Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the government-sponsored enterprises which are emblematic of a lot of things such as mistaking “social justice” for sound business practice and then wondering what went wrong.. Never mind, taxpayers funds will take up the slack. Why, one would wonder, would anyone name financial entities after cartoon characters, but the answer is that Freddie and Fannie have become cartoon characters without any help from their names. This is from the Washington Post and more can be found there.
“The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.
The Christmas Eve announcement by the Treasury Department means that it can continue to run the companies, which were seized last year, as arms of the government for the rest of President Obama’s current term.
But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.
The compensation packages, including up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s chief executives, come amid an ongoing public debate about lavish payments to executives at banks and other financial firms that have received taxpayer aid. But while many firms on Wall Street have repaid the assistance, there is no prospect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will do so.
The administration faced a congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 31 to increase the amount of aid it could provide to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together have already received $111 billion in assistance.”
and another entry from: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope: about Criminal Rehabilitation
The prime mover behind this research was Katherine Larson who stated, at a hearing, “You may not want to hear it, but in my opinion, over the years, it’s been my experience that elected officials from both parties share with YA leadership and some YA staff the responsibility for the sad state of affairs in youth corrections. Too often over the last 15 years I have seen and experienced elected officials provide funds or press YA administrators to implement programs that had more to do with ideology and personal opinion than effective research-based practice.”
The Larson Procedure
Katherine Larson did a program, which contained almost all these requirements, with young gang members incarcerated by the California Youth Authority. Her subjects were high risk, young male gang members from a large American city who were currently imprisoned and had a very high risk of re-offending. Larson had a matched control group of prisoners which did not receive the program. Fifteen months after release, 100% of the control group were re-incarcerated vs 25% of the program group. The average number of incarcerated days during the fifteen month period was 313.7 vs 87.4. The average number of "good street days", days working or in school, was 127.6 for the control group and 266 for the program group.
The program curriculum revolved around social skills and problem-solving training with a scripted, direct instruction, very specific program which required constant student participation via written exercises, role-playing and transfer of skills outside the teaching situation. As Larson told her trainees, "Your problems don"t get you into trouble. Your solutions get you into trouble." The training program was based on the notion that offenders have defective social and problem-solving skills including not being able to take the perspective of others, impulse control problems, inability to plan ahead, inability to define the problem in terms of what to do, inability to formulate solutions not involving law breaking and\or violence and inability to see the consequences of actions. Larson divided the program into three phases which apply to all successful prison rehabilitation programs. The skill acquisition phase referred to the classroom teaching phase. During the skill maintenance phase, the clients met to review their use of skills in the institution. The skill transfer phase occurred after release from prison and was a compulsory part of parole. Trainers showed clients how to apply their skills to their behavior outside prison. The follow-up sessions concentrated on highly structured, specific behaviors which were important for a law-abiding life such as dealing with problems without violence and solving problems and not avoiding them.
Larson, K.D. (1989). Problem-solving training and parole adjustment in high-risk young adult offenders. in S. Duguid (Ed.) The Yearbook of Correctional Education. 279-299, Burnaby, British Columbia: Simon Fraser University.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
