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Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Why are fed employees getting millions in bonuses?

  The hot news today is that Fannie and Freddie federal employees are receiving a tremendous amount of money in bonuses. Newsmax:
What’s the benefit for taking over troubled mortgage agencies after the government bails them out? Millions of dollars in bonuses, apparently.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the government regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, approved $12.79 million of bonuses for 10 executives from the two government-sponsored agencies after they met modest performance targets tied to modifying mortgages at risk of foreclosure, Politico reports.
  This isn't the first time Fannie and Freddie federal employees have received enormous bonuses. Franklin Raines was well known for his bonuses during the Clinton era. When he retired, he received:
According to a December 27 Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Raines is entitled to:
• “Deferred compensation” of $8.7 million.
• Stock options currently worth $5.5 million, and potentially millions more.
• “Performance Share Payouts” through 2006, potentially worth millions more.
• A monthly pension of $114,393 for the rest of his life, and for the life of his spouse should she survive him.
• Free medical and dental coverage for the rest of his life, as well as for his wife for the rest of her life, and his children until age 21.
• Free life insurance in the amount of $5 million until age 60, and $2.5 million thereafter. 
  From Slate.com:
At the top of the list we must place Franklin D. Raines, chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004. Raines, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, had previously worked at Fannie Mae as vice chairman. Before that, he worked on the Clinton transition team following the 1992 election. Before that, he was ageneral partner at Lazard Freres & Co. Raines, as the Wall Street Journalreported, was forced to leave Fannie Mae in 2004, when regulators discovered it had broken accounting rules "in an effort to conceal fluctuations in profit and hadn't maintained adequate risk controls." The New York Times reported two year ago that regulators "have said that of the $90 million paid to Mr. Raines from 1998 to 2003 at least $52 million—more than half—was tied to bonus targets that were reached by manipulating accounting." Raines agreed to a $24.7 million settlement with a federal regulator in exchange for charges being dropped, but he admitted no wrongdoing. 
  And from Wikipedia, we see that the corruption ran deep and didn't stop with Raines. Other individuals were involved.(This resulted in a lawsuit in which Raines and others paid back what the WSJ called a pittance amount.)
  In what other ways have we rewarded bad behavior?
  In 1999, Clinton & the Republicans' welfare reform resulted in dropping welfare roll numbers, although while still encouraging states to sign up more people on health benefits.
  Now in Obama's world, rewards are given for signing up the MOST people to receive food stamps, rather than trying to move people off the welfare rolls.
In its quest to promote taxpayer-funded entitlement programs, the Obama Administration has actually rewarded one state with a $5 million bonus for its efficiency in adding food-stamp recipients to already bulging rolls.
It’s part of the administration’s campaign to eradicate “food insecure households” by improving access and increasing participation in the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).  
 
Incidentally, the program was recently changed to SNAP to eliminate the stigma that comes with a name like food stamps. Just a few months ago the federal agency that administers the program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), launched a multi-million-dollar initiative to recruit more food-stamp participants even though the number of recipients has skyrocketed in the last few years.
    What's most inconceivable is that the current administration claims that the life of a federal employee is a life of sacrifice. Our POTUS encourages people to go into government employment with its cushy pensions, benefits and salaries that are 43% higher than everybody else's and, indeed, employment is up most in the country in the DC area.
  But how do these enormous salaries and bonuses, particularly to ineffective, corrupt institutions who have defrauded the taxpayers of billions of dollars merit such enormous payouts?

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