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January 31st, 2014

1/31/2014

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Regarding Immigration Reform, TPP, and Maryland's real unemployment:

WATCHING OBAMA/O'MALLEY ONE CAN ACTUALLY SEE THE CORPORATE STRINGS PULLING HIS MOUTH UP AND DOWN!  THIS IS SERIOUS FOLKS----NEO-LIBERALS RIGHT HERE IN MARYLAND ARE PUSHING THIS AS HARD AS THEY CAN AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS HEADED BY PEOPLE WANTING TO MAKE A BUCK ARE LEADING IMMIGRANTS AND JUSTICE TO SUPPORT THIS AS A SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUE!

One thing you can bet on when you listen to main stream media and NPR/APM is news that has no basis in fact.  As they are shouting the unemployment is 6.1% here in Maryland it is really 36%......far higher than at the time of the crash.  So, why are national and local news deliberately deceiving the public?  First, people would be out in the street protesting as in other Western countries that still have free press.....second, the entire premise of Immigration Reform tied to TPP is that employment figures must be low enough for corporations to bring in immigrant/green card labor.  SEE WHY MARYLAND MUST MAKE ITS 36% UNEMPLOYMENT LOOKS LIKE 6.1%?  If you look at national advertizements you will see this figure used for unemployment in Baltimore if you can believe it!  So, as with all stats released by Maryland state or Baltimore City.....there is no basis of truth in the figures.  This happens because neo-liberals and republicans have dismantled all of public agencies tasked with oversight and producing this data.  WE FIX IT BY RUNNING LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AND REPLACING THESE NEO-LIBERALS.....ALL POLS IN MARYLAND ARE NEO-LIBERALS!



This is great....it shows Maryland with a long-term unemployed at 36% as they shout out that unemployment in Maryland is at 6.1%. Keep in mind that Congress passed an extension of unemployment insurance with a 6.7% level of exclusion for states falling under that level. Maryland immediately feel below that 6.7% and as a result.....all those who would have gotten longer unemployment dropped off the rolls....ergo...the 6.1%.

Keep in mind that with long-term unemployed and part time workers over 40% of Americans are income distressed and neo-liberals like it that way!!!! Desperate workers maximizes corporate profits!  Take a look at the interactive map/graph in this article below to see how each state in America has the highest unemployment in Western world.  YOU HEAR NPR SHOUT OUT THAT SPAIN HAS THE HIGHEST AT 25%.....MARYLAND HAS SPAIN BEAT AND NEO-LIBERAL STATES HAVE HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY NEO-LIBERALS ROLL!


Long-Term Unemployment Is at Record Levels in Virtually Every State

www.epi.org

During last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama stressed the urgency of reinstating the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program for long-term unemployed workers, which, in an unprecedented move, Congress allowed to expire last month. This federal program typically provided a maximum of 28 weeks of additional benefits to workers who lost a job, through no fault of their own, and had exhausted their regular state benefits but were still unable to find work. With the program’s expiration, more than 1.5 million jobless workers have already stopped receiving aid and more than 2 million more will exhaust their benefits by the end of this year.

Laid-off workers will now lose any support after only six months, the maximum duration of unemployment insurance benefits in most states. The map below shows the share of the unemployed who have been jobless for six months or more in each state. There are 28 states, plus the District of Columbia, where more than a third of the unemployed have been jobless for six months or more. In New Jersey (46.6 percent), the District of Columbia (46.6 percent), and Florida (46.2 percent), nearly half of the unemployed are long-term unemployed.

With long-term unemployment still at record levels, Congress’ failure to renew this program is shocking; long-term unemployment benefits have never been cut off before with long-term unemployment so high. The highest the national long-term unemployment share ever reached prior to the Great Recession was 26 percent in June of 1983. Currently, there are 41 states (plus the District of Columbia) with long-term unemployment shares above 26 percent.

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How is the Immigration Reform and TPP attached to employment figures?  Let's remember what the neo-liberal Senate and republicans have as their main goal with this market-based Immigration bill sold as a help for Hispanic undocumented workers.
First there is the law enforcement element of Immigration Reform that has US prisons now filled with undocumented workers....Obama as a neo-liberal has placed imprisonment on steroids......think about California being the incarceration capital of the world.....neo-liberals.  The border enforcement along with countries like Peru will join Mexico knowing the same massive displacement of its citizens will happen again as global corporations come into these countries and send the citizens packing as described in the article below.  So, the Immigration Bill works to stop what will be a rush to the US border for jobs as it takes these immigrants now in the US and places them on restrictions that will indenture them for life or until they fail to meet the terms are are deported.

The Pathway to Citizenship is like the Trail of Tears for the native Americans.  It says you must remain continually employed for years......think how abusive workplaces are now and then think what will happen when employers know these immigrants will not be able to quit.  When they do.....these employers report them to authorities and the immigrant is deported.  When talking to the Super Shuttle workers in Maryland who are shouting they are indentured and enslaved by contracts that allow them no money.....their words were.....'we will lose our jobs and be deported but we cannot live like this'.  THIS IS MARYLAND AND THIS IS NOW!  IMMIGRATION REFORM SIMPLY PUTS THIS INTO LAW.  

PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP INDENTURES IMMIGRANTS AND MAKE DEPORTATION A STRONGER LIKELIHOOD.

This is all important because TPP is all about bringing immigrants just like these Maryland immigrants from Africa to America and tying them to just the same contracts that they too will not be able to tolerate.  So, they will work a while, discover they are enslaved in America and want to leave but have no way to disengage from these contracts.  With the US having suspended Rule of Law, these workers will not have the US Federal Justice/Maryland Attorney General protecting them.  So, how will immigrants be able to pay back taxes and current taxes and all these Pathway requirements as indentured servants?  Add to that stolen wages and illegal independent contractor status for those lucky enough to avoid endenturement....THE ANSWER IS THEY WILL NOT.  THEY WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ACCUMULATE ENOUGH MONEY TO BUY THEIR WAY TO CITIZENSHIP.....WHICH IS THE POINT OF TPP.

The 1% say we'll take bring a few immigrants into our ranks to lord over the bulk of workers as they do now in Maryland.....as slavery always has.......but most immigrants will be trapped in the same indenturement as now exists in third world countries.  THIS IS WHAT IMMIGRATION REFORM IS ALL ABOUT.  

The second piece of Immigration Reform is the high-skilled labor end where TPP has high-skilled labor come to the US and if they are working for a global corporation....which most skilled businesses are these days....the employer will be able to hire them under terms of the country to which the corporation is attached if following US law causes lost profit.....which it always does.  So, John Hopkins partners with an Indian health corporation which then comes to the US as a global corporations hiring health care workers and those workers would be brought from India and work under Indian law.  So, this will not be a win for those immigrants workers being brought thinking they will be apart of the American Dream....unless they are the few selected to higher positions.....they will toil here as they did in India.

Why is this bad for domestic workers just as it is immigrant workers?  IF YOU ARE A DOMESTIC WORKER NEEDING A JOB....YOU WILL AGREE TO WORK FOR THE TERMS THE IMMIGRANTS DO OR YOU WILL NOT HAVE A JOB.  So, the foreign corporation comes to your town with manufacturing jobs, brings immigrant workers to fill many jobs and offers some to the locals if they work for the same as the immigrants.  This will go for the high-skilled jobs as well.  

IT NEGATES ALL OF US LAW BY MAKING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS EXEMPT FROM ALL US LAW WHICH IS ILLEGAL AND A COUP AGAINST THE US CONSTITUTION.


'Domestic workers don't have to work there if they don't like the conditions say neo-liberals'.  See why unemployment has been left so high?


PATH TO CITIZENSHIP

—The estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally could obtain "registered provisional immigrant status" six months after enactment of the bill as long as:

(1) The Homeland Security Department has developed border security and fencing plans.

(2) They arrived in the U.S. prior to Dec. 31, 2011, and maintained continuous physical presence since then.

(3) They do not have a felony conviction or three or more misdemeanors.

(4) They pay a $500 fine.

—People in provisional legal status could work and travel in the U.S. but would not be eligible for federal benefits.

—The provisional legal status lasts six years and is renewable for another $500.

—People deported for noncriminal reasons can apply to re-enter in provisional status if they have a spouse or child who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, or if they had been brought to the U.S. as a child.

—After 10 years in provisional status, immigrants can seek a green card and lawful permanent resident status if they are up-to-date on taxes and pay a $1,000 fine, have maintained continuous physical presence in the U.S., meet work requirements, and learn English. Also the border triggers must have been met, and all people waiting to immigrate through the legal system as of date of enactment of the legislation must have been dealt with.

—People brought to the country as youths would be able to get green cards in five years, and citizenship immediately thereafter.
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Sign on to this letter calling for border justice and fair trade


This letter explains the relationship between ‘free’ trade agreements and militarization of the border. The struggle for immigrant rights includes opening borders, not locking them down, and creating fair trade for people and the planet, not corporate trade for profit with impunity. Please consider signing on to this letter (fill out the form below). Then also share this letter with individuals and organizations in your community that work for immigrant rights or that also might be willing to sign on, and encourage them to add their names. We can stop the TPP! The first step is to educate more people about the effects the TPP will have on our communities. Then together, we will flush the TPP.

July, 2013

Stopping the TPP is  Immigrant Rights

We write this letter out of concern regarding a looming humanitarian crisis. The prospect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) along with a surge in border militarization will leave in its wake a trail of displacement and death. The TPP will continue destroying rural economies and uprooting workers in Mexico and elsewhere. More border militarization and criminalization will leave yet more bodies of the undocumented and their families abandoned and lifeless in the desert. We call on fair trade and immigrant rights activists to join together to stop the TPP and to demand real, just immigration reform.

Over 6,000 undocumented workers and their family members have died crossing the US-Mexico border since 1994, the year that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed. It was also when construction of the border wall began. NAFTA led to a 60% increase in migration across the Southern border–a forced migration of people desperately looking for jobs to feed their families. Because of border militarization the undocumented generally enter the US via its most sparsely populated and harshest desert terrains to avoid apprehension. Those who don’t make it die from dysentery, dehydration and exposure.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been called “NAFTA on Steroids”. If it passes, it will be the largest FTA in the world, including not only Mexico, the United States and Canada, but also Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Obama administration is asking for “Fast Track” authority to negotiate the TPP. Fast Track would enable the President to circumvent Congress’ constitutional power to establish the parameters of US trade policy. It allows the President to sign an agreement before a Congressional vote, which must take place within 90 days of the signature and which prohibits the addition of amendments.

Immigration reform legislation is also moving forward. The proposed reform includes a “border surge” of militarization and related benchmarks that must go into effect before road to citizenship provisions kick in. This surge would include between $30 and $50 billion for “security”, including the construction of 350 to 700 more miles of the border wall. The number of agents on the border would be doubled to 40,000. The US-Mexico border would become one of the most militarized borders in the world.

It is no coincidence that the year 1994 saw not only passage of NAFTA, but the beginning of border wall construction. And it is no coincidence that the border surge is being considered at the same time the TPP is being negotiated. Also closely related is the proliferation of private prisons, especially immigration detention centers. Militarized borders and new prisons help manage social disruptions as well as political dissent resulting from FTAs. Criminalization of the undocumented creates a sub-class of workers denied basic labor rights while forced to work long hours for low wages. The ones who benefit are transnational corporations and agribusinesses.

If things were already bad under NAFTA and the current level of border militarization, a border surge and the TPP will make them worse. When NAFTA went into effect, Mexico was importing 30,000 tons of pork. By 2010, that had gone up to 811,000 tons. Mexico lost 4,000 hog farms and 20,000 farm jobs as a result. If we include indirect jobs dependent on the pork industry, as many as 120,000 jobs were lost. Likewise, corn imports rose from 2 million tons in 1992 to 10.3 million tons in 2008 and the cost of corn tortillas rose by 50%. This scenario was repeated in different sectors, such as wheat and sorghum production. By 2006, NAFTA had forced two million Mexicans out of farm work and some 28,000 small and medium sized businesses had been eliminated. Wages in maquiladora zones along the border had been driven down by 25%. A 2005 study for the Mexican government by the World Bank showed that rural poverty had risen from 35% between 1992 and 1994, to 55% between 1996 and 1998. By 2010, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty, or half the population, and 20%, mostly in rural areas, lived in extreme poverty.

The TPP is being negotiated in secrecy. Only a few insistent Congress persons have seen it. However, some 600 corporate lobbyists have read the text and made comments on it. What few details have been leaked to the public reveal a document that guards the interests of big corporations even more than NAFTA, which at least includes a provision allowing countries to withdraw with only six months notice. Investor-State provisions will be strengthened letting foreign corporations sue a government over policies that provide environmental and community protection but curb private profits. Suits would be decided by a special court comprised from a rotating pool of corporate lawyers.

What will it mean if passage of the TPP is coupled with a border surge? We have already seen significant growth in border militarization. Whether it be because of this, or because the US is recovering from its own economic crisis, apprehensions by the border patrol have dropped by 50% since 2008. But at the same time, deaths in the desert of border crossers has risen by 27%. The National Foundation for American Policy has found that an undocumented immigrant is eight times more likely to die crossing the border today than ten years ago. With the TPP and a border surge, deaths will increase.

The fight to defeat the TPP is advocacy for immigrant rights, or better put, for the rights of Mexican and other workers and farming families to not be forcibly displaced. One of the central rights of any potential immigrant is the choice whether or not to migrate. Even more central is the right not to die crossing the desert in search of jobs. We must tell Congress: End border militarization, deny fast track authority and reject the TPP. What we need, what we require, is fair trade, not free trade, and border justice, not militarization and criminalization.


****************************************

The reason WYPR and Basu keep telling you the unemployment rate is 6.1% instead of 36% has to do with the Immigration Bill and the rates needed before green card workers take jobs.  Can you imagine 180,000 foreign high-skilled workers coming to the US each year when the US has STEM grads unemployed in great numbers?  It will flood the work force.  Not only are high-skilled workers coming.....but all that 'innovation' money that Maryland shouts is creating jobs but is used for marketing Maryland to these prospective foreign workers.....can be given to foreign immigrants to start new companies.  THESE GOES ALL THE MONEY FOR DOMESTIC CITIZENS WANTING TO SIMPLY BUILD A SMALL BUSINESS!

The good news is that all the figures are a lie and  TPP is illegal and a COUP against the American people and can be made NULL AND VOID with Rule of Law.  Neo-liberals cannot simply fail to enforce US law because a foreign treaty was signed....the point is that it was illegal for the US Trade Rep to sign this deal!




'The cap could go as high as 180,000 a year depending on demand and unemployment rate'.



HIGH-SKILLED WORKERS

—The cap on the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers would be immediately raised from 65,000 a year to 110,000 a year, with 25,000 more set aside for people with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math from a U.S. school. The cap could go as high as 180,000 a year depending on demand and unemployment rate.

—New protections would crack down on companies that use H-1B visas to train workers in the U.S. only to ship them back overseas.

—Immigrants with certain extraordinary abilities, such as professors and researchers, multinational executives and athletes, would be exempted from green-card limits.

—A startup visa would be made available to foreign entrepreneurs seeking to come to the U.S. to start a company.

—A new merit visa, capped at 250,000 a year, would award points to prospective immigrants based on their education, employment, length of residence in the U.S. and other considerations. Those with the most points would earn the visas.

—The bill would eliminate the government's Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which randomly awards 55,000 visas to immigrants from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, so that more visas can be awarded for employment and merit ties.


******************************
Below you see the good points for the low-skilled workers given by the Tea Party.  These republicans are right....it is devastating to all domestic workers, but low-skilled especially.  Now, a republican has always been ready to enslave workers.......they want to get rid of the minimum wage for goodness sake, so they are simply playing good cop on an issue they really , really, want.

The national ID for immigrants will be the republican way of holding these workers in indenturement and deport anyone breaking these harsh rules.  You notice that nowhere are corporations going to be held accountable to breaking these laws as Rule of Law has been suspended.




LETTER WARNS: IMMIGRATION BILL WILL COLLAPSE MIDDLE CLASS AND INCREASE UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY

Posted by tomfernandez28 on January 9, 2014


LETTER WARNS: IMMIGRATION BILL WILL COLLAPSE MIDDLE CLASS AND INCREASE UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY

A group of House Republicans has written a letter to Barack Obama to warn that the immigration bill he supports will have an adverse effect on American workers. The immigration bill will, the letter writers say, lead to an increase in unemployment and poverty, help collapse the middle class, and decrease wages for American citizens.

“[W]e reject your call for the House to get an immigration bill to your desk that would permanently displace American workers,” the House Republicans write. “The Senate immigration bill, which the White House helped craft and which you personally endorse, would double the number of guest workers brought into this country at a time of crippling joblessness and falling incomes. On top of that, the Senate immigration bill would also add millions more permanent immigrant workers through green cards – handing out permanent residency to more than 30 million immigrants over the next decade. This represents a tripling of the normal green card rate.

CBO confirms that these immigrants will be mostly lower-skilled, and that wages for American citizens would fall while American unemployment would rise. Per-capita GNP would sink as well.

According to research from Harvard Professor Dr. George Borjas, low-skilled immigration has, between the years 1980 and 2000, resulted in nearly an 8% wage reduction for US-born workers without a high school degree. Rapidly expanding unskilled immigration – at time when factory work and blue collar jobs are disappearing – would represent the final economic blow for millions of workers who have been struggling to gain an economic foothold.

This group of House Republicans, who say that are writing the president “on behalf of the 21 million Americans who can’t find a full-time job” and “on behalf of the 90 million Americans over 16 – including early retirees, college grads living at home, and those living on welfare – who are not part of our nation’s workforce,” warn that things will get worse if this immigration bill becomes law.

“According to research from Harvard Professor Dr. George Borjas, low-skilled immigration has, between the years 1980 and 2000, resulted in nearly an 8% wage reduction for US-born workers without a high school degree. Rapidly expanding unskilled immigration – at time when factory work and blue collar jobs are disappearing – would represent the final economic blow for millions of workers who have been struggling to gain an economic foothold,” the letter writers say.

And it concludes: “Job number one for Congress should be to reduce the unemployment rolls, get families and communities out of poverty and government dependency, rebuild our deteriorating communities and collapsing middle class, and increase wages for American citizens. Your immigration proposals do the exact opposite on every count.”

The letter has been signed by 16 Republican members of Congress: Mo Brooks of Alabama, Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania, Kerry Bentivolio of Missouri, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Walter Jones of North Carolina, Phil Gingrey of Georgia, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, John Fleming of Louisiana, Steve King of Iowa, Ted Yoho of Florida, Joe Wilson of South Carolina, Steve Stockman of Texas, Lamar Smith also of Texas, Steven Palazzo of Mississippi, Mike Rogers of Alabama, and Jeff Duncan of South Carolina.

Here’s the entire letter, which is dated today:

Dear Mr. President:

We write to you today on behalf of the 21 million Americans who can’t find a full-time job. We write to you on behalf of the 6 million young Americans who are neither working nor in school. We write on behalf of the countless American workers whose wages today are lower than they were more than a decade ago. We write on behalf of the 90 million Americans over 16 – including early retirees, college grads living at home, and those living on welfare – who are not part of our nation’s workforce.

That is why we reject your call for the House to get an immigration bill to your desk that would permanently displace American workers. The Senate immigration bill, which the White House helped craft and which you personally endorse, would double the number of guest workers brought into this country at a time of crippling joblessness and falling incomes. On top of that, the Senate immigration bill would also add millions more permanent immigrant workers through green cards – handing out permanent residency to more than 30 million immigrants over the next decade. This represents a tripling of the normal green card rate.
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January 30th, 2014

1/30/2014

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AS YOU WILL READ BELOW, FARM SUBSIDIES STARTED AS AN AID TO SMALL FARMERS JUST AS THE FHA STARTED TO FINANCE HOMES FOR THE LOW-INCOME.  NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS HAVE ALLOWED ALL PUBLIC AGENCIES TO BE CAPTURED BY CORPORATE INTERESTS AND EXTEND THE CORPORATE WELFARE SYSTEM.

THEY ARE BLOWING UP YET ANOTHER AGENCY MEANT TO HELP THE WORKING CLASS!




Obama's TPP and the Farm Bill now ready to pass:

The Affordable Care Act, the Immigration Reform, and the Farm Bill are all legislation tied to TPP and pols have been waiting for TPP to be signed to move all the legislation forward.

As we are seeing, all the legislation waiting for the TPP to be signed is now ready to move as neo-liberals and neo-cons work to make sure all the law works with the TPP treaty laws. That means, with agriculture neo-liberals had to move from an outright farm subsidy by paying farmers not to farm to a disguised subsidy.....crop insurance. That's all this issue is about ......what the TPP requirements are. Now, for the American taxpayer it means a lot more tax money for corporate subsidy as global warming is making the mid-west a dust bowl. WAIT A MINUTE,....I THOUGHT THE DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS WERE AGAINST CORPORATE SUBSIDY? Are you kidding.....trillions in corporate tax breaks in the guise to job creation to expand US corporations globally not a corporate subsidy? THAT'S RIGHT....NEO-LIBERALS ARE ONE GREAT BIG CORPORATE TAX SUBSIDY.

I listened to our local Maryland Chesapeake Bay environmental advocate do a nice job outing O'Malley's failure to press legislation into action.....that's what Maryland does to look progressive....it passes laws and then never enforces them. The way we know this man is not working for REAL ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES......he never mentions that having a global food corporation is very, very, very very bad for Maryland and the US. He does mention the political sway but not the damage these industrial food corporations reek on our food chain and environment. Even the farmers that own most of the farmland on the Eastern Shore of MD and VA are industrial agriculture. As my grandmother used to say about all those tomatoes growing on the shore.....all of them are shipped away and we are left with bad tomatoes. INDEED. It's the global market that pays more you know.

That is the big picture with the Farm Bill. It is designed to make sure global agriculture does not lose money just as oil subsidies and all the public private partnerships are made to hand all corporate losses to the taxpayer or consumer. THIS IS WHAT NEO-LIBERALS DO....THEY WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT JUST LIKE REPUBLICANS! THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS SO WE NEED TO RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!

So this is what all of Maryland neo-liberals did for you and me.....crop insurance will pay for crop failure in a region of the US that we all know is and will continue to become a dust bowl as global warming weather changes will be long-term. So, global agriculture goes on a buying spree overseas buying all the most fertile land to start farming overseas and will import America's food supply while taxpayers subsidize farms in the mid-west that fail year after year. It guarantees the US will have almost no viable agriculture as these billions of dollars being sunk into failed farming could be used to move US farming further north where climate would not be as extreme and where there may actually be aquifers with water. Remember, all of the mid-west aquifers are drying because global agriculture drained domestic resources so that global corporations could make more profits. THIS IS THE FARM BILL. Meanwhile small family farms are disappearing as land grabs and all these farm subsidies go to the big AG and never to the small farmer.

If you look at the Eastern Shore of MD and VA you will find the same thing. A few great big farm industries own much of the land and cart away the food to sell overseas. This industrial farming is why so much fertilizer is being used and not used correctly. If mom and pop farmer simply used his/her own chicken poop to fertilize a small farm that grew produce for the locals and maybe to send to Baltimore for example.....we would not have the flood of nitrogen, phosphorus and others into the Chesapeake Bay. The same for the global Perdue. If we did not have a global meat industry, but rather went back to small farmers with some chicken houses that fed local and some regional areas, we would not have all that chicken poop, all that processed body waste, and all those hormones and anti-bodies global corporate food suppliers use to maximize profit. So, this is the story the Chesapeake Bay advocate did not tell. What happens with these laws aimed at correcting these problems is as with the RAIN TAX.....it will increase expenses for the small farmers that have little to do with the pollution.

This is what the Farm Bill does on a national level. It expands and supports global agriculture and global meat which in turn gives us unhealthy food and drains resources.....

AND ALL OF MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS VOTED FOR IT!

They didn't do it for the Food Stamps because remember, in 2009 they had a super-majority of democrats that could have funded Food Stamps for a decade or more at full value and they did not because they wanted to pretend Food Stamps were forcing them to compromise!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL MARYLAND PRIMARIES TO SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERAL BUGS FROM THE RUG!

Look below who Obama and Maryland neo-liberals have as the chief negotiators for the agriculture part of TPP------MONSANTO.....

THE ENTIRE WORLD HATES MONSANTO AND DO NOT WANT IT IN THEIR COUNTRIES BUT ARE BEING FORCED WITH THESE TRADE DEALS TO LET THIS MONOCULTURE DISASTER INTO THEIR COUNTRIES!


Top Agriculture Negotiator on to the TPP: Monsanto
Protect the land from Monsanto


Educate! Food and Water, TPP

By Barbara Chicherio, www.nationofchange.org
June 24th, 2013

Something is looming in the shadows that could help erode our basic rights and contaminate our food. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has the potential to become the biggest regional Free Trade Agreement in history, both in economic size and the ability to quietly add more countries in addition to those originally included. As of 2011 its 11 countries accounted for 30 percent of the world’s agricultural exports. Those countries are the US, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Viet Nam. Recently, Japan has joined the negotiations.

Six hundred US corporate advisors have had input into the TPP. The draft text has not been made available to the public, press or policy makers. The level of secrecy around this agreement is unparalleled. The majority of Congress is being kept in the dark while representatives of US corporations are being consulted and privy to the details.

The chief agricultural negotiator for the US is the former Monsanto lobbyist, Islam Siddique. If ratified the TPP would impose punishing regulations that give multinational corporations unprecedented right to demand taxpayer compensation for policies that corporations deem a barrier to their profits.

There appears not to be a specific agricultural chapter in the TPP. Instead, rules affecting food systems and food safety are woven throughout the text. This agreement is attempting to establish corporations’ rights to skirt domestic courts and laws and sue governments directly with taxpayers paying compensation and fines directly from the treasury.
Article image

Though TPP content remains hidden, here are some things we do know:



Members of Congress are concerned that the TPP would open the door to imports without resolving questions around food safety or environmental impacts on its production.
Procurement rules specifically forbid discrimination based on the quality of production. This means that public programs that favor the use of sustainably produced local foods in school lunch programs could be prohibited.
The labeling of foods containing GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) will not be allowed. Japan currently has labeling laws for GMOs in food. Under the TPP Japan would no longer be able to label GMOs. This situation is the same for New Zealand and Australia. In the US we are just beginning to see some progress towards labeling GMOs. Under the TPP GMO labels for US food would not be allowed.
In April 2013, Peru placed a 10-year moratorium on GMO foods and plants. This prohibits the import, production and use of GMOs in foods and GMO plants and is aimed at safeguarding Peru’s agricultural diversity. The hope is to prevent cross-pollination with non-GMO crops and to ban GMO crops like Bt corn. What will become of Peru’s moratorium if the TPP is passed?
There is a growing resistance to Monsanto’s agricultural plans in Vietnam. Monsanto (the US corporation controlling an estimated 90% of the world seed genetics) has a dark history with Vietnam. Many believe that Monsanto has no right to do business in a country where Monsanto’s product Agent Orange is estimated to have killed 400,000 Vietnamese, deformed another 500,000 and stricken another 2 million with various diseases.

Legacies of other trade agreements that serve as a warning about the TPP have a history of displacing small farmers and destroying local food economies. Ten years following the passage of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 1.5 million Mexican farmers became bankrupt because they could not compete with the highly subsidized US corn entering the Mexican market.

In the same 10 years Mexico went from a country virtually producing all of its own corn to a country that now imports at least half of this food staple. Mexican consumers are now paying higher prices for Monsanto’s GMO corn.

With little or no competition for large corporations Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta now control 57 percent of the commercial food market.

While the TPP is in many ways like NAFTA and other existing trade agreements, it appears that the corporations have learned from previous experience. They are carefully crafting the TPP to insure that citizens of the involved countries have no control over food safety, what they will be eating, where it is grown, the conditions under which food is grown and the use of herbicides and pesticides.

If the TPP is adopted the door will be open wider for human rights and environmental abuse. Some of the things we should expect to see include:

more large scale farming and more monocultures;
destruction of local economies;
no input into how our food is grown or what we will be eating;
more deforestation;
increased use of herbicides and pesticides;
increased patenting of life forms;
more GMO plants and foods; and
no labeling of GMOs in food.

Together these are a step backwards for human rights and a giant step towards Monsanto’s control of our food.

Please pass the word to others about the TPP as most Americans are unaware of this trade agreement or its ominous effects if passed.


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HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT WHETHER FEDERAL, STATE, OR LOCAL -----THE COMMON PHRASE TODAY IS -------FAILED PUBLIC POLICY.

The reason you hear of massive protests around the world is the TPP and citizens in these countries are set on getting rid of politicians allowing their countries to become involved. The US will do the same as people are able to hear the truth and because TPP is illegal it can be made NULL and VOID if passed. Many of the countries involved are developing and have agriculture as their way of life and what neo-liberal politicians writing these TPP want to do is have US dominated global agriculture to come in and do what was done in the US to these subsistence farmers.

IT IS TRULY EVIL STUFF AND YOUR NEO-LIBERAL RIGHT HERE IN MARYLAND IS BACKING IT!

So, what will happen in these countries is global agriculture will take over, the meats and food will be filled with hormones and anti-biotics and GMO seeds will cause massive crop failure by making crop pests resistant to any chemical treatment. Can you imagine what a country like China will do to hogs if they own Smithfield....even as we are told they will operate in the US? I know, you say 'can it get worse'?

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU!!!!!

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TPP: Doubling down on failed trade policy

Posted March 6, 2013 by Karen Hansen-Kuhn


Used under creative commons license from Gobierno de Chile.

A 2010 summit with leaders of the member states of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPP).

The 16th round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) began this week in Singapore. That trade deal has the potential to become the biggest regional free-trade agreement in history, both because of the size of the economies participating in the negotiations and because it holds open the possibility for other countries to quietly “dock in” to the existing agreement at some point in the future. What started as an agreement among Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore in 2005 has expanded to include trade talks with Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the United States and Vietnam. Japan and Thailand are considering entering into the negotiations, and others are waiting in the wings.

And yet, despite the potential of this agreement to shape (and in very real ways override) a vast range of public policies, there has been very little public debate on the TPP to date. Governments have refused to release negotiating texts. Media attention on agriculture and the TPP has focused on New Zealand’s insistence on access to U.S. dairy markets and Japan’s concerns over rice imports.

While important, that debate is much too narrow. The TPP is not only about lowering tariffs. It has the potential to greatly expand protections for investors over those for consumers and farmers, and severely restrict governments’ ability to use public policy to reshape food systems. The fundamental causes of recent protests across the globe over food prices, the rising market power of a handful of global food and agriculture corporations, as well as the dual specters of rising hunger and obesity around the world, point to the need to transform the world’s food systems, not to lock the current dysfunction situation in place.

In Who’s at the Table? Demanding Answers on Agriculture in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, IATP raises questions around investment, food safety (especially in emerging new food technologies), procurement and competition policy that should guide an informed public debate around the right rules for agricultural trade.

Trade policy should start from such goals as ending global hunger, enhancing rural and urban incomes and employment, and encouraging a transition to climate friendly agriculture--not from the bottom line of multinational corporations. The burden of proof should be on governments to demonstrate that the commitments being negotiated in the TPP will advance the human rights to food and development. Given the stakes for agriculture and food systems in all of the countries involved, they should include all stakeholders in a frank discussion of the trade rules that are needed to ensure that food sovereignty, rural livelihoods and sustainable development take precedence over misguided efforts to expand exports at any cost. That is what should be on the table in Singapore.
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If you look at this article you will see the big AG subsidizing is one great big fraud and below this article you will see pols concerned that Food Stamp and fuel subsidy has too much fraud. Indeed, there is pressure placed on the poor to sell their Food Stamps....but solving the need for them will eliminate that problem.....corporate fraud by people having millions of dollars....THIS NEEDS ATTENTION. This Farm Bill simply super-sizes the opportunity for fraud as these global agriculture corporations are now working both the import and export side of the aisle.



REMEMBER, WITH CORPORATIONS AND THE RICH NO LONGER PAYING TAXES YOU AND I ARE THE ONES HANDING OUR TAX REVENUE STRAIGHT INTO THE POCKET OF CORPORATE SUBSIDY!

Corporate Welfare Racket: Big Agriculture’s Crop Insurance Fraud

posted by Marcos Da Silva September 13, 2013 Current Events,

A federally subsidized crop insurance program instituted in the wake of the Dust Bowl to help protect American farmers has matured into an undesirable situation that facilitates opportunism by duplicitous growers and financial institutions, who bank on exploiting the trust of taxpayers who helplessly foot the bill.

Today’s federal crop insurance makes it dangerously easy for planters to commit fraud and hold a cavalier attitude about crops they have no incentive to maintain since they will be compensated regardless of their yield or success. Farmers need not have a vested interest in caring for their crops and may gamble on risky plantings.

The arrangement is pretty much a setup for taxpayers.


The government pays 18 approved insurance companies to run its crop insurance program, doling out $1.4 billion last year to cover the “administrative costs” incurred by these insurance companies. The government then pays farmers to buy coverage AND on top of that, it also pays the bills on losses if losses exceed predetermined limits.

And this all happens even as farm income this year is expected to top $120 billion, its highest inflation-adjusted mark since 1973, and as median commercial farm household income hits $84,649, almost 70 percent higher than that of the typical American household.

Taxpayers should not finance payments for a business sector that is more than capable of thriving on its own.

Crop Insurance Anatomy Of A Fraud

For obvious reasons, the growing insurance tab is a bipartisan target.

In a budget strained America, even diametrically opposed figures such as President Obama and Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan recognize a problem with the bloated subsidized insurance program, but the farm and insurance lobbies, which spent at least $52 million influencing lawmakers in the 2012 election cycle, are resilient forces.

“We have been subsidizing some of the farmers who least need it in a way that is really costing taxpayers a lot of money,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat of New Hampshire. “We’re never going to solve our budget challenges if that’s what we’re doing.”


Crop insurers say that the subsidized insurance helps stabilize food prices while protecting farmers from losses and sparing politicians from ad-hoc farm bailouts. But unlike direct farm aid payments, which are capped at $40,000 per farm, there is no limit on crop insurance subsidies.

And there is no transparency. The names of those receiving payouts from the program are kept secret. In 2011, 26 anonymous farmers each got annual subsidies of more than $1 million; and more than 10,000 received $100,000 or more. One grower of tomatoes and peppers in Florida enjoyed a subsidy of $1.9 million.

It pays to be a farmer in America.

Crop Insurance Covering Companies' CostsThe U.S. crop insurance program, intended to safeguard farmers from natural disasters, has mutated into an income support mechanism that almost eliminates risk from agriculture and helps private insurance companies benefit from public assistance.

And when it’s not the insurance companies benefitting at taxpayer expense, it’s the farmers.

By law, insurers are obligated to cover anyone who applies for crop insurance. Yet. farmers pay only about 38 percent of their insurance bills. Policies protect as much as 85 percent of a farm’s average yield, but over 70 percent of policies guarantee income rather than yield.

When last year’s drought drove corn prices to record highs, farmers with “harvest price option” policies were paid those inflated prices for what didn’t even grow — contributing to a record bill for taxpayers and record income for farmers. Taxpayers bore the burden of almost 75 percent of the 2012 insurance payouts.

And that’s not even accounting for any collusion there might be between insurance companies and farmers, or as taxpayers like to call it…

Fraud.

Exposing dangerous flaws in America’s crop insurance program in North Carolina, in 2009 it was discovered that an entire network of insurance agents, claims adjusters and farmers had been conning the government for over a decade to the tune of $100 million in taxpayer money.

Last December, Harry Dean Canady, found himself pleading guilty to defrauding the federal crop insurance system for $1 million. But Canady was the tip of the iceberg in the largest fraud in the program’s history, a case that so far has ensnared 41 North Carolina tobacco farmers, insurance agents and claims adjusters whose law breaking cost taxpayers close to $100 million.


The evidence is incontrovertible:

America’s crop insurance system is in need of serious reform.


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There is a funny part in this article that states that there is a scheme to give fuel subsidy with food stamps that circumvents the law!!!! That's why they needed to cut. The Farm Bill is a republican one -----all the things a global corporation needs and democrats pretended it was all about the Food Stamps. Poor people are indeed often forced to hand over Food Stamps or try to sell them for money. That reflects on you and me....

House Passes Farm Bill, Crop Subsidies Preserved
By AP / Mary Clare Jalonick Jan. 29, 20143



After years of setbacks, a nearly $100 billion-a-year compromise farm bill cleared the House on Wednesday despite strong opposition from conservatives who sought a bigger cut in food stamps.

The five-year bill, which preserves generous crop subsidies, heads to the Senate, where approval seems certain. The White House said President Barack Obama would sign it.

The measure, which the House approved 251-166, had backing from the Republican leadership team, even though it makes smaller cuts to food stamps than they would have liked. After wavering for several years, the GOP leaders were seeking to put the long-stalled bill behind them and build on the success of a bipartisan budget passed earlier this month. Leaders in both parties also were hoping to bolster rural candidates in this year’s midterm elections.

House Speaker John Boehner did not cast a vote on the bill, a commonplace practice for a speaker, but he had issued a statement Monday saying it was “worthy of the House’s support.” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., voted for the bill despite concerns from some in her caucus that the bill cut too much from the food stamp program.

The bill ultimately would cut about $800 million a year from the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program, or around 1 percent. The House had sought a 5 percent cut.

The legislation also would continue to heavily subsidize major crops for the nation’s farmers while eliminating some subsidies and shifting them toward more politically defensible insurance programs.

House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., called the compromise a “miracle” after trying to get the bill passed for almost three years. An early version of the legislation was defeated on the House floor last June after conservatives said the food stamp cuts were too modest and liberal Democrats said they were too deep.

The House later passed a bill with a higher, $4 billion cut, arguing at the time that the program had spiraled out of control after costs doubled in the last five years. But cuts that high were ultimately not possible after the Senate balked and the White House threatened a veto. The Senate had sought a cut of $400 million annually.

Many House conservatives still voted against the bill — 63 Republicans opposed it, one more than in June.

One of those conservative opponents was Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind. “It spends money we simply don’t have,” he said.

But 89 Democrats supported it, bolstered by the lower cut in food stamps. The top Democrat on the agriculture panel, Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, said he also enticed some of his colleagues with more money for fruit, vegetable and organic programs.


The final savings in the food stamp program would come from cracking down on some states that seek to boost individual food stamp benefits by giving people small amounts of federal heating assistance that they don’t need. That heating assistance, sometimes as low as $1 per person, triggers higher benefits, and some critics see that practice as circumventing the law. The compromise bill would require states to give individual recipients at least $20 in heating assistance before a higher food stamp benefit could kick in.

Some Democrats said the food stamp cut still is too high.

Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, one of the states that have boosted benefits through heating assistance, said the cut will be harmful on top of automatic food stamp cuts that went into place in November.

“I don’t know where they are going to make that up,” McGovern said.

To pass the bill, Lucas and his Senate counterpart, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, found ways to bring many potential naysayers on board. They spent more than two years crafting the bill to appeal to members from all regions of the country. They included a boost in money for crop insurance popular in the Midwest; higher rice and peanut subsidies for Southern farmers; and renewal of federal land payments for Western states.

They also backed away from repealing a catfish program — a move that would have angered Mississippi lawmakers — and dropped House language that would have thwarted a California law requiring all eggs sold in the state to come from hens living in larger cages. Striking out that provision was a priority for California lawmakers who did not want to see the state law changed.

For those seeking reform of farm programs, the legislation would eliminate a $4.5 billion-a-year farm subsidy called direct payments, which are paid to farmers whether they farm or not. But the bill nonetheless would continue to heavily subsidize major crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and cotton — while shifting many of those subsidies toward more politically defensible insurance programs. That means farmers would have to incur losses before they could get a payout.

The almost $100 billion-a-year bill would save around $1.65 billion annually overall, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amount was less than the $2.3 billion annual savings the agriculture committees originally projected for the bill.

An aide to Lucas said the difference was due to how the CBO calculated budget savings from recent automatic across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration.


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Here is a local look at how ordinary farming families see this farm bill and what it does to the fabric of our US agriculture system.....Nebraska is a solidly RED state so these are views from conservatives.....who by the way want to get rid of  neo-cons just as democrats want to get rid of neo-liberals.


Farm subsidies: Largest corporate welfare program Tell North Platte what you think
by The Platte Institute - 6/30/2012


Last week, the United States Senate passed a new farm bill which, among its many provisions, changes the way crop insurance is calculated, makes some changes to farm subsidies, and finances new price support programs.

While the bill still has to pass the House of Representatives, it once again raises the issue of farm subsidies and their effects on the overall economy.

Farm subsidies first began during the Great Depression when Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt enacted price floors and began paying farmers not to grow crops in order to deal with oversupply and stop prices from falling.

Since then, Congress has passed similar farm bills sustaining these subsidies approximately every five years, resulting in a gross distortion of the agricultural markets.

These subsidies were originally intended to help small family farmers from bankruptcy due to falling commodity prices, but they have since become America's largest corporate welfare program.

Farm subsidies are awarded based upon the type of crop grown - with 90 percent being awarded for growing corn, wheat, rice, cotton, and soybeans - and the amount of crop grown, with high producers receiving higher subsidies. This means that most subsidies go not to the family farmer who could face bankruptcy in the event of a bad yield, but instead go to large farms and agribusinesses who can afford to produce the favored crops in massive quantities.

The corporate welfare nature of farm subsidies becomes clear when one examines exactly where the subsidies go. Nebraska currently receives $239 million in direct payment subsidies, the seventh-highest payment in the nation.

Those payments go to the 73.2 percent of all Nebraska farmers who collect government subsidies.

Of those 73.2 percent, 10 percent collected 62 percent of all subsidies awarded in the state. The top 10 percent of subsidized farmers in Nebraska collected an average of $35,752 per year in subsidies between 1995 and 2010, while the bottom 80 percent of Nebraska's subsidized farmers collected an average of $1,334 per year in subsidies over the same time period.

Adding to the idea that farm subsidies are far from a "safety net" is that fact that Nebraska farmers are currently seeing record-high farm income. In 2011, the net total farm income was $5.4 billion, a 35 percent increase over 2010, a year where farmers already saw their income increase 49 percent from 2009.

Farm income accounted for one-third of the state's income growth in 2011. On a national level, 2010 Census data indicates that the average farm household income was 25 percent higher than the average for all U.S. taxpayers.

On top of all this, some of the subsidies go to organizations that do not use farming as their primary income, further diminishing the role of subsidies as a last resort safety net.

For example, between 1995 and 2010, the 19th largest recipient of farm subsidies in the state of Nebraska was the University of Nebraska Board of Regents, who received $2,797,796 in subsidies from the federal government over those 15 years.


Nebraskans must recognize that we do not need subsidies to have a thriving agricultural sector.


The example of New Zealand shows that when a country eliminates subsidies it can actually create innovation which improves the economic health of the agricultural sector. In 1984, the New Zealand government subsidized 44 percent of all sheep farming, meaning that although farmers sold lamb for $30, it was only actually worth $12.50 in the international marketplace with the government making up the difference.

That same year New Zealand eliminated their sheep farming subsidies. By 1989, after changing how they produced, processed, and sold their product, New Zealand farmers found a new market for their lamb and began selling it for $30 without government assistance. By 1999, the price had increased to $115.

Far from providing a safety net to small farmers - something that is better provided through things like crop and disaster insurance - farm subsidies have become tools for corporate welfare, taking taxpayer money and giving it to organizations that do not need it.

Nebraskans should encourage their federal representatives to end farm subsidies and allow farmers to be independent from the government.
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January 29th, 2014

1/29/2014

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FOLKS, IF YOU DO NOT HERE YOUR INCUMBENT POL SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY AGAINST ALL THESE POLICIES AND TPP-------THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEED TO GO!  RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!

I want to take today through Friday to talk about why Obama and Congress are now ready to focus on domestic issues and why his mantra of helping the middle-class and poor is ridiculous......all the items on the Congressional agenda are tied to TPP and they intend to pass TPP in the near future.

The good news for US citizens is that TPP is illegal and a COUP against the US Constitution and American people and we can simply declare it NULL AND VOID when we reinstate Rule of Law. 

I'm starting with the environmental issues in Obama's speech and TPP because we have a corporate 'public' media outlet....WYPR with commentators who pretend to lament issues that they really support.


You may have seen the Huffington Post article on TPP and the environment but continue down to see how Maryland is one big TPP sesspool thanks to your neo-liberal!

ALL THE CANDIDATES RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND WILL CONTINUE TO PUSH THE TPP AGENDA!


In Maryland, labor and justice simply backs the worst of TPP neo-liberals even as they intend to make labor and justice just like Chinese workers and citizens.  WHY ARE THEY NOT RUNNING LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN ALL PRIMARIES!!!!!??????


Regarding Obama's domestic agenda that all involves passing TPP:

Basu's shout out for attention to global warming is a HOOT isn't it!  The US is the number one exporting now of all the raw materials that hasten global warming and Basu supports every one as this makes the rich richer in the US while it kills our environment.  TPP makes sure that all those silly US environmental laws won't get in the way of corporate profit and that is why we have XL Pipeline preparing to export the worst methane and carbon emitter TAR SAND OIL.  Basu is for building this pipeline....it creates jobs you know as he is in building a natural gas export right here in Maryland.  Fracking is a great methane/carbon emitter.  The US exports coal and raw timber all of which are great carbon emitters so all this talk of global warming by neo-liberals is only to sell windmill funding to make another source of profit for Wall Street investment firms.  YOU CANNOT BE A NET EXPORTER OF ALL THE MATERIALS CREATING CARBON AND METHANE EMISSIONS AND SAY YOU ARE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING FOR GOODNESS SAKE.   All of Maryland pols are backing the natural gas terminal that will place fracking on steroids.

 NEO-LIBERALS WILL VOTE ON A TPP BILL THAT KILLS ENVIRONMENTAL ENFORCEMENT AND THAT IS WHY WE HAVE SUCH A HIGH LEVEL OF ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION TODAY....OBAMA AND CONGRESSIONAL NEO-LIBERALS ARE ALLOWING FREE TRADE OF ALL OF US NATURAL RESOURCES.


You wouldn't know that Obama's entire agenda surrounds the legislation needed to pass the TPP and we all know that has nothing to do with making a strong middle-class and helping the poor.  Remember, there is no wealth inequality because tens of trillions of dollar in corporate fraud still needs to come back.

The reason we had a do-nothing Congress is that these few years your neo-liberal has been working on behalf of their state's global corporations in writing TPP and now that Obama's Trade Rep signed the TPP agreement Congress is ready to go full court passing all the domestic bills that are written just for TPP.

ALL OF MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS!!!!!

Let's look at each one to remember how they are attached to TPP and how they kill American workers and families.  THESE ARE EVIL DUDES YOU ARE ELECTING AND RE-ELECTING FOLKS!

So why are corporate NPR/APM and WYPR not connecting these TPP/environment dots?  More important, why are Maryland's environmental groups and 'progressive' action groups not sounding the alarm?  Maryland Progressives give Maryland Assembly strong marks on environment without ever shouting that TPP will knock the socks off of anything local.  Building windmills off of Maryland coast while exporting natural gas.....REALLY?


Let's look closer at what this environmental catastrophe means to labor and justice.  First, look at the Incinerator project everyone is fighting here in the Baltimore area.  Why would you build something like this with all kinds of 'green language' when we all know it is bad news for health and climate?  THE INCINERATOR IS PART OF A GLOBAL CORPORATION THAT RUNS THESE AROUND THE WORLD -------VEOLA ENVIRONOMENT OWNED BY JOHNS HOPKINS.

Remember, VEOLA is a global corporation and is TPP is passed we will not have all those air quality standards met as all this hampers corporate profit!!!!!




 WikiLeaks Exposes What Obama's Secret Trade Deal Would Do To The Environment


Posted: 01/15/2014 12:22 pm EST  |  Updated: 01/25/2014 4:01 pm EST


WASHINGTON -- WikiLeaks published a leaked draft of the environment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Wednesday, and environmental groups are lining up to take a swing.

The leaked documents come from a meeting of the trade deal's chief negotiators held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Nov. 19 to 24, 2013. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) includes 12 countries –- the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei –- and would govern a number of international environmental and trade issues.

The draft indicates the pact will include a number of promises on the environment, but will lack strong enforcement tools. "When compared against other TPP chapters, the Environment Chapter is noteworthy for its absence of mandated clauses or meaningful enforcement measures," wrote WikiLeaks in its release. The chapter is intended to deal with issues like overfishing, trade of wood products, wildlife crime, and illegal logging. But most of the measures in the chapter are voluntary, rather than binding, and do not include penalties or criminal sanctions for violations. Compliance is largely left to the respective countries.

Enviros offered similar criticism. "The lack of fully-enforceable environmental safeguards means negotiators are allowing a unique opportunity to protect wildlife and support legal sustainable trade of renewable resources to slip through their fingers,” said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, in a statement.

The leaked document from November is only a draft, but if the trade pact's final environmental chapter looks like it, it would make the Obama administration's environmental trade record "worse than George W. Bush’s," said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This draft chapter falls flat on every single one of our issues -- oceans, fish, wildlife, and forest protections -- and in fact, rolls back on the progress made in past free trade pacts.”

According to a report from the chairs of the TPP Environmental Working Group drafting the chapter, also released by WikiLeaks, there remains significant disagreement among the parties on many of the pact's provisions. The chairs wrote that Vietnam, Peru and Malaysia object to a provision calling for countries to "rationalize and phase out" fossil fuel subsidies "that encourage wasteful consumption." They also noted that the United States and Australia object to the climate change portion of the pact as it is written.

Negotiation of the pact has been underway since 2010, but all discussions take place entirely outside of public view. The Obama administration has already received backlash for leaked portions of the pact that indicate it would grant greater rights to corporations to challenge national laws in private courts.

Efforts to fast-track the trade deal met resistance from Democrats in Congress this week.


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VEOLA ENVIRONMENT IS OWNED BY HIGHSTAR WITH JOHNS HOPKINS AS ITS MAJOR SHAREHOLDER AND THIS IS WHY O'MALLEY AND RAWLINGS-BLAKE ARE PUSHING THESE PLANTS IN MARYLAND.  

It has nothing to do with greening or environmentalism.....it simply moves all public waste and recycling to this Hopkins' owned business VEOLA.  As this happens, communities around it will see all kinds of health effects and the air quality already bad in Maryland will get worse------THAT'S A DOUBLE WIN FOR JOHNS HOPKINS AS ASTHMA IS THE NUMBER ONE HEALTH PROFIT FOR MARYLAND HOSPITALS!!!!

Just imagine how likely having a global health corporation like Hopkins owning and running the disposal of medical waste.....their major expense.  Remember, in China there are no environmental laws and that is why all kinds of hazardous dumping and leeching has made China an industrial dump.


This policy is not only disgusting......but O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake and your Maryland Assembly and Baltimore City Hall neo-liberals are tying the funding of public schools to this Johns Hopkins business that kills the environment.  If you look at who supports these incinerators--------Baltimore museums and many Maryland public school districts.  The public sector tied to yet another corporation.




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Keep in mind Maryland's Governor O'Malley led the way for exporting natural gas while leading the Governor's Association because, of course, O'Malley is a raging Wall Street pol.  Mike Miller has said this will happen as as all Maryland neo-liberals keep voting him as leader.....they will vote for it as well.

The infrastructure funding bill by Congress and by Maryland Assembly would fund the construction of this project.  That is why they want this BOLIS OF MONEY as Clinton investment banker turned pol Dulaney moves forward.


ISN'T IT AMAZING THAT YOU NEVER HEAR ANY OF THIS FROM MARYLAND MEDIA OR WYPR AND MARYLAND ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS ARE MOSTLY SILENT TO SOMETHING THAT WILL HAVE DEVASTATING ENVIRONMENTAL AFFECTS ON THE STATE???

I want to add that it is Frosh that heads the judiciary committee that vets judicial appointments and if you liked Maryland's court decision that MERS was not criminal.....you can expect that Frosh placed  pro-global corporates judges in Maryland courts.  See why we do not want Frosh as Maryland Attorney General?  Wonder why Maryland labor groups are backing him?


Court Considers Natural Gas Exports From MD Terminal  

Mon, 01/13/2014 - 11:02am
MAX EHRENFREUND, The Washington Post  

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — The future of a massive, controversial construction project on the Chesapeake Bay for exporting natural gas could depend on one poorly written sentence.

Attorneys for the Sierra Club were in court last week fighting the $3.8 billion proposal by Dominion Resources to renovate its terminal in Calvert County so the facility could send domestic gas overseas. The case — which turns on several words in a contract first signed in 1972 and rewritten over the years — is pending in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.

Labor and business leaders argue that construction would bring a huge influx of capital to a state still recovering from the financial crisis. But environmentalists say that the project would worsen global warming, and residents are concerned about the effects on traffic and property values in the sleepy coastal community of Lusby about 60 miles southeast of the District.

"We are all following it really closely," Kelly Canavan, president of a local community organization, said of the dispute between the Sierra Club and Dominion.

Canavan's group, the Accokeek, Mattawoman, Piscataway Creeks Communities Council, opposes Dominion's plans. She said the court case "is one of the strongest possibilities for actually stopping the project."

The case also demonstrates how radically the global energy economy can change in just a few years.

Dominion's Cove Point terminal, which began operating in 1978, was built to receive imported natural gas. But recently, few tankers have come through as the new drilling techniques commonly known as "fracking" have produced an unexpected glut of domestic shale gas.

Dominion now proposes to use Cove Point for export instead of import. But natural gas must be cooled into a liquid before it is loaded onto a tanker. Dominion will have to build cooling facilities at Cove Point — a project that would require three years and thousands of workers.

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club — which aims to decrease the country's reliance on naturalgas — worry that allowing the exports would encourage domestic drilling, damage the ecology of the bay and ultimately hasten climate change.

Whether the project proceeds could depend on how the court interprets the contract, which curtails how the site can be used. The facility's original owner, Columbia Gas, initially signed the agreement with the Sierra Club and another environmental group. Relations between business and the environmental movement were friendlier then than they are today, and Columbia wanted to avoid a legal dispute.

Sierra argues that the most recent version of that agreement, which Dominion signed in 2005, a few years after acquiring the property, precludes the company from exporting natural gas from Cove Point by sea.

The agreement provides that Dominion can use the site for "receipt by tanker and the receipt or delivery bypipeline" of natural gas in its various forms.

According to the environmental group's lawyers, that phrase means that Cove Point can receive shipments of natural gas by sea or overland via pipeline, and that it can deliver gas to domestic customers, also viapipeline. Delivering gas to outgoing vessels is not permitted, they argue.

A lower court ruled against the Sierra Club last year. Circuit Judge James Salmon agreed with Dominion that the facility could make a "delivery by pipeline" to the pier where deep-water tankers dock.

The offshore pier, just over a mile from the coast, is indeed connected to land by an insulated pipeline along the bottom of the bay.

The Sierra Club appealed the decision.

The parties to the contract in 2005 did not anticipate that Dominion would ever need to export natural gas. During arguments Wednesday, appeals court judges questioned attorneys for both sides on economic and technological aspects of shipping gas at that time, trying to reconstruct a world that already seems far in the past.

Dominion has signed contracts with importers in India and Japan, who agreed to buy capacity at Cove Point for 20 years. The company asked the court to rule quickly on the case, citing the volatility of the global market for fossil fuels.

For those who live near the facility, the debate about Cove Point is much more than a disagreement over the meaning of "receipt or delivery."

Carolyn Hart, president of the Calvert County Chamber of Commerce, said her group's members are eager for the jobs and people they expect construction to bring to the area. "I can tell you, we're waiting," she said. Hart lives a quarter of a mile from the terminal, and she and her husband own a nearby wine shop.

Dominion said they are among many people who think the project will benefit the community. "The support for this kind of a project is extremely broad and very deep," said Chet Wade, a spokesman for Dominion.

Others worry about the risk of an industrial accident.

"We feel like Dominion is transferring environmental and health risks to their neighbors, and we're not getting compensated," said Sue Allison, who can see Cove Point's storage tanks from her kitchen window and made the trip to the courthouse in Annapolis to demonstrate her opposition to the project.

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Do you know that selling the coal fire- power plants with the deal with Exelon is an environmental greenhouse disaster and your Maryland Assembly pol voted for this merger deal that could have required these power plants be shut down?  O'Malley handed them to Exelon who simply handed them to a connected figure and Maryland still has coal-fired power plants all by a governor who Maryland press labels a friend of the environment!!!!

I NEVER HEAR BASU TELLING US ALL THIS AS HE LAMENTS GREENHOUSE GAS LEVELS AND GLOBAL WARMING.....HE WILL SHOUT OUT TO BUILD WINDMILLS, BECAUSE THAT WILL MAKE A DIFFERENCE WITH ALL THIS OTHER BAD ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN MARYLAND!

Know where the windmills will be built?  I know, Maryland pols said this was a job creator.....yet, very few Maryland workers  will be involved.  IT'S ABOUT CHANNELLING FEDERAL AND STATE FUNDING TO CAMPAIGN DONORS YOU KNOW!

Look below to see yet another foreign global corporation coming into the US to build manufacturing.  Remember, TPP gives global corporations a pass on all US labor and justice laws if it cuts into profits.......TPP will allow Siemens to bring workers from around the world to work in Kansas and if Kansas citizens want a job.....they will work for the same third world wages these immigrants get...... THIS IS WHAT GREEN TECHNOLOGY BUSINESSES BRING TO THE US.....AND YOUR FEDERAL AND STATE TAX MONEY WILL SUBSIDIZE THE BUILDING OF THESE PLANTS BECAUSE.....AFTER ALL.....THEY CREATE JOBS!

See why WYPR does not connect the dots......see why public media was taken corporate?



Siemens will Build Wind Turbine Production Facility in the U.S.
05.05.2009 · Posted in Wind Energy

 
Additional capital investment in green technologies – 400 new jobs to be created

Erlangen, Germany, May 05, 2009

Siemens intends to build a new production facility for wind turbines in the state of Kansas. Initially, 400 new jobs are expected to be created in the new wind turbine production facility in Hutchinson, Kansas. When production begins at this facility, Siemens will be able to even more effectively meet the strong demand for wind turbine equipment in North and South America in the future.

75px Siemens AG logo.svg Siemens will Build Wind Turbine Production Facility in the U.S.“The United States already is and will continue to be one of the world’s fastest growing wind energy markets. We are thus intensifying our commitment to this green technology to further expand our leading global position in this field,” stated Peter Löscher, CEO of Siemens AG. “We are already the leading green infrastructure giant. And by making these investments, we will become even greener.” With revenues totaling EUR19 billion in fiscal year 2008, Siemens now has the world’s largest portfolio of environmental technologies.

Construction of the 300,000-square-foot nacelle production facility is scheduled to begin in August 2009. A nacelle is mounted on top of the tower and supports the rotor. It houses a wind turbine’s major components for electric power generation, including the gearbox, the drive train and the control electronics.

The nacelles to be produced in Kansas will weigh 90 tons and the first nacelle is expected to be shipped in December 2010. All nacelles produced in Hutchinson will be used in the company’s reliable 2.3-MW wind turbine product family. Initially, the factory’s planned annual output is approximately 650 nacelles – or 1,500 megawatts (MW).

“Just two years ago we opened a rotor blade manufacturing facility in Fort Madison, Iowa. By expanding our investment in Kansas, we are strengthening our presence in the U.S. and, at the same time, we are increasing the proximity to our U.S. customers. This new location will enable us to serve them more rapidly and cost-effectively,” said René Umlauft, CEO of Siemens Energy’s Renewable Energy Division.

Hutchinson is near the geographic center of the continental United States and offers a viable workforce and excellent transportation logistics. The factory will include direct loading onto rail, which will provide easy access to project locations throughout the Unites States and Canada. Shipments can also be made utilizing the barge facilities at the port of Catoosa, located 250 miles from the plant. Kansas also has excellent wind conditions. In terms of wind energy potential, this centrally located state ranks third in the U.S.

Since entering the wind industry in 2004, Siemens has greatly expanded its worldwide manufacturing network. In addition to opening and consequently expanding the wind turbine blade manufacturing facilities in Fort Madison, Iowa, USA, and Engesvang, Denmark, the Danish facilities in Brande and Aalborg have been expanded and a new R&D center in Boulder, USA, was established. Siemens’ global wind power business has grown from approximately 800 employees in 2004 to more than 5,500 today, which equals an increase of approximately 650 percent.

Wind power is an important feature of Siemens’ environmental portfolio. In 2008, revenue from the products and solutions of Siemens’ environmental portfolio was nearly EUR19 billion, which is equivalent to around a quarter of Siemens’ total revenue.
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January 27th, 2014

1/27/2014

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Regarding the next phase to the New Economy....economic collapse:

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.


It is interesting that when I first hit on this Forbes article yesterday I had no problem opening it.....and today, the page was inaccessible.

Below you see what has been coming since Obama took office.  Since all Obama did was oversee massive movement of money from one place to another to make it look like economic activity was happening while tens of trillions of dollars have  been carted out of the US and into off-shore accounts....making the economy starved of cash and stagnant.....China/Europe has been doing the same thing.  So, all the Wall Street news about recapitalized banks ready to get on with business is a lie.  What is happening is the few families at the top who have the massive wealth are now fighting on how to hide it and/or use it to their benefit while the entire economic system collapses.


REMEMBER, WE NEEDED TO NATIONALIZE THE US BANKS IN 2009 TO DOWNSIZE THEM BY SIMPLY RECOVERING TENS OF TRILLIONS IN CORPORATE FRAUD.  EASY PEASY.  OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS WERE THERE TO MAKE SURE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN....RATHER, ALL THAT MONEY HAS BEEN MOVED AROUND THE WORLD TO HIDE IT.



China Halts Bank Cash Transfers: Forbes

Sunday, January 26, 2014 15:59
0

(Before It's News)


According to this breaking story from Forbes.com, China has halted all bank cash transfers as shared in the story below. WHY would China’s central bank ORDER commercial banks to put an end to cash transfers? Is this the next step in the global currency war? Could this lead to WW3 as is now being argued by some? With America already practically ‘owned’ by China and getting more in debt every year, this can’t be a good thing. Video reports on China’s money problems also below.
The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has just ordered commercial banks to halt cash transfers.
In short, there will be a three-day suspension of domestic renminbi transfers. There will also be a suspension, spanning nine calendar days, of conversions of renminbi to foreign currency.
The specific reason given—“system maintenance” at the central bank—is preposterous.  It is not credible that during the highest usage period in the year—the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday beginning January 31—the central bank would schedule an upgrade and shut down cash transfers.
A better explanation is that the country’s banking system is running dry.  Yes, there is an increased need for money in the run-up to and during the Lunar New Year holiday, but that is only a small factor.  After all, central bank officials knew this spike in demand was coming—it occurs every year at this time—and a core function of central banks is to manage seasonal liquidity fluctuations.  Moreover, the holiday has not started yet, and the PBOC, as that institution is known, could have added more liquidity to meet cash needs.


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As we see, a US bank crash is coming because all that has happened over these few years is scuffling around of money to prop up the European market and hiding and expanding in a Chinese market all of which having money sucked out of economies.  

THIS IS OF COURSE ALL FRAUD AND CORRUPTION THAT YOUR NEO-LIBERAL IS AIDING AND ABETTING BY PASSING LAWS THAT MAKE ONCE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES NOW LEGAL....OR SO THEY SAY.  THE US HAS ANTI-TRUST AND MONOPOLY LAWS THAT ARE SIMPLY BEING IGNORED.

You know I have called for this for three years as US media played the propaganda machine yet again....acting as if something real was being done.  There is nothing that can be done to stop this crash.....citizens in Europe will stop the TROIKA sucking of all public wealth and the US citizens are waking to the fact that all their wealth is being sucked up as well in this US Perestroika.  Without that sucking of public money the economies will collapse.  Not so bad for the few families at the top they say......the plan is to soak the public sector with debt as Rawlings-Blake and O'Malley have done with tons of credit bonds, Wall Street leverage deals,  and TIFs, so that when the collapse comes, even more public wealth comes as cities and states default and public property and partnership deals go into the hands of Wall Street and public sector pensions and benefits are dismissed in bankruptcy.  

THIS IS THE BAINS CAPITAL GUTTING OF PUBLIC SECTOR WEALTH....SAME THING THAT WAS DONE WITH PRIVATE CORPORATIONS SHEDDING ALL THEIR DEBT AND LABOR CONTRACTS WILL NOW HAPPEN WITH THIS CRASH.

Look at what has happened with HSBC to see the wave of the future in the UK, Europe, and US.....this is the next bank bailout.....it involves simply capturing the people's bank accounts to pay a municipal debt created by mayors and governors across the country all under the guise of 'development and jobs'.

HSBC is simply the British version of Wall Street banks like Bank of America and Citigroup.....that spent these few years expanding all over the world with the free money the FED gave them and now all of them are exposed to these global economic calamities.  So, Obama and neo-liberals......ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS....were not deadlocked these few years.  They were working on TPP and international marketing and growth while allowing the US economy to be starved.  That was their job.  So, US banks have been operating under the wild west of no regulation as they expanded overseas and our economy is now tied ten times more to this TOO BIG TO FAIL.  Only this time the Federal government has been tapped and it will be your bank account and mine that banks seize to keep them afloat.  Add to that all kinds of public infrastructure like roads, bridges, water and sewer infrastructure and you betcha......PERESTROIKA'S NEXT STEP IN THE NEW ECONOMY!

It is valuable to record all of this....I for example print all FACEBOOK and website entries because I know they could disappear any time.....please do the same.  Documenting that all of this was known beforehand allows for legal retribution when the people reinstate Rule of Law and bring back all those tens of trillions of dollars.....remember, when a government suspends Rule of Law, it suspends Statutes of Limitation!



A Closer Look at China and HSBC – Are they Running Out of Cash?
Kerry-anne


January 26, 2014


Fears are growing that HSBC bank is insolvent, after the Bank refused cash withdrawals and has an $80bn blackhole in their balance sheet.  Last night,Forbes and a variety of sources including Max Keiser, and FXstreet (Forex) reported a Bank of China announcement suspending all cash transfers for the next several days.  So what’s really going on?


HSBC Collapse

 

HSBC is scrambling to manage a seemingly terminal liquidity crisis (a lack of hard cash) that could see the bank become the next Northern Rock – and trigger a bank crash. The analyst’s advice is for shareholders to sell HSBC investments, and customers to move their accounts elsewhere before the crash.


This from the Telegraph:

Forensic Asia on Tuesday began its coverage of Britain’s largest banking group with a ‘sell’ recommendation, warning the lender had between $63.6bn (£38.7bn) and $92.3bn of “questionable assets” on its balance sheet, ranging from loan loss reserves and accrued interest to deferred tax assets, defined benefit pension schemes and opaque Level 3 assets.

According a report by the BBC’s MoneyBox Programme, HSBC customers have gone to withdraw cash from their accounts, only to find HSBC would not release the funds. Customers were told to make a bank transfer instead, unless they provided documentation proving the intended use of the money. Stephen Cotton attempted a withdrawal and told the programme:

“When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day.

As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change”

He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change.

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

Mr Cotton is not alone, with other customers seeking to withdraw cash amounts over £3,000 facing the same obstacles. While HSBC argue there is comes customer security interest here, the story simply doesn’t add up. Customer identification is required for large withdrawals, not customer intentions – a person’s cash is theirs to withdraw and place wherever they so wish. Instead, HSBC has been found to have a capitalization black hole (gap between actual cash and obligations) of $80bn. The message is simple, get your money out now.
The Gold Rush

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.

There is a gold rush underway, with Banks and States frantically buying up as much gold reserve as they can, stoking fears that confidence in currency is at an all-time low. In recent months and weeks, banks like HSBC and JP Morgan, and states such as the US, Germany and China have joined the gold rush, making vast purchases of stocks.

Investment analysts at Seeking Alpha have been monitoring the strange activity on the COMEX, stating:

“keeping track of COMEX inventories is something that is recommended for all serious investors who own physical gold and the gold ETFs (SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), PHYS, and CEF) because any abnormal inventory declines may signify extraordinary events behind the scenes.”


Another Bank Crash? Why?

 

The crash is in some ways a replay of the last one. The US dollar is a fiat currency (as is the pound sterling, the euro and most other major currencies). This means, it is monopoly money. There is no gold reserve that its values are pegged to. It is simply made up. So how does money get made? A private, for profit central bank prints it and lends it to the government (or other banks) at an interest rate. So the Central Bank prints $100, and gives it to the government on the basis that it returns $101. You may have already spotted the first flaw in this process. The additional $1 can only ever come from the Central Bank. There is never enough money. The second issue is that all money is debt.

This used to be the way pretty much all of the money in circulation came to be. That is, until Investment and Retail Banks got tired of this monopoly on debt based currency, and kicked off the commercial money supply. You might assume that when you take out a loan or other form of credit, a bank gives you that money from its reserves, and you then pay back that loan to the Bank at a given interest rate – the Bank making its profit on the interest rate. You would be wrong. The Bank simply creates that loan on a computer screen. Let’s say you are granted a loan for $100,000. The moment that loan is approved and $100k is entered on the computer – that promise from you to the bank creates $100k for the bank, in that instant. This ledger entry alone creates the $100k, from nothing. Today, over 97% of all money that exists, is made this way.

This is what drove the dodgy lending practises that created the last crisis. But since then, the failure to regulate the markets means that while bailouts hit public services and the real economy – banks were free to continue the same behaviour, bringing the next crash.

The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse.

The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.

Global GDP stands at $69.4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.

Not only can the Bankers not pay it back, the combined earning power of the earth could not pay it back in less than ten years if every last cent of our productive power went solely to pay off this debt.

This is why answering the issues with our currencies, our banking practices and economic system are not theoretical or academic – they are a most practical matter of keen urgency.


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Below you see what is about to happen in the UK, Europe, and the US.  When this happened in Cyprus there was all kinds of discussion as to how this could be legal, but what happens when a government allows itself to be called bankrupt and tied to the IMF is that all sovereignty is lost.  This is what they are doing to the southern European nations and they know that banks will do the same thing in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece as was done in Cyprus.

For the US and Americans.....remember the first thing neo-liberals did when the last collapse came was to raise the FDIC insurance of bank accounts to $250,000 per bank, protecting the affluent from losses.  The wealthy no longer have much wealth tied to these accounts and just as Congress voted to raise the FDIC.....it can lower/eliminate it because.....it will not be able to afford to pay the protection....it will default on you and me.


ARE MY DEPOSITS INSURED?

FDIC insurance covers all deposit accounts, including checking and savings accounts, money market deposit accounts and certificates of deposit. The standard insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category.




Cyprus banks remain closed to avert run on deposits

By Michele Kambas and Karolina Tagaris

NICOSIA Mon Mar 25, 2013 7:44pm EDT


People sit at a cafeteria as Cyprus' President Nicos Anastasiades addresses the nation in Nicosia March 25, 2013. REUTERS-Yorgos Karahalis


Anti-Troika protesters hold a 'Hands off Cyprus' banner during a demonstration outside the EU offices in Nicosia March 24, 2013. REUTERS-Yannis Behrakis

 
(Reuters) - The president of Cyprus assured his people a bailout deal he struck with the European Union was in their best interests, but banks will remain closed until Thursday - and even then subject to capital controls to prevent a run on deposits.

Returned from fraught negotiations in Brussels, President Nicos Anastasiades said late on Monday the 10-billion euro ($13 billion) rescue plan agreed there in the early hours of the morning was "painful" but essential to avoid economic meltdown.

He agreed to close down the second-largest bank, Cyprus Popular, and inflict heavy losses on big depositors, many of them Russian, after Cyprus's outsize financial sector ran into trouble when its investments in neighboring Greece went sour.

European leaders said a chaotic national bankruptcy that might have forced Cyprus from the euro and upset Europe's economy was averted - though investors in other European banks are alarmed by the precedent of losses for depositors in Cyprus.

"The agreement we reached is difficult but, under the circumstances, the best that we could achieve," Anastasiades said in a televised address to the nation on Monday evening.

"We leave behind the uncertainty and anxiety that we all lived through over the last few months and we look forward now to the future with optimism," he told compatriots who face an immediate, deep recession and years of hardship unlikely to be milder than those experienced by Irish, Greeks and Portuguese.

Many Cypriots say they felt anything but reassured by the bailout deal, however, and are expected to besiege banks as soon as they reopen after a shutdown that began over a week ago.

Reversing a previous decision to start reopening at least some banks on Tuesday, the central bank said late on Monday that they would all now stay shut until Thursday to ensure the "smooth functioning of the whole banking system".

Little is known about the restrictions on transactions that Anastasiades said the central bank would impose, but he told Cypriots: "I want to assure you that this will be a very temporary measure that will gradually be relaxed."

Capital controls, preventing people moving funds out of the country, are at odds with the European Union's ideals of a common market but the government may fear an ebb tide of panic that would cause even more disruption to the local economy.

Without an agreement by the end of Monday, Cyprus had faced certain banking collapse and risked becoming the first country to be pushed out of the European single currency - a fate that Germany and other northern creditors seemed willing to inflict on a nation that accounts for just a tiny fraction of the euro economy and whose banks they felt had overreached themselves.

Backed by euro zone finance ministers, the plan will wind down the largely state-owned Cyprus Popular Bank, known as Laiki, and shift deposits under 100,000 euros to the Bank of Cyprus to create a "good bank", leaving problems behind in, effectively, a "bad bank".

Deposits above 100,000 euros in both banks, which are not guaranteed by the state under EU law, will be frozen and used to resolve Laiki's debts and recapitalize the Bank of Cyprus, the island's biggest, through a deposit/equity conversion.


PRECEDENT SET

The raid on uninsured Laiki depositors is expected to raise 4.2 billion euros of the 5.8 billion euros the EU and IMF had told Cyprus to raise as a contribution to the bailout, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said.

Cyprus government spokesman Christos Stylianides said losses for uninsured depositors would be "under or around 30 percent".


Laiki will effectively be shuttered, with thousands of job losses. Officials said senior bondholders in Laiki would be wiped out and those in Bank of Cyprus would have to make a contribution - setting a precedent for the euro zone.

Comments by Dijsselbloem on the need for lenders to banks to accept the potential risks of their failure had a knock-on effect in the euro zone, raising the cost of insuring holdings of bonds issued by other banks, notably in Italy and Spain.

Global equity markets and the euro retreated on his comment that the Cyprus bailout could be a template for solving other problems, by shifting more risk to depositors and stakeholders:

"What we've done last night is what I call pushing back the risks," Dijsselbloem, who heads the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers, told Reuters and the Financial Times.

A first attempt at a deal 10 days ago had collapsed when the Cypriot parliament rejected a proposed levy on all deposits, large and small. That proposal outraged ordinary Cypriots, leading to queues at bank cash machines.

The central bank has imposed a 100-euro daily limit on withdrawals from ATMs at the two biggest banks to avert a run.

PUBLIC SCEPTICAL

Russia signaled it would back the bailout even though it would impose big losses on Russian depositors, who by some estimates may hold a third of all deposits in Cypriot banks.

President Vladimir Putin ordered officials to restructure a loan Moscow granted to Cyprus in 2011 - having rejected Nicosia's request for easier terms in crisis talks last week.

Among Cypriots sipping coffee in warm sunshine, there was a mood of wariness about the deal: "How long will it last?" asked Georgia Xenophontos, 23, a hotel receptionist in Nicosia.

"Why should anyone believe anything this government says?"

In the morning, a public holiday, residents of the capital lined the streets to watch a parade by soldiers and students to mark Greek Independence Day, waving the Greek and Cypriot flags.

"On this day I'm proud to be Greek, but at the same time I feel humiliated," said Marios Charalambous, 56, a print-shop owner. "I'm worried what will happen when the banks reopen."

Cyprus' tottering banks held 68 billion euros in deposits, including 38 billion in accounts of more than 100,000 euros - enormous sums for an nation of 860,000 people that could never sustain such a big financial system on its own.

The U.S. Treasury, noting the importance to the United States of financial stability in Europe, its largest trading partner, said it was now up to Cypriots to rebuild their economy: "It is critical to lay the foundation for a return to financial stability and growth in Cyprus," the Treasury said.

______________________________________________


China's Epic Offshore Wealth Revealed: How Chinese Oligarchs Quietly Parked Up To $4 Trillion In The Caribbean

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/21/2014 20:02 -0500


  The last time the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists made a splash in the financial media was in April of last year year when it disclosed a trove of secret documents revealing a massive treasury of offshore wealth parked away from taxation-happy host governments. The context was clear: in the aftermath of the Cyprus deposit confiscation, public opinion had to turn against those who were exploiting offshore tax loophole in order to avoid a panic that the same "bail in" could happen to the common man.

Needless to say, the circumstances surrounding the release then were rather curious: one day thousands of files - revealing the names behind covert companies used by people from American doctors to Russian executives and international arms dealers - just happened to turn up at a source's house.

Well, the ICIJ is back in the spotlight once again, this time revealing "nearly 22,000 tax haven clients from Hong Kong and mainland China. Among them are some of China’s most powerful men and women — including at least 15 of China’s richest, members of the National People’s Congress and executives from state-owned companies entangled in corruption scandals."

Once again, the source of this treasure trove of data is secret, although we feel the recent Bloomberg cover up (and suspension and termination of Michael Forsyth) regarding a certain investigation into Chinese tycoons' connections with Communist party leaders may have something to do with it. All ICIJ says on the matter is that "In November, a mainland Chinese news organization that was working with ICIJ to analyze the offshore data withdrew from the reporting partnership, explaining that authorities had warned it not to publish anything about the material. ICIJ is keeping the identity of the news outlet confidential to protect journalists from government retaliation." But where the data comes from is largely irrelevant.

What is relevant is that once again the two largest Swiss banks are about to be embroiled in yet another money laundering scandal, this time involving the parking of wealth belonging to China's aristocracy - including its princelings - in various Caribbean, and mostly British Virgin Island, tax havens.

From the ICJC's findings:

PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS and other Western banks and accounting firms play a key role as middlemen in helping Chinese clients set up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore centers usually associated with hidden wealth, the records show. For instance, Swiss financial giant Credit Suisse helped Wen Jiabao’s son create his BVI company while his father was leading the country.

The files come from two offshore firms — Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited — that help clients create offshore companies, trusts and bank accounts. They are part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked files that ICIJ has sifted through with help from more than 50 reporting partners in Europe, North America, Asia and other regions.

Since last April, ICIJ’s stories have triggered official inquiries, high-profile resignations and policy changes around the world.

Until now, the details on China and Hong Kong had not been disclosed.

What is notable, if not unexpected, is just how pervasive the parking of offshore capital has been, and confirms that it is not inflow of money that the PBOC has to be afraid of when its internationalizes the Yuan, it is the outflow that will be far more worrisome.

The data illustrates the outsized dependency of the world’s second largest economy on tiny islands thousands of miles away.  As the country has moved from an insular communist system to a socialist/capitalist hybrid, China has become a leading market for offshore havens that peddle secrecy, tax shelters and streamlined international deal making.

Every corner of China’s economy, from oil to green energy and from mining to arms trading, appears in the ICIJ data.

But the biggest stunner is the sheer size of the wealth transfer: according to ICIJ estimate, up to $4 trillion in "untraced assets" may have left China since 2000.

Chinese officials aren’t required to disclose their assets publicly and until now citizens have remained largely in the dark about the parallel economy that can allow the powerful and well-connected to avoid taxes and keep their dealings secret. By some estimates, between $1 trillion and $4 trillion in untraced assets have left the country since 2000.

And while the parking of capital abroad is not illegal, it does contribute to concerns about vast corruption in China, which is also why the current Politburo has been scrambling to cut down on superficial among China's higher echelons. At least optically... And certainly not going to the very top, where it appears the bulk of the corruption resides as the initial data dump discloses.

To be sure, this is just the start of peeling away the layers of China's offshore wealth: the ICIJ provides this teaser: "Along with the China and Hong Kong names, ICIJ’s files also include the names of roughly 16,000 offshore clients from Taiwan. ICIJ will continue to publish stories with its partners in the next few days and will release the Greater China names on its Offshore Leaks Database on Jan. 23."

In the meantime, the ICIJ has disclosed select key individuals that suddenly may have a lot of explaining to do, considering China's very theatrical crackdown on corruption and all that.

The key players, whose life is about to get a whole lot more difficult, are without doubt China's princelings.

China's Politburo Standing Committee is the all-powerful group of seven (formerly nine) men who run the Communist Party and the country. The records obtained by ICIJ show that relatives of at least five current or former members of this small circle have incorporated companies in the Cook Islands or British Virgin Islands.

China’s “red nobility” — elites tied by blood or marriage to the current leadership or Party elders — are also popularly known as “princelings.” Ordinary Chinese have grown increasingly angry over their vast wealth and what many see as the hypocrisy of officials who tout “people-first” ideals but look the other way while their families peddle power and influence for personal gain.

The leaked offshore records include details of a BVI company 50 percent owned by President Xi’s brother-in-law Deng Jiagui. The husband of Xi’s older sister, Deng is a multimillionaire real estate developer and an investor in metals used in cell phones and other electronics. The records show the other half of Excellence Effort Property Development was owned by yet another BVI company belonging to Li Wa and Li Xiaoping, property tycoons who made news in July by winning a $2 billion bid to purchase commercial real estate in Shenzhen.

Since taking over as the Communist Party’s top official in 2012, Xi has sought to burnish his image with an aggressive anti-graft campaign, promising to go after official corruption involving both low-level “flies” and high-level “tigers.” Yet he has crushed a grassroots movement that called for government officials to publicly declare their assets. Wen Jiabao, who stepped down as premier in 2013 after a decade-long tenure, also styled himself as a reformer, cultivating an image of grandfatherly concern for China’s poor.

The ICIJ offshore files reveal that Wen’s son Wen Yunsong set up a BVI-registered company, Trend Gold Consultants, with help from the Hong Kong office of Credit Suisse in 2006. Wen Yunsong was the lone director and shareholder of the firm, which appears to have been dissolved in 2008. 

Bare-bones company structures are often created to open bank accounts in the offshore firm’s name, helping obscure the relationship to the real account owner. It isn’t immediately clear from the documents what Trend Gold Consultants was used for. A U.S.-educated venture capitalist, Wen Yunsong co-founded a China-focused private equity firm and in 2012 became chairman of China’s Satellite Communications Co., a state-owned firm that aspires to be Asia’s largest satellite operator.

ICIJ made repeated attempts to reach Wen Yunsong and other individuals named in this story. Only a few responded. Wen was among those who did not. Citing confidentiality rules, a Credit Suisse spokesman said the bank is “unable to comment on this matter.”

The ICIJ files also shed light on the BVI’s previously unreported role in a burgeoning scandal involving Wen Jiabao’s daughter, Wen Ruchun, also known as Lily Chang. The New York Times has reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co. paid a firm that she ran, Fullmark Consultants, $1.8 million in consulting fees. U.S. securities regulators are investigating the relationship as part of a probe into the bank’s alleged use of princelings to increase its influence in China.

Fullmark Consultants appears to have been set up in a manner that obscured Wen Ruchun’s relationship to the firm, the ICIJ files indicate. Her name does not show up in any of the incorporation documents in the ICIJ data, though a 'Lily Chang' is CC’d in one August, 2009 email correspondence about the company. Her husband Liu Chunhang, a former Morgan Stanley finance guru, created Fullmark Consultants in the BVI in 2004 and was the sole director and shareholder of the firm until 2006, the same year he took a government job at the agency that regulates China’s banking industry.

Liu transferred control of the company, the ICIJ files show, to a Wen family friend, Zhang Yuhong, a wealthy businesswoman and colleague of Wen Jiabao’s brother. The Times reported that Zhang also helped control other Wen family assets including diamond and jewelry ventures. 

The ICIJ files show that offshore provider Portcullis TrustNet billed UBS AG for a certificate of good standing for Fullmark Consultants in October 2005, indicating a business relationship between Fullmark and the Swiss bank. In response to ICIJ’s questions, UBS issued a statement saying its “know-your-client” policies as well as procedures to deal with politically-sensitive clients are among “the strictest in the industry.” Liu and Zhang did not respond to ICIJ's requests for comment.

A 2007 U.S. Department of State cable passed along a source’s tip that Premier Wen was “disgusted with his family’s activities,” and that “Wen’s wife and children all have a reputation as people who can ‘get things done’ for the right price.” The cable, part of the Wikileaks document dump, reported that Wen’s kin “did not necessarily take bribes, [but] they are amenable to receiving exorbitant ‘consulting fees.’ ”

The records also include incorporations by relatives of Deng Xiaoping, former Premier Li Peng, and former President Hu Jintao.

China experts say that the growing wealth and business interests of the princelings, including offshore holdings, are a dangerous liability for the ruling Communist Party but that people in leadership positions are too involved to stop it.

“What’s the point of running the Communist Party if you can’t get a couple billion for your family?” said Steve Dickinson, a China-based American lawyer who has investigated fraud cases involving BVI companies. “The issue is enormous and has tremendous significance for China, and the fact that everybody dances around it and doesn’t want to talk about it is understandable but scandalous.”


Perhaps now, finally, the dancing will stop. Because for the first time, key players are named. First the "Red Nobility" (full list here)


0 Comments

January 25th, 2014

1/25/2014

0 Comments

 
I'm making up for snow days with this blog......

DO YOU KNOW THAT WE HAVE ONLY 25 DAYS TO FILE AS A CANDIDATE FOR STATE-WIDE ELECTION IN MARYLAND AND NO ONE IS CHALLENGING NEO-LIBERALS WHO INTEND TO MOVE ALL THESE POLICIES FORWARD!!!!!!! 

As I rant about having all health care decisions now placed in the hands of corporations I want to be clear.....corporate wellness/ACOs are not across-the-board bad.....just as charter schools, individual programs can be innovative.  But, as with charter chain businesses.....when the whole process becomes market-driven none of what is done is done for the good of people.  Remember as well, as these health systems go global they will behave just as Wall Street banks do.....they will be predatory and unaccountable.


Looking towards health care policy I am glad to have been able to share with friends across the country that  Maryland is ground zero for ending Medicare and Medicaid as Federal programs by sending them to these state health systems and having people simply treated as they are with the tiered system being built.  So, working/middle class......you paid all the payroll taxes and income taxes that allowed this first class health care system to exist.....but, at best, only upper middle-class will have a Medicare we have always been used to.  Who are those upper/middle class-----give or take $250,000.  You see, disposible income is hard to find in a society that has the middle-class preyed upon from the top and bottom income groups!

Raise your hands if you understand that the ACA reforms make hospitals profitable and therefor they are not private non-profits. Look, they are being rated for profitability for goodness sake.....

TAX THEM AND USE THAT TAX TO BUILD AND RUN PUBLIC HOSPITALS!

We are now to believe that once these hospitals take steps to become more cost-effective and profitable.....that they will still be private non-profits.  After all, even though they use that extra money earned to expand globally....they are not handing out dividends-----OH REALLY?????  Below you see Wall Street modelling these corporations and you see how these corporations are planning and investing all those PROFITS.  As I show below that.....the UMMS health care union shouts loudly and strongly how what is in Maryland a quasi-governmental state university hospital.....see how far they go not to say corporation.....uses Wall Street investments of what should be public money to the detriment of staff and patients all to boost profit and expansion.

THESE ARE NOT NON-PROFITS AND NEED TO EITHER GO BACK TO BEING PUBLIC HOSPITALS OR PAY TAXES AS CORPORATIONS.

33 Statistics on Nonprofit Hospital Operating Margin by Credit Rating

Written by Bob Herman (Twitter | Google+)  | January 17, 2014 BEcker's Hospital Review

  Healthcare CFOs and other top finance leaders view operating margin as one of the most important metrics to gauge the sustainability of their organizations.

In 2012, the median operating margin at most nonprofit hospitals and health systems varied, depending on credit rating and other factors, but generally it fell between 1 and 4 percent.

Here are 33 statistics on nonprofit hospital and health system operating margins, separated by credit rating categories from the three major rating agencies. Note: All data are medians and reflect audited 2012 financial statements.

Fitch Ratings

Hospital credit rating

Median operating margin (2012)


10 Priorities for Nonprofit Hospital Investment Committees

 Written by Bob Herman (
Twitter | Google+)  | January 16, 2014 

Given the large-scale changes in the healthcare sector today, investment strategy has become more important.

As the calendar flips to a new year, prudent hospital and health system executives are looking at their investment strategies from 2013 and evaluating what worked — and what didn't. A report from consulting firm Mercer identified 10 priorities that investment committees at nonprofit hospitals and health systems should consider as 2014 gets underway.

1. Assess whether risk tolerance in the investment portfolio has changed, given a challenging operating environment.

2. Review the fixed income allocation in both a low and a rising interest rate environment.

3. Consider whether a delegated investment approach could offer time and cost savings for your organization.

4. Evaluate whether investment strategy should take into account a pending or potential strategic action, such as a merger, acquisition or joint venture.

5. In a post-merger situation, conduct an investment policy survey to facilitate successful integration of investment assets.

6. Develop a strategy for getting a defined benefit pension plan fully funded.

7. Recognize the growing importance of the defined contribution pension plan.

8. Consider how best to meet the fiduciary obligations of defined contribution plan governance.

9. If you are considering moving a captive insurance company offshore, understand the governance, reporting and regulatory requirements.

10. Assess the balance sheet implications of taking on capitation or insurance risk.

Here you have real patient advocates in the UMMS Code Red union shouting that 'IF AN INSTITUTION WALKS LIKE A DUCK AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK, IT IS A CORPORATION FOR GOODNESS SAKE AND NOT A NON-PROFIT.

Let's be clear......we all know a health system based on privatized corporate policies will be purely profit-driven and bad for patients and their employees!


UMMS is seeking $155 million for the Upper Chesapeake Health System even as the system’s debts mount from the purchase of St. Joseph Hospital and even though UMMS has failed to build a promised hospital on the Eastern Shore. All the while, UMMS is laying off frontline caregivers.


UMMS Code Red December 17, 2013 In Maryland, private hospitals fall under the National Labor Relations Act and public hospitals fall under the Maryland Labor Relations Act. The University of Maryland Medical Center, based in Baltimore, is governed by neither. UMMC is the only hospital in the state where workers do not have basic labor protections.

The issues at stake at UMMS are the same issues at stake nationally. An ethos has developed in this country in which executives, even those of taxpayer supported nonprofits, are lavished with high pay, perks and bonuses while their employees struggle to make ends meet, and risky financial schemes by CEOs are given a pass. Will we continue to live in a society where executives can squander taxpayer dollars at will? http://ummscodered.org/


Between 2008 and 2012, pay jumped 75 percent for the top four UMMS executives, who received more than $21 million during that time, and that’s not including perks like exclusive health club memberships, each for worth thousands of dollars. www.ummscodered.org

Why should a "non-profit" hospital, which gets more than 58 percent of its funding from tax dollars, sic "nasty" lawyers on anyone or push patients into bankruptcy? If you are also looking at patient issues, fiscal problems or other types of mismanagement at UMMS, write us at info@UMMSCodeRed.org or call our hotline: 877-434-1011.
________________________________________________


Raise your hand if you understand that something with the title of corporation and headed by a CEO is not public!!!!!!!!! EVERYONE.

This is what public private looks like and it does not work for you and me.....it works to maximize profits for the health industry. So, the first thing a real progressive would do is dismantle the private from the public!

Dr. Ramanathan Raju Named President of New York Health and Hospitals Corporation

Written by Akanksha Jayanthi
January 21, 2014   Becker Hospital Review

 New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has
selected Ramanathan Raju, MD, as president of New York Health and Hospitals Corporation, the largest public hospital system in the country.

Dr. Raju currently serves as CEO of Cook County Health and Hospitals Systems in Chicago, the third largest public hospital system in the country.

He previously served as CMO, corporate COO and executive vice president of New York City HHC.

Dr. Raju has also served as director of surgery, director of medical education and senior vice president of Lutheran Medical Center and COO and CMO of Coney Island Hospital, both in Brooklyn, N.Y.

_________________________________________________________

'In other words, if you are high maintenance because you don’t do what your doctor says (and remember, “non-compliant” includes people who don’t follow orders because they think the cookie-cutter approach isn’t right for them) or want higher service or per the example of the pediatrician Patricia’s 40 minute case, have a complicated set of ailments, you’ll be shunted. The brave new world of corporate medicine will eject you'.


WOW......JUST AS I SAID FOUR YEARS AGO.....It's almost like I knew the goal of ACA was to consolidate the health industry into Wall Street sized global health systems that would maximize profits by excluding most people from coverage.  All labor and justice leaders knew this too------leaders shouting loudly for ACA knew you would lose access to health care and Medicare and Medicaid would be ended as a Federal program.

We are watching as corporations are now being given rights to force their employees to behave a certain way regarding health care and health conditions are else be without health coverage and perhaps a job.  These preventative plans are simply a way of having people tied to blood tests that show high levels of sugar, cholesterol, fats, for example and expect that employee to use a wellness program to bring levels into range.......it will be a boot camp and this is all supposed to bring wellness.  It will be more about having all that data on you in a database and sold for profit and it will be used to discriminate in employment and how much you pay for health insurance premiums.
  PERIOD!!!!!

Remember, many health risks are hereditary and cannot simply be wellnessed away.  Many health problems like obesity are now linked to chemicals placed in common foods that are impossible to avoid.  There is no way that preventative care will stop much of what most people experience in illness......cancers, diabetes, heart disease..... but these neo-liberals are going to deny access to these ordinary treatments using these arbitrary prevention schemes.  I had my doctor tell me I am obese.  This places me in an insurance premium and preventative care regime that I do not need
BECAUSE I AM NOT OBESE FOR GOODNESS SAKE.....I AM SIMPLY A MID-AGED WOMAN!

This is not a good thing.  It follows  the idea of a totalitarian society where everything you do is guided by corporations and this health policy is truly regressive.  Here in Maryland it comes from Johns Hopkins.

THE PROBLEM WITH COST IN HEALTH CARE IS HEALTH FRAUD AND PROFITEERING NOT PATIENT ABUSE OF THE SYSTEM!!!!!

Obamacare penalties spawn 'skinny' plans

The law is nearly silent on what employers need to include in their health plans. | Reuters

By
BRETT NORMAN | 7/16/13 4:59 AM EDT

Employers heaved a sigh of relief when the Obama administration announced it would not enforce Obamacare’s mandate that large companies provide insurance to their workers next year.

But some companies plan to offer “skinny plans” designed to duck the biggest penalties anyway, according to industry consultants. And the Obama administration has extended its blessing to this limited coverage, even though it would not protect individuals from medical bills that could cause financial ruin in the case of severe injury or illness.

The health law spells out in detail the comprehensive coverage that insurers have to provide on the new insurance marketplaces or exchanges. But it’s nearly silent about what the employers who provide insurance to a majority of Americans need to include in their health plans.



“There are no rules on how good that coverage has to be,” said Gretchen Young, senior vice president of health policy at the ERISA Industry Committee.

About 95 percent of large employers already offer health insurance. Most of them offer fairly comprehensive coverage, as good or better than the typical plans that will be offered on the exchanges.

That’s not the case for many retailers, restaurant chains and the hospitality industry, which often rely on low-wage, part-time workers and offer few or no health benefits.

And those are the businesses that were most seriously affected by the employer mandate.

“There are particular employers in particular industries for whom the Affordable Care Act is a disaster,” said Andy Anderson, who leads the health division at the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in Chicago. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the penalties would bring in $3.7 billion per year.



The health care law required employers with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time workers to provide health insurance or else pay a $2,000 per employee fine, starting in 2014. After intense lobbying from the business community, the Treasury Department announced earlier this month that the mandate won’t take effect until 2015.

The penalty is a fraction of the roughly $8,000 it costs to provide an employee with comprehensive health insurance. But it would be a major new expense for large employers that don’t pay for coverage now.

A firm with 2,500 employees would pay about $5 million in penalties each year.

But there’s a second penalty that gets less attention. Large employers that don’t provide robust, affordable insurance to their workers will pay a $3,000 penalty for each employee who gets taxpayer-funded subsidies on an exchange.

And there is a new type of insurance plan that is designed to protect employers from the first penalty and lower their exposure to the second. They are the skinny plans, a descendant of limited benefit — or “mini-med” — plans that are set to be phased out at the end of this year.

“Skinny alternatives are an attempt to manage liability for ACA penalties,” said Neil Trautwein, employee benefits policy counsel at the National Retail Federation.
__________________________________________________

The mantra with the Affordable Care Act people is that these reforms give access to health care to more people and boosts the number insured for health care.  Before all of this the poor had clinics that gave them all the care they needed and they were able to go to the emergency rooms for more serious conditions.  So, the poor were far better off then now.  Now, they are excluded from most hospitals for many kinds of care.....they are eligible for less preventative care, rather than more.   It will be a debacle for the poor as regards access to ordinary medical procedures.

The expanded Medicare takes in what used to be people with strong workplace health policies that were lost or will be shed in this reform as businesses stop health plan coverage for low-income workers.  It is simply an step down to basic Medicaid and will encompass 80% of Americans.  So, the ACA is indeed a type of single-payer.......Medicaid for All.

This is a good article showing what basic procedures that save lives will not fall under the venue of ACA......and how lots of people will not be in the window of Medicaid.

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU.....MAXIMIZING PROFITS BY ENDING PUBLIC SERVICES AND PROGRAMS.

We already see the number of poor and low-income who try to access dental care for instance is extremely low because these people are getting such poor care and/or abused by these caretakers to which they are referred....they are not using it.....WHICH I FEEL IS DELIBERATE.

Sen. Grassley Investigating Abuse at Corporate Dental Chains

July 2, 2012, 1:23 pm ET by David Heath Center for Public Integrity

a joint investigation by FRONTLINE and the Center for Public Integrity. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) says that 
his investigators have found evidence of abuses by corporate dental chains treating children on Medicaid.

For months now, Grassley’s staff has been asking questions of three dental chains serving poor children on Medicaid. Each is owned by a private-equity firm. The chains are Kool Smiles, Small Smiles and ReachOut HealthCare America.




Medicaid Programs Vary in Coverage of Preventive Care, Report Says

 Released: 7/3/2013 9:00 AM EDT
Embargo expired: 7/8/2013 4:00 PM EDT
Source Newsroom:
George Washington University more news from this source Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only

CitationsHealth Affairs

Newswise — WASHINGTON, DC—Existing Medicaid beneficiaries have largely been left out of the health reform movement when it comes to preventive services that can ward off cancer, heart disease and other potentially deadly diseases, according to a new study by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS).

The study, which appears in the July issue of Health Affairs, notes that under the Affordable Care Act most private insurance plans, Medicare and Medicaid expansion programs are required by law to cover a full range of crucial preventive services such as screening tests for colorectal cancer, high blood cholesterol, HIV infection, and diet counseling that can prevent obesity. But state Medicaid plans are not required to cover such care for adults already enrolled in Medicaid—and this report suggests that those adults will not have access to the full range of preventive services.

“Preventive services save lives by detecting diseases before they can progress,” says lead author Sara Wilensky, PhD, JD, special services faculty for undergraduate education in the Department of Health Policy at SPHHS. “Why should some Medicaid beneficiaries be left out when it comes to coverage for this kind of care?” Screening mammograms, colonoscopies, cholesterol screenings and other preventive services are aimed at staving off health problems early on rather than trying to provide costly health care for established and hard-to-treat disorders, she said.

Wilensky and her co-author Elizabeth Gray, JD, a research associate at SPHHS, reviewed Medicaid policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from June 2012 through November 2012. The initial review looked at all publically available information on coverage of preventive services. After that first review, the researchers then contacted state Medicaid officials to fill in any missing information about coverage for this population.

The researchers found that most states do not cover all of the preventive services recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel that looks at preventive care and offers guidelines for health plans and providers. In addition, it was often difficult to discern exactly which services were covered by Medicaid programs based on the vague language used by many programs. The report highlighted some serious gaps in coverage. For example, while most states provided coverage for screening mammograms, not all Medicaid programs offered such care to existing beneficiaries. In fact, three states don’t cover preventive mammograms for this population at all—a shortfall that could mean low-income women will go without the test, the authors said.

The analysis also says that states appear to rarely cover other types of preventive care for breast cancer for those at high risk. Only 11 state Medicaid programs, for example, make it clear that they will pay for breast cancer susceptibility testing for the BRCA1 gene that increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. And just three states explicitly cover chemoprevention for such beneficiaries. This medication can be used to lower the risk of breast cancer, a disease that kills about 40,000 American women every year.

"The Affordable Care Act guarantees millions of low-income Americans access to mammograms, colonoscopies and other lifesaving preventive services, but that assurance does not extend to people who currently have Medicaid coverage," said Chris Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), the advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society and one funder of the study. "States have a responsibility to ensure that all people in Medicaid have access to preventive care for a life-threatening disease such as cancer."

The authors of the study also say there is wide variation in coverage of tests for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and the test for the HIV virus that causes AIDS. And in some states STD screening is limited to family planning visits, a restriction that means people visiting the doctor for some other reason or those who are not eligible for family planning services may not have coverage. Going without this screen, increases the risk that an infected person will not receive treatment and could unknowingly spread a disease to others, Wilensky said.

Many of the preventive services evaluated by the study, such as screenings for early signs of heart disease, depression or diabetes, were either not covered or it was unclear if they would be paid for by Medicaid. In some cases, state Medicaid officers said that the preventive services would be paid for only if deemed “medically necessary.” But Wilensky says that these terms should not be used together because medically necessary tests are for instances when a provider has a reason to suspect an established health problem, while preventive tests are crucial in detecting an emerging problem in an otherwise healthy, asymptomatic person.

Such confusion could leave providers wondering if preventive services will be covered by Medicaid, says the report. In the end, providers may simply fail to provide care if they are uncertain about Medicaid coverage and/or payment for their services, the authors said.

“By lowering risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, Americans can reduce their risk of heart disease or stroke by as much as 80 percent,” said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, which also helped fund the study. “Evidence-based screenings play an essential role in identifying and reducing these factors. Without Medicaid coverage of preventative screenings and services, we could fall behind in the battle against the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 killers.”

The authors conclude that there are many opportunities to increase the coverage of preventive services for this population. For example, managed care plans could choose to cover services that end up saving lives even if not required by state Medicaid programs. In states that do not clearly spell out covered preventive services or require providers to follow a specific standard of care, providers could choose to follow the guidelines of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Alternatively, Congress could step in and give existing Medicaid beneficiaries the same coverage of preventive services as most other Americans enjoy under health reform, the authors point out.

The Health Affairs study, “Existing Medicaid Beneficiaries Left Off the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention Bandwagon,” was funded by the American Cancer Society, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Heart Association and the National Colorectal Cancer Roundtable.

The full report, “Coverage of Medicaid Preventive Services for Adults—A National Review,” includes state-specific data and additional information about this topic. To access the report
click here.

About the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services:
Established in July 1997, the School of Public Health and Health Services brought together three longstanding university programs in the schools of medicine, business, and education and is now the only school of public health in the nation’s capital. Today, more than 1,100 students from nearly every U.S. state and more than 40 nations pursue undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral-level degrees in public health.
http://sphhs.gwu.edu/







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January 24th, 2014

1/24/2014

0 Comments

 
CONTINUING TALK ONE MORE DAY ON TOTALITARIAN POLICY LET'S REVIEW YESTERDAY'S POINTS......CAPTURED ELECTIONS TAKING THE DEMOCRACY OUT OF DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS.......BUILD-UP OF MILITARISTIC POLICING WITH SUSPENDED RULE OF LAW ALLOWING NO PUBLIC JUSTICE AND HOLDING NO ONE ACCOUNTABLE FOR CRIMES BY CORPORATIONS AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION.  YOUR MONEY BECOMES THEIR MONEY.  I'VE SPOKEN ENOUGH FOR NOW ON TPP AND THE RE-WRITING OF THE US CONSTITUTION AND SHOWED HOW IT WILL ALLOW ENSLAVEMENT TO OPERATE RIGHT HERE IN MARYLAND FOR EXAMPLE. 

No matter how many times they say all this loss of privacy and freedom is Constitutional-----IT IS NOT!

LET'S REVIEW THE SURVEILLANCE AND SECURITY SYSTEM THAT IS HOMELAND SECURITY:

Remember, the reason the US suddenly has all these people wanting death to America is that US policy went with global corporations with Reagan and Clinton and since then the IMF has attempted to capture developing world governments and economies just as they are doing now in the US.  All we have to do is run and vote for labor and justice and reinstate Rule of Law to downsize these global corporations----EASY PEASY.


ARE YOU MAD AT CORPORATIONS AND WALL STREET?  UNDERSTAND WHY OTHERS WOULD WANT TO FLY A PLANE INTO WALL STREET?


Baltimore is home of Johns Hopkins which is NSA and drone extraordinaire so the first to build militarized policing would be Baltimore and NYC.  Bloomberg is tied to Hopkins so all policy is shared.  Baltimore has a population of around 650,000 people most of which are poor and working class and Hopkins through a development corporation has been forcing huge numbers of poor and working class out of city center just as with NYC with many more wanted to go.  This brings social unrest and with it all kinds of security build-up.  We just had another spy plane fly over testing for radiation (dirty bombs).  The other problem will be the really bad policy of making Baltimore a world-class Port for international shipping.  It will kill our bay and Port but that does not matter.  With international shipping comes cargo containers that may have dirty bombs.

For those living in Baltimore and Maryland we know there is a common denominator in drones, NSA surveillance, and Smart Meters of which I speak below.....JOHNS HOPKINS AND BROOKINGS INSTITUTION.  Hopkins owns VEOLA ENVIRONMENTAL that will be overseeing Smart Meters for waste and energy and profiting from recycling and tiered energy pricing.....not to mention all of that personal data heading to the super computer on the Hopkins campus.


Why is a Gigantic War-Blimp About to Fly Above the Skies of Suburban Baltimore?

Posted on January 23, 2014

One of the most disturbing and relentless trends over the past several years has been the redirection of war technology and equipment from the battlefield abroad toward domestic use in the USA. This has resulted in a militarization of police across the nation and has encouraged small towns to use Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants to purchase ridiculous items such as tanks.

Sadly, it appears this trend is only accelerating. With billions of dollars already spent, and failed wars abroad, the military-industrial complex needs to continue to generate cash flow. May as well just use it against the American people.

We find out from the Washington Post that:

They will look like two giant white blimps floating high above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with war.

The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.

Interesting, I didn’t realize we were at war. When was the last time cruise missiles were shot into the United States?

Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to track the movements of suspected insurgents and even U.S. soldiers.

Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.


The Army said it has “no current plans” to mount such cameras or infrared sensors on the aerostats or to share information with federal, state or local law enforcement, but it declined to rule out either possibility. The radar system that is planned for the aerostats will be capable of monitoring the movement of trains, boats and cars, the Army said.

“No Current plans.” What a bunch of assholes. You know they can’t wait to attach an ARGUS surveillance system to these puppies.

“That’s the kind of massive persistent surveillance we’ve always been concerned about with drones,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s part of this trend we’ve seen since 9/11, which is the turning inward of all of these surveillance technologies.”

The Army played down such concerns in written responses to questions posed by The Washington Post, saying its goal is to test the ability of the aerostats to bolster the region’s missile-defense capability, especially against low-flying cruise missiles that can be hard for ground-based systems to detect in time to intercept them.

The Army determined it did not need to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment, required for some government programs, because it was not going to collect any personally identifiable information, officials said in their written responses to The Post.

Did the FISA court rubber stamp this assessment?

Technologies developed for battlefields — weapons, vehicles, communications systems — long have flowed homeward as overseas conflicts have ended. The battles that followed the Sept. 11 attacks have produced major advances in surveillance equipment whose manufacturers increasingly are looking to expand their use within the United States.

Aerostats — basically big balloons on strings — grew popular in Iraq and Afghanistan and also are used by Israel to monitor the Gaza Strip and by the United States to eye movement along southern border areas. Even a rifle shot through an aerostat will not bring it down, because the pressure of the helium inside nearly matches the pressure of the air outside, preventing rapid deflation.

So equipment used to control people in war zones are coming to America and there’s nothing to be concerned about?

The Defense Department spent nearly $7 billion on 15 different lighter-than-air systems between 2007 and 2012, with several suffering from technical problems, delays and unexpectedly high costs, the Government Accountability Office found in an October 2012 report.


“They are bringing this to the East Coast, close to Washington, to get the Pentagon guys and Congress to say, ‘Whoa, we could really use this,’ ” said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, a military think tank with ties to the defense industry. “This is re-purposing. You’ve already spent the money.”

Have fun Baltimore.

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U of M College Park is no longer a public university----it is now a lean, mean corporate machine with all the course work it takes to keep US global corporations safe around the world.  All this is important for job creation you know!

Hitler took over a nation's industry and used it for his war of expansion, taking the public's wealth to do it.  He had the largest Secret Police and surveillance service making everyone fearful that someone else was a spy.  If you cannot see that happening with these NSA scandals and the expanded roll of policing and drone/surveillance technology in Maryland-----WAKE UP!!!!!

MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD OF TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND PUBLIC MONEY USED FOR EXPANSIONS OF GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND BUILDING SECURITY/SURVEILLANCE APPARATUS!!!!  REALLY?????


University Of Md. Among Schools Developing Drone Concepts For Civilian Use

January 2, 2014 5:08 PM

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (WJZ) — Maryland airspace may not be involved, but the state’s brain power definitely is.

Alex DeMetrick reports the FAA will include research at the University of Maryland into the job of integrating drone aircraft into civilian airspace.

At the University of Maryland, they’re trying to do more than pilot drones by hand. Researchers are trying to figure out how insects navigate through the air without big brains or GPS.

Figure that out, and:

“We can leverage that to navigate and also possibly for sense and avoid technology in the national airspace,” said Dr. Darryll Pines, Dean, University of Maryland School of Engineering.

Right now, that airspace takes humans to fly in. But the FAA has selected Virginia and five other states to develop and test drone technology in unrestricted airspace–research the University of Maryland will also join in.

MEANWHILE-------


There is absolutely no way this technology will not be abused as they pretend they can simply allow these drones to fill the airways.  Do we really need drones to do the work of our Department of Natural Resources employees?  This is yet another step of taking the public out of all loops in knowing what is happening in the state and being accountable to the public. 

YOU WILL NOT HAVE ANY EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY ONCE YOU WALK OUT THE DOOR THEY TELL US-----OH REALLY????????  THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU.

Please check out this group and get involved!!!!


No Drones Maryland

Tuesday, April 2, 2013


April Days of Action Against Drones in MARYLAND Advanced Physics Laboratory, home of drones research at JHU. Maryland has been an important site of protest activity against drones, particularly protests against drones research at Johns Hopkins University.

Numerous Maryland events are planned as part of the nationwide April Days of Action Against Drones.

UPCOMING MARYLAND EVENTS

TOWSON - Friday, April 5, through Sunday, April 7, 2013 - The Politics of Drone Warfare and the University - Topics in this important 3-day conference will include:
  • "Distancing Acts: Imperial War from Counterinsurgency to Drones"
  • "The Politics of Drone Warfare and the University"
  • "Teaching the War on Terror"
Speakers will include:
  • Rashid Khalidi - Columbia University
  • Nick Turse - TomDispatch.com
  • Phyllis Bennis - Institute for Policy Studies
  • Ray McGovern - Ex-CIA White House briefer
  • Irene Gendizer - Boston University
  • Judith Le Blanc - Peace Action
  • David Swanson - War is a Crime.org
  • Jerry Lembcke - College of the Holy Cross
  • Vinay Lal - UCLA
  • Paul Joseph - Tufts University
  • Carolyn Eisenberg - Hofstra University
  • John Prados - National Security Archive
Friday Keynote Session: Friday evening, April 5, St. John's Methodist Church, 2640 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, MD. Keynote speakers: Col. Ann Wright, former Army officer and State Department diplomat; Alfred McCoy, University of Wisconsin.

All Saturday, April 6 and Sunday April 7 sessions will be held at the College of Liberal Arts Building, Towson University, 8000 York Road, Towson, MD 21252

For additional details see: Historians Against the War

BALTIMORE - Friday, April 12, through Sunday, April 14, 2013 - Exhibit: Drone Warfare Exhibit and Luminous Light Intervention . . . Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Exhibit: Workshop on the Legal, Political, and Ethical Implications of Militarized Drones . . . Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - Exhibit: "DRONECOMING" - Mobile drone warfare exhibition at Johns Hopkins University homecoming events.

(Add additional Illinois events to the master list of national April Days of Action actions.)


What about YOU? Become part of the No Drones movement!
Read about ALL the ways YOU can be involved  in the April Days of Action Against Drones!


____________________________________________

Do you think a government willing to allow massive fracking and exporting raw energy and global agriculture that drain and contaminate all of our fresh water is really concerned with energy conservation?  What a LOL thought!

This would have once been thought a conspiracy theory but we now see this article as mainstream as people across the country now believe that these Smart Meters are only meant to ration and restrict the public as needed.  I've spoken of the intent to end subsidy and tie product to what can be afforded.  As this article indicates, it goes further than that.  Wall Street and corporations will be allowed access to your energy consumption data for bill collection purposes----are you at home when not at work?  Will I hire someone who can only afford to keep energy running part of the day or will that make someone easily exploited?

This is not hyperbole.....it is in fact what a totalitarian society would do.  Control of every aspect of your life.

THIS IS WHY SNOWDEN OUTED THE NSA-------AS HE SAID -----YOU WILL NOT HAVE AN AVENUE OF PRIVACY AT ALL IF THIS IS LEFT UNCHECKED!


I included an article from the UK because it needs to be seen as a global effort.  There is no shortage of natural gas or electricity.....so the reasons are a ploy.



Smart meters could be 'spy in the home'

Smart meters could become a 'spy in the home' by allowing social workers and health authorities to monitor households, adding to concern at Britain's surveillance society. Smart meters will eliminate the need to take readings from traditional electricity and gas meters.

10:30AM BST 11 Oct 2009 UK Telegraph



The devices, which the government plans to install in every home by 2020, will also tell energy firms what sort of appliances are being used, allowing companies to target customers who do not reduce their energy consumption.

Privacy campaigners have expressed horror at the proposals, which come as two million homes have 'spy' devices fitted to their rubbish bins by councils who record how much residents are recycling.

The government wants every home in Britain to have smart meters, which give users information on how to save energy and send real-time data direct to utility companies, eliminating the need for customers to stay at home for meter readings or to receive estimated bills.

The devices also pave the way for a national 'smart grid', backed by David Cameron's Conservatives, which would use the data to manage national demand more efficiently and advise households when it is cheapest to switch on appliances.

In its impact assessment, however, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) says there "is theoretically scope... for using the smart metering communications infrastructure to enable a variety of other services, such as monitoring of vulnerable householders by health authorities or social services departments."

Related Articles
  • Households face higher bills for using home appliances at peak periods

It adds: "Information from smart meters could also make it possible for a supplier to determine when electricity or gas was being used in a property and, to a degree, the types of technology that were being used within the property. This could be used to target energy efficiency advice and offers of measures, social programmes etc to householders."

Doretta Cocks, founder of the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, said: "This is Orwellian. We're already under surveillance for what we put outside the home in bins and now we could be watched for what we're doing inside as well.

"Most of us are happy to reduce our energy consumption or reduce waste but these measures always seem to come at the expense of our privacy. If I want advice on energy efficiency I will ask for it."

Guy Herbert, general secretary of NO2ID, said: "Information from smart meters might be useful to energy providers and perhaps even their customers, but there's no reason for any public authority to have access to it – unless they've a warrant to do so.

"This document is a prime example of government efforts to shoehorn data sharing and feature creep into every new policy. For example, it suggests that NHS or social services could use the system to monitor 'vulnerable

householders', or that companies could use the system to spam customers with adverts for their services – having paid the government for the privilege, no doubt."

The DECC document adds households could even have their power to some appliances turned off remotely to help the national grid if there is too much demand. It says: "In terms of potentially intrusive non-physical behaviour unrelated to data, smart metering potentially offers scope for remote intervention such as dynamic demand management, which is designed to assist management of the network and thus security of supply. This could involve direct supplier or distribution company interface with equipment, such as refrigerators, within a property, overriding the control of the householder."

It also says potential extra uses for smart meters would need to be checked to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.

The Information Commissioner's Office said it had already discussed the issue of smart meters with some suppliers, including Eon, Scottish Power and British Gas. A spokesman said the ICO would "continue to maintain a close dialogue to ensure that their introduction does not compromise customers' privacy".

He added: "Important issues include what information is stored on the meters themselves, in particular whether information identifying the householder will be held. In any event energy companies will clearly need to hold records linking meters with householders and all the information must be held in line with the requirements of the Data Protection Act."

A spokeswoman for the DECC said: "The accurate, informative data that smart meters provide will be of great value to consumers. Rules and safeguards governing access to, and the use of, the data from smart meters will be reviewed as part of the Government's work in preparing for the start of the mass smart meter roll-out."

Consumer Focus, the watchdog, has also expressed concern about the privacy implications of the meters, saying consumers are "at risk of unfair, excessive, inequitable and inefficient charging" because energy companies could use the new data to introduce more complex tariffs to maximise profits at peak times.

The government has yet to decide who will pay for replacing Britain's 47 million meters, which could cost up to £8bn over the next 20 years. Its preferred option is for the cost to be met by energy firms, who stand to gain the most from meters as they remove the need to employ meter readers or calculate estimated bills.

More than two million households in Britain have microchips in their council bin. Sensors and weighing equipment fitted to the back of each rubbish lorry allow the council to collect data as each bin is raised. Information collected from outside each household is downloaded to a database that allows officials to monitor how much waste each household is producing for waste and for recycling. Officials then use the data to target errant streets and households in a bid to increase recycling rates from 43 per cent to 60 per cent.


I want to be clear, when we are made to use our energy a particular way.....forced to recycle because to is now a corporate profit factor......charged more to use energy at prime time......and having all our data sold to corporations for their marketing/research needs we have lost all of our freedoms.

Keep in mind that when there is a water shortage or an electrical shortage the government simply has local news tell people not to water lawns or wash cars or not to use air conditioners at peak hours AND THAT WORKS JUST FINE!  So, this is NOT about conservation.....it is about control and surveillance.

The complaint about detecting marijuana growers is mute......the problem is far greater than that.

Smart Meters: Surveillance Devices

Smart Meters Are Surveillance Devices That Monitor The Behavior In Your Home Every Single Minute Of Every Single Day  

Today's Date:  Friday, January 24th, 2014 Decrypted Matrix

Have you heard about the new “smart meters” that are being installed in homes all across America?  Under the guise of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions” and “reducing energy bills”, utility companies all over the United States are forcing tens of millions of American families to accept sophisticated surveillance devices in their homes.  Currently, approximately 9 percent of all electric meters in the U.S. have been converted over to smart meters.  It is being projected that by 2012, the number of smart meters in use will rise to 52 million, and the federal government is spending a lot of money to help get these installed everywhere.  Eventually the goal is to have these smart meters in all of our homes and if that ever happened there would essentially be no more privacy.  Once installed, a smart meter monitors your home every single minute of every single day and it transmits very sophisticated data about your personal behavior back to the utility company.



So can’t we just tell the utility companies that we don’t want these stupid things?

Unfortunately, in many areas of the country you can’t.  For example, one outraged resident of California contacted the utility company and was told that if he did not consent to taking a smart meter he would receive no service.

So unless you want to live “off the grid”, what are you going to do?  Can any of us really survive without electricity these days?

The sad truth is that these things are being forced upon us.

It is happening in Europe too.  The European Parliament has set a goal of having smart meters in the homes of 80 percent of all electricity consumers by the year 2020.

Sadly, as these smart meters have gone in there have been reports all over the country of electricity bills increasing dramatically.  There have been mountains of complaints about these things and yet their use keeps spreading.

But of course the biggest issue with smart meters is how they will strip us of our privacy.

The concern is that the incredibly detailed data that these surveillance devices collect will be given or sold to a vast array of third parties.

For example, smart meters are already being used by police to bust marijuana growers.

It is also feared that insurance companies, credit agencies, lawyers, marketing firms and even criminals will be able to get their hands on this data as well.

A recent article posted on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summarized some of the concerns….

“Without strong protections, this information can and will be repurposed by interested parties. It’s not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the information to plan a burglary. Marketing companies will also desperately want to access this data”

For law enforcement officials, these surveillance devices are a dream come true. According to the Columbus Dispatch, police in central Ohio have been filing at least 60 subpoenas every single month for the energy-use records of those that they suspect are growing pot in their homes.

Well, it turns out that sometimes police are raiding homes that are using a lot of energy and they don’t find any marijuana at all.  Instead, sometimes these raids reveal others kinds of activities….

Sometimes, high electricity use doesn’t lead investigators to drugs. A federal investigation in the Powell area turned into a surprise for detectives.

“We thought it was a major grow operation … but this guy had some kind of business involving computers,” Marotta said. “I don’t know how many computer servers we found in his home.”

So do you want police raiding your home if you start using a little bit too much electricity?

Jerry Day, an electronics and media expert from Burbank California, recently detailed many of the ways that smart meters act as surveillance devices when they are installed in our homes….

1. They individually identify electrical devices inside the home and record when they are operated causing invasion of privacy.

2. They monitor household activity and occupancy in violation of rights and domestic security.

3. They transmit wireless signals which may be intercepted by unauthorized and unknown parties. Those signals can be used to monitor behavior and occupancy and they can be used by criminals to aid criminal activity against the occupants.

4. Data about occupant’s daily habits and activities are collected, recorded and stored in permanent databases which are accessed by parties not authorized or invited to know and share that private data.

5. Those with access to the smart meter databases can review a permanent history of household activities complete with calendar and time-of-day metrics to gain a highly invasive and detailed view of the lives of the occupants.

6. Those databases may be shared with, or fall into the hands of criminals, blackmailers, law enforcement, private hackers of wireless transmissions, power company employees, and other unidentified parties who may act against the interests of the occupants under metered surveillance.

7. “Smart Meters” are, by definition, surveillance devices which violate Federal and State wiretapping laws by recording and storing databases of private and personal activities and behaviors without the consent or knowledge of those people who are monitored.

8. It is possible for example, with analysis of certain “Smart Meter” data, for unauthorized and distant parties to determine medical conditions, sexual activities, physical locations of persons within the home, vacancy patterns and personal information and habits of the occupants.

Jerry Day has also produced a terrific YouTube video in which he explains many of these points more fully.  If you live in an area where these insidious smart meters are going in, then please share this video with as many people living near you as you can….

The time to object to these smart meters is before they go in.  Once they are in all of our homes it is going to be too late.

This is all part of the radical green agenda that is being forced down the throats of people all over the world.

Everything that we do has to be watched, monitored and tightly controlled for the “good of the environment”.

To the control freaks running things, that also means that the liberties and freedoms that we cherish so much must be greatly restricted.

If you don’t know about “Agenda 21“, you should learn about it.  The UN has a plan for the future of this planet, and once you find out about this plan you probably are not going to like it very much.  The entire globe is rapidly becoming one big prison grid as the elite implement their vision of the future.

If you want to get a really good idea of what they are planning, just watch this video.

If the control freaks get their way, there will eventually be no more privacy for any of us.

Unless we speak out now, the surveillance devices are just going to become more and more sophisticated.  At some point, none of us is even going to be able to sneeze without someone knowing about it.

So what do all of you think about these smart meters?  Does anyone out there have a smart meter horror story?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
_________________________________________________

Those of us in Baltimore already know the debacle that is speed cameras and we know as well that it took constant media shaming and huge public outrage to stop what all knew were faulty tickets actually stealing money from citizens.  Between Smart Meters that are already showing skewed pricing for utilities and these ticketing schemes all of which record our movement by car.......the WAR BLIMP will follow us by train or bus!

Who are these people preparing all kinds of escape from whom our Homeland Security pretend to protect WE THE PEOPLE?  Probably the world's citizens coming to recover their tens of trillions of dollars stolen with massive corporate fraud!


Cordon multi-target photo-radar system leaves no car untagged

(video) BY Amar Toor October 31st, 2011 at 8:37AM ET

engadget


Go easy on the gas, Speed Racer, because Cordon is on its way. Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon's device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle's license plate. It's also capable of instantly measuring a car's speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX. Plus, this device is compact and durable enough to be mounted upon a tripod or atop a road sign, making it even harder for drivers to spot. Fortunately, though, you still have time to change your dragster ways, as distributor Peak Gain Systems won't be bringing the Cordon to North America until the first quarter of 2012. Cruise past the break to see some footage of a field trial that's currently underway -- cars tagged with a green dot are traveling below the speed limit, those with a yellow marking are chugging along within an acceptable range above the limit, while vehicles with a red tab are just asking for trouble.

____________________________________________





0 Comments

January 23rd, 2014

1/23/2014

0 Comments

 
I listened to my local corporate NPR/APM outlet WYPR give political commentary that does all it can to support the crony political system we have in Maryland.  As you read below, what got my ire going this morning requires remembering that progressive politics and neo-liberalism are at polar opposites in political spectrum.   A candidate cannot be a neo-liberal supporting a few progressive policies because global corporate rule will not allow any of these progressive stances to exist in the end.  Fraser Smith and his enthusiasm for Maryland's political machines cannot be outdone and WYPR makes sure that commentary like mine......a counterpoint is never heard.  I bet that my website and blog has more people visiting than WYPR!!!!!

IF YOU HEAR 'NEW ECONOMY' OR '21ST CENTURY ECONOMY' THAT MEANS THE WORLD UNDER TPP----GLOBAL NEO-LIBERALISM.
  The Brookings Institute and Johns Hopkins are leaders in these policies!

I so not know if this group is a real progressive economics group or a poser as is the case with most groups calling themselves progressive but this statement on their website hits at the definition of economic progressivism.  What we have in the US are neo-liberals-----global corporate pols using a few progressive issues to get votes and then they kill us with policy like TPP.  WE MUST DO OUR HOMEWORK WHEN WE CHOOSE MEDIA OR PUNDITS FOR OUR INFORMATION!!!!

Maryland has only neo-liberals in the democratic party.....as Fraser says......it is the political machines that choose the candidates.  So, when Heather Mizeur says she is 'progressive' and uses a few progressive issues to label her as such.....she makes her economic platform clearly neo-liberal.......tying the state to Wall Street leveraging, public private partnerships, and building global markets.  MIZEUR IS NOT THE PROGRESSIVE CANDIDATE----SHE IS THE NEO-LIBERAL TRYING TO WIN WITH PROGRESSIVE ISSUES!  Montgomery County is the wealthiest in the nation because it is from here (and the Virginia suburbs) that all of the fraud and corruption bringing trillions to corporations originate.....and that includes state fraud and corruption.  We would not go to Montgomery County for a democratic candidate!


NEO-LIBERALISM = GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNAL RULE = TOTALITARIANISM = THE END OF DEMOCRACY AND WE THE PEOPLE  US CONSTITUTION


Progressive Economics – Everyone Makes Progress
Monday, Dec. 24, 2012 - by Diane Alter

Progressive economics is chiefly concerned with advancing human commerce for the betterment of all – so that all can make progress. The aim is to make certain that greater stability exists in tandem with balanced growth in the economy, to keep money flowing – preventing it from accruing solely in one place or to one small group – in order to better reach universal goals. This is where the Center for Progressive Economics (CPE) comes in. The Encino, California-based non-profit company’s mission is “to promote the correct macroeconomic understanding, mainly through economic validation, that joins business with government, educators, environmentalists, civic and philanthropic leaders to create a quality global economy and community.”

At the helm is founder and Chairman Mark Pash, a Certified Financial Planner, who boasts the kind of lengthy and impressive resume that comes from 40 years of working in finance and politics. He was even a Congressional candidate in 1996. Pash founded CPE with the goal of making the world a better place for current and future generations.

Totally committed and passionate to this cause, Pash promised to fund all the expenses of CPE’s website, with its plethora of valuable information, for the next several years, encouraging everyone to become a member. Tax deductible donations are accepted, but CPE’s primary goal is to grow its member base rather than to increase the amount of dollars pledged.

CPE strives to educate individuals about, and be the advocate for, progressive economics. Members recognize progressive economic principles as being the most favorable way to safeguard the checks and balances between fair markets and community interests. As the backbone of our society, the economy has a monumental impact on the quality of life for everyone. In order for individuals to prosper and provide for their families, the economy must function properly. With proper policies, the economy can stabilize our society.

One of CPE's basic tenets is this: “We cannot have a politically democratic society without economic democracy.” CPE’s underlying philosophy is designed to facilitate the advancement of human commerce for the benefit of all, while also protecting the business environment from its own zealous hands and those of a meddlesome government. Acknowledging the myriad flaws of commerce and capitalism, the government has a role to play in countering these imperfections. But it must do so without hampering the marketplace, allowing for free enterprise and competition.

CPE, with its vibrant vision of future possibilities, explains that an understanding of progressive economic understanding along with wise application of its principles could be the conduit to future financial success for everyone – underscoring that we are all in this together. Progressive economic principles, CPE maintains, can insulate America and the entire world from the defects of capitalism, and is capable of escorting us into a future where wealth can be created and relished by all in a quality economy.




As we watch law enforcement become tightened and cruel on citizens of the US at the same time Rule of Law is suspended on white collar and government crime, we see what Germany and Fascism looked like as it was building in Europe pre-WW2.  Hitler took over all of a nation's businesses and used them for his goal of taking over the world.  Neo-liberals have as their goal taking over the world with global markets leading to colonialism.

SAME THING.  TRANS PACIFIC PACT-----TPP TRADE DEALS MOVE FURTHER TOWARDS THAT.

Let's look at some of the facts happening across the country to show what the goal looks like and how NOW IS THE TIME TO ENERGIZE AGAINST THIS.  In Hitler's time people ask......how did these citizens allow a grip on society take hold?  WELL, IT IS HAPPENING NOW IN AMERICA AND EUROPE.

I'm listening to my corporate 'public' media station WYPR giving its typical political coverage that has no counterpoint and always pushes the political machine agenda in Maryland.  Fraser Smith tells us that a newcomer to the state elections in June would not have a chance now because all of the campaign money and war chests and alignment of labor and justice has already taken place.  The candidate getting Fraser's ire didn't have any political experience for goodness sake and it seems he must have intentions of promoting his own business.  This is LOL as all Maryland politics is about promoting and moving money to connected business.  I was at an election event where a few candidates came to the podium to give their canned speaking points with the selected progressive issues of the election but the people were not able to ask any questions on policy.......neither are they at any event and the media certainly doesn't allow general questions.  So, what happens in Maryland are not elections.......THEY ARE FIXES.  The need for political experience to run for state office?  REALLY??????

WHEN THE US WAS NUMBER 1 IN THE WORLD WITH A THRIVING ECONOMY AND FIRST WORLD STANDARDS........THE GOVERNMENT WAS FILLED WITH TEACHERS, SOCIAL WORKERS, TRADES PEOPLE, CLERKS AND THE MANTRA------

SEND MR AND MS SMITH TO WASHINGTON, THE STATE HOUSE, AND CITY HALL!!!!!  AS IT IS TODAY. 


We try to help our local media be sharing with them what the Maryland citizens really think.  For example, did you know that Maryland has one of the strongest Expanded and Improved Medicare for All?  See why the private health system reform is trying to dismantle public health as fast as possible.  Not one word from media about this Universal Care movement!

Well, from Occupy, to labor and justice movements, to seniors and professionals------EVERYBODY WANT CORPORATIONS AND THEIR MONEY OUT OF GOVERNMENT AND THESE SAME PEOPLE SEE TODAYS NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS AS SIMPLY CORPORATE EXECUTIVES, NOT POLITICIANS.  So, why does Fraser Smith speak about the very system people do not want as the status quo that will stand? Oh, that's right ------corporate 'public' media working to keep corporate pols and their machines cranking!


LET'S SEE WHAT TOTALITARIANISM LOOKS LIKE IN AMERICA:



So, as Fraser tells us that having a campaign war chest will decide the Maryland elections in June-----(don't  forget FEBRUARY 25TH DEADLINE FOR FILING FOR ALL PRIMARIES),  you see the entire electorate wanting big money out of politics.  Even small business, which is an endangered species with global corporate rule, is on the bandwagon.  Here in Maryland we hear nothing of this mass movement!
  Rather, war chests are touted as what is needed to win-----GO GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS!!!!

A CAPTURED POLITICAL SYSTEM IS A MUST TO WEAN PEOPLE FROM THE IDEA OF FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS THAT DO NOT HAPPEN IN A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY! 


About Us

We are a community of citizens who believe passionately that public funding is the single most critical long-term public policy issue our nation faces. What’s at stake are nothing less than the health of our democracy, the quality of our leadership, and our government’s ability to tackle the serious problems that affect us all: health care, energy policy, education, the environment and the economy.

Clearly, incumbents have an interest in keeping the current system in place — because it keeps them in place. It will take a powerful, non-partisan, grassroots movement to demand their support for a new kind of politics in America.

Vision

We have a vision of a better America, and a return to a more responsive, participatory democracy. It’s a nation whose leaders are accountable to the voters, and elected according to their abilities, their qualifications and their character. A nation whose citizens once more have confidence in their leaders and in the integrity of the political system. A nation where cynicism and apathy are replaced by the true American ideals of optimism and activism.




Business groups call for campaign finance reform
By Amanda Conto

March 01, 2013

Business leaders are calling for full disclosure and small-donor citizen-funded elections that will restore power to the voters.

Americans for Campaign Reform, along with several other groups, will host a free event discussing why campaign finance reform matters to New York's business leaders at noon on Tuesday, March 5 at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

The coalition formed by the American Sustainable Business Council, the Business and Labor Coalition of New York, Citizens Union of the City of New York, the Committee for Economic Development, the New York State Sustainable Business Council and New York Leadership for Accountable Government, will present an overview of business benefits related to campaign finance reform and discuss how small-donor citizen-funded elections can strengthen democracy.

According to Americans for Campaign Reform's website public funding is the "single most critical long-term public policy issue" facing the nation.

"We have a vision of a better America, and a return to a more responsive, participatory democracy. It's a nation whose leaders are accountable to the voters, and elected according to their abilities, their qualifications and their character—a nation whose citizens once more have confidence in their leaders and in the integrity of the political system, a nation where cynicism and apathy are replaced by the true American ideals of optimism and activism," the website states.

Campaign finance reformers say the current system promotes a pay-to-play mentality that encourages political giving as a means of influencing legislative decision-making and increases the risk of sacrificing long-term interests for short-term gains. They also said donor influence can serve to undermine market forces by the pursuit of policies and regulations that diminish competition or unduly benefit particular firms or industries.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo outlined plans for campaign reform during his Jan 4, 2012 State of the State Address. Rob Werner, national field director for Americans for Campaign Reform, said with Cuomo's support, now is the time for campaign reform.

The governor's plan includes a voluntary "multiple match" public financing system that will encourage candidates to fund their campaigns through a broad base of small donors. His plan also includes lower contribution limits and the closure of contribution loopholes as well as lower contribution limits for corporations and individuals who do business with New York state. (Sounds the same as public media requirements----wait, they have nothing but businesses supporting them now)  Note that Maryland has done just the opposite in raising campaign donation levels and no election oversight.  Would seeing no corporate fraud for Gansler equate to a campaign war chest?  THE ASSOCIATION IS EASY-PEASY!!!!

A new enforcement unit in the New York State Board of Elections, with the independence and authority to investigate alleged violations, is also a part of Cuomo's plan.

"New York is very important and beneficial. The people of New York provide a beacon for the nation," said Werner.

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Maryland is acting as though TPP has already been passed as all of Maryland Assembly works towards installing these policies in the state.  I spoke at length about this VEOLA Super Shuttle incident so I won't go further than to say it embraces the idea that a global corporation can act any way it chooses inside the US as laws that inhibit profits are not enforced.  So, this French global corporation with headquarters in Africa brings African immigrants to Maryland and indentures them with contracts that have them working but not earning any money. 


THIS IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN BECAUSE OF MARYLAND CAPTURED POLITICAL SYSTEM THAT ONLY ALLOWS PEOPLE PROVEN TO WORK FOR THESE SITUATIONS RISE IN THE POLITICAL MACHINES......SEE WHY FRASER IS SO ADAMANT THAT POLITICAL MACHINE POLITICIANS BE THE ONES THAT RUN.......GROOM THEM AT THE LOCAL LEVEL AND IF THEY HAND ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO MARYLAND'S 1%, THEN THEY CAN MOVE UP TO THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND STATE POLITICS!  Just running MR AND MS SMITH in state elections????!!!!!  ARE YOU CRAZY SAYS FRASER!


BELOW YOU SEE A SURE SIGN OF TOTALITARIANISM.....CORPORATE SLAVERY RIGHT HERE IN MARYLAND!

Veolia Draws Labor Protest at its Headquarters in Baltimore


Oh, let's vote for more Maryland political machine candidates to fix this!!!!!!!  RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE AND DO NOT ALLOW THE DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL MACHINES CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES AS THEY ARE ALL NEO-LIBERALS!

Baltimore PostExaminer·25 videos
  Published on Jan 20, 2014

Veolia is a billion dollar international corporation with transportation companies operating along the East Coast of the U.S. It hires SuperShuttle workers at both BWI and Dulles airports. Many of the SuperShuttle workers at the airports are very unhappy with the conditions of their employment. On Monday, January 20, 2014, some of the workers, and their allies in the Social Justice and Union Movements, stage a rally at Veolia's main office in Baltimore, MD. The action was organized by activists Sharon Black and Amy Millar of UFCW, Local 1994. To learn more, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/20568...


Reclaim Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream -
END POVERTY & INJUSTICE! SUPPORT SUPERSHUTTLE DRIVERS!



PROTEST VEOLIA’S SYSTEM OF WORKER SLAVERY
Monday, January 20, 3 P.M. to 4 P.M. at Veolia’s Baltimore transportation HQ, 2100 Huntington Ave, Baltimore, MD (21st St. & Huntington Ave. right off of Howard Street near the car wash and Jiffy Lube)

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Below you see Bill Bratton, the NYC police chief put into place by a supposed 'progressive' de Blasio calling a citizen's beating for almost nothing anything but excessive force.  We all know in Baltimore it is militaristic policing that has police acting like this and the SWAT TEAM mentally is directed at WE THE PEOPLE and not terrorist.

Truthout
Kang Wong was attacked as he crossed a busy street in Manhattan. He was thrown against a wall and left with cuts on his face that required metal staples. But it was Wong who was subsequently arrested and charged at the nearest police station - because his attackers were New York City cops.


Why Did Police Beat an Elderly Man for Jaywalking?
Wednesday, 22 January 2014 15:12 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program

(Image: Don't walk via Shutterstock)84-year-old Kang Wong is recovering today from a brutal attack on the streets of New York City.

Wong’s attackers jumped him as he jaywalked across a busy street in Manhattan, threw him up against a wall, and left him with cuts all across his face that have since been sealed up with four metal staples.

The attackers then brought Wong to the nearest police station, where he was booked on charges of jaywalking and resisting arrest.

Kang Wong’s attackers, you see, were New York City cops.

That city’s police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has said that excessive force wasn’t used in his arrest, but that statement doesn’t really face up to much muster. It’s pretty clear that the cops overreacted.

Wong doesn’t speak any English, and if it looked like he was resisting the officers in question, that’s almost certainly because he didn’t understand a word they were saying.

Understandably, his family now plans on pressing charges.

Wong’s brutal arrest is outrageous in its own right, but it also speaks to the broader problem of police brutality in this country. In some places, police culture is very professional; in others it’s just plain militaristic.

I know this from personal experience.

Back in 1996, the Olympics were coming to Atlanta. Just like right now, with Sochi trying to ramp up their security, Atlanta needed more security for the Olympics than was available from just the local police.

At the time, I was writing a novel about a private detective, and shadowing an Atlanta PI, a now-longtime friend named DeWitt Wannamaker, who has held a variety of jobs in law enforcement.

The Georgia Police Academy had opened their doors to civilians that year with an “executive protection” training course for people who’d work for Olympic athletes and visiting VIPs, and DeWitt got me into the course. I ended up not only completing the course but getting licensed for two years as a private detective in the state of Georgia.

Most of the guys going through the course were small-town cops who’d never had any professional training at all, and what I discovered was that there are a lot of really good, really dedicated, and really smart people who aspire to or work in law enforcement.

I also discovered that there are a small number of yahoos who are just really, really excited about the chance to get a gun and a billy club and have the legal authority to kick the stuffing out of people. I encountered one of those guys in the “hand to hand” part of the Academy’s course, and still remember the bruises.

It’s cops like that who do things like beat up an 84-year-old man for jaywalking and it’s cops like that who crack open a protestor’s head at an Occupy Wall Street protest.

Part of this, I believe, has to do with how we talk about law enforcement in the United States. We don’t solve crime, we “fight” it; we don’t have a campaign to stop drug addiction, we have a “War on Drugs.”

We tell cops that they’re in a battle with crime, and then they act accordingly: like soldiers, not public servants.


It shouldn’t be any surprise, then, that the number of SWAT team deployments - something unheard of when I was growing up - jumped from around one hundred in the 1970s to over 50,000 in 2005.

While we’ve turned our public servants into warriors, we’ve started to give up - at the federal level, at least - on the whole idea of community policing.

The federal Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS, which provides resources for local police forces around the country was initiated in 1994 during the Clinton administration as part of an effort to put 100,000 police officers on America’s streets.

The idea was to get officers out into the community where they could form relationships with everyday people and act more like teachers than soldiers.

Madison, Wisconsin Police Officer Katie Adler is a great example of the kind of person the COPS program was meant to create.

She is a neighborhood officer in the crime-ridden North Side area of Madison. Unlike regular patrol cops in Madison, neighborhood officers are put in at-risk communities to help make a difference and build relationships with citizens in the hopes preventing future crime.

Officer Katie, as everyone calls her, is beloved in the communities that she patrols, so much so that kids follow her wherever she goes. She’s even inspiring children in the communities to become police officers when they grow up.

But the promise of every neighborhood having an Officer Katie is becoming increasingly unlikely.

That’s because ever since the Bush administration, funding for the COPS program has been continually slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2010, $792 million was allotted in the form of federal grants under the COPS program for local police forces across the country; by 2012, that number shrank to just $199 million.

We need to reverse this trend and ramp up funding for community policing.

Programs like COPS encourage law enforcement agencies to do more than just catch criminals. They encourage them to work with communities to create a culture of trust that breaks down the barrier between cops and civilians. They also encourage police officers, police officers like Katie Adler, to work towards solving the root causes of crime as opposed to just trying to stop its symptoms.

Not all police officers are bad guys. The vast majority, in my experience, actually want to do good by their community. But it’s clear that by turning our law enforcement agencies into battalions, we’ve created an environment where violence is both more acceptable and more likely.

If we really want to prevent people like Kang Wong from being brutalized at the hands of the people who are supposed to protect them, then we need to totally rethink what it means to be a police officer in America.

Part of this means drawing down wasteful and ineffective initiatives like Nixon’s War on Drugs that do nothing but alienate already vulnerable communities from law enforcement.

But we need to go bigger than that. We need to make a commitment to funding the COPS program so that police work is seen not just as a way to catch the bad guys, but as a way to serve communities all across the country.

We also need to pay police as professionals and hold them to professional standards just like we do other professions.

This won’t stop all police brutality, but it will definitely go a long way towards making sure that our streets become less of a battle zone and more of a place where we can all learn to live with each other in peace.


______________________________________


0 Comments

January 22nd, 2014

1/22/2014

0 Comments

 
SNOW DAY FOR ME!!!!!!  BE BACK ON THURSDAY




Remember, February 25 is the cut-off to register as a candidate in this primary......if you do not act now, they will finish dismantling all of public sector and democratic structures.....THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE FOLKS!!!!!  WAKE UP!!!!!
0 Comments

January 21st, 2014

1/21/2014

0 Comments

 
THE 1% ARE KILLING ALL AVENUES FOR PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS AND THE ABILITY OF THE PUBLIC TO NETWORK WITHIN THEIR COMMUNITIES!  WE SHOULD SEE A FLOOD OF PROTEST OVER ENDING NET NEUTRALITY, THE WAR ON THE POST OFFICE, THE PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITY CENTERS, AND THE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS/DATA MINING  WITHIN SCHOOLS AND PRIVATE NON-PROFITS TAKING THESE PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS.

TOTALITARIANISM LOOKS JUST LIKE THIS!!!!!


Regarding news outlets the American people no longer listen to:

If you listen to the social media bunch you never hear or see any mainstream media repeated or posted and MSNBC is losing any viewership because they are neo-liberal.  I happen to watch a Sunday CBS talk show that showed why.  The commentator asks the Obama representative about NSA and the fact that it is run by hedge funds and is not really a public agency and the Obama spokesman ignored the question and went on to say the issue is whether the government or private businesses should store the data,......THE POINT IS THAT THE GOVERNMENT AS A PUBLIC AGENCY IS NOT INVOLVED....IT IS PRIVATE BUSINESSES RUNNING NSA.  Then we read where Microsoft's Seattle is trying to pass anti-spying on the world legislation because since they are part of the hedge funds running NSA, tech companies are losing the world's business because no one trusts them.  So, they are pretending to be against the spying system they helped develop.  Today corporate NPR/APM's Marketplace tells us the world's monied elite and elite politicians need to do something about wealth inequity because the natives are getting restless.  This is like listening to the monied Godfather called elite and his Goodfellas called elite politicians.  Absolutely no one thinks of the crew at the top as elite.  People have even stopped viewing Ivy League schools as good academic institutions.  Abroad, American universities are looked at as the least of choices because they are now so sullied and thuggish.

This is why no one watches/listens to mainstream news.
This is also what people in second/third world autocracies hear when they listen to the news.  They sit there for a minute looking at news people saying nothing that is true, other nations are telling their citizens Russia and Iranian news is propaganda because they are doing the same thing.  Meanwhile the citizens have a completely separate system of media and communication. This is the state of US news media.

The important things for the American people in this regard are two-fold.  As we listen to neo-liberals handing the US Post Office over to Staples and cuts to buildings and employees we are seeing the VISIGOTH politicians dismantling the only public means of communication....if you think 46 cents is a lot for a letter wait until neo-liberals get rid of public mail.  The Maryland pols are all neo-liberals and when a supermajority of democrats had all branches of government.....they pretended to be writing a Financial Reform bill that has nothing enacted and is totally dismantled.  Maryland in fact is the most naked capitalist state in the country with its neo-liberals running as democrats pretending they are fighting for public interests!  Indeed, creating postal kiosks and giving Staples the rights to postal activities is simply killing the Post Office.  So, do you think two global corporations like UPS and FED-X will be looking for quality and cost competition without the Post Office?  Of course not.  Do you think they will be delivering RAIN, HAIL, SLEET, OR SNOW.....OR SOCIAL REVOLUTION?  Good luck, as people in third world countries get mail a few times a month.  The Post Office is the best run company in the country, it is just having a BAINS CAPITAL gutting of all of its assets so it cannot do its job. 

THOSE CRAZY PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS HANDING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO PRIVATE HANDS IN A RUSSIAN PERESTROIKA COUP AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE'S WEALTH!

IF YOU KEEP ALLOWING THE SAME NEO-LIBERALS TO RUN FOR OFFICE EVERY ELECTION....IF YOU ALLOW A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES, YOU WILL LOSE ALL PUBLIC POST OFFICES AND THE LAST METHOD OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION!  NET NEUTRALITY?  NEO-LIBERALS SAID FORGET-ABOUT-IT!  WE CAN TURN THAT AROUND.

The second issue is depending too much on social media.  As we saw a few years ago, the first thing neo-liberals did when the economic collapse revealed the entire business and government system in the US was criminal and corrupt was to pass laws allowing the government to do a wholesale shut down of all media in the US in the case of civil unrest.....just as third world Egypt and other revolutionary nations.  You see, since the US is going to have a revolution because VISIGOTHS have stolen all our wealth and intend to keep it.....they are preparing to be the autocratic crowd they are.  Indefinite detention, mass communication shut down, and spying extraordinaire!!!  Now we know what Muslim countries are feeling when they shout DEATH TO AMERICA, which means Wall Street and the TROIKA.  We know what they mean now don't we!  When you go from being hated around the world for your IMF activities taking over government control of undeveloped nations to doing the same in US cities and government.....you are pretty much hated by everyone.  This is what Obama and his NSA are all about.

 EVERYONE IS THE ENEMY.....WE WANT ALL WEALTH AND CONTROL.....ERGO, WE MUST BE THE MOST TOTALLY REPRESSIVE NATION IN THE WORLD.  THAT IS WHAT THESE PACIFIC TRADE AGREEMENTS.....TPP DO.  IT IS NOT SO MUCH ABOUT TRADE.....IT IS ABOUT ENDING NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND NATIONAL CONSTITUTIONS TO BUILDING A GLOBAL  NETWORK THAT CONTROLS ALL NATIONS. PRETTY TALL ORDER.

So, this is why Market Place said that the 'elite' need to get busy giving the poor some way to have money to survive....notice they did not suggest simply reinstating Rule of Law to recover tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud giving each person in America some hundreds of thousands of dollars.....and a democracy!!



REMEMBER, THE FINANCIAL PROBLEMS WITH THE POST OFFICE ARE A DISMANTLING OF ALL ITS ABILITY TO GENERATE REVENUE WITH SPINOFFS OF IT BASIC BUSINESS AND THE INCREDIBLE PRE-FUNDING OF PENSIONS IN THE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS, WHICH IS NOW BEING STOLEN BY WALL STREET THROUGH PENSION FRAUD AND GOVERNMENT RAIDING.

YES, YOUR MARYLAND NEO-LIBERAL IS NOT ONLY RESPONSIBLE.....THEY ARE WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO HAND ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO PRIVATE HANDS.


Staples' mini post offices draw union ire
By Gregory Wallace  @gregorywallace January 19, 2014: 9:04 PM ET  CNN Money



"The Staples-USPS deal has to be looked at in the context of a drive towards privatizing the U.S. Postal Service," said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. His group is a network of local unions that represents over 220,000 current and retired mail workers.

"We are willing to support this program as long as it's staffed with United States Postal Service employees," he said.

Staples declined to comment on the unions' concerns and said it doesn't discuss agreements with vendors, but said the pilot program is intended to offer "added convenience for our customers."

"Staples continually tests new products and services to better meet the needs of our customers," said spokeswoman Carrie McElwee.


And Postal Service spokeswoman Darleen Reid-MeMeo rejected the idea that the Staples program was "an attempt to replace stand alone Post Offices."

The post office, whose financial struggles are well-known, is adapting, Reid-MeMeo said. The Staples pilot is the next step of a program that already has over 65,000 retail partners -- including grocery stores and pharmacies that sell stamps and village stores that sell flat-rate boxes in rural areas.

Sarah Ryan, a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Washington, said she thinks the Staples partnership does little to help traditionally underserved postal customers.

"The interesting thing is this won't do anything to help people who are in rural or lower income neighborhoods," Ryan said. She has studied privatization and the Postal Service and is a former retail clerk at a Seattle post office and held elected positions in the local postal union.


"This is the first time since the Sears deal that there's an effort to move the retail into a national, corporate chain," she said.

In the 1980s, the Postal Service and Sears (SHLD, Fortune 500) struck an arrangement similar to the one at Staples today. Postal unions protested and the program was eventually canceled.

This time around, Dimondstein said, the union president, said workers want guarantees their jobs will be protected and not outsourced to Staples.

"We do not have any problem with the people of this country getting expanded access to postal service," said Dimondstein. "We are willing to support this program as long as it's staffed with United States Postal Service employees."

The Postal Service counters are currently available at just over 80 Staples stores in and around San Francisco, San Diego, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Worcester, Massachusetts, said Reid-MeMeo, the USPS spokeswoman. She said the postal service is "always looking to expand access to postal products and services in locations where our customers frequent."


_________________________________________
Well, if they kill the public Post Office we will go to our community schools and communicate in public meetings and networking!!!!  Oh, that's right....they are privatizing all public education and schools are going to be run by national charter chains.  In Baltimore, people do not see their schools as center of community public forums and there goes the public community centers handed over to private non-profits run by corporate interests that just won't allow public dialog on political issues.  What is a person fighting for democracy to do in Baltimore and Maryland?

Below you see what school privatizers have already thought on that issue.  You see a Department of Education agency network designed specifically to give private education businesses the means to education data and how to capture a communities communications through schools.....

THERE GOES THAT PUBLIC OUTLET......OBAMA, ARNE DUNCAN, AND MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS HAVE BEEN BUSY DISMANTLING ALL AVENUES FOR PUBLIC GATHERING FOR DIALOG AND NETWORKING.....OH, THAT IS WHY ALL THE PUBLIC COMMUNITY RECREATION CENTERS IN THE CITY ARE NOW CLOSED AND RUN BY PRIVATE NON-PROFITS!!!!!


A School-Community Communication Model:

1. Specific Behavioral Concerns of the Community for Its Youth. A Report on the Instructional Tasks Project.Abbot, William P.; And OthersThe longrange goal of the Instructional Tasks Project is to determine the requirements for an effective community-school communication model and its implementation. In the project's first year, the critical incident technique was used to identify the specific behavioral concerns of the community served by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, for its youth. Over 1,000 persons sampled from parents, youth, school staff, and the social community contributed data from which several thousand specific valued behaviors were abstracted and then classified via content analysis into a taxonomy of community concerns. Although subsequent data obtained from nonrespondents to the original sample and selected citizens indicated that the taxonomy was comprehensive, ratings of importance were not significantly associated with frequency of behavioral concerns mentioned by respondents in the initial sample. Hopefully this taxonomy will serve to progress further toward (1) an effective model and language for school-community communications about student performances, (2) development of instructional objectives based on community concerns, and (3) a description of similarities and differences among parts of the community in their concerns for youth. [Fig.1, p14 & Table 22, p46-56 may be of doubtful legibility in HC because of size of print.] (Author/JH)


THINK WE HAVE A DO-NOTHING CONGRESS AND WHITE HOUSE......MAN......THERE IS NOT AN AGENCY LEFT WITHOUT PRIVATIZATION AND IT IS AUTOCRATIC AS CAN BE!!!!!


WHEN OBAMA AND O'MALLEY SAYS THEY SUPPORT OPEN GOVERNMENT.....THEY DO NOT MEAN PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY.....THEY MEAN BUSINESSES CAN COME AND TAKE ALL DATA ACCUMULATED BY GOVERNMENT AND SELL IT, USE IT FOR RESEARCH.....WHATEVER. 


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____________________________________________

Obama and neo-liberals just allowed for the end of internet neutrality by not declaring the internet a utility regulated just as any vital service system in the US......electricity, water, communications.  What neo-liberals want to do is keep most people from being able to access the one ubiquitous means of communication by placing it in tiered payment levels that have full access too expensive except for the wealthiest.  Consolidation in the US has openly broken all ant-trust and monopoly laws and is allowing a few global corporations decide how the public's internet will run and be accessed.  The public paid for the internet.....it is our internet.  Not now say the VISIGOTHS and their neo-liberal pols!


I DON'T HEAR YOU SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY AGAINST TAKING A FIRST WORLD COUNTRY THIRD WORLD!!!!!  RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!!!!!


Living in the Third World of Communications

March 8, 2007 digg  TMCNet Bloggers

If you haven’t heard, a court decided Vonage needs to pay Verizon $58 million in past damages for patent infringement in the following areas:  
  • Technology used to bridge Internet calls to the traditional phone system
  • Features such as call-waiting and voice-mail
  • Wireless Internet phone calls
  Now I know many people at Verizon and they are very smart, well rounded and seem nice enough. From an investment perspective they did a good thing by using patents as a competitive weapon against a small provider who has revolutionized the telecom industry and made telcos wake up and realize they need to compete.   The question worth posing however is how is the consumer benefiting from this lawsuit?   My concern is with the government and the various agencies who are supposed to be protecting me, my family and friends’ from monopolistic practices such as this.   When I learn about large companies using the legal and regulatory systems, to flush their competitors down the toilet I have to stop and remember what country I am living in.   I am a US citizen. I was born in the US and I am proud of it. I want consumers to have the best of everything. Lower prices, better quality – again, the best of everything.   VoIP has afforded consumers many benefits. FCC Chairman Michael Powell realized this and used Vonage as a poster child for competition that was pro consumer.   Unfortunately the massive amount of telco consolidation leaves a few large service providers with war chests full of cash and patents they will use to wipe out any and all competition in the market.   The system is so broken it is tough to imagine it can be called a system. How could the FCC feel good about this sort of decision? How could it ever be argued that a huge patent portfolio wielded like nuclear weapons can benefit consumers?   Merger after merger gets approved and no one puts an end to it.   This patent case is but one result of consolidation.   The damage of these mergers is not only to consumers but to the very telcos who are merging. I am speaking tomorrow at the VPF in Miami and as I sat through the sessions today I almost started tearing as I heard the amazing technologies and services being rolled out by companies like BT.   It seems phone companies in every country in the world are rolling out services that are many years ahead of the US.   The United States of America is the third world of telecom. It is an embarrassment and an outrage. Worse yet, we invent the leading edge technologies which actually get deployed on our shores next to last!   The few telcos in this country are falling behind in innovation and to be honest I do not blame them one bit. If I were a shareholder I would be proud of these accomplishments. In fact the way things are going, AT&T will be a single telephone company left to battle a single cable company.   At what point does the FCC need to stop mergers? It looks like there will soon be one choice in satellite radio for example.   Who decides how much competition is enough?   I remember a telecom market with no choice. I do not recall any innovation taking place with one company at the helm. Disruption and fear breeds competition and makes companies experiment with new products to get consumers excited. Duopolies do not.   When the old AT&T saw the threat from Vonage they rolled out a competitive service called CallVantage and you know what ? Tthey had a bunch of enthusiastic people at the helm of this organization and they innovated regularly. It was very refreshing to see AT&T act like a start up.   CallVantage now has pretty much been left for dead.   Every day I worry the path the US is going down is very wrong. We have to focus more on expanding competition and stop killing it at every turn. All government officials are responsible for what is happening to consumers through rulings such as the one above.   I suppose all I can ask is does anyone want to be responsible for telling their kids they are the reason there are 2 choices for telephone service where there was once thousands? Is this a legacy anyone wants to leave? How do you want to be remembered?   One day your kids may read this article – or even your grandchildren. Are you concerned at all? Please tell me you are.   I am very interested in opinions to this entry and I apologize if I come out harsh. Unfortunately some things just have to be said and someone has to start protecting consumers and keep them from getting thrown to the sharks.
___________________________________________
It is important for the American people to develop community-wide communications and having DEMOCRACY NOW MEETINGS STARTS THAT.  Whether newsletter or using local school networks, develop a strong system of communication that is not tied with social media and private phone services.  Democracy depends on free press and free speech and a national shut down of communications because of threats of civil unrest does not meet this mark.  We do not have as of now the mainstream media reporting on millions of people in the US and Europe marching and rallying....so think what will happen when everyone sees how TOTALITARIAN these neo-liberals are with TPP!!!!!

GO OLD SCHOOL WITH YOUR COMMUNICATION NETWORKS!!!!



New Bill Gives Obama ‘Kill Switch’ To Shut Down The Internet



Government would have “absolute power” to seize control of the world wide web under Lieberman legislation



Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The federal government would have “absolute power” to shut down the Internet under the terms of a new US Senate bill being pushed by Joe Lieberman, legislation which would hand President Obama a figurative “kill switch” to seize control of the world wide web in response to a Homeland Security directive.

Lieberman has been pushing for government regulation of the Internet for years under the guise of cybersecurity, but this new bill goes even further in handing emergency powers over to the feds which could be used to silence free speech under the pretext of a national emergency.

“The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined,” reports ZDNet’s Declan McCullagh.

The 197-page bill (PDF) is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA.

Technology lobbying group TechAmerica warned that the legislation created “the potential for absolute power,” while the Center for Democracy and Technology worried that the bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems.”



The bill has the vehement support of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who last year asked during a congressional hearing, “Would it had been better if we’d have never invented the Internet?” while fearmongering about cyber-terrorists preparing attacks.

The largest Internet-based corporations are seemingly happy with the bill, primarily because it contains language that will give them immunity from civil lawsuits and also reimburse them for any costs incurred if the Internet is shut down for a period of time.

“If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the President has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the US Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab,” writes McCullagh.


Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, described the bill as a “very important piece of legislation”.

As we have repeatedly warned for years, the federal government is desperate to seize control of the Internet because the establishment is petrified at the fact that alternative and independent media outlets are now eclipsing corporate media outlets in terms of audience share, trust, and influence.

We witnessed another example of this on Monday when establishment Congressman Bob Etheridge was publicly shamed after he was shown on video assaulting two college students who asked him a question. Two kids with a flip cam and a You Tube account could very well have changed the course of a state election, another startling reminder of the power of the Internet and independent media, and why the establishment is desperate to take that power away.

The government has been searching for any avenue possible through which to regulate free speech on the Internet and strangle alternative media outlets, with the FTC recently proposing a “Drudge Tax” that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers.

Similar legislation aimed at imposing Chinese-style censorship of the Internet and giving the state the power to shut down networks has already been passed globally, including in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.

We have extensively covered efforts to scrap the internet as we know it and move toward a greatly restricted “internet 2″ system. Handing government the power to control the Internet would only be the first step towards this system, whereby individual ID’s and government permission would be required simply to operate a website.

The Lieberman bill needs to be met with fierce opposition at every level and from across the political spectrum. Regulation of the Internet would not only represent a massive assault on free speech, it would also create new roadblocks for e-commerce and as a consequence further devastate the economy.






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January 20th, 2014

1/20/2014

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I WANT TO EMPHASIZE TO THE CURRENT MIDDLE-CLASS WHO HAVE THE VOICE AND POWER TO CHANGE THIS MORE-SO THAN THE WORKING CLASS AND POOR-----THIS SOCIAL REFORM THAT TAKES US BACK TO MEDIEVAL SERFDOM DOES NOT END WELL FOR ANYONE BUT THOSE NOW THE RICHEST.  YOU NEED TO SHAKE THESE NEO-LIBERAL BUGS OUT OF THE RUG OR YOU WILL BE LIVING IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE.

MLK WOULD SAY NAKED CAPITALISM HAS TO GO!!!!



Regarding MLK day and The Lines Between Us:

I attended a justice gathering this week that had people telling stories of abuse in the City of Baltimore. It paints the ongoing War Against the Poor in the city. Now, if you are middle-class and think gentrification of the city needs to follow the path being taken by sociopaths at the top of the income scale....you need to reflect as to where your family will be if these sociopaths are allowed to carry through their plans to eliminate WE THE PEOPLE and THE BILL OF RIGHTS with TPP----living under suspended Rule of Law brings everyone down! That was MLK's message in the 1960s and it is 10 times more relevant now that Clinton and Obama have created global corporate rule and now move towards ending US sovereignty giving all rights to rule to the heads of a few global corporations. Don't worry, it is all illegal and a COUP against the American people and will be NULL AND VOID.....but most will see their personal wealth disappear before we turn this around!

I was speaking to a wonderful lady shouting loudly against injustice in the city who tells me of long lines around the NORTH AVE social services office waiting to process information for FOOD STAMPS. She told me how people were made to wait for hours in these lines in the freezing cold and if they made it inside the process failed to complete registration. Given phone numbers to follow up they found no answer to these phone calls.
PEOPLE NEEDING FOOD STAMPS ARE BEING GIVEN THE RUN AROUND SO THEY BECOME DESPERATE AND GIVE UP IN BALTIMORE.

I explained that this was deliberate and taken from the Texas plan used now for a decade of moving social services to phone and online where, just as a consumer trying to get through with a product complaint and cannot speak to a real person.....this is happening in social services. So, Baltimore closed 2 major social services hubs and left this one facility open to process all the people while being understaffed. THIS IS A SIGN OF ENDING PUBLIC ASSISTANCE IN THE STATE. She told me how Mikulski and Cummings told her they were fighting for Food Stamps and extended unemployment and I shouted to those gathered that these pols are lying because they know these services are being dismantled in Maryland as they pretend to fight for them! Remember, Maryland amazingly fell below the limit for extended unemployment just as it is being pushed in Congress.....6.4% all without any sustained job growth. No one believes that figure and it is skewed to play the requirements. Just an aside, the same is happening with health care. No one using dental insurance because they are being abused and exploited by dental chains. Another situation of passing progressive laws and not enforcing them. Texas is now equivalent to a third world nation with all of its social restructuring and suspension of Rule of Law and Maryland is using Texas as a model for their structural changes.....neo-liberals and neo-cons......WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE....THERE IS NONE. ALL OF YOUR INCUMBENT POLITICIANS KNOW THIS IS HAPPENING.

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES TO SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERAL BUGS FROM THE RUG.

So, what happens when public policy deliberately makes sure you cannot be employed, then you cannot get social services, and all of the wealth you accumulated is lost to corporate fraud, and police brutality and abuse has you in jail working for prison contractors making profits paying you $2 an hour? Baltimore has over 160,000 people of which 60% are at or below poverty most victims of O'Malley's zero tolerance criminal record.

THIS IS BALTIMORE'S MLK LEGACY AND IT IS A REALLY SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS. ALL OF THE TIME AND MONEY THAT GOES WITH MAKING SURE PEOPLE CANNOT THRIVE COSTS SOCIETY MORE AND LABELS THAT SOCIETY IMMORAL AND CORRUPT.

This MLK march will be about a revolution that will not be stopped by social programs meant to quell social unrest. It is growing, it is broad, and it will be sustained. When Rule of Law returns, we know that Statutes of Limitation is suspended when a government suspends Rule of Law.


Below you see where the conservative approach to ending welfare and social services because it 'makes people lazy' went.....and this includes closing brick and mortar buildings for social services and directing people to call and then ignoring them as is happening in Baltimore today! 

Remember, this is only about the richest getting richer.....it is not about sound public policy.  Clinton took a thriving and strong society with middle-class wealth, strong integrity and oversight over business and government, strong social safety nets and ended all of that just so a few at the top could become extremely rich.  THAT IS ALL.  It wasn't enough to be millionaires.....  Obama and neo-liberals today are trying to seal the deal by suspending all Rule of Law and public justice as we all get fleeced.

Welfare Reform in Texas Has Not Worked, According to University of Texas at Austin Researchers

Jan. 29, 2008  University of Texas, Austin

AUSTIN, Texas — Most Texas families who leave welfare remain in or near poverty and many are likely to return to the welfare rolls in the future, say University of Texas at Austin researchers.

For a new book, "Life After Welfare: Reform and the Persistence of Poverty," Laura Lein and Deanna Schexnayder followed 179 families who left welfare after the welfare reform act of 1996 was signed into law.

"We examine the ways in which the effort to 'end welfare as we know it' has played out in the lives of impoverished families in Texas who draw on welfare support," said Lein, a professor in the School of Social Work and Department of Anthropology. President Bill Clinton signed a welfare law in 1996, and President George W. Bush reauthorized the bill with more stringent requirements for welfare recipients in 2006.

Lein and Schexnayder, a research scientist and associate director of the Ray Marshall Center in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, found the families experienced barriers to employment, confronted poverty even when employed and faced a failing safety net of basic human services as they attempted to sustain low-wage jobs.


"Have these reforms—ending entitlements and moving towards time limits and work requirement—lifted Texas families once living on welfare out of poverty or merely stricken their names from the administrative rolls?" they ask.

"If the goal of welfare reform was to reduce the welfare rolls, it was undeniably successful—at least in the short term," the authors said. "But if the goal was to reduce poverty and increase the well-being and stability of families previously on welfare, the results are far more complicated and disturbing."

Texas, with its early experiments with welfare reform and a relatively limited welfare program to begin with, is an important arena in which to study the aftermath of welfare reform, said Lein and Schexnayder, adding that federal lawmakers later increased the severity of welfare reform even more.

"Through the experiences of Texas welfare leavers, we can examine the potential outcomes of similar policy initiatives in other states as budgetary constraints continue to affect welfare policies," the researchers said.

University of Texas Press published the book. Daniel Schroeder, also of the LBJ School, and Karen Douglas of Sam Houston State University, contributed to the research.



______________________________________________



Next, I spoke with a group fighting for Expanded and Improved Medicare for All in Maryland.......A GREAT ISSUE!  What citizens in Maryland do not know is that Baltimore and Maryland have/are dismantling all of public health and with that the structures for entitlements like Medicare.  If you are fighting for universal care that is not Medicaid for All......the ACA idea of health care for all.....then you need to be shouting against the privatization of all of public health!  It is on steroids here in Baltimore and was the primary goal of City Health Commissioner Barbot and State Health Executive Sharfstein.......SEE WHY THEY DIDN'T HAVE TIME TO SEE THE HEALTH SYSTEM ROLLOUT WORKED!  Handing all of public health to private corporate non-profits is a big job!!!!

One of the people attending told a story of abuse in Baltimore's health system and foster care program that makes one think of Charles Dicken's London.  When a health system moves from public health to private and profit-driven you get a level of deregulation and unaccountability as makes Wall Street what it is today.....predatory and fleecing everything a person has under any means.  Now, imagine a global medical corporation like Hopkins who famously allowed impoverished people in Baltimore so little access to health care as to have them with life spans 30 years less than the upper class all while getting tons of Medicare and Medicare funding for these majority of poor.  We know the poor were given research projects to join for health care access and that is why the poor in Baltimore shout that they are being used as experiments.....because, in a way they are.  What is the level of abuse?  Well, dismantling public health in Baltimore has a private corporation like Hopkins shielded from most public scrutiny and the opting out of Federal Medicare oversight that has allowed Maryland to dismantle much of those public oversight systems tells us THERE IS A LOT OF VERY, VERY, VERY BAD STUFF HAPPENING IN MARYLAND HEALTH CARE.

Just recently we read where Hopkins was found to be providing faulty data for a black lung class-action lawsuit that worked against the victims and we know that victims of health abuse in Baltimore have absolutely no recourse for the most part as public justice does not exist and these MALPRACTICE LAWYERS only look for sure things that can easily win.  Now, we see Hopkins connected to organ laundering and new laws passing now surrounding tissue banking make EVERYONE LEARY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE DIE IN THE HOSPITAL.  It is third world stuff to be thinking an institution operating in the US would be out to get us-------LITERALLY.  Since there is no oversight and since all of these practices bring big money especially to the MEDICAL TOURISM GROUP........  Hopkins took billions of taxpayer money to build its global campus in Baltimore.....IT IS SAFER TO ASSUME THIS IS ALL HAPPENING THAN NOT!


THIS IS NEO-LIBERALISM AND NAKED CAPITALISM FOR YOU AND IT IS EXACTLY WHAT CLINTON HAD IN MIND WHEN HE TOOK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND HANDED IT TO CORPORATIONS.  REMEMBER, ALL OF MARYLAND'S POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS, THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS!

Below we see just one of many examples of how this organ stealing will grow and the public is deliberately left out of the loop in accountability...

THIS GENERATES DISTRUST!!!!


Israeli organ trafficker pleads guilty


Mon Oct 31, 2011 8:23AM3 0

 Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum (L) led by his attorneys Ronald Kleinberg (C) and Richard A. Finkel (R) An Israeli rabbi who was in involved in organ trafficking to the US pleaded guilty for breaking law.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, 60, pleaded guilty to three counts of organ trafficking and one count of conspiracy in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey.

Rosenbaum brokered black-market sales of human kidneys in the US and arranged transplant surgeries at well known medical centers, including Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

“The transplant surgeries occurred in prestigious American hospitals and were performed by experienced and expert kidney transplant surgeons,” attorneys Richard Finkel and Ronald Kleinberg said in a statement.

He reportedly was paid $410,000 to arrange the sales of kidneys from healthy donors in Israel to three people in New Jersey.

Rosenbaum admitted in court papers that he “would assist the donor and the recipient to coordinate a cover story to mislead hospital personnel into believing that the donation of the kidney was a purely voluntary act and not a commercial transaction.”

Rosenbaum may face up to five years imprisonment on each count of the four-count information, and $250,000 in fines when he is sentenced in February

Following Rosenbaum's arrest, US authorities detained some 44 others, including rabbis and mayors in New Jersey, who were prosecuted for money laundering and human organs trade.

A month before his arrest, a report published in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, accused Israeli soldiers of kidnapping Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip for their organs, indicating a possible link between the Israeli military and the mafia of human organs detected in the US.

SJM/MMA



___________________________________________

The Master Plan for Baltimore's development has the working class and poor out of the city center and off to the periphery of the Baltimore City line.  So, all low-income housing is being destroyed and not replaced and all Enterprise Zones using taxpayer money requiring low-income housing is ignored.  Even the parking ticket of subprime mortgage fraud has almost none of the money going to low-income housing or the victims.  We are seeing such a high level of corruption and fraud in these Enterprise Zones it takes your breathe away as tax credits given with almost free houses to connected people and bundled by the thousands to Wall Street investment banks.  Now residents of Remington and Old Goucher/Barclay are watching with alarm as all of the property around them are bought with cash and left to sit or are so badly rehabbed as to make them little better than before.  THIS IS WALL STREET AS LANDLORD AS RENTS GO SKY-HIGH FOR PROPERTY NOT MUCH BETTER THAN BEFORE THESE PROPERTY OWNERS WERE GIVEN THE PROPERTY FOR NOTHING WITH TAX BREAKS TO BOOT.  So, working class people who live in these neighborhoods know what is in store and they have no recourse and the COMMUNITY GROUPS that should be their voice are stocked with Hopkins development people who simply adopt whatever Baltimore Development says.  Now the development that poor and black citizens have felt are coming to the lower income white population and they are not liking it either.  We are organizing both groups of people along with the middle-class to fight what is THUGGERY GENTRIFICATION that guts a city's assets for the few and leaves control of city center's real estate to a few VISIGOTHS and that is not good social planning.

I let everyone know that Hopkins' plan of moving all low-income housing and poverty resources to the city line has to do with the plan to downsize the city's limits where the boundary will be moved closer to City Center leaving all the poor and working class outside Baltimore City limits.  Hopkins is diligently studying transporting the poor as the plan will be to stop public transportation out to these areas and limit it to shorter routes leaving those stuck at the border with few transportation opportunities.  What Hopkins has to do is think about how to move people to and from work without allowing them movement for personal reasons.  They are well on their way by making the MTA in Baltimore so bad in service, cutting routes and leaving people standing at bus stops for hours as to make it impossible to use.  Next, the subsidized bus fares will be built like school children's bus passes in that they will be valid in only moving during work hours.

Tying people moved out to the city boundaries to businesses right next to their living quarters sounds a lot like feudalism doesn't it! 

WELL, THAT'S MEDIEVALISM FOR YOU AND THAT IS THE NEW ECONOMY TO NEO-LIBERALS!


If people look at what housing looked like for the Chinese brought to an industrial city in China it has workers impoverished with wages tied to housing right there at the company for which they worked and they were literally trapped in these working situations.


SOUND LIKE PLANTATION COMPANY STORE STUFF??????  EXACTLY.

This is what Obama's HUD reform looks to do in cities being gentrified.  Now, do we as a society really want to go there because the few of the richest want to be super-rich and have fiefdom living?  REALLY?  Wouldn't we rather go back to first world standards and make the poverty programs work better?



Obama's housing reform panel angers affordable-housing advocates

John Taylor of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition says there should be more community representation on the panel. (Melissa Golden/bloomberg News) 

By Zachary A. Goldfarb Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 13, 2010

Affordable-housing advocates raised concerns Thursday that the Obama administration is excluding consumer and community groups from playing prominent roles in a government-sponsored conference next week that will kick off efforts to overhaul national housing policy.

After the administration announced the 12 panelists for Tuesday's conference, the nonprofit National Community Reinvestment Coalition said consumer and community groups had been "muscled out" by financial companies, economists and academics without a sense of how housing policy plays out in communities.

"Apparently being a community organizer qualifies you to be president, but it's not good enough to be part of HUD and Treasury's think tank on housing," said NCRC chief executive John Taylor, whose group works with hundreds of community organizations to promote access to financial services for low- and middle-income people.

The criticism by affordable-housing advocates was notable because the Obama administration has so far paid much more attention to their concerns than previous administrations have. Advocates, for instance, had credited the administration with listening to community groups that argued that the government must do more to embrace rental housing for those who cannot afford to buy a home.

Panels and players


Almost everyone agrees that the government's role in providing financing for home loans -- now standing behind nine in 10 new loans -- is too big and must be replaced by private capital. But an emerging flash point in the debate is how much the government may compel private companies to spend on ensuring that low- and middle-income people have access to housing -- either by renting or buying.

Tuesday's conference will feature two panels on housing reform -- one led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and focused on financial markets, and another led by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and focused on broader housing policy goals. Six executives, five academics and a representative of a civil rights group will participate as panelists. After the panel discussions, breakout sessions will take up topics such as securitization and rental housing.

"Across the spectrum, stakeholders agree that our current system of housing finance requires fundamental reform," said Jeffrey A. Goldstein, undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance. "This conference is an opportunity for us to broaden our perspectives on a number of key issues in a transparent way to make certain that all of the best ideas are on the table."

The panelists include Bill Gross, Pimco's chief investment officer, who has been a large buyer of securities backed by home loans; Moody's economist Mark Zandi, who has advised politicians on economic policy; and Lewis Ranieri, who helped pioneer mortgage securitization.

The heads of Bank of America and Wells Fargo's mortgage units will be panelists, as well as former bank regulator Ellen Seidman.

Seidman, who now runs a community-oriented bank in Chicago, and Marc Morial, a former New Orleans mayor who is now president of the National Urban League, are likely to be among affordable-housing advocates' biggest allies at the conference.

Still, "it's really not much diversity or real community perspective from folks that represent the end user of mortgages," said Janis Bowdler, deputy director of the wealth-building program at the National Council of La Raza. "I am concerned that the process will be heavily influenced and informed by major industry players and economists."

But Andrew Williams, a Treasury spokesman, said consumer advocates will have a voice. "A number of consumer advocates will participate in the conference to ensure that a broad range of stakeholders have input into the reform discussion," he said.

White House's approach


Some say that, regardless of who is being invited to speak, the topics the administration is addressing are important ones.

"While I think it's important that the right people are at the table, the agenda really points to them trying to get the issues that the housing finance system has left behind -- like multifamily housing and affordability," said Linda Couch, deputy director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The Obama administration has taken an incremental approach to reforming housing. It faces a January deadline, imposed by the new financial regulatory reform law, to come up with a plan for overhauling housing finance.

But officials say they fear that any specific proposal could rattle the fragile housing and mortgage markets, which are now supported to a great extent by government programs.

In April, the Treasury and HUD released seven broad questions to guide thinking on how to reshape housing finance. They received more than 300 comments.


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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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