It was in August of 2010 that the House Ethics Committee decided to proceed with charges against California Congresswoman Maxine Waters for contriving to procure “special favors” for the Massachusetts-based OneUnited Bank. And although “Waters has done her damnedest during [these] three years to exploit as many legal technicalities as possible to try to get the investigation halted…” it now looks as though the jig might finally be up.

In 2008, Representative Waters set up a meeting between officials of the Treasury Department and members of a “trade association” of minority-owned banks. The meeting, however, consisted almost exclusively of OneUnited Bank executives who, to the surprise of the Treasury people, asked them for a $50 million dollar loan!

It seems the minority-owned OneUnited was in trouble. It also seems Maxine Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, was on the board of OneUnited and owned $350,000 worth of the bank’s stock–stock that would have been worthless if the bank failed. The Congresswoman forgot to mention this minor point to Treasury when arranging the get-together.

Now who came to Waters’ assistance but Rush Limbaugh’s “Banking Queen,” Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank? Advising the congresswoman that her involvement in the affair might not look so hot to the House Ethics Committee, Frank offered to do the dirty work for her as OneUnited Bank was, after all, in his district. Frank later told the Committee:

“I said, look, it’s a Boston institution. You should stay out of it. It’s a legitimate constituency thing for me. You should stay away from this. It’s a legitimate thing for me to do, and you shouldn’t be involved,” Frank told the Globe, recounting his conversations with Waters.

Although it is against House rules to “use one’s power as a member for personal financial gain,” it’s apparently just FINE if one of your House colleagues does it FOR you.

At this point, Waters’ Chief of Staff—and grandson—Mikael Moore decided to lend a hand. He addressed numerous emails to the House Financial Services Committee, “…discussing with committee members details of a bank bailout bill apparently after Ms. Waters agreed to refrain from advocating on the bank’s behalf. The bailout bill had provisions that ultimately benefited OneUnited…” 

Read More at Western Journalism. By Doug Book.

Only this one may not even succeed in buying time – I give it less than a month before some such other piece of bad news comes along to fire the crisis anew. Like all the others, the latest fix seems to create as many problems as it solves. The euphoria in markets at Spain’s rescue lasted all of a few hours; having bounded away at the opening, they ended broadly flat.

But please don’t call it a bail-out. It may walk, talk and look like a bail-out, but to the Spanish premier, Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s handout is completely different to the three rescues we’ve already seen, even though at €100bn (£81bn)– or some 10pc of Spanish GDP – it’s quite a bit larger than that of Ireland and Portugal.

No doubt mindful of the fact that every political leader who has agreed on a bailout to date has been defenestrated soon afterwards, Mr Rajoy has attempted to snatch victory from the jaws of humiliation by proclaiming the €100bn of aid an unparalleled triumph. Don Quixote himself would have struggled to see such majesty in all too self evident defeat.

To Mr Rajoy, however, the Spanish aid is no more than “the opening of a line of credit for our financial system”, which because Spain has been such an exemplary to others in accepting austerity without complaint, has been offered more or less unconditionally. I suspect Mr Rajoy is in for a bit of a shock once he sees the fine print, but for him, the important thing is getting it across to his electorate that Spain is not being bailed out. Honour has to be seen to be maintained.

Unfortunately, the reality is altogether different. This is not a direct line of credit to the Spanish banking system, but a sovereign loan which expands the national debt by getting on for 20pc. The fact that all of it is going to be used to prop up the banking sector is no more than cosmetic for an underlying truth – that it is Spanish taxpayers who are left with the liability. Spain is being forced to borrow from Europe to bailout its banks because markets won’t provide the money directly to Spain.

Read More at The Telegraph. By Jeremy Warner.

When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago, the book’s fictional working-class neighborhood, Fishtown, became one more battleground in America’s 50-year-old culture war. Fishtown was representative, Murray argued, of a new white underclass in America—one produced by cultural decline, especially the collapse of marriage. Critics objected that the real source of misery in the nation’s Fishtowns wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics, David Brooks versus Paul Krugman.

Murray might have done more to acknowledge that globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. In fact, the single-mother revolution, as I’ll call it, takes us a long way toward understanding the socioeconomic problems on everyone’s mind these days: poverty, inequality, and the inability of those at the bottom to move up.

The single-mother revolution shouldn’t need much introduction. It started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the revolution were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The first public sign that the single-mother revolution had arrived came in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his controversial report on the black family. As a young assistant secretary of labor, Moynihan had stumbled across data showing that the percentage of black mothers who were unmarried at the time of their children’s birth was rising, reaching a then-staggering 24 percent, even while black male unemployment was falling. This puzzled Moynihan: Shouldn’t more male paychecks mean fewer single mothers? Moynihan realized that he was uncovering a new cultural phenomenon—voluntary single motherhood—and concluded that it would impede blacks’ economic progress.

After 1965 came the deluge. Other minorities and then whites joined the revolution, and it found plenty of extra recruits among the rapidly increasing number of women made single through divorce. In its broad outlines, the story is familiar by now. When Moynihan was writing, 93 percent of all American births were to women with marriage licenses. Sure, lots of these women might have married just before the baby bump, as had long been the case—but they nevertheless had husbands, with whom they formed a unit responsible for the coming baby. Over the next few decades, however, the percentage of babies with no father around rose steadily. As of 1970, 11 percent of births were to unmarried mothers; by 1990, that number had risen to 28 percent. Today, 41 percent of all births are nonmarital. And for mothers under 30, the number is 53 percent.

Read More at city-journal.org. By Kay S. Hymowitz.

(CBS News) CBS News has learned the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It’s the fourth time in 30 years that Congress has launched a contempt action against an executive branch member.

This time, the dispute stems from Holder failing to turn over documents subpoenaed on October 12, 2011 in the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” investigation.

The Justice Department has maintained it has cooperated fully with the congressional investigation, turning over tens of thousands of documents and having Holder testify to Congress on the topic at least eight times.

However, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., says the Justice Department has refused to turn over tens of thousands of pages of documents. Those include materials created after Feb. 4, 2011, when the Justice Department wrote a letter to Congress saying no gunwalking had occurred. The Justice Department later retracted the denial.

“The Obama Administration has not asserted Executive Privilege or any other valid privilege over these materials and it is unacceptable that the Department of Justice refuses to produce them. These documents pertain to Operation Fast and Furious, the claims of whistleblowers, and why it took the Department nearly a year to retract false denials of reckless tactics,” Issa wrote in an announcement of the vote to be released shortly. It will reveal the vote is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20.

Read More at CBS News. By Sharyl Attkison.