Thread: PUTRID WATERS

Pack a snack - this is a long one.
PUTRID WATERS

Maxine Waters, the most vicious racist and socialist in the U.S. Congress.

August 17, 2017
John Perazzo
There are many worthless deceivers from both major parties in the U.S. Congress ⸺ individuals whose principal talent is to screw over the American public while enriching themselves and basking obscenely in the glow of the political limelight they crave even more than life itself. But no one better fits this description than Los Angeles-based Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who has been secreting her special brand of racist, anti-American bile into the House of Representatives for more than a quarter of a century.

In recent months, Waters has experienced something of a resurgence in her popularity among leftists. In honor of her 79th birthday this Tuesday, for instance, Elle magazine lauded Waters not only as “a beacon of hope” in “these dark times,” but also as “a pop culture icon” who is “telling it like it is to anyone who has sense enough to listen.” MSN.com crowed: “It's Rep. Maxine Waters' birthday and the whole Internet is celebrating.” And TheRoot.com ran a puff piece titled “The Making of Auntie Maxine,” stating that “we love her” because she “says what many black women are thinking,” she “will not bow down to anyone,” and “time and time again she has fought against racism, white supremacy, white mediocrity, and misogyny.”

What the Left particularly loves about Maxine Waters lately, are her relentless, seething, theatrical professions of hatred for President Trump. Indeed, destroying Donald Trump's presidency and having him removed from office in disgrace is mostly what she lives for nowadays. When Waters boycotted Trump's inauguration on January 21, 2017, she explained her reasoning as follows: “I don't honor him, I don't respect him, and I don't want to be involved with him.” In an appearance on MSNBC the following month, Waters called President Trump and his associates “a bunch of scumbags.” At a large rally two months ago in Los Angeles, she called for Trump's impeachment: “He is not my president. He is not your president.... I’m saying, impeach 45. Impeach 45!” (Trump is the 45th U.S. President.) And at the annual ESSENCE Festival in New Orleans in early July, Waters revisitedthis same theme: “I am taking off the gloves. I don’t honor him, I don’t respect him, and I am not going to tolerate him. I am going to do everything I can do to get him impeached.”

Then, very recently, in a discussion about the multiple felonious leaks that have surfaced in recent months about President Trump and his associates ⸺ including transcripts of Trump's private phone conversations with other world leaders ⸺ Waters proudly affirmed that she is “so glad” that the leakers are “telling us what's going on,” adding: “I welcome the leaks. I welcome the information. That keeps us focused on him [Trump] and talking about what is wrong with him.” And for good measure, Waters vowed that “when we finish with [the impeachment of] Trump, we have to go and get” Vice President Mike Pence as well. “He’s next.”

Fidel and the Many Other Communists in Maxine's Life

In stark contrast to her undiluted contempt for President Trump, Waters had a remarkable affinity for the late Fidel Castro, the longtime Communist dictator, mass murderer, and overseer of the island gulag known as Cuba. That would be the same Fidel Castro who tried very hard to provoke an intercontinental nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union; the same Fidel Castro who, according to Humberto Fontova, “jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror” and “murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six”; and the same Fidel Castro whose most infamous ally, Che Guevara, once boasted that if he and Castro would have had the opportunity, “we would have fired [nuclear missiles] against the very heart of the U.S., including New York,” because “the victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”

But none of these things ever bothered Maxine Waters nearly as much as Donald Trump's character flaws and political agendas bother her today. How do we know this? Because on September 9, 2000, Waters was among the throng of starstruck leftists who greeted and honored Fidel Castro during his visit to Harlem’s Riverside Church. “Viva Fidel!” the congresswoman shouted jubilantly as the dictator soaked up the adoration. As Castro himself put it: “I came to Harlem because I knew it was here that I would find my best friends.” Best friends like Maxine Waters.

That Harlem soirée was just one of several noteworthy interactions that Waters had with Fidel Castro and his iron-fisted government over the years. On September 29, 1998, for instance, the congresswoman wrote Castro a lengthy personal letter conveying her very obvious respect for Communist Cuba while dripping with disdain for her own country. In that letter, Waters apologized to Castro for having “mistakenly” ⸺ due to a “deceptive” legislative maneuver by “the Republican leadership” ⸺ voted for a House Resolution that called on the Cuban government to extradite the fugitive Assata Shakur to the United States. Though Waters respectfully referred to Shakur as a “political activist,” Shakur was in fact a former Black Panther, a Marxist revolutionary, and a convicted cop-killer who had broken out of an American prison in 1979 and subsequently fled to Cuba, where Castro gave her safe haven for decades thereafter. Waters wrote:
“[W]e must respect the right of the government of Cuba to grant political asylum for individuals from the U.S. fleeing political persecution.... I respect the right of Assata Shakur to seek political asylum. Assata Shakur has maintained that she was persecuted as a result of her political beliefs and political affiliations. As a result, she left the United States and sought political asylum in Cuba, where she still resides. In a sad and shameful chapter of our history, during the 1960s and 1970s, many civil rights, Black Power and other politically active groups were secretly targeted by the FBI for prosecution based on their political beliefs.... [T]he most vicious and reprehensible acts were taken against the leaders and organizations associated with the Black Power or Black Liberation Movement. Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party, one of the leading groups associated with the Black Liberation Movement.”
In this recitation of American misdeeds, Waters made no mention of the fact that the Black Panthers ⸺ whom historian Ronald Radosh has aptly described as “a group of Stalinist thugs who murdered and killed both police and their own internal dissenters” ⸺ actively promoted revolutionary Marxism, Jew-hatred, and all manner of violent crime. But hey, at least they weren't Donald Trump, right?

Waters again crossed paths with Castro's dictatorial regime in February 1999, when she presided over a delegation of six Congressional Black Caucus members who traveled to Cuba on a fact-finding mission to gather information that hopefully “would help the Black Caucus take a leading role in introducing legislation to change current U.S. policies toward Cuba.”

Eleven months later, Waters headed another Congressional Black Caucus delegation to Cuba, this time to monitor a healthcare exhibition in Havana. The trip was sponsored by the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, which was a staunch supporter of Communist Cuba and was once a steering committee member of the Marxist-Leninist front group International ANSWER.

In May 2005, Waters was one of only 22 House members to vote against HR 193, a Republican-sponsored bill that urged the Bush Administration and the international community “to actively oppose any attempts by the Castro regime to repress or punish the organizers and participants” of the Assembly to Promote the Civil Society in Cuba, a group whose mission was to advance “pro-democracy ideals” that might “hasten the day of freedom and democracy for the people of Cuba.”

But the foregoing facts scarcely begin to scratch the surface of Waters's affiliations with, and affection for, communists and socialists far beyond the borders of Castro's Cuba. Consider the following facts:

● As noted by author and political activist Trevor Loudon, who has done immensely valuable work in uncovering Maxine Waters's communist ties, Waters in 1982 lent her name to a pamphlet published by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a Communist Party USA front group that was led by Angela Davis⸺ the longtime Marxist revolutionary, America-hating racist, and former Black Panther ⸺ as well as other Communist Party members and supporters.

● On March 9, 1983 in Los Angeles, Waters participated in a solidarity-event planning session organized by the Federation For Progress, a Communist Workers Party front group.

● In February 1984 at UC Berkeley, Waters spoke at a conference sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Review, the monthly magazine of the Socialist Workers Party.

● A few months later in San Francisco, Waters co-sponsored a reception organized by the Democratic Socialists of America.

● Waters served on the welcoming committee for an April 27, 1991 event in Los Angeles honoring South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani.

● “In May 1992,” reports Trevor Loudon, “Waters put her name to a supplement in the … People’s Weekly World[the Communist Party USA newspaper], 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 1992, Waters was in St. Louis to keynote a meeting of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, an organization that began as a Communist Party front.

● As a longtime supporter of the former Black Panther, convicted cop-killer, and Marxist icon Mumia Abu-Jamal, Waters in 1995 joined several fellow Congressional Black Caucus members in writing a letter that stated: “There is ample evidence that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s constitutional rights were violated, that he did not receive a fair trial, and that he is, in fact, innocent.” On August 13, 1995, Waters and Jesse Jackson were among the notables who attended a Los Angeles rally to protest Abu-Jamal's murder conviction.

● In the mid-1990s, Waters employed Patrick Lacefield, a former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, as her press secretary and speechwriter.

● Beginning in the mid-1990s as well, Waters became an outspoken champion for Lori Berenson, an American citizen who in 1995 was arrested in Peru for collaborating with Marxist guerrillas on a plot to kidnap members of the Peruvian Congress, and who in 1996 was sentenced to life-in-prison for her crime (a sentence that, to Waters's delight, was later reduced to 20 years).

● At a June 1996 tribute event which the Communist Party USA newspaper People's Weekly World held in Los Angeles for a pair of prominent unionists, one of Waters's staffers made a presentation to the honorees on behalf of the congresswoman.
● In July 1996, the Democratic Socialists of America's Political Action Committee endorsed Waters's candidacy in the race for California's District 35 congressional seat.

● In 2004, Waters lauded Democratic Socialists of America member Stanley Sheinbaum, a Los Angeles-based activist and funder of left-wing causes, as someone who had been a trustworthy friend and mentor to her.

● In April 2004, Waters was the featured speaker at a rally organized by the International Action Center, an offshoot organization of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.

● In February 2005, Waters sent one of her congressional aides to speak at an “anti-war and social justice conference” co-sponsored by the International Action Center and the L.A. Million Worker March Committee, the latter of which was a socialist entity that aimed to “expos[e] the real nature of the two parties that support big business and capitalism,” and to “challenge the capitalist class.”
● In a May 2008 congressional hearing on gasoline prices, Waters bluntly told Shell Oil president John Hofmeister that she favored the nationalization of America's oil companies: “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.”

● In 2009 Waters was a guest speaker at an event organized by the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, a group whose board of directors included Workers World Party organizer Abayomi Azikiwe, who also chaired the event.

● In 2010, Waters served on the Advisory Board of the Progressive Democrats of America, whose leadership consisted of several activists affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.

● In November 2010, Waters and 15 other congressional Democrats met — either personally or through their respective staffers — with supporters of the Marxist-Leninist Freedom Road Socialist Organization to discuss “the FBI raids and grand jury subpoenas of people doing international solidarity work and anti-war organizing.”

● In the fall of 2011, Waters supported the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement for “bring[ing] attention” to “the unfairness of the system.”

Waters's Obsession with Race

Congresswoman Waters has lots of other interests, of course, besides aligning herself with communists and socialists. Foremost among those interests is her deep and ugly obsession with race. She's particularly adept at smearing white people as “racists” if they do not share her political or ideological values, while portraying black conservatives as loathsome race-traitors and cowardly appeasers. Wherever Maxine Waters looks, she inevitably sees the specter of race.

● In 1984, for instance, Waters said that President Ronald Reagan's campaign platform “snidely suggested that he was going to put Blacks in their place once and for all.” She derided Reagan's black supporters, meanwhile, as “Uncle Tom” and “Aunt Tomasina.”

● In the 1980s as well, Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine in black urban neighborhoods across the United States, basing her allegations mainly on the claims of the rabidly anti-American Christic Institute and a series of articles by a San Jose Mercury-News reporter. When the conspiracy theory eventually fell apart as a wholly unsubstantiated fiction, Waters was undeterred, telling 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.”

● During the April 1992 riots that took place in Los Angeles after the infamous Rodney King trial, Waters described the deadly violence as “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration,” and to the federal government’s longstanding “neglect” of America’s inner cities. Holding “economic, social, cultural and political” factors responsible for the disorder in Los Angeles,[1] Waters claimed that the mayhem could rightly be called a “rebellion” or an “insurrection,” but not a riot. “If you call it a riot,” the congresswoman explained, “it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion.” In a similar vein, Waters dismissed the widespread black looting of Korean-owned stores in the area by saying: “There were [black] mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. Maybe they shouldn't have done it, but the atmosphere was such that they did it. They are not crooks.”

One individual who was gravely injured in Los Angeles was a white truck driver named Reginald Denny, whom a group of rioters pulled out of his vehicle and bashed in the head with a cinder block – simply because of the color of his skin. The entire incident was videotaped from a helicopter above the scene. When Damian Williams, the ringleader of the mob that attacked Denny, was later arrested, Waters visited Williams's family to offer her support.[2] The “anger in my district is a righteous anger,” Waters told the press, and “I'm just as angry as they are.” And when Damian Williams and his chief accomplice in the Denny beating were eventually acquitted on the most serious charges against them, Waters again visited Williams's home to convey her congratulations.

By no means was this the only time that Waters has made common cause with violent black racists. Indeed, she once joined with street-gang members belonging to the fearsome Crips and Bloods, in performing a communal dance called the “Electric Slide” at a housing project party.

● When Waters endorsed Bill Clinton for U.S. President in 1992, she accused Clinton's Republican opponent, incumbent President George H.W. Bush, of being “a racist” and “a mean-spirited man who has no care or concern about what happens to the African-American community in this country.”

● Ron Christie, an African American who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush during Bush's first term in office, recalls that when he first began working as a young legislative aide for Republican Congressman Craig James in 1991, Waters called Christie on the phone and said, “Young man, this is Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and I would like to speak to you immediately.” When Christie promptly went to Waters's office as instructed, the congresswoman asked him angrily: “What are you doing working for Mr. James?... I want to know why you're working for a Republican. Are you confused?” When Christie replied that “I work with Congressman James because I share his values,” Waters thundered: “You're a sellout to your race! White people work for Republicans! Not African Americans! You're nothing but an Uncle Tom!”

● In 2001 Waters depicted the retiring moderate Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, as a “plantation owner.”

● Waters played the race card in August 2010, when the House Ethics Committee was investigating her for having used her political influence to help officials of OneUnited Bank get a special meeting in 2008 with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ⸺ a meeting that laid the groundwork for OneUnited receiving $12 million in federal TARP bailout money. Notably, OneUnited executives had donated lots of money to Waters' congressional campaigns, and Waters's husband held some $350,000 worth of stock in OneUnited. For this influence-peddling as well as other improprieties, the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) named Waters as one of “The Most Corrupt Members of Congress” four times in a seven-year-stretch from 2005 to 2011. “The question at this point should not be why I called Secretary Paulson, but why I had to,” said a defiant Waters regarding the OneUnited matter. “The question at this point should be why a trade association representing over 100 minority banks could not get a meeting at the height of the [2008 financial] crisis.”

● Waters objected strenuously to the Supreme Court's June 2013 decision in Shelby County [Alabama] v. Holder, where the Court ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act ⸺ a provision that required states with histories of election-related discrimination to obtain federal pre-approval for any new voting measure they wished to adopt ⸺ was unconstitutional, as it had become nothing more than an anachronism. Waters denounced the new ruling as a “slick, calculated, dastardly decision to keep us [blacks] from voting and keep us from the voting booth.”

● Waters likewise objected to North Carolina's July 2013 decision to approve new laws requiring voters to present government-issued IDs at their polling places, shortening the early voting period from 17 days to 10, doing away with same-day voter registration, and requiring that any changes in voter registration be made at least 25 days before an election. Asserting that “North Carolina has just gone crazy,” Waters condemned “the right-wing Republicans” who were “pushing restrictive voter ID legislation” not only in North Carolina but “in states around the country,” in order to “make it more difficult for us [blacks] to make our voices heard.”

● In August 2014, Waters traveled to St. Louis to attend the funeral of Michael Brown, a 6-foot-4-inch, 300-pound black man who had been shot and killed during a highly publicized altercation with a white police officer named Darren Wilson two weeks earlier in Ferguson, Missouri. “I have been in contact with some of the elected officials and community leaders in the St. Louis area and join with the overall community in calling for justice for Michael Brown,” Waters said in a statement issued shortly before the funeral. Adding that she was “particularly sympathetic to the parents and relatives of Michael Brown for their loss,” Waters vowed that “while I am in St. Louis, I will meet with local leaders and offer my assistance in future political organizing to help create change in the Ferguson community.”

But lo and behold, it turned out that the only person who was ultimately responsible for Michael Brown's death was none other than Michael Brown himself. Indeed, the evidence pertaining to this case showed that: (a) Officer Wilson knew from the outset that Brown had just carried out a reported strong-armed robbery at a convenience store (apparently in frustration over the fact that his attempted drug deal with an employee had failed to materialize as planned); (b) Brown initiated the attack on Officer Wilson while the latter was still inside his police car; (c) Brown grabbed Wilson's gun during the initial struggle, causing the weapon to fire twice; (d) the much-smaller Wilson, who feared for his life during the struggle, repeatedly told Brown to surrender, but to no avail; and (e) Brown, who had marijuana in his system and on his possession at the time of his altercation with Wilson, was aggressively charging the officer when he was fatally shot.

It is noteworthy that over the course of 2014, a total of 159 people were murdered in the city and county of St. Louis. The vast majority of those were black victims who were killed by black perpetrators. And yet, out of all of them, Maxine Waters chose to attend only the funeral of Michael Brown. Would you care to guess why that is?

● Waters supports the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and in 2016 she was photographed participating in a BLM demonstration. Founded by Marxist revolutionaries in 2013, BLM depicts the United States as a nation awash in racism, routinely smearing white police officers as trigger-happy bigots who are intent upon killing innocent, unarmed black males. At all BLM events, demonstrators invoke a call-to-arms by the Marxist revolutionary / former Black Panther / convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur, in which Shakur quotes a passage from the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

● In a May 9, 2017 podcast with the Washington Post, Waters asserted that former U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, whom President Donald Trump had appointed as Attorney General, is “a racist”; “a throwback to the days of Jim Crow in the South”; a man who “absolutely believes that it’s his job to keep minorities in their place”; and a man sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. She emphasized how “very dangerous” it is for the U.S. to have Sessions as the Attorney General, given the fact that “we're still faced with the fact that police officers will not be charged criminally, for the most part, for killing people of color.”

● When Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently questioned how Waters has managed to become so wealthy during the course of her 26 years in Congress ⸺ e.g., she owns a $4.8 million mansion in the upscale Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, several miles outside of her Congressional District – Waters accused Carlson of racism: “I own several properties. The Way Carlson talked about it is: What right does an African-American woman have to do well? He doesn't know anything about my investments, about the house that I've lived in for 25, 30 years. This idea of 'How could she afford that?' is racist, and I just dismiss it.” In response, Carlson reported that according to real-estate records, Waters purchased her home just 13 years ago and has spent “an awful lot since to remodel it.”

● Earlier this month, Waters was angered by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz's remarks about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's decision to impanel a grand jury to investigate Donald Trump in the District of Columbia rather than in Virginia. Said Dershowitz: “[Washington] has an ethnic and racial composition that would be somewhat less favorable to Donald Trump.” Waters, in turn, characterized Dershowitz's statement as “absolutely racist” and vowed, “We will not stand for it.”

● In an interview on The Breakfast Club radio program just a few days ago, Waters was asked if she thinks it might be time for black people to form their own political party. In response, she suggested that while the idea is not yet feasible, it might be worth considering in the future: “We [blacks] still are not voting our influence yet. What we should do is organize our power, exercise our power, particularly in the Democratic Party because that’s where most of us are.... [T]hen you can raise that kind of question – whether we are strong enough to talk about organizing another party.”

● When President Trump's initial denunciation of the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville a few days ago failed to meet Waters's standard for sincerity and forcefulness ⸺ mainly because the president also dared to point out that left-wing Antifa radicals had perpetrated violence in Charlottesville as well ⸺ the congresswoman said: “I’ve always known that he was dog-whistling to a certain element in our society, so I was not surprised at all that he did not condemn the white supremacists — or any of those, the KKK — when he made his first statement.”
Conclusion

The fact that Maxine Waters is very obviously a raging, race-obsessed socialist does not in any way make her unique among Democrats in Congress. Indeed, it is precisely her lack of uniqueness that makes her an important figure to examine. Substantively, Waters says almost nothing that is inconsistent with the views of the vast majority of House Democrats today. They virtually all embrace primitive socialist economic policies and ugly racial biases to one degree or another, but most of them typically manage to couch their views in more polite, euphemistic tones than Waters, who doesn't bother much with verbal filters. Being the intemperate, buffoonish loudmouth that she is, Waters repeatedly shows us ⸺ without the disarming subtlety that softer-spoken socialists and racialists typically employ to veil their radicalism ⸺ just how truly detestable the Democratic Party has become. Thus we owe Waters a great debt of gratitude for her sledge-hammer bluntness, because with it, she has effectively laid bare what the modern-day Democratic Party now stands for: socialism, tribalism, perpetual grievance, and a raging hatred that will use any means necessary to satisfy its lust for vengeance and power.

If you take away only one lesson from this article, let it be this: Maxine Waters is the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is Maxine Waters. If enough Democratic voters were to finally wake up to this very plain and sobering reality, their party's influence would finally wither away like a fallen turd in the sun.

NOTES

[1] Minoo Southgate, “Black Power, Nineties Style,” National Review (December 13, 1993), p. 47.
[2] Notably, Damian Williams was released from prison a few years later. But in 2000 he committed a murder, for which he was sentenced to 51 years in prison.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267602/putrid-waters-john-perazzo

From 2008 - A refresher...
Democratic Coverup for Fannie and Freddie Led to 2008 Meltdown

By Ross Kaminsky (more by this author)

Posted 09/30/2008 ET
Updated 09/30/2008 ET

If anyone wants to find the people responsible for the current financial meltdown, they need to look no farther than the Democrats -- Maxine Waters, Barney Frank and their Fannie Mae pal Franklin Raines -- to indentify the culprits.

Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines. Everything in the 1992 act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals. What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission, a mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100 percent loans. -- Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) in a September, 2003, hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services.

The above quote from Waters was in a hearing convened by then-committee Chairman Michael Oxley (R-OH) to discuss “the oversight of the housing government-sponsored enterprises.”

The hearing came about because two Bush Administration cabinet secretaries had presented the committee with a “proposal to improve regulatory oversight for the GSEs” with an opening statement, including: “There is a broad agreement that the current regulatory structure for the GSEs is not operating as effectively as it should. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight is underfunded, understaffed and unable to fully oversee the operations of these sophisticated enterprises.

“This was reflected in the surprise management reorganization by Freddie Mac and by Wall Street reports stating that GSE oversight is viewed with skepticism because OFHEO is largely seen as a weak regulator. A strengthened regulator will send a signal to the markets that these entities have solid management and are engaging in safe and sound activities.”

Yet the response by the Democrats on the committee, who had turned what should have been an issue of protecting public trust and money into a partisan divide so that they could buy votes with their “affordable housing” social engineering scheme, was uniformly against improving oversight of GSEs.

Democrat Barney Frank (D-MA), who was the ranking Democratic committee member at the time (and is its chairman today), said, “I think it is clear that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are sufficiently secure so they are in no great danger… Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do very good work, and they are not endangering the fiscal health of this country.”

Representative Waters continued her contribution to the discussion by making clear the Democrats’ true mission for Fannie and Freddie, namely to find a way to get minorities into houses even if they would not meet the qualifications for standard loans, such as in having the ability to bring a down payment to the transaction.

Waters seemed particularly proud to say “since the inception of goals from 1993 to 2002, loans to African-Americans increased 219 percent and loans to Hispanics increased 244 percent, while loans to non-minorities increased 62 percent. Additionally, in 2001, 43.1 percent of Fannie Mae's single-family business served low-and moderate-income borrowers…” She then said “the GSEs are working” and reiterated her opposition to more oversight.

The next panel at that hearing included George Gould, a long-time Freddie Mac board member and former Under Secretary for Finance at the Department of the Treasury, who discussed Freddie’s view of the situation. He testified that:

• “Freddie Mac's franchise is rock solid. Our exposure to both credit risk and interest rate risk remains extremely low.”

• “These are strong incentives for the GSEs to meet the goals year after year, to say nothing of the reputational penalties of failing to meet a goal.” (This is important when we turn to Franklin Raines in a moment.)

• “Considering that we have consistently met the permanent affordable housing goals, additional enforcement authority seems unnecessary. Therefore, we would respectfully suggest that no additional authority is needed.”

This last statement reinforces the position taken by Maxine Waters that the mission of the GSEs is primarily to increase “affordable housing” regardless of how that gets done.

Next up was Franklin Raines, CEO of Fannie Mae. Raines made millions in bonuses when Fannie Mae manipulated earnings to meet the highest profit and “affordable housing” targets. He settled with the SEC in a sweetheart deal that cost him little or nothing out of his own pocket, even though Fannie Mae was slapped with the biggest fine in SEC history for overstating Fannie Mae’s profits by $6.3 billion over several years.

Raines went through the standard litany such as “provid(ing) $2 trillion for 18 million underserved families” but did not oppose modernizing GSE oversight. Indeed, Raines admitted that “you can imagine our trying to get into some area that could cause a safety and soundness issue.”

During the hearing Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said “I am just pissed off at OFHEO because if it wasn’t for you I don’t think we’d have to be here in the first place.”

The head of OFHEO, the under-funded regulator of Fannie and Freddie, did not take that lying down: “Congressman, OFHEO did not improperly apply accounting rules; Freddie Mac did. OFHEO did not try to manage earnings improperly; Freddie Mac did. So this isn't about the agency's engagement in improper conduct, it is about Freddie Mac.”

Though this 2003 hearing (which is widely being reported on the Internet has having happened in 2004, in part because of this otherwise-excellent video showing some of the highlights), it is only a small part of the consistent support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by Democrats regardless of the risk caused by or fraud perpetrated by those organizations.

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), the largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie in the past decade, also turned a blind eye to the risks posed by the GSE’s.

In an article earlier this month, the Washington Post (no friend to the Bush administration), offered this: “Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has the gall to ask in a Bloomberg Television interview: I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years’” before explaining that “Dodd -- who along with Democratic Sens. John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign contributions from 1988 to 2008 -- actively opposed such measures and further weakened existing regulation.”

The corruption of Fannie Mae was not simply partisan, but it was also racist in its own way. Just as Fannie and Freddie threatened to harm “racist” banks which didn’t loan money to (unqualified) minorities, the leadership of the GSEs was clearly just as afraid of being called racist by minority (by race, not political party) members of Congress. In this remarkable 2005 video of the swearing-in ceremony of the Congressional Black Caucus (with an applauding Michelle Obama prominently featured), Fannie Mae interim CEO Daniel Mudd, cozies up to the CBC: “I humbly ask you to help us and help me… If there areas where we could do better, we’d like to hear it from our friends, and I’d be so bold as to say our family, first.” Mudd was afraid of the CBC. And who wouldn’t be, in a society where the an unfounded charge of racism can destroy fortunes and careers?

What lessons can we learn about confusing social programs with the proper functions of government, about the inherent conflict between believing that a cause is worth any price and protecting citizens’ money from waste and corruption? (Indeed can we not ask the same question about the conflict inherent in Paulson’s bailout proposal?)

Democrats have taken the wrong side in this conflict for years, right up until the bitter and expensive end of Fannie and Freddie as independent institutions, including their multi-billion dollar tax-payer bailout .

In fact, over the years, their actions to protect Fannie and Freddie from Congressional prying are nothing short of a coverup.

Sens. Dodd and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wanted to expand Fannie and Freddie as recently as a year ago, while John McCain was one of just 4 sponsors of a 2005 measure to rein in these financial Frankensteins. McCain offered support of the bill with this statement: “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

But when even Bill Clinton has to admit the truth, you know it’s not just a matter of parsing words: “The responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more with resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Part of the reason the Democrats are so angry about the Paulson bailout proposal failing is that it allows the public that much longer to figure out who is primarily responsible for the current debt market turmoil.

The villains in this story are primarily Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd, with conspirators throughout the Democratic Party, the Congressional Black Caucus, and corrupt leftist organizations like ACORN, which not only received Fannie Mae money despite repeated convictions for voter fraud, but which was slated by the Democrats to share in any future potential profits from the bailout.

To use the words of House Republican Leader John Boehner, the bailout bill was a “crap sandwich”. But what beside such a meal should we have expected given the disgusting history of fraud by GSEs and neglect and stonewalling by their Democratic defenders in Congress?

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/A...20Freddie.html

Yep, Maxine Waters is about 52 cards short of a full deck. How this lady has avoided an investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) is beyond my comprehension.