ron paul on the daily show

A California lawmaker who got a communist dictator to harbor a cop-murdering Black Panther fugitive and accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine in black neighborhoods has become the laughing stock of Congress for threatening to nationalize the oil industry.

California’s most influential black lawmaker, Democrat Representative Maxine Waters, made the threat during recent congressional hearings with oil company executives. She said the federal government would take over their industry if they failed to do something to stop the escalating price of gasoline.

Waters told the president of a major oil company to “guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be all about socializing -- uh, uh, would be about basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.” One renowned commentator, who said Waters made an absolute total fool of herself, points out that the congresswoman’s associates can be heard laughing in the video of the embarrassing exchange.

This is just the latest shameful performance in Waters’ storied congressional career. She has been crowned among the nation’s most corrupt members of Congress by a reputable ethics watchdog for awarding federal contracts to businesses owned by or connected to members of her family, including her husband and children.

She frequently takes trips to communist Cuba to visit her convicted cop-assassin friend, Joanne Chesimard, who is also known by her Black Panther name of Assata Shakur. In 1979 Chesimard murdered a New Jersey State trooper and a jury convicted her of murder and sentenced her to life in prison. In a daring breakout with the help of fellow cult members, Chesimard escaped from prison and fled to Cuba. U.S. lawmakers insisted she be extradited but Waters always stood by her side, even likening her to civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

In fact, she wrote Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro a letter to say that she was not part of the group of U.S. legislators who voted for a resolution to extradite the cop murderer. Waters told Castro that she opposed extradition because Chesimard was “politically persecuted” in the U.S. and simply seeking political asylum in Havana, where she still lives.

In the 1980s Waters accused the CIA of selling crack cocaine to blacks in her south central Los Angeles district to raise millions of dollars to support clandestine operations in Latin America, including a guerrilla army. During the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots she repeatedly excused the violent behavior that destroyed the areas she represents in the House. She dismissed the severe beating of a white truck driver by saying the anger in her district was righteous. She also excused looters who stole form stores by saying they were simply mothers capitalizing on an opportunity to take some milk, bread and shoes.

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A senior member of the congressional committee handling the financial crisis is being investigated for steering federal bailout funds to a questionable bank because she and her board member husband had deep financial ties to it.

Months after the media exposed the shady deal involving prominent California Democrat Maxine Waters, the House Ethics Committee is finally investigating the veteran lawmaker’s controversial intervention on behalf of her husband’s failing Massachusetts bank. As a result, the financial institution (OneUnited) received $12 million in federal bailout funds.

Waters pressured Treasury officials to bail out the minority-owned bank whose executives have donated heavily to her political campaigns. At the time she and her husband, Sidney Williams, held big financial stakes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in OneUnited and her husband had just been the bank’s director and still served on its board.

The conflict was so blatant that even the scandal-plagued chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, her good buddy Barney Frank, urged Waters to “stay out of it,” assuring her that he would see to it that her precious bank got bailout money. Earlier this year Judicial Watch uncovered documents that Congress, especially Frank, for years ignored corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so it’s not surprising that he took no action when Waters ignored his suggestion.

The OneUnited case was hardly the first time that Waters, California’s most influential black lawmaker, used her political clout to benefit her family financially. In 2004 Waters’ hometown newspaper reported that her relatives made more than $1 million by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that the well-connected and powerful congresswoman had helped.

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