The Congressional Black Caucus’ TARP/TALP Access Summit drew a SRO crowd of minority and women-owned professional services companies.
The CBC is pushing for the inclusion of diverse firms for the same reason that President Barack Obama pushed out General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner: The federal government should not reward failure.
CBC Chairwoman Barbara Lee said:
Today’s discussions are a critical step in addressing barriers faced by minority and women-owned business enterprises to participate in the TARP and TALF programs.
It’s insane that the $700 billion bailout program is being managed by the same people who are responsible for the financial meltdown. The biggest contractor, Bank of New York Mellon, was so mismanaged that it needed $3 billion in TARP funds.
For Rep. Maxine Waters, co-chair of the CBC Economic Security Taskforce, diversity is in taxpayers’ interest:
It doesn’t make sense to trust just a few of the same old Wall Street firms with trillions of taxpayer dollars, especially since some of them are the same ones responsible for the crisis Americans are in now.
In recent weeks, we have heard much about prominent banks and other institutions being “too big to fail.” Today America’s minority- and women-owned business enterprises are exclaiming, “We have experience and qualifications that can help America out of the economic crisis, and we are too numerous to ignore,” and the CBC will make sure this does not fall on deaf ears.
It's also about accountability. The inclusion of minority-owned businesses must be the metric by which black folks measure whether the Obama administration is listening.
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