Author: Neil Barofsky File Type: epub In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader publicand at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S. Attorneys Office in New York City, where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts. Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofskys efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithners decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonusesincluding $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistantand that the Obama administrations TARP czar lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay. Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administrations homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial systemas Barofsky disclosestotaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis. hrFROM BAILOUTThe further we dug into the way TARP was being administered, the more obvious it became that Treasury applied a consistent double standard. In the late fall of 2009, as I began receiving the results of two of our most important audits, the contradiction couldnt have been more glaring. When providing the largest financial institutions with bailout money, Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt. For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of the sanctity of contracts. Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for home- owners and businesses that were most assuredly small enough to fail. Nowhere was the favoritism toward Wall Street more evident than with the governments approach to AIG, where inviolable contract terms were cited to justify the absurd executive bonus payments as well as far richer payouts provided to the megabank counterparties to AIGs CDS deals, honoring even their most reckless bets. For homeowners and small business owners, though, contracts went from being sacrosanct to inconvenient irrelevancies. So when mortgage servicers blatantly disregarded HAMP contracts by trampling over homeowners rights, Treasury turned to an endless series of excuses to justify its refusal to hold them accountable. Similarly, for more than two thousand auto dealerships, Treasurys auto bailout team sought to void the contractual rights granted them under state franchise laws to shut them down.ReviewBailout is a jaw-dropping play-by-play of how the Treasury Department bungled the financial bailouts With a prosecutors logic and copious footnotes, Barofsky makes it clear things are rarely what they seem in Washington. (USA Today )[Bailout] is an interesting behind-the-scenes account of how Washington tried to save the economy [and] an enjoyable tale of how a prosecutor of Colombian drug gangs got drafted for the thankless task of policing a $700 billion bailout from a dank basement office of the Treasury. (Fortune )[An] everyman account of the pervasive cynicism and insider-dealing of the D.C. establishment. (The American Spectator )[One] of our favorite business books so far this yearThe former special inspector general policing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program lifts the lid on the U.S. Treasury and settles scores [an] illuminating memoir. (Bloomberg Businessweek )A damning indictment of the Obama administrations execution of the TARP program. (Washington Examiner )A quick, intense, read. (Business Insider )[Barofsky] set out to account for the TARP spending in a transparent, nonpartisan manner. However, as he demonstrates in his energetically written first-person account, he and his staff met resistance every time they tried to share the truth with Congress, the White House and the American public a courageous, insightful book that offers no cause for optimism. (Kirkus (starred review) )Blistering in its assessment of the Treasury Departments handling of the bailouts. (Huffington Post )In his scathing new book, Barofsky says taxpayers got shafted while the rich got richer a true expose. Taxpayers who feel helpless in the midst of the extended economic recession are likely to feel energized to metaphorically blow up the system after reading Barofskys account. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )[An] explosive account of the mishandling of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram ) About the AuthorNeil Barofsky is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. From December 2008 until March 2011, he served as the Special Inspector General in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Before that he was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York. This is his first book.

Author: Robert Pattison File Type: pdf This book is original, informed, brilliantly argued, and written with real passion ... It is going to be very useful in the literacy debates in the next few years.--Richard Lanham.

Author: Richard Heinberg File Type: pdf With fossil fuels fast disappearing, and their continuing supplies becoming ever more problematic and expensive, hopes have turned to renewable sources that we ask to save our way of life at more or less its current level. Alas, as we will see, the net energy gain from all alternative systems -- that is, the amount of energy produced, compared with the amount of energy (as well as money and materials) that must be invested in building and operating them -- is far too small to begin to sustain industrial society at its present levels. There is a strong likelihood that future energy systems, both conventional and alternative, will have higher energy input costs than those that powered industrial societies during the last century. The report explores some of the presently proposed energy transition scenarios, showing why, up to this time, most are overly optimistic, as they do not address all of the relevant limiting factors to the expansion of alternative energy sources. Finally, it shows why energy conservation (using less energy, and also less resource materials) combined with humane, gradual population decline must become primary strategies for achieving sustainability.

Author: Stefan Höschele File Type: pdf The growth of Christianity in Africa during the twentieth century is one of the most fascinating shifts in the history of religions. This book presents a history of the Tanzanian Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is representative of this shift in many respects slow beginnings, struggles over cultural issues, the emergence of a unique church life combining denominational heritage and African elements, frictions with governments, and the development of popular theology. Yet Tanzanian Adventism also exemplifies an important phenomenon which has been given little attention so far - the transformation of minority denominations to dominant religions. This study breaks new ground in analyzing how the Adventist remnant developed into an African folk church while attempting to remain true to its original ethos.