Obama is the Charlie Sheen of Debt Addiction

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, FloydReports.com

Watching Charlie Sheen’s outbursts is a great entertainment for Americans. Here is a guy who has it all — fame, fortune, a great career — and it is all crashing in on him because of addiction.

We all know that Charlie Sheen is one 911 call from the morgue. He has made the ambulance trip before, and he doesn’t see it coming. Denial is a classic symptom of drug addiction.

Here is Charlie in his own words responding to a question about his drug and alcohol problems: “I’m different. I have a different constitution, I have a different brain, I have a different heart. I got tiger blood, man.”

Sheen is not dealing with reality and the concern of others around him doesn’t seem to register: “I’m dealing with fools and trolls. I’m dealing with soft targets, and it’s just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee.”

Addiction does strange things to the mind. The same is true of America’s addiction to debt.

Americans have been warned many times about excessive debt. The latest warning in Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders is a prime example. Here is what Buffett concludes: “But leverage is addictive. Once having profited from its wonders, very few people retreat to more conservative practices. And as we all learned in third grade – and some relearned in 2008 – any series of positive numbers, however impressive the numbers may be, evaporates when multiplied by a single zero. History tells us that leverage all too often produces zeroes, even when it is employed by very smart people.”

Leverage has sent America to the emergency room already. We called it the financial crisis of 2008. But now in 2011, the problems of debt have faded in the minds of many, just as the problems caused by addiction don’t register in the mind of Charlie Sheen. But the danger hasn’t passed.

We believe the danger has increased. TARP and the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have socialized what were once private debts. Billions in private debts and risk were transferred from Wall Street to the taxpayers under the guise of a policy called “too big to fail.”

Now, with the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing programs, America is merrily printing money….

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The Top 10 Obama Administration Investigation Targets

Human Events

Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.), the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has signaled he will conduct numerous oversight investigations of the Obama Administration. Here are the Top 10 areas ripe for investigation for Issa and other congressional Republicans:

(1) ObamaCare: Any measure that restructures one-sixth of the U.S. economy bears scrutiny particularly when passage of the bill required legislative bribes such as the Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker Kickback. To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, now that ObamaCare has passed, let’s see exactly what is in it — and how it got there.

(2) Stimulus: The American people deserve to know what they got for the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama signed in February 2009, including how much money was spent frivolously to publicize the legislation. And where exactly are all those jobs that the administration claims were “created or saved?”

(3) Freddie and Fannie: Previous attempts by congressional Democrats to get to the bottom of the 2008 financial meltdown conveniently overlooked the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. How much of the housing crisis was due to financial donations going to Democratic officials, who overlooked financial transgressions at the agencies so long as mortgages flowed to unworthy credit risks?

(4) Wikileaks: Someone in the administration needs to explain how the lowly serviceman who served up secret documents to Wikileaks could have access to such a large amount of classified material. And were any actions taken to shut down Julian Assange in the months after the initial disclosures and before the embarrassing leak of State Department cables?

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Obama’s NSA Pick Blocked Fannnie Mae, Freddie Mac Oversight

Jim McElhatton, Washington Times

Years before Fannie Mae foundered amid a massive accounting scandal, President Obama’s choice for national security adviser oversaw an office inside the mortgage giant that orchestrated a negative publicity blitz to fight attempts by Congress to increase government oversight, records show.

Thomas E. Donilon, who won the job as national security adviser this month, worked as a registered lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005 at a time the company’s officials insisted finances were sound. He also earned more than $1.8 million in bonuses before the government took over the troubled company in the wake of an accounting scandal.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mr. Obama, who railed against lobbyists on the campaign trail, hailed Mr. Donilon’s appointment last week, but made no mention of his time as a registered lobbyist.

Mr. Donilon’s work came under scrutiny in a 2006 report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), which found that Fannie Mae lobbyists – working in an office overseen by Mr. Donilon – parlayed their ties to members of Congress to try to discredit federal regulators looking into the finances of the company.

“Thus, Fannie Mae succeeded in creating a large volume of negative publicity about the OFHEO examination report, in an effort to distract attention from its multibillion-dollar accounting errors,” the OFHEO report concluded.

In addition, the report noted that the publicity campaign, which included leaking nonpublic information, was conceived and executed by Fannie Mae’s government and industry relations department, but was still “well known” to Mr. Donilon and other senior executives.

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Congressman Issa: Congress Must Oversee Executive Branch

Congressman Darrell Issa, Floyd Reports

The unparalleled encroachment of the federal government in the private sector and the lives of individual Americans that began during the Bush Administration and continues in the Obama Administration (see, for example, the Troubled Assets Protection Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the rapid growth of the federal workforce, and the health care and financial overhauls) has led to concerns of an oncoming tsunami of opacity, waste, fraud, and abuse. This trend must be met by vigorous Congressional oversight of the massive federal bureaucracy.

The vast expansion of the power and reach of the executive branch of government under both Republican and Democratic administrations has only increased the need for vigorous, unflinching congressional oversight. Under one-party rule in Washington, with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and the executive branch, the majority reiterated its commitment to congressional oversight.

Unfortunately, since President Obama took office 19 months ago, the country has seen the emergence of a large accountability gap. Congress’ chief watchdog committee has failed repeatedly to conduct meaningful and sustained investigations and hold federal executives and bureaucrats responsible for the unprecedented levels of waste, fraud, and abuse that such rapid growth has nurtured.

Despite repeated requests by the Republican minority for oversight hearings, joint investigations, and subpoenas, and despite myriad news reports raising allegations of waste, fraud, and other misconduct, the Oversight Committee and the Democratic-controlled Congress have overwhelmingly shunned responsible but tough oversight of the Obama administration.

As of August 2010, the Republican members of the Oversight Committee had sent 46 letters to the Democratic Chairman of the committee or its subcommittee chairs requesting hearings, additional witnesses at hearings, or subpoenas of important documents related to significant investigations. Formal responses were received for only six of those requests.

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Obama’s Fixes Keep Financial Crisis Going

Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, FloydReports.com

Erkle Obama: "Did I Do That?"On July 2, President Obama declared, “And finally, because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. (Applause.) There will be no more tax-funded bailouts — period. (Applause.) If a large financial institution should ever fail, this reform gives us the ability to wind it down without endangering the broader economy. “

The occasion of his bold statement was the signing of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act.

So imagine our surprise when less than two weeks later Fannie Mae requested $1.5 billion more from the U.S. Treasury. This request came after the 12th quarterly loss by Fannie, and with this money Fannie’s take from the taxpayers’ wallet will grow to a whopping $86.1 billion for one company. Together with its twin Freddie Mac the bailout package is over $200 billion.

Fannie Mae, aka the Federal National Mortgage Association, was created in 1938 as a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) to bolster the housing market by increasing Americans’ access to cheap home loans during the last Great Depression. Freddie Mac, aka the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., was created in 1970 to end Fannie’s monopoly in the secondary mortgage market. Both are mandated by Congress to help increase home ownership.

The problem we have with this housing mandate is that not all Americans deserve, nor are they responsible enough, to go deep into debt to purchase a home.

Everyone understands that mortgage debt stands at the center of the ongoing financial crisis. Responsible analysis concludes that too much credit was extended to too many un-creditworthy buyers of homes. At the center of this debacle stand these government-sponsored private financial firms named Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Neither of these firms were “reformed” by the so-called Reform Act.

Fannie has long been a favorite tool of America’s political left. A revolving door has allowed politically connected White House and Congressional aides to spend time at Fannie becoming fabulously wealthy.

The examples of this revolving door are many, but the most famous and wealthiest is Obama campaign adviser Franklin Raines. Raines served on both the Carter and Clinton White House staffs before becoming Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae. In the Fannie job this former bureaucrat earned over $100 million.

Raines was eventually pushed out of Fannie in an accounting scandal. He was accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the regulator of Fannie Mae, of manipulating the firm’s accounting so that he and other senior executives could pocket ever-larger bonuses.

While at Fannie, Raines began a program in 1999 to encourage bank loans to individuals with low incomes. He also downgraded credit requirements on loans that Fannie Mae purchased from banks. Raines claimed the program would allow borrowers who were “a notch below what our current underwriting has required” to get home loans. The move was praise by liberals because they believed it would increase the number of minority and low-income home owners. We now know the program is central to the ongoing mortgage defaults still unfolding at Fannie.

So the foreclosure crisis limps on with no end in sight.

To understand Obama’s failure at financial reform, you only have to analyze his rhetoric. At the same July 21 ceremony he boldly proclaimed about the bill, “It demands accountability and responsibility from everyone.” Problem is, on its face this statement is a bold faced lie. Fannie and Freddie have been neither fixed nor reformed and both are bleeding the taxpayers daily.