Bachmann: ACORN could regulate the financial sector

The embattled community group ACORN could help regulate the financial services industry under new financial regulatory reforms, said Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) on Wednesday.

Bachmann, a consistent opponent of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), said that an amendment given in the House Financial Services Committee could allow the group to sit on an advisory panel that monitors the regulations.

“ACORN may have a seat at the table being on the oversight committee regulating the financial services industry of the United States,” Bachmann said at a press conference. “And that would be a cruel joke."

Bachmann’s remarks come as House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank’s (D-Mass.) regulatory reform bill is set to be brought to a floor vote this week.

The amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) created Consumer Financial Protection Oversight Board that would need to include five members from the “fields of consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve under-served communities or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgage loans.”

The panel does not have the power to create policy but can recommend policies to the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Bachmann argued that this provision could allow ACORN to participate on the board. ACORN was temporarily stripped of its federal funding by Congress in September after two conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute filmed ACORN employees offering them financial advice.

The Minnesota congresswoman said she would offer an amendment negating the Waters language. She requested a provision be added to the omnibus appropriations bill that would extend the funding ban to Sept. 30, 2010.

Bachmann previously offered an amendment to the Financial Services Committee version that would bar ACORN-like groups from sitting on a separate advisory panel. Her amendment was approved by the panel. Waters' amendment was also included in the final bill.

The Enemy within

(copied from discoverthenetworks.org}

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."

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