There's really one thing to say. It's political. So it comes as no surprise that various political operatives have dug up some dirt on Maxine Waters' holdings in OneUnited Bank vis a vis her calling of a meeting with Paulson to get some TARP. From what I can see, OneUnited asked for 50 million and got 12.
Now the singular fact missing from all this reporting is this. OneUnited Bank is the largest black owned bank in the US. It was formed several years ago as a merger between some of the more broadly known black banks. It includes assets acquired over the years from Family Savings, Broadway Federal and Founders. When I grew up in LA, Family Savings is where I opened my first account - it was the tallest building in the neighborhood.
So Waters is likely to talk about how many dozen minority owned banks she was representing, but the bottom line is that OneUnited is the only one worth talking about, as meager as its assets may be, relatively speaking to TARP bailees. There's no doubt that Waters would be connected, but OneUnited has either always been private or was recently taken private.
What's relatively interesting about all this is how Waters, who is inevitably mobbed up with most of the blackified blacks of Los Angeles is going to draw all the heat. You see, I would bet a million bucks that Magic Johnson had a million bucks in OneUnited at least once in its history. OneUnited has a storied history. But this isn't about black LA, it's about Maxine - a crusty old pol with a stranglehold on her district.
The saga of OneUnited ought to be a singular and hot issue among black political partisans. But to talk about OneUnited is to raise questions about black capitalism's failure and the relative isolation of the black upper middle class and upper class from the actual fortunes of those they often claim to support. And it also raises questions about why anybody has bothered to coin the term 'silver rights' rather than just talk straight economics.
Maxine may or may not be an enabler in all that, but she cannot be far from its center, because she has parlayed it into ten Congressional terms, back to back to back. A ten-peat. That's political currency.How long will it last?
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