'Hogan says he believes new concepts can change Baltimore’s destiny'
When Wall Street global corporate Bush/Hopkins neo-conservative Larry Hogan came to office his eyes were on Baltimore---he will FIX BALTIMORE he says. What Hogan means is his administration is set to bring Baltimore into bankruptcy, sending a city manager to do with Baltimore what was done with Detroit----Wall Street calls Detroit the MODEL for bringing US cities into bankruptcy----DOING THE BAINS CAPITAL GUTTING OF ALL ASSETS FROM A HEALTHY BUSINESS AND THEN SENDING IT TO BANKRUPTCY----only now it is our US cities. Detroit no doubt had the same Wall Street Development Corporation bound to its city hall as Baltimore has to Baltimore City Hall directing all city revenue these few decades to build a few global corporations and sending billions of dollars in fraud to Wall Street. Hogan knows all this----he knows the US Treasury and state municipal bond market has been subprimed and targeted for collapse----he knows Maryland and especially Baltimore is soaked in subprimed bond leverage----he knows the Maryland and Baltimore pensions are again invested in the worst of the bond markets as Maryland was ranked at the top for pension loses from bad investments in 2008-----he knows an economic crash is coming and Baltimore is loaded to the gills with global corporate subsidy, global corporate tax breaks, and as the current Baltimore City Hall leaves office----they are super-sizing this TIF debt with the largest awards ever just as the economic crash occurs. THIS IS ALL PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AND HOGAN WOULD ATTACK THAT AS A FIX FOR BALTIMORE----but it is not the citizens of Maryland or Baltimore for whom Hogan works----he will BAINS CAPITAL BAltimore into bankruptcy to send city assets to the same institutions moving all city revenue to the top. His first move in that direction was this GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS footprint that is Freddie Gray's community.
THIS IS WHY AN ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATE IS SO IMPORTANT====THEY NEED A WALL STREET PLAYER TO ADVANCE THESE GOALS IN US CITIES DESIGNATED INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES----THE WALL STREET PLAYERS-------DIXON, EMBRY, WARNOCK, PUGH, STOKES----
Gov. Larry Hogan Pledging A Better Future For Baltimore
September 18, 2015 10:31 PM By Rick Ritter
Filed Under: governor, Larry Hogan, Maryland, Op-ed
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
2BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Pledging to fix what’s broken. In an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun, Governor Larry Hogan vows to make Baltimore more livable and to solve the problems plaguing the city.
Rick Ritter has more on the governor’s new plan of action.
Governor Hogan says we need to make Baltimore the economic engine of Maryland, and that over the next few months, his administration will start delivering real change.
Bustling, amazing and beautiful. That’s how Governor Larry Hogan describes Charm City in an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun that’s grabbing the attention of many.
“I found it to be an incredible love letter to Baltimore City,” said Carl Stokes, Baltimore City Council.
A letter keying in on the good and bad of Baltimore.
“In order for all of Maryland to thrive, all the cities need to thrive,” said Jayce Flickinger., general manager, Parts and Labor.
Hogan reflected on the Freddie Gray aftermath, saying: “During the riots in April and during my campaign for governor last year, I toured every corner of Baltimore, from Sandtown-Winchester to Fells Point. Everywhere I went, I met people who talked with me about their optimism for a better future for the great city they love.”
“We’re going to make sure that we get Baltimore back on track and make sure our neighborhoods are safe again,” Hogan said in the aftermath of the riots.
The governor immediately referred to vacant areas as part of the crime wave, saying: “Fixing what’s broken in Baltimore starts with the sea of abandoned, dilapidated buildings that infect entire neighborhoods. These empty, decaying structures are a breeding ground for crime.”
Jayce Flickinger is the general manager for Parts and Labor butchery and restaurant in Remington–hat was recently an old, vacant tire shop is now a success story Hogan hopes to mirror.
“Once you see it happen and you’re a part of it, you can’t help but not notice what’s not being done to certain buildings in certain areas and the potential those buildings hold,” said Flickinger.
Hogan also reaffirmed his commitment to increasing the number of jobs.
“He understands the importance of the vitality of Baltimore, and I stand as always as a ready partner to make that happen,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
Implying without a strong Baltimore, the state as a whole is weaker.
Hogan says he believes new concepts can change Baltimore’s destiny.
__________________________________________
'The debt-cutting plan is "an ideal model" for rebuilding a broken city, the judge said. It includes $1.7 billion to tear down burned-out homes, buy new police cars and fire trucks, and bankroll new computer systems. Detroit'
Demolish for global corporate campuses/factories-----privatize police and fire to global corporate security/fire ----install technology infrastructure for global corporations/markets. The original deal placed in the media made it sound like pensions would be protected but right after the settlement-----the pension protections disappeared. For citizens in Baltimore ----lots of opportunities for volunteers, VISTAS, interns, startups-----
Tying pensions to the Detroit Art Museum assets----REALLY?????
NOW IS THE TIME TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY------wait, a democracy does not allow martial law to suspend democracy simply for massive Wall Street looting of a city.
Judge: 'Now is time to restore democracy to the people'
Robert Snell, Christine Ferretti, Steve Pardo, Chad Livengood, The Detroit News 10:52 p.m. EST November 7, 2014(Photo: Charles V. Tines,The Detroit News)
In a bankruptcy case about numbers — $18 billion in debt, 32,000 pensioners, 35,000 broken streetlights — a judge needed 75 seconds Friday to approve a plan to undo decades of financial decline.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes went on to deliver a nearly two-hour speech sprinkled with sympathy for residents of the insolvent city and praise for a plan to shed $7 billion in debt, shield the city's art collection and minimize cuts to retiree pensions.
Rhodes read from a 50-page script that laid out the legal reasons why Detroit's bankruptcy plan was feasible, fair and in the best interest of creditors, and spoke directly to residents angry about losing money and elected representation.
Anger can be good, the judge said, vowing democratic rule soon would be returned to Detroit.
"I urge you now not to forget your anger," Rhodes said. "Your enduring and collective memory of what happened here, and your memory of your anger about it, will be exactly what will prevent this from ever happening again. It must never happen again."
Rhodes' ruling capped Detroit's nearly 16-month trip through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history that began with fear and anger, and ended with retirees and other major creditors agreeing to sacrifices that spared the city and region a lengthy legal battle.
His decision drew widespread praise from both public and private sector leaders, from automakers to foundations who committed millions to help settle the bankruptcy. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr called the ruling a "legal tour de force."
Rhodes spoke about "inhumane" city services and the loss of democracy. Mayor Mike Duggan was listening, sitting in the front row next to City Council President Brenda Jones, who sat behind Orr, the architect of the plan to revitalize an iconic industrial town that became the biggest American city to go broke.
"This will cause real hardship and, in some cases, it is severe," Rhodes said. "This bankruptcy, however, like most, is about shared sacrifice that is necessary because the city is insolvent and desperately needs to fix its future."
The judge's emotional appeal to Detroit's nearly 680,000 residents came with a blunt warning to elected city leaders not to waste the opportunity.
"We give the city back with the fresh start and second chance the city needs," Rhodes said.
The judge concluded Detroit's plan for offloading decades of accumulated debt was fair, feasible and in the best interests of creditors, particularly residents who endure an inferior level of city services.
"Detroit's inability to provide adequate municipal service runs deep and has for years," Rhodes said. "It's inhumane and intolerable and it must be fixed. This plan can fix these problems."
Rhodes acknowledged retirees and the suffering they will experience through reductions in their monthly pensions ranging from 4.5 percent to 20 percent.
For some residents, the anger remained.
"This whole thing is horrible," said retiree William Davis, who spent 34 years working in the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. "The money is coming from the backs of the retirees."
A pillar of Detroit's debt-cutting plan is the so-called "grand bargain," which will shield the Detroit Institute of Arts collection from creditors and soften pension cuts to city retirees.
The grand bargain required state legislation and includes $195 million from the state and $466 million from foundations, corporations and private donors.
Rhodes said the grand bargain "borders on the miraculous."
The grand bargain will pump the equivalent of $816 million into the city's pension funds over the next 20 years through contributions made by private foundations, state taxpayers and private donors to the DIA. SOON AFTER THIS CASE WAS SETTLED CITY PENSIONERS FOUND NONE OF THE ABOVE WOULD HAPPEN.
"No one could have foreseen this settlement when the city filed its case," Rhodes said.
The debt-cutting plan is "an ideal model" for rebuilding a broken city, the judge said. It includes $1.7 billion to tear down burned-out homes, buy new police cars and fire trucks, and bankroll new computer systems.
The approval pushes Detroit to the brink of exiting bankruptcy court in a decision that comes 15½ months after Gov. Rick Snyder approved a bankruptcy petition triggered by population loss, a dwindling tax base, corruption, mismanagement and financial problems.
Just down the hallway from Rhodes' courtroom, Snyder watched the judge's speech via a closed-circuit feed inside the private chambers of Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen. Rosen is the architect of the "grand bargain" settlement credited with helping speed Detroit through through bankruptcy.
The decision was watched closely by retirees, Wall Street banks and officials in struggling communities nationwide.
Rhodes called Detroit's bankruptcy plan "an ideal model for future municipal debt restructurings."
The judge said litigation surrounding whether the art could be sold or if the state could be on the hook for paying $3 billion in pension claims would be "long, complex and expensive."
Rhodes also rejected arguments made by a small group of holdout creditors that the city should sell pieces of its art collection or borrow against the value of the masterpieces housed in the Woodward Avenue museum to satisfy debts.
"To sell the DIA art would be to forfeit Detroit's future," Rhodes said.
"The city made the right decision."
He was impressed by testimony that the museum's art was held in a public trust and the donor restrictions prevented an art sale.
Rhodes also approved a slew of deals negotiated on the sidelines of the bankruptcy case with creditors including bondholders and bond insurers.
The city will remain under several layers of oversight to ensure Detroit does not slide back into insolvency. That oversight includes a nine-member financial review commission that includes two people from Detroit. THIS WILL BE LIKE BALTIMORE HANDING OUR SCHOOL BOARD TO MARYLAND EXCEPT NOW THE ENTIRE CITY ECONOMY WILL BE MANAGED.
That is a mistake, Rhodes said, and he urged Snyder to eliminate the two city positions, calling city input a potential conflict that could undermine the process.
<!--iframe-->After the ruling, Duggan defended the makeup of the commission.
Under the terms of the grand bargain, the state's $195 million contribution to the pension funds absolves the state of any legal liability to pay for Detroit's pensions under the state's constitution.
Rhodes signaled that the state's contribution was just enough to win his approval.
He called it "the lowest end of the range of reasonable settlements."
In a direct appeal to Snyder, the judge said the state has a "legal and moral obligation" to ensure municipal employee benefits in Michigan are adequately funded.
"If the state fails, history will judge that this court's approval of that settlement was a massive mistake," Rhodes said.
Snyder, who was re-elected Tuesday, said his administration has been examining the pension and retiree health care liabilities of other communities to try to avert future financial calamities that led to Detroit's bankruptcy.
"I take his comments very seriously and it was an amazing opinion," Snyder said at a news conference.
_________________________________________
The losses to Maryland pensions was great and it was revealed that the state pensions as with Baltimore pension unfunded liability was in the highest rankings of states. O'Malley did some CREATIVE manipulations to make these pensions seem to be addressed----but they were not. O'Malley sent pensions down to city/county level knowing that debt load would be too much but it did a good job making Baltimore seem even more debt-laden on top of bond debt and corporate subsidy/tax break debt-----
CREATING DEBT TO SEND BALTIMORE INTO BANKRUPTCY.
Keep in mind these state/city pensions were in the then safety of the bond market----and moved into the worst of subprime mortgage fraud investments in 2007---just as the economic crash from subprime mortgage fraud occurred. A Mayor of Baltimore would look to see where these pension funds are invested right now because we know a bond market that was safe in 2008 is the one being imploded with fraud in 2016. This is of course what a Governor Hogan and a Mayor Rawlings-Blake with Maryland Assembly, City Hall, Maryland State's Attorney have as a duty----protecting the state and city assets and citizens.
'had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry’s services.”'
Maryland
68.2% funded (31 U.S. rank)
$56.4 billion Pension obligations
$38.4 billion Total cash and investment holdings
Notes: For fiscal year 2011. Data for Washington, D.C., not available.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of Public Pensions
I posted only part of this article as it was too long and this is not a discussion about pension policy---it is a talk about saving Baltimore from bankruptcy and securing citizen assets as we build a Baltimore Public Bank. Everyone knew pensions were used as Wall Street fodder and absolutely nothing was done to bring back those losses and TODAY-----THESE SAME PENSION ARE AGAIN GOING TO BE USED AS FODDER----and Hogan and a city manager will say these pensions are too much of an unfunded liability.
For those citizens always against public pensions as costing taxpayers too much----most of the cost of pensions comes from misappropriation and fraud---had they been funded as required these few decades the gains from market would have worked to meet those pension obligations with no problems. Think as this coming decade of economic recession with lost jobs and then think if all that pension wealth disappears---who fuels the Baltimore local small business economy with consumption?
THERE WILL BE NONE WITH GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS/GLOBAL FACTORY INSTALLING NEXT DECADE IF ALL THESE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE MASTER PLANS MOVE FORWARD.
A Mayor of Baltimore would shout that the city did not have all that pension liability----it simply needed to recover the fraud. This represents billions of dollars to the Baltimore economy over time.
Wall Street’s Looting Of Pension Funds
Educate! Corruption, Finance and Economy, Pensions
By Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com
April 23rd, 2014
In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.
Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”
Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island’s 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo’s ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.
What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo’s “tool kit” wasn’t just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation’s Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.
Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.
The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
_______________________________________
Wall Street and the FED times these massive economic crashes during a Presidential/Mayoral election season just as the General elections start-----late summer early fall----so what was a primary filled with all kinds of talking points for citizens and their issues becomes centered on how that Republican, Democrat, or Independent will rescue the national or local economy from the coming economic crash. It happened at the end of Clinton's terms----it happened at the end of Bush's terms----and now it will happen at the end of Obama's terms. It is deliberate and as we saw under Bush and we are seeing today under Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall------Bush did his emergency fix for the Wall Street banks while Obama came to office PRETENDING he was hamstrung to these same issues. So, as Rawlings-Blake and many outgoing city council pass huge amounts of development legislation much of it tied with creating more UNNECESSARY DEBT directed at corporate campuses----all this will supposedly have a BERNIE SANDERS/CINDY WALSH coming into office hamstrung and only able to continue with the 'bankruptcy' or privatized infrastructure scheme devised in the coming months.
Wall Street has the economic crash in early fall------Hogan comes in and declares Baltimore insolvent sending a city manager through late fall-----and Baltimore comes out of bankruptcy a few months AS A NEW MAYOR OF BALTIMORE TAKES OFFICE. This is the history of Wall Street use of bubbles to control all public policy since Clinton and I bet it plays out close to what I describe above.
A MAYOR OF BALTIMORE CAN STOP THIS BANKRUPTCY BY IDENTIFYING ALL THE REVENUE STRUCTURES THAT HAVE BEEN RE-APPROPRIATED AWAY FROM GOVERNMENT COFFERS AND BRING THEM BACK
The last source of revenue due the City of Baltimore but never making it to government coffers is all the Federal and state funding being directed to CORPORATE NON-PROFITS for everything from affordable housing to health care. This revenue source is from where much of these few decades of fraud occurred but the City accounts should have these funds coming to non-profits as ASSETS-----want to bet that a bankruptcy proceeding wanting to move Baltimore into bankruptcy would not SEE THOSE FUNDS GOING TO NON-PROFITS----AND THOSE REVENUE ASSETS ARE HUGE.
These are the funds that would be going into our Baltimore Public Bank as assets to loan to citizens in each community. Bringing all those Federal and state funds to government coffers makes the city look far more solvent ------and it is where we start in REMOVING ALL CORPORATIONS FROM EVERY BALTIMORE CITY AGENCY AND BUILDING EACH AGENCY OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY.
You can bet Governor Hogan and his city manager will not SEE those assets because he has no intention of bringing those funds back to government coffers ---he intended to SUPER-SIZE THE NON-PROFIT ECONOMY----OR WHAT I CALL---THE NON-ECONOMY.
I have spoken for years of BLOCK GRANTING----it is a very Republican economic approach that does just that----creates a huge network of non-profits doing what city employees and private small businesses should be doing. That Federal and state funding comes as BLOCK GRANTS----and is filled with pay-to-play. This is what low-income citizens in BAltimore feel they have to vote----for the politician sending the most grants as jobs in non-profits.
THE SAME BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT NON-PROFITS GETTING ALL THESE FUNDS AND CITIZENS WILL TELL YOU NOTHING EVER HAPPENS----ALL THESE FUNDS CAN APPEAR TO NOT BE PART OF BALTIMORE CITY ASSETS BECAUSE THEY GO DIRECTLY TO THESES NON-PROFITS.
Baltimore Received $1.8 Billion from Obama’s Stimulus Law
City burned despite ‘massive investment’ implemented by president
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
May 4, 2015 5:00 am
The city of Baltimore received over $1.8 billion from President Barack Obama’s stimulus law, including $467.1 million to invest in education and $26.5 million for crime prevention.
President Obama claimed last Tuesday that if the Republican-controlled Congress would implement his policies to make “massive investments in urban communities,” they could “make a difference right now” in the city, currently in upheaval following the death of Freddie Gray.
However, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found that the Obama administration and Democratically-controlled Congress did make a “massive” investment into Baltimore, appropriating $1,831,768,487 though the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), commonly known as the stimulus.
According to Recovery.gov, one of Baltimore’s central ZIP codes, 21201, received the most stimulus funding in the city, a total of $837,955,866. The amount included funding for 276 awards, and the website reports that the spending had created 290 jobs in the fourth quarter in 2013.
Of this amount, $467.1 million went to education; $206.1 million to the environment; $24 million to “family”; $16.1 million to infrastructure; $15.2 million to transportation; $11.9 million to housing; and $3.1 million to job training.
ZIP code 21202 received $425,170,937, including a $136 million grant to “improve teaching and learning for students most at risk of failing to meet State academic achievement standards.”
Twenty-nine other ZIP codes listed in Baltimore city received a total of $568,641,684.
The Free Beacon calculated the total amount of stimulus funds disbursed to all ZIP codes in Baltimore City, as reported on the stimulus website Recovery.gov. The analysis includes the totals of awards to prime recipients in Baltimore, plus sub-recipient awards to Baltimore organizations and companies that conducted stimulus projects located outside the city.
The projects included $26.5 million from the Justice Department (DOJ) to combat gang activity and provide community support for at-risk juveniles.
“The State of MD Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP) goals and objectives of this project are to create and retain jobs to bolster Maryland’s faltering economy, and make resources available to law enforcement and other public safety agencies to help protect Maryland citizens,” the project’s description states.
Among the listed goals are “to curb the growth of criminal gangs in Maryland, and to effectively dismantle existing gangs.”
Funding also went to “Operation Safe Kids,” which sought to “develop and implement an effective community-based supervision model for at-risk juveniles to minimize residential placements without compromising public safety.”
The project also included criminal justice reform, to “identify non-violent substance abusing offenders who may be amenable to treatment, and place them under community-based supervision with intensive drug treatment combined with strong judicial oversight and support.”
The stimulus also gave the city $26 million for the “Healthy Neighborhoods, Inc. Neighborhood Stabilization Program,” to “redevelop residential foreclosed, abandoned, or vacant properties in designated neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland.”
Roughly $9.5 million went towards homelessness prevention.
A total of $5,644,792 of Community Services Block Grants went to Baltimore meant to “promote the economic and social well-being of children, youth, families and communities.”
“The funding is used for activities that contribute to the reduction of poverty, revitalization of low-income communities, and empowerment of low-income families and individuals,” a description of the project said. “These activities include, but are not limited to; emergency services, shelter programs and services, job training and job readiness training, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, nutrition programs, as well as medical assistance programs and services.”
“Working through a network of non-profit community action agencies and other neighborhood-based organizations in rural and urban areas, this wide range of programs and services is implemented to help clients become fully self-sufficient,” it said.
Another $548,100 project, which reported creating 15.41 jobs during its most productive quarter, was devoted to the “preservation of jobs that are threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn.”
Baltimore’s unemployment rate currently is 8.4 percent.
Following the violent riots on Monday evening that resulted in over 235 arrests, 15 torched buildings, 144 destroyed vehicles, and 20 injured police officers, President Obama spoke on the issue.
Obama called for more early education programs, criminal justice reform, and “making investments so that [youth] can get the training they need to find jobs.”
“There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that,” he said.
The president then proceeded to blame the Republican-controlled Congress for not implementing his agenda.
“I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” Obama said.
The left-wing comedian Jon Stewart and the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos made a similar argument on the Daily Show on Tuesday.
“You just wonder sometimes if we’re spending a trillion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t build a little taste down Baltimore way,” Stewart said. “Like is that what’s really going on.”
“This is what drives me crazy, you just got applause when you said that line,” Stephanopoulos said. “Any single politician in the country gets applause when they say that line. Yet it doesn’t happen.”
Peter Wehner of Commentary Magazine pointed out that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) only invested $885 million in education projects in Afghanistan over a ten-year period, less than the amount that Baltimore received from the stimulus law.
_____________________________________________
Here you have the end of term transition where the mayor and city council through PORK to global corporations KNOWING Baltimore has been compromised financially and with a coming economic crash everyone knows will be deep. This is public malfeasance------politicians cannot keep placing the city and citizens into deeper and deeper debt for decades all under the guise of creating 26,000 jobs when Baltimore could have created hundreds of thousands of jobs rebuilding a small business economy.
As we see the city council and candidates for Mayor of Baltimore fighting not over NOT GIVING THIS TIF-----but what kinds of PROGRESSIVE POSING points will be placed in the legislation to make it seem these pols are holding power accountable.
CARL STOKES IS THE WORST OF GLOBAL CORPORATE DEVELOPERMENT AND WALL STREET PLAYER WHO SPENT THE ENTIRE CAMPAIGN FOR MAYOR BUILDING THE IDEA HE IS THE OUTSIDER.
Of course Baltimore media never writes in ways that show these histories----they simply allow these establishment pols built a phoney campaign platform. This TIF will be used by the bankruptcy city manager as debt moving the city towards insolvency-----and that is the issue around this TIF as with all the others. None of these corporate subsidy and corporate tax breaks are needed to build Baltimore's economy----we could have had a small business economy decades ago.
Where are Baltimore's values in the Port Covington TIF?
J. Peter Sabonis
Op-ed: Where are Baltimore's values in the Port Covington TIF?The proposed Port Covington Tax Increment Financing (TIF) package for Under Armour's new headquarters may be the largest in Baltimore history, but let's not call it a "game changer," as did one city councilman and mayoral candidate.
The game is the still same: City officials continue to funnel public subsidies toward the pursuit of private profits by a few on the now much discredited assumption that somehow that will benefit the rest of us.
The requirement that a development project must only show it will not succeed "but for" the TIF is not law, but Board of Finance policy. This standard is not clearly related to the public good or values. Witness the fact that the city's largest three TIFS have funded a headquarters for the $29.1 billion Exelon Corporation in Harbor Point, an unneeded convention hotel, and now, presumably, Under Armour's corporate headquarters.
The countless people who watched angry Baltimore City residents atop police cars last spring must be stunned to hear that within 12 months, the city's response would include closed-door consideration of a half-billion dollar subsidy for yet another corporate headquarters.
Before we embarrass ourselves nationally and further deteriorate the public trust in the city's leadership, let's enact a value-based "fair development" framework, where public subsidies are assessed under basic human rights principles that speak to both common sense and moral imperatives. In 2013, Baltimore-based human rights group the United Workers proposed as much demanding: equity, universality, participation, transparency and accountability.
Equity means development policies must enable equality of opportunity and outcome by prioritizing populations and communities with the greatest need, which in our city means communities of color. This requires asking: Will 51 percent of the construction jobs relative to Port Covington go to city residents? Will the entertainment and hospitality jobs on the Under Armour campus pay living wages or, at least, allow the unfettered freedom to organize? Will all these jobs prioritize Baltimore citizens, and will recruitment maximize opportunities for workers of color?
Historically, subsidized economic development projects do not include a "work with dignity" analysis. But the idea that any job is sufficient, regardless of pay and benefits, serves to only deepen the structural inequality and structural racism we must overcome.
Universality means that the city's goals in development shall be to increase every resident's ability to access the resources required to meet their fundamental needs, and no single development goal shall be pursued to the detriment of other fundamental needs.
How many of the 750 homes for sale or rent in Port Covington will be available to those with incomes less than $25,500 annually — the sector with the greatest need in the metro area? Forget the city's toothless inclusionary housing ordinance; it has produced roughly 30 affordable units in eight years.
Will increasing property values radiate from the Port Covington campus and lead to the involuntary displacement of renters? Will the property tax circuit breaker and homestead tax credit provide enough protection for homeowners on fixed incomes?
Port Covington property taxes will be earmarked for TIF bonds for years to come. They will not go to pay for city services. The TIF zone exists in isolation, the offspring of a municipal parent, but one that doesn't contribute directly to the urban household. Only when the bonds are retired in 30 years, does Port Covington start pulling its weight.
During those 30 years, the borrowing needs of others sectors and communities will likely go unabated: Neighborhoods in need of school rehabilitation, parks and recreation maintenance, fire station repair, vacant housing demolition and affordable housing development.
Do TIF bonds hurt city bond ratings? This may seem esoteric to most, but it is critical to us at Baltimore Housing Roundtable, as we ask city officials to devote annually $20 million in bonds for permanently affordable housing and another $20 million for community jobs deconstructing vacants and urban greening. Initial reports show the first round of Port Covington bonds will eclipse our entire "20-20" annual ask, totaling $49 million in the first year of what will be many years of public debt earmarked for a corporate headquarters.
The multi-step TIF process precludes fair development's requirement of transparency and informed public participation necessary to explore the above questions and establish human rights based accountability standards. TIF details remain out of public view until the final stage when the project emerges to the City Council after being crafted by the Baltimore Development Corporation, Board of Finance, bond counsel and financial advisers. This journey is hardly transparent, and leaves end-stage legislators ill equipped to interrogate intelligently. According to The Sun, the city already has declined to share the full estimate of the costs associated with the proposal, including interest payments and issuance costs, which are likely to add millions.
If we are going to treat a few as more important than the vast majority of our residents, isn't it time we use a human rights based development framework to consider their requests, and to envision our own?
_________________________________________
Baltimore Development Corporation has killed almost every small business and local economy in the city these few decades----if not by simply allowing communities deemed to become global corporate campuses die on the vine taking those economies with them-----then outsourcing government tasks sending most contracts to national/global corporations slowly killing local contracting businesses by making them subcontractors to subcontractors having to bid lower and lower to get that job. This is not building second stage companies----it is choking them.
Then there is the most frequent in Baltimore and surrounding areas-----the global corporation as branch office made to look like that second stage company when it is under the umbrella of that monopoly. When the goal is to send Baltimore into bankruptcy----with an economic crash slated to take out community banks and credit unions-----leaving Wall Street and global corporations as the sole source of economic development-----HOW WOULD A MAYOR OF BALTIMORE BUILD A SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMY? The answer is they would not and yet---all of the Wall Street Baltimore Development candidates are making small business growth central to their platform. Raise your hand if you know a Mayor PUGH, EMBRY, DIXON, WARNOCK, STOKES----would allow Governor Hogan and his city manager bring Baltimore into bankruptcy and WORK WITH HOGAN as all these candidates say at forums----meaning global corporate and Wall Street control of development.
IT IS CRITICAL FOR CITIZENS IN BALTIMORE WANTING TO STOP THIS GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS TAKEOVER AND WHO WANT REAL SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMIES AS THE ONLY WAY TOWARDS A STABLE, HEALTHY, QUALITY OF LIFE ECONOMY FOR BALTIMORE------DO NOT ALLOW WALL STREET TAKE BALTIMORE OR ANY US CITY INTO BANKRUPTCY.
If O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake had created that Maryland and Baltimore Public Bank in 2009 while knowing Wall Street was systemically criminal all state and city assets would be safe from this coming economic crash and bond market fraud. It must happen in 2017-----as the first step towards a recovering Baltimore economy!
Growing Strong Local Economies, How Cities Can Support Second Stage Companies
December 7, 2009by Katie McConnell
Slowly building momentum over the past twenty years, economic development policies in cities are shifting from the primary goal of attracting new companies to also focusing on growing local assets. This economic development concept, commonly referred to as economic gardening, strives to create an entrepreneurial culture where local businesses can begin, grow, and prosper. An important part of an economic gardening strategy is supporting second-stage companies.
Second stage companies are commonly defined as companies with 10 – 99 employees and/or $750 ,000 to $50 million in receipts and are in the revenue generating phase. These businesses are no longer in need of the traditional small business services offered by cities, like business plan writing, but instead need opportunities like networking with other second stage companies that share similar issues and challenges.
For cities, supporting these companies can be very important to their local economies. As these businesses grow, they can create more jobs and add to a culture of entrepreneurship. Establishing strong local ties also increases the likelihood that a company will not relocate to another city.
Penny Lewandowski, Director of Entrepreneurship Development at the Edward Lowe Foundation – which is dedicated to supporting economic and community growth through entrepreneurship – explained that there are efforts local elected leaders can take to encourage and support second-stage companies. “Think of the resources and efforts your city invests to attract outside businesses, and then ask what efforts you are doing to support the needs of businesses that are already in your area. Cities need to make sure they are focusing on both sides of the equation. ”
According to Ms. Lewandowski, local leaders have the unique ability to help create a culture of entrepreneurship by championing second-stage companies and sharing success stories. In most cities, ribbon cutting happens when a new business opens, what is your city doing to celebrate the successes of locally grown businesses that are prospering?
In addition, Ms. Lewandowski stressed that cities need to make sure city policies support their local businesses and do not hinder growth. For example, a city could form a task force with the local chamber of commerce and other stakeholders like regional technology councils to better understand the needs of local businesses and make sure policies are supportive of an entrepreneurial culture.
As cities strive to support local businesses, it is important to first have an understanding of your local industry make-up. To help, The Edward Lowe Foundation has created a tool to help communities access in-depth information about their business communities. The free tool allows users to access data about businesses and jobs at the state, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and county levels. To learn more visit www.YourEconomy.org. To learn more about the Edward Lowe Foundation and second-stage companies, visit www.edwardlowefoundation.com.
When Wall Street global corporate Bush/Hopkins neo-conservative Larry Hogan came to office his eyes were on Baltimore---he will FIX BALTIMORE he says. What Hogan means is his administration is set to bring Baltimore into bankruptcy, sending a city manager to do with Baltimore what was done with Detroit----Wall Street calls Detroit the MODEL for bringing US cities into bankruptcy----DOING THE BAINS CAPITAL GUTTING OF ALL ASSETS FROM A HEALTHY BUSINESS AND THEN SENDING IT TO BANKRUPTCY----only now it is our US cities. Detroit no doubt had the same Wall Street Development Corporation bound to its city hall as Baltimore has to Baltimore City Hall directing all city revenue these few decades to build a few global corporations and sending billions of dollars in fraud to Wall Street. Hogan knows all this----he knows the US Treasury and state municipal bond market has been subprimed and targeted for collapse----he knows Maryland and especially Baltimore is soaked in subprimed bond leverage----he knows the Maryland and Baltimore pensions are again invested in the worst of the bond markets as Maryland was ranked at the top for pension loses from bad investments in 2008-----he knows an economic crash is coming and Baltimore is loaded to the gills with global corporate subsidy, global corporate tax breaks, and as the current Baltimore City Hall leaves office----they are super-sizing this TIF debt with the largest awards ever just as the economic crash occurs. THIS IS ALL PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AND HOGAN WOULD ATTACK THAT AS A FIX FOR BALTIMORE----but it is not the citizens of Maryland or Baltimore for whom Hogan works----he will BAINS CAPITAL BAltimore into bankruptcy to send city assets to the same institutions moving all city revenue to the top. His first move in that direction was this GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS footprint that is Freddie Gray's community.
THIS IS WHY AN ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATE IS SO IMPORTANT====THEY NEED A WALL STREET PLAYER TO ADVANCE THESE GOALS IN US CITIES DESIGNATED INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES----THE WALL STREET PLAYERS-------DIXON, EMBRY, WARNOCK, PUGH, STOKES----
Gov. Larry Hogan Pledging A Better Future For Baltimore
September 18, 2015 10:31 PM By Rick Ritter
Filed Under: governor, Larry Hogan, Maryland, Op-ed
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
2BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Pledging to fix what’s broken. In an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun, Governor Larry Hogan vows to make Baltimore more livable and to solve the problems plaguing the city.
Rick Ritter has more on the governor’s new plan of action.
Governor Hogan says we need to make Baltimore the economic engine of Maryland, and that over the next few months, his administration will start delivering real change.
Bustling, amazing and beautiful. That’s how Governor Larry Hogan describes Charm City in an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun that’s grabbing the attention of many.
“I found it to be an incredible love letter to Baltimore City,” said Carl Stokes, Baltimore City Council.
A letter keying in on the good and bad of Baltimore.
“In order for all of Maryland to thrive, all the cities need to thrive,” said Jayce Flickinger., general manager, Parts and Labor.
Hogan reflected on the Freddie Gray aftermath, saying: “During the riots in April and during my campaign for governor last year, I toured every corner of Baltimore, from Sandtown-Winchester to Fells Point. Everywhere I went, I met people who talked with me about their optimism for a better future for the great city they love.”
“We’re going to make sure that we get Baltimore back on track and make sure our neighborhoods are safe again,” Hogan said in the aftermath of the riots.
The governor immediately referred to vacant areas as part of the crime wave, saying: “Fixing what’s broken in Baltimore starts with the sea of abandoned, dilapidated buildings that infect entire neighborhoods. These empty, decaying structures are a breeding ground for crime.”
Jayce Flickinger is the general manager for Parts and Labor butchery and restaurant in Remington–hat was recently an old, vacant tire shop is now a success story Hogan hopes to mirror.
“Once you see it happen and you’re a part of it, you can’t help but not notice what’s not being done to certain buildings in certain areas and the potential those buildings hold,” said Flickinger.
Hogan also reaffirmed his commitment to increasing the number of jobs.
“He understands the importance of the vitality of Baltimore, and I stand as always as a ready partner to make that happen,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
Implying without a strong Baltimore, the state as a whole is weaker.
Hogan says he believes new concepts can change Baltimore’s destiny.
__________________________________________
'The debt-cutting plan is "an ideal model" for rebuilding a broken city, the judge said. It includes $1.7 billion to tear down burned-out homes, buy new police cars and fire trucks, and bankroll new computer systems. Detroit'
Demolish for global corporate campuses/factories-----privatize police and fire to global corporate security/fire ----install technology infrastructure for global corporations/markets. The original deal placed in the media made it sound like pensions would be protected but right after the settlement-----the pension protections disappeared. For citizens in Baltimore ----lots of opportunities for volunteers, VISTAS, interns, startups-----
Tying pensions to the Detroit Art Museum assets----REALLY?????
NOW IS THE TIME TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY------wait, a democracy does not allow martial law to suspend democracy simply for massive Wall Street looting of a city.
Judge: 'Now is time to restore democracy to the people'
Robert Snell, Christine Ferretti, Steve Pardo, Chad Livengood, The Detroit News 10:52 p.m. EST November 7, 2014(Photo: Charles V. Tines,The Detroit News)
In a bankruptcy case about numbers — $18 billion in debt, 32,000 pensioners, 35,000 broken streetlights — a judge needed 75 seconds Friday to approve a plan to undo decades of financial decline.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes went on to deliver a nearly two-hour speech sprinkled with sympathy for residents of the insolvent city and praise for a plan to shed $7 billion in debt, shield the city's art collection and minimize cuts to retiree pensions.
Rhodes read from a 50-page script that laid out the legal reasons why Detroit's bankruptcy plan was feasible, fair and in the best interest of creditors, and spoke directly to residents angry about losing money and elected representation.
Anger can be good, the judge said, vowing democratic rule soon would be returned to Detroit.
"I urge you now not to forget your anger," Rhodes said. "Your enduring and collective memory of what happened here, and your memory of your anger about it, will be exactly what will prevent this from ever happening again. It must never happen again."
Rhodes' ruling capped Detroit's nearly 16-month trip through the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history that began with fear and anger, and ended with retirees and other major creditors agreeing to sacrifices that spared the city and region a lengthy legal battle.
His decision drew widespread praise from both public and private sector leaders, from automakers to foundations who committed millions to help settle the bankruptcy. Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr called the ruling a "legal tour de force."
Rhodes spoke about "inhumane" city services and the loss of democracy. Mayor Mike Duggan was listening, sitting in the front row next to City Council President Brenda Jones, who sat behind Orr, the architect of the plan to revitalize an iconic industrial town that became the biggest American city to go broke.
"This will cause real hardship and, in some cases, it is severe," Rhodes said. "This bankruptcy, however, like most, is about shared sacrifice that is necessary because the city is insolvent and desperately needs to fix its future."
The judge's emotional appeal to Detroit's nearly 680,000 residents came with a blunt warning to elected city leaders not to waste the opportunity.
"We give the city back with the fresh start and second chance the city needs," Rhodes said.
The judge concluded Detroit's plan for offloading decades of accumulated debt was fair, feasible and in the best interests of creditors, particularly residents who endure an inferior level of city services.
"Detroit's inability to provide adequate municipal service runs deep and has for years," Rhodes said. "It's inhumane and intolerable and it must be fixed. This plan can fix these problems."
Rhodes acknowledged retirees and the suffering they will experience through reductions in their monthly pensions ranging from 4.5 percent to 20 percent.
For some residents, the anger remained.
"This whole thing is horrible," said retiree William Davis, who spent 34 years working in the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. "The money is coming from the backs of the retirees."
A pillar of Detroit's debt-cutting plan is the so-called "grand bargain," which will shield the Detroit Institute of Arts collection from creditors and soften pension cuts to city retirees.
The grand bargain required state legislation and includes $195 million from the state and $466 million from foundations, corporations and private donors.
Rhodes said the grand bargain "borders on the miraculous."
The grand bargain will pump the equivalent of $816 million into the city's pension funds over the next 20 years through contributions made by private foundations, state taxpayers and private donors to the DIA. SOON AFTER THIS CASE WAS SETTLED CITY PENSIONERS FOUND NONE OF THE ABOVE WOULD HAPPEN.
"No one could have foreseen this settlement when the city filed its case," Rhodes said.
The debt-cutting plan is "an ideal model" for rebuilding a broken city, the judge said. It includes $1.7 billion to tear down burned-out homes, buy new police cars and fire trucks, and bankroll new computer systems.
The approval pushes Detroit to the brink of exiting bankruptcy court in a decision that comes 15½ months after Gov. Rick Snyder approved a bankruptcy petition triggered by population loss, a dwindling tax base, corruption, mismanagement and financial problems.
Just down the hallway from Rhodes' courtroom, Snyder watched the judge's speech via a closed-circuit feed inside the private chambers of Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen. Rosen is the architect of the "grand bargain" settlement credited with helping speed Detroit through through bankruptcy.
The decision was watched closely by retirees, Wall Street banks and officials in struggling communities nationwide.
Rhodes called Detroit's bankruptcy plan "an ideal model for future municipal debt restructurings."
The judge said litigation surrounding whether the art could be sold or if the state could be on the hook for paying $3 billion in pension claims would be "long, complex and expensive."
Rhodes also rejected arguments made by a small group of holdout creditors that the city should sell pieces of its art collection or borrow against the value of the masterpieces housed in the Woodward Avenue museum to satisfy debts.
"To sell the DIA art would be to forfeit Detroit's future," Rhodes said.
"The city made the right decision."
He was impressed by testimony that the museum's art was held in a public trust and the donor restrictions prevented an art sale.
Rhodes also approved a slew of deals negotiated on the sidelines of the bankruptcy case with creditors including bondholders and bond insurers.
The city will remain under several layers of oversight to ensure Detroit does not slide back into insolvency. That oversight includes a nine-member financial review commission that includes two people from Detroit. THIS WILL BE LIKE BALTIMORE HANDING OUR SCHOOL BOARD TO MARYLAND EXCEPT NOW THE ENTIRE CITY ECONOMY WILL BE MANAGED.
That is a mistake, Rhodes said, and he urged Snyder to eliminate the two city positions, calling city input a potential conflict that could undermine the process.
<!--iframe-->After the ruling, Duggan defended the makeup of the commission.
Under the terms of the grand bargain, the state's $195 million contribution to the pension funds absolves the state of any legal liability to pay for Detroit's pensions under the state's constitution.
Rhodes signaled that the state's contribution was just enough to win his approval.
He called it "the lowest end of the range of reasonable settlements."
In a direct appeal to Snyder, the judge said the state has a "legal and moral obligation" to ensure municipal employee benefits in Michigan are adequately funded.
"If the state fails, history will judge that this court's approval of that settlement was a massive mistake," Rhodes said.
Snyder, who was re-elected Tuesday, said his administration has been examining the pension and retiree health care liabilities of other communities to try to avert future financial calamities that led to Detroit's bankruptcy.
"I take his comments very seriously and it was an amazing opinion," Snyder said at a news conference.
_________________________________________
The losses to Maryland pensions was great and it was revealed that the state pensions as with Baltimore pension unfunded liability was in the highest rankings of states. O'Malley did some CREATIVE manipulations to make these pensions seem to be addressed----but they were not. O'Malley sent pensions down to city/county level knowing that debt load would be too much but it did a good job making Baltimore seem even more debt-laden on top of bond debt and corporate subsidy/tax break debt-----
CREATING DEBT TO SEND BALTIMORE INTO BANKRUPTCY.
Keep in mind these state/city pensions were in the then safety of the bond market----and moved into the worst of subprime mortgage fraud investments in 2007---just as the economic crash from subprime mortgage fraud occurred. A Mayor of Baltimore would look to see where these pension funds are invested right now because we know a bond market that was safe in 2008 is the one being imploded with fraud in 2016. This is of course what a Governor Hogan and a Mayor Rawlings-Blake with Maryland Assembly, City Hall, Maryland State's Attorney have as a duty----protecting the state and city assets and citizens.
'had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry’s services.”'
Maryland
68.2% funded (31 U.S. rank)
$56.4 billion Pension obligations
$38.4 billion Total cash and investment holdings
Notes: For fiscal year 2011. Data for Washington, D.C., not available.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of Public Pensions
I posted only part of this article as it was too long and this is not a discussion about pension policy---it is a talk about saving Baltimore from bankruptcy and securing citizen assets as we build a Baltimore Public Bank. Everyone knew pensions were used as Wall Street fodder and absolutely nothing was done to bring back those losses and TODAY-----THESE SAME PENSION ARE AGAIN GOING TO BE USED AS FODDER----and Hogan and a city manager will say these pensions are too much of an unfunded liability.
For those citizens always against public pensions as costing taxpayers too much----most of the cost of pensions comes from misappropriation and fraud---had they been funded as required these few decades the gains from market would have worked to meet those pension obligations with no problems. Think as this coming decade of economic recession with lost jobs and then think if all that pension wealth disappears---who fuels the Baltimore local small business economy with consumption?
THERE WILL BE NONE WITH GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS/GLOBAL FACTORY INSTALLING NEXT DECADE IF ALL THESE INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE MASTER PLANS MOVE FORWARD.
A Mayor of Baltimore would shout that the city did not have all that pension liability----it simply needed to recover the fraud. This represents billions of dollars to the Baltimore economy over time.
Wall Street’s Looting Of Pension Funds
Educate! Corruption, Finance and Economy, Pensions
By Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com
April 23rd, 2014
In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.
Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn’t even know how to react. “She’s Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street,” says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. “Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn’t know what the fuck she was talking about.”
Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island’s 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo’s ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.
What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo’s “tool kit” wasn’t just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation’s Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.
Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo’s strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb’s Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina’s Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 “Urban Innovator” of the year.
The state’s workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn’t know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of “proprietary” information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. “When I asked, I was basically hammered,” says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island’s nine-member State Investment Commission. “I couldn’t get any information about the actual costs.”
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
_______________________________________
Wall Street and the FED times these massive economic crashes during a Presidential/Mayoral election season just as the General elections start-----late summer early fall----so what was a primary filled with all kinds of talking points for citizens and their issues becomes centered on how that Republican, Democrat, or Independent will rescue the national or local economy from the coming economic crash. It happened at the end of Clinton's terms----it happened at the end of Bush's terms----and now it will happen at the end of Obama's terms. It is deliberate and as we saw under Bush and we are seeing today under Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall------Bush did his emergency fix for the Wall Street banks while Obama came to office PRETENDING he was hamstrung to these same issues. So, as Rawlings-Blake and many outgoing city council pass huge amounts of development legislation much of it tied with creating more UNNECESSARY DEBT directed at corporate campuses----all this will supposedly have a BERNIE SANDERS/CINDY WALSH coming into office hamstrung and only able to continue with the 'bankruptcy' or privatized infrastructure scheme devised in the coming months.
Wall Street has the economic crash in early fall------Hogan comes in and declares Baltimore insolvent sending a city manager through late fall-----and Baltimore comes out of bankruptcy a few months AS A NEW MAYOR OF BALTIMORE TAKES OFFICE. This is the history of Wall Street use of bubbles to control all public policy since Clinton and I bet it plays out close to what I describe above.
A MAYOR OF BALTIMORE CAN STOP THIS BANKRUPTCY BY IDENTIFYING ALL THE REVENUE STRUCTURES THAT HAVE BEEN RE-APPROPRIATED AWAY FROM GOVERNMENT COFFERS AND BRING THEM BACK
The last source of revenue due the City of Baltimore but never making it to government coffers is all the Federal and state funding being directed to CORPORATE NON-PROFITS for everything from affordable housing to health care. This revenue source is from where much of these few decades of fraud occurred but the City accounts should have these funds coming to non-profits as ASSETS-----want to bet that a bankruptcy proceeding wanting to move Baltimore into bankruptcy would not SEE THOSE FUNDS GOING TO NON-PROFITS----AND THOSE REVENUE ASSETS ARE HUGE.
These are the funds that would be going into our Baltimore Public Bank as assets to loan to citizens in each community. Bringing all those Federal and state funds to government coffers makes the city look far more solvent ------and it is where we start in REMOVING ALL CORPORATIONS FROM EVERY BALTIMORE CITY AGENCY AND BUILDING EACH AGENCY OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY.
You can bet Governor Hogan and his city manager will not SEE those assets because he has no intention of bringing those funds back to government coffers ---he intended to SUPER-SIZE THE NON-PROFIT ECONOMY----OR WHAT I CALL---THE NON-ECONOMY.
I have spoken for years of BLOCK GRANTING----it is a very Republican economic approach that does just that----creates a huge network of non-profits doing what city employees and private small businesses should be doing. That Federal and state funding comes as BLOCK GRANTS----and is filled with pay-to-play. This is what low-income citizens in BAltimore feel they have to vote----for the politician sending the most grants as jobs in non-profits.
THE SAME BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT NON-PROFITS GETTING ALL THESE FUNDS AND CITIZENS WILL TELL YOU NOTHING EVER HAPPENS----ALL THESE FUNDS CAN APPEAR TO NOT BE PART OF BALTIMORE CITY ASSETS BECAUSE THEY GO DIRECTLY TO THESES NON-PROFITS.
Baltimore Received $1.8 Billion from Obama’s Stimulus Law
City burned despite ‘massive investment’ implemented by president
BY: Elizabeth Harrington
May 4, 2015 5:00 am
The city of Baltimore received over $1.8 billion from President Barack Obama’s stimulus law, including $467.1 million to invest in education and $26.5 million for crime prevention.
President Obama claimed last Tuesday that if the Republican-controlled Congress would implement his policies to make “massive investments in urban communities,” they could “make a difference right now” in the city, currently in upheaval following the death of Freddie Gray.
However, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found that the Obama administration and Democratically-controlled Congress did make a “massive” investment into Baltimore, appropriating $1,831,768,487 though the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), commonly known as the stimulus.
According to Recovery.gov, one of Baltimore’s central ZIP codes, 21201, received the most stimulus funding in the city, a total of $837,955,866. The amount included funding for 276 awards, and the website reports that the spending had created 290 jobs in the fourth quarter in 2013.
Of this amount, $467.1 million went to education; $206.1 million to the environment; $24 million to “family”; $16.1 million to infrastructure; $15.2 million to transportation; $11.9 million to housing; and $3.1 million to job training.
ZIP code 21202 received $425,170,937, including a $136 million grant to “improve teaching and learning for students most at risk of failing to meet State academic achievement standards.”
Twenty-nine other ZIP codes listed in Baltimore city received a total of $568,641,684.
The Free Beacon calculated the total amount of stimulus funds disbursed to all ZIP codes in Baltimore City, as reported on the stimulus website Recovery.gov. The analysis includes the totals of awards to prime recipients in Baltimore, plus sub-recipient awards to Baltimore organizations and companies that conducted stimulus projects located outside the city.
The projects included $26.5 million from the Justice Department (DOJ) to combat gang activity and provide community support for at-risk juveniles.
“The State of MD Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention (GOCCP) goals and objectives of this project are to create and retain jobs to bolster Maryland’s faltering economy, and make resources available to law enforcement and other public safety agencies to help protect Maryland citizens,” the project’s description states.
Among the listed goals are “to curb the growth of criminal gangs in Maryland, and to effectively dismantle existing gangs.”
Funding also went to “Operation Safe Kids,” which sought to “develop and implement an effective community-based supervision model for at-risk juveniles to minimize residential placements without compromising public safety.”
The project also included criminal justice reform, to “identify non-violent substance abusing offenders who may be amenable to treatment, and place them under community-based supervision with intensive drug treatment combined with strong judicial oversight and support.”
The stimulus also gave the city $26 million for the “Healthy Neighborhoods, Inc. Neighborhood Stabilization Program,” to “redevelop residential foreclosed, abandoned, or vacant properties in designated neighborhoods in Baltimore, Maryland.”
Roughly $9.5 million went towards homelessness prevention.
A total of $5,644,792 of Community Services Block Grants went to Baltimore meant to “promote the economic and social well-being of children, youth, families and communities.”
“The funding is used for activities that contribute to the reduction of poverty, revitalization of low-income communities, and empowerment of low-income families and individuals,” a description of the project said. “These activities include, but are not limited to; emergency services, shelter programs and services, job training and job readiness training, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, nutrition programs, as well as medical assistance programs and services.”
“Working through a network of non-profit community action agencies and other neighborhood-based organizations in rural and urban areas, this wide range of programs and services is implemented to help clients become fully self-sufficient,” it said.
Another $548,100 project, which reported creating 15.41 jobs during its most productive quarter, was devoted to the “preservation of jobs that are threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn.”
Baltimore’s unemployment rate currently is 8.4 percent.
Following the violent riots on Monday evening that resulted in over 235 arrests, 15 torched buildings, 144 destroyed vehicles, and 20 injured police officers, President Obama spoke on the issue.
Obama called for more early education programs, criminal justice reform, and “making investments so that [youth] can get the training they need to find jobs.”
“There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that,” he said.
The president then proceeded to blame the Republican-controlled Congress for not implementing his agenda.
“I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” Obama said.
The left-wing comedian Jon Stewart and the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos made a similar argument on the Daily Show on Tuesday.
“You just wonder sometimes if we’re spending a trillion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan’s schools, like, we can’t build a little taste down Baltimore way,” Stewart said. “Like is that what’s really going on.”
“This is what drives me crazy, you just got applause when you said that line,” Stephanopoulos said. “Any single politician in the country gets applause when they say that line. Yet it doesn’t happen.”
Peter Wehner of Commentary Magazine pointed out that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) only invested $885 million in education projects in Afghanistan over a ten-year period, less than the amount that Baltimore received from the stimulus law.
_____________________________________________
Here you have the end of term transition where the mayor and city council through PORK to global corporations KNOWING Baltimore has been compromised financially and with a coming economic crash everyone knows will be deep. This is public malfeasance------politicians cannot keep placing the city and citizens into deeper and deeper debt for decades all under the guise of creating 26,000 jobs when Baltimore could have created hundreds of thousands of jobs rebuilding a small business economy.
As we see the city council and candidates for Mayor of Baltimore fighting not over NOT GIVING THIS TIF-----but what kinds of PROGRESSIVE POSING points will be placed in the legislation to make it seem these pols are holding power accountable.
CARL STOKES IS THE WORST OF GLOBAL CORPORATE DEVELOPERMENT AND WALL STREET PLAYER WHO SPENT THE ENTIRE CAMPAIGN FOR MAYOR BUILDING THE IDEA HE IS THE OUTSIDER.
Of course Baltimore media never writes in ways that show these histories----they simply allow these establishment pols built a phoney campaign platform. This TIF will be used by the bankruptcy city manager as debt moving the city towards insolvency-----and that is the issue around this TIF as with all the others. None of these corporate subsidy and corporate tax breaks are needed to build Baltimore's economy----we could have had a small business economy decades ago.
Where are Baltimore's values in the Port Covington TIF?
J. Peter Sabonis
Op-ed: Where are Baltimore's values in the Port Covington TIF?The proposed Port Covington Tax Increment Financing (TIF) package for Under Armour's new headquarters may be the largest in Baltimore history, but let's not call it a "game changer," as did one city councilman and mayoral candidate.
The game is the still same: City officials continue to funnel public subsidies toward the pursuit of private profits by a few on the now much discredited assumption that somehow that will benefit the rest of us.
The requirement that a development project must only show it will not succeed "but for" the TIF is not law, but Board of Finance policy. This standard is not clearly related to the public good or values. Witness the fact that the city's largest three TIFS have funded a headquarters for the $29.1 billion Exelon Corporation in Harbor Point, an unneeded convention hotel, and now, presumably, Under Armour's corporate headquarters.
The countless people who watched angry Baltimore City residents atop police cars last spring must be stunned to hear that within 12 months, the city's response would include closed-door consideration of a half-billion dollar subsidy for yet another corporate headquarters.
Before we embarrass ourselves nationally and further deteriorate the public trust in the city's leadership, let's enact a value-based "fair development" framework, where public subsidies are assessed under basic human rights principles that speak to both common sense and moral imperatives. In 2013, Baltimore-based human rights group the United Workers proposed as much demanding: equity, universality, participation, transparency and accountability.
Equity means development policies must enable equality of opportunity and outcome by prioritizing populations and communities with the greatest need, which in our city means communities of color. This requires asking: Will 51 percent of the construction jobs relative to Port Covington go to city residents? Will the entertainment and hospitality jobs on the Under Armour campus pay living wages or, at least, allow the unfettered freedom to organize? Will all these jobs prioritize Baltimore citizens, and will recruitment maximize opportunities for workers of color?
Historically, subsidized economic development projects do not include a "work with dignity" analysis. But the idea that any job is sufficient, regardless of pay and benefits, serves to only deepen the structural inequality and structural racism we must overcome.
Universality means that the city's goals in development shall be to increase every resident's ability to access the resources required to meet their fundamental needs, and no single development goal shall be pursued to the detriment of other fundamental needs.
How many of the 750 homes for sale or rent in Port Covington will be available to those with incomes less than $25,500 annually — the sector with the greatest need in the metro area? Forget the city's toothless inclusionary housing ordinance; it has produced roughly 30 affordable units in eight years.
Will increasing property values radiate from the Port Covington campus and lead to the involuntary displacement of renters? Will the property tax circuit breaker and homestead tax credit provide enough protection for homeowners on fixed incomes?
Port Covington property taxes will be earmarked for TIF bonds for years to come. They will not go to pay for city services. The TIF zone exists in isolation, the offspring of a municipal parent, but one that doesn't contribute directly to the urban household. Only when the bonds are retired in 30 years, does Port Covington start pulling its weight.
During those 30 years, the borrowing needs of others sectors and communities will likely go unabated: Neighborhoods in need of school rehabilitation, parks and recreation maintenance, fire station repair, vacant housing demolition and affordable housing development.
Do TIF bonds hurt city bond ratings? This may seem esoteric to most, but it is critical to us at Baltimore Housing Roundtable, as we ask city officials to devote annually $20 million in bonds for permanently affordable housing and another $20 million for community jobs deconstructing vacants and urban greening. Initial reports show the first round of Port Covington bonds will eclipse our entire "20-20" annual ask, totaling $49 million in the first year of what will be many years of public debt earmarked for a corporate headquarters.
The multi-step TIF process precludes fair development's requirement of transparency and informed public participation necessary to explore the above questions and establish human rights based accountability standards. TIF details remain out of public view until the final stage when the project emerges to the City Council after being crafted by the Baltimore Development Corporation, Board of Finance, bond counsel and financial advisers. This journey is hardly transparent, and leaves end-stage legislators ill equipped to interrogate intelligently. According to The Sun, the city already has declined to share the full estimate of the costs associated with the proposal, including interest payments and issuance costs, which are likely to add millions.
If we are going to treat a few as more important than the vast majority of our residents, isn't it time we use a human rights based development framework to consider their requests, and to envision our own?
_________________________________________
Baltimore Development Corporation has killed almost every small business and local economy in the city these few decades----if not by simply allowing communities deemed to become global corporate campuses die on the vine taking those economies with them-----then outsourcing government tasks sending most contracts to national/global corporations slowly killing local contracting businesses by making them subcontractors to subcontractors having to bid lower and lower to get that job. This is not building second stage companies----it is choking them.
Then there is the most frequent in Baltimore and surrounding areas-----the global corporation as branch office made to look like that second stage company when it is under the umbrella of that monopoly. When the goal is to send Baltimore into bankruptcy----with an economic crash slated to take out community banks and credit unions-----leaving Wall Street and global corporations as the sole source of economic development-----HOW WOULD A MAYOR OF BALTIMORE BUILD A SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMY? The answer is they would not and yet---all of the Wall Street Baltimore Development candidates are making small business growth central to their platform. Raise your hand if you know a Mayor PUGH, EMBRY, DIXON, WARNOCK, STOKES----would allow Governor Hogan and his city manager bring Baltimore into bankruptcy and WORK WITH HOGAN as all these candidates say at forums----meaning global corporate and Wall Street control of development.
IT IS CRITICAL FOR CITIZENS IN BALTIMORE WANTING TO STOP THIS GLOBAL CORPORATE CAMPUS TAKEOVER AND WHO WANT REAL SMALL BUSINESS ECONOMIES AS THE ONLY WAY TOWARDS A STABLE, HEALTHY, QUALITY OF LIFE ECONOMY FOR BALTIMORE------DO NOT ALLOW WALL STREET TAKE BALTIMORE OR ANY US CITY INTO BANKRUPTCY.
If O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake had created that Maryland and Baltimore Public Bank in 2009 while knowing Wall Street was systemically criminal all state and city assets would be safe from this coming economic crash and bond market fraud. It must happen in 2017-----as the first step towards a recovering Baltimore economy!
Growing Strong Local Economies, How Cities Can Support Second Stage Companies
December 7, 2009by Katie McConnell
Slowly building momentum over the past twenty years, economic development policies in cities are shifting from the primary goal of attracting new companies to also focusing on growing local assets. This economic development concept, commonly referred to as economic gardening, strives to create an entrepreneurial culture where local businesses can begin, grow, and prosper. An important part of an economic gardening strategy is supporting second-stage companies.
Second stage companies are commonly defined as companies with 10 – 99 employees and/or $750 ,000 to $50 million in receipts and are in the revenue generating phase. These businesses are no longer in need of the traditional small business services offered by cities, like business plan writing, but instead need opportunities like networking with other second stage companies that share similar issues and challenges.
For cities, supporting these companies can be very important to their local economies. As these businesses grow, they can create more jobs and add to a culture of entrepreneurship. Establishing strong local ties also increases the likelihood that a company will not relocate to another city.
Penny Lewandowski, Director of Entrepreneurship Development at the Edward Lowe Foundation – which is dedicated to supporting economic and community growth through entrepreneurship – explained that there are efforts local elected leaders can take to encourage and support second-stage companies. “Think of the resources and efforts your city invests to attract outside businesses, and then ask what efforts you are doing to support the needs of businesses that are already in your area. Cities need to make sure they are focusing on both sides of the equation. ”
According to Ms. Lewandowski, local leaders have the unique ability to help create a culture of entrepreneurship by championing second-stage companies and sharing success stories. In most cities, ribbon cutting happens when a new business opens, what is your city doing to celebrate the successes of locally grown businesses that are prospering?
In addition, Ms. Lewandowski stressed that cities need to make sure city policies support their local businesses and do not hinder growth. For example, a city could form a task force with the local chamber of commerce and other stakeholders like regional technology councils to better understand the needs of local businesses and make sure policies are supportive of an entrepreneurial culture.
As cities strive to support local businesses, it is important to first have an understanding of your local industry make-up. To help, The Edward Lowe Foundation has created a tool to help communities access in-depth information about their business communities. The free tool allows users to access data about businesses and jobs at the state, metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and county levels. To learn more visit www.YourEconomy.org. To learn more about the Edward Lowe Foundation and second-stage companies, visit www.edwardlowefoundation.com.
RSS Feed
