COMMENTARY | I resent Newt Gingrich consulting with government-sponsored private enterprise Freddie Mac, but I’d vote for him anyway, should he become the GOP candidate.
An Associated Press story reports that Gingrich received $1.6 million from consulting contracts he held with Freddie Mac during the period 1999 to 2008.
That’s a lot of money to me, averaging just shy of $200,000 a year. True, it is slightly less than the $9 million earned in two years by a Freddie Mac top executive, just one of the executives who testified yesterday at a congressional hearing.
Gingrich is all the more suspect for pointing out, in 2008, that Barack Obama should return campaign contributions made to him by former Fannie Mae executive and Obama economic advisor Franklin Raines.
Big salaries and fat bonuses were apparently all the rage at Fanny Mae. Of $90 million Raines received in remuneration at Fanny Mae, $52 million was paid to him in bonuses, according to writer Sylvia Cochran.
For his part, Gingrich protests that he was in consulting rather than a lobbying position at Freddie Mac but that is a bit of sophistry. The Gingrich name lent additional political weight to his advisements and activities.
Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac are both at the root of the housing problems that are hurting so many of us today. Politicians on both sides of the aisle recognize this and the agencies, set to be phased out, have embarrassed several administrations.
Nor does the Obama administration rate higher than Gingrich with its bottomless pit of support for people who took no-money-down mortgages and stopped paying when it became inconvenient.
While propping up the markets has delayed foreclosures on a small number of homeowners, a great number of indentured people are still paying their mortgages.
For the moment, such people are in limbo, essentially sharecroppers on a government sponsored taxpayer supported plantation.
Problems with the troubled quasi-government banking agencies are not recent phenomena. Liberal “Slate” online magazine defined the agencies and their “corporate socialism” in a provocative 2008 article that highlighted a long list of Fanny Mae piracy and profiteering.
The names in that article are the usual suspects and won’t be unfamiliar. Newt Gingrich is merely one of the last to be named to the list, and at a discounted price.
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.
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