Votto
Diamond Member
- Oct 31, 2012
- 55,784
- 55,944
Yes, that must be it. We need more transparency like that of Nancy Pelosi
Ethics: As Democrats demonize Wall Street CEOs as the "greedy" fiends of the financial crisis, they've lined their own pockets — both before and after the crisis. Nancy Pelosi's just the latest example.
The former House speaker allegedly gamed financial reforms to boost her personal stock portfolio. The brewing scandal is complicated, but here's the Reader's Digest version:
After a Pelosi staffer left to lobby on behalf of credit-card giant Visa, Pelosi delayed bringing to the House floor a bill to end lucrative "swipe fees" for Visa and other credit providers.
The bill couldn't have come at a worse time for Visa. It planned to launch an $18 billion public stock offering, so stalling Hill action became a priority. The San Francisco-based company curried favor with Pelosi by pumping cash into her re-election efforts, earning its CEO a rare one-on-one meeting with the speaker.
At the same time, Visa offered her husband a VIP cut of the IPO. Paul Pelosi jumped at the offer, buying 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. In a couple of days, the shares soared to $64. Pelosi later bought 15,000 more, raising the total value of his investment to about $5 million. In the end, the legislation Visa fought starting in 2007 was forestalled two full years.
Publicly, Nancy Pelosi has been a frequent critic of the financial industry. The commission she impaneled in 2009 to investigate the root causes of the crisis summarily indicted Wall Street honchos, while exonerating guilty Democrats, including several who had their hands in the subprime pot. Among them:
Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's CEO through 2005, who helped plunge the government-sponsored mortgage giant into the subprime abyss, while cooking Fannie's books to score fatter bonuses for himself and other Clinton Democrats on its board. Despite holding 20 hearings and 700 interviews, Pelosi's commission never found room for Raines on the witness list. One of the prime suspects in the crisis got off scot-free.
Henry Cisneros, Clinton's housing chief who strong-armed Countrywide Financial into signing "fair lending" contracts that exposed it to billions in risky subprime loans. Cisneros later joined Countrywide's board. (Pelosi's son also worked for Countrywide.)
Rahm Emanuel, who served on Freddie Mac's board, where he pocketed $320,000 before making millions working for an investment banker in Chicago that brokered high-cost subprime loans to minorities.
Barney Frank, who was one of Fannie's and Freddie's biggest protectors — and beneficiaries of their political donations — on Capitol Hill. Frank landed a plum Fannie job for his gay partner, Herb Moses, whose work involved relaxing Fannie's restrictions on home loans. Frank previously led the House committee charged with oversight of Fannie, which also gave at least $25,000 to Frank's mother's charity in Boston. His glaring conflicts of interest were never investigated.
Chris Dodd, the ex-Democratic senator who scored not one, but two sweetheart Countrywide mortgages, while protecting Fannie as head of the Senate committee charged with oversight of Fannie. Countrywide was Fannie's biggest customer.
Dodd and Frank did more than any other lawmakers to cover up the risks Fannie and Freddie took meeting government-imposed affordable lending quotas. Yet they got to write the law to supposedly stop the next financial crisis — one that doesn't even lay a glove on Fannie and Freddie, who together held or guaranteed almost half the subprime and other bad loans in the system when it crashed in 2008.
Maxine Waters, senior Democratic member of the House banking committee who defended Raines by arguing that reining him in would only hurt lending to lower-income and minority households.
After the subprime crisis, Waters allegedly swung $12 million in federal bailout money to her husband's ailing minority bank. Regulators cited OneUnited Bank for poor lending practices and excessive executive pay and perks — including providing its CEO a $6 million mansion and a Porsche SUV. The Waters at the time owned more than $350,000 in OneUnited stock.
It wasn't the first time Waters used her power to advance the interests of the bank. In 2002, when her husband first became a shareholder in OneUnited, the bank (then known as Boston Bank of Commerce) tried to purchase Family Savings, another minority-owned bank in Los Angeles. But when the thrift turned instead to a suitor in Illinois, Waters tried to block the merger by contacting FDIC regulators. Her efforts paid off. The thrift ended up merging with her husband's bank.
Waters remains one of Washington's most outspoken critics of "greedy" Wall Street bankers — whom she says conspired with Republicans to create the crisis.
But Democrats ought to look in the mirror. Their colleague Jon Corzine wasn't just tied to Wall Street bankers. He was one — and one of the worst.
As a Democratic senator and governor of New Jersey, Corzine decried income inequality and Wall Street pay. Then he joined MF Global Holdings and bagged a $14 million compensation package — including $2 million in guaranteed bonuses, regardless of performance.
It took Corzine just 18 months to run the Wall Street brokerage into the ground with risky bets on euro zone debt. Just hours before filing for bankruptcy, Corzine continued paying out executive bonuses, mimicking the actions of Wall Street CEOs he had criticized during the crisis.
The list of financial "greed" and sleaze on the left is long. What a bunch of hypocrites.
