Next month, Rep. Maxine Waters (CA-43) is being challenged for her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by Joe E. Collins, a Republican who left military service in order to run for office.
It is no secret that during the past four years, Waters has been an outspoken critic of the U.S. president. Following the recent thwarted kidnapping attempt of Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by an extremist militia, Waters issued the following statement:
“Donald Trump’s influence and implicit support of white supremacist terrorist organizations have increased the number of threats against elected officials nationwide. At this point, it is clear and we must all realize—Republicans and Democrats alike—that this president is willing to take our country to the brink of civil war if necessary to maintain his grip on the White House.”
During a recent interview with OW, Waters stressed that in her work as chair of the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, she oversees banks, insurance companies and all the agencies of the federal government that are responsible for financial services.
“In my second term as chair, I created a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion,” she said. “It’s about opening up opportunities in both the public sector and private sector.”
Waters explained that the committee also has jurisdiction on securities and exchanges and international finance companies, whose asset managers develop job opportunities.
“They enable businesses to come out and grow,” Waters said. “That’s job creation. The other thing we need to do is we need to make sure those businesses who want to do business from afar, can. We need to leverage them to create these opportunities.
“Buildings are being built, businesses are being created, but they avoid Black and Brown communities because they don’t understand them,” Waters said. “We have to make it feasible for them to come into our communities and we have to get people ready for the kinds of jobs that are coming in.”
District 43 includes portions of the cities of Los Angeles and Torrance. It also includes the entirety of Hawthorne, Lawndale, Gardena, Inglewood and Lomita.
“I work with the airport and I work with hotels,” Waters said, noting that she has taken young engineers to visit SpaceX in her district. “Our community is so diverse, my area is so diverse and so I work with all these different communities.”
“Let’s talk about the creation of wealth,” Waters said. “That means access to credit.
That’s why I put so much pressure on the banks. These banks have not done a good job of working with minority depository institutions (MDI).”
The FDIC defines an MDI as, “a federal insured depository institution for which (1) 51 percent or more of the voting stock is owned by minority individuals; or (2) a majority of the board of directors is minority and the community that the institution serves is predominantly minority.
Waters said that she helped put $60 billion into the CARES Act, so the MDIs would be able to issue loans in the community.
‘We’re doing everything that we can,” Waters said. “Much of the work I do in financial service doesn’t get attention. But I do it. people feel it. That‘s what I do.”
