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.

The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending US$1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its final major audit over the weekend, delivering quite a bottom line: it cannot say how much U.S taxpayers lost while trying to rebuild Iraq, but it was a lot. The U.S. government Iraq relief and reconstruction program had serious internal control weaknesses that put billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of fraud, waste, and abuse. The precise amount lost to fraud and waste may never be known, but SIGIR’s audits and investigations have demonstrated that the amount could be substantial.

Romney Lapdog Joins Criminal Senate, Guarantees $9 Billion Dollars (plus interest) in Loans to Israel in six second voice vote
U.S. Senate also acknowledges "efforts to expand cooperation between the United States and Israel in homeland security, counter-terrorism, maritime security, energy, cyber-security, and other related areas."

"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...

Facial Recognition Technology..................Read more here:

"With the G2O meeting in Toronto this weekend , 26-27 June, the police have tightened security to what can only be described as a full on police state.

Its reported that the cost for hosting the meeting is in the region of $1 billion dollars - just what the world needs in the middle of a financial crisis. How ironic that top of the agenda is, you guessed it, the financial crisis. Is there no end to this madness?

This time it started out differently. Adam Mueller and Pete Eyre from Liberty on Tour were there with Antonio Musumeci (otherwise known as "Bile" for his blog, Blog of Bile) and, of course, Julian Heicklen.

California lawmakers have approved billions of dollars in construction financing for the first segment of what would be the nation's first dedicated high-speed rail line, eventually connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco. The state Senate voted 21-16 on a party-line vote Friday after intense lobbying by Gov. Jerry Brown, Democratic leaders and labor groups. The bill authorizes the state to begin selling $2.6 billion in voter-approved bonds to build an initial 130-miles stretch in the Central Valley.