December 12, 2008, 5:33 pm

FINANCE: Considering the Differences Between Two Billion-Dollar Bailouts

By Kat Aaron

Photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of photographer Hauke Sandhaus. The auto industry bailout has stalled in the Senate, putting the fate of Detroit’s Big Three and their employees in the hands of the White House. Why did this bailout — or bridge loan, depending who you ask — fail, when the bank bailout succeeded?

Maybe because the public and the legislators they elect are wary of another bailout with a price tag in the billions. That’s not an unreasonable stance, given the recent questions about the implementation of the bank bailout. Last week, the Government Accountability Office questioned Treasury’s oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan (TARP), saying that the department must do more to ensure that banks are actually lending the funds they’ve gotten through the bailout.

The Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the bailout has also raised questions: 10 of them, in fact. Among the 10 questions outlined in the panel’s first report, released Wednesday, are:

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December 12, 2008, 10:38 am

DEFENSE: Lost, Stolen, Sold? Tracking U.S. Weapons in Afghanistan

By Te-Ping Chen

When the headlines first appeared in August 2007, they seemed ironic: Four years after the United States invaded Iraq in search of Saddam Hussein’s weapons, according to the Government Accountability Office, the real problem was keeping track of our own arms. It turns out the Pentagon’s difficulty in keeping tabs on the weaponry it ships isn’t restricted to Iraq. PaperTrail has learned that the GAO is now focusing on U.S. weapons that are unaccounted for in Afghanistan, and a new report is slated for release in January.

Preliminary findings on the subject were issued in October by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General, which flew a team to Afghanistan this past spring to suss out the extent of the problem.

Their findings were suggestive, noting that the U.S. Central Command lacked well-defined procedures to track and locate weaponry supplied to the Afghan National Security Forces, meaning the “misplacement, loss, or theft of [arms, ammunition, and explosives] may not be prevented.” (In particular, the serial numbers of U.S.-issued weapons were never kept on careful file.) The report, however, attracted none of the media furor that followed the GAO’s Iraq release.

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December 10, 2008, 4:06 pm

POLITICS: Does Blagojevich Arrest Make Illinois the New New Jersey?

By Sarah Laskow

Before he was Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich speaking at an event. Rahm Emanuel, now the White House chief of staff designate, listens in the background. This morning’s idle chatter in the Center newsroom raised the question of whether Illinois may have surpassed those perennially ethically challenged states of Louisiana, New Jersey, and Rhode Island in the contest for (drumroll) Most Corrupt State Ever. But in truth, Illinois has been one of our favorite whipping boys for years. The state’s ethics law flat-out failed on our ethics survey. Illinois did pass a new ethics law this year, but apparently it didn’t do much good.

Though, it’s not like Governor Blagojevich would have written on his ethics form, under gifts, “Received ambassadorship to Bahamas from president-elect in exchange for picking his Senate preference.” But one reason ethics experts like financial disclosure is that it reminds elected officials that they’re supposed to be acting in the public interest and that there are folks out there keeping an eye on them. In a state with a more robust ethics disclosure law, he might have had to at least disclose the high-paying corporate board positions he seemed to covet for his wife, allegedly in exchange for favorable treatment.

In Illinois, though, disclosure has never been more than a formality, a gesture to the rules most of us squares follow. Whereas many states entrust the oversight of financial disclosure to an independent ethics agency, in Illinois those forms go to the Index Department, where they’re filed in drawers. Really, really dusty drawers, most likely.

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December 09, 2008, 11:01 pm

BROKEN GOVERNMENT: By the Numbers

By Bill Buzenberg, David E. Kaplan

VISIT THE NEW BROKEN GOVERNMENT PROJECT.

With two wars and an economy in shambles, it’s not hard to get the feeling that something’s gone terribly wrong here in Washington. “We’ll look back on this period as one of the most destructive in our public life,” Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution told us in a recent interview. He’s not alone. Public opinion pollsters give this president the lowest marks for job performance of any administration since they started polling.

How bad is it? The Center for Public Integrity set out to document just how off-track things have gone. We assigned a team of 13 reporters to sift through hundreds of GAO assessments, inspectors general reports, congressional investigations, and news stories. The team also interviewed dozens of experts and sent e-mails to nearly 5,000 federal employees to solicit nominations for this project.

The results surprised even us.

From 250 suggested failures, our editors narrowed the list to half, focusing on those that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans. We’re calling this our Broken Government project, and it reveals an extraordinary record of failure: eight years of poor oversight, lack of accountability, and a government based on ideology not competence.

Many of the failures will be familiar to you, but the breadth and depth of them all just might surprise you, too. For more on the project, check out our Broken Government project. For now, here’s a sampling of what we found — 40 ways in which the executive branch of the U.S. government failed to perform from 2001-2008:

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December 09, 2008, 2:20 pm

POLITICS: Let This Be a Lesson: 2008 a Bad Year for Political Bad Guys

By Josh Israel

Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich Is it open season on ethically-challenged pols? The latest to fall is Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, taken into federal custody today amid allegations he conspired to sell an open U.S. Senate seat appointment.

Just a few days ago, the voters of Louisiana’s second district defeated nine-term Congressman William Jefferson. His heavily Democratic district chose Republican Ahn “Joseph” Cao rather than keep him, amid an investigation of bribery allegations and $90,000 in cash found in his fridge.

Jefferson joins the ranks of several others who left Congress under an ethical cloud:

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December 08, 2008, 3:16 pm

POLITICS: From the White House, Silence is Not Golden

By Sarah Laskow

As investigative journalists, we’re a little, um, addicted to documents. We understand perfectly well that politicians aren’t thrilled about people like us getting their hands on records showing what they were actually saying and thinking. It tends to lead to coverage like this. But PaperTrail hopes that the new White House team won’t buy into recent chatter that documenting deliberations would stifle debate.

In an article discussing the White House’s newly souped-up Situation Room, The New York Times wrote that “several veterans of the White House have noted in conversations over the past two years that the secure video does not lend itself to open, vigorous debate. Instead, it can squelch it. . . There may be recordings for posterity, or presidential libraries.”

Similar concerns dotted articles in November about Obama giving up his BlackBerry. Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan told the AP that the president-elect “will have to think very hard about whether he wants to make his own words that subject to open records by having his own e-mail and his own BlackBerry.”

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December 05, 2008, 5:31 pm

ELECTION ’08: The Final Totals

By Caitlin Ginley

Three-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Photo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of photographer Ragesoss. It’s official. President-Elect Barack Obama not only made history as the first black president, but also by drawing almost $750 million for his campaign — the most ever since anyone cared enough to start tracking such things. And he still has $30 million of it left in the bank.

Meanwhile, McCain, having opted for public financing, could only accept $85 million for the general election. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he raised about $360 million during his campaign, which includes the public financing, but still puts him far behind Obama in the money race. (Of course, McCain got a serious boost from the RNC, which raised more than $80 million in the weeks leading up to the election.)

The totals for the various third-party candidates obviously pale in comparison to both Obama and McCain: Ralph Nader led the pack with about $4.5 million, followed by Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr with about $1.2 million, Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party with about $260,000, and the Green’s pick, Cynthia McKinney, with about $198,000.

The lesson: Money talks. But you already knew that.

December 03, 2008, 2:17 pm

ENVIRONMENT: U.S. Greenhouse Gases Go Up, Bush Talking Point Goes Down

By Marianne Lavelle

The Bush administration today lost one of its main talking points for defending its approach of relying on voluntary measures to address climate change. The government’s energy statistics agency is reporting that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased 1.4 percent in 2007 — meaning the slight decrease recorded the prior year was a mere blip on the nation’s current pathway toward increasing its fossil fuel burden on the atmosphere.

Last year, President Bush touted a 1.3 percent decrease in U.S. carbon emissions in 2006 — a year when the economy grew by 2.9 percent — as proof that “a strong and growing economy can deliver both a better life for its people and a cleaner environment at the same time.” When asked recently about the administration’s record on climate change, the White House Council on Environmental Quality sent over a brief summary that cited the 2006 emissions drop as proof of “real progress.”

But in 2007, that seeming progress was more than erased, as the United States released 106.7 million more metric tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases than it did the previous year, raising the total to a record 7,282.4 million metric tons, according to the annual inventory released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Greenhouse gases did decline twice during the Bush administration, in 2001 — associated with the economic slowdown that year — and in 2006, the second-warmest year on record in the United States, with a corresponding decline in energy use to heat homes. But the overall trend was up during President Bush’s tenure, with emissions rising nearly 3 percent from 2000 to 2007.

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November 26, 2008, 11:43 am

AGRICULTURE: Wealthy ‘Farmers’ Snag Federal Dollars

By Joe Eaton

Forget stimulus checks; wealthy farmers raked in more than $49 million in federal funds between 2003 and 2006 that they may have been ineligible for, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture payments went to 2,702 farmers who had adjusted gross incomes that “exceeded $2.5 million and derived less than 75 percent of their income from farming, ranching, or forestry operations,” which makes them potentially ineligible for the payments, according to the report.

Examples of wealthy individuals who may have improperly received funds (which ranged from crop subsidies to disaster payments) include:

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November 25, 2008, 2:41 pm

CRIME: Europe’s Future Mafia States

By Marina Walker Guevara

The National Intelligence Council released its latest study on the world’s future last week, Global Trends 2025. The report, produced by experts inside and out of the U.S. intelligence community, found, among other things, that Al Qaeda could soon be on the decline and that America will be less dominant as China, India, and other powers rise. But buried on page 33 was also this tantalizing tidbit:

“Crime could be the gravest threat inside Europe as Eurasian transnational organizations — flush from involvement in energy and mineral concerns — become more powerful and broaden their scope. One or more governments in Eastern or Central Europe could fall prey to their domination.”

While some media reports noted this provocative passage, missed in the coverage was exactly which countries the U.S. spy agencies were talking about. PaperTrail consulted organized crime experts close to the U.S. government, who were all too happy to name names. Topping the list of potential Mafia states: Moldova, that ex-Soviet cauldron of crime and corruption, and the Balkan nations of Albania and its newly-founded neighbor Kosovo, known for their ruthless drug trafficking syndicates.

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