantial excessive inflation of prices later caused some problems, we are talking here about an entity, home ownership. Homes, where there is not the degree of leverage that we've seen elsewhere. This is not the dot-com situation, where you had problems when people invested in a business plan where there was no reality. People building fiber optic cable for which there was no need. Homes that are occupied may see ebb and flow of price at a certain percentage level, but you're not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. So those of us on our committee will continue to push for home ownership."
When the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or OFHEO (the agency responsible for overseeing Fannie and Freddie), in 2004 issued a 211-page report condemning irregularities in Fannie Mae's accounting, Frank said: "It is clear that a leadership change at OFHEO is overdue."
In 2007 Frank became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That same year the mortgage crisis first began to manifest itself, resulting from the large number of defaults on the subprime loans which Frank had long advocated. Yet the congressman attributed the crisis not to the lending policies he had been espousing, but rather to the allegedly greedy practices of banks and inadequate regulatory oversight. "The subprime crisis," he said, "demonstrates the serious economic and social consequences that result from too little regulation." In 2008 Frank similarly blamed the crisis on "excessive deregulation" and "bad decisions that were made by people in the private sector thanks to a conservative philosophy that says the market knows best."
Frank has defended ACORN and other, likeminded activist groups that have spearheaded the movement demanding that underqualified minority borrowers be given access to subprime loans and lower eligibility standards. According to the congressman, these activist organizations are composed of "people who are trying very hard to preserve some equity and some social justice," and "people whose only crime was to offend powerful political interests because they cared about equity."
Frank approved of the massive government bailouts of the banking industry in 2008 and 2009, saying: "This is equivalent to what FDR had to do ... to save capitalism from its own excesses."
In 2008 Frank was asked how the U.S. government ought to address the nation's financial crisis. He replied:
"I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending, and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat. I do think this is a time for a very important kind of dose of Keynesianism. Yes, I believe later on, there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of this money."
In 2006 Frank was one of only three members of the House of Representatives to oppose the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act, which restricted political protests -- most notably those led by the anti-gay, anti-war activist Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church -- at U.S. soldiers' funerals. Frank opposed the bill, which the Senate passed unanimously, on civil liberties and constitutional grounds.
In 2008 Frank called for a 25 percent reduction in U.S. military spending. "The math is compelling," he wrote. "If we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity."
Frank is a member of the socialist-leaning Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives.
'Communist Front' in the United States was the Progressive Party
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MAXINE WATERS
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org
Democratic Member of Congress
Member of the radical Progressive Caucus
Chief Deputy Minority Whip in the House of Representatives
Voted against the 1991 Gulf War after it began, and in March 2003, was one of 11 who voted against the resolution to support our troops after the Iraq War commenced
Has traveled to Cuba and has praised Marxist dictator Fidel Castro
Rationalized and justified the actions of the 1992 Los Angeles rioters
Maxine Waters is a Democratic Member of Congress who represents the 35th District of California. She was born in 1938 in St. Louis, Missouri, the fifth of thirteen children raised by a single mother in a home that was visited regularly by welfare and social workers.
Waters moved to Southern California in 1961, worked in a garment factory, raised two children and was employed for a year as a Head Start social worker following the 1965 Watts riots. In 1970 she earned a degree in sociology from California State University in Los Angeles.
Waters entered politics in 1973 as deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman David Cunningham. Three years later she ran successfully for a seat in the California Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature. She became a member of the Democratic National Committee in 1980 and helped design California's gerrymandered redistricting in 1982. In 1984 she was co-chair of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. When longtime Democratic Congressman Augustus Hawkins retired in 1990, Waters was anointed as his successor by Democratic Party bosses and easily won election. She has served in the U.S. House of Representatives ever since.
As a Member of Congress, Waters belongs to the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus, the latter of which she formerly headed. In June 2005 she co-founded and chaired the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus (OICC), an entity dedicated to agitating for a swift withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Iraqi theater of war -- alleging that the American invasion in 2003 had been launched on a pretext of lies and deliberately manipulated intelligence. Waters’ fellow OICC co-founders included Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Barbara Lee, Jan Schakowsky, William Delahunt, and John R. Lewis.
Prior to every primary and final election, Waters publishes her own Progressive Connection mailer for her constituents; Democrat politicians eager for votes from her district pay Waters anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000 to be included in the slates of candidates her mailer endorses.
Waters’ political rhetoric is often demagogic. In 2001 she depicted the retiring moderate Republican Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, as a "plantation owner." On another occasion, while addressing the allegedly pervasive problem of police brutality against African Americans, Waters said that she had never seen Los Angeles police officers abuse "little white boys."
During the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the infamous 1992 Rodney King trial, Waters described the violence (in which 58 people were killed) as "a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice." She held “economic, social, cultural and political” factors responsible for the disorder.[1] She dismissed the mass black looting of Korean-owned stores by saying: "There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes…. They are not crooks." Chanting the radical slogan "No justice, no peace," she attributed the rioters’ underlying rage to the federal government’s allegedly longstanding “neglect” of America’s inner cities.[2]
Waters further asserted that racial injustice was rampant in America. She claimed that the L.A. tumult could rightly be called a “rebellion” or “insurrection,” but not a riot. “Riot implies to me wild, crazed, uncalled-for actions,” she explained, “and I’m not so sure that’s quite appropriate for what took place in Los Angeles.”[3] It was “unfortunate,” she said, “that “it takes things like this rebellion to wake people up.”[4]
Waters co-sponsored Rep. John Conyers' bill calling for reparations for slavery to be paid to African Americans.
Waters blames illicit drugs for the rampant crime that plagues her congressional district, and she has blamed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the presence of those drugs. In the 1980s she accused the CIA of selling crack in black neighborhoods. However, the San Jose Mercury-News eventually retracted the story on which Waters had based her allegations for lack of evidence. Undeterred, Waters told the Los Angeles Times in 1997: "It doesn't matter whether the CIA delivered the kilo of cocaine themselves or turned their back on it to let somebody else do it. They're guilty just the same."
Waters has traveled several times to Cuba, where she praised dictator Fidel Castro and called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against the Castro government. In a letter to Castro (quoted during an October 2, 1998 newscast on Radio Havana), she wrote that Castro had a perfect right to grant "political asylum" to U.S. citizens fleeing "political persecution."
In 1999, when six-year-old Elian Gonzalez requested asylum in the U.S. after his mother had drowned during their escape from Cuba, Waters pressured President Bill Clinton to return the boy immediately to his homeland. During the controversy over the matter, Waters flew to Cuba and met with the boy's father and grandmothers, thereby giving political and propaganda support to Castro.
In 1998 Waters voted in favor of a measure calling on Castro to turn over (to U.S. authorities) a female fugitive named Assata Olugbala Shakur, who had received refugee status in Havana after escaping from a U.S. prison -- where she had been serving time for her role in the 1973 murder of a New Jersey state trooper. After having cast the aforementioned vote, Waters learned that Shakur was actually the former Black Panther Joanne Chesimard, who had taken a new name in the early 1970s. Once Waters was aware of the fugitive's actual identity, the congresswoman penned a letter of apology to Castro and urged the Cuban dictator to continue safeguarding the convicted killer -- because the latter been "persecuted for her civil-rights work" in the United States.
Organized labor is by far Waters’ biggest campaign contributor and has supplied more than two-thirds of her Political Action Committee (PAC) donations. Her largest labor support comes from the Laborers' International Union of North America and the Service Employees International Union. Other Waters campaign donors include the American Association for Justice (formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America) and Viacom, which owns CBS and many cable networks.
In August 2005 Waters threw her support behind Cindy Sheehan’s campaign to discredit President Bush and the Iraq War effort.
Also in 2005, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) named Waters as one of the 13 "most corrupt" members of the U.S. Congress. The CREW report cited a December 2004 Los Angeles Times investigation disclosing how a number of Waters’ relatives had made more than $1 million during the preceding eight years by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that Waters had helped. Waters declined to be interviewed about this matter, saying only that her family members “do their business, and I do mine.”
In a May 2008 congressional hearing on gasoline prices, Shell Oil President John Hofmeister stated: “I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress, ever-increasing prices, unless the demand comes down, and that $5 [per gallon] will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new [oil] reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.” Waters replied: “And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing – would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
During the national financial crisis that struck in the autumn of 2008, Waters was lobbied by representatives of OneUnited Bank, a black-owned depository institution that was seeking a federal government bailout after having squandered almost $52 million of its bank capital on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock. These lobbyists were longtime friends, donors, and fundraisers of Rep. Waters.
Meanwhile, Waters' husband had a long history as an investor in one of the banks that had previously merged into OneUnited; he had once served on OneUnited's board of directors; and he owned large amounts of stock in OneUnited. In fact, both he and Rep. Waters had owned six-figure sums of OneUnited stock at various times during the preceding six years.
In response to OneUnited's lobbying, Rep. Waters intervened to arrange a meeting where representatives of the bank could plead their case to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and 20 of his subordinates. As a result of that meeting, Paulson et al secretly engineered a special federal rescue of the floundering bank. This bailout cost American taxpayers $12 million in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) cash.
On August 2, 2010, the House Ethics Committee filed three charges against Waters, alleging that she had used her influence to gain special favors (from the federal government) for OneUnited.
Following is an overview of Waters’ congressional voting record over the course of her political career, as per key pieces of legislation covering a wide array of issues.
Criminal Justice
In October 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to replace the death penalty with a life imprisonment sentence in certain federal cases. In April 1994 she voted in favor of substituting life imprisonment for the death penalty in all cases.
Also in April 1994, she voted against a bill requiring a mandatory life sentence in prison for anyone convicted of three violent or drug-related felonies; reducing the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults for violent crimes; allocating $13.5 billion for the development and operation of prisons; and earmarking $3.45 billion to hire and train more police officers nationwide. In August 1994 she voted against another very similar bill.
Waters believes that the American justice system is thoroughly infested with racism and discrimination against nonwhite minorities. She has stated that “the color of your skin dictates whether you will be arrested or not, prosecuted harshly or less harshly, or receive a stiff sentence or gain probation or entry into treatment.”[5] Further, she warns that by imprisoning a disproportionate number of black males, “we are risking an entire generation of African American young men because of an unjust justice system.”[6]
Welfare
In February 1995 and December 1995, Waters voted against a welfare-reform bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. This bill replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with block grants to states; it increased those grants after two years for states wherein the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies had declined; it barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; it prohibited states from providing additional cash assistance to families that gave birth to additional children while on public assistance; it required states to limit their aid to five years per family; it denied assistance for ten years to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain assistance in more than one state; it denied assistance to fugitive felons and parole and probation violators; and it denied assistance to alcoholics and drug addicts.
Military Commissions
In September 2006 Waters voted against a bill authorizing the President to establish military commissions to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror. In Waters’ view, such tribunals trample on the civil rights and liberties of defendants who, she contends, should be entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the American criminal court system—where the standards that govern the admissibility of evidence are considerably stricter than the counterpart standards in military tribunals.
Counter-Terrorism & Homeland Security
In May 1991 Waters voted in favor of a proposal to terminate the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, which called for the development of a missile defense system.
In June 1991 she voted to cut $260 million in funding related to the development of the MX missile rail garrison.
In June 1992 she voted to decrease defense spending by 10 percent in the ensuing fiscal year. That same month, she voted to prohibit the production of any new B-2 aircraft by cutting $2.7 billion. In yet another June 1992 vote, she supported a $937.5 million funding cut for the SDI program (a 22 percent reduction).
In April 1996 she voted against a bill to increase the number of explosive-detection agents; to expand the deportation of criminal illegal aliens and suspected terrorists; to make it easier for the U.S. to deny asylum to suspected terrorists; and to bar terrorist organizations from fundraising in the United States.
In March 1999 she voted against a bill “to declare it to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense.”
In September 2001 she voted in favor of a joint resolution “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent [9/11] attacks launched against the United States.”
In October 2001 she voted against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which proposed to ease restrictions on government wiretap and surveillance operations; to permit government officials to share with one another the information they obtain from such surveillance operations; to strengthen security along the U.S./Canadian border; and to deny U.S. visas to suspected money-launderers.
Also in October 2001, she voted against the post-9/11 anti-terrorism measure known as the Patriot Act.
In July 2002 she voted against a bill permitting airline pilots to carry firearms for the purpose of defending the aircraft against acts of violence or terrorism.
In July 2005 she voted against reauthorizing the Patriot Act.
In September 2006 she voted against an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978; this amendment called for allowing the government to use electronic surveillance to investigate suspected terrorist operatives.
In August 2007 she voted against a bill permitting the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to monitor foreign electronic communications which are routed through the United States—provided that the purpose of such monitoring was to obtain "foreign intelligence information" about suspected terrorists. In June 2008 she voted in favor of a bill specifically prohibiting this type of surveillance.
From 1998 to 2005, the Center for Security Policy, which is committed to "promoting international peace through American strength," gave Waters ratings that ranged from 8 percent to 12 percent.
In 2003-2004, the American Security Council, which "serves as educational secretariat of the Congressional Caucus on National Security," gave Waters a 10 percent rating.
Iraq War / War on Terror
In October 2002 Waters voted against a joint resolution to authorize the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In June 2006 she voted against a resolution which stated that it was not in America's national security interest to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, and that a better course of action would be to withdraw the troops only upon the "completion of the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure and united Iraq."
In February 2007 she voted to disapprove of President Bush's decision to move ahead with the so-called troop "surge"—the deployment of some 21,500 additional U.S. soldiers in an effort to quell the violent insurgents in Iraq.
In July 2007 she voted to begin dramatically reducing the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq by April 1, 2008.
Immigration/Nationality Issues
In July 1994 Waters voted against barring illegal aliens from receiving benefits and aid under the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) emergency food and shelter programs.
In March 1996 she cast no vote on a bill to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving public assistance.
In August 1996 she voted against a proposal “to declare English as the official language of the Government of the United States.”
In September 1996 she voted against a bill to increase border patrol personnel and to adopt other measures designed to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.
In May 2004 she voted "No" on requiring hospitals to report (to the federal government) illegal aliens who receive emergency medical treatment. That same month, she cast no vote on a separate proposal to deny public education to illegal aliens.
In February 2005 she voted against the Real ID Act, which proposed to: set minimal security requirements for state driver licenses and identification cards; require asylum applicants suspected of affiliating with terrorist groups to prove that they are indeed seeking to escape persecution in their homeland; and ensure that physical barriers to prevent illegal immigration would be expeditiously constructed where needed along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In December 2005 she voted against a bill calling for: the construction of some 700 miles of fencing along America's southern border; the establishment of a system requiring business owners to verify the legal status of all their employees; the detention of any person attempting to enter the U.S. illegally after October 1, 2006; an increase in the penalties on anyone attempting to smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S.; the annual provision of $250 million to pay state and local police agencies for their assistance in enforcing federal immigration laws; and funding for a program to deport "removable criminal aliens" in prison following the completion of their sentences, rather than releasing them into American communities.
In September 2006 she again voted against a bill authorizing the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. That same month, she voted against a proposal to grant state and local officials the authority to investigate, identify, and arrest illegal immigrants.
The U.S. Border Control, which "is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation's borders and reforming our immigration policies," gave Waters a rating of 0 percent in 2005-2006.
Abortion and the Rights of the Unborn
In November 1995, September 1996, March 1997, July 1998, April 2000, June 2003, and October 2003, Waters voted against legislation to ban the late-term abortion procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion (a.k.a. "intact dilation and extraction"). According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, in the year 2000 this procedure was performed approximately 2,200 times in the United States.
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