$840 Million Of $1 Billion In “Green Stimulus” Spending Sent Overseas – 3000 Jobs Created in China – 300 In US

Note the following from Liberal Democratic Senator Charles E Schumer

November 05, 2009

Schumer takes aim at Texas wind farm

 

Sen. Charles E. Schumer on Thursday moved to block the federal government from doling economic stimulus dollars to a $1.5 billion dollar wind farm planned for west Texas because it will rely on turbines manufactured in China.

Under the $787 billion economic stimulus package enacted in February, the group is eligible to seek a federal grant paying for 30 percent of certain costs on the planned 648-megawatt wind farm. Although the project is expected to involve 2,000 to 3,000 manufacturing jobs in China, Schumer said it would create just a little over 300 in the U.S.


Although Schumer singled out the Texas wind project Thursday, he said he was concerned that about 84 percent of the more than $1 billion in stimulus grants doled out by the Energy Department has gone to foreign companies. (or 84 cents out of every dollar)

Schumer said the spending pattern is helping create jobs overseas, therefore running counter to the stimulus package’s goals of spurring an economic recovery within the U.S. And, he said, when the grant money flows outside U.S. borders that undercuts Congress’ goals of spurring domestic manufacturing jobs and plants for emerging alternative energy technologies.

http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/energy/

McAuleys World: Did the Administration take credit for these 3000 jobs “saved or created”?

Fannie Mae Democratic Liberals – Back to Work In Washington

Jim Johnson – Former Fannie CEO is back with Obama Campaign:

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 

October 14, 2004     

Fannie Mae Liberals

There were many moments of high entertainment during last week’s House hearings on Fannie Mae’s creative accounting. But our favorite was the Mister Magoo performance given by Barney Frank (D., Massachusetts) after learning that Fannie had handed out $245 million in bonuses over five years. Mr. Frank chided Fannie CEO Frank Raines and CFO Tim Howard, saying, “At the level of compensation you get, we ought to be able to count on you to do your very best without additional incentives.”

Here’s a case of misplaced moral outrage if we’ve ever seen one. Mr. Franks is mad about the salaries when he really should be mad at the rigged political game that has made them possible. Fannie’s regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, has reported that Fannie has been cooking its books. Add that to the increasing evidence that Fannie has been ignoring its mission to provide affordable housing, and we wonder if Mr. Frank doesn’t need an eye checkup.

Ditto for the good liberals in the Congressional Black Caucus. Members of this group are often the loudest defenders of Fannie and her brother, Freddie Mac. Can it be that the annual donations made by the Fannie Mae Foundation to the Caucus have blurred their vision too?

Maxine Waters (D., California) cooed all over Mr. Raines, and Clay Lacy (D., Missouri) played the race card by calling the hearings a “political lynching” of Mr. Raines, who is African-American. Are CEOs not supposed to be accountable simply because they’re persons of color? By the way, Roger Barnes, the whistle-blower who was fired by Fannie after complaining about its accounting procedures, is also black. In a more consistent world — where political principles mean something — these liberals would be scorching a company that used a government subsidy to enrich its own executives. Instead, they’re defending it.

The default position for Fannie’s defenders is that the giant mortgage finance company provides more affordable housing. At least that’s Fannie’s declared mission and that’s why the government offers it an implicit subsidy. But as study after study has demonstrated, Fannie does not provide homeowners with significant savings.

The Federal Reserve found that about half of the government subsidy going to Fannie and Freddie is retained by the company. Studies conclude that the tiny amount of subsidy that actually reaches borrowers does not increase homeownership.

To be sure, Mr. Franks is right that Fannie’s executive compensation is rich by any standards. When a government-sponsored company pays its top 21 executives more than $1 million each in 2002 (and three of them are lobbyists), that fact does bear some reflection.

And, aside from the evidence that Fannie was cooking its books to trigger big bonuses, there’s also the issue of performance. Mr. Raines’s 2003 compensation was over $20 million. That’s about $14 million more than the median for CEOs of very large companies. What did Mr. Raines do to deserve this giant sum? Not much. In the five years that Mr. Raines has been at the helm, Fannie’s cumulative shareholder return, including reinvested dividends, has been 4% compared with the 23% achieved by the S&P financial sector.

The evidence is overwhelming that Fannie only pretends to be a tribune of the poor. Not only does the company use its implicit subsidy to enrich its executives, some of that money is funneled into the Fannie Mae Foundation, which, no surprise, motors it back out to favorite charities of Fannie board members. It’s an odd sort of liberal principle that endorses private profits at public risk.

New Video: Description of How We Got Into This Mess – By John Gibson

History of who is who in the Fannie / Freddie scandal.

http://www.foxnews.com/video-search/m/20968545/my_word_9_19.htm?q=Barney+Frank+Video

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer Hypocrisy On Deregulation

Schumer Tries To Rewrite History

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York says a lack of regulation by the Bush administration is responsible for the current economic troubles. The New York Sun reports Schumer says, “Eight years of deregulatory zeal by the Bush administration, an attitude of ‘the market can do no wrong,’ have led us down a short path to economic recession.”

But Schumer fails to mention he has been a leading voice of deregulation. The Sun reports he championed the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, the law which separated commercial and investment banking.

Watch a Video that Describes who voted for and who voted against Fannie Regulation: http://www.foxnews.com/video-search/m/20997113/blame_game.htm?q=blame+game

He also wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in 2006 which warned about what he called “overzealous regulators” and opposed a bill in 2005 that would have transformed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from large investment funds into “conduits” that only bought mortgages, packaged them into securities and sold them on the market.

The 2005 bill was defeated by Democratcs in Congress.

Breaking News Update:FBI investigating companies at heart of meltdown

WASHINGTON – The FBI is investigating four major U.S. financial institutions whose collapse helped trigger a $700 billion bailout.

Two law enforcement officials said Tuesday the FBI is looking at potential fraud by mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and insurer American International Group Inc. Additionally, a senior law enforcement official said Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. also is under investigation.

The inquiries will focus on the financial institutions and the individuals that ran them, the senior law enforcement official said.

The law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigations are ongoing and are in the very early stages.

Officials said the new inquiries bring to 26 the number of corporate lenders under investigation over the past year.

Spokesmen for AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did not immediately return calls for comment Tuesday evening. A Lehman spokesman did not have an immediate comment.

Just last week, FBI Director Robert Mueller put the number of large financial firms under investigation at 24. He did not name any of the companies under investigation but said the FBI also was looking at whether any of them have misrepresented their assets.

Over the past year as the housing market cratered, the FBI has opened a wide-ranging probe of companies across the financial services industry, from mortgage lenders to investment banks that bundle home loans into securities sold to investors. Mueller has previously said the FBI’s hunt for culprits in the nation’s subprime mortgage crisis focused on accounting fraud, insider trading, and failure to disclose the value of mortgage-related securities and other investments.

The investigations revealed Tuesday come as lawmakers began considering whether to approve emergency legislation that would give the government broad power to buy up devalued assets from troubled financial firms.

In the past two weeks, the government has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the country’s two biggest mortgage companies, with a bailout plan that could require the Treasury Department to put up as much as $100 billion for each of them over time if needed to keep them afloat as mortgage losses mount.

Last week, the Federal Reserve provided an emergency $85 billion loan to AIG, which teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers was forced to file for bankruptcy after attempts to engineer a private rescue fell apart. All the companies were laid low from bad bets on complex mortgage-related securities tied to sub-prime mortgage loans.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made the joint decision last week that the only way to stop the carnage was to address the symptoms of all the troubles, billions of dollars in bad mortgage debt sitting on the books of major financial companies. This debt has triggered the worst credit crisis in decades, causing credit markets to essentially freeze up despite the fact that the Fed joined with major central banks around the world to pump billions of dollars of reserves into the financial system.

Additionally, the FBI is investigating failed bank IndyMac Bancorp Inc. for possible fraud. Countrywide Financial Corp., formerly the nation’s largest mortgage lender and now owned by Bank of America Corp., is also under scrutiny.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080924/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/financial_meltdown_investigation

This article originally claimed that the Fed was addressing the “root cause” of the problem – that is incorrect – the bad debt on the books – from bad mortgages – are in fact the “symptoms” of the broken system. The root cause is the underwriting of these bad loans. The proposed bailout is silent as to what will be done to prevent a repeat of the horrendous lending practices.