September 15, 2008 (LPAC)--Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee tonight shot back at Wall Street, the New York Times, the Murdoch press and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by defiantly refusing to step down from his chairmanship. Wall Street has been on an all-out drive to unseat Rangel from the chairmanship of the tax-writing committee, since he refused to cave in to Treasury Department pressure months ago, to give Sec. Paulson a free hand to bail out the entire bankrupt financial system, at taxpayers expense.

Sources on Capitol Hill had reported last week that the demand by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), that Rangel step down from the Ways and Means chairmanship, while a series of ethics probes were conducted, would not have been pressed, had it not been known that Nancy Pelosi was also out to unseat Rangel. Pelosi is well-known to be controlled by Wall Street/London sharks Felix Rohatyn and George Soros.

The smear campaign, aimed at ousting Rangel from his top Congressional post, has been orchestrated for months by the New York Times and the New York Post, culminating in a New York Times editorial call today, for Rangel to ``temporarily'' step down.

At 5 p.m., Rangel met, behind closed doors, with Pelosi and other top Democrats. He made it clear at a rally in Harlem earlier in the day that he would not step down, and coming out of the meeting with Pelosi, he refused, defiantly, to even take questions from reporters. When she was pressed on whether she had asked Rangel to resign his chairmanship, Pelosi denied it, claiming that the meeting was about the stock market crash. The Dow Jones lost 504 points in Monday trading, following the announcement that Lehman Brothers had declared bankruptcy, and would be liquidated, that Bank of America would buy up Merrill Lynch, and that the country's largest insurance company, American International Group, was near collapse, and would require a $70 billion cash infusion.