Everybody needs to read Kurtz’ book and this one Reckless Endangerment. Kurtz’ research into 0’s life in Chicago gets closer to the real truth about his activities than anyone has.
REFERENCE---BY MICHELLE MALKIN Fannie Mae serves as an industrial-sized patronage factory -- sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to voting blocs----like ethnic groups-----and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens and back-scratching buddies. Obama insider Fannie Mae exec Jim Johnson got sweetheart loans from shady subprime Countrywide. Pols raked in six-figure salaries as F/F engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through cockamamie lending practices.
Bill Clinton appointed Franklin Raines, Daley and Rahm Emanuel just as the quasi-governmental F/M engaged in rampant book-cooking so that F/M insider could help themselves to massive bonuses. The Chi/Tribune exposed how Emanuel's "profitable stint" was low-show w/ no work involved. Emanuel was not even assigned to committees, according to company proxy statements (more on Raines and Emanuel below).
Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other insiders qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, public records indicate. W/ Wall Street Emanuel there, accounting tricks were used to mislead shareholders about outsize profits F/M reaped from risky investments. The goal was to cook the books to keep fraudulent earnings on the books, to make Freddie Mac look profitable on paper-----AND to fraudulently obtain humongous annual bonuses for political insiders.
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Freddie and Fannie, the two big quasi-govt mortgage banks that HAVE ALREADY RECEIVED HUGE federal bailouts, had huge lobbying budgets that they used for political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.
So which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions.
The top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and number two was then-Senator Barack Obama who had only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab the number two spot ahead of John Kerry, decades in the senate, and Chris Dodd then-chairman of the powerful Senate Banking Committee.
Fannie and Freddie were creations of the Congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people, and as it turned out, some many many who couldn’t afford them.
Fannie and Freddie have also been places for big Washington democrats to go to work in the semi-private sector and pocket millions.
The Clinton Administration’s White House budget director Franklin Raines was appointed by Clinton to run Fannie........ and collected $50 million dollars. Jamie Gurilli Gorelick (now BP's attorney), a Clinton Justice Apartment Official, worked for Fannie and took home $26 million dollars in mfg bonuses.
Big Democrat Jim Johnson, recently on Obama’s VP search committee hauled in millions from his Fannie Mae CEO job. Now remember, Obama’s ads and stump speeches attacked McCain and Republican policies for the financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggy’s lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks...." - FoxNews, Sept. 2008