New Cuba Relations May Reveal Nasty Truths and People

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Cuba thaw could bring answers to mystery of fugitive financier

FNC: Restored relations between the U.S. and Cuba could help investigators find hundreds of millions of dollars embezzled more than 40 years ago by a high-flying fugitive, but they acknowledge it is more likely Robert Vesco took his secrets to the grave.

Vesco was a 35-year-old Wall Street whiz when he mounted a takeover of mutual fund investment firm, Investors Overseas Service,which had $1.5 billion in investors’ money. Three years later, Vesco left America for good aboard a private jet with an estimated $220 million, as the Securities and Exchange Commission closed in on him for allegedly hiding his clients’ money in foreign accounts. Rumored contributions to President Nixon’s re-election campaign, possibly in the hopes of staving off the SEC probe, proved to be no help as Vesco settled in Costa Rica.

“He would go to a country with weak extradition laws like Colombia or Costa Rica and once the laws would change he would go to another country until his only option was Cuba,” said Ed Butowsky, whose father, David Butowsky, was chief enforcement officer for the SEC when he began hunting Vesco in 1973.

“We know one thing, that money is still in Cuba if it was being kept anywhere else, it would have already made its way back to the U.S.”

– Ed Butowsky

In 1982, Vesco moved to Havana, where his money was good and he was safe from U.S. authorities. Butowsky, in his government role and then later as an attorney for a private firm hired to recoup the stolen loot, knew where Vesco was but that brought him no closer to the money.

The elder Butowsky is no longer alive, but Ted Altman, an attorney who worked with him recalled interviewing the mustachioed embezzler on multiple occasions.

“We met with him a few times, first in Costa Rica, then in the Bahamas,” Altman said. “We asked about what he did with the money and he answered every question but without an ounce of truth.”

Vesco was arrested by Cuban authorities in 1995 for being “under suspicion of being a provocateur and an agent of foreign special services” and charged with fraud. He served a 10-year sentence, then resumed a quiet life in Havana, according to The New York Times. A chain smoker, he reportedly died in 2007. But even his death was reported with skepticism worthy of a wily con artist who had spent decades eluding authorities.

“If so, it was never reported publicly by the Cuban authorities, who said Friday that they considered him a “non-issue,” read a May 3, 2008 article in the New York Times written some five months after Vesco’s alleged death and entitled “A Last Vanishing Act for Robert Vesco, Fugitive.”

Ed Butowsky believes that new diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Cuba – Secretary of State John Kerry opened an American embassy in Havana last week – should allow authorities to find the millions his father once hunted.

“It should be an open case,” Butowsky said. “We know one thing, that money is still in Cuba if it was being kept anywhere else, it would have already made its way back to the U.S.”

But Altman doubts that Vesco’s money ever wound up in Cuba.

“I could only speculate with what I know about Vesco,” he said. “But the bulk of that money would be in a much more secure location than Cuba.”

“More than likely, it would be in accounts in Europe, if anywhere at all.”

Reminder of the Cuban spies case and how far the Obama administration colluded

January 2015

Havana, Cuba (CNN)It might be the most bizarre of the closely guarded secrets from last week’s historic agreement between the United States and Cuba: How did the leader of a Cuban spy ring serving life in a California federal prison manage to impregnate his wife 2,245 miles away in Havana?

As part of the most significant diplomatic breakthrough between the United States and Cuba in more than 50 years, a prisoner swap was made. To uphold its part of the bargain, the U.S. released three Cuban spies, including Gerardo Hernandez, the head of the spy ring known as the Wasp Network.

Hernandez had an ear-to-ear smile Wednesday as he arrived at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport. State TV showed Hernandez as he was greeted by President Raul Castro and then embraced and kissed his wife, Adriana Perez.

Cubans watching the nonstop coverage of the prisoner swap were shocked when the cameras zeroed in on Hernandez hugging Perez. She was obviously in the late stages of a pregnancy that had no easy explanation.

Not only had Hernandez been serving a double life sentence, but his wife also worked for Cuba’s intelligence services and was banned by U.S. officials from visiting her husband in prison, according to the Cuban government.

Rumors swirl in sultry Havana

The subject became the immediate hot topic in Havana where rumors swirled fast about the baby’s paternity and whether the Cuban government could have somehow arranged a clandestine conjugal visit under the nose of U.S. authorities.

The couple appeared at another event on Saturday, where together with the other freed spies, Castro and the communist island’s top political and military officials showered them with applause.

A beaming Hernandez stood by Perez, whose round stomach was clearly visible for viewers of the live broadcast

As the couple left the celebration, Hernandez hinted at the secret surrounding the pregnancy.

“Everyone’s asking, and we have had a lot of fun with the comments and speculations. The reality is it had to be kept quiet,” Hernandez told the government-run television channel. “We can’t give a lot of details, because we don’t want to hurt people who meant well.”

He said his wife’s pregnancy was a direct result of the high-level talks.

“One of the first things accomplished by this process was this,” Hernandez said, gesturing to his Perez’s stomach. “I had to do it by ‘remote control,’ but everything turned out well.”

Two sources involved with the diplomatic talks, when questioned by CNN, uncloaked the mystery: During the negotiations, Hernandez’s sperm was collected and sent to Cuba, where Perez was artificially inseminated.

The U.S. Justice Department confirmed the story, without going into the details.

“We can confirm the United States facilitated Mrs. Hernandez’s request to have a baby with her husband,” spokesman Brian Fallon said.

What the U.S. would gain

Why would the U.S. government do this? The artificial insemination was made possible in exchange for better conditions for Alan Gross, a U.S. contractor imprisoned in Cuba. Gross was released last week as part of the prisoner swap.

“In light of Mr. Hernandez’s two life sentences,” Fallon said, “the request was passed along by Senator [Patrick] Leahy, who was seeking to improve the conditions for Mr. Gross while he was imprisoned in Cuba.”

The discretion on both sides makes sense.

For 18 months, officials from both countries refused to admit that they were even holding high-level talks.

Officials communicated via back channels, knowing that any leak about the talks could doom the talks.

Impregnating Perez involved cutting through bureaucratic red tape at multiple U.S. government agencies.

As Perez began to show, officials from both countries fretted over how they would explain her pregnancy and what to do if the baby arrived before the talks succeeded.

2001 conviction

Hernandez was convicted in 2001 of conspiracy to commit murder for his role in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down that left four Cuban-Americans dead after Cuban Air Force MIGs blew up the two civilian planes as they flew toward Havana to distribute anti-government leaflets. He received two life sentences.

Cuban authorities said Hernandez and the other operatives were trying to prevent terrorist attacks from being carried out on their homeland by violent Miami exiles.

That the U.S. government helped a man convicted of plotting the murder of four Cuban-Americans and spying on the exile community in Miami will likely further rankle many of the same Cuban-Americans who were already furious that Washington is restoring diplomatic relations with Havana.

But Tim Reiser, an aide to Leahy who worked to broker the landmark agreement with Cuba, said helping Hernandez conceive a child led to better treatment for Gross by Cuban authorities and was an important concession to help reach a historic deal.

“The expectation was that this man would die in prison. This was her only chance of having a child,” Rieser told CNN.

Gerardo Hernandez said he and his wife are expecting their baby daughter to arrive in two weeks and they will name her Gema.

The EPA has Been Dumping Toxic Waste Longer than Reported

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Mine owner: EPA record of toxic dumping dates back to 2005

by Tori Richards

The EPA has a record of releasing toxic runoff from mines in two tiny Colorado towns that dates to 2005, a local mine owner claims.

The 3-million-gallon heavy-metal spill two weeks ago in Silverton polluted three states and touched off national outrage. But the EPA escaped public wrath in 2005 when it secretly dumped up to 15,000 tons of poisonous waste into another mine 124 miles away. That dump – containing arsenic, lead and other materials – materialized in runoff in the town of Leadville, said Todd Hennis, who owns both mines along with numerous others.

“If a private company had done this, they would’ve been fined out of existence,” Hennis said. “I have been battling the EPA for 10 years and they have done nothing but create pollution. About 20 percent (of Silverton residents) think it’s on purpose so they can declare the whole area a Superfund site.”

Like Silverton to the south, Leadville was founded in the late 1800s as a mining town and is the only municipality in its county. Today, tourism is its livelihood.

It’s against this backdrop that the Environmental Protection Agency began lobbying to declare part of Leadville a Superfund site in order to develop a recreational area called the Mineral Belt Trail. The project was officially completed in 2000, but apparently the agency stayed on and continued to work in town.

In late 2005, the EPA collected tons of sludge from two Leadville mines and secretly dumped it down the shaft of the New Mikado mine without notifying Hennis, its owner, according to documents reviewed by Watchdog.

A drainage tunnel had been installed at the bottom of the mine shaft by the U.S. government in 1942, meaning that any snow or rain would leach toxins into the surrounding land.

Hennis said the EPA claims it has installed a treatment pond near the tunnel to clean runoff. The EPA rebuffed his demands to clean up the mess it created in his mine, he said. In frustration, Hennis sent the county sheriff a certified notice that any EPA officials found near his property were trespassing and should be arrested.

Despite that history of bitterness, in 2010, the EPA asked Hennis to grant its agents access to Gold King Mine in Silverton because the agency was investigating hazardous runoff from other mines in the region.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want you on my land out of fear that you will create additional pollution like you did in Leadville,’” Hennis said. The official request turned into a threat, Hennis said: “They said, ‘If you don’t give us access within four days, we will fine you $35,000 a day.’”

An EPA administrative order dated May 12, 2011 said its inspectors wanted to conduct “drilling of holes and installing monitoring wells, sampling and monitoring water, soil, and mine waste material from mine water rock dumps…as necessary to evaluate releases of hazardous substances…”

When the EPA hit Hennis with $300,000 in fines, he said, he “waved the white flag” and allowed the agency on his property.

So for the past four years, the EPA has been working at the mine and two others nearby – all which border a creek that funnels into the Animas River. One mine to the north had been walled off with cement by its owner but it continued to leak water into Gold King. The EPA installed a drainage ditch on the Gold King side of the mine to alleviate the problem, but then accidentally filled the ditch with dirt and rocks last summer while building a water-retention wall.

That was the wall that burst when a contractor punched a hole in the top on Aug. 5, sending a bright orange stream cascading down. The EPA looked like the Keystone Kops as anger intensified in the media and general public: 24 hours passed with no notification to the lower states or Navajo Nation; the White House ignored mentioning the incident; and it took a week for the EPA administrator to tour Durango downstream, while refusing to visit Silverton itself.

The EPA says cleaning ponds have been installed to leach toxins from the water, and claims that anything released now is actually cleaner than before the spill occurred. The fallout from this disaster in the lower states is still unknown.

Also unknown is the fate of Silverton itself. For months, the EPA has been pushing town leaders into allowing designation as a Superfund site out of belief that the whole town is contaminated. This is something the town has resisted, as its reputation is at stake and no current tests have shown any evidence of toxic soil levels.

“Whenever we hear the word ‘EPA,’ we think of Superfund,” said Silverton Town Board Trustee David Zanoni. “They say, ‘We want to work together.’ That’s B.S. They want to come in and take over. The water up here is naturally filled with minerals. They don’t need to be here cleaning up.”

If the EPA’s litany of mistakes at Gold King mine is a barometer, Zanoni said, handing over the reins of Silverton would be a disaster.

“They had no contingency plan in case all of this went to hell,” he said.

The EPA could not be reached for comment.

*** How bad is the EPA otherwise? Sheesh much worse than can be fully explained yet here are some additional facts.

AmericanThinker in part:

“I’m very concerned that vital information regarding suspected employee misconduct is being withheld from the OIG,” Patrick Sullivan, assistant inspector general, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“This is truly a broken agency,” committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said, adding that the employee problems have gotten to the point of being “intolerable.”

The committee revealed several startling allegations and cases shared by the inspector general’s office. In one case, an employee was getting paid for one or two years after moving to a retirement home, where the employee allegedly did not work. When an investigation began, the worker was simply placed on sick leave.

In another case, an employee with multiple-sclerosis was allowed to work at home for the last 20 years. However, for the past five years, she allegedly produced no work — though she was paid roughly $600,000. She retired after an investigation.

In yet another case, an employee was accused of viewing pornography for two-to-six hours a day since 2010. An IG probe found the worker had 7,000 pornographic files on his EPA computer.

At the hearing, Sullivan detailed specific concerns with the agency’s little-known Office of Homeland Security.

The office of about 10 employees is overseen by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s office, and the inspector general’s office is accusing it of operating illegally as a “rogue law enforcement agency” that has impeded independent investigations into employee misconduct, computer security and external threats, including compelling employees involved in cases to sign non-disclosure agreements.

EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe told Congress that the agency’s employees work cooperatively with the inspector general and support its mission.

[…]

The dispute between the inspector general’s office and the Homeland Security office came to a head last year, as Republicans in Congress investigated the agency’s handling of John C. Beale, a former deputy assistant administrator who pleaded guilty in federal court last fall to stealing a total of $886,186 between 2000 and April 2013, falsely claiming he was working undercover for the CIA. The Beale case was initially investigated by the Homeland Security office months before the IG’s office was made aware of it.

Sullivan said Wednesday that the office’s actions delayed and damaged their own probe.

Further, he claimed a “total and systematic refusal” to share information has stymied investigations. Sullivan said the office for years has blocked the inspector general’s office from information by citing national security concerns and compelling employees to sign non-disclosure agreements.

The Beale case is especially egregious because this singularly unqualified employee was giving input into new environmental regulations for years. Makes you wonder about the “scientific basis” for clean air and water regs issued in the last few years.

The EPA’s Office of Homeland Security may have begun innocently enough, but was turned into something sinister by the Obama administration. It became an umbrella political hit squad, squashing potentially damaging investigations, intimidating witnesses, and interferring in the operations of the inspector general’s office, It reports only to the EPA administrator and is thus outside the normal chain of command at the agency.

Sounds like the old East German Stasi.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy should be fired immediately and the homeland security office disbanded. This is intolerable behavior from anyone in government, much less from an agency with so much power.

Mexican Drug Cartels Embedded with Terrorists

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Motorist With ISIS Flag Makes Bomb Threat Against Police

Emad Karakrah (Chicago Police Department)

A man who had an ISIS flag waving from his vehicle is facing several charges after he threatened police with a bomb Wednesday morning when he was pulled over on the Southwest Side.

Emad Karakrah, 49, was charged with felony counts of disorderly conduct and aggravated fleeing; and a misdemeanor count of driving on a never-issued license, according to Chicago police. He was also issued three traffic citations.

Someone called police after seeing a “suspicious person” driving a silver Pontiac southbound in the 7700 block of South Kedzie at 9:18 a.m. with an ISIS flag waving out the window, according to a police report.

Officers attempted to pull over the vehicle, but the driver took off, according to the report. The officers called for assistance, and another officer pulled the vehicle over after it went through several red lights.

The man told police during his arrest that there was a bomb in the car and he would detonate it if they searched the vehicle, according to the report.

A bomb squad, the FBI and Homeland Security responded to the scene and searched the vehicle, but no bomb was found, authorities said.

Judge Laura Sullivan ordered Karakrah held on a $55,000 bond Thursday. He is next scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 3.

Investigation: Collusion Between Terrorists and Mexican Cartels is a Threat to U.S.

Lead investigator says Obama administration has a responsibility to stop it

Muslim terrorists are using Mexican drug cartels to infiltrate the U.S. southern border to plan attacks on the United States from within, according to Sun City Cell, a documentary produced in collaboration between Judicial Watch and TheBlaze TV.

“Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links into a small Texas rural town near El Paso and they’re using remote farm roads—rather than interstates—to elude the Border Patrol and other law enforcement barriers,” states Judicial Watch. “Our nation’s unsecured border with Mexico is an existential threat to our nation.”

Chris Farrell, the director of research and investigations at Judicial Watch, says the cartel’s ability to completely control the El Paso region paved the way for a sophisticated narcoterrorism partnership.

“If you want to move something from point A to point B, a contraband item, you need their assistance, there’s a price tag with it, its all about making money,” he says. “There’s a tremendous amount of public corruption. There are cartels and those criminal enterprises do billions and billions of dollars worth of elicit business. Their corruption runs deep and it runs high and so there are people that are afraid frankly for this story to come out.”

Jonathan Gilliam, retired Navy Seal and former FBI special agent, says it’s always been his fear that high-level terrorist leaders would try to get into the United States and plan things here.

“For them to send out orders from overseas is one thing, but to see them come into the United States and actually start helping plan and give orders, that just shows another level of commitment and it shows a drastic shift in their mindset and where there dedication is,” says Gilliam. “I mean you don’t just go embed yourself into where you want to start a war, unless you’re serious about starting a war.”

“It probably means that’s not the first time they’ve gotten people in this way. And it’s really scary when you think about it,” said Gilliam.

Despite the alleged collusion between the Mexican cartels and Muslim terrorists, many tout El Paso, Texas, as a safe city to live.

“The cartel wants El Paso to be the shiny penny where everything is good, don’t look behind the curtain over here,” says an anonymous source in the documentary. “Everything is wonderful. And so, it’s known by the gang members and the criminals in all the area, if you draw attention, you hurt a police officer, you do anything that interferes with their business, they’ll melt you in a bucket of acid and not think twice about it.”

“The law enforcement for the most part is bought and paid for,” the source continues. “Not a lot of people have respect for police. The criminals certainly don’t, but what they have fear of is an organization that doesn’t have Fourth Amendment and doesn’t use jail cells, and that’s the cartel.”

Farrell says the Obama administration has a responsibility in putting an end to the alleged narcoterrorism ring.

“The principal functions of the administration, certainly of a president, is to provide for the security of the country and this is an issue that goes to terrorism, it goes to narcotics trafficking, human smuggling all sorts of areas of security and criminality, preventing crime,” he said. “And so of course it’s the administration’s responsibility.”

A former military intelligence officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Farrell spent four years on the investigation and has traveled to El Paso many times to meet with dozens of sources for this story.

He says the investigation will continue.

“This is probably one-third of the whole story about what’s going on in El Paso right now,” he said. “Two-thirds of the story we have not even reported on. There is so much more and our investigation continues.”

“It only gets worse, frankly,” he said. “If people were disturbed or concerned about what they saw in this portion of the story, it is a fragment of the overall story.”

The First Lie About the IRS Hack Gets Some Truth?

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Social security numbers are the basis and entry point to hack when it comes to the cyber intrusion into the IRS. Given the software platform the IRS uses, which is outdated completely, there are warnings there could be more intrusions.

IRS Hack Far Worse Than First Thought

USAToday:

SAN FRANCISCO — A hack of the Internal Revenue service first reported in May was nearly three times as large as previously stated, the agency said Monday.

Thieves have accessed as many as 334,000 taxpayer accounts, the IRS said.

In May, the IRS reported that identity thieves were able to use the agency’s Get Transcript program to get personal information about as many as 114,000 taxpayers.

On Monday, the IRS said an additional 220,000 accounts had also been hacked. In all, 334,000 accounts were accessed, though whether information was stolen from every one of them is not known.

The hackers made use of an IRS application called Get Transcript, which allows users to view their tax account transactions, line-by-line tax return information or wage and income reported to the IRS for a specific tax year.

To enter the Get Transcript system, the user must correctly answer multiple identity verification question.

The hackers took information about taxpayers acquired from other sources and used it to correctly answer the questions, allowing them to gain access to a plethora of data about individual taxpayers.

The Get Transcript service was shut down in May.

Hackers love authentication-based systems because it’s very difficult to distinguish between “the good guys and the bad guys” when someone is trying to get in, said Jeff Hill of STEALTHbits Technologies, a cyber security company.

“Here we have a case where a successful authentication-based attack was discovered in May, and yet the IRS is still unclear of the extent of the breach’s damage months later. Even now, how confident is the IRS they fully understand the extent of the attack completely, or should we expect yet another shoe to drop in the coming weeks?” Hill said.

Notification of the increased number of hacked accounts came Monday.

In a statement the agency said, “as part of the IRS’s continued efforts to protect taxpayer data, the IRS conducted a deeper analysis over a wider time period covering the 2015 filing season, analyzing more than 23 million uses of the Get Transcript system.”

That analysis revealed an additional 220,000 accounts had also potentially been accessed.

In addition to accounts the hackers were successfully able to access, the IRS disclosed hack attempts that didn’t succeed. There were 111,000 attempts on accounts disclosed in May and 170,000 disclosed on Monday, for a total of 281,000 of accounts where the hackers “failed to clear the authentication processes,” the agency said.

Taxpayers whose information was potentially breached will get letters in the mail from the IRS in the coming days.

They will also get access to free credit protection and Identity Protection PINs, the IRS said in a statement.

Taxpayers Fleeced

1/2 TRILLION spent on IT upgrades, but IRS, Feds still use DOS, old Windows

Examiner: President Obama’s team has spent more than a half trillion dollars on information technology but some departments, notably the IRS, still run on DOS and old Windows, which isn’t serviced anymore, according to House chairman.

“Since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has spent in excess of $525 billion dollars on IT. And it doesn’t work,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

In an address to the centrist Ripon Society, Chaffetz suggested that the slow change of the federal government’s IT led to the recent and historic hack of personal data of millions of current and former federal workers, including CIA and other clandestine employees.

“The IRS still uses the DOS operating system. You have a Patent office that just got Windows 97. They don’t even service Windows 97 anymore. And yet they just got it. So the procurement process is really, really broken in this regard,” he added.

Chaffetz also offered to praise for Obama’s pick to head the Office of Personnel Management, home to the massive computer hack.

Have You Met Tom Steyer?

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by Denise Simon

Tom Steyer is a billionaire having created wealth due to hedge funds with concentration on the green agenda and going against coal, fossil fuels and promoting climate change.

He has been a champion of the Obama White House and is called on often for support in California and Washington DC power circles. He is even considering running for a U.S. Senate seat to take up where Senator Barbara Boxer leaves behind as she is retiring. (yeah!)

So, read on to know more about Steyer….some truths bubble to the surface where some major failures have become real.

Lawmakers call for oversight hearings on green jobs measure

AP: SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers from both parties are calling for more stringent oversight of a clean jobs initiative after an Associated Press report found that a fraction of the promised jobs have been created.

The report also found that the state has no comprehensive list to show much work has been done or energy saved, three years after voters approved a ballot measure to raise taxes on corporations and generate clean-energy jobs.

“It’s clear to me that the Legislature should immediately hold oversight hearings to get to the bottom of why yet another promise to the voters has been broken,” Senate Minority Leader Bob Huff, R-San Dimas, said in a news released Monday.

The AP reported that three years after voters passed Proposition 39, money is trickling in at a slower-than-anticipated rate, and more than half of the $297 million given to schools so far has gone to consultants and energy auditors. The board created to oversee the project and submit annual progress reports to the Legislature has never met.

Voters in 2012 approved the Clean Energy Jobs Act by a large margin, closing a tax loophole for multistate corporations. The Legislature decided to send half the money to fund clean energy projects in schools, promising to generate more than 11,000 jobs each year.

Instead, only 1,700 jobs have been created in three years, raising concerns about whether the money is accomplishing what voters were promised.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, the Los Angeles Democrat who was the primary booster of Proposition 39 and its implementation in the state Legislature, said Monday that the measure is already successful, and said it is too soon to assess its effectiveness.

“Most school districts are either in the planning phase or are preparing to launch large-scale, intensive retrofit projects that will maximize benefits to students, school sites and the California economy,” de Leon said in a joint statement with the initiative’s chief supporter, billionaire investor and philanthropist Tom Steyer, who funded the initiative campaign with $30 million of his own money.

“We have every confidence that, as more projects break ground and come on line, Californians in every region of the state will increasingly realize the full benefits of improvements that make schools stronger and more energy-efficient,” they said.

But other Democrats said the report raised concerns.

“We should hold some oversight hearings to see how the money is being spent, where it is being spent and seeing if Prop. 39 is fulfilling the promise that it said it would,” said Assemblyman Henry Perea, D-Fresno.

Republican lawmakers sought to present Proposition 39 as a cautionary tale for other proposals as Democrats push bills to further limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Where’s the oversight? We are talking about giving away a whole lot of power to unelected bureaucracies,” said Republican Assemblyman James Gallagher of Nicolaus.

The State Energy Commission, which oversees Proposition 39 spending, could not provide any data about completed projects or calculate energy savings because schools are not required to report the results for up to 15 months after completion, spokeswoman Amber Beck said.

Still, Beck said she believes the program is on track. The commission estimates that based on proposals approved so far, Proposition 39 should generate an estimated $25 million a year in energy savings for schools.

Not enough data has been collected for the nine-member oversight board of professors, engineers and climate experts to meet, she said.

Among the planned projects are $12.6 million in work in the Los Angeles Unified School District, that would save $1.4 million a year in energy costs. Two schools were scheduled this summer to receive lighting retrofits and heating and cooling upgrades, but no construction work has been done on either site, LAUSD spokeswoman Barbara Jones said.

School district officials around the state say they intend to meet a 2018 deadline to request funds and a 2020 deadline to complete projects. They say the money will go to major, long-needed projects and are unconcerned schools have applied for only half of the $973 million available so far, or that $153 million of the $297 million given to schools has gone for energy planning by consultants and auditors.

“If there’s money out there, we’re going for it,” said Tom Wright, an energy manager for the San Diego Unified School District, which has received $9.5 million of its available $9.7 million.

Leftover money would return to the general fund for unrestricted projects of lawmakers’ choosing.

The proposition is also bringing in millions less each year than initially projected. Proponents told voters in 2012 that it would send up to $550 million annually to the Clean Jobs Energy Fund. But it brought in just $381 million in 2013, $279 million in 2014 and $313 million in 2015.

There’s no exact way to track how corporations reacted to the tax code change, but it’s likely most companies adapted to minimize their tax burdens, nonpartisan legislative analyst Ken Kapphahn said. He also said the change applies to a very small number of corporations.

Neither the Energy Commission nor Tim Rainey, director of the California Workforce Investment Board, could identify the types of jobs created by Proposition 39 projects. They said that information would be available when the oversight board meets for the first time, likely in October or November.

Schools often prioritize lighting projects because they work well with the Energy Commission’s formula, which requires schools to save at least $1.05 on energy costs for every dollar spent.

Douglas Johnson, a state government expert at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, said the slow results show the oversight board should have gotten involved much earlier.

“They should have been overseeing all stages of this project, not just waiting until the money’s gone and seeing where it went,” Johnson said.