[OPINION] David Sarasohn: Uncle Sam's failed mortgage-relief program

At the end of January 2009, less than a month in the Senate and a brand-new member of the Senate banking and housing committee, Jeff Merkley saw a problem in how the Obama administration was planning to deal with the Great Recession's mortgage crisis.

"Folks in key positions at the top of the Obama financial team," he cautioned, "are more oriented to Wall Street than families."

Despite Merkley's concerns, the administration proceeded with its Home Affordable Refinance Program and Home Affordable Modification Program, promising to adjust 4 million mortgages to keep families in their homes. Endangered homeowners would get in touch with their mortgage holders, get their payments reduced with the help of $50 billion in federal money set aside for the purpose, and both families and neighborhoods would be stabilized.

By that summer, the phones in government offices — and some at The Oregonian/OregonLive — were swamped by calls from applicants complaining about banks losing applications and documents, repeatedly asking applicants for the same information, telling homeowners not to make mortgage payments because they were applying for modification and then telling them they were in foreclosure because they hadn't made payments. By the end of 2009, Merkley warned, "There are some incredibly telling signs that this is not going well. The program is, so far, a huge disappointment."

By the end of the next year, the program that had promised to modify 4 million mortgages had totaled just over half a million. To the House financial services committee, Jack Schakett, Bank of America's executive for credit-loss-mitigation strategies, conceded "ineffective communications with customers, shortcomings in document maintenance, misunderstandings about program requirements and the inability to comply by some borrowers."

In 2011, Merkley introduced a bill to require banks to provide a single contact for applicants, to allow homeowners to refinance with different providers and to let bankruptcy judges modify the terms of mortgages, as they can with other debts. By then, Republicans had taken the House, and the issue was dead.

A report issued at the end of last month by Christy L. Romero, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, explained just how the program — which after six years has modified 887,000 mortgages, instead of 4 million — ended up as less profit than loss. With participation voluntary for the banks, all banks rejected the majority of applications — led by Citibank with 87 percent — and roadblocks in the process led virtually all applicants to be rejected the first time around. The report told of homeowners improperly rejected four times before finally, with legal help, getting approved.

"We are constantly seeing problems," Romero told The New York Times, "with the way servicers are treating homeowners and not following the rules. I don't understand why there hasn't been a stronger policing from Treasury on servicers."

To Merkley, his six-year-old doubts and objections about the program have all been painfully confirmed.

"The program was and is poorly defined," the senator said this month, and he holds to his diagnosis of the basic problem: Obama's economic advisers — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Chairman Larry Summers — "were more concerned about strengthening the banks than helping families."

Partly as a result, the ultimate decisions were all made by the mortgage holders, often distracted by their collecting fees on overdue payments.

"There were fundamental conflicts of interest and poor design," concluded Merkley. "There is an incentive to prolong the process. The only point when it's in the interest of the banks (to complete the modification) is when a family is just about to go under."

Which, not occasionally, was too late.

The bail-out programs have now been extended through 2016, but nobody expects them to make much progress toward 4 million modifications, or in fact to make much progress at all. Merkley reports his office now gets only about one call a month on modifications — most of the people who needed help having found another approach or, more likely, having left their house.

Instead, Merkley thinks about what could have been the effect of the 3 million mortgage modifications that were promised but never achieved.

"That's a lot of families not relocated, of kids staying in their schools, of marital tensions that would have been directly reduced," he says. "It would have had a strengthening effect on the economy. It would have been a real win-win."

Instead, with the design and operation of the program, and how hard it was for homeowners to get help, the recovery didn't move as much.

But a lot of American families did.

•

David Sarasohn's column appears on Wednesdays and Sundays. He blogs at davidsarasohn.com.

Via: Oregon Live

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HUD Staffer Fraudulently Charges $12k on Govt. Credit Card

During the government shutdown a couple of years ago, an employee at a cabinet-level agency long embroiled in scandal fraudulently charged thousands of dollars in personal items on his work-issued credit card.

Enraging as it may seem, it’s not all that surprising considering it involves the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a famously corrupt agency well known for a multitude of transgressions over the years. In this particular case a HUD staffer racked up nearly $12,000 on his agency credit card by charging personal items such as groceries, lodging, television cable, transportation and even prescription medications.

This occurred in the midst of the 2013 government shutdown caused by Congress’s failure to pass a spending bill. That paralyzed most functions of government, accounting for the second longest shutdown since 1980. The standstill caused a huge economic disruption and billions in lost output, according to a report published by the White House. Although federal employees were eventually compensated for the period of the shutdown, hundreds of thousands did not receive their full paychecks during that time. “The burden of delayed paychecks on federal workers and their families was significant and harmful,” the White House report states.

The HUD employee who went on a spending spree with his government credit card got busted but the agency didn’t bother to take action, according to the federal audit that exposed the scandal this month. The fraudulent purchases—$11,938 in total—were made during a relatively short period from August through October of 2013 so it was difficult for the agency not to notice. By January 2014 the fraud was confirmed but HUD failed to even reprimand the employee or report the wrongdoing. “This occurred because HUD’s existing purchase card policies did not include specific procedures to evaluate violations for purchase card program weaknesses and criteria to report violations,” the inspector general writes.

So, this bloated and notoriously corrupt agency gives its employees credit cards and has no measures to assess violations, which occur regularly throughout government. In this case the HUD staffer charged an astounding $7,357 in groceries, which raises red flags all on its own. He also charged $1,280 in drug stores and pharmacies and $488 on cable television for his home. The rest was spent on commuter transportation, hotels, restaurants and telecommunications equipment, according to the breakdown offered in the audit.

HUD’s scandals have been well documented throughout various administrations—both Republican and Democrat—and Judicial Watch has covered many of them. In fact, earlier this year JW reported that a HUD director who simultaneously ran a leftwing nonprofit changed agency policies to benefit her group. Her name is Debra Gross and for years she headed a crucial HUD policy office while she served as deputy director of a leftist organization called Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) that claims to work to “preserve and improve public and affordable housing through advocacy, research, policy analysis and public education.”

In 2011 a JW investigation found that the Obama administration violated the ban on federal funding for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) by giving the famously corrupt group tens of thousands of dollars in grants to “combat housing and lending discrimination.” The money, $79,819, flowed through HUD and clearly violated a law (Defund ACORN Act) passed by Congress in 2009 to stop the huge flow of taxpayer money that annually went to ACORN after a series of exposés about the leftwing group’s illegal activities.

Problems at the agency go way back. President George W. Bush’s HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, was ousted after the feds launched an investigation into his plots to enrich himself and his friends by giving them lucrative government contracts and Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about payments to his former mistress. An influence-peddling scandal under Ronald Reagan led to the conviction of 16 people, including top aides to then HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce.

Via: Judicial Watch

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Castro: In America, geography has consequences

Where you live matters. A child born today in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood in St. Louis can expect to live 18 fewer years than a child born just 10 miles away in Clayton. Why? Because poverty presents obstacles that, too often, prevent families from getting ahead no matter how hard they try.

Imagine you are a child growing up in a struggling community. Your parents might not be able to find good jobs because local businesses are hurting and there aren’t any public transit options that can connect them to the other side of town. Your family can’t afford quality housing so your apartment is full of hazards that are making you sick, resulting in more time in the emergency room and less time in the classroom. You aren’t allowed to play outside because the local playground isn’t safe from crime, impacting your health and well-being.

A ZIP code should never prevent people from reaching their aspirations. That’s why the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has taken an important step to promote greater access to quality, affordable housing for all Americans. We published a final rule updating the process by which local communities use HUD funding to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing — a key provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

When this landmark law was passed 47 years ago, it boldly declared that all Americans deserve an equal chance to access safe, affordable housing near quality schools, transportation and jobs — no matter who they are, what they look like, how they worship or where they are from. As part of this effort, the Fair Housing Act required local governments and states that receive HUD funding to use it to promote fair housing and expand access to opportunities. That’s why we’ve published this rule, to simplify that process and provide better partnership to local leaders working to put opportunity within reach of every resident they serve.

In this age of limited resources, communities are often operating without the data and tools they need to chart the landscape of opportunity in their area and craft locally tailored plans to achieve their goals.

HUD’s new effort will provide these resources. It will empower mayors, county officials, and community members with publicly-open data and tools to eliminate the barriers that block many Americans from getting ahead in life. As a former mayor, I know how valuable these resources are for communities.

During the pilot phase of this effort, local leaders in the Twin Cities region used the information to plan investments in housing and infrastructure where they are needed most. In Chicago, transit agencies are expanding service between high-poverty neighborhoods and job centers. In upcoming years, cities across the nation will be able to use these tools to ensure that every family’s destiny is determined by their effort and talent, not by where they were born.

Via: Detroit News

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Countering Progressives' Assault on Suburbia

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners.

Some conservatives rightly criticize such intrusive moves, but they generally ignore how Wall Street interests and some developers see forced densification as opportunities for greater profits, often sweetened by public subsidies. Overall, suburban interests are poorly organized, particularly compared to well-connected density lobbies such as the developer-funded Urban Land Institute (ULI), which have opposed suburbanization for nearly 80 years. 

Via: Real Clear Politics

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Massive Government Overreach: Obama’s AFFH Rule Is Out

Today, HUD Secretary Julian Castro announced the finalization of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. A front-page article pre-emptively defending the move appears in today’s Washington Post. The final rule is 377 pages, vastly longer than the preliminary version of the rule promulgated in 2013. 

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning, to transportation, to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense—at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

 It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release. The rule has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident. Three years ago, when I wrote about Obama’s policy blueprint in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, the administration’s efforts to keep this issue under the radar were evident. Only last month, an admission of the stealth relied on by advocates to advance this initiative was caught on video. 

Obama has downplayed his policy goals in this area and delayed the finalization of AFFH for years, because he understands how politically explosive this rule is. Once the true implications of AFFH are understood, Americans will rebel. The only prospect for successful imposition is a frog-boiling strategy of gradual intensification. The last day the frog will be able to jump is Tuesday, November 8, 2016. 

Fundamentally, AFFH is an attempt to achieve economic integration. Race and ethnicity are being used as proxies for class, since these are the only hooks for social engineering provided by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Like AFFH itself, today’s Washington Post piece blurs the distinction between race and class, conflating the persistence of “concentrated poverty” with housing discrimination by race. Not being able to afford a free-standing house in a bedroom suburb is no proof of racial discrimination. Erstwhile urbanites have been moving to rustic and spacious suburbs since Cicero built his villa outside Rome. Even in a mono-racial and mono-ethnic world, suburbanites would zone to set limits on dense development.

Via: National Review

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Regulatory Taking on an Unprecedented Scale

The Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” stipulates that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”  Many state constitutions provide additional limitations on eminent domain, such as California’s, which stipulates that such compensation must be “ascertained by a jury unless waived.”

The courts recognize that takings extend beyond the physical seizure of property.  Takings also occur when government regulations restrict the use or alter the value of property.  Yet such regulatory takings have become increasingly common as federal agencies turn a blind eye to the Constitution.

Now the Obama administration has announced a diversity policy that constitutes regulatory taking on an unprecedented scale.  With HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, the administration plans to fund the construction of low-income housing within middle-class neighborhoods across the country.  This placement of subsidized housing projects within affluent neighborhoods constitutes a taking, because the property values and usefulness of existing homes will be reduced and curtailed.

The damage will include but not be limited to financial loss.  HUD’s rule change undermines the fundamental right of homeowners to live in a safe, quiet, well-maintained neighborhood.

It is hard to underestimate the insidiousness of HUD’s unconstitutional expansion of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  The new initiative employs a taxpayer’s own money to fund the reduction of his property values and to strip him of his rights as a homeowner.  And it does so in order to provide subsidized or no-cost housing to welfare clients of the state who in many cases have never worked. 

Once HUD’s low-income housing has been built, suburban families will find their crime rates increasing – not just the number of burglaries and thefts, but drug sales, gang activity, and murders as well.  Every survey of crime statistics has revealed the same fact: criminal activity, and violent activity in particular, occurs at a much higher rates in proximity to public housing.

Via: American Thinker

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Obama wants to reengineer your neighborhood

Julian Castro addresses the 2012 Democratic National Convention at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

This is what you get when you put a community organizer in the White House — he tries to reorganize your community from Washington.

Apparently, President Obama thinks your neighborhood may not be inclusive enough, so he has instructed his Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue a new rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which is designed to force communities to diversify.

According to the Obama administration, in too many neighborhoods “housing choices continue to be constrained through housing discrimination, the operation of housing markets, [and] investment choices by holders of capital.” (Yes, that is a quote from an actual HUD document, not a bad undergraduate thesis on Karl Marx.)

Under Obama’s proposed rule, the federal government will collect massive amounts of data on the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of thousands of local communities, looking for signs of “disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets.” Then the government will target communities withresults it doesn’t like and use billions of dollars in federal grant money to bribe or blackmail them into changing their zoning and housing policies.

This is not about blocking housing discrimination, which has been illegal since 1968. It is unlawful for someone to deny you a loan or prevent you from buying a home because of your race, creed or color. Socioeconomic status is — and ought to be — another matter. If you want to buy a nice house in the suburbs, you have to be able to afford it. Apparently, Obama thinks that’s unfair discrimination by the “holders of capital.”

Via: Washington Post

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GOP Critical of New Obama Rules To Create 'Utopian' Neighborhoods

Housing regulations aimed at diversifying wealthy neighborhoods, which some are calling executive overreach for the purpose of establishing a utopia, are expected to be released by the Obama administration this month.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will release the rules with the aim of ending segregation in neighborhoods around the country, The Hill is reporting. 

HUD plans to offer grant money to communities willing to build affordable housing within affluent neighborhoods. On the flip side, the federal agency will also give money to poorer neighborhoods to improve those communities through better schools, parks, libraries and grocery stores. 

"HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all," a HUD spokeswoman told The Hill. "The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds." 

The regulations are a continuation of a rule made by the Obama administration in 2013, in which HUD started gathering data about diversity in neighborhoods around the country for the purpose of making such policy changes. 

The new regulation has its share of critics, especially among conservatives. 

Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, who is working to block the rule, said that the Obama administration "shouldn’t be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble."

"American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government," Gosar told The Hill. 

Via: News Max

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Obama making bid to diversify wealthy neighborhoods

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.”

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.

“HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

It’s a tough sell for some conservatives. Among them is Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who argued that the administration “shouldn’t be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble.”

“American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government,” said Gosar, who is leading an effort in the House to block the regulations.

Civil rights advocates, meanwhile, are praising the plan, arguing that it is needed to break through decades-old barriers that keep poor and minority families trapped in hardscrabble neighborhoods.

“We have a history of putting affordable housing in poor communities,” said Debby Goldberg, vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance.

HUD says it is obligated to take the action under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited direct and intentional housing discrimination, such as a real estate agent not showing a home in a wealthy neighborhood to a black family or a bank not providing a loan based on someone’s race.

The agency is also looking to root out more subtle forms of discrimination that take shape in local government policies that unintentionally harm minority communities, known as “disparate impact.” 

Via: The Hill

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Disgraced Healthcare.gov Firm Ensnared In New Jersey Sandy Recovery Flimflam

A federal watchdog is throwing a red flag on a $60.2 million Hurricane Sandy Recovery contract New Jersey officials awarded to the Canadian firm behind the disastrous Obamacare Healthcare.gov web site.

CGI Federal lost its $93 million contract for Healthcare.gov after it crashed within hours of going live in 2013 and contained so many design flaws the Obama administration had to assemble an emergency team to make the Obamacare website minimally operable.

Five months before that widely publicized digital disaster, CGI won the New Jersey contract in a procurement process that the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general now says was rife with serious flaws.

New Jersey officials were required to comply with federal procurement rules because the $60.2 million was awarded as part of Washington’s $1.5 billion disaster recovery assistance to the state in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

The contract was to design and operate the Sandy Integrated Recovery Operations and Management System for administering the federal funds. New Jersey officials claimed they complied with all applicable federal requirements in their selection of CGI.

But state officials “did not procure services and products for its system in accordance with federal procurement standards or comply with all federal cost principle requirements for supporting salary and wage compensation,” the IG said in a report made public late Friday.

“Specifically, it did not prepare an independent cost estimate and analysis before awarding the system contract to the only responsive bidder. It also did not ensure that option years were awarded competitively and included provisions in its request for quotation that restricted competition,” the report said.

“Further, it did not ensure that software was purchased competitively and that the winning contractor had adequate documentation to support labor costs charged by its employees,” it said.

Via: Daily Caller

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Members Living in Their Offices Rent-Free Adds Up

Rep. Joaquin Castro knows a little about real estate, in part because his twin, Julian, is secretary of Housing and Urban Development. So after winning a safely Democratic seat three years ago, he decided buying a condo on the Hill was a smart investment.

He soon started noticing, when walking home at night, how many windows in the darkened House office buildings emanated a distinctive bluish light. Castro guesses the number of his colleagues inside, watching TV while falling asleep, has only grown and easily tops 50 these days.

“I’ve been joking with my brother,” the San Antonio congressman says with a broad grin, “that he should have HUD designate this place a public housing project.”

Humor aside, there’s a strong argument to be made for the conclusion. The dozens of members who sleep in their offices are, in effect, spending their weekdays in 100 percent federally subsidized apartments.

They are not charged any rent. They receive no utility bills. They don’t pay for the daily cleaning services. Microwaves and refrigerators have been installed in most suites. There’s a half bathroom connected to each personal office, and the showers at the members’ gym open at 5:30 a.m.

In short, lawmakers who choose their offices as their crash pads are getting a valuable government freebie — worth 10 percent or more of their $174,000 annual salary.

Zillow, the real estate search engine, on Wednesday listed 50 studio or one-bedroom apartments for lease on Capitol Hill, a solid majority for between $18,000 and $23,000 a year. (The cheapest, 447 square feet on 15th Street Southeast, was $1,100 a month.) Airbnb was offering more than 300 spots in the neighborhood for shorter-term rent, at an average of $152 a night. Even with that arrangement, House members would need to budget $17,000 for lodging on the 110 or so weeknights their schedule says they can expect to be in D.C. this year.

The fact that members are free to freeload off Congress is back in the news this week, as the House voted to maintain the congressional pay freeze for a seventh year. The few lawmakers willing to advocate for a raise inevitably lamented the expense of maintaining places to live in both their districts and high-cost Washington. Those complaints, in turn, revived chatter about the growing numbers who have figured out how to avoid the problem.

No Capitol administrative office claims to keep track of which members bunk next to their desks, but news stories and anecdotal reports suggest the number is at least 45 and may be 70 or higher. No senators appear to be doing so, and the House contingent seems to be exclusively male — and lopsidedly Republican.

Via: Roll Call

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Hillary’s Potential Running Mate Calls Email Inquiry A ‘Witch Hunt’ [VIDEO]

Julian Castro, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development whose name has been floated as a potential Hillary Clinton running mate, is calling the investigation into Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails a “witch hunt” and a “sideshow.”

“This thing has been studied to death by Republicans and Democrats,” Castro said of Benghazi during an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Several committees including in Congress that have all said, ‘Yes, of course what happened was tragic, but Secretary Clinton was not in any way at fault,’ and what you have here with these emails is basically a witch hunt,” he added.

The State Department Friday released 296 emails Clinton turned over in December related to Libya and the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Clinton sent and received the emails on her personal account, which was maintained on a private server. The email set-up has raised questions over whether Clinton had tried to keep emails she sent as secretary of state secret.

Because of his age — 40 — and his Hispanic heritage, Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, is considered to be an appealing vice presidential candidate on Clinton’s 2016 ticket. Though he denied Sunday that Clinton is considering him for the ticket, earlier this week, former HUD Sec. Henry Cisneros said that Castro was an early favorite.

In his interview, Castro defended Clinton further saying she has “already explained” her email set-up. He also said American voters don’t care “whether somebody had emails or didn’t have them.”

Castro also offered pointed remarks for Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican leading the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Gowdy “is very intentionally trying to manipulate this witch hunt to play politics,” Castro said.

Asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta whether he sends his government business-related emails on an official account, Castro said “that’s right.”

Via: The Daily Caller

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Dem Mayor Who Helped Sebelius Push Obamacare Charged With Fraud

A Democratic mayor who appeared alongside U.S. Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sebelius earlier this year to promote Obamacare has been charged with wire fraud in connection with an $8 million mortgage scheme.

Lucie Tondreau, who has been marred by scandal since she was elected mayor of North Miami last year, will be charged in the conspiracy alongside three other suspects.

According to the indictment, between 2005 and 2008, Tondreau conspired with the president of a South Florida mortgage company to recruit straw borrowers to obtain mortgages.

Tondreau and the mortgage company president aired advertisements on a radio show that they hosted to help prop up the scheme, the indictment alleges. The duo “recruited and paid some of the listeners who responded to those advertisements, as well as other individuals, to pose as borrowers to purchase properties”.

The indictment also alleges that the co-conspirators fabricated HUD-1 Settlement forms which misrepresented that straw borrowers had made down payments and closing payments on homes.

The fraudulent loans were made for 20 properties.

In February, Tondreau, North Miami’s first Haitian-American mayor, helped the Obama administration and HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius promote Obamacare. Both spoke at a National Youth Enrollment Day event to increase awareness of Obamacare among young people six weeks before the March 31 sign-up deadline.

Even before Monday’s indictment and February’s appearance with Sebelius, Tondreau was the center of another fraud probe.

Via: Daily Caller

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Company behind Obamacare website in charge of nearly $2 billion in Sandy relief

CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.

In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.

Item five of the meeting agenda reads:

Mr. Nelson presented that the State received a $1.7 billion allocation in CDBG Disaster Recovery aid from HUD to aid impacted businesses and residences.  He stated that the State’s Action Plan was approved on April 26, 2013 and HTFC is currently in a phase of implementing the program.  He stated that in this phase, the corporation needs to stand-up its recovery programs as soon as possible to deliver critical resources, and in order to do so, the corporation requires immediate access to consultant services to assist in policy and procedure development, training, surge capacity, and call center assistance, and stated that CGI Federal Inc. could provide such services.

The resolution was passed and scheduled to “take effect immediately.”

The Associated Press revealed Tuesday that a mere $700 million of the $60 billion federal aid package – 1.2 percent of the total funds – has been given to victims of super storm Sandy.

Nearly a year after the devastating storm, a majority of the 24,000 families that have requested monetary assistance have yet to receive a penny from the federal aid package.

Via: Daily Caller

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Census: 49% of Americans Get Gov’t Benefits; 82M in Households on Medicaid

(CNSNews.com) - In the fourth quarter of 2011, 49.2 percent of Americans received benefits from one or more government programs, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

In total, the Census Bureau estimated, 151,014,000 Americans out of a population then estimated to be 306,804,000 received benefits from one or more government programs during the last three months of 2011. Those 151,014,000 beneficiaries equaled 49.2 percent of the population.

This included 82,457,000 people--or 26.9 percent of the population--who lived in households in which one or more people received Medicaid benefits.

Also among the 151,014,000 who received benefits from one or more government programs during that period: 49,901,000 who collected Social Security; 49,073,000 who got food stamps; 46,440,000 on Medicare; 23,228,000 in the Women, Infants and Children program, 20,223,000 getting Supplemental Security Income;13,433,000 who lived in public or subsidized rental housing; 5,098,000 who got unemployment; 3,178,000 who got veterans' benefits; and 364,000 who got railroad retirement benefits.

Via: CNS News
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U.S. Study Makes Case for Its Failed Weatherization Program

Surprise, surprise a new government study makes a powerful case for a fraud-infested welfare program that’s already fleeced American taxpayers out of millions to make low-income houses energy efficient.

 This can only mean the Obama administration plans to continue funding and promoting the scandal-plagued weatherization program which has proven to be a huge boondoggle infested with fraud and corruption. The money— a total of $5 billion from the disastrous stimulus—is distributed by the Department of Energy (DOE) to charities and community groups that have stolen the cash or used it illegally.

The idea is to make the homes of poor folks more efficient by offering them free insulation, sealing and even new central heating and cooling systems compliments of Uncle Sam. Instead there have been serious problems in the workmanship of more than half of the weatherization jobs in some states and a chunk of the money has been illegally spent by community group employees in other states to buy personal items. In one instance the husband of a charity employee got $10,000 worth of U.S. taxpayer-financed work on his house even though it didn’t qualify.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration shamelessly continues promoting and funding the hapless endeavor nationwide. In fact, Vice President Joe Biden has advertised it as an example of success in stimulus spending even though a federal audit exposed serious corruption problems in the weatherization program in his home state of Delaware. The state had received $13.7 million for weatherization projects when the scathing probe found “gross mismanagement” and fraudulent activity that includes contractors getting paid for work that was never done. 

Now, as if to counter the documented problems in the government’s costly weatherization enterprise, a new taxpayer-funded study outlines all the wonderful things about the program. For instance, as a nation we could consume much less energy and save an astounding $33 billion a year. A group of topnotch scientists conducted the research, which was funded by the DOE and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Accessing the entire study costs $35.95, but highlights are available for free from a government website announcing the findings. The nutshell version is that the paper, which includes a lot of technical scientific terms, makes a strong argument for weatherization especially as winter approaches. However, this is an area that still requires “more research” to figure out the most effective ways to weatherize, according to the government-funded scientists who conducted this particular study.

Via: Judicial Watch

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