Free Talk Live

Troubled U.S. government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae on Monday asked for 8.4 billion dollars in additional federal aid to cover its huge losses.

Fannie Mae reported earlier Monday that it lost 13.1 billion dollars in the first quarter, or 2.29 dollars a share. It lost 23. 2 billion dollars in the same period a year ago.

The new aid will bring the total bill for rescuing Fannie and its sister company Freddie Mac to 145 billion dollars. The Obama administration has pledged to provide an unlimited amount of funds to Fannie and Freddie to keep them solvent.

A US federal watchdog has criticised the US military for failing to account properly for billions of dollars it received to help rebuild Iraq.

(They sure as hell won't just 'criticize' you or I if we did the same thing....

"The program, which is by far the Pentagon’s largest, is expected to cost nearly $300 billion"

So we spend billions of dollars to build new weapons to "protect us" from the people who we used our old weapons to make hate us...

Your Stimulus Dollars at Work: $2 Million Per Job

The U.S. Department of Defense got more than $9 billion from the sale of Iraqi oil and other revenue streams to be used for reconstruction inside the war-damaged nation and spent it but now cannot document where $8.7 billion of those funds went, according to an inspector general's report published online.

Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it's woven its way into America’s DNA.

Remember the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that helped collect dubious intelligence that led to the war in Iraq? Or the program where the Pentagon secretly briefed military analysts to promote the Iraq war?

What do robotic squirrels, menus for Martian meals and a musical about climate change have in common? They've all been made possible with taxpayer assistance, according to the latest survey of government waste put out by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. Known simply as the Waste Book, the report is a watchlist of eye-opening expenditures, which Coburn blames on a "let them eat caviar" attitude in Washington -- at a time when "23 million of our fellow Americans do not have good jobs," Coburn notes.

Medicare fraud has become very big business for gangs, members of the Mafia and other thugs. One estimate suggests that criminals steal some $60 billion from the federal government via health care fraud every year.