The fox has taken charge of the hen house, and things will not be business as usual. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has said as much.
Waters outlined her agenda as the new chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, blaming Wall Street for its greed and warning that it won’t go unpunished.
“The crisis was a result of Wall Street running amok,” Waters said at a speech hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Large Wall Street banks are not subject to anybody and do great damage to our economy.”
Waters is one to talk. Just like the banks, she knows a bit about dodging oversight. As financial institutions were collapsing one by one in 2008, Waters was making money moves. The California Democrat helped arrange a meeting between the Treasury Department and top executives at a Massachusetts bank called OneUnited. What was so special about this one little lending institution? Her husband was a shareholder.
Using her post on the House Financial Committee, the one she now leads, Waters leveraged a call with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson personally, asking him to meet with minority-owned banks.
Treasury followed up, but only one bank bothered to show: OneUnited. This didn’t go unnoticed by ethics officials or by the New York Times. That paper would later report that Waters and her husband would have lost as much as $350,000 personally if the bank had folded. It didn’t. The Federal Reserve came through and OneUnited received $12 million in bailout funds.
The House Ethics Committee launched an investigation because that kind of money can’t just go missing without some sort of consequence. Waters insisted she was just looking out for minority-owned banks. Never mind that it was just one minority-owned bank in particular that benefited: the one she had a stake in.
The Ethics Committee ended up slapping Waters on the wrist for the unrelated offense of making her own grandson her chief of staff. She got off easy otherwise. Then, as now, when she stirs up mobs or floats conspiracy theories, Waters knows how to get away with it. Lack of oversight indeed.
