Yes Rep. Issa, Please, by All Means Dig, Dig, Dig

This New York Times article asks whether Rep. Darrell Issa and the GOP will be digging or investigating a long laundry list of violations that the Obama admin has committed over the last two years.  I can almost guarantee that Rep. Issa and the GOP will be investigating away.  YEA!! The N.Y. Times columnist Brian Friel makes an educated guess as to which issues he thinks that Darrell Issa and the GOP will be investigating after they takeover the reigns in January.  Friel even goes onto mention some additional issues which he thinks should be investigated as well. 

Here is the list:

White House job offers. The question is whether the administration offered plum positions to get two Senate primary challengers — Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado — to drop their bids against Democratic incumbents. While the White House insists and most legal experts agree that no law was broken, Mr. Issa has said that that Americans could have “confidence in the legitimacy of the conclusions drawn” by the administration in the cases only if they have access to all related documents.


“Friends of Angelo.” Several prominent Democrats, including two senators, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut (who chose not to run for re-election this month), were found to have received sweetheart mortgage rates from Countrywide Financial and its former chief executive, Angelo Mozilo. While the Senate Ethics Committee found “no substantial credible evidence” that the two senators had violated ethics rules, Mr. Issa says more investigation is warranted into whether other government officials got such deals.

Acorn. The liberal nonprofit group dissolved last year in the glare of conservative scrutiny, but some Republicans want an investigation into Acorn’s federal financing for its housing programs, which amounted to at least $53 million since 1994.

New Black Panthers. Last year the Justice Department convened and then dropped an investigation into whether members of the New Black Panther Party intimidated voters at a polling place in Philadelphia in 2008. Many conservatives feel the case was concluded prematurely and would like the Justice Department to take it up again.

Climate science. Conservatives who question the consensus that climate change is manmade want to use various committees’ oversight powers to challenge its scientific underpinnings, many of which were reached by federally financed researchers. Mr. Issa has focused on the so-called Climategate scandal involving alleged manipulation of data by British scientists: “For me, settled science starts out with settled raw data,” Mr. Issa said. “If the raw data’s in doubt, then the idea that we have settled science doesn’t exist. I want settled science.”

BP oil-spill response. Republicans may want to emphasize the White House’s missteps in dealing with the Gulf oil spill in April. In July, Mr. Issa said that the administration’s “preoccupation with public relations” might have hindered local officials’ efforts to deal with the disaster.

Economic stimulus. Representative Issa created a Web site where people can post pictures of road signs touting projects financed by the $787 billion economic stimulus package; he says the signs are little more than expensive propaganda, costing taxpayers $192 million. Mr. Issa will no doubt find additional creative ways to raise doubts about the administration’s response to the Great Recession, which he says has wasted money on swimming pools, zoos and golf courses.


Czars. Mr. Issa wants to give special scrutiny to unconfirmed presidential advisers including Elizabeth Warren, who is setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Carol Browner, who oversees environmental policy. Such czars are a sign of the “arrogance of government,” Mr. Issa says, because their appointments avoid Congress’s constitutional advise-and-consent role.


INVESTIGATIONS WE COULD REALLY USE


Federal contracts. Agencies paid private contractors at least $539 billion in fiscal 2009, much of it with little or no competition or performance evaluation. An additional $660 billion-plus in grants to states, local governments and nonprofits has undergone no systemic Congressional review. The committee should look into possible waste and whether contracting rules were followed.

The Civil Service. As with contractors, Congress has not systemically reviewed the performance and efficiency of the government’s 1.8 million-member work force.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At $136 billion so far, the federal takeover of the quasi-private housing corporations is the most expensive component of the government’s response to the economic crisis. Figuring out the government’s role in the housing market going forward is essential after decades of Congressional neglect.

Defense spending. Congress has been loath to dig too deeply into waste in the Pentagon budget, in part because every state and Congressional district benefits from the spending. But 8 of the 31 agencies on the Government Accountability Office high-risk list of programs “vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement” are run out of the Defense Department. Certainly Congress should scrutinize them.

Food safety. A series of recalls, including that of half a billion eggs last summer in a salmonella outbreak, has highlighted the strains on the Food and Drug Administration. Congress should investigate whether it needs to be reformed or its duties taken up by other agencies.

Transparency. The government keeps too much information secret, operating a costly system of classification. Much of the information it does make public is impossible for most citizens to comprehend. Republicans could push agencies to declassify more information more quickly and draft legislation to compel the bureaucracy to release data in more usable formats.

Veterans health. Since the exposure of terrible conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007, Congress has dumped billions into the veterans health system. But there has been little follow-up to examine the quality of care and the cost-effectiveness of efforts by the Department of Veterans Affairs and other agencies.

Loan guarantees. Congress has backed more than $100 billion in loans in energy-related private projects. Because the guarantees don’t cost much up front, they tend to get little scrutiny. But the taxpayers are on the hook for any projects that go bust, and Congress should scrutinize them more carefully to determine the risk of failure and whether the projects truly deserve our backing.

Agency performance. Do taxpayers get what they pay for? In 1993, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act, requiring federal agencies to report each year on how well they were meeting goals, like whether the Internal Revenue Service is collecting all taxes due or whether the Education Department is improving student achievement. Agencies still produce those reports, but everyone involved knows that nobody really reads them. Oversight committees should start using them the way shareholders use companies’ annual reports: to see if their investments are paying off.

Congress itself. Committees in general do little sustained oversight, instead chasing headlines. And they operate with significant overlap — more than 100 committees and subcommittees oversee the Homeland Security Department, for example. The committees offer few channels for public input and participation. As one expert says, “I’d like to see Congress take a hard look at how it does oversight before it does any more of it.”


I am looking forward to seeing Rep. Darrell Issa dig, dig, dig, and the deeper the better.

Marxism/Socialism/Liberalism FAIL -- Democrats Policies Caused Financial Crisis, NOT Bush's Policies

Obama continues to try to deflect the blame from himself, by blaming Bush again and again, and again, meanwhile the policies of Democrats are the ones that caused this financial crisis and not Bush‘s policies. Lyndon B. Johnson, Clinton, Obama, Democrats, Fannie, Freddie, and Community Reinvestment Act epitomizes the failure of Marxism/Socialism/liberalism/ Progressivism. Yes, the problem originates all the way back to LBJ. 
LBJ created the problem! Explained here:

From AEI.org: “The peculiar structure of the GSEs--shareholder-owned companies with a public mission--reflected a serious confusion of purpose on the part of the Lyndon Johnson administration and the members of Congress who created this flawed structure in 1968. In seeking to reduce the budget deficits associated with the Vietnam War and Great Society programs, the administration hit upon the idea of "privatizing" Fannie Mae by allowing the company to sell shares to the public. This, according to the budget theories of the time, would take Fannie's expenditures off-budget, while allowing it to continue its activities with funds borrowed in the public credit markets. But turning Fannie into a wholly private company was not acceptable either. Various special provisions were placed in Fannie's congressional charter that intentionally blurred the line between a public instrumentality and a private corporation. Among these provisions: Fannie was given a line of credit at the Treasury; the president could appoint five members of its board of directors; and its debt could be used, like Treasury debt, to collateralize government deposits in private banks.”


Democrats from the time of Clinton and continuing all the way thru to Obama caused this financial crisis in their trying to “level the playing field” with instituting and promoting these sub-prime mortgages for low-income people to take on. Many of the low-income people that took on mortgages knew they couldn’t afford them. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-owned or State-owned enterprises (GOC‘s). GOC’s are companies that are created by our government to undertake commercial activities. The GSE business model faces inherent conflicts due to being indebted to the government mission and trying to compete in the private sector at the same time.

More from AEI.org

"The government mission required them to keep mortgage interest rates low and to increase their support for affordable housing. Their shareholder ownership, however, required them to fight increases in their capital requirements and regulation that would raise their costs and reduce their risk-taking and profitability. But there were two other parties—Congress and the taxpayers—that also had a stake in the choices that Fannie and Freddie made. Congress got some benefits in the form of political support from the GSEs' ability to hold down mortgage rates, but it garnered even more political benefits from GSE support for affordable housing." Peter J. Wallison explains the peculiar structure, flawed structure in more detail as well as outlines other pertinent information on GSE‘s. Since these GSE’s were government backed our government allowed the GSE’s to take excessive risks. These excessive risks were done at the taxpayers expense.


“That result--the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk--has now come to pass. U.S. taxpayers are now called upon to fill in the hole that reckless and improvident investment activity--fueled by inexpensive and easily accessible funds--has created in the GSEs' balance sheets. The special relationship was also the GSEs' undoing, because it allowed them to escape the market discipline--the wariness of lenders--that keeps corporate managements from taking unacceptable risks. Normally, when a privately held company is backed by the government (for example, in the case of commercial banks covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), regulation is the way that the government protects the taxpayers against the loss of market discipline. When Fannie Mae was privatized in 1968, however, no special regulatory structure was created to limit the taxpayers' exposure to loss. The Johnson administration officials who structured the privatization may not have realized that they were creating what we recognize today as a huge moral hazard, but when Fannie became insolvent (the first time) in the high-interest-rate environment of the early 1980s, policymakers recognized that the company represented a potential risk to taxpayers.” After recognizing the potential risk to taxpayers in 1991, Congress created their first time regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) but unfortunately the OFHEO had only limited regulatory authority and it was housed under HUD which had no regulatory experience whatsoever.

“… and it was funded by congressional appropriations, allowing the GSEs to control their regulator through the key lawmakers who held OFHEO's purse strings.”

"In congressional testimony on September 23, James Lockhart, the director of their new regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, cited these loans as the source of the GSEs' ultimate collapse, as reported in the Washington Post:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchased and guaranteed 'many more low-documentation, low-verification and non-standard' mortgages in 2006 and 2007 'than they had in the past.' He said the companies increased their exposure to risks in 2006 and 2007 despite the regulator's warnings.

Roughly 33 percent of the companies' business involved buying or guaranteeing these risky mortgages, compared with 14 percent in 2005. Those bad debts on mortgages led to billions of dollars in losses at the firms. 'The capacity to raise capital to absorb further losses without Treasury Department support vanished,' Lockhart said."

In 2003, the Bush administration tried to create a new agency to oversee Fannie and Freddie but unfortunately no reform bills materialized. Many Democrat members of Congress expressed faith in the solvency of Fannie and Freddie. Barney Frank, at the time stated that they were "not facing any kind of financial crisis."


None other than Jimmy Carter instituted the Housing and Community Development Act of 1977 which was designed to meet the needs of borrowers from all economic backgrounds, including those that live in low and moderate-income neighborhoods. Then, in 1994 the Community Reinvestment Act was passed under Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton enacted the Community Reinvestment Act in such a way that it basically put the Housing and Community Development Act on steroids, and this is what caused our country’s financial collapse in 2008. This kind of tinkering with the free market - forcing banks to make risky loans to those that in all actuality couldn’t afford their mortgages - is what caused the financial crisis. This kind of combination of Marxist/Socialist/liberal policies that started with Lyndon Johnson and ended with Clinton is what has turned out to be toxic for our economy. Bush was left with a raw deal and the Democrat’s toxic economic policies just happened to fester, surface and eventually burst while he was in office. One can disagree with how Bush handled this financial fiasco but the fact is that Bush was dealt a very bad hand by the Democrats. Plus, the Democrats blocked him from being able to cut off the problem at the impasse before the problem morphed into the financial disaster . Bush, and Capitalism were NOT the cause of this financial meltdown.  The Democrats, who are beholden to the philosophies of Marxism/Socialism/liberalism and who in their misguided compassion endorsed and encouraged low-income persons to take on these sub-prime mortgages, all the while many of these people couldn't afford these mortgage loans in the first place, was in fact the cause of the financial crisis.  Marxism/Socialism/liberalism is the cause of this financial crisis.  The Dems compassion has resulted in economic mayhem which has continued under Obama with extremely slow job growth (if at all in the private sector) and other policies which hurt small business owners, the unemployed, such as higher taxes, a higher deficit due to the passage of the Stimulus, and Obamacare which is going to cause mega-rationing and higher health costs.