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So far this election cycle, Freddie Mac’s political action committee and employees have contributed $555,567 to Senate and House candidates, and Fannie Mae’s PAC and employees have given more than $1.1 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In total, the two companies have spent $170 million on lobbying over the past decade, according to the Center, although they have scaled back in recent years. Last year, they paid $14.1 million in lobbying fees, a significant decrease from a high of more than $26 million in 2004. The connections of both campaigns to the well-entrenched mortgage companies highlight the difficulties the candidates face in selling voters on an outsider message
A spokesman for the Obama campaign declined to comment, noting only that former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson stepped down from his campaign post in June. His resignation came in the wake of charges that he collected more then $7 million in home loans at special, below-average rates.

On Sunday, Obama shied away from commenting on the specific proposals, but cautioned regulators to give top priority to the interests of homeowners.
Jamie S. Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and a chief policy adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton, is rumored to be a possible attorney general in an Obama administration. She was vice chairman of Fannie Mae and sat on its board of directors.

and from my link:
http://www.openmarket.org/2008/07/23/fannie-maes-thugs-vilified-whistleblowers-told-avalanche-of-lies/

Fannie Mae’s Thugs Vilified Whistleblowers, Told Avalanche of Lies
Posted by Hans Bader
A $25 billion bailout of government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae is now planned. But Fannie Mae has such political power that its crooked managers will probably never be held accountable for their fraud in any way, unlike the Enron executives who went to jail. Instead, its lending authority will likely expand under federal mortgage bailout bills.

Paul Gigot, a Wall Street Journal editor, describes the personal vilification he has received over the years after the Journal began warning, prophetically, that Fannie Mae was engaged in fraudulent accounting, and that the taxpayers might some day have to pick up the tab. (To award themselves millions of dollars in bonuses, Fannie Mae’s managers used Enron-style fraudulent accounting). Fannie Mae’s managers, he notes, were ”unique in their thuggery” and arrogance.

When conservative Congressmen tried to rein it in, Fannie Mae responded with an avalanche of lies and political reprisals. It told Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s constituents that he wanted to raise the rates on their existing mortgages, a complete fabrication. And when Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns began investigating its fraudulent accounting, it got jurisdiction over its accounting practices transferred to another committee run by Michael G. Oxley, who worked in tandem with liberal stalwart Barney Frank to cover up the abuses at Fannie Mae and kill any reform legislation.

(Congressman Michael Oxley was the co-author of the devastatingly-costly and wasteful Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which ”created more busywork for accountants than real protection against abuses,” according to David Ignatius in the Washington Post. Oxley received generous donations from the big accounting firms, which were responsible for failing to detect Enron’s fraudulent accounting. The Sarbanes-Oxley law has made those firms fabulously wealthy, increasing the volume of work they receive by making auditing of public companies needlessly complicated. The big accounting firms now must be paid to evaluate and supervise companies’ “internal controls,” such as which employee has access to which computer password. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has cost the stock market over a trillion dollars in value, and imposed ongoing compliance costs exceeding $35 billion per year, while diverting attention away from corporate incompetence at mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, a close Fannie Mae ally. It also created an unaccountable agency, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, to create mountains of red tape to enrich big accounting firms at the expense of productive businesses. Like Fannie Mae, it is nominally “private” to evade accountability and open-government laws (even though in reality, it is a governmental agency, and unlike Fannie, qualifies as such under the Supreme Court’s Lebron decision).

Fannie Mae was run by liberal power brokers like Franklin D. Raines who even now are unrepentant about their thuggery and accounting fraud. Franklin Raines recently took to the pages of the Washington Post to attack as “ideologues” the banking experts in the Bush Administration who had long and prophetically warned about the dangers of Fannie Mae’s risky practices. I published a letter to the editor in response criticizing Raines for his utter gall in lecturing whistleblowers about how Fannie should be managed. But amazingly enough, he continues to be treated like a financial hotshot. Law Professor James Lindgren has a post about Fannie Mae aptly entitled “Fannie Mae’s Thugs.”

Plenty of this to go around and stick to everyone, so be sure to enjoy the slime stuck to your candidate as well. I love the sexist messages in your comments, sounds like you don’t think a woman can get ahead without using her sexuality, thats gonna hurt you on election day, so keep it up.

Dubai can now make money off your mortgage payment and your car fill up.

http://peureport.blogspot.com/2008/09/domestic-taxes-prop-up-foreign-swfs.html

http://skepticalpollster.com/

http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2008/08/29/pollsters-schizophrenia-and-the-convention-bounce.html

September 9th, 2008 at 11:25 am
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I don’t know yet. I just signed up last week, so I haven’t gone to any training sessions yet – there will be a bunch in the next two months, so I’ll be learning the local procedures soon.

However, we do use electronic touch-screen machines here, which is why I’m very eager to learn how they work and how the votes are tabulated and what happens to the vote counts at the end of the day. I’m very concerned about the possibility of vote hacking, so I’m trying to research as much as I can – any other info you have would be appreciated. I’m also concerned about the many low-tech methods of election fraud – everything from not having enough machines in certain districts to aggressive enforcement of parking violations against people waiting on line to vote.

In terms of lobbyists and the absurd artificially high price of oil, Phil Gramm, McCain and Bush were the leaders in deregulating both the energy markets and the real estate mortgage markets.

Below is my take from a couple of months ago about the effects of uncontrolled electronic speculation in the oil futures markets:

We’re being ENRONed again: this time by oil futures contracts speculators who are unnecessarily and very profitably driving up the price of crude oil and hence retail gasoline prices. Curious as to why you are suddenly paying over four dollars a gallon for gasoline? No, it’s not due to “supply-and-demand,” no, it’s not due to “OPEC,” nor is it due to “peak oil.” It’s due to totally unregulated electronic oil futures trading in world markets. Check out the very lucid article that explains the unseen financial machinations in oil futures markets written by F. W. Engdahl on May 2, 2008, entitled, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price is Pure Speculation.” It may be viewed at .
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/0502.html

In a nutshell, he suggests that the Bush Administration dropped the ball in January 2006, when they allowed totally unregulated electronic trading of oil futures contracts in New York. Previously these electronic trades had been made at the London Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Futures Market. With that decision by the Bush Administration, all of the world’s oil prices were then opened to upward pressure from speculative futures contracts. In essence, oil futures contracts made by speculators, banks, hedge funds and pension funds all competed with real demand on the spot markets and had the effect of driving up both wholesale oil prices and retail gasoline prices. Speculators have made billions of dollars on their trading of oil futures contracts. All of their profits come right out of our pockets.

Even with a stable oil supply, there is a slow worldwide increase in demand for oil, which creates a long-term upward pressure on oil prices. However, with the relentless saber-rattling and war-mongering by Bush and Cheney in the last several years, and the more recent war talks by McCain and the Israelis, the oil futures markets are rife with speculation and paranoia. This war talk keeps ratcheting up the prices on the oil futures contracts and hence the wholesale spot market prices. It is an endless spiral of greed and paranoia.

As long as there is no tough and effective oversight of the electronic oil futures markets by the Bush Administration, the oil prices will climb endlessly. These oil prices will be quickly followed by hikes in the retail gasoline prices at the pump. The 60% speculation share of the $4.25/gallon gasoline price, is about $2.55/gallon, which is what we consumers are paying to these oil speculators as a “service fee.” Not a bad “fee,” since the speculators produce no usable goods or services…Just a few large greedy oil futures traders helping themselves to your gas money.
Without this added-on oil futures “service fee,” you would be paying about $1.75/gallon for gasoline. Write, call or smoke-signal your Representatives and Senators today and suggest that they read the June 2006 report by The U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled, “The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices.” Then demand that they investigate and then force the Bush Administration to firmly regulate the computerized oil futures contracts trading in New York, London and Dubai.

This electronic oil price futures scandal is costing US drivers about $969,000,000.00 per day! That number is based on 60% speculation fee of a gasoline price of $4.25/gallon and on US 2004 consumption of 380,000,000 gallons/day. Tell you Senators and Congresspersons to simply shut down this unregulated electronic oil futures contract trading market. Then the price of gasoline will slowly drop to about $1.75/gallon…The only way that oil price futures contracts make money is if the price of oil goes up in the future, say, 30, 60 or 90 days later. This futures market serves no social need. It is just for corporate greed. The corporate speculators are probably also gaming/ENRONing the wheat and corn futures markets the same way.