THIS WEEK I WILL TALK ABOUT REAL ESTATE----BEYOND THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD ISSUES----REMEMBER, THE GOAL IS TO ELIMINATE PROPERTY OWNERSHIP FOR ALL BUT THE WEALTHIEST!  THAT MEANS YOU MIDDLE-CLASS!  THIS ATTACK IS NOT ONLY ON WORKING CLASS!

You won't hear all of this talk in Baltimore because none of these transactions are made public in Baltimore but the same thing has been happening these several years. The FED QE policy----Obama and Congressional foreclosure policy all allowed for this second phase of rebundling and securitizing massive amounts of real estate that was owned for the most part by the American people and in cities. Now they are handing entire communities to these investment firms that are wealthy enough to charge high rent and wait for a decade or two until a Manhattan is born. They are using the money stolen in fraud to fund these huge securitized purchases. Now, these 'landlords' will say-----we are held accountable to our shareholders, we have to maximize profits and it has nothing to do with the city or its needs....these are international investment firms.

THIS IS WHAT WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS HAS BALTIMORE'S MAYOR RAWLINGS-BLAKE DOING WHEN SHE IS OFF TO LAS VEGAS TO FIND REAL ESTATE INVESTORS FOR BALTIMORE.

'Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”

The Great Recession of 2016?

These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.

Keep in mind much of this real estate was taken with fraud and these securitized bundles should not have made it to market----they should have been sent back to citizens victimized by fraud.  That did not happen because the pols working the fraud are still in office----GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS.

Blackstone is simply a global investment firm of all of the players from Bush and Clinton to Wall Street CEOs......enriched from last decade's massive, systemic frauds.  This is for whom your Clinton neo-liberal pols work

Wednesday, Nov 27, 2013 08:12 AM EDT

Wall Street: The empire strikes back How the financial industry has turned housing into a dangerous get-rich-quick scheme -- again


Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch

•  

(Credit: Wikipedia) This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.

Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.

Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up — again.


Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.

In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.

Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation — and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.

Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.

In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks — generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place — make money too.


An All-Cash Goliath

In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.

Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast — up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.

The second sign was the buyers themselves.

Click here to see a larger version

About 5% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 2,000 houses, are located in the Charlotte metro area. Of those, just under 1,000 (pictured above) are in Mecklenberg County, the city’s center. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Symone New.)

“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers — every last one of them — were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.

Between 2005 and 2009, the mortgage crisis, fueled by racially discriminatorylending practices, destroyed 53% of African American wealth and 66% of Hispanic wealth, figures that stagger the imagination. As a result, it’s safe to say that few blacks or Hispanics today are buying homes outright, in cash. Blackstone, on the other hand, doesn’t have a problem fronting the money, given its $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank. This money has allowed it to outbid families who have to secure traditional financing. It’s also paved the way for the company to purchase a lot of homes very quickly, shocking local markets and driving prices up in a way that pushes even more families out of the game.

“You can’t compete with a company that’s betting on speculative future value when they’re playing with cash,” says Alston. “It’s almost like they planned this.”

In hindsight, it’s clear that the Great Recession fueled a terrific wealth and asset transfer away from ordinary Americans and to financial institutions. During that crisis, Americans lost trillions of dollars of household wealth when housing prices crashed, while banks seized about five million homes. But what’s just beginning to emerge is how, as in the recession years, the recovery itself continues to drive the process of transferring wealth and power from the bottom to the top.

From 2009-2012, the top 1% of Americans captured 95% of income gains. Now, as the housing market rebounds, billions of dollars in recovered housing wealth are flowing straight to Wall Street instead of to families and communities. Since spring 2012, just at the time when Blackstone began buying foreclosed homes in bulk, an estimated $88 billion of housing wealth accumulation has gone straight to banks or institutional investors as a result of their residential property holdings, according to an analysis by TomDispatch. And it’s a number that’s likely to just keep growing.

“Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities,” says Henry Wade, founder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.

But buying homes cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate in value isn’t the only way Blackstone is making money on this deal. It wants your rental payment, too.

Securitizing Rentals

Wall Street’s rental empire is entirely new. The single-family rental industry used to be the bailiwick of small-time mom-and-pop operations. But what makes this moment unprecedented is the financial alchemy that Blackstone added. In November, after many months of hype, Blackstone released history’s first rated bond backed by securitized rental payments. And once investors tripped over themselves in a rush to get it, Blackstone’s competitors announced that they, too, would develop similar securities as soon as possible.

Depending on whom you ask, the idea of bundling rental payments and selling them off to investors is either a natural evolution of the finance industry or a fire-breathing chimera.

“This is a new frontier,” comments Ted Weinstein, a consultant in the real-estate-owned homes industry for 30 years. “It’s something I never really would have dreamt of.”

However, to anyone who went through the 2008 mortgage-backed-security crisis, this new territory will sound strangely familiar.

“It’s just like a residential mortgage-backed security,” said one hedge-fund investor whose company does business with Blackstone. When asked why the public should expect these securities to be safe, given the fact that risky mortgage-backed securities caused the 2008 collapse, he responded, “Trust me.”


For Blackstone, at least, the logic is simple. The company wants money upfront to purchase more cheap, foreclosed homes before prices rise. So it’s joined forces with JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank to bundle the rental payments of 3,207 single-family houses and sell this bond to investors with mortgages on the underlying houses offered as collateral. This is, of course, just a test case for what could become a whole new industry of rental-backed securities.

Many major Wall Street banks are involved in the deal, according to a copy of the private pitch documents Blackstone sent to potential investors on October 31st, which was reviewed by TomDispatch. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Credit Suisse are helping market the bond. Wells Fargo is the certificate administrator. Midland Loan Services, a subsidiary of PNC Bank, is the loan servicer. (By the way, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and PNC Bank are all members of another clique: the list of banks foreclosing on the most families in 2013.)

According to interviews with economists, industry insiders, and housing activists, people are more or less holding their collective breath, hoping that what looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck won’t crash the economy the same way the last flock of ducks did.

“You kind of just hope they know what they’re doing,” says Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “That they have provisions for turnover and vacancies. But have they done that? Have they taken the appropriate care? I certainly wouldn’t count on it.” The cash flow analysis in the documents sent to investors assumes that 95% of these homes will be rented at all times, at an average monthly rent of $1,312. It’s an occupancy rate that real estate professionals describe as ambitious.

There’s one significant way, however, in which this kind of security differs from its mortgage-backed counterpart. When banks repossess mortgaged homes as collateral, there is at least the assumption (often incorrect due to botched or falsified paperwork from the banks) that the homeowner has, indeed, defaulted on her mortgage. In this case, however, if a single home-rental bond blows up, thousands of families could be evicted, whether or not they ever missed a single rental payment.

“We could well end up in that situation where you get a lot of people getting evicted… not because the tenants have fallen behind but because the landlordshave fallen behind,” says Baker.

Bugs in Blackstone’s Housing Dreams

Whether these new securities are safe may boil down to the simple question of whether Blackstone proves to be a good property manager. Decent management practices will ensure high occupancy rates, predictable turnover, and increased investor confidence. Bad management will create complaints, investigations, and vacancies, all of which will increase the likelihood that Blackstone won’t have the cash flow to pay investors back.

If you ask CaDonna Porter, a tenant in one of Blackstone’s Invitation Homes properties in a suburb outside Atlanta, property management is exactly the skill that Blackstone lacks. “If I could shorten my lease — I signed a two-year lease — I definitely would,” says Porter.

The cockroaches and fat water bugs were the first problem in the Invitation Homes rental that she and her children moved into in September. Porter repeatedly filed online maintenance requests that were canceled without anyone coming to investigate the infestation. She called the company’s repairs hotline. No one answered.

The second problem arrived in an email with the subject line marked “URGENT.” Invitation Homes had failed to withdraw part of Porter’s November payment from her bank account, prompting the company to demand that she deliver the remaining payment in person, via certified funds, by five p.m. the following day or incur “the additional legal fee of $200 and dispossessory,” according to email correspondences reviewed by TomDispatch.

Porter took off from work to deliver the money order in person, only to receive an email saying that the payment had been rejected because it didn’t include the $200 late fee and an additional $75 insufficient funds fee. What followed were a maddening string of emails that recall the fraught and often fraudulent interactions between homeowners and mortgage-servicing companies. Invitation Homes repeatedly threatened to file for eviction unless Porter paid various penalty fees. She repeatedly asked the company to simply accept her month’s payment and leave her alone.

“I felt really harassed. I felt it was very unjust,” says Porter. She ultimately wrote that she would seek legal counsel, which caused Invitation Homes to immediately agree to accept the payment as “a one-time courtesy.”

Porter is still frustrated by the experience — and by the continued presence of the cockroaches. (“I put in another request today about the bugs, which will probably be canceled again.”)

A recent Huffington Post investigation and dozens of online reviews written by Invitation Homes tenants echo Porter’s frustrations. Many said maintenance requests went unanswered, while others complained that their spiffed-up houses actually had underlying structural issues.

There’s also at least one documented case of Blackstone moving into murkier legal territory. This fall, the Orlando, Florida, branch of Invitation Homes appeared to mail forged eviction notices to a homeowner named Francisco Molina, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Delivered in letter-sized manila envelopes, the fake notices claimed that an eviction had been filed against Molina in court, although the city confirmed otherwise. The kicker is that Invitation Homes didn’t even have the right to evict Molina, legally or otherwise. Blackstone’s purchase of the house had been reversed months earlier, but the company had lost track of that information.

The Great Recession of 2016?

These anecdotal stories about Invitation Homes being quick to evict tenants may prove to be the trend rather than the exception, given Blackstone’s underlying business model. Securitizing rental payments creates an intense pressure on the company to ensure that the monthly checks keep flowing. For renters, that may mean you either pay on the first of the month every month, or you’re out.

Although Blackstone has issued only one rental-payment security so far, it already seems to be putting this strict protocol into place. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, the company has filed eviction proceedings against a full 10% of its renters, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.

Click here to see a larger version

About 9% of Blackstone’s properties, approximately 3,600 houses, are located in the Phoenix metro area. Most are in low- to middle-income neighborhoods. (Map by Anthony Giancatarino, research by Jose Taveras.)

Forty thousand homes add up to only a small percentage of the total national housing stock. Yet in the cities Blackstone has targeted most aggressively, the concentration of its properties is staggering. In Phoenix, Arizona, some neighborhoods have at least one, if not two or three, Blackstone-owned homes on just about every block.

This inundation has some concerned that the private equity giant, perhaps in conjunction with other institutional investors, will exercise undue influence over regional markets, pushing up rental prices because of a lack of competition. The biggest concern among many ordinary Americans, however, should be that, not too many years from now, this whole rental empire and its hot new class of securities might fail, sending the economy into an all-too-familiar tailspin.

“You’re allowing Wall Street to control a significant sector of single-family housing,” said Michael Donley, a resident of Chicago who has been investigating Blackstone’s rapidly expanding presence in his neighborhood. “But is it sustainable?” he wondered. “It could all collapse in 2016, and you’ll be worse off than in 2008.”

____________________________________________


For those not knowing all of this is simply the next phase of a decades old plan to centralize all real estate ownership to the rich of the world-----creating this International Economic Zone where the American people are not in the picture and there is no Constitutional rights as citizens-----this is it.

The FED QE policy allowed all this on steroids and now we have consolidated ownership by investment firms in cities like Baltimore. Securitized means these buildings are working for world-shareholders and will be predatory for profit. It also means that this real estate is being held and controlled by global investors until they see a Manhattan level of wealth all the while controlling who gets to rent in these communities.

This is happening big time in the South----from Maryland down as these are the Republican-held areas moving these International Economic Zones and global FOXCONN sweat shop policies forward. The South is building corporate plantations this time with the global rich as plantation owners. The 15 black ministers in Baltimore, the fraternity/sorority business owners, and the pols getting all kinds of real estate in this deal to create an International Economic Zone all for their support of the most crony, corrupt, and Wall Street/Neo-conservative Johns Hopkins politicians that are the mayors and Baltimore City council-----

ARE BEING PLAYED AND WILL END UP WITH NOTHING FOR TRYING TO HAND THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE TO THESE GLOBAL SOCIOPATHS.

When you hear Obama fans touting a rising economy and stock market---this is what they were touting.  This movement by Wall Street of bundled, foreclosed securities was just about the totality of the stock market and housing rise.  Historically Black Colleges were the ones touting this the most---and they know where this all leads.  Any labor and justice organization that shouts Obama and Congressional neo-liberals have improved the economy while it was all driven by this mass consolidation of real estate-----THEY ARE WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND NOT ME AND YOU.

Think of where you will be come this next huge economic crash from a collapsing bond market----which was created in part by this Wall Street bundling of securitized foreclosures.  If you are the middle-class having bought a home these last several years----look below at Blackstone looking to connect these bundles to the bond market just as the bond market is getting ready to collapse.  They are doing it again-----using real estate market to prop up the bond market for a few months of profit before it all falls down.  What will happen to rental houses tied to a collapsed bond market?  They will go bankrupt and the tenets living there will be forced to move as these houses simply move back to Wall Street banks for the next round of ------THIS IS LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING AT ITS FINEST.


Rental-Home-Backed Securities? Wall Street’s New Money-Making Strategy



Shayla Mars, Posted on Jan 31st, 2014,

  For those of you who aren’t a housing industry aficionado, you may have missed it when banks, hedge funds and private equity firms bought up 200,000 single-family homes across the nation. Wall Street firms capitalized on the low housing prices and interest rates in order to secure the properties. But being a landlord doesn’t seem to be the end goal for most firms—the real money is in turning those homes into investment properties and then selling them off to investors. While converting homes into bundled investment properties (mortgage-backed securities) is a legal financial practice, the bundling of rental homes hasn’t been done before. The mass buying and selling of mortgage-backed securities played a major part in the last financial crisis. It is uncertain whether rental-home-backed securities would fare better, but some Wall Street firms plan on making a play for it anyway.


Meet your new landlord Between 2012 and 2013, firms took to buying up foreclosed real estate in distressed markets across the nation—those areas hit hardest by the financial crash. Instead of flipping these properties and transforming them into investments to be sold off, a percentage of homes are being used as rental properties. Firms often contract other companies to maintain their properties, but those companies are sometimes miles away. This could spell potential trouble for renters; be sure you investigate who oversees any rental property you’re interested in and find out what the response time is in emergency situations (e.g., a busted water pipe).



The possibility of rental-home-backed securities It has been widely accepted that Wall Street fueled the growth of the housing bubble by being the supplier of easily attainable mortgage-backed securities. The securities proved toxic and poisoned the economy, causing the downturn. Investors’ planning to buy up large quantities of property hoping to make a profit from rent is a risky endeavor. Rising housing prices is one concern as supply dwindles, because it will become harder for firms to purchase future housing prospects (large quantities of housing) and to keep pace with paying back lenders.

Blackstone Group LP doesn’t seem to be worried. The world’s largest private equity firm is also the largest owner of housing in America with a total of 41,000 home under its supervision. Blackstone, like other firms, is considering bundling some of its properties and selling them off as rental-home-backed securities--bonds tied to rental income. Economists and rating agencies are both skeptical of this strategy for good reason. There is no precedent of how rental-home-backed securities would fare in a revitalizing market, nor is there knowledge on how they would be regulated. The fear of whether these securities would become unregulated, like the mortgage-backed securities that expedited the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, adds to the hesitation around accepting them. Before Blackstone Group LP can move forward with this novel idea, rating agencies must approve it.

Firms are looking at the possibility of renter-back securities as a safer bet than mortgage-back securities, because a few tenants not paying their rent won’t cause the same economic upset as defaulting on a mortgage. Bloomberg created an easy to understand infograph of Blackstone’s rental-home-back securities strategy. The graph points out what could potentially happen in the event of rent defaults, evictions and vacant homes. The scenario is very similar to what happened when people defaulted on their mortgages—investors won’t be paid and overall revenue will drop. Of course there are safeguards but there were also safeguards set-up before the housing collapse.

Renters are the wave of the future The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University produced a study on rental housing entitled “America’s Rental Housing: Evolving Markets and Needs” in 2013. The study discusses the growth of renting over home ownership. It states that myriad factors, such as displacement of homeowners during the crash of 2008, the recession that followed and the high cost of relocating all contributed to the increase in renters.

Unemployment is down but a vast majority of new jobs are lower-paying full-time positions. Wall Street firms are banking on a continued increase of renters as housing prices rise, pushing more people out of the buying market. The New York Times speculates that the bulk-buying by Wall Street firms may be one of the factors contributing to the rapid decline in supply. Sharp decline in supply leads to a significant jump in housing prices.

The rental market and the housing market are intertwined. Historically, there have been more homeowners than renters in America but as the Joint Center points out, a shift is on the horizon. If home-builders start to cater to the middle and upper class coupled with rising prices of present homes, more and more Americans will slip into the renter category. Rental-home-backed securities could be a great way for Wall Street firms to increase their revenue, but the economy can be unstable. Mass lay-offs or a slight rise in rent could negatively impact both a renter’s ability to pay and a return on the securities. If that happens on a large enough scale, it could cause another financial crisis. It will be interesting to see whether or not rental-home-backed securities come to fruition.

___________________________________________________

Nowhere in Maryland media does all of this long-term International Economic Zone plan come out. We don't know Rawlings-Blake is looking for these global investment firms to come to Baltimore as a solution to tens of thousands of Baltimore citizens losing their homes to Wall Street subprime mortgage fraud knowing that the securitized property could simply be recovered by enforcing Rule of Law and claiming it for citizens of Baltimore. Rawlings-Blake is being touted in Baltimore for her being lifted to higher positions but she is doing nothing----she simply shows up and Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins and its wheelers and dealers close the deals. Hopkins already has its endowment tied to these securitized real estate deals here in Baltimore.

The middle-class lost big with the 2008 crash and will be the big losers with this coming bond market crash as the working class has all but lost their homes. Remember, these International Economic Zones will have the world's rich in the city center----

The capture of media was very important in moving these policies forward ------and in Baltimore there is silence as these repressive policies are installed. Baltimore should and can be a progressive labor and justice city with Rule of Law, Equal Protection, and citizens building a local economy for its citizens-----AND NOT A NEO--CONSERVATIVE/ NEO-LIBERAL INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE WITH NO SOVEREIGNTY OR RIGHTS FOR CITIZENS.

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We are seeing the exact mortgage fraud as last decade except that this time they are rolling what used to be citizens' homes to Wall Street investment firms to make into rentals with the goal of imploding them right back to Wall Street as bankruptcies minus the tenets renting from these buildings.  Wall Street will then simply sell these properties again to the same investment firms.  Each time this happens----more and more citizen homeowners are taken out and more and more renters are impoverished and left unable to secure stable housing.


Real Estate

Private equity funds go to Las Vegas looking to bankroll builders
Originally published January 29, 2010 at 10:25 pm Updated January 29, 2010 at 12:25 pm


Mayor heads back to Las Vegas this week
Inside City Hall: Rawlings-Blake set to attend a conference of mayors.

Mark Reutter June 17, 2013 at 6:59 pm

While not yet a fixture like Penn & Teller or Cher, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is getting in her showtime at Las Vegas.

Less than a month after she spent five days at a shopping center convention – and took time out to marry City Hall’s top lobbyists, Lisa Harris Jones and Sean Malone, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – the mayor will savor the “City of Lights” once more during a weekend-long meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.


The Board of Estimates is set to approve $4,182 for the travel, meals, registration fee and lodging of Rawlings-Blake and Andrew Smullian, her deputy chief of governmental affairs.

The cost of Police Department security, which accompanies the mayor on out-of-town trips, was not disclosed in the board’s agenda.
Brochure announcing the group's 81th annual meeting, starting on Friday. (U.S. Conference of Mayors)

Brochure announcing the group’s 81st annual meeting, starting on Friday.

Five-Day Trip

The mayor will attend the conference through next Monday, according to her office, and will make appearances at three meetings.

She’ll speak on Baltimore’s food desert strategy (“A Catalyst to Address Health, Employment and Economic Disparities”), chair a session of the Mayors’ Water Council and address how her administration “engages and connects citizens” through the Internet (an event sponsored by Google).

In-between there will be plenty of time to hang out and enjoy the conference’s various activities, including Friday night’s “Surf Party at Mandalay Bay Beach,” Saturday’s excursions to the Fremont Entertainment District, and Sunday’s show by Cirque du Soleil featuring the music of Michael Jackson.

Rawlings-Blake is the only mayor from Maryland registered at the conference. Altogether, 188 mayors, chiefly from mid-sized cities, were registered as of this afternoon.

____________________________________________


Now, call me skeptical -------but I think this drop in lead cases has more to do with the inability of Baltimore citizens to get these cases to court-----and then when the Mayor of Baltimore refuses to pay a Federal lead paint award----sending the message that Baltimore does not take these lead paint cases seriously. It is like saying the Baltimore crime rate decreased the whole time the police department was juking the stats. The truth is Baltimore pols have passed laws these few years making it harder for a family to win these cases opening the ability of investment firms coming into the city to do quick rehabs and placing people in them. I will look more closely at this later in the week. This is how Maryland pretends to be progressive while Baltimore is one of the worst in the world in health outcomes for its citizens.....IF PEOPLE CANNOT ACCESS JUSTICE THE STATS GO DOWN.

As Baltimore City Hall goes to global investment firms to rebuild communities----all of these laws will be ignored as they are in nations from where these investors live. Baltimore had three decades it could have been tearing down and rebuilding safe housing in communities with all kinds of Federal grants and city taxation and instead----it built global Johns Hopkins and its global East Baltimore campus as central to its International Economic Zone plan. Imagine-----investment firms with securitized property they plan to maximize profits caring about lead abatement? REALLY???????

Below you see the number of lead paint tests done in Baltimore was down from what is a relatively small number as it is-----with Baltimore having over 600,000 citizens many living in underserved communities having this problem.

Take a look at the next article to see these Wall Street investment firm landlords are slum landlords who do not care about people.  They will be worse than Baltimore slum landlords if that is possible.

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“Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment


Lead poisoning cases drop, many cases linked to properties not previously covered by Maryland law


Posted by mdnewsuser on September 25, 2013 in Lead poisoning prevention, Press releases No Comments Department of Environment releases 2012 Childhood Lead Registry report; continued reduction in cases shows impact of Maryland’s 1994 law; legislation addresses cases in newer rental units and owner-occupied housing  

BALTIMORE, MD (September 24, 2013) – Childhood lead poisoning in Maryland continued to decrease last year, but a significant number of new lead poisoning cases are linked to homes that had not been covered by Maryland’s 1994 lead law, a report released today by the Maryland Department of the Environment shows.

Legislation passed last year is designed to reduce lead poisoning cases in homes that had not been covered under Maryland law. A key provision of that legislation takes effect in January 2015.

Statewide_2012_Childhood_Blood_Lead_Surveillance

More Information The Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) has released the 2012 Maryland Childhood Lead Registry Annual Surveillance Report. The report shows that the percentage of tested young children with blood levels at or above the level that triggers actions under state law dropped to 0.3 percent. This is the lowest percentage ever recorded in annual surveying that began in 1993, the year before Maryland’s Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing Act was enacted. The figures also represent a decrease of more than 98 percent in the percentage of young children reported to have lead poisoning since 1993. Much of the decline in blood lead levels is the result of implementation and enforcement of Maryland’s lead law.The report also shows that more than 110,000 Maryland children were tested in 2012 – an increase from the previous year.Maryland’s 1994 lead law applies to rental units built before 1950, when lead paint was prohibited in Baltimore City. In Maryland counties outside of Baltimore City, more than eight out of 10 confirmed cases of an initial report of lead poisoning involved children living in post-1949 rental housing or owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed in the 2012 Maryland General Assembly session and signed into law by Governor Martin O’Malley is designed to reduce the risk of lead poisoning in these newer rental units and in owner-occupied properties. Core Facts MDE’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program serves as the coordinating agency of statewide efforts to eliminate childhood lead poisoning.Exposure to lead is the most significant and widespread environmental hazard for children in Maryland, and, according to the CDC, there is no safe level of blood lead. Children are at the greatest risk from birth to age six while their neurological systems are being developed. Exposure to lead can cause long-term neurological damage that may be associated with learning and behavioral problems and with decreased intelligence.Among other data, the annual Childhood Lead Registry survey compiles all blood lead tests done on Maryland children up to 18 years of age, and provides blood lead test results to local health departments as needed for case management and planning. Only the data for children under the age of 6 years is used for review of the lead poisoning prevention effort. MDE has compiled this comprehensive assessment on statewide childhood blood lead screening since 1993.Key statistics from the 2012 Childhood Lead Registry annual survey include:

• Statewide, 110,539 children under the age of 6 were tested, which is an increase from the 2011 figure of 109,534. In Baltimore City, 18,717 children were tested, a decrease from 19,049 in 2011.
• Statewide, 364 children (or 0.3 percent of those tested) had a blood lead level of 10 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dL) or above. This is lower than the analogous figure of 452 (0.4 percent) for 2011. In Baltimore City, 219 children (1.2 percent of those tested) had a blood lead level of 10 mg/dL or above, which is down from 258 (1.4 percent) in 2011.
• Of the 364 cases statewide for 2012, 255 were new cases. Of the 219 cases in Baltimore City, 148 were new cases.
• Of the children in Maryland counties outside of Baltimore City with a first test through the more reliable venous method showing a blood lead level of 10 mg/dL or above, 84 percent lived in homes other than pre-1950 residential rental units. The analogous figure for Baltimore City for 2012 was 32 percent.

   Maryland’s 1994 Reduction of Lead Risk in Housing Act requires owners of pre-1950 rental dwelling units to register their properties and reduce the potential for child exposure to lead paint hazards by performing specific lead risk reduction treatments prior to each change in tenancy. House Bill 644, passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 2012 and signed into law by Governor O’Malley, requires owners of rental properties built before 1978, when the use of lead paint was prohibited, to register these properties and take steps toward reducing the risk of lead poisoning beginning in January 2015. In addition, it raised the annual registration fee.

The legislation also allows MDE to seek delegation to administer a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule that regulates renovations, repairs and painting in homes that were built before 1978, whether they are rental units or owner-occupied, and in pre-1978 facilities with young children. The rule requires contractors who do work on these properties to receive training and use safe work practices. Maryland regulations to allow MDE to administer the federal rule are being drafted.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had, since 1990, maintained the blood lead level of 10 mg/dL as the “level of concern.” In 2012, the CDC adopted its Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention’s recommendation that eliminated the term “level of concern”  (since there is no known safe blood lead level) and the recommendation of a new blood lead level “reference level” of 5 mg/dL, based on current lead levels in the population. In 2012, 1,792 Maryland children were identified with a first-time blood lead level in the range of 5 to 9 mg/dL, compared to 2,129 in 2011. MDE, in addition to performing environmental investigations in all cases where blood lead levels are 10 mg/dL or greater has begun opening compliance cases on confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL in which a child is identified to live in a pre-1950 rental property. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) has provided guidance to health care providers that children with confirmed levels of 5-9 mg/dL should be retested within three months, in order to ensure that their lead levels are not increasing.

DHMH and MDE are also using data from the new MDE report to revise the State’s requirements for testing of children who live in certain zip codes. DHMH expects to have a draft of the revised testing strategy available for public review in several months.

Quotes “Through Maryland’s highly successful lead program we have reduced lead poisoning by more than 98 percent. But this disease is completely preventable. We cannot and will not let up in our work to eliminate childhood lead poisoning in our state.”“Working with our partners, including Baltimore City and the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Maryland has made significant gains to protect our children, particularly those who live in older rental housing. But a significant number of lead poisoning cases in Maryland are linked to newer rental and owner-occupied housing. Legislation passed and signed into law last year will allow us to reach more children who might be affected by lead paint dust – and allow us to prevent more children from being poisoned in the first place.”— Robert M. Summers, Secretary, Maryland Department of the Environment
“Lead poisoning can rob children of their potential. Maryland has made tremendous progress over the past two decades, but there is still work to do. We must partner with health care providers to ensure that children are appropriately screened and tested around the State, build on efforts to reduce lead exposure from contaminated housing and help parents prevent low-level exposures from other lead sources. The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene will continue to work with MDE and our partners to eliminate lead poisoning in Maryland.”— Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, Secretary, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
“We are heartened to see the ongoing progress being made in the reduction of childhood lead poisoning in Maryland,” said Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “We will continue to work closely with MDE on efforts to eliminate this tragic and costly disease and ensure that all of the state’s children are able to grow and thrive in safe and healthy homes.”— Ruth Ann Norton, Executive Director of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (formerly the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning)

__________________________________________________


This is what Rawlings-Blake and Wall Street's Baltimore Development and Hopkins is moving into Baltimore in leaps and bounds. Think as well that in Baltimore's city center many of the buildings surrounding Hopkins Homewood are aging co-op buildings home of the middle-class often working for Hopkins. These co-ops are facing major structural repair bills that they cannot often afford and we are seeing Korean and Chinese investors looking at Baltimore's co-ops. Think buildings around Hopkins taken private apartments will be affordable to the middle-class?

“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.

“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”

This is not an experiment with a financial instrument having social good in mind----it is a long-range plan to dismantle all citizen control of real estate and take all their wealth while doing it.  If you think this is only hitting the underserved and/or communities of color----it is those young white middle-class being sold homes in cities like Baltimore who will be taken next with this coming bond market crash and recession/depression.  This will take the next generation seeking to move into the middle-class and it is all deliberate.  Clinton Wall Street global corporate neo-liberals and neo-cons are working as hard as they can to end US sovereignty and hand all control of real estate to a few of the world's rich.  Then those few of the world's rich with fight and kill each other for further control.

WAKE UP AND SIMPLY GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS OR IN BALTIMORE'S CASE----HOPKINS NEO-CONSERVATIVES AND REVERSE THIS MESS.

New York City with Mayor Bloomberg always lead in installing these Wall Street policies so what happened in NYC last decade is now coming to cities all over America.  This is why Bloomberg is going across the nation funding both Republicans and Democrats and why most cities now have Clinton neo-liberal and Bush neo-con mayors.  Baltimore is of course home of Bloomberg University----Johns Hopkins.


This is a long article----glance through to see where Baltimore and other US cities are going.


Why Wall Street Firms Make Terrible Landlords The New York real estate market has become a private equity playground, and the result has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.


By  Laura Gottesdiener April 8, 2014

Stellar Management lost ownership of Harlem’s Riverton Houses apartment complex after defaulting on the mortgage. (AP Photos/Bebeto Matthews)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Things are heating up inside Wall Street’s new rental empire.

Over the last few years, giant private equity firms have bet big on the housing market, buying up more than 200,000 cheap homes across the country. Their plan is to rent the houses back to families—sometimes the very same people who were displaced during the foreclosure crisis—while waiting for the home values to rise. But it wouldn’t be Wall Street not to have a short-term trick up its sleeve, so the private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as “rental-backed securities.” (Remember that toxic “mortgage-backed securities” are widely blamed for crashing the global economy in 2007-2008.)

All this got me thinking: Have private equity firms gambled with rental housing somewhere else before? If so, what happened?

It turns out that the real estate market in my New York City backyard has been a private equity playground for the last decade, and the result, unsurprisingly, has been a disaster for tenants and the market alike.

“They’re Warm Wherever They Are”

In the Bronx, Benjamin Warren fears that he and other residents could burn to death in a fire because management has blocked both sides of the passageways between buildings designed to offer ways out of the massive apartment complex. (Warren has called the city and management multiple times to complain, but the routes remain shut.) Nearby, Liza Ash found herself intimidated by nearly a dozen hired men when she and other residents of her building, which had heat or hot water only sporadically this past winter, attempted to organize a tenants’ meeting in the lobby. A little farther south, Khamoni Cooper and her neighbors receive a constant stream of fake eviction notices ordering them to vacate their apartments within five days, even though all of them have paid their rent.

These three tenants—and nearly 1,600 more families in forty-two buildings—are living through one of the largest single foreclosures to hit New York City since the financial crisis began seven years ago. But here’s the twist. The owner of these buildings is far from a traditional landlord. It’s actually a conglomerate of private equity firms that bet it would be able to squeeze more money out of these buildings than it ultimately could—and ended up unable to pay back the $133 million mortgage.

The problem is that, when things go bust, the tenants, far more than these private equity owners, end up shouldering the costs.

“They don’t care if we freeze,” said Khamoni Cooper, speaking of the owners, Normandy Real Estate Partners, Vantage Properties, Westbrook Partners and Colonial Management, who have consistently failed to pay for even basic necessities, including heat and hot water, throughout the winter. Cooper had just learned from a neighbor that management cut off all the water in her building, a move she and others believed was retaliation for a protest they had helped to organize at City Hall earlier that day. “They’re warm wherever they are,” she added bitterly.


Around 2005, private equity firms began amassing real estate mini-empires across the city, chasing outlandish projections of future profit. And when these deals started to fall apart, it was tenants, public pension funds, or the city that took the hit, while the private equity owners sometimes succeeded in walking away from the financial wreckage with cash in hand. The story of how those private equity players bet so wrong on housing in New York City is one that, despite the quirks of real estate in the Big Apple, is important to understand now that private equity has taken its rental market show on the road nationwide, and may soon be coming to a town near you.

The Buying Frenzy

Today, private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation, believe the money to be made in the housing market lies in snapping up cheap homes in the cities where housing prices crashed most spectacularly. Back in the early 2000s, in the eyes of private equity, New York City’s comparable corner of the market was “affordable housing.”

In that city, hundreds of thousands of apartment units were still designated as “rent regulated,” meaning that landlords were prohibited from dramatically raising the rent. The only significant way around that constraint for a landlord was to wait for a long-time tenant to move out. Then the rent could be raised to whatever the market would bear.

To private equity firms, this dynamic seemed to offer a profit opportunity. All they had to do was buy up rent-regulated buildings and replace the current tenants with higher paying ones. (In industry-speak, this was called “transitioning” the building.) About a decade ago, private equity firms or private equity-backed developers began gobbling up rent-regulated buildings across the city at extraordinarily overvalued prices. One of the most aggressive players in the game was the private equity-backed firm Vantage. Between 2006 and 2007, it spent about $2 billion buying 125 buildings city-wide, including a share of the forty-two-building portfolio in which Khamoni Cooper, Lisa Warren, and Benjamin Ash live. Within three years, private equity firms or developers backed by private equity money had scarfed up 90,000 rent-regulated apartments, a full 10 percent of the total stock, according to the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development.

In their spreadsheets, everything looked good. The buildings were saddled with huge mortgages, but the companies also calculated big rental income increases once they were “transitioned.” In some cases, the projections reported on corporate filings were downright extraordinary. In 2005, for instance, the Rockpoint Group, a private equity real estate firm, bought a complex of apartment buildings in Harlem known as the Riverton Houses. To justify the whopping $225 million mortgage, the company projected that it would be able to more than triple the rental income from $5.2 million to $23.6 million by forcing out half of the rent-regulated tenants within five years.

Get a FREE PDF copy of our 150th anniversary issue. Sign Up There was only one big miscalculation, not just in the Riverton deal, but in almost all of them. Inside the apartment buildings were actual, live tenants who didn’t want to be “transitioned” out and fought like hell to stay.

Complete Criminality

Big money and cutthroat landlords have never been strangers to New York’s real estate market. But the descent of private equity firms on the city in the early years of this century was so striking that housing advocates dubbed the practice “predatory equity.” The name refers to the tactics these companies resorted to once it became clear that longtime tenants weren’t going to leave.

Generally, the average turnover rate for rent-regulated apartments is close to 5 percent a year. Landlords whose business plan depends on tripling that figure soon find themselves orchestrating a host of harassment tactics, some of them quite illegal, to get people to move, including mailing fake eviction notices, cutting off the heat or water, and allowing vermin infestations to take hold.

“You don’t get 30 percent of tenants to move out without harassing them and committing some type of fraud,” explained Desiree Fields, an assistant professor of urban studies at Queens College. As an example, she points out how Vantage sent out so many fake eviction notices to the tenants at a collection of buildings in Queens that the borough court gave the company its own day on the housing court docket. Vantage was later sued by the New York Attorney General’s office for illegally harassing tenants in what The New York Times called “a systematic effort to force their departure to create vacancies for higher-paying tenants.”

For tenants, these private equity purchases were essentially a lose-lose situation. For the deal to succeed, tenants had to be forced out. If, on the other hand, the deal failed and tenants got to stay, landlords immediately disinvested from the buildings, making the living conditions worse than ever.

The most infamous case of this type of predatory equity abuse was perpetrated by a real estate company named Ocelot Capital Group. In 2007, backed by an Israeli private equity firm, it bought twenty-five rent-regulated apartments in the Bronx. Deutsche Bank issued the $29 million in financing, later purchased by Fannie Mae. Soon after, the situation started to deteriorate. The buildings had only sporadic heat or hot water. Pipes burst. Ceilings caved in. As Ocelot realized it wasn’t going to make any money, it only withdrew further.

In a 2011 article for Shelter Force magazine, Dina Levy, former director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board who now works with the Attorney General’s office, described one visit to the buildings:

Organizers found a single mother caring for three small children who had been living without a working bathroom for more than three months. Her makeshift toilet consisted of a bucket and a hose she managed to connect to the leaky kitchen sink. She explained that she had not moved out because the local housing authority that provided her monthly rental assistance subsidy would not approve her for a transfer to a new apartment.

Housing advocates suggest that the aggressive level often employed by private equity players in these years has set the tone for the broader market, especially in neighborhoods where the rents are rising fastest. In February, a landlord of a rent-regulated building in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick made headlines by hiring construction workers to take sledge hammers into the bathrooms and kitchens of his tenants’ apartments and just start tearing them apart.

“It’s complete criminality,” said Adam Meyers, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A who works with the tenants at one of this landlord’s other buildings, where the boiler and pipes in the basement were recently destroyed. As far as Meyers knows, this landlord doesn’t have private equity backing, but he is typical in believing that the level of harassment reflects the entry of private equity money and manners into the rental marketplace. “You don’t have to go through many steps to see Wall Street financiers driving this process,” Meyers says.

Fantasy and Greed

As early as 2008, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong with the financial calculations underneath these private equity purchases, not just for the tenants, but for the broader market.

“The entire predatory equity enterprise is a house of cards built on a foundation of fantasy and greed,” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced in December 2008.

By that time, the private equity owner of Riverton Houses was already in danger of falling into default. Other deals would soon sour. The biggest was the unprecedented $5.4 billion purchase of two Manhattan complexes, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, by private equity giant BlackRock Realty and real estate company Tishman Speyer Properties in 2006. By 2010, BlackRock and Tishman had defaulted on the mortgage and walked away from the properties.

As the financial crisis set in, it became clear how significant the role lenders played in the whole predatory equity scheme had been. None of these overly aggressive deals would have been possible without the easy access private equity firms had to mortgage loans, which in turn was enabled by the process of securitization (the banks’ practice of bundling and selling off these loans to investors in order to reduce their own risk).

Looking back, nothing may be more striking than the fact that when these predatory equity purchases blow up, the private equity firms themselves rarely seemed to lose all that much. In the collapse of the Stuyvesant Town deal, for example, Black Rock lost only $112 million. In other cases, the firms appear to have made money even though the deals failed.

In 2006, Vantage and its financial partner AREA Property Partners bought a complex of seven buildings in Manhattan called Delano Village for $175 million. (Its current name is Savoy Park.) Most of the price was covered by a $128.7 million mortgage. The following year, Vantage refinanced it, securing $367.5 million in new loans. While the bank bundled the majority of this loan into a security and sold it off to investors, Vantage used the financing to pay off the first mortgage, repaid itself for the original investment, and put aside some money for reserves. At the end of the day, however, Vantage and AREA Property Partners were left holding about $105 million in cash, according to The New York Times. What they did with that money, no one is quite sure. By 2010, the loan was delinquent. In 2012, Vantage sold off the complex for enough to pay off the outstanding mortgage.

Writing in the Times in 2011, a year before Vantage unloaded the complex to cover the outstanding mortgage, Charles Bagli summarized the Delano Village deal and another similar one: “In each case, they have not exactly suffered: despite plunging the buildings into financial despair, each has been able to take tens of millions of dollars in cash out of the properties.”

But that doesn’t mean some players didn’t lose big, even if these aren’t always the high-flying, risk-taking investors that you might expect. In the Stuyvesant Town deal, for instance, the California public employees’ pension fund lost more than $500 million. The California teacher’s retirement fund lost $100 million, and a Florida pension fund lost $250 million.

To Kerri White, director of organizing and policy at the non-profit housing organization the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, what’s questionable about public pension funds investing in these types of doomed deals is not just the losses they suffer. It’s also the fact that these pension funds are sometimes actively financing deals that will fuel the possible displacement of some of their own members from their apartments.

She remembers the first time she and her co-workers ran across a predatory equity scheme. Tenants were complaining of harassment and abuse at a collection of buildings in upper Manhattan that had long been part of the city’s Mitchell-Lama affordable housing program. In 2007, at the height of the bubble, a management company backed by a Morgan Stanley-created investment firm bought the buildings for $918 million, one of the largest Manhattan real estate deals in history. Following the purchase, the management company sent out a barrage of eviction notices--633 in one building alone.



But what really caused controversy was that both the city and state pension funds had money wrapped up in the deal, and city workers were often residents of Mitchell-Lama-designated buildings. “Their own pension funds were going to finance deals that were hoping to push them out,” says White.

Things Fall Apart

Today, private equity firms are playing a different game in the national single-family rental market. But some housing advocates believe that private equity’s disastrous decade in New York can offer a test case of what might happen across the country. In both cases, aggressive Wall Street investors quickly buy up an enormous number of rental properties with projections of short-term profits that, to economists and housing advocates, seem more than a little optimistic. In New York, they assumed that they could flip rent-regulated buildings. Nationally, they’re betting that they can profit off buying and renting out homes in cities hardest hit by the housing crisis—a plan that relies on their ability to repair, manage and lease tens of thousands of houses nationwide and on a scale far larger than anyone or any company has ever attempted in the United States. In both cases, if projected profit margins aren’t met, the deals collapse, threatening the stability of tenants’ lives and the success of complex financial products that impact the broader market (even if the private equity firms are able to escape with relatively little of their own money lost).

There are already signs of storm clouds on the horizon for these new rental empires. The private equity giant Blackstone, the leader of the new industry, saw its collected rents decrease 7.6 percent in the last quarter of 2013. As with the predatory equity deals in New York City, the key for Blackstone is being able to collect the necessary amount of rent. Otherwise, the whole plan crumbles.

Back in the Bronx, Khamoni Cooper is continuing to pay her monthly $1,300 rent check, even as her group of private equity owners is being foreclosed on and her building falls apart. Her neighbors say that they can’t drink the tap water because the pipes are so old that the water sometimes comes out black. Others report thick, black mold or mushrooms growing in their bathrooms. Cooper herself is glad to have hers working at all. This winter, management destroyed her bathroom, while tearing up her floors. For two months, she had to use a bathroom in a vacant apartment and greeted her downstairs neighbors each morning by simply waving through the gaps in her kitchen floor.

“They use us like we’re an ATM machine” is how she describes it. Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers living in rent-regulated buildings controlled by Wall Street investors, she insists that she’d leave if she could, but has found nowhere else to go.

“It feels like I’m being punished,” she says and wonders about her building’s owners: “What did I ever do to you people?”

To Kerim Odekon, who spent seven years working as a policy analyst for New York’s Department for Housing Preservation and Development, Cooper’s is the type of story he heard about inside the agency on almost a daily basis.

“It’s a crisis,” he says. “There should be a truth and reconciliation commission for the tenants of New York.”

 

I want to end this week with a talk on public sector unions that are being dismantled at city and state level and Federal level as well. 

As we rebuild the public sector we must reform our public unions as well.  The constant downsizing of all unions have made them restructure to survive as a union----and that often placed them at odds with protecting union members.  This is making rank and file labor mad at unions so it is a lose-lose situation for what is  vital labor organizing/voice structure.

I was speaking with a Maryland MTA employee on a subway platform about how important it was not to allow VEOLA and privatization of transportation occur----and it is fast.  He stated concerns I hear all over from public sector workers---too many public workers are not doing their jobs and soaking the system for time off.  This paints the very picture people against unions use for a reason to privatize.  What we don't hear is the reminder that with downsizing of government over a few decades comes the gutting of all mid-management whose job it is to train, supervise, and update operations.  At the same time public sector unions have cut their staff that would do the same----as the man said----THERE IS NO ONE KICKING THESE GUYS TO DO THEIR JOBS.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES HAVE BEEN OPERATING WITHOUT THE STRUCTURE NEEDED FOR THEM TO SUCCEED.

Now, whether we hear words like FAILED schools, FAILED students, a person hired FAILED to do the job right.  There are many personalities in people mostly formed from brain chemistry that makes some people self-directed and others needing direction.  ONE IS NOT BETTER THAN THE OTHER---IT IS SIMPLY BRAIN CHEMISTRY----we know the percentage of people needing direction far exceeds people self-directed and that is why we have mid-management keeping people on task.

I've written before that this is why the stats on number of people in the workforce has dropped to lowest in history with Clinton neo-liberal and Republican dismantling of Federal regulatory and oversight and accountability----over 25% unemployed and growing fast.  It is this middle-management and jobs sent overseas.
When people get mad at poor service from City Hall for example I say this-----these employees probably do not even know what business administration looks like and may not have ever really experienced it so how do you do a good job if installed as a department supervisor or manager?

IN BALTIMORE THAT IS NOT WHAT IS WANTED----IT IS A PATRONAGE SYSTEM---PAY-TO-PLAY AND HAVE A JOB


Management & Labor

Open Season on Middle Managers In the latest round of budget cuts, mid-level managers are considered the easiest and most defenseless target. by Jonathan Walters | July 2005 Governing
     

It's hard to say exactly when states declared the current open season on middle managers. While they always seem to be a tempting target for politicians who want to trim the bureaucrat fat, their profile seems to rise with state budget crises. The last de-layering craze coincided with the recession in the early 1990s. The most recent effort seems directly tied to the budget malaise that has dogged states for the past several years. The spring of 2001 may represent the clearest opening salvo. That's when Florida took thousands of middle managers out of civil service and made them at-will employees, subject to summary dismissal. Since then, states have been pushing them out, buying them out, bumping them and generally bashing them, a phenomenon that's also induced many longtime and high-level managers eligible for retirement to simply pack it in, leaving behind empty chairs that haven't been filled.

But if it's hard to identify an exact date for when states generally started aiming at middle managers this time around, pinpointing the official launch in Washington State is easy. It was last March 16, the day that Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire laid out her plan for fixing what she described as broken government. Among the main problems, she said, was "bloated management" clogged with "too many people pushing paper. Instead of pushing paper, we need to push people out of management and into delivery of real services to real people."

It was red-meat rhetoric worthy of the toughest "cut bureaucratic waste" Republican, and to back it up, Gregoire had a very specific prescription. This wouldn't be any vague swipe at those pesky paper pushers; the governor had a nice round number in mind: 1,000.

How states define middle managers varies widely--from staff operating just above the front line to just below cabinet secretary. Moreover, traditional roles of middle managers are shifting, as more state bureaucrats are called upon to oversee programs, projects and contracts, in addition to--or instead of--supervising people.

But if expanding definitions make for some ambiguity over who, exactly, is a middle manager, that hasn't slowed down politicians any when it comes to firing away at their favorite personnel target. In Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle ran on a promise to cut 10,000 employees, including a raft of middle managers. In Ohio, an ambitious reorganization and consolidation plan recently floated in the legislature would cut layer upon layer of administration, adding up to 11,500 positions wiped off the books. In Minnesota, the Senate proposed a bill this spring to eliminate 150 upper-level administrative positions that lawmakers said were packed with political appointees.

Not all the staff-cutting efforts being proposed or executed around the country are aimed specifically at mid-level managers, but they are certainly considered the easiest and most defenseless target. When the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association expressed concern about the proposed reorganization coming out of Columbus, and its impact on rank-and-file employees, Bruce Wyngaard, the association's operations director, says he was told by one state senator, " 'Bruce, don't worry, it's all about middle management.'" Indeed, in testimony before the House State Government Committee in support of the reorganization legislation, Attorney General (and aspiring gubernatorial candidate) Jim Petro argued that the state's executive branch "is top heavy; we simply have too many managers in government."

So middle managers might be excused these days if they feel like they're walking around with bull's-eyes on their backs. And nowhere is that more clearly delineated than in Washington, where specific agencies have been given hard numbers by which they have to reduce middle management by the end of the 2005-07 budget biennium.

The place where most of those mid-level managers reside is in the Washington Management Service, a special class of employee created in 1993 to provide agencies with some mechanism for recruiting and grooming a cadre of top-flight career managers. WMS offers agencies an avenue for paying hard-to-recruit and hard-to-retain employees outside the regular civil service system, with its tight restrictions on pay and promotion (WMSers are compensated on a sliding scale and make between $36,500 and $165,500 a year).

As envisioned in Washington, WMS employees would circulate in and through state government, bringing their specialized, high-level management skills to the various and complicated problems facing government. It wasn't a new idea. Other governments--federal, state and local--have created their own versions of such senior executive services aimed at building a stable group of career managers to keep the ship of state on course from administration to administration. It certainly became a popular idea in Washington State. Since 1993 agencies have loaded up on WMSers, starting with about 400 in the mid- 1990s; growing to around 5,300 today.

According to those who support cutting Washington's middle managers, such numbers are a clear indication of bloat run amok. "A big chunk of agencies' money goes to employees," says state Representative Mike Armstrong, who has been pushing legislation for the past few years to cut middle management. "If you want to make government more efficient, then you do just as private business and cut, and the front line for a long time has been the ones being cut and they're the ones putting the work forward for the citizens of state." Too many agencies, Armstrong argues, have "managers managing managers."

Pressure to cut back middle management in Washington hasn't come solely from the legislature. Armstrong, a conservative Republican, had an interesting ally in his crusade to render the fat: organized labor. When asked why the big push on middle management, Greg Deveraux, executive director of the Washington Federation of State Employees (an AFSCME affiliate) points to what he argues is powerful circumstantial evidence of government saddled with love handles. "Unfortunately, many of our stories from our members [about unnecessary middle managers] were anecdotal. But there were enough that is seemed like there was quite a bit of smoke there." According to statistics compiled by his organization, nearly half of all new state agency positions created between 1998 and 2003 were either in the WMS, or higher up the organizational ladder in the state's "exempt" class of employee.

Such arguably vague impressions that WMS was out of control might not satisfy hard-nosed span-of-control and workflow analysts. But they were enough to get the governor's attention. Gregoire's advisers say she decided to act preemptively, before the legislature forced her hand. According to a Gregoire spokeswoman, the suspiciously round number of 1,000 wasn't symbolic; it represents cuts that the governor "believes are achievable," and were inspired by personnel figures that showed a much higher percentage growth in the WMS than in front-line ranks over the past six years--42 percent versus 4 percent. Washington agency administrators aren't so sure that the number wasn't just pulled out of thin air. "We heard that it was the lowest number they could come up with that had four digits," quips one high-level state administrator.

Regardless of the avenue Gregoire took to get to 1,000, the cuts are real: The $121 million for the positions has been eliminated from the 2005-07 biennial budget. And Gregoire has designated a middle- management cutting czar, Eva Santos, director of the state's personnel office, to certify to the governor that each agency has followed through on its assigned excisions.

"WMS was a program with good intentions behind it," Santos says. "In essence, it was created as a developmental program, and to give management flexibility to move managers around and to bring people in at higher salaries that were more comparable to the market than was allowed in the classified service." But now, she says, it's time to take stock. "I see this as an opportunity for agencies to take a look at their organizations and say, 'Is my structure the proper one? Do I have clear lines of responsibility? Do I know who is accountable for what? Or do I have multiple people responsible for the delivery of some service?'"

Not surprisingly, high-level agency administrators in Olympia aren't quite as excited by the opportunity presented by the gubernatorial directive as is Santos. In fact, the overall response of agencies in Washington can probably best be described as annoyed resignation. With a reputation for being a well-run state, and having experienced numerous budget cuts and downsizings over the past few years, agency leaders seemed especially put off by the governor's assertion that their organizations were deep harbors for "bloat." "Central administration at DSHS has been consistently cut every fiscal year for years," says Liz Dunbar, deputy secretary at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, the state's largest agency. Taking further cuts is going to be tough, she says. The Department of Natural Resources has already been cutting middle managers, says Bonnie Bunning, executive director of policy and administration--28 of them in the last four years.

Nor did veterans of state government appreciate the characterization of middle managers as "paper pushers." "I was personally offended by that," says Bunning, a 25-year veteran of state service. "Our managers do not just manage. In fact, they struggle to get the time to do their managerial duties because they're working managers out in the field a lot of the time."

Indeed, in digging around Washington to look for abuse of the WMS system, what's easier to turn up are WMS employees who seem to be working very hard at very important jobs. Take Cullen Stephenson, a program manager with the Washington State Department of Ecology and a member of the WMS, who oversees a $23 million biennial budget and an $80 million grants program. He admits to doing plenty of paperwork, but in many cases it involves millions of dollars in grants and contracts. "I get a purple folder once a day with the grants in them and I make sure they're done correctly so I can sign off on them. I guess that's paper pushing a little bit, but I need to make sure that I understand what the grants are and that the request lines up with the dollars."

Even critics of WMS would probably agree that Stephenson represents the best use of WMS. He manages large programs, big money and a staff of 104 people. The state couldn't possibly compensate him for what he delivers through the classified (civil service) system, and so he and the WMS are a perfect fit.

How then to deal with Stephen Simmons, risk management administrator in the social and health services department? Simmons manages no programs, no people and no money. Rather, he is the traffic cop for all tort claims and lawsuits filed against the department, which is under constant legal bombardment. At any given moment, Simmons is juggling hundreds of cases and claims. When asked how he can possibly keep track of them all, he says, "Well, I've been doing this job since 1994, so I sort of have a system. I know a lot of people and people know me, so I can navigate issues pretty quickly." Yet those pushing for a stricter definition of manager in Washington might immediately disqualify Simmons for WMS and its more flexible, generous compensation packages.

What is the institutional knowledge represented by Simmons' 11 years of managing cases worth, and how does a state compensate him for it? Such questions defy easy answers or across-the-board solutions, argue those who understand the complexities of staffing up a high- functioning government in complex and demanding times. 

PICK A NUMBER And yet, in many places the notion of complexity doesn't seem to be playing into the current downsizing craze. Bleeding budgets and high- stakes politics have led to more of a pick-a-number-out-of-the-hat approach, bolstered by plans to magically cope and backfill by streamlining, consolidating, computerizing and privatizing.

"New York State is in fiscal decline," says one long-time personnel insider there. "And so 'head count' has become critical from both a fiscal and political perspective." There, the state has simply kicked open the back door for longtime staff--most of whom are in middle and upper management--to walk out with generous retirement benefits jammed in their pockets. "What they did essentially is rip out the most seasoned middle managers and then turned to the people left behind and said, 'Okay, you're now acting manager,'" says the New York official. It's not an approach that has led to higher-performing government, he says, but rather an approach that has led to burnout, resentment and serious morale problems.

Critics of Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle's most recent budget, which calls for eliminating 1,800 jobs, say the move is motivated more by politics than by any sophisticated analysis of personnel needs. When he was campaigning for governor, Doyle promised to cut 10,000 from the state payroll, a number that critics charged was chosen for impact. Doyle's office responds that the proposed cuts are focused and "based on areas where we have duplication of services."

In Ohio, Senator Tim Grendell sponsored Senate Bill 78, which aimed to whittle state government down from 23 departments to nine, cut thousands of middle managers, and is projected to save $1.2 billion. Grendell asserts that "we didn't pull this out of thin air." He says the consolidation plan is based in large part on audits done by Attorney General Jim Petro, which have highlighted, he says, "where there are efficiencies and inefficiencies." Grendell's bill has been rolled up with its House companion into a proposal that a government reorganization study commission be convened to look at overhauling Ohio state government. On the personnel side, the goal is very clear. "We're going to cut from top middle management down," Grendell says.

REDEFINING "MANAGER" Nobody, of course, is saying that state governments aren't in need of a hard look from the standpoint of efficiency and effectiveness. And inasmuch as the majority of state operating budgets are spent on personnel, it's natural that personnel is the area that comes in for the most scrutiny. Even maligned managers in Washington agree that it's always worthwhile to review operations to ensure things are running efficiently.

What those in the trenches of government management and administration resent, though, is the assumption that middle managers are by definition schlubs. What they are asking for is a more sophisticated approach to the problem than simply taking a meat ax to "full-time equivalents," the budgeting catch phrase for all the warm bodies doing the work of government.

Despite some misgivings, upper-level agency administrators in Washington State are now struggling gamely with their assignments. The Department of Transportation has to cut 130 middle managers; Social and Health Services has to chop 330 (out of 1,700); Natural Resources' magic number is 26; at the Department of Ecology it's 45.5 (begging the question of who gets cut in half). A working group made up of agency staff has been pulled together by Eva Santos and is currently hashing out who, exactly, counts as a manager and how an agency will get credit for cuts.

At the same time, the group is looking at larger issues, including how to create some system that allows government to recruit and promote highly skilled individuals, which may also involve looking at new definitions of "manager." Such a redefinition is required because the nature of government work has changed dramatically, note agency administrators, along with who and what is being managed. It's not just people being managed but also projects, programs and contracts, particularly in an era when outsourcing and privatization are being considered as options more and more frequently by states as a way to do business.

"We have a sizable group of people who I would call professional and technical experts, who maybe don't manage a bunch of people but who might be the person overseeing a multi-million-dollar transportation project," says Paula Hammond, chief of staff in the Washington State Department of Transportation, another one of the state's largest departments. "The classifications within our civil service system don't pay enough for us to be able to hire electrical or civil engineers, project designers, contract experts, consultant managers-- those kind of people--and so we've used WMS."

If "manager" isn't a comfortable fit for those sorts of staffers, argue administrators such as Hammond, then the state is going to have to figure out what new description and system might be created for those who don't fall comfortably into the technical definition; people who are accountable for million-dollar projects or contracts and who need to be paid for taking on that sort of responsibility.

The issue of management and accountability is especially topical in Washington State these days. One of the governor's other major initiatives is G-Map, an effort to bring the "city-stat" model to state government, using clear performance measures to hold managers accountable for concrete results. One of the things that both agency administrators and WMSers say they like about WMS is that it makes managers directly accountable for their performance. "The WMS was a major move in this state toward a more private industry type of organizational structure that allows us to hire people in a whole different fashion and hold them accountable," says Ken Harden, director of personnel for the social and health services department. "What we should be measuring is whether we do the job, not how many FTEs we've got in certain positions."

And right now, managers in Washington are being handed some very big jobs for which they will be held very accountable. While being asked to cut 130 middle managers, the transportation department is, at the same time, being asked to manage billions of dollars in new transportation projects made possible by two recent state gas tax hikes. Paula Hammond estimates that even given her department's more aggressive use of outside consultants and contractors, the agency is going to need around 300 new staff to manage contracts and projects.

At Social and Health Services, Liz Dunbar says her agency is under court order to beef up its policing of sexual predators. "So we need to hire forensic psychologists, and that's a very difficult area in which to attract people, and we did recently put some positions into WMS because otherwise we could not hire them. This is for our violent sexual predator program where we're under court supervision, and if we don't perform well, we're in deep trouble."

When told of the Washington initiative to cut middle managers, Ohio Senator Tim Grendell quickly interjects, "They won't miss them one bit." But those in the trenches of Washington State government aren't so sure. Dunbar says her department will look at who is responsible for what and where cuts and consolidations might be made. But in an agency that's already been ordered by a judge to improve its performance, she has just one word to describe further cuts in the ranks of those who are both overseeing and carrying out some of the hardest jobs in government. "It's worrisome," she says.

____________________________

There is no doubt many city and state employees do not know the meaning of working hard for union wages because of this missing structure.

I'll use United Parcel Service as an example of a union employee that has a long history of strong salary and benefits as they work very hard.  Today's teamsters are under attack and not doing as well---but the code of working hard in return for a good wage is instilled in private unions.  UPS had time studies that counted drivers steps to cut down on wasteful time for example.  They calculated exactly how long it takes to deliver packages considering type of building and traffic...this is serious management and it works.  UPS drivers work hard and are paid well.  There are supervisors, managers for every department and a district manager managing them.  All they do is paperwork as they audit drivers, audit incoming and outgoing package figures, audit safety and quality figures all while going on the road to observe each driver.  THAT IS MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT and it is why UPS has been the best operated corporation in America.  They did this all while paying well and earning millions of dollars in profit. 

As I said----UPS has cut wages as with all corporations---but 40 years ago a driver could earn $50,000---a part time loader going to university earned $10 an hour----and management earned $60-80,000---THAT WAS 40 YEARS AGO!

This is exactly what Baltimore City Hall and Maryland State needs to install and you can bet employees would think they are being abused---IF YOU WANT STRONG PUBLIC SECTOR WAGES AND BENEFITS YOU MUST WORK HARD or you will be privatized out of a job.  Clinton neo-liberals are downsizing anyway to gut government and replacing with corporate control as with quasi-and public private designations----but if we are going to rebuild the public sector----this is how it will be done. If public employees are not trained, given oversight, audited for performance, given progress reports, and if operations are not updated frequently----you have a public sector like Baltimore City Hall and Maryland State ----where everything from water department to public transportation operates in ways that have citizens hating it.  This also adds to opportunity for corruption and fraud.


If UPS employees are unionized, why do they work so hard?

It doesn't make sense, my Republican friends all say union workers are fat and lazy.

Every time I see a UPS driver, I barely catch a glimpse because they are always on the move. What gives? They're TEAMSTERS for God's sake! That's the most evil union of all! How is UPS so profitable? I thought unions destroyed companies and the work ethics of its employees...

Is it possible my Republicon friends have no damned idea what they're talking about? Are they simply regurgitating the opinions of radio hosts?


Motorized cavalry

In the highly mechanized culture at UPS, drivers are front-line, motorized cavalry fighting multiple fronts: road hazards, inclement weather, the clock and competitors. To UPS, the key to a successful career starts with safe driving indoctrination.

The trainees' confidence course offers a small taste of hassles urban drivers such as Bob Screen face every day: wayward motorists and pedestrians, theft, road hazards and construction sites.

Accidents and delays can topple the tight, orchestrated delivery schedule Screen maintains on his Washington route near the White House. When Screen finds convenient parking, he usually keeps it and makes most of his office building routes on foot. It's not unusual to accrue up to $400 in weekly parking tickets. (UPS picks up parking fees — including more than $1 million a year for its New York City drivers.)

With programs such as money-back guarantees on next-day ground shipment orders, "it's gotten more competitive and more demanding — it used to be just us and the Postal Service," he says. "Now, it's FedEx and everyone else. So we have to provide more and stay on top of things. Customers can always go with someone else."

To maximize efficiency and safety, UPS has developed 340 methods for drivers to follow, ranging from mandates on how to carry the ignition key to package distribution. UPS drivers log more than 2 billion miles a year, so a core part of the methodology focuses on driving. UPS has segmented instruction down to specialists focusing on rear mirror positioning.

Attention to little details has helped UPS achieve a stellar driving record. Fleet drivers average less than one accident per million miles. That's led more than 100 companies and law enforcement agencies to seek out UPS for safety expertise.

Despite their early gaffes, the trainees will likely survive the October cut. Metropolitan Washington has a higher shipping volume rate — and turnover rate among workers — than most other districts. Moreover, UPS will soon enter its peak season. U.S. operations chief Cal Darden notes that between Thanksgiving and year's end, more than 50,000 temporary workers, including sorters, loaders, driver's helpers and drivers, will be needed nationwide to handle increased volume, which typically surges nearly 50%.

Lerch appears ripe for the challenge. He's already memorized the answers for the 60-part written exam to be given at the course's end and spends 90 minutes a night practicing on the DIAD.

"I just want to get out there and drive," he says.

____________________________________________
What private outsourcing of public work has lead to is this outside contractor and consultant position that takes the lead in development and always has ties to some pay-to-play or some insider corruption geared to send in people who look the other way.  It was bad from the start----and it is only meant to act like the revolving door of Federal agencies where the SEC director is  the bank executives they oversee.

These few decades allowing massive and systemic fraud were about having people in public positions more geared towards seeing/speaking/hearing no evil than management skills.  The same is true for our political and corporate leadership.  If we are going to rebuild and return to government that works for the people----we need all agencies staffed and well operated.

"WMS was a program with good intentions behind it," Santos says. "In essence, it was created as a developmental program, and to give management flexibility to move managers around and to bring people in at higher salaries that were more comparable to the market than was allowed in the classified service." But now, she says, it's time to take stock. "I see this as an opportunity for agencies to take a look at their organizations and say, 'Is my structure the proper one? Do I have clear lines of responsibility? Do I know who is accountable for what? Or do I have multiple people responsible for the delivery of some service?'"

Below you see what is a Republican idea of public sector unions---which we know they do not like.  The constant referral to public sector employees getting more benefits or wages than private sector is only because private sector unions have been bashed for two decades-----public sector unions had similar union wages and benefits as private unions for many decades.  Looking at where public sector unions are today as opposed to private only shows how far private sector unions have been allowed to fall.

The referral to unfunded pensions et al for public sector and how this happened because of government's inability to meet these demands----THAT IS A BUNCH OF BULL!  As I showed with taxes paid by city taxpayers for water and property----that revenue was misappropriated as well----we have crumbling infrastructure because of failure to send government funds to the right place----this includes public sector pensions et al----

WE HAD PLENTY OF REVENUE TO FUND AND PAY THIS---IT SIMPLY WAS MOVED TO PLACES LIKE WALL STREET'S BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS.  FUND PEOPLE NOT PROFITS----

Right now they are preparing to BAIN's CAPITAL government revenue with the bond market fraud----all giving them reason they do not have funds to pay public pensions and wages.

THERE IS PLENTY OF MONEY TO ALLOW PUBLIC EMPLOYEES A QUALITY OF LIFE IF WE STOP THE SOARING PUBLIC SECTOR FRAUD AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION ----which we need more public employees to do.


Differences between private sector unions and government unions

State Budget SolutionsMarch 23, 2011 Liberal icons

New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and President Franklin D. Roosevelt strongly supported industrial unions, but both opposed collective bargaining by government employees because government employees enjoy market advantages too easily exploited. President Roosevelt once said, "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted in the public service." Former AFL-CIO President George Meany also viewed government unions as unthinkable.  All three recognized the fundamental differences between private-sector unions and government unions.

One key distinction between the two unions is that private sector unions must respect their employer's bottom line, whereas government unions do not have that same obligation. Private sector union leaders bargain for more benefits while at the same time recognizing that excesses will force the company to lay off employees or go bankrupt.  Those unions bargain face-to-face with those who pay the bills.  In addition, private sector union members on strike lose their wages. Both private sector management and owners have an incentive to resist unreasonable union demands, particularly in regard to pension and retiree health care. If private sector managers make unwise concessions impairing the long-term profitability of their company, it is reflected immediately in the value of the company.  In contrast, government unions are not confined by an employer's bottom line. For public employees, the bottom line is the bottom of the taxpayers' pockets. 

When the government entity bargaining with government employees cannot afford the cost of the union demands, the government increases the fringe benefits, i.e. pensions, and pushes the costs off to the future. The heavily unionized government worker states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, have the largest unfunded pension and retiree health care liabilities.  In Wisconsin, public employers from 2000 to 2009 contributed $12.6 billion to public employee pensions while the employees contributed only $55.4 million.  

State Budget Solutions examined the Bureau of Labor Statistics Databases and found dramatic evidence of the increases in fringe benefits by state and local governments.  The revelation that public employees receive pension and retirement benefits that were worth 337% more than private sector employees is shocking, and illustrates the lengths to which governments will go in bargaining. 

Overall, state and local government employees receive total benefits worth 171% more than what public sector employees earn.  On an hourly basis, state and local government employees earn an average of $40.28 per hour in total compensation, whereas private sector employees average only $27.75 per hour. 

In Milwaukee the average teacher will earn this year $59,500 in salary and $41,591 in benefit for $101,091 in total compensation. The average Milwaukee teacher has a $23,820 health insurance plan with no premium. Contrast that with a private sector employee in Wisconsin, who has a $14,656 insurance plan with a 20% premium. Despite this, last July the teachers union sued when the Milwaukee Public Schools stopped giving free Viagra because it cost the district nearly $800,000 per year and district was facing a deficit. The union just dropped this lawsuit on March 7, 2011.

Just as public sector unions are not concerned with the bottom line, performance is also not valued as it would be in the private sector.  For example, Milwaukee School teacher Megan Sampson was laid off less than one week after being named Outstanding First Year Teacher by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers.  She was laid off because the collective bargaining agreement requires layoffs to be made based on seniority rather than merit. 

Government unions don't bargain with the taxpayers who pay the bills. When teachers go on strike, they pay no penalty when their absence forces schools to close. Adding insult to injury to taxpayers, their actions force parents to either take time off work or quickly find someone else to care for their children.  Also, unlike private sector unions, a government union has a natural monopoly over government services. This monopoly gives government union leaders extraordinary power over elected officials.

Most government unions would not exist without forced union dues.  One of the first things government union leaders bargain for is a "union security" clause, which forces all government employees in the unit to pay for union services as a condition of employment. If a government employee works in a state with a "union security" clause, the individual must pay tribute to the union or they will be fired.

The money the government unions collect in dues helps to elect politicians who support the unions' objectives. Government unions play a major role in electing their management team!  In essence, government unions have a seat on both sides of the bargaining table. The U.S. Supreme Court made it clear that there is no "right" to collective bargaining. Collective bargaining for government employees makes them "super citizens" and the rest of the taxpayers are relegated to second-class status.

Today, the number of unionized government workers surpasses the number of unionized private sector workers. As a result, national unions have become advocates for higher taxes and government expansion, despite the fact that many of their private sector members oppose these efforts.

In the last election at the national level, government unions spent more than $200 million to defeat Republican candidates. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees -the main union of state government employees- spent over $90 million during the campaign, and it was the top donor to the Democrats' efforts to win gubernatorial and state legislative races.

As a result, the Democratic Party is now heavily reliant on unions and forced political contributions from their members. Unions help elect Democrats who repay the unions with more pay and benefits, many of which are unfunded. In effect, government unions elect their "management," who in turn can forcibly extract more money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits. Government officials can promise pensions and retiree health care benefits that future taxpayers will have to fund. This, in turn, sucks jobs from the private sector by forcing businesses to pay higher taxes.

Today, government union leaders want it all - high pay, stability, and a growing work force. They lobby every level of government for increased spending and higher taxes.  There are no studies that show government workers in unionized states provide better service than those in nonunionized states.

The issue facing states around the nation is not a traditional private sector dispute between labor and management. It is a question of important public policy and whether states can afford agreements for government employees' salaries and benefits.  The numbers from State Budget Solutions below clearly show that the salaries and benefits are unsustainable and the states cannot afford these agreements.

The data below illustrates the stark differences between private compensation and state and local government compensation.  While the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not include what percentage of each group is represented by a union in this publication, in January 2011 it published "Union Members Summary", finding that the union membership rate for public sector workers at 36.2 percent was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers at 6.9 percent. Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate of 42.3 percent.

_________________________________________________



I again use a Republican article to highlight to reforms we need to take in rebuilding our public sector unions.  Paying union dues----not a problem for me.  It is like paying for a professional membership for non-union job categories.  The problem has become the association of public sector with private sector under the guise of power.  When I talk to AFL-CIO about ending support for candidates that push public private partnerships because that is public union-busting---the first thing that happens when VEOLA privatizes public transportation for example is a private sector union comes in to organize.  There is great motivation for AFL-CIO to support a Clinton neo-liberal killing public sector unions while protecting global corporations often with AFL-CIO private union associations. 

IT IS KILLING PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS TO BE TIED TO PRIVATE INTERNATIONAL UNIONS.

This article goes on about the Republican stance on card check and union dues-----but health care and teacher's unions are leaving because they are being busted by Clinton neo-liberals supported strongly by AFL-CIO.  AFSCME and AFGE are tied to AFL-CIO as well and we have all of that private outsourcing of Federal agencies to private corporations that are very, very, very, very bad for Americans.

So, as we rebuild our local and state unions---this needs to change and as we rebuild Expanded and Improved Medicare for All and strong PUBLIC k-universities---WE WILL NEED STRONG PUBLIC HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION UNIONS.

The media are highlighting all of this fight for union rights while union members are getting killed.  Protect our public sector unions as we rebuild all unions domestically and locally.

State, local laws force public employees to pay labor unions

Jason Hart | Thursday Sep 25, 2014 10:42 AM  Human Events

• 
  

This article originally appeared on watchdog.org.

Taxpayer money goes to mandatory labor union “fair share” or “agency” fees in Washington, D.C,. and 23 states.

Public employees can be forced to pay a labor union as a condition of employment in the states highlighted on the map below.



Nearly half of all U.S. states allow public-sector union contracts to require mandatory dues as a condition of employment, based on a review of U.S. Department of Labor records, state labor laws and a National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation study from 2012.

Many of these states and local governments automatically deduct union fees from public employees’ pay, funneling taxpayer money directly to labor bosses.

Although Missouri and Kentucky do not explicitly ban public-sector agency fees, DOL reports indicate no major labor union in either state takes such fees from government workers. Among the states where agency fees are permitted, statutes governing the practice are far from uniform.

Wisconsin’s 2011 Act 10 labor reforms ending forced unionism for most government workers exempted public safety unions. Michigan’s 2012 right-to-work law included similar exceptions for public safety unions.

National Education Association and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — the nation’s largest and fourth-largest labor unions, respectively — are leading opponents of laws that let workers opt out of both union membership and fees.

AFSCME and NEA have lost thousands of members in Wisconsin and Michigan who were previously required to pay fees through the unions’ local affiliates.

“If they still want to belong to the union and pay dues, government workers are welcome to. But, when given the choice, a vast majority of workers have abandoned their union,” Brett Healy, president of the Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute, said in an email to Watchdog.org.

“Since (Wisconsin) Gov. Scott Walker passed his signature collective bargaining reforms known as Act 10, AFSCME membership alone is down a whopping 70 percent in the state.”

“If unions were truly interested in helping workers — and not raw political power — they would not need forced unionization,” Healy said. “Wisconsin is a clear example of what the unions’ priorities really are. They simply care about filling their own pockets, and the pockets of their close political allies, with other people’s hard earned money.”

Mackinac Center, Michigan’s largest free-market think tank, reported on Sept. 8 that at least 6,500 Michigan Education Association members have left the NEA affiliate. Many MEA contracts with fair-share provisions were rushed through before Michigan’s right-to-work law took effect, locking in tens of thousands of teachers for several more years.

The following states’ labor laws allow public-sector unions to take mandatory fees from public school teachers and other government employees in unionized workplaces:

• Alaska
• California
• Connecticut
• Delaware
• Hawaii
• Illinois
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• Montana
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• Ohio
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Vermont
• Washington

_____________________________________________



AFGE at a Glance


The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union representing 670,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas. Workers in virtually all functions of government at every federal agency depend upon AFGE for legal representation, legislative advocacy, technical expertise and informational services.

AFGE believes that all unions should belong to the house of labor and has been nationally affiliated with the AFL-CIO since AFGE was founded in 1932. At AFGE's national convention in 1997, the delegates took the importance of affiliation one step further, voting for each of its 1,100 Locals to affiliate with their AFL-CIO state federations. This makes AFGE one of the few nationally affiliated unions to have all of its Locals affiliated at the state level. National President J. David Cox and National Vice President for Women & Fair Practices Augusta Y. Thomas are active participants in the AFL-CIO, working to enhance and energize the labor movement.



We Are AFSCME

AFSCME is the nation’s largest and fastest growing public services employees union with more than 1.6 million working and retired members. AFSCME’s members provide the vital services that make America happen. We are nurses, corrections officers, child care providers, EMTs, sanitation workers and more. With members in hundreds of different occupations, AFSCME advocates for fairness in the workplace, excellence in public services and prosperity and opportunity for all working families.

AFSCME is a union comprised of a diverse group of people who share a common commitment to public service. For us, serving the public is not just a job, it’s a calling. An important part of our mission is to advocate for the vital services that keep our families safe and make our communities strong. We also advocate for prosperity and opportunity for all of America’s working families. We not only stand for fairness at the bargaining table — we fight for fairness in our communities and in the halls of government.

How AFSCME Works AFSCME has approximately 3,400 local unions and 58 councils and affiliates in 46 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Every local writes its own constitution, designs its own structure, elects its own officers and sets its own dues.

Make sure you are seeing red on an AC/DC color TV set!!!!!! Analog cables must be included in all infrastructure upgrade in order for the American people to have choice and be free from a SMART CITY capture by global energy/telecomm corporations.

WHEN OBAMA MADE THE DIRECTIVE FOR DIGITAL BROADCAST ONLY----HE WAS SETTING THE STAGE FOR A NATIONAL SMART CITY CAPTURE BY GLOBAL CORPORATIONS. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH AFFORDABILITY OR QUALITY.

PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS STABILIZE A CITY'S ECONOMY---MUNICIPALITIES HAVE BEEN PUBLIC FOR A REASON.  HAVING A STRONG PUBLIC SECTOR PROVIDES PUBLIC INTEREST QUALITY OF LIFE AND IT STIMULATES PRIVATE SECTOR WORK AS WELL.  BALTIMORE HAS HAD NO PUBLIC SECTOR FOR DECADES AND DELIBERATE, COMPLETE STAGNATION OF ECONOMY.

I will finish with public works and services by looking at local taxation and property taxes in particular.  This after all is what pays for public works for the most part.  Baltimore is one of a few localities that have a local tax and it has one of the highest property taxes in Maryland.  Meanwhile, all that is public has been dismantled or left to decay----and communities are crumbling, so where has that revenue gone for decades?  Same place as all the Federal social services and Constitutional equal protection funds have----in the billions----Wall Street Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins global expansion and fraud.


The amount of fraud attached to just the Baltimore Board of Estimates bidding process is grounds to stop outsourcing so much municipal work.  It entire system is used for pay-to-play, crony political patronage, and kills real job growth for the city.  The small government mantra of Republicans/Clinton neo-liberals, and neo-conservative Johns Hopkins is the source of decades of looting of Federal, state, and local funding that would have fueled the local economy and kept communities stable and people employed.  SMALL GOVERNMENT IS ALWAYS USED TO MOVE MONEY TO THE RICH.

Any candidate running for mayor that does not make restructuring the government back to one of a strong public municipality is working for global corporations and wealth---not for the citizens of that city or state.  If you are a small business minority contractor benefiting from it now---you will lose in no time as Baltimore's business people are learning.  All of the outsourced consultants that should simply be Baltimore City employees receiving a steady salary----all of the equipment the city, state, and Federal government pays a private corporation to buy for a city project COULD BE BOUGHT AS CITY PUBLIC WORKS EQUIPMENT.

BRING GOVERNMENT BACK AT THE LOCAL AND STATE LEVEL AND YOU WILL MOVE THE AMERICAN ECONOMY FROM GLOBAL CORPORATE CONTROL----TO SMALL AND REGIONAL CORPORATION AND DOMESTIC CONTROL.

It is not just Rawlings-Blake----she simply does what Wall Street Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins tells her to do----as does all Baltimore pols.

Below you see what is one of tons of lawsuits for corruption and it is not only minority contractors involved in bad awards----they know they too were on the other end a few decades ago of this systemic fraud and corruption that comes with outsourcing.


$30M lawsuit claims Baltimore awarded more than 40 no-bid contracts

Minority Contractors Association suit claims contracts worth $250M UPDATED 6:35 PM EDT Aug 01, 2012

• 
  

BALTIMORE --The mayor of Baltimore and key city officials face a $30 million lawsuit that alleges the city awarded more than 40 no-bid contracts totaling some $250 million.


The Maryland Minority Contractors Association filed the lawsuit against Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and her appointees on the city Board of Estimates.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday morning calls on the Baltimore City Circuit Court to appoint an administrator to oversee contracts awarded by the Board of Estimates, to bar the city from using its Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprise ordinance and for the mayor and her appointees to make full restitution to the city treasury.

"The suit alleges a pattern and practice of corruption, fraud, favoritism and extravagance," said Arnold Jolivet, managing director of the Maryland Minority Contractors Association. "The mayor doesn't seem to want to work with the minority contractors, particularly the African-American community."

Jolivet is a lawyer who is a fixture at the city Board of Estimates meetings. When asked what his organization is seeking, Jolivet said, "That the court appoint a receiver to administer the city's whole entire contracting program."

"It (the lawsuit) seeks to have the court to order the mayor and city solicitor and the director of public works to make restitution," Jolivet said.

City law requires contracts totaling $50,000 or more to be advertised and competitively bid.


The lawsuit claims seven companies have benefited from no-bid contracts, including Johnson Controls, Wheelabrator, Constellation New Energy, National Economic Research Associates, Motorola, Baltimore City Foundation and Digicon Corp.


The civil action cites the city overpaying by as much as $316,000 on a no-bid contract to conduct a minority disparity study.


"The suit points out they could have funded three fire stations for a whole fiscal year," Jolivet said.


Other projects include a multimillion-dollar contract to repair underground pipes; millions awarded for services regarding the city's 800 megahertz radio system; and millions spent for energy conservation for several city-owned buildings.


The action takes issue with contract extensions and pricy change orders outside the competitive bidding process. The lawsuit claims the city's MWBE ordinance is unconstitutional; that it actually excludes African-Americans from bidding; that the program doesn't track who's getting contracts and it's unenforceable because it lacks a certification process.


As an example, the lawsuit cites a business at 10 N. Calvert St. Suite 708 has no phone, fax or other office support. The civil action contends the Washington, D.C.-based company established a virtual office to qualify as an operating agent in the Baltimore market.


"We are putting our foot down. We are not going to tolerate this anymore. We are fired up," Jolivet said.


The mayor's press office responded, saying the lawsuit has no merit and the city will vigorously defend against it. Just last week, the mayor created an advisory council to recommend improvements to the city's MWBE program.





Everyone in the city who is a homeowner has been soaked and received very little in city services in return.

The first thing I noticed in moving to Baltimore is homeowners have to repair their own sidewalks----- the city sewage and water pipes have not been upgraded placing more stress on pipes going to people's homes.  The alley roads are crumbling as are the streets----some neighborhoods are having their street lamps turned off----no school ground maintenance or playground maintenance----and the latest policies have moved to privatizing and charging homeowners for trash pick-up.  We pay for ambulance, school closures mean a community may not have a school---any need for public paperwork comes with high copy charges. 

IT IS AMAZING AT HOW A CITY CAN HAVE SUCH A REGRESSIVE REVENUE STRUCTURE AS BALTIMORE CITY AND IT IS NOT BECAUSE CITIZENS MOVED OUT OF THE CITY IN THE 1960s.  The city collects and receives plenty of revenue to support all communities---it simply allows all revenue to be lost to fraud, misappropriation, and government corruption---pay-to-play business.


FOLKS---THIS IS ALL PUBLIC WORKS----THERE SHOULD BE CITY EMPLOYEES WHOSE JOB IT IS TO DO THIS ALL DAY EVERY DAY AND IT IS PAID FOR BY THESE CITY TAXES AND PROPERTY TAXES.  BALTIMORE SAYS----PAY HIGH TAXES AND VOLUNTEER TO BE PUBLIC WORKS EMPLOYEES.

Below you see where when individuals hire their own company to do one small piece of sidewalk---you have a mess.


Baltimore Neighborhood Issued Controversy Sidewalk Repair Citations March 6, 2012 6:32 PM

BALTIMORE (WJZ)—Residents in a Baltimore neighborhood are at war with City Hall. They’re angry over thousands of dollars in sidewalk repair citations.

Adam May discovers homeowners aren’t the biggest offenders. It’s actually the city.

Ronald Munk is furious with City Hall after inspectors said he needs to pay $650 to replace his section of sidewalk.

“If you’re gonna trip over it, you need to pick up your feet,” Munk said. “There’s a lot worse sidewalks.”

More than a dozen residents in the Lakeland neighborhood got citations.

Jim Breakwell says his wife, who uses a walker, has no problem with the slight bump on their sidewalk. He says the sidewalk is raised roughly half an inch.

Plus, the citations are based on square footage. Breakwell is a cabinet maker, who uses a ruler daily, and he says inspectors want to fine him too much money.

He says the city even measured it wrong in his citation.

And what really has neighbors crying foul is a city-owned sidewalk across the street. It is broken up so badly that grass is growing up between the cracks.

WJZ showed pictures of the difference between the cited sidewalks and the crumbling city sidewalks to officials with the transportation department.

When asked if the comparison seems right, Adrienne Barnes of the Department of Transportation said “No it doesn’t. It doesn’t. You’re right.”

WJZ’s questions are now prompting a review of the citations while city officials stand by their goal.

“We want people to be able to travel safely, and we don’t want children hurt on damaged or cracked sidewalks,” Barnes said.

“We’re poor, hard working people, disabled people. Just leave us alone. We don’t have the money,” Munk said.

Baltimore residents can expect an increase in sidewalk citations as we head into the summer construction season.

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Have you noticed pols never talk about the coming fees for trash pickup tied to Smart Trash Cans---only that they have chips.  These chips can track not only cans----but people.  Fined for not recycling---as an environmentalist---this can go too far.  Remember when you could get the money for recycling?  Trash pickup has always been part of property tax revenue with no charge----smart trash cans will privatize waste and charges will start despite their not talking about this.

'In charging for the weight of garbage, which The Register calls a “scheme [that] drives recycling,” it speculates it could also lead to customers demanding manufacturers reduce the amount of packaging they use'.


Smart Trash Carts Tell If You Haven't Been Recycling

622 Posted by samzenpus on Sunday August 22, 2010 @02:53PM from the clean-up-or-pay-up dept. Starting next year Cleveland residents face paying a $100 fine if they don't recycle, and the city's new high-tech trash cans will keep track if they don't. The new cans are embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes which keep track of how often residents take them to the curb. If the chip shows you haven't brought your recycle can out in a while, a lucky trash supervisor will go through your can looking for recyclables. From the article: "Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard."

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Now, the malfeasance goes on and on in Baltimore as the city failed to use decades of water bill payments made by residents to actually upgrade the city's water and sewer system which is what our bills include each month.  Instead of reinvesting these water bill payments into infrastructure maintenance----the revenue was sent to Enterprise Zone development and corporate subsidy or simply misappropriated.

Baltimore now has a water system crisis as other cities do for the same reason.  A major water main break occurs all over the city and the flooding and pressure of stopping and starting the flow implodes city resident's water and sewer lines which, without this stress may not have failed.  You can make this relation because these failures at homes are often tied to city work on pipelines near these homes.

What the city does in cases clearly the city's fault---flooding of basements or failure of homeowner pipes----GO TO A PRIVATE INSURER AND MAKE A CLAIM.  Below you even see the city promoting one insurer as citizens face higher insurance rates and denials of claim for city-caused pipe failures. 

IT IS INCREDIBLE.  THE CITY COULD CARE LESS ABOUT THESE HOMEOWNERS----THEY ARE BUILDING AN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE FOR NEW WORLD CITIZENS AND DON'T NEED BALTIMORE'S HOMEOWNERS THEY SAY.

These cases happen all over Baltimore but they do more harm in the surrounding communities because the downtown district has taxpayers paying for all new water and sewer right to the high-rise building's door.


Concern and confusion as city promotes water pipe warranties from one company

Residents have been getting letters from Public Works encouraging them to buy water and sewer line protection from HomeServe. Part 1 of a two-part series.

Danielle Sweeney September 17, 2014 at 8:36 am Story Link 29

The city wants residents to buy water and sewer line coverage from this Connecticut company.

By now, if you live in Baltimore City, you’ve likely received in the mail an official-looking letter signed by Rudolph S. Chow with the city’s black-and-yellow municipal seal in the upper left hand corner.

Chow, director of the Department of Public Works (DPW), invites you, the homeowner, to enroll in a service plan to protect your pocketbook from the cost of potential pipe repairs. Specifically, on the water and sewer pipes between the street and your house that you – and not the city – are responsible for repairing.

A utility line break can cost property owners thousands of dollars.

Not only does Chow urge you to get coverage, he recommends a particular company with whom the city has signed a two-year contract – HomeServe USA, a leading provider of home emergency service plans that serves 1.6 million active policies in the U.S. and Canada.

The solicitation has set off a ripple of anxiety in households and online discussion forums across town, in part because one company has been endorsed by city government.

“I, too, got the letter from the city with the recommendation, but am I the only one who thinks the city endorsing one company is a serious conflict – and reminiscent of Sheila Dixon and those illegal back scratching issues. . .?” a Patterson Park area writer posted to Facebook.

Another writer said he would check to make sure his homeowners insurance doesn’t already cover it,” but was suspicious of the timing of the insurance push.

“Along with the major water infrastructure upgrades,” he wrote, “[it] really smells like ‘we know we’re going to break some stuff, and we are going to do our level best not to fix it, so here, buy some insurance, and it’ll be somebody else’s problem.’”

A Marketing Partnership

DPW has yet to respond to these concerns, but said in an earlier release that HomeServe “offered the lowest single premium cost to consumers and other quality services that will benefit city homeowners.”

Rudy Chow’s letter encourages city residents to get water and sewer line protection from HomeServe.

The marketing partnership allows HomeServe “exclusive rights” to establish and provide a residential water and sewer service line protection program for Baltimore residents.

The letter from Chow says that for $5.99 a month for the first year (and a to-be-determined renewal price thereafter), Baltimore homeowners will get exterior water and sewer line coverage with no deductible.

The sewer service line’s annual benefit limit is $10,000; the water service line has no annual benefit limit. Customers can also purchase either water or sewer line coverage separately.

As part of its agreement approved last May by the Board of Estimates, the city would provide HomeServe a list of water and sewer customers for direct marketing purposes, and allow them to use city and DPW logos for “co-branding” products and services. Hence, the city seal on the solicitation from Chow.

Like Another Tax?


Why, though, is the city promoting pipe insurance?

The insurance idea was first publicly revealed last November after the Board of Estimates approved an $83.5 million contract to start the process of installing “smart,” or wireless, water meters across the city.

Timothy Krus, city purchasing agent, said the meter upgrades and related construction by the city could have an impact on aging pipes on private property. As a service to homeowners, he said, his office and DPW were preparing an RFP (Request For Proposals) to solicit private companies to offer warranty protection for residential water and sewer breaks.

At the time, City Comptroller Joan Pratt said purchasing the warranty was “like another tax.”

DPW now says that its partnership with HomeServe is separate and distinct from the city’s upcoming water meter replacement program.

“The replacement of a meter is very unlikely to impact water service to a home,” the department said in a statement. “If a city contractor’s negligent actions are the cause of damage to a citizen’s pipes, the contractor will be held responsible for the city’s costs.”

“We’re Not Making Any Money on This”

DPW spokesman Jeff Raymond also states that the city is not making money on this HomeServe contract.

In fact, “HomeServe will provide a pool of money for a hardship fund that will be used to offset the cost of repairs on properties owned by indigent residents. But even this money [$150,000 per year] does not go to city coffers, as it is held by and administered by HomeServe,” Raymond said in an email to The Brew. “Baltimore City is not making any money off of its agreement with HomeServe.”

But an “administrative compensation fee” to the city was originally on the table – it was a requirement in the RFP to bid on the contract.

The RFP stated that “For exclusive rights to establish and provide a Residential Water and Sewer Service Line Protection program for City customers, Proposer shall pay the city a monthly Administrative Compensation Fee based on the number of active customers. . . during that monthly period.”

According to Raymond, “The RFP did mention it [the administrative fee],  but by the time we got done, there was no administrative fee.”

A document on file at the Comptrollers Office confirms that the city will “forego the acceptance of any administration commission fee in favor of maximizing the available fund to city residents.”

Why the city first required an administrative compensation fee, but then chose not to accept it, is not clear.

Confusing Letter

Chow’s solicitation letter to city residents is a little confusing as well.

The missive clearly states that “HomeServe is an independent company separate from the city of Baltimore.” But it is the city’s – and not HomeServe’s – logo on the letter. (HomeServe’s logo does not have to be present, because the city is in a partnership with the company, said the Better Business Bureau of Connecticut, which reviews member advertising on an ongoing basis.)

Chow’s letter does state that the sewer and water line service is optional. It also tells customers that their “choice to participate in the service plan will not affect the price, availability, or terms of service from the City of Baltimore.”

Additionally, it notes that HomeServe is headquartered in Norwalk, Conn., and that homeowners should make their checks payable to HomeServe USA – not to the City of Baltimore.

And yet, Chow writes: “if you are interested in purchasing coverage for only one of your service lines [instead of the bundle] call us at the above number.” The “above number” is HomeServe’s.

Warranty, not Insurance

Whatever the city’s rationale for the partnership, an insurance policy for old pipes in Baltimore City, at least in principle, might make sense for some Baltimoreans.

But HomeServe’s policy is not insurance. It’s a warranty.

The Chow letter includes an Acceptance Form for residents to fill out and return to HomeServe.

“HomeServe USA Repair Management Corporation. . . offers this optional service as an authorized representative of AMT Warranty Corp., the contract issuer.”

The difference between an insurance company and a warranty company likely has little to do with the quality of repair service a subscriber receives (The Better Business Bureau of Connecticut gives HomeServe an A- rating), but it’s an important distinction in terms of oversight.

No State Oversight


“We have no standing to regulate them.” Joe Sviatko, spokesman for the Maryland Insurance Administration, which enforces insurance laws and protects consumers, said. “They are not an insurance company.”

Who would help consumers with problems with a warranty company?

“We would refer any concerns to the Maryland Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division,” Sviatko said.

The Attorney General’s office has not reviewed HomeServe’s warranty.

“The OAG doesn’t ordinarily review warranties unless there is a complaint or complaints and a reason to do so,” said AG spokesman David Paulson.

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Having property taxes tied to school funding has never been the best of ideas-----but they should be part of public school support as they are a vital part of a community.  I have never seen such decay allowed in areas for children as in Baltimore and the new school privatization policy has schools funded so low these schools are now pushing public playgrounds to private hands----yet another step to privatizing the entire school system.  It appears that the City of Baltimore pays private contractors to come and service public school playgrounds and community parks but it never gets done.  One would think a corporation is getting lots of revenue for work it does not do!  SURPRISE!!!

When you have a public works department fully staffed to care for public grounds none of this happens.  The people hired as public employees come right from your community so if you have a problem you know where they live.  You cannot do that with a huge landscaping corporation coming from Montgomery County with different people each time they come.

The amount of Federal funding for public schools that are underserved over decades was huge for Baltimore City Schools.  Every kind of social program for students----every kind of structural maintenance for underserved schools----THE AMOUNT OF REVENUE WAS HUGE AND NEVER MADE IT TO THESE SCHOOLS. 

This is what pays for public works people charged with maintaining public school buildings and grounds.  It is a big employer for the city.

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES ARE VITAL FOR A DOMESTIC ECONOMY AND HAVING THESE EMPLOYEES ONLY GROWS THE NEED FOR PRIVATE CONTRACTORS AS WELL---IT IS NOT AN EITHER/OR.

Hopkins allowed all this decay as a platform for installing its Master Plan designed in the 1980s---decades of children exposed to the worst of conditions because property taxes and city taxes did not reach our schools....not to mention state and Federal funds.  This article from 1999 has had two decades to get worse.

Empty school playgrounds send discouraging message

The Education Beat

Neglect: Playgrounds' safety and maintenance are so inadequate in the city that some schools offer no outside breaks during the day, making the areas appear abandoned.

March 03, 1999|By Mike Bowler | Mike Bowler,SUN STAFF

DRIVING AROUND THE city, you notice that many school playgrounds are empty during the day.

Empty of children, that is. They're full enough of broken glass, swing sets without seats, basketball backboards without hoops and ancient slides coated with rust.

At Barclay Elementary-Middle, children at recess encounter exposed nails and bolts, rusted equipment and splintered wood.

"They can use the playground, but they can't use the equipment," says Principal David Clapp. "At the beginning of the week there's always broken glass, the leavings from the weekend parties. It's so discouraging."

Nearby, at Margaret Brent Elementary, a survey last fall found an exposed electrical transformer -- this a few blocks from North Avenue school headquarters. And a pedestrian walkway at Tench Tilghman Elementary in East Baltimore takes kids over Patterson Park Avenue to a playground where discarded needles are commonplace.

Some schools have no playgrounds. And half of the city's playgrounds have surfaces of concrete or asphalt, considered unsafe by modern standards.

"A playground of concrete is not a good place to fall down," says Carol Gilbert, executive director of the Neighborhood Design Center, a nonprofit organization of design professionals that is working to beautify the city.

So bleak is the situation that some schools offer no outside breaks for the kids during the school day. That's why so many playgrounds appear abandoned, even on splendid days like yesterday: "Sweet childish days," the poet Wordsworth called them, "that were as long as 20 days are now."

The urban schools -- and not a few suburban schools, too -- have to lock their doors to keep intruders out. A byproduct of that is keeping children in. "When you have to operate in an environment in which the school doors are locked, you're sending a powerful message to the children," says William P. Miller, executive director of Greater Homewood Community Corp.

The state of the playgrounds on which we expect children to play sends them other messages: We don't care much about the value of your play. We certainly don't care that you attend school in aesthetically pleasing surroundings.

What has happened to the playgrounds has happened also to the libraries and gyms and auditoriums and restrooms -- all of those things neglected over many years to keep the three R's in operation.

However, numerous signs of hope exist. On the same day Clapp was decrying the broken glass in his playground, his pupils were completing a colorful mural on one wall of the Barclay cafeteria. This is one of a series of murals -- inside and outside -- planned by Greater Homewood to beautify playgrounds and neighborhoods.

Greater Homewood is joining forces with the city, the Neighborhood Design Center, the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy and the city's Safe and Sound Campaign to focus attention and money on playground rehabilitation.

To do it right would cost millions of dollars. Half of the playground surfaces -- paved over years ago in a frenzy of activity that ignored everything known about the safety of children at play -- would have to be replaced by wood chips, sand or synthetic material. That's before the replacement of rusted, unsafe equipment.

"It's expensive, but if it's done right, you can create a safe playground," says Susan DeFrancesco of the Hopkins center. "A lot of them in the city and county just haven't been maintained or updated."

Adds Hathaway C. Ferebee, executive director of the Safe and Sound Campaign: "Then once you get the playgrounds wonderful, you have to keep them wonderful. You do that by making them places where whole families want to go and spend time -- and take care of because they have a sense of ownership."

AME bishop sees education as next civil rights frontier

Leaders of nearly 400 African Methodist Episcopal churches met in Baltimore during the weekend, and one of the questions put to them was this:

What if the church on the corner paid as much attention to the education of neighborhood kids as it does to Sunday services and potluck suppers?

"The new civil rights frontier is public education," said Bishop Vinton R. Anderson, who heads the AME district that includes North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Vinton and other church officials acknowledged that most churches stand as empty as those playgrounds on weekdays.

"There's an entrenched mentality that has to be overcome," Vinton said. "We have to become involved and stay involved, and I'm not just talking about praying."

Pub Date: 3/03/99

Below you see the players in Baltimore trying to quell anger in citizens by pretending they are going to be part of this SMART CITY Economic Zone when the whole intent is to eliminate far more jobs.
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On Saturday October 24, 2015 the Center for International Entrepreneur Development will be hosting an Economic Forum with our current and future leaders.

• Saturday, October 24at 1:00pm
• 
  Show DetailsCoppin State University2500 W North Ave, Baltimore, Maryland 21216

This public discussion will cover three major challenge areas in Baltimore City, which are public safety, education, and economic empowerment. Professionals in these fields as well as our current and future officials have been selected to speak on these issues. The goal of this forum is to productively discuss the current economic standing as well as some possible solutions to the problems at hand.

This event is open to the public and will allow residents of Baltimore City to ask questions and share their concerns.
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Today I would like to show that WE THE PEOPLE CAN REVERSE THIS AUTOCRATIC/TECHNOCRATIC HOLD  that global corporations want to take on nations through infrastructure control.

When Obama came to office the first thing he did was change national energy communications transmissions from analog to digital. 
This startled most people as no discussion on this major transition occurred AT ALL and the reason it happened is this SMART CITY/Technocracy policy to control all of a nation's infrastructure.  If you are trying to build a competitive economy with lots of choices----you don't eliminate analog.  You see below an activist article from groups fighting this NSA surveillance/data mining system that uses just that concept-------WE CAN ESCAPE YOU IF WE TURN TO ANALOG.

This is not only a policy that takes power away from global corporations----it is simple common sense----diversity is strength.  We may not change quickly the power of global corporations at the national level----but we can at the local level.  Cities across America need to rebuild public agencies for regulating the energy and water utility industry-----they must rebuild oversight and accountability to eliminate fraud and profiteering---and they must insist that all new cables and infrastructure for energy transmission INCLUDE ANALOG. 

IT IS NOT HARD----IT IS NOT EXPENSIVE----AND REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT QUALITY OF SIGNAL---ANALOG GIVES FAR MORE CONSISTENCY OF SERVICE FOR OVER A CENTURY.

Exelon is receiving lots of government funding to upgrade these lines throughout Baltimore -----the coming national infrastructure stimulus will target the same----AND A CITY CAN REQUIRE THIS DUAL FUNCTION.

Analog not only keeps corporations from intercepting communications/data----it keeps them from having the power to blacken all energy transmission.  PEOPLE WILL HAVE THAT CHOICE.


'Turning back to the world of coaxial cable, we can now answer a few questions. Can analog cables be used in digital applications? Yes, up to a point; but the looser tolerances of older analog cable designs will limit their run lengths, at least when used in high-bandwidth applications like SDI video. Can digital cables be used in analog applications? Yes, absolutely; the same tight tolerances which make digital cables appropriate for digital applications make them superb for analog applications. One may not "need" the improvement, but it will never hurt, and can help. SDI coax, like Belden 1694A, costs very little more than (and in many cases less than) traditional analog coax designs, and will outperform it on every measure of analog cable performance. The advances in dielectric foaming result in a cable which is not only higher-performing, but more flexible and easy to work with, than its older counterparts. Contrast, for example, 1694A with a cable that was once the broadcast industry standard cable, Belden 8281. 8281 is heavier, thicker, and dramatically less flexible. And if the notion of heavier and thicker cable sounds better--bigger cable equals lower loss, right?--think again. Because of efficient dielectric foaming, 1694A is able to use a larger center conductor in a smaller cable, for lower loss'.



Just the fax: internet activists go analog to fight Congress on cybersecurity bill


Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would give tech firms broad latitude to collect personal data – even as Congress uses old tech to avoid prying eyes




A fax machine with a phone? Far too fancy for US politicians. Photograph: Ronnie McMillan/Alamy Sam Thielman in New York



@samthielman Monday 27 July 2015 12.50 EDT Last modified on Monday 27 July 2015 15.28 EDT

Internet activists determined to halt what they see as another ill-conceived Washington cybersecurity bill are hitting Congress where it hurts: right in the fax machine.

Protesters have programmed eight separate phone lines to convert emails sent from a handy box at FaxBigBrother.com (as well as tweets with the hashtag #faxbigbrother) to individual faxes and send them to all 100 members of the US Senate.

The rationale, said Evan Greer of activist group Fight for the Future, is that Congress doesn’t appear to understand technology invented in the current century.

A government surveillance bill by any other name is just as dangerous Trevor Timm The Cisa ‘cybersecurity’ bill is really a way to blow another massive hole in Americans’ privacy

“Groups like Fight for the Future have sent millions of emails, and they still don’t seem to get it,” said Greer. “Maybe they don’t get it because they’re stuck in 1984, and we figured we’d use some 80s technology to try to get our point across.” All 100 members of Congress will receive each of the faxes.

The deluge of badly printed screenshots is in protest of the the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), sponsored by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, which proposes cooperation between government agencies and private tech companies and gives the latter broad latitude to collect as much data as possible from users in the name of cybersecurity and then share it with specific federal agencies, who in turn have latitude to share it with all federal agencies.

Findings shared by companies who work with the government will be specifically exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) and all other attempts by the public to learn exactly what pieces of their data are being collected, scaled and leafed through. Fans of the bill include Facebook, Google, AT&T, Comcast, Bank of America and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The bill, stalled last year, has been recently resuscitated and will likely be considered next week before Congress adjourns for the summer on 7 August.

Do US senators really use their fax machines that often, though? “Yes, sadly,” one former Senate staffer told the Guardian. They love their pagers as well. Faxes “all get digitized by the time they get to the office, though”, which bodes ill for senatorial email inboxes.

And why is 1979’s hottest tech trend still so popular on Capitol Hill? “One thing that makes faxes – and pagers, for that matter – still good tech is that they are analog and difficult to search. Members love them, especially to transmit data for things like campaign financing records.”

It is, in other words, a great way for American elected officials to obey the letter of the law when it comes to campaign disclosures and Foia requests without exposing themselves to the kinds of invasive data-crunching to which the general public will be prey, should CISA pass. “No one wants to read” the transmissions, the ex-staffer said. “Readers get lost in them, but there is still a record of info being sent and received.”


Latest updates as world markets continue to seesaw in the wake of China’s Black Monday

  But there’s still pressure on Congress to act on cybersecurity worries, especially after the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management (to say nothing of the security problems at Target, Sony and a dozen other high-profile companies).

Matt Comyns, global cybersecurity practice leader with executive search firm Russell Reynolds, said there were great risks from simply letting the current arc of cybercrime take its course. “We are living in a new world and need to adjust our thinking and behavior,” he said. “The obvious risk to CISA and more regulation from the government is the abuse of privacy. However, the government seems to have decided that is the potential cost of creating a more secure environment for companies and US citizens.”

Greer had a different take. “With all these breaches,” she said, “there’s a lot of fearmongering going on in DC. They just say: ‘This is a problem – we’ve got to do something!’ And this is the something they’re going to do. It’s not just that this won’t fix things – it’ll make them worse. And it’ll give sweeping legal immunity to some of the largest companies in the world and open us all up to new forms of surveillance.”

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You will here nothing of these choices from Clinton neo-liberals and Bush neo-cons wanting to use digital as a means to control all of a nation's energy infrastructure.  Please take time to understand that America was analog for a century and the transmission was fine.  The need is simply in replacing century-old cable. 

The money to do these cable upgrades for analog goes hand and hand in all infrastructure upgrades-----water pipeline, gas pipeline, digital cable, and road repair.  AS YOU REBUILD A COMMUNITY AND ITS INFRASTRUCTURE YOU INCLUDE ANALOG.

I told my story of paying over $800 for a great digital TV only to have to repair it 5 years later at the tune of $400.  Analog TVs were in people's families for generations.  So, Baltimore becomes the location for manufacturing analog products for example.  This is how you reverse the power of global corporations using technology for control and it allows for growth of a local domestic economy.

Digital Versus Analog Power Control—A Fight To The... Draw?They're different, but by borrowing some digital approaches to design simplification, analog can play nicely with digital in many vendors' portfolios.

Mar 2, 2006 Don Tuite | Electronic Design The gossip: Analog and digital will soon battle for control of power-supply regulation. The reality: When it comes to feedback-loop control, both approaches seem to happily coexist. (See "True Digital," p. 46, and "Looks Like Analog, Designs Like Digital," p. 48.)

Indeed, many vendors offer a choice. Some of digital control's initial programmability advantages are now available even in controllers and regulators that use analog feedback. Still, digital power has some appeal.

"Power supplies have become a part of the overall system, and they're expected to handle power management," says Mikhail Guz, Power-One's director of strategic marketing and applications. "That last point is particularly important as more and more system engineers want to be able to talk to the power supply in real time for monitoring and diagnostics." Many power-management engineers agree.

"An engineer can use a single digital product in many different modes and applications," Guz continues. "They can relatively easily implement adaptive control and nonlinear control algorithms. Unlike analog, digital controllers are not subject to component tolerances and aging effects. Moreover, most of the digital control loop is built on CMOS processes that scale much more readily than analog processes, leading to cost savings in future digital generations."

...........................................................

In the long run, digital control was a breakthrough technology. But many of digital control's benefits have now migrated back into analog-control regulators.

_________________________________________________

The FCC requirement for national change has no teeth.  It is unconstitutional for the Federal government to make such restrictions especially at a time when the Federalism Act embraced by Executive Order through Obama specifically states this.  Now, if you are going to ignore Federal law as they are doing now----cities need to step in and fight for diversity in energy transmission.  We are fighting for what is there----not for something entirely new.  This is not a luddite stance for those wanting the best in digital transmission as it does not effect the laying of digital cable.  It simply allows dual systems to operate and the analog can be a PUBLIC UTILITY.

As much as Obama promised rural upgrades to digital as analog ended-----we all know a profit-driven global corporation is not going to wire rural America and maintain the infrastructure especially with the push to move people to the cities for density.

 Residents fight to keep analog cell phones Claim better signal coverage than digital service in rural areas 

Chet Brokaw  /  AP Johnny Smith talks on an analog bag phone in his car outside the Livestock Auction in Fort Pierre, S.D. updated 7/26/2005 7:40:47 AM ET 2005-07-26T11:40:47

FORT PIERRE, S.D. — Johnny Smith has a new digital cell phone, but he relies on an older analog bag phone when he travels the wide open spaces in the western part of the state to line up cattle for sale at a local livestock auction.

In rural areas where cellular towers are far apart, analog phones often work when digital models can't get a signal.  With the Federal Communications Commission pushing the move to all-digital phone service across the country, Smith and others in rural areas are urging the agency to wait until more towers are built to improve service.

"I carry a bag phone just because I can get so much better reception with it," Smith said.  "If you're out in the middle of no place, it's nice to be able to call somebody."

According to current timelines set up by the FCC, wireless companies can phase out analog service by 2008.  By the end of this year, the agency also is requiring that 95 percent of each wireless company's customers have digital phones containing chips that allow emergency operators to pinpoint a person's location when a call is placed to 911.

The South Dakota Public Utilities Commission will attempt to rally support for a resolution seeking to suspend or modify the deadline on location-capable phones Tuesday at the National Association of Regulatory Utilities Commissioners meeting in Austin, Texas.

Bob Sahr, a PUC member, said he hopes the FCC will look at the situation on a case-by-case basis to give continued support to analog service in rural areas that need the older technology. In some areas, it's the only kind of service that works, he said.

"If we phase those people out, they may be in a situation where they have this brand new, state-of-the-art digital phone with all sorts of bells and whistles, but they're not going to be able to complete the call in the first place," Sahr said.

AdvertiseAdvertise Advertise The Rural Cellular Association and CTIA-The Wireless Association, which both represent wireless companies, also support suspending the deadline.  Companies do not want to force their customers to switch to newer phones until it makes sense to do so, RCA executive director Tim Raven said. 

"We have instances every day in local markets where folks are rescued because of their cell phones.  It's just a matter of working up the technology issues and obstacles," he said.

The FCC has not responded to the request, and officials said the commission does not comment on pending matters.  The agency has already granted some companies waivers from the deadline based on local conditions.

E911 coverage
The National Emergency Number Association, whose aim is to implement a universal emergency telephone number system, opposes a blanket delay in the move to the new digital phones, said Rick Jones, director of operations issues for the organization.  However, the group is also willing to consider requests for waivers by individual companies in areas where a delay might make sense, he said.

As of June, less than half the nation's 911 call centers had the capability of locating a cell phone containing one of the chips, Jones said. The call centers with the technology covered nearly 58 percent of the nation's population but less than 36 percent of its counties, he said.

In many states in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, less than 20 percent of call centers are capable of locating a cell phone, Jones said.  That number may not improve unless more funding is allocated.  Jones said Congress passed a bill authorizing $250 million a year for five years to help call centers install the new phone-locating technology, but the funding has yet to be appropriated.

In the meantime, residents of rural areas will continue to fight to keep their old analog service. Emmer Hulce of Midland, S.D., said he wants to keep his analog bag phone so he can call family members without racking up long-distance charges.  "There's no chance of going with digital.  I had digital and that wasn't as good as the analog," the 79-year-old retired power company worker said.

______________________________________________

Everybody understands that these energy mergers are bad for the American people.  Below you see Maryland citizens everywhere fought the merger of BGE with Exelon.  It was done by O'Malley as pay-to-play to Obama for his bid for President as Exelon is a Chicago-based corporation that sponsored Obama's election.  Regardless, a corporate government would have pushed these mergers anyway.  If not Exelon---then Duke.

Maryland Public Service Commission is filled with corporate appointments with Clinton neo-liberal O'Malley and it will stay that way with Bush neo-con Hogan.  That is not the mission or Constitutional purpose of this commission tasked with serving in the PUBLIC'S INTEREST.  We all know none of these rulings by this commission is in the public's interest.

When you go locally with regulation and oversight moving away from all of the dismantled state structure that allows these corporations all the fraud, profiteering, and violations of existing regulations-----you take away all incentive of these national corporations to be in the Maryland/Baltimore market.  Maryland may ignore all of this----but Baltimore can enforce all of this as we move to becoming a regulated public utility for energy and water.

THIS MARYLAND PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION KNOWS IT IS NOT SERVING THE PUBLIC AND BALTIMORE CAN CHALLENGE ALL OF THIS IN STATE AND FEDERAL COURTS WHILE ENFORCING LAWS THAT EXIST.

For those having jobs with these national/global corporations----and often they are union-----you can be a public sector union member with more stability with a public utility and all the management jobs tied to regulation and oversight....THERE ARE MORE JOBS DOING THIS.

Despite Overwhelming Opposition, Maryland Commission Approves Exelon-Pepco-Delmarva Power Merger


Statements on the decision from groups that challenged the merger 

Exelon now controls electric delivery service to approximately 1.97 million Maryland ratepayers.

Exelon’s long history of hostility to renewable energy and competition from small clean energy businesses is a threat to the future of homegrown clean energy projects in D.C. and Maryland. Let’s hope that D.C.’s leadership will acknowledge these risks and reject the merger.

Susan Stevens MillerEarthjustice’s lead counsel on this caseMay 15, 2015 Baltimore, MD — Today, the Maryland Public Service Commission approved Exelon Corporation’s request to acquire Potomac Electric Power Company and Delmarva Power & Light (Pepco). The Commissioners, charged with regulating public utilities in Maryland, approved the merger despite opposition from the Office of People’s Counsel, the State of Maryland and the Commission’s own Staff, as well as numerous environmental, business and consumer advocates.

Exelon’s application is still pending before the D.C. Public Service Commission. Just this week D.C. Council members called on the mayor to reject the merger. The Delaware Public Service Commission is also considering a settlement to approve the application.

Earthjustice served as counsel for the Sierra Club and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in opposing the acquisition because its approval harms Maryland’s ability to achieve its clean energy and public health goals. Exelon has a long history of open hostility to renewable energy and blocking competition from small clean energy businesses. Today’s decision will negatively impact Pepco customers throughout the D.C. metro area and inhibit the growth of clean, reliable and affordable electricity.

The following is a statement from Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network:
“The PSC has made a grave error today. Instead of rejecting this bad merger deal outright, the Commission has approved it with conditions that do not fix the fundamental problems. This nearly $7 billion deal threatens to raise rates and inhibit wind and solar development, as well as reduce efficiency gains, across 85 percent of the state’s customer base for electricity. The PSC has put the profits of a Chicago-based corporation over the public interest of Marylanders, despite the overwhelming opposition of the state’s attorney general, the Office of People’s Counsel, the Maryland Energy Administration and Maryland’s environmental community."

The following is a statement from Sierra Club representative David Smedick:
“We are disappointed by today’s decision, which comes as a blow to the future of clean energy in Maryland. The meager conditions added by the Commission do not come close to mitigating the harms that the merger will cause to Marylanders.”

The following is a statement from Susan Stevens Miller, Earthjustice’s lead counsel on this case:
"This merger is simply not in the best interest of Pepco or Delmarva Power customers. There are significant and reals risks that Exelon will use this merger to increase energy bills over the next few years to subsidize its failing investments in nuclear power. The minimal additional conditions imposed by the Commission will do absolutely nothing to offset the harms caused by this merger. Exelon’s long history of hostility to renewable energy and competition from small clean energy businesses is a threat to the future of homegrown clean energy projects in D.C. and Maryland. Let’s hope that D.C.’s leadership will acknowledge these risks and reject the merger.”

___________________________________________

The fight for net neutrality nationally has the FCC supposedly deciding that the internet is a PUBLIC UTILITY NEEDING TO BE REGULATED AS SUCH.  It is a public utility as all of the funding to develop the internet came from Federal Defense funding and this is why the internet is common carrier.

If cities like Baltimore handle corporations in this way it makes that Federal standing stick.  We have global corporate pols who intend to ignore any Federal ruling in this regard even if it happens.  Challenging an FCC ruling against public utility designation is what a city like Baltimore should do.  If we have no local or state government challenging Federal agencies working against public interest-----the illegal rulings are simply allowed to stand.

THE INTERNET IS A PUBLIC UTILITY. THAT MEANS ALL PEOPLE HAVE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND ACCESS WHETHER FOR VIEWING OR OPERATING A BUSINESS.

Trans Pacific Trade Pact will be used to negate this public utility stance-----global corporations and their rights to profit.  Obama is no doubt waiting for TPP to pass to make that happen as he pretends he is standing with net neutrality.

It is the failure of local governments to challenge these global corporate rulings at the Federal level that allows them to move forward against the good of the public. 

IF VERIZON OR COMCAST MOVE OUT OF BALTIMORE BECAUSE OF THIS STANCE----WE HAVE SMALLER COMPANIES MOVE IN TO TAKE THE MARKET---WHICH IS WHAT WE WANT.

As you see below, these telecommunications corporations pushing complete digital wiring are using common carrier status to get the funding and then replacing all cable from copper to fiber-----making digital king. This is happening because city and state pols are silent and not educating the public or taking this to court.

Report: Verizon FiOS claimed public utility status to get government perks

Still, Verizon campaigns against utility-style regulation that it benefits from.

by Jon Brodkin - May 28, 2014 3:43pm EDT

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. Verizon Verizon and the rest of the country's biggest Internet service providers joined forces this month to argue that so-called "common carrier" regulations for utilities shouldn't be applied to broadband. Such rules would force the ISPs to innovate less and spend less money than they do today on network upgrades, they argue.



Yet Verizon obtains a variety of perks from the government for its FiOS Internet service by using public utility rules to its advantage, a new report drawing on public documents says.

This isn’t a new practice and it isn’t illegal, but it could become part of the debate over network neutrality rules and the transition from heavily regulated landline phone networks to Internet-based voice service.

“It's the secret that's been hiding in plain sight,” said Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge and an expert on the FCC and telecommunications. “At the exact moment that these guys are complaining about how awful Title II is, they are trying to enjoy all the privileges of Title II on the regulated side.”

“There's nothing illegal about it,” Feld, who wasn’t involved in writing the report, told Ars. However, “as a political point this is very useful.”

The FCC classifies broadband (such as FiOS) as an information service under Title I of the Communications Act, resulting in less strict rules than the ones applied to common carrier services (such as the traditional phone system) under Title II. But since both services are delivered over the same wire, Verizon FiOS is able to reap the benefits of utility regulation without the downsides.

Verizon checks its privileges, finds them quite niceThe US has long applied common carrier status to the telephone network, providing justification for universal service obligations that guarantee affordable phone service to all Americans and other rules that promote competition and consumer choice. In exchange, phone companies are granted certain kinds of legal immunity, easements over private property and public rights of way, pole attachment rights, access to the phone number system, and the right to interconnect with other networks.

The report by telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick says the following:

FiOS Rides over a “Title II”, Common Carriage, Telecommunications Network.

• Verizon’s FiOS TV, phone, Internet and broadband service products ride over a Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.
• This FTTP network, as stated in the Verizon New York City FiOS TV franchise, is categorized as a “Title II”, common carriage, telecommunications service, as opposed to a ‘Title VI” (cable TV service) or a “Title I” (“information” service). These “Titles” refer to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and they are critical as to whether and how the services are regulated.
• This classification of FTTP as a Title II service appears to be in every Verizon FiOS TV cable franchise nationwide.
• “FiOS” is not the fiber optic wire; it is a brand name of a Verizon product that uses the FTTP networks.
• Verizon invokes its powers as a telephone corporation under the NY Transportation Corporations Law to install fiber optic wire over private property, or use the public rights-of-way.

Kushnick points to a New Jersey franchise agreement which states, "The construction of Verizon NJ’s fiber-to-the-premises FTTP network (the FTTP network) is being performed under the authority of Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 and under the appropriate state telecommunications authority granted to Verizon NJ."

"Verizon New York City’s current cable franchise, as well as the franchises for other Verizon franchises in other states, from DC to New Jersey--all detail that at the core of Verizon’s cable, Internet, and broadband networks is a 'Title II', common carriage, telecommunications service," Kushnick wrote. "And it appears this was done for two reasons—it gets all of the powers of the utility, including the rights-of-way that are part of the telecommunications utility service, but it also may charge the copper-based POTS [plain old telephone service] utility customers for the development and deployment of FiOS."

Verizon's New York division also obtained tax benefits, although it still lost money. "Over the last five years, Verizon NY showed over $11 billion in losses, about $2.1 billion annually, with an income tax benefit of $1 billion that is used by Verizon Communications, the parent holding company, to offset its tax liabilities," Kushnick wrote. "This also means Verizon New York paid no taxes, even though the company had $7.2 billion in revenues in 2010, the last year the information was available."

Verizon Communications itself has been profitable, and yet "New York’s residential POTS customers, who use the aging copper wires, [are] paying rate increases for the development and deployment of FiOS—a cable, phone, broadband and Internet service," Kushnick wrote.

The Verge has a good analysis of the report.

“We will ask the FCC to open the networks”Kushnick wrote the report for the Public Utility Law Project of New York. The group will lobby the FCC to take action, he told Ars.

“The companies' affiliates have acted together and have taken control of the customer-funded wires and networks, which are Title II, in multiple ways that allow the company to control both the end-user connection—speed, access, and use of the Internet—as well as the competitor side of attaching to the wire and delivering services to the end users,” Kushnick wrote in an e-mail. “We will be asking for the FCC to open the networks to all forms of competition because customers paid for it and they are Title II, and because the affiliate companies have created a bottleneck that controls the wires and blocks competitors.”

Verizon and the FCC did not provide responses to Ars’ requests for comment.

Feld noted that it's common for transmission paths to include multiple services governed by different sets of regulations.

"You have a bunch of different services that go over the same wire," he said. "This is true for wireless also. When you buy your wireless mobile device, what you're buying is a Title II service for voice, probably a Title II service for the text, although the FCC has never really classified it one way or the other... and the data part is Title I."

"The wireless carriers are all big on using this Title II stuff when it comes to things like getting the FCC to preempt states on tower siting and... the use of phone numbers and mandatory interconnections with landline [networks] and all that good stuff," he said.

Cable companies like Comcast are "offering you a cable service, Title VI, over the line that also brings you broadband, which is Title I, and their phone service which is unclassified because it's Voice over IP (VoIP)."

Verizon's phone services are even more complicated. Although traditional landlines typically ride over copper networks, Verizon can also provide Title II phone services over fiber. In these cases, Verizon says that "phone service is still provided by our conventional switched network, not over the Internet. We’re simply changing the infrastructure over which their service is delivered from copper to our more reliable, all-fiber network."

That fiber network also carries traffic for VoIP, which the FCC has never classified as either Title I or Title II. With AT&T and Verizon asking the FCC for permission to shut off the Public Switched Telephone Network by 2020, the regulatory status of VoIP is going to come under increased scrutiny.

One question for the phone transition is whether phone companies get to "keep all the good stuff about being a phone provider... while not having any of the attendant responsibilities that come with it," Feld said.

The potential of the FCC classifying broadband as a common carrier service is also being widely debated, because it could let the FCC impose stronger net neutrality rules on ISPs. As we mentioned, ISPs have railed against this possibility.

Verizon's use of Title II to its advantage "highlights that these providers are speaking out of both sides of their mouths," Feld said. "They say, 'oh you can't do Title II for broadband because that would be heavy-handed, burdensome regulation and would destroy investment.' You're over here at the FCC saying, 'you can't treat this as Title II' and you're in New Jersey saying, 'you must treat it as Title II.'"

The treatment of cellular voice calls (or "Commercial Mobile Radio Service") as Title II (albeit with fewer regulations than landline phone service) proves the regulations aren't an investment killer, he said.

"It is nonsense to say that Title II is this terrible, horrible thing that kills investment," Feld said. "As the wireless industry never gets tired of telling me, there's nothing more dynamic and [full of] investment wonderfulness than wireless, where they spend billions of dollars on licenses alone in order to provide a Title II service."

Let's see-----regarding public works and services and centralizing all to a few global corporations----

We already see why all this is bad but today we find yet another reason we do not want SMART CITY technology in the US. 

BIG BROTHER SURVEILLANCE AND SPYING AND SELLING OF ALL OUR PERSONAL DATA.

This is a huge issue for everyone, both Democrat and Republican.  No one wants this and yet we hear absolutely nothing about this from our national labor unions and justice organizations educating as to goals of these policies.  We only see support from them of ever increasing online courses on cyber-technology and defense----ever-more jobs in cyber-security and defense.  If we can organize them ----if it creates a job----then we support it.


SMART CITIES are nothing but all of the above.  They say the US Constitution does not protect privacy just as they say they are not violating anti-trust laws----THEY ARE SIMPLY PRETENDING FOLKS----WE ARE PROTECTED FROM MONOPOLIES AND INVASION OF PRIVACY.  We simply have Clinton neo-liberals running as Democrats instead of labor and justice candidates.  Democrats protect against anti-trust---invasion of privacy----

CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS PUSHING ALL THIS.  GET RID OF ALL CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS!

When Maryland's O'Malley was praised for CitiStat and now Bill Ferguson is behind StateStat----all of this is structure that works into SMART CITIES.  It has no intent of helping the people in communities---it provides logistics for international development---PERIOD.  Anyone in Baltimore can tell you CitiStat has done nothing to improve service.  The issues in the article below are simply reinstating oversight and accountability in government---hiring public sector employees to be middle-management and keep track every day of daily operations.  Only, it does not follow the money, it does not follow contract compliance or public works inspections.  It does not follow outsourcing and subcontractors----it merely eliminated a bloated payroll that was bloated because Baltimore's economy is kept completely stagnant with no job creation AT ALL and public policy in hiring that keeps Baltimore citizens unemployed.  Was Baltimore's public agencies heavy with too many employees not doing what they should?  YES.  CitiStat does not get those employees doing what they should----oversight of all I listed above---it simply eliminates even that avenue for having a job.  This was Baltimore's patronage system-----and it was allowed by Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins for decades as pay-to-play----give jobs in exchange for allowing Hopkins and Baltimore Development move billions and billions of dollars to the top and away from the communities.  Wall Street and Hopkins kept over 600,000 people impoverished by creating this patronage system of pols hiring people who supported them.   Now that Hopkins and Wall Street is ready to move the International Economic Zone policies---they don't need patronage ----and that is what O'Malley did with CitiStat....

IF YOU LOOK AT THE TITLE OF THIS ARTICLE YOU SEE THE SAME WORDS AS SMART CITIES----IT'S ALL ABOUT EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS.

Efficiency and effectiveness was had by oversight and accountability and regulation enforcement and the management hired to see that happened.  SMART CITIES is simply a tool of dominance and repression.



The CitiStat Model: How Data-Driven Government Can Increase Efficiency and Effectiveness


By Teresita Perez and Reece Rushing | Monday, April 23, 2007



Read "Governing by the Numbers: The Promise of Date-Driven Policymaking in the Information Age"

When Martin O’Malley took over as Baltimore mayor in December 1999, the city gov­ernment suffered from rampant absenteeism. In the Department of Public Works, for example, one in seven employees failed to report to work every day on average. This absenteeism required other employees to pick up the slack, which produced high overtime costs and a huge burden on the city’s finances.

O’Malley decided to tackle this problem by implementing a data-tracking and management tool called CitiStat. This program enabled the mayor’s office to monitor overtime and sick leave in real-time, providing ammunition to crack down on chronic absenteeism. In Citi­Stat’s first year of implementation the city saved $13.2 million—$6 million in overtime pay alone. Outside of the police department, overtime fell by 40 percent within the program’s first three years, and absenteeism plummeted by as much as 50 percent in some agencies.

Baltimore now uses the data-driven CitiStat system to manage all city programs and ser­vices. Information is gathered on an array of performance indicators, including response times for things like pothole abatement, trash collection, and snow removal, as well as the prevalence of problems such as illegal dumping, vacant buildings, and sewage overflows. This information is analyzed with the assistance of computerized databases and geographic mapping to zero in on areas of underperformance. Managers from each city department then meet with the mayor’s office every two weeks to answer questions about their results.

This approach has produced dramatic improvements in city services and efficiency, with savings of $350 million since its inception. As a result of this success, at least 11 other U.S. cities have adopted the CitiStat approach, with Washington, D.C., under new Mayor Adri­an Fenty, the latest addition to this list. Although O’Malley was recently elected governor of Maryland, his successor, Mayor Sheila Dixon, continues to employ CitiStat.

As Maryland’s new governor, O’Malley is now beginning to apply the CitiStat approach to state government. This brings hope that Maryland will set an example for other states, as Baltimore has for other cities.

Washington state has already adopted a CitiStat-inspired system. Gov. Christine Gregoire implemented the Government Management Accountability and Performance initiative, or GMAP, after her staff visited Baltimore and attended a CitiStat meeting. Like Citi­Stat, GMAP demands systematic analysis of data and regular review sessions with agency heads to assess performance. GMAP, however, employs thematic review—as opposed to departmental review—around specific issues, such as “vulnerable children and adults,” to promote collective problem-solving and cross-departmental collaboration.

This focus on the numbers, not surpris­ingly, has produced dramatic improve­ments in government performance. Gregoire has relied on GMAP to, among other things, improve responsiveness to reports of child abuse, facilitate faster decisions on environmental permits, and reduce highway fatalities.

These gains (as well as those achieved by CitiStat) have required little extra expense. Both GMAP and CitiStat use affordable, off-the-shelf software and rely on a small staff to analyze data and oversee depart­mental implementation. The GMAP staff numbers nine analysts, while CitiStat has never had more than eight full-time staff.

Nor have these programs been especially complex to implement. Gregoire and O’Malley launched their programs almost immediately after taking office. In both cases, departments and agencies were al­ready collecting data sufficient to get started (though additional data have been collected as the programs have matured). GMAP and CitiStat simply unlocked this information and put it to use for decision-making.

This never would have happened, however, without commitment at the top. Gregoire and O’Malley placed top deputies in charge of presiding over review sessions, while sometimes attending sessions themselves. This hands-on attention has signaled to managers of agencies and departments that data must drive their decision-mak­ing—and that they will be held accountable for results. The insight here is that data alone will not change behavior and improve performance. Rather, good data must be coupled with committed leadership.

A CitiStat session is shown above. Then Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, sworn in as governor of Maryland in January, is at the center of the table facing the podium.

__________________________________________
All we hear these elections is how the War on Crime that was shown to be effective two decades ago was not really effective.  We all know now that the crime data was skewed------mayors in cities like Baltimore simply juked the stats to make it seem they were reducing crime.  It also created the environment of unconstitutional policing where police were encouraged behind the scenes to go beyond zero tolerance in order to meet quotas.

O'Malley is running today in a Presidential race that has a nation knowing he was lying about his record---where in Maryland the media and non-profits are designed to pretend pols are successful while they are not.  All of this data and efficiency is simply a ploy to build the systems that are becoming SMART CITIES. 

We just saw the latest police chief fired for using this system in policing---supposedly focusing in on specific behaviors in communities----all that data collected on people has nothing to do with policing----it simply was developing the surveillance system that is SMART CITIES.  We all know the reasons for crime and violence in Baltimore----extreme poverty and a push to black market economy because of no jobs.  AND ALL THIS WAS CREATED BY BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS---THEY KNOW THE PROBLEMS. 

So, for two decades since Clinton neo-liberals got hold of the Democratic Party and since neo-conservative Hopkins gained hold of all Baltimore public policy----we have seen the building of structures for installing this SMART CITY control. 

NEVER ONCE IS THIS DATA COLLECTION SHOWN ON GETTING RID OF WIDESPREAD CORPORATE FRAUD AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION MOVING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS---IT IS ALWAYS FOCUSED AT INDIVIDUAL CITIZENS.

Everyone in Baltimore knows that all of the so-called social non-profits in Baltimore over decades have done nothing for social benefit---they are meant only to move money to Wall Street and Hopkins----they make no social improvements at all.  The money moves----media pretends something is happening to improve the underserved communities ----and nothing happens.  This is exactly what NGOs overseas have been doing for decades----it is money laundering.  These 'data' collection devices simply supply data they want to give----and everyone in Baltimore and around America knows it. 

THAT IS WHY O'MALLEY IS BEING BOOed AROUND THE NATION----THEY KNOW HE IS A FRAUD AND TAMMANY HALL.

There is one thing all citizens in Maryland knows----THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY BUILT INTO ANY OF THE STATE'S OR BALTIMORE'S GOVERNMENT AGENCIES DIRECTED AT RULE OF LAW.


Armed With Data, Fighting More Than Crime

By Tina Rosenberg May 2, 2012 7:00 am May 2, 2012 7:00 am Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Government accountability systems don’t usually become global superstars, but CompStat did.  The ideas in CompStat were first developed by Jack Maple, when he was a lieutenant in the New York City Transit Police, as a way to track subway crime and more intelligently deploy transit cops.  In 1994, when William Bratton, the chief of the transit police, became chief of the New York City Police Department, he brought Maple with him as a deputy. They then applied CompStat principles throughout the city’s entire crime fighting operation. The CompStat era coincided with a staggering decline in crime.  Between 1990 and 2011, homicide in New York City declined by 80 percent, robbery by 83 percent, burglary by 86 percent and car theft by 94 percent.  During that period crime fell everywhere in the United States, but it fell twice as much and for twice as long in New York City.

How much of this was due to CompStat is still hotly debated. One of the most careful criminologists, Franklin Zimring, gives New York City’s changes in policing (which are not limited to CompStat) credit for a significant share of the crime drop.

CompStat has now become almost as much a part of policing as the blue uniform.  A survey last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank for city police departments, found that 79 percent of medium to large police departments surveyed use some form of the CompStat model.

What is only starting to catch on, though, is the idea that CompStat isn’t just for policing.   In Baltimore, which pioneered the application of CompStat to other government business, mayors for the last decade have used a CompStat-style system to run the whole city.  CitiStat has greatly improved how the city does the meat-and-potatoes of government: picking up trash, filling potholes.   But it goes much further.  “We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence,” Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor, said in an interview.  “We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years.”   Baltimore has been trying for years to put in a new computerized system for emergency dispatch of ambulances and firefighters. “We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks,” she said.

Robert Behn, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, counts at least 19 United States cities, a couple of counties and two states — Maryland and Washington — that use CompStat for activities other than police work.  Some federal agencies are also adapting the model.

CompStat is popularly seen as a high-tech way of sticking pins in a map.   It is much more than that.  It starts with collecting data, analyzing it and presenting it in visual form — whether with pins on a map, bar graphs or other charts.

But the key to CompStat is how the data gets used.  Maple’s four principles, which he claimed (entirely credibly; this is a guy who wore a homburg and spats) to have jotted down on a napkin in the fall of 1994 in the celebrity hangout Elaine’s, are these:

• Accurate, timely intelligence
• Rapid deployment
• Effective tactics
• Relentless follow-up and assessment

Before CompStat, precincts turned in their reports on crimes and arrests only every few months.   With CompStat, that data is collected and analyzed weekly.   Precinct commanders appear before the N.Y.P.D. leadership every few weeks to be questioned about their performance.  If the numbers are not good, the commander must explain why — and have a specific plan for improvement.    The next meeting begins with questions about how well those commitments were kept.

Why did this cause a revolution?   After all, this is exactly how good businesses have always been run.  CompStat after all, is probably (accounts vary) short for Computer Statistics — now there’s an up-to-the-minute concept.

“There was nothing new about this,” said Andrew Boyd, who runs a Baltimore-based consulting firm called GovStat.  “Except that it’s a private-sector concept that had never been embraced by the public sector.”

When Martin O’Malley was running for mayor of Baltimore, reducing crime was a centerpiece of his campaign. He knew about CompStat, of course, and after he won the Democratic nomination — which in Baltimore is the same as winning the election — he called Maple.   In the fall of 1999, just before O’Malley took office, Maple and O’Malley took a drive around East Baltimore.  “They were playing a favorite game of Maple’s — spot the cop,” Michael Enright, O’Malley’s first deputy mayor, recounted in an interview.  “He liked to see how present police officers were in the most violent parts of the city.   It was extraordinary how few cops you see, how long it would take to see a uniformed presence.”

As they drove and talked about CompStat, Maple commented that CompStat wasn’t just for policing — it was for everything.  O’Malley didn’t buy it.  “Certain things can’t be measured,” he said.

“Name them,” said Maple.

O’Malley mentioned at-risk kids.   Maple started to list potential indicators:  Look at this playground — these basketball hoops have no nets.   What other parks have no nets? What hours is this rec center open?  Are they the same hours as peak time for juvenile violence?

“Anything O’Malley said, Maple could rattle off things that have an impact that the mayor could control,” said Enright.  “We were grappling with how we get our arms around this city and the enormous wheels of government we’d been handed.   O’Malley came back and said, ‘We’re going to do this.’”

Less than six months later, O’Malley and Enright presided over the first meeting of Baltimore’s CitiStat.

CitiStat cost only about $20,000 to set up (instead of expensive custom software, it used  Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint) and about $350,000 to $400,000 to run each year — mainly the salaries of four analysts and an investigator.   The initial problem was data.  Unlike police departments, which collect data on how they’re doing every time they write up an arrest report, other agencies had no performance data.   Bring in whatever you have, O’Malley told his agency directors — later we’ll decide what you should start collecting.   “We spent the first six months struggling to figure out what to measure,” said Enright, who ran the CitiStat meetings.

At first, the agencies had only personnel records and their budgets.  But those proved useful.  Once analyzed, they showed a widespread pattern of abuse of overtime, rampant absenteeism and use of city cars for private purposes — city officials drove them home every night.

The other early focus for CitiStat was on how the city handled complaints.   Any Baltimore resident trying to report a problem — a pothole, uncollected trash, a gushing fire hydrant — got bounced around to 4 or 5 different phone numbers.   The complaints were not tracked, and as a result, things didn’t get fixed.   O’Malley created a “One Call to City Hall” 311 number. Each complaint was now tracked and followed up, and operators were trained to make each caller a promise:  for example, the city will fix your pothole in 72 hours (it later became 48).   And whether the city kept those promises became more data for CitiStat.

Related More From Fixes Read previous contributions to this series.

Every two weeks, each agency head would come to a CitiStat meeting, facing Enright, sometimes the Mayor, and the heads of the departments of finance, labor, legal and information technology.  Before the meeting, a CitiStat analyst went over the latest data from the agency, pulled out the important stuff and put it in graphic form.  The agency director stood at a podium, his senior staff seated behind him, and the information was  projected onto the wall.  The first questions were always follow-up: how are you doing on the last meeting’s projects?  Then there were questions about new issues.   When solutions were discussed, there was no need to schedule a meeting with the city’s solicitors or budget director, because they were in the room.   By 5 p.m. that day, the CitiStat analyst had written and circulated a short list of commitments the agency had made or information it needed to provide.  “We expected that when you come back in two weeks you will have answers to these questions,” said Enright.

By 2003, Baltimore had reduced overtime by 30 percent, and absenteeism was cut by half in the agencies where it had been attacked.  City services had been greatly improved — snow was removed and trash picked up, potholes filled, lead abatements performed.    By the end of 2006, O’Malley’s last year in office, Enright said the program had saved the city nearly half a billion dollars over his tenure.

Is this a bargain?  In terms of cash, certainly.  But the cost of CitiStat is actually quite high measured in terms of the time of the mayor and his senior staff.  Enright, for example, attended five 90-minute meetings every week.   CitiStat has to be run by senior staff, to get agency heads to take it seriously.  (The early firing of two nonperforming agency heads, the chiefs of parks and of water, was another clear message.) Some agency heads, said Enright, realized it was an opportunity. If they could show they could spend money well, they’d get more when they needed it, quickly.   “Most saw it as keep your head down and it will go away.  There was a certain passive-aggressive nature to meetings.”

It didn’t go away.  Ten years later, the program has evolved, said Chad Kenney, a CitiStat analyst.  “It used to be a very agency-specific conversation — about getting agencies used to data, collecting data and making decisions based on data.  As that became ingrained we realized most things don’t just touch one agency.”  Now there is CleanStat, which looks at not just whether the Solid Waste department is picking up trash on time, but whether Transportation maintains street medians, whether the Parks department keeps  parks tidy and whether Housing enforces relevant building codes.

“It’s a learning process,” said Kenney.   “What we were measuring in 2002 is very different than what we look at now — we learn that actually, this metric isn’t the best metric for what we’re trying to accomplish.”

One example goes back to crime control.  CitiStat initially focused on arrests, but now the focus is on gun crime.  “If our goal is a safer city, we want to look at guns, gun violence and violent repeat offenders, because they’re driving crime,” Kenney said.   Since GunStat was established in 2008, arrests, in fact, have dropped.  But so have shootings — down from 651 in 2007 to 368 last year — and homicides, down from 282 in 2007 to 197 last year.

“The traditional way of being successful in a large bureaucracy is to not screw up,” said Harvard’s Behn.   CitiStat-style programs, he said, change that – “from not screwing up and staying out of the newspapers to a list of things they are supposed to accomplish.   People are aware there are things they’re responsible for accomplishing, and they eventually drive that down into the organization.”

THEY DON'T HAVE BALTIMORE'S SUCCESS BECAUSE BALTIMORE JUKES THE STATS FOR GOODNESS SAKE.

Not every city that has instituted a Stat program has had Baltimore’s success, but not everyone has done it the way Baltimore has.   “They mimic the superficial features,” said Behn.  “They show up in Baltimore and see a meeting.  But they don’t get the importance of follow-up, and the importance of the chief showing that this isn’t going away.”

O’Malley is now governor of Maryland.   The StateStat tenets on its home page are exactly the same ones Jack Maple scrawled on his napkin at Elaine’s.  “It’s how he runs the state,” said Enright.  “I have yet to see a better way to manage vast bureaucracies than this system.”

Have you?   If your city has a form of CitiStat, how well does it work? Are there problems in your city that might benefit from a Stat approach? Where else might such an approach work?   Let us know.

______________________________________________


O'Malley is Big Data candidate----he is the face of SMART CITIES and this totalitarian global corporate control of all public functions in cities around the world that will become the International Economic Zones under Global Corporate Tribunal Rule.

O'Malley showed data that made him look like he was successful in all kinds of categories----and in each case a few years after he releases the data it is found to be fraudulent.  His crime stats, his job growth stats, his education stats, his community development stats----ALL FOUND TO BE FALSE BY FEDERAL INVESTIGATION----GOVERNMENT WATCHDOG INVESTIGATION----anytime someone outside the State of Maryland looks at the data----they see the fraud. 

BIG DATA is BIG NSA------surveillance and spying-----BIG GLOBAL CORPORATION buying and selling our personal data for profit------and BIG SMART GRID with the goal of controlling every bit of our public infrastructure and vital services.  The Republicans have the mirror of O'Malley in Bobby Jindal of New Orleans-----Jindal is a neo-conservative that made New Orleans the first SMART CITY-----joining third world cities in installing these policies.

Jindal is the Global Corporate Tribunal Rule pol pretending to be a Republican as a Bush neo-conservative-----and O'Malley is the Global Corporate Tribunal Rule pol pretending to be a Democrat as a Clinton neo-liberal.



Meet The Big Data Candidate Of The 2016 Presidential Race

• Colin Campbell

• Nov. 11, 2014, 6:28 AM  Business Insider
  

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) believes he has discovered a "new way of governing" that could revolutionize Washington. 

Throughout his political career, O'Malley has been obsessed with data. Now, he appears to be mulling whether to mount a potential primary challenger to 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton. If he does run, it seems his devotion to performance metrics could become a major part of his platform. 

"It is not like the old way that was very often hierarchical, and bureaucratic, ideological — orders from on high that eventually make it to the bottom of the pyramid," O'Malley recently told Business Insider in his Annapolis office, which is adorned with historic paintings and war memorabilia. "It's relentlessly interactive. It is performance-measured."

Minutes before the interview, O'Malley completed one of his regular "StateStat" meetings where his data-centric methods were on full display.

During the meeting, the governor sat at the center of a table encircled by his top aides and uniformed state police troopers wielding tablets and laptops. Before a PowerPoint presentation began, two screen projectors displayed the motto: "A deadline is the difference between a dream and a goal."

Violent crime was the first item on the agenda. A map of Maryland showed a clear drop across various counties. However, there was one exception in the Western corner of the state: Garrett County, population roughly 30,000. The officers and O'Malley's team debated what caused the spike. 

O'Malley's office.Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is particularly proud of the work his state did to reduce the backlog of unprocessed DNA samples with "DNA Stat."

"I know it's a drop in the bucket," one aide admitted while pressing for more details. 

They moved on to other crime statistics. Each PowerPoint slide had either a colorful map or chart. Maryland’s governor was full of questions.

"Do we fund that?" he asked about domestic abuse coordinators at hospitals. "Have the frontline people seen that graph?"

O'Malley's queries continued throughout the meeting.

"Have you ever sat them down as a group and asked what they could be doing better?"

"Where are we on traffic fatalities? It's down, but what's the number?"

"What do the numbers say? This is our best graph?"

Afterwards, O'Malley told Business Insider visualizing data is a key component of his management style.

"I think I've always had a knack for the spatial and for understanding things spatially — how things are connected," he explained. "I think it's really illuminating and clarifying when you can actually chart, graph, and map problems, and opportunities, and interventions, and actions."

 'Nothing Short of Confrontational' O'Malley's interest in data-centric governing was inspired by a program associated with an unlikely role model for a progressive Democrat — former New York City mayor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. 

During Giuliani's administration in the mid-1990s, the mayor and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton revolutionized the city's crime-fighting policy with a program known as CompStat that has been described as both a tool and a management philosophy. Short for "compare stats," CompStat isn't an especially complicated concept. Its central tenets are that police departments should track the specifics of crime data and complaints, deploy resources to troubled locations, and hold local commanders accountable for the results.

Bratton credited the program for helping him achieve record-breaking drops in crime. According to Newsday, hundreds of police agencies around the country now use a CompStat-like system.

"CompStat was one of the most revolutionary developments in policing in the last century," Vincent Henry, a former NYPD officer who worked with Bratton, told the paper. "It was revolutionary, it changed the way people do business, changed the way police think about crime."

AP/Gail BurtonThen-Councilman Martin O'Malley, right, on the campaign trail in 1999.

O'Malley, who was then a Baltimore city councilman, made a surprising bid for mayor in 1999 and reportedly campaigned on halving Baltimore's crippling crime rate. This would be no small feat: Constant homicides had painfully earned the city nicknames like "Bodymore, Murdaland" and "Bulletmore, Murderland." O'Malley has said Baltimore was then "the most violent and addicted big city in America."

As a white politician facing a majority-black electorate, it initially seemed the odds were against him. (He was an inspiration for the Tommy Carcetti character in "The Wire" but is said to still hate the show with a "taut fury.") In an election focused on crime, O'Malley nevertheless surged, got the support of important black leaders, and easily won his primary.

According to the Baltimore Sun, O'Malley never reached his goal of cutting the city's homicide rate from more than 300 to 175 annually. However, "he drove the killings down to 253 in 2003, and for the next six years Baltimore experienced the sharpest reduction in violent crime of any city in the country."

But O'Malley wasn't content to just apply the data-centered approach to crime, as Matt Gallagher, his former chief of staff, recalled.

"As things began to work on the policing side because of CompStat, then-Mayor O'Malley began to ask us questions. Like, 'Boy, I wish I had something like CompStat for the rest of the city," Gallagher told Business Insider.

O'Malley's OfficeGov. Martin O'Malley has touted his work to reduce wait time at Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administration through "MVA Stat."

O'Malley ended up doing exactly that. Gallagher, who became director of the new "CitiStat" program, said O'Malley started with the department of public works but soon monitored everything from overtime hours to the time it took to fill potholes after a complaint. 

Of course, O'Malley's administration didn't solely rely on statistics and charts. CitiStat also involved on-the-ground assessments of local agencies — and there were some surprises along the way.

"After we studied potholes for a while, we learned that ... only one in 10 potholes was being filled as the result of a complaint. We came out and gave the '48-hour pothole guarantee,'" Gallagher said. "People were really happy. We kind of took that same approach and applied it to things like graffiti and abandoned vehicle removal."

Gallagher said the program sometimes led O'Malley's staff to uncover waste and abuse in unexpected places.

"Site visits used to be a really big part of what we did — try and get out in the field and see what is going on. I remember in City Hall we went to a garage one day where vehicles were being worked on. We found a team of people who were grilling food, having a barbecue in the middle of the workday," he recalled. "Some were fired; some were disciplined. The barbecue equipment was moved."

CitiStat was credited as a massive success and was considered both effective and aggressive. In 2004, Baltimore won an "Innovations in American Government" award from Harvard's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovations, which called the city's program "nothing short of confrontational."

"In biweekly meetings, the manager of each city agency must stand at a podium and answer questions from a panel led by the mayor or his appointed inquisitor," the Ash Center said at the time. "CitiStat's primary innovation is its ability to tailor performance evaluations to each agency: the animal control manager must explain an increase in strays and propose a solution; the housing manager must explain a chart of vacant houses and the plans to resolve this problem; all managers may be asked to explain each hour of their department's overtime."

According to Gallagher, O'Malley was eager to apply CitiStat on an even bigger scale. In the 2006 governor's race, he earned the chance to fulfill this ambition when he rode that year's Democratic wave and unseated incumbent Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R). 

"I think most people would say it was his signature management accomplishment as mayor of Baltimore. Fast forward to 2006, when the mayor ran for governor, he pledged that he was going to bring CitiStat to the state," Gallagher said. "He got inaugurated in January of 2007; two months later you had the first 'StateStat' meeting."

Bob Behn, a Harvard Professor who wrote a book about the CompStat and CitiStat programs, The PerformanceStat Potential, told Business Insider the transition from city to state analytical programs wasn't simple. Many city services are relatively direct and easily converted into statistics — such as the number of potholes filled, or abandoned houses renovated — while state services involve more relatively complex outcomes.

"The city was filling potholes, right? That's very operational, easy to count, easy for citizens to see, easy for citizens to complain about. ... They had to make the leap to the state where they weren't doing the same sort of operational thing," Behn said. "The ability to make that transition was not something that everybody could have done, let's just put it that way."

Gov. Martin O'Malley's office.An example of some of the "Baystat" statistics.

Still, today, StateStat has expanded to cover a plethora of wide-ranging issues with specific policy goals. They include: reducing the nitrogen and phosphorous in the Chesapeake Bay through "Baystat," reducing infant mortality 10% by 2017, and doubling transit ridership by 2020. Touting O'Malley's analytics, Governing magazine put him on the cover in 2009.

Of course, by presenting specific goals, O'Malley also sets himself up to fail when they aren't achieved. For example, progress on the transit ridership goal is lagging. The StateStat website has a red downward arrow next to the substance abuse section, noting: "-7.4% Progress towards Accidental or Undetermined Intoxication Death Reduction Goal of 20 percent in Maryland."

"There's lots of political people that would say, 'Don't do that, you have an election coming up,'" O'Malley said of the potential for public failure inherent in his program. "The reality is what the reality is: We're losing too many people to heroin overdoses, but it's not for lack of being aware of it. It's not for lack of doing things to combat it."

He soon added: "It was the rare mayor — man or woman — who would already have a term under their belt that would be willing to embrace this. So, I've found newer mayors did this more freely because they did not have to own the past performance and the past numbers."

'What Would It Take to Do It on the Federal Level?' When asked about creating a "stat" program for the federal government, O'Malley recalled a conversation he once had with Jack Maple, the architect of CompStat in New York who worked with him to bring the program to Baltimore.

"I said, 'Jack, we should do this in a few departments of Baltimore City.' And Jack said that, 'You should do it for the entire city.' I said, 'Well the city might be too big.' He says, 'No. It's not too big. But because it's big, that should mean you want to do it throughout the city,' ... It's even more urgently needed the larger an organization, because the number of combinations of actions become more multiple and more layered. All the more important that there be a management discipline, a management rhythm — a visible, measurable way to determine where our dollars go," O'Malley recounted.

AP/Brian WitteGov. Martin O'Malley looks at a chart showing pollution monitoring efforts in the Chesapeake Bay while aboard the R/V Rachel Carson on the Bush River in Maryland.

It's difficult to know what exactly is in O'Malley's head when it comes to his presidential ambitions, but it's clear he has them. Unlike every other Democrat — including Clinton — O'Malley is attending local, small-ball campaign events and deploying political staff to key presidential primary states' local races. Some speculate he could be aiming for something more modest, such as the vice presidency or a cabinet position in a Clinton administration.

O'Malley will only say he is "seriously considering" a run for president. In spite of this, O'Malley was willing to offer some not-so-subtle hints that he's contemplating bringing his data-based approach to the White House. 

"What would it take to do it on the federal level? The same thing it takes to do at the mayoral level or the gubernatorial level. And that's executive commitment," said O'Malley. "If the executive, the man or woman standing at the center of the circle, isn't committed to create this new way of governing and this new executive method, it's not going to happen. The bureaucracies will wait you out. You might have a press conference. You might even give a good speech about it. But if you're not doing it everyday, in every way, you're not going to change the culture."

However, O'Malley's critics argue his record in Maryland doesn't actually withstand rigorous analysis

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R), who worked under Ehrlich and went on to head the GOP's national committee, mocked O'Malley's data-based approach with his own take on the numbers.

"He didn't turn sh-- around. He made it worse. We left him with a $2 billion surplus in the rainy day fund. There's now a $2 billion deficit," Steele told Business Insider.

Steele scoffed: "So much for analytics."

O'Malley, who would be the unquestioned underdog against a candidate like Clinton, may have become even more of a presidential long-shot in recent weeks. His handpicked successor, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown (D), was upset on Election Day by Republican businessman Larry Hogan despite the Democratic tilt of the state. Hogan's campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues like state tax increases — not StateStat. Still, Brown's defeat could be a sign O'Malley's statistics-based management style won't be enough win over voters.

Asked for comment on Brown's loss, O'Malley spokeswoman Lis Smith pointed to the governor's decisive 2010 re-election campaign, a rematch against Ehrlich.

"In 2010, Governor O'Malley ran on the results his data-driven approach achieved for the people of Maryland. He bucked the national trend and won by 14 points," Smith said in a statement. "His data-driven approach resonates most prominently in cities, where dozens of mayors have adopted the CitiStat program then-Mayor O’Malley pioneered in Baltimore. Especially in this time of anxiety, Americans want more results, transparency, and accountability in government, not less."

Gov. Martin O'Malley's officeGov. Martin O'Malley set the goal to increase Maryland's renewable energy generation from 5.6% of the energy generated to 20% by 2022. It now stands at 8.2%.

O'Malley appears to be similarly framing his data-centric approach for a national audience. In addition to racking up a laundry list of progressive achievements — including same-sex marriage, gun control, and immigration reform laws — O'Malley is offering some soft criticism of the Democratic Party's loyalty to government programs that may not be cost-effective.

"I think sometimes the one party undercuts its arguments for accountability and fiscal responsibility by its mad drive to dismantle government," he said, referring to Republicans. "In the same way, I think sometimes our own party undercuts our arguments for effective governance by not be willing to make our actions accountable. ... If they don't work we should stop doing them and find something new that works better."

Though that sort of tough talk against wasteful government programs is more common among conservatives, O'Malley insisted there's no conflict between being liberal and being focused on data.

"I don't find anything contradictory with wanting a government to work more effectively," O'Malley said.

He paused before explaining himself again in less wonky terms.

"How can I say it in a pithier, more quotable kind of way?" he asked. "I borrowed this idea from Giuliani's administration in New York. And I really could give a rat's ass that it was a Republican administration at the time. It was an idea that worked."

______________________________________________
Obama and Clinton neo-liberals funded as a stimulus package the costs of these super-computer installations in cities set to move forward as SMART CITY International Economic Zones.  If you are going to be an independent zone in the Northern Hemisphere acting as a colony of the Global Corporate Tribunal----you need to have all of capacity the Federal and State government has built right in that International Economic Zone government structure.

So, CitiStat was simply moving funds to build the platform for what is now moving towards this SMART CITY policy of control by Global Corporate Tribunal.

The article looks conspiracy theory but it is not------all SMART technology products are following citizens in all ways.  Our phones/computers have implanted GPS whether we want it or not-----they are being built to allow for the NSA surveillance of our emails/social media communications-----cars have tracking devices-----your discount food cards are listing and selling all food and products you buy and that is being transferred to health corporations and health insurers who will charge you more because they know you drink soda and like ice cream.  SMART TVs that surveill?  I do not think that would be far-fetched in this environment.  We know that SMART METERS super-sizes this as everything we do inside our homes will be monitored----from how we use appliances, what we throw away, and ration according to corporate standards for profit.  We are at a point where a corporation forces you to sign all rights to all your information in order to access their business and since global corporations control all business---you have to sign away your rights.

Espionage was always a fascist government operation----Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had huge networks of surveillance. Now it is corporate fascism.....by the same few sociopaths!

Singapore is the first completely SMART GRID nation with BAHRAIN coming in fast.  Both are the most neo-liberal Wall Street cities in the world and they are completely autocratic and corporate controlled.

Take a look at this article---I could not copy and post it as they do not want it shared.

 Johns Hopkins building data analysis supercomputer


With help from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Johns Hopkins builds a data mining supercomputercomputerworld.com|By Joab Jackson


Big Brother Surveillance – It Is Not Just For Governments Anymore By Michael Snyder, on March 12th, 2014

Traditionally, when we have thought of “Big Brother technology” we have thought of government oppression.  But these days, it isn’t just governments that are using creepy new technologies to spy on all of us.  As you will see below, “Big Brother surveillance” has become very big business.  In the information age, knowledge is power, and big corporations seem to have an endless thirst for even more of it.  So it isn’t just governments that are completely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do.  Corporations have discovered that they can use Orwellian technologies to make lots of money, and this is likely only going to get worse in the years ahead.  Below, I have shared a few examples of this phenomenon…

Private Companies Are Using Automated License Plate Readers To Spy On You

Did you know that people that work for private companies are driving around scanning our license plates?

I never knew this until I came across an article about it the other day.  The following is an excerpt from that article…

Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa’s repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa’s unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond the repossession business, transforming any ­industry that wants to check on the whereabouts of ordinary people.

An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every ­license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.

These scans mean big money for Sousa — typically $200 to $400 every time the spotter finds a vehicle that’s stolen or in default — so he runs his spotter around the clock, typically adding 8,000 plate scans to the database in Texas each day.

Your Cell Phone Is Spying On You

If you carry a cell phone around with you, then you are willingly offering up a whole host of information about yourself.  This is something that I have written about previously, but I never realized that some private companies are now setting up sensors in businesses to purposely capture information from the cell phones of anyone that walks in.  Yes, this is actually happening according to the Wall Street Journal…

Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.

And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.

Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.

Entire “Big Brother Housing Developments” Are Now Being Designed

Would you live in a housing development with a sophisticated “video surveillance program” and that uses automated license plate scanners to monitor everyone who comes and goes from the community?

In a country that is becoming increasingly obsessed with “security”, these new kinds of housing developments are surely going to be quite popular.  The following is an excerpt from an article about one of these communities that is being built in California…

A new, scenic development surrounded by winding waterways is billed as a safe haven.

Only four bridges lead in and out of the area with security checkpoints and a fiberoptic video surveillance program. Every license plate scanned on those roads will be cross-checked with a DMV database for stolen cars.

The first homes are already going up at River Islands, and the people who move in can expect to be part of a new era in policing.

Disney Implements The “MagicBand” Tracking Device

Would you wear an RFID tracking device that allows you to buy stuff and that monitors you wherever you go?

Well, Disney actually wants their customers to willingly use this technology.

They are calling it the “MagicBand”, and perhaps you have already watched one of the new Disney commercials about it.  You can see what Disney has to say about “MagicBand” right here.

In the video posted below, activist Mark Dice discusses this troubling move by Disney…

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Our “Smart Televisions” Are Spying On Us

How would you feel if I told you that your expensive new television is actually spying on you?

You probably would not be too excited to hear that.

Well, depending on the actual brand, this is really happening.  In fact, one brand of television actually sends information about every button that press on your remote back to corporate headquarters…

An IT consultant called Jason Huntley, who lives in a village near Hull, uncovered evidence that a flat-screen television, which had been sitting in his living room since the summer, was secretly invading his family’s privacy.

He began investigating the £400 LG device after noticing that its home screen appeared to be showing him ‘targeted’ adverts — for cars, and Knorr stock cubes — based on programmes he’d just been watching.

Huntley decided to monitor information that the so-called smart TV — which connects to the internet — was sending and receiving. He did this by using his laptop effectively as a bridge between his television and the internet receiver, so the laptop was able to show all the data being sucked out of his set.

He soon discovered that details of not just every show he watched but every button he pressed on his remote control were being sent back to LG’s corporate headquarters in South Korea.

Data Mining – Your Personal Information Is Big Business

There are huge companies that most people have never even heard of that do nothing but buy and sell our personal information.  The collection of this personal information is called “data mining”, and it is extremely profitable.

In fact, there is one company called Acxiom that made a profit of more than 77 million dollars in one recent year by collecting and selling info about all of us.

In case you were wondering, yes, Acxiom almost certainly has a profile on you too…

The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year.

As long as these technologies are legal and businesses can make money this way, they are going to keep doing it.

So even if we stopped the rapid expansion of “Big Brother surveillance” by the governments of the world, the reality is that private corporations are going to keep pushing the envelope.

We live in a world that is rapidly changing, and unless a miracle happens we soon will not have very much privacy left at all.

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All of this is why justice activists around the world are shouting that Trans Pacific Trade Pact is not about free trade----it is about dismantling national sovereignty in those nations signing----LIKE THE US-----and building the government structures necessary for this global corporate tribunal rule. 

IT IS NOT ABOUT FREE TRADE JUST AS CITISTAT WAS NEVER ABOUT CREATING QUALITY PUBLIC SERVICE----

The American people must WAKE UP-----the world is successfully throwing off this Wall Street global corporate control of their nations while America sits and watches Obama and Clinton neo-liberals dismantled our Federal government and send trillions of dollars to building this SMART CITIES and International Economic Zone structure tied to Trans Pacific Trade Pact.

While these deals are falling through on particular policy issues----it is critical to get rid of the neo-liberals controlling the political parties to the left -----as with Labour in Canada, UK, and Australia----and with the Democratic Party in the US.  Meanwhile, the Tea Party and Libertarians one the right are fighting against the same on the Republican side.

Neo-cons and neo-liberals are not Democrats and Republicans---they are simply pols working to advance this global corporate rule----an autocratic totalitarian global corporate state.  SMART GRID would make Stalin, Mao, and Hitler green with envy in controlling huge populations with secret service agencies.

Does anyone believe the goal of TPP is levelling up when every nation tied to neo-liberal economic policy has extreme wealth inequity?  Global corporations will keep pushing to the lowest common denominator.  These global pols expect to take the US down to third world levels---not bring those nations up.

'He said the TPP accord would result in “levelling up, as opposed to a race to the bottom.”'

They would not dare announce a signed agreement before the 2016 elections and they need an economic crash as is coming with the bond market as an excuse to install all these TPP policies quickly.

Trade ministers fail to forge Trans-Pacific pact Dispute over Canadian dairy tariffs, protection of some cutting-edge drugs and Japanese access to the North American automobile market stymie deal.

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BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

People pass an advertisement protesting the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Washington, D.C. on July 23. Talks to forge the deal broke up Friday without resolving issues that include a dispute over Canadian dairy tariffs.

By: Steven Mufson The Washington Post, Published on Fri Jul 31 2015 WASHINGTON—High-level talks to forge a 12-nation trade deal spanning the Pacific broke up Friday without resolving contentious disputes over Canadian dairy tariffs, the protection of cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics,” and Japanese access to the North American automobile market.

Negotiators said they would continue to seek agreement over the coming months, but the failure to wrap up the accord, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was a setback for U.S. President Barack Obama, who hopes that the completion of a deal will be one of his signature achievements.

Further talks could still produce an accord before the end of the year, but earlier, American officials had been hopeful that the four days of negotiations, which took place this week in beachside hotels on the Hawaiian island of Maui, could produce a final agreement.

Substantial progress was made in certain areas, including the completion of a chapter about environmental protection. Negotiators also made progress on whether geographic places can be trademarks for items such as cheeses.

But the trade ministers could not work out other issues, despite lengthy sessions. The top trade ministers themselves met until well past midnight Thursday but still could not bridge differences over intellectual property and how many years of protection to provide data belonging to the makers of biologic drugs from natural chemicals.

Those companies have 12 years’ protection in the United States under the Affordable Care Act, but some TPP countries offer as little as three years’ protection.

When completed, the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be composed of more than 100,000 tariff lines, cover economies with 40 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, and include more than 20 different chapters addressing issues such as labour conditions, wildlife trafficking and human rights, as well as trade.

But the secret negotiations have drawn sharp criticism from unions, human rights groups and the overwhelming majority of congressional Democrats. Obama barely scraped together enough support in June to secure negotiating authority from Congress in a close vote on Trade Promotion Authority commonly known as fast track.

The delay in wrapping up the terms of the accord makes it more likely that a final agreement would not go to Congress for approval until 2016, when political considerations will be even more in the forefront of lawmakers’ minds. But U.S. officials said any setback would be temporary and that the trade accord, which has been under negotiation for six years, was still within reach. And they have observed that political concerns were already front and centre in Congress as well as the presidential campaign.

“The calendar is never your friend,” Susan Schwab, the trade negotiator for president George W. Bush, said earlier in the week. “When you have 12 countries, somebody’s always going to have an election.”

One of the week’s toughest issues was how much to cut dairy tariffs in Canada. Canada, which is the United States’ largest trading partner, is holding elections in October, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper is reluctant to rouse the ire of dairy farmers who benefit from tariffs of up to 296 per cent.

U.S.-Canada ties have already been strained over the Obama administration’s failure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oilsands oil from northern Alberta to refineries on the Texas gulf coast.

Canada did offer to reduce the tariffs, but other countries felt the offer wasn’t adequate. New Zealand, in particular, is eager to gain access to the Canadian dairy market and was not satisfied with the proposal.

In other areas, Japan appeared probable to gradually reduce tariffs on pork and beef but was more reluctant to give access to foreign rice growers.

The United States sought to write in a clause that would help establish safeguards so that frivolous lawsuits could not be brought under the investor-state dispute settlement process that was widely criticized by liberal Democrats. The critics said it allows companies to use international arbitration to undercut national regulations.

Japan was also seeking more concessions on what is known as “rules of origin” that determine what national source of auto parts that are made with components from different countries. Japanese automakers want to use components made in non-TPP countries such as Thailand.

The country most notably absent from the talks has been China, the second-largest trading partner with the United States and the biggest trading partner with most of the Asian countries that are part of the accord. Obama has pointedly said that he favours the TPP because he does not want China to be setting lower standards.

“If we are not there helping to shape the rules of the road, then U.S. businesses and U.S. workers are going to be cut out, because there’s a pretty big country there, called China, that is growing fast, has great gravitational pull and often operates with different sets of rules,” Obama said in an interview in June with public radio show Marketplace.

Obama said that China had expressed interest in joining the TPP later, but he said that by that time TPP would have set standards and “then China is going to have to at least take those international norms into account.” He said the TPP accord would result in “levelling up, as opposed to a race to the bottom.”

In addition to negotiators, corporate lobbyists and others have been in Maui hoping to corner people involved in negotiations. One was Rep. Sander Levin, (D-Mich.), who earlier said that he was also concerned about currency manipulation that could artificially boost a country’s exports; the possibility of long protection times for certain drugs and limits in access that could result; and whether goods from non-TPP countries, such as China, could be incorporated into products made by member countries and turn those non-TPP countries into free riders.

Levin said he also wanted the TPP to explicitly reserve the right of member countries to regulate tobacco products.

“It’s always been my goal to have strong bipartisan support for a major trade bill,” Levin said. “There’s been too little meaningful congressional involvement despite all the consultations.”

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No one believes that the extent of the NSA spying was contained to what Obama and Congress told us-----we know it goes beyond protecting from terrorists and checking phone and social media.  This was Bush's contribution to the SMART GRID for global corporate tribunal control.  The neo-cons are the military/defense/energy/surveillance/spying side of this global corporate rule and the neo-liberals are the finance/food/ technology side.  We know that Google and social media was developed for this SMART GRID collection of surveillance----it is not simply a corporation. This was Bush's side of SMART GRID while in US cities Wall Street pols like O'Malley were creating CITISTAT-----the next phase of SMART CITY.  Now, as a baby boomer I lived in what was a social capitalism where regulations, oversight and accountability over corporations and enforced Rule of Law created the most efficient and effective operation of both corporations and government----it was aimed at keeping the economy strong and people with disposable income to fuel the economy.  THAT WAS WHAT MIDDLE-MANAGEMENT DID FOR A CENTURY AND IT WAS DESIGNED TO KEEP PEOPLE AND CORPORATIONS HONEST.  This SMART CITY has nothing to do with that.  It has only to do with maximizing global corporate profits and making sure all revenue moves to the top.  Privatizing all of America's public sector makes sure of this!

IF LEFT UNCHECKED----PEOPLE WILL BE MADE AFRAID OF SAYING OR DOING EVERYTHING------AND THAT IS WHAT MAKES FASCISTS ABLE TO CONTROL LARGE POPULATIONS.


Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data Revealed: The NSA's powerful tool for cataloguing global surveillance data – including figures on US collection



The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). Note the '2007' date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself. Guardian Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill

Tuesday 11 June 2013 09.00 EDT Last modified on Thursday 9 October 2014 06.16 EDT

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure."

An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country."

Under the heading "Sample use cases", the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country."

A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map" seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide.

The heat map reveals how much data is being collected from around the world. Note the '2007' date in the image relates to the document from which the interactive map derives its top secret classification, not to the map itself. Guardian Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn.

The heatmap gives each nation a color code based on how extensively it is subjected to NSA surveillance. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance).

The disclosure of the internal Boundless Informant system comes amid a struggle between the NSA and its overseers in the Senate over whether it can track the intelligence it collects on American communications. The NSA's position is that it is not technologically feasible to do so.

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case."

Other documents seen by the Guardian further demonstrate that the NSA does in fact break down its surveillance intercepts which could allow the agency to determine how many of them are from the US. The level of detail includes individual IP addresses.

IP address is not a perfect proxy for someone's physical location but it is rather close, said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist with the Speech Privacy and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "If you don't take steps to hide it, the IP address provided by your internet provider will certainly tell you what country, state and, typically, city you are in," Soghoian said.

That approximation has implications for the ongoing oversight battle between the intelligence agencies and Congress.

On Friday, in his first public response to the Guardian's disclosures this week on NSA surveillance, Barack Obama said that that congressional oversight was the American peoples' best guarantee that they were not being spied on.

"These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress and they are being fully briefed on these programs," he said. Obama also insisted that any surveillance was "very narrowly circumscribed".

Senators have expressed their frustration at the NSA's refusal to supply statistics. In a letter to NSA director General Keith Alexander in October last year, senator Wyden and his Democratic colleague on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall, noted that "the intelligence community has stated repeatedly that it is not possible to provide even a rough estimate of how many American communications have been collected under the Fisa Amendments Act, and has even declined to estimate the scale of this collection."

At a congressional hearing in March last year, Alexander denied point-blank that the agency had the figures on how many Americans had their electronic communications collected or reviewed. Asked if he had the capability to get them, Alexander said: "No. No. We do not have the technical insights in the United States." He added that "nor do we do have the equipment in the United States to actually collect that kind of information".

Soon after, the NSA, through the inspector general of the overall US intelligence community, told the senators that making such a determination would jeopardize US intelligence operations – and might itself violate Americans' privacy.

"All that senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the inspectors general cannot provide it," Wyden told Wired magazine at the time.

The documents show that the team responsible for Boundless Informant assured its bosses that the tool is on track for upgrades.

The team will "accept user requests for additional functionality or enhancements," according to the FAQ acquired by the Guardian. "Users are also allowed to vote on which functionality or enhancements are most important to them (as well as add comments). The BOUNDLESSINFORMANT team will periodically review all requests and triage according to level of effort (Easy, Medium, Hard) and mission impact (High, Medium, Low)."

Emmel, the NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian: "Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address).

"Thus, we apply rigorous training and technological advancements to combine both our automated and manual (human) processes to characterize communications – ensuring protection of the privacy rights of the American people. This is not just our judgment, but that of the relevant inspectors general, who have also reported this."

She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs."

We do not have Democrats and Republicans in Congress----we have politicians working for this industry or that---they are not connected to you and me AT ALL.

I want to extend my discussion of public energy services by looking at the public airwaves that are radio, TV, internet, and cell phones.  This segues right in from SMART GRID discussions because all of that SMART GRID takes the airwaves and the growth in online health, education, utility services, cell phones will take ALL OF THE PUBLIC AIRWAVES.  This will be like the consolidation of our print media to the point a few media corporations own all newspapers, magazines, and even in-house corporate newsletters.  Now, they are going to do the same with our airwaves.  Is means BYE-BYE TV---BYE BYE PUBLIC MEDIA----BYE BYE GOVERNMENT ACCESS STATIONS.  All avenues of public voice will be gone. This does not mean every single wavelength will be sold---it means it will become too expensive for anyone other than big corporations to buy and operate.

If you noticed our local Baltimore TV stations bought 2 extra wavelength outlets---ABC, NBC, CBS and have put what are simply old-time reruns and informercials.  They bought those in expectation of this bidding war and will sell or change usage to mobile device usage because corporations will pay top dollar to use it while the public watching TV or cable will not be able to pay more.

THESE ARE NOT DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLCANS IN CONGRESS----IT IS JUST WHICH GLOBAL INDUSTRY FOR WHICH THEY WORK--AS YOU SEE HERE----CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY.  Drat, that economic downturn and trillions of dollars of national debt created by massive Wall Street and corporate fraud requires we sell public airwaves say Clinton neo-liberals......THINK ENDING NET NEUTRALITY.

None of this was done for stimulus----it was planned in moving the global SMART GRID policies forward period.  Who will be doing all the work with this?  Global corporations.  It will offer NO BENEFIT locally.

Smart grid, broadband appear in $825 billion 'stimulus'

planA 258-page bill proposed by House Democrats as a way to counter the economic downturn spends billions on clean electricity generation, better battery technology, and broadband deployment.

Tech IndustryJanuary 15, 20093:40 PM PST

• by Declan McCullagh @declanm

House Democrats on Thursday revealed details of a massive legislative effort they said would inject new life into a flagging U.S. economy, thanks to a combination of $825 billion in tax cuts and new government spending.

The sprawling, 258-page draft bill includes $32 billion in electric power upgrades, sometimes known as "smart grid" technology, $6 billion for expanded broadband Internet access, and $20 billion for health care information technology.

"The economy is in a crisis not seen since the Great Depression," said letter published Thursday by Rep. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Appropriations Committee. "Credit is frozen, consumer purchasing power is in decline, in the last four months the country has lost 2 million jobs and we are expected to lose another 3 (million) to 5 million in the next year."

The House leadership has said it would like to hold a floor vote on the package by January 28 and send it to President-elect Barack Obama by mid-February. One potential obstacle is negotiations with the Senate, which is likely to have its own priorities.

The energy-related sections of what is tentatively called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 include $11 billion for research and development related to the "Smart Grid Investment Program;" $8 billion in loans guarantees for renewable energy generation; $2 billion for loan guarantees to high-capacity battery makers; and $200 million for a grant program for electric vehicles.

Some other portions, excerpted from the summary prepared by Rep. Obey's office:

* Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Research: $2 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment activities to foster energy independence, reduce carbon emissions, and cut utility bills. Funds are awarded on a competitive basis to universities, companies, and national laboratories.
* Home Weatherization: $6.2 billion to help low-income families reduce their energy costs by weatherizing their homes and make our country more energy efficient.
* Cleaning Fossil Energy: $2.4 billion for carbon capture and sequestration technology demonstration projects. This funding will provide valuable information necessary to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere from industrial facilities and fossil fuel power plants.
* Alternative Buses and Trucks: $400 million to help state and local governments purchase efficient alternative fuel vehicles to reduce fuel costs and carbon emissions. In terms of wireless and broadband, the legislation would require the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (part of the Commerce Department) to create a grant program for "nonrecurring" costs of broadband deployment in rural, suburban, and urban areas--meaning, basically, anywhere in the country. NTIA is supposed to prioritize "unserved" and "underserved" areas, two terms that have no actual meaning until the Federal Communications Commission eventually comes up with one.

State governments may apply for grants by submitting reports listing which of their areas have unserved wireless voice, underserved "advanced wireless broadband," unserved basic broadband, and underserved "advanced broadband service." NTIA will dole out separate funds for wireless deployment and broadband deployment.

"Advanced broadband service" is defined as at least 45 megabits per second downstream and 15 megabits per second upstream; "advanced wireless broadband" is 3 mb/sec downstream and 1 mb/sec upstream.

Whether this so-called stimulus will have any positive effect on the economy is uncertain, though, because the U.S. Treasury will pay for it by running up the national debt significantly and future generations of taxpayers will be expected to pay it back.

The bailout's cost so far has ballooned to $8.5 trillion, not counting the $5.2 trillion in Fannie and Freddie guarantees, although the Treasury should eventually recover some or even much of this amount. If deficit spending were a sure way to stimulate the economy, the Treasury could simply borrow, say, $100 trillion -- and the economic malaise of the last few months would evaporate.

A recent article by Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and former adviser to President Bush, surveys recent research and concludes that each dollar of government spending increases economic activity by only 1.4 dollars, while (according to Obama's top economics adviser) a dollar of tax cuts raises the GDP by about $3. And Tyler Cowen of George Mason University suggests that "we are being asked to spend (untold) hundreds of billion dollars" even though the evidence it will have a positive impact "is inconclusive."

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Now, when we see the uses for which all of this airwave auction is to encompass---think SMART GRID and think global online industry because that is ALL THIS IS ABOUT.

When I shout out about how important keeping the Post Office and public media is----it is because people are not going to be able to access any of these mobile devices as they become designated to corporate use and/or are made too expensive to access.  This is all avenues of communication for the American people.

THINK HOW MASSIVE GLOBAL HEALTH, EDUCATION, SURVEILLANCE, SMART METERS, ET AL WILL BECOME IF ALL THIS IS LEFT TO GROW.

We had analog devices ended when Obama took office pushing all media to digital.  This is not competition---it is narrowing control. Now, they are coming for TV and radio airwaves with global corporations buying current and future airspace ENDING COMPETITION.  None of this has to do with what is good for the public---it simply will be a bidding war for control of all public airwaves.


FCC Delays Auction of TV Airwaves for Mobile Broadband

Bid for TV Broadcasters to Sell Airwaves to Wireless Carriers Now Planned for 2016 By Gautham Nagesh

Gautham NageshThe Wall Street Journal

Updated Oct. 24, 2014 4:18 p.m. ET WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it is delaying to 2016 a highly anticipated spectrum auction in which TV broadcasters will sell airwaves so they can be used for mobile broadband.


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Wireless spectrum: What it is, and why you should care


CNET's Marguerite Reardon explains wireless spectrum in layman's terms and tells why it's so important to what's happening in the wireless market today.

MobileAugust 13, 201212:01 AM PDT

• by Marguerite Reardon @maggie_reardon

There has been a lot of talk over the past year about spectrum shortages, spectrum interference, companies proposing mergers just to get their hands on spectrum and even spectrum auctions that will help bail the nation out of debt.

But what exactly is wireless spectrum? And why are people in the wireless industry talking about it in apocalyptic terms?

Related stories

• The coming wireless spectrum apocalypse and how it hits you
• Wireless spectrum shortage? What spectrum shortage?
• Why spectrum debate is tied to debt ceiling plan
• How politics inflame the 'spectrum crisis'

These are good questions, so let's step back and explain what wireless spectrum is, why it's become increasingly scarce, and what regulators are supposed to (or not) do about it.

All wireless communications signals travel over the air via radio frequency, aka spectrum. The TV broadcast you watch, the radio program you listen to, the GPS device that helps get you where you're going, and the wireless phone service you use to make phone calls and check Facebook from your smartphone -- all use invisible airwaves to transmit bits of data through the air.

The easiest way to understand what spectrum really is and how it provides services is to look at your radio. When you tune your radio to 93.9 FM, you are tuning into a station that is broadcasting at 93.9 megahertz. If you want to a listen to a different station, like one that only plays country music or jazz, you turn the dial to another frequency like 104.7 FM. And a different radio station will be transmitting over that particular frequency on a different setting on your radio dial. No two stations transmit over the same spectrum at the same time in the same area, because if they did, they'd cause interference with one another.

And because wireless signals only transmit over a certain distance, you won't be able to tune in a radio station you like that broadcasts out of New York City when you are in Philadelphia or Chicago or anywhere beyond the distance that those broadcast signals can travel via spectrum over the air to your radio.

James Martin/CNET Mobile phones work much the same way. Wireless operators, such as AT&T and Verizon, cannot transmit wireless signals over the same frequencies in the same markets at the same time.

The Federal Communications Commission is the government agency that keeps track of who's using which slivers of spectrum. The agency grants companies licenses to use the spectrum. In the mobile phone market, the FCC has auctioned off spectrum, generating billions of dollars in revenue for the government.

The FCC also decides which frequencies of spectrum can be used for which purposes. For mobile phones, it has allocated spectrum generally between 700 MHz and 2.6 GHz. Most of the spectrum in this range has already been allocated for use. This means that when a wireless company wants to add more spectrum to its service to boost its capacity, it may well be disappointed: there isn't much more available spectrum that can be used.

 Spectrum is the lifeblood of the industry. And as more consumers buy smartphones, which according to the FCC, use 24 times more data than a traditional cell phone, and tablets, which can consume 122 times more data than old traditional phones, there is a greater need for spectrum. The question is, where's it going to come from? Much of the best spectrum for transmitting mobile signals has already been licensed to wireless carriers, or it's being used by TV broadcasters or government agencies, which hold the rights to these licenses. As a result, the industry and the FCC have declared a spectrum shortage.

The FCC is working on ways to free up additional spectrum:

• with other government agencies to hand over spectrum for commercial use.
• with TV broadcasters to develop incentive auctions that will allow TV stations to put their unused or underused spectrum up for sale and get a cut of the proceeds.
• and in various ways to change the rules for certain blocks of spectrum used for things like satellite communications so that they can be used for mobile broadband services.

In the National Broadband Plan presented to Congress in 2010, the agency set a goal of freeing up an additional 500 MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband use by 2020.

But the process to free up additional spectrum has been slow, and it's unclear whether the agency will meet this goal. What's more, many industry insiders believe 500 MHz by 2020 is still not enough spectrum to fuel such a fast-growing industry.

With an essential resource in high demand and low supply, FCC commissioners are also staring at a classic regulators' quandary: When they do auction off this additional spectrum, should they allow the market to sort itself out in the Darwinian sense and allow the spoils to go to the highest bidder? Or do they intercede, in the process protecting small carriers and protecting, in theory, consumer choice? And would it even matter if they did?

These are the questions with which the FCC is currently wrestling. There are no easy answers, but the policies that the agency sets today will have a lasting effect well into the future, whether those policies result in fewer competitors or they help preserve the many wireless competitors that exist today.

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Now, when we see the uses for which all of this airwave auction is to encompass---think SMART GRID and think global online industry because that is ALL THIS IS ABOUT.

When I shout out about how important keeping the Post Office and public media is----it is because people are not going to be able to access any of these mobile devices as they become designated to corporate use and/or are made too expensive to access. This is all avenues of communication for the American people....

THINK HOW MASSIVE GLOBAL HEALTH, EDUCATION, SURVEILLANCE, SMART METERS, ET AL WILL BECOME IF ALL THIS IS LEFT TO GROW.

We had analog devices ended when Obama took office pushing all media to digital. This is not competition---it is narrowing control. Now, they are coming for TV and radio airwaves with global corporations buying current and future airspace ENDING COMPETITION. None of this has to do with what is good for the public---it simply will be a bidding war for control of all public airwaves


Bidding In Government Auction of Airwaves Reaches $34 Billion

Posted by samzenpus on Monday November 24, 2014 @06:05AM from the more-money-more-spectrums dept.



An anonymous reader sends word that the 2014 wireless spectrum license auction has surpassed $34 billion. "A government auction of airwaves for use in mobile broadband has blown through presale estimates, becoming the biggest auction in the Federal Communications Commission's history and signaling that wireless companies expect demand for Internet access by smartphones to continue to soar. And it's not over yet. Companies bid more than $34 billion as of Friday afternoon for six blocks of airwaves, totaling 65 megahertz of the electromagnetic spectrum, being sold by the F.C.C. That total is more than three times the $10.5 billion reserve price that the commission put on the sale, the first offering of previously unavailable airwaves in six years."




Speculators betting big on FCC TV spectrum auctions


By Ben Mook | February 26, 2013 Currents

For the last few years, three well-funded buyout firms have been quietly picking up licenses to commercial and noncommercial TV stations in a gamble on big payouts from next year’s FCC incentive auction of television spectrum.

Current’s research of FCC license applications filed since 2010 found at least 25 separate deals involving three firms: OTA Broadcasting, NRJ TV and LocusPoint Networks. The stations they’ve acquired to date are on the peripheries of major markets, primarily ranging from Boston to Washington, D.C., in the eastern U.S. and from Seattle down to Los Angeles along the West Coast. The three firms are all owned or funded by private equity firms that command billions in assets.

Due to vagaries in the FCC’s reporting requirements, it’s likely that the commission’s records provide an incomplete picture of the companies’ purchases. In the 25 transactions turned up by Current, the firms have spent almost $230 million since December 2010, according to asset purchase agreements provided to the FCC.

Apart from their locations near major markets, most of the stations that have been purchased share one other characteristic: They were underperforming commercial stations or outlets whose owners were in bankruptcy. But several experts who have been watching the run-up to the auction expect that the speculators’ next big push for spectrum will focus on public TV stations.

Circle size indicates the amounts that speculators have invested in each market.  Note- In Los Angeles, the sale of KSCI was part of a multi-license transaction that included stations in Hawaii. Data compiled by Current from FCC asset purchase agreements. Click to open interactive map.

“The commercial stations are more attractive, and that’s what they targeted first: stations in bankruptcy or insolvent, or hadn’t been sold in a while — the low-hanging fruit,” said Larry Miller, a Washington-based media attorney with Schwartz, Woods & Miller who represents many pubcasting clients. “And now they’re looking at noncommercials, and they’d be attractive if they’re owned by people anxious to sell.”

“There are a number of hooks in the water from auction speculators,” Miller added.

The FCC’s first action in the spectrum auction is the so-called “incentive,” or reverse, auction in which stations can offer up some or all of their spectrum for sale. The FCC will act as a middleman, trying to match interested sellers with buyers. Presumably wireless companies such as Sprint, AT&T and Verizon will be among those looking to bid.

“There are arguably markets out there where TV stations are finding it not easy to reach an audience,” said Ernest Sanchez of the Sanchez Law Firm, which also represents pubcasters before the FCC. “So it does beg the question if they should sell the spectrum and find a way to get their programming out to the audience, such as the Internet.”

W. Lawrence Patrick, founder of Elkridge, Md.–based Patrick Communications, has helped broker a number of the deals, including LocusPoint’s purchases of WUDT in Detroit from Daystar Television Network, the Texas-based religious broadcaster, and KSKJ near Los Angeles, which was sold by Capital Broadcasting Corp. Patrick is also an investor in NRJ and anticipates a marked increase in pubTV deals this year.

“The original idea was to look at the commercial stations, but more recently, they’ve started taking a look at noncommercials — religious broadcasters, or third or fourth public stations in a larger market,” Patrick said.

“It affects the ones on the margins,” Patrick said. Financially stable stations in big markets won’t sell, but those that are struggling on the peripheries of major cities will have a strong incentive. Now “they find they have beachfront property that’s worth a lot of money.”

High-rolling playersThe Blackstone Group LP, which recorded a $2 billion profit in 2012, owns 99 percent of LocusPoint through its “Blackstone Tactical Opportunities” division, according to FCC filings. The remaining 1 percent is split by Ravi Potharlanka and William deKay, veteran telecom executives who find and handle the transactions. In 2012, Blackstone recorded a $2 billion profit for the year on $4 billion in revenue.

When reached by phone last week, deKay refused to answer questions about the firm’s plans for future acquisitions.

NRJ TV LLC is a media holding company funded through loans from Fortress Investment Group LLC., a money manager with more than $50 billion in assets under management as of Sept. 30, 2012, according to a recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Calls to NRJ and Fortress were not returned.

NRJ’s deals include the $22.7 million purchase of WZME in New York in August 2011, the $30.4 million purchase of WTVE in Philadelphia and last month’s deal for KNET in Los Angeles for $4.4 million.

The third major player is OTA Broadcasting, a division of MSD Capital, L.P., which was formed to exclusively manage the capital of Dell Computer founder Michael Dell and his family. Calls to MSD were not returned. OTA’s deals include purchases of KAXT in San Francisco for $10.1 million in January and WEBR in New York for $6.6 million in March 2012.

With no guarantees of participation or interest from buyers, the incentive auction is not a sure bet for investors. The speculators could be out the initial purchase price, usually more than $1 million. If there are no willing buyers, they could be left with a cash-strapped broadcast station. The companies are speculating that the demand for wireless spectrum will keep increasing in major urban markets and drive prices up over time.

“The companies want to buy the stations and flip them down the road for a profit, but they are taking a huge risk,” Patrick said. “There is a lot of money being spent, and they might get stuck down the road if the auction doesn’t turn out as planned.”

Gold in noncom airwaves?The first transaction involving a noncommercial TV station was filed with the FCC in December when LocusPoint signed a contract to buy student-run low-power WMJF in Towson, Md., from Towson University. Under the terms of the deal, Towson will get $1.8 million and payments to cover operating costs for two years after the sale closes. WMJF had been on the market for almost nine years after the university decided the analog equipment and license were “no longer needed to deliver academic programs and courses.”

In the FCC filing seeking approval of the license transfer, Towson officials said the university doesn’t plan to fund the station’s conversion to digital. Dr. John MacKerron, the Towson professor who serves as WMJF’s faculty advisor, said the purchase price of $1.8 million was the low end of WMJF’s appraised value.

“It works out for the university, since we were ready to take this turn away from analog anyway,” MacKerron said. “And this money from the sale will help create an endowment to keep the studio going as a multimedia platform.”

WMJF may have been the first noncom to go to speculators, but Patrick expects an unspecified number of deals to close later this year.

Late last week, bidding closed on purchase offers for KCSM-TV, licensed to the San Mateo Community College District in California. Blackstone’s LocusPoint was among the potential buyers announced Feb. 22.

This is LocusPoint’s second attempt to buy the station. College trustees rejected finalists in an earlier bidding process last November and issued a new request for proposals a month later. The college gave bidders two options for their purchase proposals:  Buy the assets outright or subsidize the station’s day-to-day operations and participate “in some capacity” in the incentive auction.

The option allowing for a subsidy in return for a cut of KCSM auction proceeds could play out in other markets with multiple noncommercial stations, according to Patrick.

He expects that universities or other educational institutions operating stations in the top 10 to 15 markets will be increasingly open to considering sales as the licensees consider the market value of their broadcast spectrum.  In big markets that could command the highest prices, administrators are weighing the pros and cons of keeping the stations versus selling and using the money, possibly starting an endowment with it.

If public stations and their governing licensees decide to roll these dice, it will be hard to determine how many pubcasters have placed their bets with the speculators.

Under Section 73.3613 of the FCC’s regulations, a transaction that involves a license change can be filed up to a month later. And the application can be entered on paper rather than electronically, making it that much more difficult to track.

____________________________________________

Global corporations buying airwaves to install global SMART GRID controlling all utilities and telecommunications----THAT IS WHAT TOTALITARIAN LOOKS LIKE.  Think Marxist Stalinism with all that and you see what your pols, national labor and justice organization leaders have been working together to create.


As we see, China has dominance and that will be used as reason to consolidate and expand in the US-----we will see Verizon and Comcast merging down the road to become a global corporation.  The article above stated that cable TV will end with free TV so all these cable corporations listed below will consolidate into a new broadband corporation.

This is what global markets is about.  It does nothing for jobs, for quality of life or good service---it is only a wealth and power struggle.  The US is watching as everything that makes America free and democratic is sold and consolidated away and the American people will be in the same shape as third world nations that have one national entity controlling all media content.  THAT IS TO WHERE THIS IS GOING.

As these articles state----each time the FCC has to give reasons as to why these deals are good the the public.  As with the Maryland Public Service Commission which has to do the same----the reasons are bogus.  We can easily reverse these sales as anti-trust and NOT IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST if we have pols in office that are not global corporate pols.  ALL MARYLAND POLS WORK TO MOVE THESE CONSOLIDATION AND GLOBAL DEALS ALONG. 

Maryland already has such terrible capture of media----

Who is the World's Biggest Broadband Company? Find Out


Om Malik Jul. 28, 2010 - 6:30 AM PDT



Given that Asia dominates the list of 100 Fastest Internet cities and China is the most populous nation in the world, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that China is home to the largest broadband service provider in the world. The latest data gathered by Telegeography, a research firm, shows that at the end of the first quarter of 2010, China Telecom led the top 10 broadband service providers rankings. It was followed by China Unicom.

The two Chinese ISPs account for nearly 20 percent of the world’s broadband subscribers. At the end of the first quarter of 2010, there were close to 492 million broadband subscribers worldwide, Telegeography notes. (Related: there are nearly half a billion broadband subscribers worldwide.)

China vs US

The rise of these two carriers also mirrors the rise of China as an Internet behemoth, pushing the U.S. into the second spot. ?The United States had four broadband ISPs in the top ten list: Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable (c TWC) and Verizon. ?Korea Telecom cracked the top 10 and edged out Telecom Italia, pushing it to the No. 11 spot.

These top 10 broadband service providers in total account for roughly 39 percent of world’s total broadband customers, and they collectively added about 23.3 million new subscribers between the first quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010.

Who’s The Best Performing ISP?

While sheer size and scope matters, it’s also important to check out a service provider’s actual performance. Many ISPs make wild bandwidth and speed claims, but deliver a suboptimal performance from their broadband connections.

Ookla, the Seattle, Wash.-based company behind the popular Speedtest.net web service, has developed a new methodology (announced yesterday) that shows you the actual performance of broadband service providers from an end-user’s perspective.

“The new ISP ranking data takes a giant step in that direction, further empowering consumers for the first time with rich data that helps evaluate ISP performance close to home or throughout the world,” ?Ookla co-founder Mike Apgar said in a statement.  With nearly a million speed tests a day, Ookla has a good idea about which ISPs are performing well and are true to their claims. According to Ookla, U.S. ISPs deliver an average download speed of 9.9  Mbps while Chinese ISPs deliver an average download speed of 3.5 Mbps. South Korean download speeds, meanwhile, are around 31.5 Mbps.

How do U.S. broadband service providers rank? Ookla says Comcast is the best broadband provider in download speed terms, with an average download speed of 16.26 Mbps, while Time Warner Cable has an average speed of 13.48 Mbps and Verizon has an average of 10.76 Mbps.

Here are the top ten broadband service providers in the US based on download speeds.

1. Comcast 16.26 Mbps

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2. Charter Communications 15.06 Mbps

3. Midcontinent Communications 14.36 Mbps

4. Optimum Online (Cablevision) 14.31 Mbp

5. RoadRunner (Time Warner Cable) 13.48 Mbps.

6. Cox Communications 13.41 Mbps

7. Insight Communications 11.75 Mbps

8. Surewest Broadband 11.44 Mbps

9. Verizon 10.76 Mbps

10. Prairiewave Telecommunications 10.52 Mbps.

You can see clearly that cable companies dominate this list.

Related Research Report from GigaOM Pro: The Internet of Things: Anywhere, Anytime, Anything. Buy for $199 now.

According to Ookla, in the U.S., the average monthly cost for broadband is at $47.32 or about $5.06 per megabit per second. In California, broadband costs just $4.24 per Mbps, while residents of Idaho pay $8.80 per Mbps, Washington respondents averaged just $3.89 per Mbps and Michigan subscribers pay $6.36.

I will talk elections today and continue with public policy in privatizing public works/services.

'While plain corruption affects environmentally sensitive construction all over the world, the Port of Tianjin is a convoluted legacy of state power used for market purposes that has made it all the more flagrant'.

Global corporations are coming back to the US because the level of environmental damage and social unrest because of decades of enslavement in factory sweat shops are de-stablizing Asian nations and those leaders are now telling global corporations to GET OUT.  So, Trans Pacific Trade Pact is policy that seeks to allow those global corporations to come to the US to do the same to American workers and our environment.  We are seeing Congress and our state assemblies passing laws lowering the protections on railroad transport of hazardous materials because they expect the US will be building lots of these chemical plants shown below----AND YOUR POLS KNOW THIS WILL BE THE RESULT.

GET RID OF CLINTON WALL STREET GLOBAL CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS AND BUSH NEO-CONS---ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS.

I want people to get an idea of what life will be like living in or near a FOXCONN campus.....





The Tianjin Explosion: A Tragedy of Profit, Corruption, and China’s Complicated Transition


by chuang | Aug 21, 2015 | Blog

Photo by EPA.

Late into the night on August 12, two massive explosions rocked the Port of Tianjin, immediately killing dozens and injuring hundreds of people. The explosions appear to have been caused by several hundred tons of unsafely stored sodium cyanide, in the container storage lot of Ruihai Logistics, a firm specializing in the transport and storage of hazardous materials.[1] As of 9am August 19, 114 people were confirmed dead, among them 19 Public Security Bureau firefighters, 34 port firefighters, and 7 police officers; a further 65 people are missing, while 674 have been hospitalized.[2] While public organs and journalists continue to investigate the exact causes of the blast, the backstory to the tragedy has gradually come to light. Ruihai, its insecure workers, the frantic development of the Port of Tianjin, and the especially severe abuses of power resulting from a powerful state bureau turning into a capitalist enterprise – all these are parts of the picture.

The Port of Tianjin

If an explosion were to happen at any port in China, Tianjin would have been a likely candidate. Handling more than 477 million tons of cargo and 13 million TEUs in 2013, Tianjin is the 3rd busiest port by raw tonnage and 10th busiest container port in the world.[3] It has a long history as a major trading port in China: an important foreign concession forced open in the Second Opium war, it continued to function as a major port during the socialist era, and then grew by leaps and bounds after “Reform and Opening” (economic liberalization) began in 1978. Tianjin is the closest major port to Beijing, and part of the important Bohai Economic Zone, one of the three clusters of economic development--along with the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta—that have benefited most from China’s economic liberalization. For Tianjin and its port, the past thirty years of reform have meant explosive and sometimes careless growth.

The chemical industry that erupted last week arose as Tianjin began to avidly court foreign investment. On May 12, 1991, with the approval of the State Council, the Tianjin port became the site of a bonded zone—the largest in Northern China, measuring 5 square kilometers. Since its founding, the Tianjin Port Bonded Zone has maintained a startling annual growth rate of over 30% per year, and is now home to more than 500 logistics companies and 3000 trading companies, maintaining regular trade ties with over 100 countries. It functions as an international trading center, a logistics center, a port-side processing zone, and a sales and exhibition center. Operating in the zone comes with tax, customs, and foreign exchange benefits. The cheap labor and investment incentives in the Tianjin Bonded have attracted well-known chemical companies to invest in the area, inviting clusters of dangerous chemical factories into the city. The chemical and hazardous chemicals industry has become one of the ten major industries in the Tianjin Bonded Zone, home also to heavy industries like steel and auto. [4]

Chemical factories have recently become a hot topic for environmentalist and NIMBY-style civilian protests—famously in Wukan in 2012, and in Shanghai this year. But logistics centers, where these foreign-bound chemicals are shipped in and out, are less visible yet even more dangerous nodes in the supply chains of global chemically-dependent industry. Tianjin is a reminder of this reality.

Responsibility and collusion: Ruihai’s sketchy approval process

While the Tianjin explosion is an incident reminiscent of the Lac-Megantic train derailment, a disaster that reminds us of the significance and dangers of the extensive modern supply chain, the disaster was also a uniquely Chinese incident—the product of powerful state institutions transforming into hefty commercial enterprises, management becoming directly subservient to commercial logic.

A lot of the conversation around responsibility for the Ruihai case has focused on the sketchy approval process for the company’s hazardous materials handling. Ruihai International Logistics was founded in 2012 with an initial capital of 50 million yuan, for storage and transport operations. It now handles 1 million tons of freight annually and has an annual income of over 30 million yuan. While the company had long dealt primarily in hazardous materials, handling chemicals for a major domestic chemical company, it was not until June 23 2015, just months before the accident, that Ruihai received the proper documentation to handle hazardous materials at the port. Clearly, for two or three years, someone had turned a blind eye to Ruihai’s operations.

Ruihai was allowed to operate at the port without any apparent external oversight. This may be because the Tianjin Port Group, the port’s commercial operator, doubles as its own regulator. When reporters sought out the Binhai New District’s Work Safety Committee—the body normally responsible for hazardous chemical business approvals—for questioning about Ruihai’s operating credentials, they were told the Committee had nothing to do with Ruihai’s approval. This was not merely deferral of responsibility. Ruihai’s documents were approved by the Tianjin Port Group, which has a set of independent approval procedures not subject to Binhai New District’s control. The permits they applied for were the “People’s Republic of China Port Operations Permit” and “Port Dangerous Cargo Handling License”—granted by the Tianjin Port Group—rather than the more common “Hazardous Chemicals Operation Permit”.[5] The Port Group, which profited from Ruihai’s illegal and unsafe business, was at the same time the entity responsible for overseeing and licensing the company.

The conversion of political power into economic weight is again reinforced by familial ties. Since the explosion, reporters have uncovered that Li Liang (李亮 ), the company’s main shareholder and its legal representative until the position transferred to Zhi Feng (只峰) January 29 this year, is the nephew of former Politburo member and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Li Ruihuan (李瑞环) and for this reason the company has received “conveniences” throughout its short few years of existence. The connection is reinforced in the company name: Li Liang’s father Li Ruihai (李瑞海), Li Ruihuan’s younger brother.[6] Meanwhile, secondary shareholder Shu Zheng has pleaded innocent, claiming that he is merely the nominal shareholder on behalf of friend Dong Shexuan (董社轩), son of the late Tianjin Port Public Security Bureau chief Dong Peijun (董培军). The people so far connected to the company are a complicated web of other major players in the chemical industry and major officials. While the details of the case are still being sorted out, that Ruihai involved significant transformation of political capital into economic heft is undeniable.[7]

These powerful connections as well as the independent authority of the port allowed Ruihai to operate under blatantly illegal conditions, even after its official licensing. The direct connections to the explosion are obvious. Whereas the Tianjin Administration of Work Safety’s standards for hazardous chemical handling required stacks of containers to be kept at least 0.8 meters apart, that no more than 500 grams of chemicals be stored together, and that the total amount of chemicals be no more than 2 tons, Ruihai kept its stacks a mere 0.4-0.5 meters apart, and would store 6-30 tons of chemical in one container, according to two truckers working for the company. Furthermore, Ruihai was only permitted to store its hazardous chemicals in the port’s heavy container storage area, but logistics worker Li Hua told reporters that the company instead kept most of its chemicals in transitional storage. Ruihai’s riding roughshod over regulations also put nearby communities in harms way. Regulations mandate that dangerous chemical be stored at least 1000 meters from public buildings or major thoroughfares, but Ruihai’s storage area was constructed a mere 600 meters from two existing residential communities that house over 1000 residents. Once again, they proceeded without anyone raising a cry.[8]

While plain corruption affects environmentally sensitive construction all over the world, the Port of Tianjin is a convoluted legacy of state power used for market purposes that has made it all the more flagrant.

The Independent Kingdom of the Tianjin Port

The status of the port as an entity independent from the city also significantly affects the leeway Ruihai exercised. This is a legacy dating back to socialist times. China’s major logistics and transportation arteries once operated under direct state control; its ports and railroads once operated as independent kingdoms, powerful state bureaus that managed the living conditions of workers as well as all aspects of operations, independent of local government. The Tianjin Port Group was formerly the Transportation Department Tianjin Port Management Bureau (交通部天津港务管理局). Answering directly to the central government Transportation Department, it operated independently of local Tianjin authorities. It was only in 1984, in the early days of reform, that the Transportation Department Tianjin Port Management Bureau became simply the Tianjin Port Bureau (天津港务局), coming under the control of the municipality of Tianjin with the Central Transportation Department as secondary overseer. Further reforms in 2001 cut the port off from the Transportation Department, and put it fully under the management of Tianjin. But while the port’s designation changed, its staff did not, and port business remained largely out of the grasp of local government.

This was still the case when in 2004, when under central government directives to separate port operations from port administration, the Tianjin Port Bureau became the commercial entity the Tianjin Port Group Ltd. (天津集团有限公司) and administrative control over the port was handed to the Tianjin Transportation Committee (天津交通委员会). The Transportation Committee, however, stayed out of the picture while a newly commercialized port accustomed to operating as an independent kingdom kept control over most aspects of operations, from business decisions to operations licensing to hiring its own police force outside of the municipal government system.[9] Effectively, the Tianjin port changed hands from one administrative home to another and transitioned from a state bureau to a commercial enterprise, without ever changing its internal composition and remaining largely a self-governing zone. The port has retained the independent power and economic weight it once had, while shifting its mandate from one of paternalistic overseeing of the well-being of workers and working on behalf of the national economy to one of making profit for itself. This has transformed the weight of an old state bureau into a powerful company subject to little outside control.

Insecurity and flexibility: the port as commercial enterprise

The dispatch worker firefighters who rushed to the scene, dozens of whom died in the explosions, epitomize the transition of the port. The port’s former identity as a State Bureau and socialist institution have made no difference for the Port of Tianjin when it comes to the trend of casualization hitting manual labor jobs like port and logistics work everywhere. Ruihai Logistics had a workforce of 70 full time employees and 20 dispatch workers at the time of the explosion, well above China’s legal maximum of a 10% dispatch workforce. This is a common phenomenon in the warehousing and logistics industries around the world, which rely heavily of temp workforces and labor contracting agencies that respond flexibly to the ups and downs of the market cycle in just-in-time production. Yet what startled observers was not the temporary condition of Ruihai’s logistics workers, but the temporary workforce doing the critical work of port firefighting.

The Port of Tianjin firefighters, independently managed by the port, are not the normal public servants that serve other places, but rather contract workers managed by a company, which is in turn hired by the port. The firefighters are hired and fired as needed. This is another way in which the port keeps its operating costs low and reduces its burden of staff management. The revelation of the contract worker status of port firefighters left many civilians asking, should such a risky and critical profession be left to contract workers? Why was the port allowed to keep such matters in its own hands? The answer is clearly no. While public firefighters later arrive on the scene too, the private port firefighters who were stationed the closest and arrived first on the scene make up 34 of the 53 firefighters who died. Alive they were subject to the whims of the port, who could hire and fire them at will. Dead, it is only with the public scandal that the explosion has caused that they were promised equal compensation. Li Keqiang in the wake of the explosion made a point of stating it didn’t matter whether firefighters belong to the state administration or not, they were carrying out the same duties and deserve equal compensation.[10] That the situation begs the premier’s clarification says all that needs to be said. One can imagine the situation these workers who regularly risk their lives would face were they to be maimed or to perish in obscurity.

As for Ruihai’s own workers, it is unclear how many who died were temp workers, but as groundbreaking.cn notes, we know from the Kunshan explosion and other such disasters who is usually on the ground in the middle of the night. Of the 97 people who died in that explosion at 7am in the morning, every single one was illegally hired. In such things, it is always the most vulnerable who are sacrificed.[11]

Of the Tianjin accident, too much was not accidental. Neither the rampant pressure for growth that gave birth to shortcuts and heedless rule-breaking, nor the collusion of profit-making and regulatory powers that came with the state working towards privatization. It was not an accident that the explosion site was situated so close to housing complexes with over 1000 residents, nor that Ruihai’s blatantly illegal handling of explosive chemicals was ignored. It was not an accident that many of those who died were contract workers, living day-to-day without security, and even in death, without guarantee of compensation. Tianjin reminds us of the critical role that the logistics industry plays in the global market, and of the insecure workers who often staff it.

— Yixi

_____________________________________________
I listened to Fox News last night to see my Baltimore City Council person-----CARL STOKES----head of Baltimore City Finance----the most corrupt section of city hall.  Carl has been selling himself as friend of his low-income constituents as he is the face of doing anything a Wall Street developer tells him.  Don't fall for the 'good cop/bad cop' routine.

Carl was reporting on the likelihood of UnderArmour Corporation taking a massive chunk of real estate along the Port of Baltimore in West Baltimore.  Supposedly a land deal having the Maryland Aquarium build a public nature park fell through and now the city is considering SELLING THAT VAST PIECE OF LAND TO WHAT WAS ALWAYS EXPECTED TO BE A FOXCONN FACTORY COMPLEX FOR UNDERARMOUR.

I need people to understand the size and diversity of these global factory complexes because they are not manufacturing just enough sports wear, sports equipment, et al for Maryland and surrounding states----these FOXCONN factories are geared for mass production for global product sales.  So, they will shout JOBS, JOBS, JOBS---- while UnderArmour makes sure all US laws allow it to operate as it does in third world nations.  THAT IS WHAT AN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE IS ABOUT UNDER TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT----complete with the slave labor for which they are known overseas.

'Of the Tianjin accident, too much was not accidental. Neither the rampant pressure for growth that gave birth to shortcuts and heedless rule-breaking, nor the collusion of profit-making and regulatory powers that came with the state working towards privatization'.

Carl stated he does not care who owns this prime real estate right on water's edge---prime wetland environmentally critical to the health of the Chesapeake Bay.....AS LONG AS THERE IS PUBLIC ACCESS.  This is the Carl that is bought and paid for by global corporations and Baltimore Development that could care less that his constituents will be forced into these sweat shops and their communities contaminated with pollution.  See why Baltimore was going to place a hazardous waste incinerator right there in West Baltimore----there is a lot of hazardous waste from textiles and global health tourism.

ALL OF THESE BALTIMORE CITY COUNCIL POLS AND THE MAYOR---ALONG WITH THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS WORK AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO LAWS PROTECTING THE CITIZENS AGAINST LABOR ABUSE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION.


'After a factory fire in March caused a textile company to close, the company refused to pay 4,000 workers the $600 to $700 in legally required severance they were owed. (None were injured in the blaze.) While Cambodian workers marched on the boss en masse, the Worker Rights Consortium, a factory monitoring group established by anti-sweatshop campaigners, pressured Under Armour and Russell Athletic. They were two of the brands that purchased the factory’s goods.'

Economic action to end sweatshop and forced child labor

     What to Know

Q. What is a sweatshop and how bad is the problem?

A. The US Department of Labor defines a sweatshop as any factory that violates two or more labor laws, such as those pertaining to wages and benefits, working hours, and child labor. Anti-sweatshop advocates go further to say that beyond following the letter of the law (which can be very weak in many countries that attract sweatshops), a factory pay a living wage in safe working conditions, enforce reasonable work hours, provide for sick leave and maternity leave, and allow workers to organize to avoid being labeled a sweatshop.

Because no single definition exists (and because sweatshops don’t want to be uncovered), it’s difficult to assess the worldwide scope of the problem. Compounding this difficulty is the “race to the bottom,” which means that companies don’t always let their sweatshop factories stay in one place, if they can shift their manufacturing to ever-cheaper and less-regulated locations. For example, the number of sweatshops in Mexico soared in the 1990s after NAFTA enticed companies to close their US operations and move south. As global manufacturing costs continued to shift, many companies then moved their operations from Mexico to even more attractive Asian countries. And more recently still, after the US-Jordan Free Trade agreement went into effect in 2000, the number of sweatshops in that country exploded as well. Between 2000 and 2005, apparel exports from Jordan to the US soared 2000 percent, often due to the round-the-clock labor of guest workers from poor Asian countries who were following the jobs as they moved.

Q: But if companies have to cut costs to stay competitive, aren’t sweatshops inevitable?

A: No. Low prices are only one of many factors consumers take into account when they shop, and most consumers don’t willingly purchase goods made in sweatshops.

Reporting for Dollars and Sense magazine in 2006, sweatshop expert John Miller (who teaches a class on sweatshops at Wheaton College) explained how paying decent wages to workers at the beginning of the supply chain has little effect on a company’s competiveness. “In Mexico’s apparel industry, economists from the Political Economy Research Institute found that doubling the pay of nonsupervisory workers would add just $1.80 to the cost of a $100 men’s sports jacket,” explained Miller. “And a recent survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research Found that US consumers would be willing to pay $115 for the same jacket if they knew it had not been made under sweatshop conditions.”

Living wages and reasonable working hours would not threaten companies’ overall profitability. Noone should have to work 17-hour days just so Americans can save a few dollars on clothes.

Q: Doesn’t low-wage sweatshop employment help alleviate poverty; aren’t sweatshops a necessary step on the road to economic development?

A: No. Sweatshop workers are trapped in a cycle of exploitation that rarely improves their economic situation.

“In many cases, countries’ minimum wages are insufficient to climb out of poverty,” says Todd Larsen, Green America’s Corporate Social Responsibility Program Director. “What’s more, sweatshop watchdog groups continually find factories that pay illegal wages, lower even than the minimum.”

Consider the example cited in a 2003 National Labor Committee report on a Honduran worker sewing clothing for Wal-Mart at a rate of 43 cents an hour. After spending money on daily meals and transportation to work, the average worker is left with around 80 cents per day for rent, bills, child care, school costs, medicines, emergencies, and other expenses.

If sweatshops were a necessary step toward economic development, they would not exist in the world’s most delevoped economies, yet sweatshops continue to be uncovered even in the United States. For example, PBS premiered the film “Made in LA” in the fall of 2007, documenting recent sweatshop abuses in Southern California.

Q: Isn’t it time-consuming and expensive for corporations to track their goods’ origins?

A: No, actually most corporations already track their goods to the subcontractor or factory level in order to monitor the quality of their products.

“In competitive industries like the apparel industry, all companies have quality control,” says Nikki Bas, executive director of Sweatshop Watch. “If companies are able to send representatives to inspect the quality of a garment, they can inspect the quality of their factories as well.”

Q: Do some companies track their goods to keep sweatshop labor out of their supply chains, and mark their products with a special label?

A: Unfortunately, no overarching “sweatshop-free” label exists, though a union label is a good indicator that at a minimum workers are free to organize and have a voice.
In addition, since the mid-1990s, a number of “social auditing” organizations have emerged, and companies may now coordinate with one to inspect their factories for sweatshop abuses, to greater or lesser degrees of success.

These organizations operate under a number of different structures. For example, Verité, operates as a nonprofit organization, inspecting factories on behalf of their client companies, which pay Verité a fee to perform audits and help facilitate follow-up correction programs for violations. (Verité does not make its findings public because conditions can change so quickly in faraway factories.)

Another example, Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production (WRAP), operates as a 501(c)6 corporation, and makes its list of inspected and certified factories available on its Web site, searchable by country, as a resource for companies in search of factories. Established by the American Apparel and Footwear Association, WRAP has come under fire from anti-sweatshop organizations as having weak codes of conduct and operating too closely with the apparel industry.

Similarly, the Fair Labor Association, which contracts with specific companies to perform inspections, has fallen out of favor with many activists over concerns about poor enforcement and corporate influence.

Whichever monitoring organization a company might use (and there are many more), the bottom-line concern among anti-sweatshop activists lies in the lack of transparency to the consumer of the findings, as well as the inability of inspectors to stay aware of factory conditions at all times. Instances of factories improving their conditions specifically for inspections are well-documented, and critics further charge that monitoring organizations lengthen the supply chain, relieving companies of their responsibility to vouch personally for the conditions of their factories.

Q. If something is made in the USA does that automatically mean it is sweatshop-free?

A: No. In general, countries with strong labor laws (not just the US, but several European countries, Cambodia, and others) may produce fewer sweatshop abuses than countries with weaker or non-existent laws, but no one country is automatically sweatshop-free. Not only have grievous sweatshop abuses been uncovered in mainland US factories, but also factories operating in US territories (where sweatshop abuses have been well-documented for many years) may also use the “made in the USA” label, despite being exempt from certain US labor laws.

For example, for many years garment workers in Saipan, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI) have been exploited under the islands’ exemption to US labor laws. Efforts to bring CNMI under US law have long been stymied by lobbyists and lawmakers sympathetic with exploitative garment businessess, though as this guide was going to press, the US Senate voted to finally extend federal labor and immigration laws to CNMI.

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Meanwhile, Bill Ferguson, city council person for this West Baltimore area looking just like a next generation Martin O'Malley is busy creating a Maryland State Stat-----because if these is no Federal government creating social stats then states and cities will have to.  If you are building a State Stat for Baltimore and you have UnderArmour FOXCONN coming with all its pollution and hazardous waste----along with a big UMMS FOXCONN PHARMA bio-tech/health tourism campus as Bill Ferguson does----you are going to need to hide LOTS OF HEALTH, POLLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGES BY JUKING THE STATE STATS AS O'MALLEY HAS FOR HIS ENTIRE TERMS IN OFFICE.

Bill Ferguson, as all the other Baltimore City Hall pols pushing hard for the most privatized K-career college end to public education knows------his district's public schools will simply become attached to this UnderArmour campus where children will be apprenticeship K-12 training just to be textile UnderArmour sports equipment workers.  The 'public school' right on campus----workers living in worker dormatories and eating at worker cafeterias ----JUST AS THEY DO IN CHINA AND CAMBODIA. 

BOY, DOES YOUR BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY POLS REALLY, REALLY HATE THEIR CONSTITUENTS NO MATTER RACE OR CLASS!  SHOW ME THE MONEY  NO DOUBT HAS THEM THINK THEY ARE INVESTED IN THESE GLOBAL DEALS---BUT THEY ARE BEING PLAYED.

Now, UnderArmour is very much a textile manufacturer so will have textile factories, dye factories,  garment-making factories, and lots of marketing/call center employment.  How many high-skilled good paying jobs?  Very few and don't worry----UnderArmour will bring those workers from overseas to be paid as they are overseas.  Bill Ferguson and all Baltimore City Hall know that is what they are building when they pass all these laws-----

DO YOU REALLY THINK GLOBAL CORPORATIONS COMING BACK TO THE US WILL BE AFFECTED BY LABOR PROTESTS AND SHAMING BY SOCIAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS? 
We must stop this NOW before it moves along.  We can make Baltimore's economy a domestic, local and regional manufacturing economy tied to supplying Maryland ordinary products and get more JOBS JOBS JOBS while working under Constitutional law and civil and labor rights protections.  STOP ALLOWING THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE POLS TO TIE OUR ECONOMY TO GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.

Marist students urged to raise their voices against sweatshops


By ANDREW NELSON, Staff Writer | Published January 8, 2015

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ATLANTA—Anti-sweatshop activist Jim Keady encouraged a gym full of students at Marist School to fight for rights of workers who make athletic apparel by using email and social media, and he encouraged the school’s sports teams to cover the logos on their uniforms.

“As a Catholic community, we have a different measuring stick for success,” he said, not letting corporations prosper at the expense of unprotected low-paid workers in the developing world.

Educator and social activist Jim Keady, standing, bottom left, presents his talk, “Behind the Swoosh: Sweatshops and Social Justice,” to the high school student body at Marist School, Atlanta, in December 2014. Keady is also the founding director of Educating for Justice, Inc. Photo By Michael Alexander

“This is where the Gospel gets real, gets messy,” said Keady.

Since the 1990s, Keady, a small business owner in New Jersey, has specifically challenged Nike, Inc., to change its labor practices. His motivation comes from Catholic social teaching, which promotes a just wage and safe working conditions for workers, he said.

Keady spoke at the school in early December. In his presentation he displayed quotes from Nike leaders and contrasted them with photos and anecdotes he heard from people working in Nike’s contract factories in Indonesia. He lived there for a month in 2000, relying on factory wages. After paying for food and housing, there was little money left for other necessities, he said.

Overall, Keady told the gym of young people, more than 90 percent of their clothing is made in sweatshop conditions.


Marist’s athletic uniforms are made by the Under Armour company. In fact, a sound of disappointment filled the gym when Keady told them Under Armour uses factories where there are poor working conditions, long hours and low wages.

“They do the same things. Sorry to break the news,” he said.

UnderArmour entered the sporting goods industry at a time all brands were outed for being sweat shops with no values.  Of course----UnderArmour sold itself as the anti-bad boy----and as we see below they are already sinking with no signs of taking all this GREEN/Social conscience mantra seriously.
A Code lies Beneath the Armour?



According to Under Armour’s “Code”:

“Under Armour was founded on the following core values: Innovation, Inspiration, Reliability, and Integrity. Consistent with these values, we seek to do business with suppliers and their subcontractors that adhere to these practices, follow established work place practices and comply with our Code of Conduct.”[iv]

By this standard, UA has committed to maintain a standard above and beyond the industry and consumer expectations and requires all employees and vendors/suppliers to adhere to the “Code” as well.  This includes sensitive issues such as child labor, fair wages, safe work environment, forced labor, and reasonable working hours.  For countries that do not meet those standards set forth by UA, business conducted with all vendors and third party agencies including a minimum wage and maximum work hours per week practices, UA requires these be adhered to while doing business.

In 2010, the “Code” was challenged by the Apparel Supply Chain Compliance Program survey developed by As You Sow Foundation which is dedicated to “promote corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, grant-making, and innovative legal strategies” and “A safe, just, and sustainable world in which environmental health and human rights are central to corporate decision making.”[v] This voluntary survey, created in part by Verite, a non-profit agency, indicated that UA received the overall score of C-. Their 1.9 rating (on a 4.0 scale) was nearly half of Levi Strauss & CO’s 3.4. Additionally, UA received low marks for management accountability and transparency.[vi] Further examination of the report shows that although UA understands what management decision could be undertaken to improve their scores, their grades on providing resources to improve their practices were lacking.  The only other active wear participants were Columbia Sportswear and Gildan Activewear Inc, both scoring higher than UA at 2.0 and 3.0 respectively.[vii] Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that although Under Armour takes CSR seriously, they have yet to put forth a comprehensive resource package that would enable Under Armour to earn higher marks across the board in the future. As Robbin Jaffin, Director, Supplier Programs for Verite mentions, “Global firms must have visibility and accountability for all relationships both direct and indirect in implementing global standards of responsibility.”[viii]

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We had a justice organization work hard to reverse a decision to install a toxic waste incinerator in a West Baltimore community but we need to know-----IT WILL COME BACK AND IT WILL BE IN WEST BALTIMORE AS WILL BE TRUE OF EAST BALTIMORE AS THE SAME FOXCONN CAMPUSES ARE BUILT.  WE ARE TALKING BAD POLLUTION AND WE ARE TALKING RIGHT ON WATER'S EDGE OF THE PORT OF BALTIMORE.

This is why environmental groups calling themselves Clean Water----Blue Water and of course Baltimore City's new global corporate water partners calling themselves CleanWater.org VEOLA ENVIRONMENT----ARE ALL PROGRESSIVE POSERS.  What is unfolding is no secret to most people in national organizations and all pols know it.  So, there would be lots of environmental groups shouting loudly throughout Obama's terms knowing Obama/Clinton neo-liberals were building this International Economic Zone structure across the nation.

WE ALL KNOW IT WILL HAVE THE US LOOKING LIKE CHINA AND YET----NO ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS WILL OUT THE GOALS OF THESE FOXCONN CORPORATE CAMPUSES BEING BUILT ON WATER'S EDGE.

When Catherine Pugh shouts out to her Freddie Grey West Baltimore district that she will fight to create jobs for her constituents---THEY WILL BE THE SWEAT SHOP LABOR FOR THE BIOTECH FACTORIES AND THIS UNDER ARMOUR FACTORY. 

When Republicans in rural counties who no doubt have loved having Baltimore operating under the most neo-conservative of Johns Hopkins and Wall Street Baltimore Development and vote for all this corporate power and deregulation finds out that they will be forced to work at these factories being brought in from rural areas by the bus loads.  THIS IS AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY THIRD WORLD SOCIETY.  What are all these immigrant workers being encouraged to come to Maryland and Baltimore staged to do?  WORK IN THESE SWEATSHOP FACTORIES AS THEY DO ON THE WEST COAST.

So, CASA Maryland, NAACP, Maryland AFL-CIO all labor and justice coming out every election for the most Wall Street Clinton neo-liberal candidates like O'Malley and Brown-----like all Baltimore City crony pols---and these leaders all know where these global Economic Zone policies go---THEY ARE SELLING OUT THEIR MEMBERSHIP/CONSTITUENTS.


What Kinds of Pollution Do Textile Factories Give Off?


by Karen Rogers, Demand Media


Water Pollution

The toxic chemicals used to create textiles are major sources of pollution from textile factory operations. Factories use polyvinyl chloride to size fabrics, chlorine bleach to lighten a fabric’s color, benzidine and toluidine as dyeing agents and flame retardants that are known cancer-causing agents. Other toxic chemicals that are used in everyday operations are formaldehyde, lead and mercury. Fabrics are washed and rewashed as they move down the production line. Releasing this untreated chemical wastewater brew can pollute waterways and groundwater sources.

Air Pollution

As textiles move through the production process, numerous life-threatening pollutants left untreated can contaminate the air. Factory boilers that heat the water release nitrous oxides and sulphur dioxides. Carbon monoxide is released from factory sizing operations. Bleaching operations release chlorine dioxide, and fabric printing releases hydrocarbons and ammonia. Fabric-finishing operations can release formaldehyde into the air. Without EPA safeguards, these toxic vapors would remain suspended in the air and be carried by the wind to pollute other areas.


Solid-Waste Pollution

Textile manufacturing operations create large amounts of toxic and nontoxic solid waste. Fibers, hemp, yarn and fabrics are solid waste that are created directly from production lines. The cones, looms and cardboard reels used to hold fibers and textiles during manufacturing add to a factory’s solid-waste pollution. Common toxic-solid waste pollutants include the storage drums and plastic containers used to hold hazardous chemicals and solvents. Leftover powdered dyes and dye containers, scrap metal, oily cloths and wastewater sludge can contaminate the soil and groundwater sources if not properly disposed of or released untreated.

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Baltimore City Hall has given all of downtown and now UnderArmour development corporate tax breaks, subsidies, and in exchange UnderArmour donates things for more tax write-offs all while being called a good corporate citizen.  Their marketing tries to play off of NIKE's bad reputation but all the signs are that UnderArmour will be NIKE.  As we see below, already this corporation is ignoring contracts and labor laws-----and the Trans Pacific Trade Pact and International Economic Zone establishment has not even happened.  If WE THE PEOPLE do not become engaged and be the candidate in all Democratic and Republican primaries that work for a domestic economy and keeping global corporations at bay-----these structures will be in place in a decade.  Do any of these Baltimore pols have children/grandchildren?  Do they really think they are going to be the sweat shop factory owners or is it stock options in these corporations that have them selling out the citizens of Baltimore?  THE STOCK MARKET WILL BE PRIVATE ONLY IN NO TIME AND THESE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS HAVE OBLIGATIONS TO THOSE MADE RICH OVERSEAS FROM SWEAT SHOP OPERATIONS.

Let' get back to what Baltimore City really needs------a strong DOMESTIC economy with small and regional factory manufacturing----with an economy fueled with rebuilding communities left to crumble so these mega-FOXCONN operations could move in.  We can have most people in Baltimore City employed, protected by Rule of Law and Equal Protection, and able to accumulate wealth because the economy is stable and wages are Living Wage and middle-class.  IT WOULD ONLY TAKE TWO ELECTION CYCLES OF VOTING FOR GOOD PEOPLE RUNNING IN YOUR COMMUNITIES---STOP ALLOWING THESE CRONY POLITICAL MACHINES MAKE YOU DESPERATE FOR JOBS.

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Sagamore to use Aquarium land in Port Covington Baltimore, MD --


This old city garage at 101 W. Dickman St. will be converted into a makerspace for business start-ups under Kevin Plank's ambitious plans for the land his Sagamore Development has acquired in Port Covington.

(Algerina Perna / Baltimore Sun) By Jeff Barker The Baltimore Sun


Sagamore gains access to Aquarium land in Port Covington Kevin Plank's Sagamore Development Co. can use land owned by a unit of the National Aquarium in Port Covington for a planned technology incubator nearby, under a new agreement.

The agreement grants Sagamore easements over the northern edge of a parcel owned by the Center for Aquatic Life and Conservation at 2400 Clarkson Street, a Sagamore spokesperson said Friday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

That land is to be used by the planned innovation center "for the purpose of parking, access, landscaping and construction," the spokesperson said.

cComments

• Another day, another Sun free ad for Kevin Plank. Anyone at the Sun ever worry that unlike most cities, Baltimore seems to have only ONE business? Or maybe it just seems that way because the publisher or someone at the Sun is getting 'discounts' on all the Under Armour thay can haul... wagner1 at 4:35 PM August 01, 2015

The center is being built in a 130,000-square-foot former garage at 101 W. Dickman Street and will retain the City Garage name.

Sagamore has amassed at least 148 acres in Port Covington and is planning a mixed-use development and new campus for Under Armour, the sports apparel company founded by Plank. Some work already has begun, including the conversion of a former Sam's Club into Under Armour offices and a new rye whiskey distillery called Sagamore Spirit.

Sagamore also acquired 43 acres in Westport, across the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River from Port Covington, at a bankruptcy auction earlier this year.

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The term Economic Zone is a neo-liberal term--- all of this economic policy was written and installed by the US in Asian nations with those leaders assured to become rich. So, when we see the US making itself into an International Economic Zone, the Asian nations that will build these Economic Zones will do so under the direction of the global corporations tied to them. There will be nothing American about any of this. Each International Economic Zone will have a government structure at the local level that is wired right to the global corporate tribunal structure. We will have no real Federal government other than bodies that conduct international law which is where Clinton/Bush/Obama have been taking the Federal government. Today, Obama has it operating as almost only international defense and law. ALL THE US CONSTITUTION IS STILL RIGHT THERE-------IT IS SIMPLY BEING IGNORED ILLEGALLY. IT IS A COUP AND IT IS TREASON IF TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT TRIES TO MAKE ALL THIS OFFICIAL. If the American people simply run to remove these global pols---neo-liberal or neo-con----we can simply return to the business of being a first world social capitalist republic

FOR THOSE POLS WHO THINK THEY ARE GOING TO BE MADE RICH LIKE THOSE OVERSEAS-----WALL STREET AND US CORPORATIONS DO NOT NEED TO PAY OFF WHAT THEY ALREADY CONTROL.

Baltimore is ground zero for moving these Asian partners into the US, orientating them, and sending them around the country. Johns Hopkins has made a business of it. Again, these Asian immigrants are not the bad guys----they need protection as any immigrant would----they are simply players being moved by global corporations. The wealthy foreign investors---not so much sympathy ----- UnderArmour will not have UnderArmour factories---they will have these global partnerships moving to their FOXCONN campus for example.

The article below is long but take a moment to glance through----all you do is need to think what the goals are of these policies being introduced one issue at a time----


Does China Plan To Establish “China Cities” And “Special Economic Zones” All Over America?

By Michael Snyder, on January 22nd, 2013

What in the world is China up to?  Over the past several years, the Chinese government and large Chinese corporations (which are often at least partially owned by the government) have been systematically buying up businesses, homes, farmland, real estate, infrastructure and natural resources all over America.  In some cases, China appears to be attempting to purchase entire communities in one fell swoop.  So why is this happening?  Is this some form of “economic colonization” that is taking place?  Some have speculated that China may be intending to establish “special economic zones” inside the United States modeled after the very successful Chinese city of Shenzhen.  Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village, but now it is a sprawling metropolis of over 14 million people.  Initially, these “special economic zones” were only established within China, but now the Chinese government has been buying huge tracts of land in foreign countries such as Nigeria and establishing special economic zones in those nations.  So could such a thing actually happen in America?  Well, according to Dr. Jerome Corsi, a plan being pushed by the Chinese Central Bank would set up “development zones” in the United States that would allow China to “establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work.”  Under the plan, some of the $1.17 trillion that the U.S. owes China would be converted from debt to “equity”.  As a result, “China would own U.S. businesses, U.S. infrastructure and U.S. high-value land, all with a U.S. government guarantee against loss.”  Does all of this sound far-fetched?  Well, it isn’t.  In fact, the economic colonization of America is already far more advanced than most Americans would dare to imagine.

So how in the world did we get to this point?  A few decades ago, the United States was the unchallenged economic powerhouse of the world and China was essentially a third world country.

So what happened?

Well, we entered into a whole bunch of extremely unfavorable “free trade” agreements, and countries such as China began to aggressively use “free trade” as an economic weapon against us.

Over the past decade, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs to China.  When the final numbers for 2012 come out, our trade deficit with China for the year will be well over 300 billion dollars, and that will be the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the world.

Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit with China over the past decade that comes to more than 2.3 trillion dollars.  That 2.3 trillion dollars could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers, and in turn taxes would have been paid on all of that money.  But instead, all of that money went to China.

Rather than just sitting on all of that money, China has been lending much of it back to us – at interest.  We now owe China more than a trillion dollars, and our politicians are constantly pleading with China to lend more money to us so that we can finance our exploding debt.

Today, the U.S. government pays China approximately 100 million dollars a day in interest on the debt that we owe them.  Those that say that the U.S. debt “does not matter” are being incredibly foolish.

So thanks to our massive trade deficit and our exploding national debt, China is systematically getting wealthier and the United States is systematically getting poorer.

And now China is starting to use a lot of that wealth to aggressively expand their power and influence around the globe.

But isn’t it more than a bit far-fetched to suggest that China may be planning to establish Chinese cities and special economic zones in America?

Not really.

Just look at what has already happened up in Canada.  It is well-known that the Chinese population of Vancouver, Canada has absolutely exploded in recent years.  In fact, the Vancouver suburb of Richmond is now approximately half Chinese.  The following is an excerpt from a BBC article…

Richmond is North America’s most Asian city – 50% of residents here identify themselves as Chinese. But it’s not just here that the Chinese community in British Columbia (BC) – some 407,000 strong – has left its mark. All across Vancouver, Chinese-Canadians have helped shape the local landscape.

A similar thing is happening in many communities along the west coast of the United States.  In fact, Chinese citizens purchased one out of every ten homes that were sold in the state of California in 2011.

But in other areas of the United States, the Chinese are approaching things much more systematically.

For example, as I have written about previously, a Chinese group identified as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has purchased 200 acres of land near the town of Milan, Michigan.  Their stated goal is to build a “China City” that has artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.

In other instances, large chunks of real estate in major U.S. cities that are down on their luck are being snapped up by Chinese investors.  Just check out what a Fortune article from a while back says has been happening over in Toledo, Ohio…

In March 2011, Chinese investors paid $2.15 million cash for a restaurant complex on the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. Soon they put down another $3.8 million on 69 acres of newly decontaminated land in the city’s Marina District, promising to invest $200 million in a new residential-commercial development. That September, another Chinese firm spent $3 million for an aging hotel across a nearby bridge with a view of the minor league ballpark.

Toledo is being promoted to Chinese investors as a “5-star logistics region“.  From Toledo it is very easy to get to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Indianapolis…

With a population of 287,000, Toledo is only the fourth largest city in Ohio, but it lies at the junction of two important highways — I-75 and I-80/90. “My vision is to make Toledo a true international city,” Toledo’s Mayor Mike Bell told the Toledo Blade.

But some of these deals appear to be about far more than just making “investments”.  According to the Idaho Statesman, a Chinese company known as Sinomach (which is actually controlled by the Chinese government) was actually interested in developing a 50 square mile self-sustaining “technology zone” south of the Boise airport…

A Chinese national company is interested in developing a 10,000- to 30,000-acre technology zone for industry, retail centers and homes south of the Boise Airport.

Officials of the China National Machinery Industry Corp. have broached the idea — based on a concept popular in China today — to city and state leaders.

The article suggested that this “technology zone” would be modeled after similar projects that already exist in China, and that Chinese officials were conducting similar negotiations with other U.S. states as well…

Sinomach is not looking only at Idaho.

The company sent delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania this year to talk about setting up research and development bases and industrial parks. It has an interest in electric transmission projects and alternative energy as well.

The technology zone proposal follows a model of science, technology and industrial parks in China — often fully contained cities with all services included.

Thankfully the deal in Idaho appears to be stalled for now, but could we soon see China establish special economic zones in other communities all around America?

The Chinese certainly do seem to be laying the groundwork for something.  They have been voraciously gobbling up important infrastructure all over the country.  The following comes from a recent American Free Press article…

In addition to already owning vital ports in Long Beach, Calif. and Boston, Mass., the China Ocean Shipping Company is eyeing major ports on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. China also owns access to ports at the entry and exit points of the Panama Canal.

And due to fiscal woes plaguing many American cities and states, U.S. legislators have been actively seeking out Chinese investors. In one of the worst cases, Baton Rouge, La., Mayor Kip Holden offered the Chinese government ownership and operating rights to a new toll way system if the Chinese would provide the funding to build it.

Does it make sense for the Chinese to own some of our most important ports?

Isn’t there a national security risk?

Sadly, there isn’t much of anything that our politicians won’t sell these days as long as someone is willing to flash a lot of cash.

The Chinese have also been busy buying up important real estate on the east coast as a recent Forbes article explained….

According to a recent report in the New York Times, investors from China are “snapping up luxury apartments” and are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on commercial and residential projects like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Chinese companies also have signed major leases at the Empire State Building and at 1 World Trade Center, the report said.

But it is not only just land and infrastructure that the Chinese have been buying up.

They have also been purchasing rights to vital oil and natural gas deposits all over the United States.

There have been two Chinese companies that have been primarily involved in this effort.

The first is the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).  According to Wikipedia, CNOOC is 100 percent owned by the Chinese government…

CNOOC Group is a state-owned oil company, fully owned by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) performs the rights and obligations of shareholder on behalf of the government.

The second is Sinopec Corporation.  Sinopec Group is the largest shareholder (approx. 75% ownership) in Sinopec Corporation.  And as the Sinopec website tells us, Sinopec Group is fully owned by the Chinese government…

Sinopec Group, the largest shareholder of Sinopec Corp., is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical group incorporated by the State in 1998 based on the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Funded by the State, it is a State authorized investment arm and State-owned controlling company.

So whenever you see CNOOC or Sinopec, you can replace those names with the Chinese government.  The Chinese government essentially runs both of those companies.

And as you can see from the following list compiled by the Wall Street Journal, those two companies have been extremely aggressive in buying up rights to oil and natural gas all over the nation…

Colorado: Cnooc gained a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming in a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Louisiana: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 265,000 acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale after a broader $2.5-billion deal with Devon Energy.

Michigan: Sinopec gained a one-third interest in 350,000 acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Ohio: Sinopec acquired a one-third stake in Devon Energy’s 235,000 Utica Shale acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Oklahoma: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 215,000 acres in a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Texas: Cnooc acquired a one-third interest in Chesapeake Energy’s 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in a $2.16-billion deal.

Wyoming: Cnooc has a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming after a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy. Sinopec gained a one-third interest in Devon Energy’s 320,000 acres as part of a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Gulf of Mexico: Cnooc Ltd. separately acquired minority stakes in some of Statoil ASA’s leases as well as six of Nexen Inc.’s deep-water wells.

So why is the U.S. government allowing this?

That is a very good question.

For a nation that purports to be pursuing “energy independence”, we sure do have a funny way of going about things.

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that China is absolutely mopping the floor with the United States on the global economic stage.  China is rising and America is in an advanced state of decline.  Global economic power has shifted dramatically and most Americans still don’t understand what has happened.

The following are 44 more signs of how dominant the economy of China has become…

1. A Chinese firm recently made a $2.6 billion offer to buy movie theater chain AMC.

2. A different Chinese firm made a $1.8 billion offer to buy aircraft maker Hawker Beechcraft.

3. In December it was announced that a Chinese group would be purchasing AIG’s plane leasing unit for $4.23 billion.

4. It was recently announced that the Federal Reserve will now allow Chinese banks to buy up American banks.

5. A $190 million bridge project up in Alaska was awarded to a Chinese firm.

6. A $400 million contract to renovate the Alexander Hamilton bridge in New York was awarded to a Chinese firm.

7. A $7.2 billion contract to construct a new bridge between San Francisco and Oakland was awarded to a Chinese firm.

8. The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team were made in China.

9. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

10. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

11. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

12. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

13. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

14. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

15. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.

16. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

17. The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

18. Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

19. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

20. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

21. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.

22. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

23. After being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, General Motors is currently involved in 11 joint ventures with companies owned by the Chinese government.  The price for entering into many of these “joint ventures” was a transfer of “state of the art technology” from General Motors to the communist Chinese.

24. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.

25. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

26. China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment.

27. The number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash”.

28. The U.S. trade deficit with China is now more than 28 times larger than it was back in 1990.

29. Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was just 6 million dollars for the entire year.  For the month of November 2012 alone, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 28.9 billion dollars.

30. China now consumes more energy than the United States does.

31. China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.

32. China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.

33. China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.

34. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

35. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

36. China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.

37. China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earth elements.

38. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.

39. A recent investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.

40. 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles.  But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.

41. China now awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.

42. According to one study, the Chinese economy already has roughly the same amount of purchasing power as the U.S. economy does.

43. According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.

44. Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.

Without the “globalization” of the world economy, none of this would have ever happened.  But instead of admitting our mistakes and fixing them, our politicians continue to press for even more “free trade” and even more integration with communist nations such as China.

In fact, according to Dr. Jerome Corsi, the U.S. government has already set up 257 “foreign trade zones” all over America.  These “foreign trade zones” are apparently given “special U.S. customs treatment” and are used to promote “free trade”…

Corsi noted that the U.S. government has created 257 foreign trade zones, or FTZs, throughout the United States, designed to extend special U.S. customs treatment to U.S. plants engaged in international-trade-related activities.

The FTZs tend to be located near airports, with easy access into the continental NAFTA and WTO multi-modal transportation systems being created to move free-trade goods cheaply, quickly and efficiently throughout the continent of North America.

“There is nothing in the U.S. government’s description of FTZs that would prevent a foreign government, like China, from operating a shell U.S. company that is in reality owned and financed by the Chinese government and operated through a Chinese government-owned corporation,” Corsi wrote.

Sadly, we are probably going to see a whole lot more of this in the years ahead.

According to Corsi, a professor of economics at Tsighua University in Beijing named Yu Qiao has suggested the following plan as a way to transform the debt that the United States owes China into something more “tangible”…

1. China would negotiate with the U.S. government to create a “crisis relief facility,” or CRF. The CRF “would be used alongside U.S. federal efforts to stabilize the banking system and to invest in capital-intensive infrastructure projects such as high-speed railroad from Boston to Washington, D.C.
2. China would pool a portion of its holdings of Treasury bonds under the CFR umbrella to convert sovereign debt into equity. Any CFR funds that were designated for investment in U.S. corporations would still be owned and managed by U.S. equity holders, with the Asians holding minority equity shares “that would, like preferred stock, be convertible.”
3. The U.S. government would act as a guarantor, “providing a sovereign guarantee scheme to assure the investment principal of the CRF against possible default of targeted companies or projects”.
4. The Federal Reserve would set up a special account to supply the liquidity the CRF would require to swap sovereign debt into industrial investment in the United States.

Apparently the Bank of China really likes this plan and would like to see something like this implemented.

In the years ahead, perhaps many of you will end up working in a “special economic zone” for a Chinese company on a project that is being financially guaranteed by the U.S. government.

If that sounds like a form of slavery to you, the truth is that you are probably not too far off the mark.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we should have never allowed ourselves to get into so much debt.

Now we will pay the price.

To get an idea of how much the world has changed in recent years, just check out this incredible photo which contrasts the decline of Detroit over the years with the amazing rise of Shanghai, China.

Things did not have to turn out this way.  Unfortunately, we made decades of incredibly foolish decisions and we wrecked the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.

Now the future for America looks really bleak.

Or could it be that I am being too pessimistic?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

I've spoken a great deal already about VEOLA ENVIRONMENT and water privatization in Baltimore and cities across the US so this week public works talk will remain with energy sources.  I would like to make a fast water privatization comment TODAY:

NEO-CONSERVATIVE JOHNS HOPKINS AND WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CONTROLS ALL PUBLIC POLICY INSTALLED BY BALTIMORE CITY POLS.

This week I received notice from a CLEAN WATER BALTIMORE.ORG with the logo of the Mayor of Baltimore and her director of Public Works on the letter telling me that they will be installing SMART METERS for water.  The letter was translated into several different languages representing all the nations tied to this global organization tied to VEOLA ENVIRONMENT.

CITY HALL SAYS----WE ARE NOT PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER.

It said that a global corporation ITRON will install and monitor for the city these water meters.  Local media pretend that ITRON is a local business----as the Baltimore Sun tells us openly misleading the Maryland public.

Washington-based Itron is expected finish the job in Baltimore by April 2016 and by 2017 in Baltimore County.


ITRON   
Our Vision The way we manage energy and water will define this century. By applying knowledge and technology, together we can create a more resourceful world.

Our Mission Itron is a world-leading technology and services company dedicated to the resourceful use of energy and water

CITY HALL SAYS ------WE ARE NOT PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER.

Veola Environment is contracted to manage and develop the rebuilding of all new water infrastructure.  Please Google the article below---it's too long to post:


Veolia Environnement - Public Citizen www.citizen.org/documents/Vivendi-USFilter.pdfPublic Citizen - Water for All - www.wateractivist.org Veolia Environnement: A Corporate Profile The Name Game - Veolia Environnement goes by many names 

CITY HALL SAYS-----WE ARE NOT PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER.

Obama and Congress send stimulus money for public utility development that targets the private sector and does not go to our state or city government or its public works department.  The awards are going to large national and global corporations coming in to install all public water pipelines.....now what kinds of companies can stocks be sold?  THAT'S RIGHT NATIONAL AND GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.  What workers do they bring in when they do a job?  Workers from their home state or country.  No hiring of Baltimore citizens happening much with all this work.  Each corporation making a patchwork of our public infrastructure. 

CITY HALL SAYS----WE ARE NOT PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER.

Water Infrastructure Stocks
Flows of Profits Under Your Nose Written by Nick HodgePosted September 9, 2009



I've wanted to put together a piece like this for some time now because of the multiple purposes it serves.

For starters, it partly answers the oft asked question of "Where are the stimulus dollars going?"

It may sound mundane, but the stimulus (or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), is actually quite easily tracked at Recovery.org. A quick browse there will answer most propaganda-driven questions being asked in the mainstream.



Secondly, today's piece legitimizes major trends I've been trying to point out to you all year.

Before we get to it, let me remind you of my words back in May:

Take, for example, the $11.28 billion recently allocated to improving our water supply via the stimulus and the president's budget. Here's how that sum breaks down:

• $3.9 billion for EPA Water Loan Programs
• $6 billion for EPA Clean Water State Revolving Funds
• $1.38 billion for the USDA Rural Water and Waste Disposal Program

The total sum is greater than the entire gross domestic product of Cambodia. And it's all going to alleviate out water problems.

Such is the benefit of living in a wealthy nation. The cumulative "they" won't let anything too bad happen. We're spoiled enough to know that Uncle Sam will always provide.

But there's more to it than just having the simple things readily available. . . water at the tap, a well-connected highway system. You can also profit from them.

Because Uncle Sam is just like, well, a rich uncle. He'll pay for you to get things done, but he won't do them himself.

This oft overlooked bridge is the key to easy profits.

A Bridge to Somewhere

The government is just providing the funding for these projects. Funding that you contributed to via taxes or from debt we've outsourced.

Those funds then go to companies that provide desired services. . . companies that you can invest in for profit. I'll call this the funding bridge. And most government projects have it.

It's why Northrup and Lockheed profit during wartime. And it's why biotechs soar when they get government funding or approval.

I'm sure even the "Bridge to Nowhere" would've had a profit bridge to somewhere.

But this funding bridge is just getting started. According to Recovery.gov, only $36.8 million of stimulus dollars have been spent. The Feds will be spending that money for the next four years.

And if you get into the right companies now, you could be profiting the entire time.

Companies are lining up to get the funding. And serious investors are lining up right behind them.

Well, it's been a few months since then. Much more than $36.8 million of the stimulus money has been spent. And, as I predicted, many stock gains have been made as a result.

But there's still plenty of time to profit from this years-long event. So let's see if we can reconnect with that funding bridge.

Water Running Under Your Nose

Billions of dollars have gone out the federal door since I forecast a profit bridge would emerge from the stimulus. And a profit bridge has clearly emerged.

Today, we'll explore both sides of the bridge with respect to water.

Here's a list of just water-related funding I painstakingly compiled from the Environmental Protection Agency's stimulus website:

• New Jersey received over $43 million for drinking water infrastructure improvements.
  
  

• New Jersey received over $160 million for waste water infrastructure improvements.
  
  

• Michigan received $1.7 million to improve water quality.
  
  
• Wisconsin, Alabama, South Carolina and Missouri received over $114 million for drinking water infrastructure improvements.
  
  
• Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands received over $253 million for waste water infrastructure improvements.
  
  
• South Carolina, Georgia, Guam, and American Samoa received over $1 million to improve water quality.
  
  
• Colorado received $6.9 million for drinking water infrastructure improvements.
  
  
• Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands received $2.9 million for clean water and drinking water improvements.
  
  
• Alaska received $.2 million to improve water quality and create jobs.
  
  
• Minnesota and New Jersey received over $200 million to improve water quality.
  
  
• U.S. EPA, Campo Band of Mission Indians, Indian Health Service celebrates more than $1.6 million in drinking water infrastructure improvements.
  
  
• EPA announces $93.7 million Recovery Act funds for wastewater infrastructure projects in Pennsylvania to boost economy, create jobs, and protect the environment.
  
  
• EPA awarded more than one million dollars in ARRA funding for water quality planning in the state of Wisconsin.
  
  
• EPA awarded over $94 million in ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of Indiana, Colorado and Tennessee and the Territory of Puerto Rico.
  
  
• EPA awarded over $267 million in ARRA funding for waste water infrastructure projects in the states of Louisiana, Indiana, Utah and Tennessee and the Territory of Puerto Rico.
  
  
• EPA awarded $7.5 million in ARRA funding for water quality planning in the states of New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Utah and Tennessee and the Territory of Puerto Rico.
  
  
• EPA awarded ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the State of Texas ($160M).
  
  
• EPA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's (HHS) Indian Health Service (IHS) announced $90 million in ARRA funds for improved access to drinking water and wastewater services in American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
  
  
• EPA awarded ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the State of Delaware ($19.2M).
  
  
• EPA awarded ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the State of Maine ($30M).
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the State of Ohio ($133.1M).
  
  
• EPA awarded ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the States of Ohio ($52.3M).
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the state of West Virginia ($15.6M).
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for Water Quality Management projects in the states of Ohio, Missouri, California, North Carolina, Iowa, Oklahoma and Louisiana totaling $7.9 M.
  
  
• EPA awarded ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Alaska and Oregon totaling $67.8M and announced funding for water infrastructure projects in Delaware and Colorado totaling $44.3M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of Georgia and Maryland totaling $81.5M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Maryland and Washington totaling $163.0M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota and Mississippi totaling $192.6M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of North Dakota, Ohio, Minnesota and Illinois totaling $489M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for water quality management planning in the states of Arkansas, New Mexico and Connecticut totaling $937.3K.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of North Dakota and Florida, totaling $107.7M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana, totaling $116.7M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for water quality management planning in the states of Nebraska, Mississippi, Kentucky, Florida and Alabama, totaling $2.8M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Arizona and Nevada for a total of $45.7 M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of Arizona, Nevada and Delaware for a total of $94.3 M.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for Water Quality Management Planning grants in the states of Kansas, Arizona and Nevada for a total of $818K.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Oklahoma and Iowa totaling $84.7 million.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding totaling $133.1 million for drinking water infrastructure projects in the states of North Carolina, and Michigan and ARRA funding totaling $336.2 for clean water infrastructure projects in the states of Florida, Michigan, and Kansas.
  
  
• EPA announced ARRA funding for drinking water infrastructure projects to the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Kentucky and Maine totaling $129.8 million.
  
  

Sorry for the long list, but I feel it's important to draw your attention to all water funding measures taken to date.

It's quite a list. . . tipping the scale at almost $4 billion. And yet, that's not even half of the water funding slated to come down the pike. In total, there's over $11 billion available to do everything from installing new water meters to building entire new treatment plants.

Half of this profit bridge has been firmly created. . . and there's still more to come. From Alaska to Puerto Rico, pipes are being laid and profits are being made.

So how's the other side of the bridge coming along?

Going With the Flow

As I said would happen, the profit side of the bridge is also coming together nicely. Had you heeded my advice of yore — and invested in water stocks — you would've already turned some nice returns.

Simply holding a broad-based water ETF since the stimulus was signed would've netted you anywhere from 50-75% already. Take a look:



That's something I told you to do when all this money began flowing. In a separate article than the one mentioned above, I said:

This is the kick-off party to years of easy water investing. If you're going it alone, I'd suggest holding a water ETF or two.

That statement came just before I showed you a chart of the same four water ETFs seen above. Of course, they were trading much lower at the time.

And individual water stocks have delivered even harder-hitting gains. Members of my Alternative Energy Speculator cashed out of Flowserve (NYSE: FLS) during its recent 100% run. And we're sitting nicely in Layne Christensen (NASDAQ: LAYN) and Lindsay Corp. (NYSE: LNN) as they make similar ascents:



But even with all the water profits being made, my advice still stands: Holding a water ETF is still the best way to profit as the water bull continues to run.

Profits from individual companies — while often much higher — are a bit harder to come by. They take more acute research, precise timing, and an intimate knowledge of the sector.

If those are the types of gains you're after, I can help you get them with the Alternative Energy Speculator. The thousands of investors that follow advice have already closed more than 30 double-digit winners this year. . . many as a direct result of water-related funding.

This elite community is where investors get my premium research and learn how to profit from it. For water, that means finding out not only how much capital is flowing (as you just learned), but on whose balance sheet it will add up. It means 50% gains from individual companies and specific knowledge rather than 25% from an ETF based on a guess.

And the system is paying off. Take a second to read about the success of this investment style and the readers that adhere to it. 

Thousands of wealthier readers and dozens of double-digit winners so far this year can't be wrong.

Call it like you see it


________________________________________________
The organizations coming out to protest water privatization are mostly linked to labor and justice organizations that work to elect Clinton neo-liberals and Bush neo-cons pushing these global privatization policies.  We see AFSCME and AFL-CIO----UNITED HERE----we see the 15 Baltimore ministers who tell Baltimore citizens to vote for the Baltimore Development corporate and corrupt pols every election---

BALTIMORE DOES NOT HAVE A HISTORY OF RIGGED AND CORRUPT ELECTIONS THAT KEEP POLS IN BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND AS MAYOR FOR DECADES BECAUSE ALL OF THESE GROUPS EDUCATE AS TO WHY THESE POLS ARE BAD.

Baltimore would have no Wall Street/Johns Hopkins pols in office without the 15 black ministers who pretend to protest while they support the most raging Wall Street pols-----Baltimore would have no Wall Street/Johns Hopkins pols in office if NAACP/Morgan State/and Urban League did not support the most raging Wall Street pols each election.

Baltimore would have no Wall Street/Johns Hopkins pols if Baltimore's middle-class would stop being silent on what will kill everybody's families in just a few decades if left unchecked.

State and local labor unions cannot support the most raging Wall Street Clinton neo-liberal in elections knowing they are going to privatize and then come out to protest privatization.  If private sector unions think this is a boon to private union work----YOU NEED TO WAKE UP AND MAKE JOBS, JOBS, JOBS ABOUT SOLID PUBLIC INTEREST DEVELOPMENT.  OUR PUBLIC UNIONS ARE THE LARGEST AND MOST IMPORTANT UNIONS WE HAVE IN THE US.

This is happening in cities across the nation and we must have the labor and justice organization members RUNNING FOR OFFICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AGAINST CLINTON NEO-LIBERALS FOR THE SAKE OF THE FUTURE OF YOUR MEMBERSHIP/CONGREGATIONS.

We should not hear politics won't solve this----we can reverse all this policy in two election cycles if people would engage and get rid of the corrupt, corporate pols.


Baltimore Coalition Protests Potential Privatization of Water Services City Administration Responds: “There is no plan, no intention, no desire to privatize…”


by: Roberto Alejandro Special to the AFRO(Photo by Stacey Mink/Maryland Working Families)Nov 1, 2014 [ A+ ] /[ A- ] Baltimoreans gather outside City Hall to protest what they see as a first-step in an effort to privatize city water services. (Photo by Stacey Mink/Maryland Working Families)

Water price increases, diminution of services, and a loss of jobs are all at stake if Baltimore City goes through with a proposed consulting plan for its water and waste management services, according to a coalition of community advocates.

The One Baltimore Coalition, representing over 40 different organizations, is speaking out against a trend towards privatization that could increase costs for essential city services while simultaneously driving down local employment.

At issue is a bid by a French company, Veolia, to conduct an efficiency study of the city’s water and wastewater management services. To Glenn Middleton, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 44, such a study smells like a first step towards privatization.

“Our concern is in an efficiency study, Veolia brings in engineers, so why would they come in to do a study unless it’s a study for them to take over?” said Middleton.

Middleton wanted to know why the Department of Public Works, which oversees water and wastewater management, would reach out to a private company to study the needs of the city’s water services rather than consulting the employees who have been doing the job and are most familiar with its problems.

On Oct. 27, the One Baltimore Coalition held a rally at City Hall attended by nearly 500 people, according to Stacey Mink, communications director for Maryland Working Families, one of the member organizations of the One Baltimore Coalition.

According to Dr. Lester Spence, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins who spoke at the rally, there has been a tendency in American politics at all levels over the past several decades to adopt the perspective that the private sector can deliver services more efficiently than government and at less cost.

“What we find is that this isn’t true, that private forces aren’t more accountable, that they’re not more efficient in a number of cases, and that they cause a number of problems as far as delivering public goods,” said Spence. “They just don’t do it that well.”

Privatization is not just a water issue in Baltimore, said Spence, pointing to the proliferation of charter schools as an example of how the privatization ethos has begun to take over delivery of education in the city.

“There’s a growing tendency to make privatization the solution for a variety of ills that Baltimore faces,” said Spence.

For Rev. Al Hathaway of Union Baptist Church, it is this broader tendency of city residents being pushed into the hands of private corporations that compelled him to team up with the One Baltimore Coalition on this issue. Hathaway says his congregants began receiving communications from the city suggesting they insure their water pipes with a private company, confusing many of them as to why suddenly the city was asking them to buy insurance from a private entity.

“We’re looking at almost a first-step move (towards privatization) where we are now being asked to bear the burden of replacing the water pipes without knowing if that’s a real need,” said Hathaway.

According to Jennifer Combs, public information officer for the Baltimore City Dept. of Public Works, the department is simply looking to conduct a review of the city’s water and wastewater treatment plants in order to keep costs and rates reasonable.

“There is no plan, no intention, no desire to privatize the Baltimore City Department of Public Works or the outstanding water system that we operate,” Combs said in an e-mail to the AFRO. “DPW will remain accountable to its 1.8 million commercial and residential customers across the Baltimore region, to the citizens and taxpayers of Baltimore City, and to their elected representatives.”

Combs said that while the city has requested proposals for an external review, it is still reviewing proposals and no contract has been awarded as of yet.

___________________________________________

Baltimore has a few decades of public works projects outsourced to private corporations that has the system looking like a jigsaw puzzle as lots of different corporations come in to do a sector of Baltimore all having different work standards---materials-----with no oversight and accountability.  We hear people say they want to have an inspector come by to approve installations but the city has no inspectors.

In Baltimore we have work crews from Indiana, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Utah, coming to install these projects and if they had a city and state public works sector in their own states as we need here in Baltimore and Maryland -----THEY COULD STAY IN THEIR OWN STATES TO WORK AND OUR BALTIMORE CITIZENS WOULD BE HIRED AS PUBLIC SECTOR WORKS EMPLOYEES.  Baltimore has absolutely no public works machinery, equipment, engineers-----

When you allow global corporations to make your city or state without any public sector resources----you have created in the US what US NGOs and global corporations have in third world nations----they replace government.

ALL OF THAT FEDERAL FUNDING SHOULD BE COMING TO OUR STATE AND CITY GOVERNMENT TO BE DISPERSED AS CITIZENS IN THESE AREAS WANT IT.  INSTEAD, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS ANNOUNCING THE AVAILABILITY OF FUNDS AND ALLOWING ONLY GLOBAL AND NATIONAL CORPORATIONS RECEIVE THIS MONEY.  THEN, THESE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS OPEN UP BRANCHES AROUND THE NATION AND PRETEND THEY ARE LOCAL BUSINESSES.

BUT BALTIMORE CITY HALL SAYS------WE ARE NOT PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER.

SAK Construction Begins Work on Baltimore Wastewater Pipeline Rehabilitation


Mon, 2015-02-02 12:19
Source:  SAK Construction
The $17.3 million project includes residential neighborhoods in southwestern Baltimore

SAK Construction LLC began work on a new $17.3 million contract to install 115,000 linear ft of 8- to 24-in. cured-in-place pipe (CIPP) in a dozen residential neighborhoods in the southwestern section of the city of Baltimore. The Atlantic Div. office of SAK is located in Arbutus, Md., and will oversee the project.

According to Bob Stier, Atlantic Div. general manager, the project also requires SAK to rehabilitate 529 manholes and repair more than 2,100 house connections, using excavation, grouting and CIPP methods. The assignment, part of a comprehensive plan the city of Baltimore is implementing to improve its wastewater system, is scheduled for completion in April 2016. SAK is concurrently working on a separate $18.8 million wastewater rehabilitation project in the Union Square area of Baltimore, scheduled for completion in November 2015.

SAK’s 7.5-acre Atlantic Div. office and campus is located one mile from the jobsite. Minority and women-owned subcontractors vetted by SAK will partner with it to execute more than 30% of the project. 

________________________________________________

We know long-term unemployment is high in industrial cities like Baltimore from decades ago----and with the slow elimination of the public sector by Baltimore City Hall at the request of Johns Hopkins and Wall Street's Baltimore Development this long-term unemployment is soaring in Baltimore.  Now, this high unemployment is highest for black citizens because all of the jobs loses recently are from slashed public sector and small business minority contractors.  This is not the only story about long-term unemployment as the city's white citizens especially union labor are high as well.  I was in a food store when a white union worker came in shouting how Hopkins and Whiting Engineering Construction was using out-of state and country workers so much that white and black citizens of Baltimore cannot get a job.  So, this is a problem for all citizens of Baltimore, but especially black citizens.  Unemployment in the US has never come down---it has risen slowly since the 2008 crash----the Federal and state government simply uses unemployment benefits as the figure----saying only 5.2 % of Maryland citizens are drawing unemployment checks is far different from saying over 25% of Maryland citizens are unemployed and in Baltimore almost 50% of black citizens are unemployed.....WHICH IS THE REAL FIGURE.  As you see below Maryland is ranked high in long-term unemployment as it totes this 5.2%.  Checking the media articles has almost all media and especially black media using this Federal and state low-ball number----meaning WE HAVE NO JOURNALISM.

The reason it is so important that media and government figures show 5.2% in Maryland is that immigration and use of immigrant workers cannot be done when unemployment for domestic workers is so high---and the global Trans Pacific Trade Pact is all about flooding the US jobs markets with immigrant workers as is happening in Baltimore and Maryland.  Immigrants are not counted as unemployed as their jobs end.  THIS IS WHY HAVING A LOCAL DOMESTIC ECONOMY KEEPING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AT BAY AND A STRONG PUBLIC SECTOR IS SO IMPORTANT---IT ASSURES STRONG LOCAL EMPLOYMENT AND A STABLE ECONOMY.  All of these Federalpolicies from Obama and Clinton neo-liberals privatizing with public private partnerships are meant to deliberately destabilize domestic employment.

Look at a comment below from someone who is able to figure out when statistics are fishy!

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




'I see that unemployment rate in Baltimore remains relatively low compared to surrounding metro areas.

I just want to ask if this is real unemployment rate... How Baltimore residents feel the local economy? If the unemployment rate is lower, why the crime rate is higher?

Read more: http://www.city-data.com/forum/baltimore/1298031-low-unemployment-rate-baltimore-real-estate.html#ixzz3jSm8RbhL'
Long-Term Unemployment Still Very High

By Jarrett Murphy | March 24, 2015View as "Clean Read" Print Email BLS

One nasty feature of the 2007-2008 recession was the high number of people who were out of work for a really long time. The good news, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that the number of people who are long-term unemployed is dropping. The bad news is that it's still a big number.

"Five years after the Great Recession ended, the number of long-term unemployed still made up a larger share of unemployment than during any previous recession," reads a BLS report.

BLS defines long-term unemployment as a spell that lasts 27 weeks or more. The bureau also looks at the number of long-term unemployed out of work for 52 and even 99 weeks.

There are obvious reasons long-term unemployment is of particular concern: the longer you're out of work, the more likely you're going to run out of unemployment benefits, exhaust your savings, fall behind on your rent or mortgage and so on. There are subtler dangers, too. Long gaps in employment taint a resume, can erode the value of contacts you made when you were employed and can degrade workers' skills. There are effects on family life. And people coming out of a long-term spell of unemployment tend to end less.

The number of people out of work for 27 weeks or longer hit 6.7 million—some 45 percent of the total unemployed population—in the second quarter of 2010. A year later, the share of the unemployed out of work for 52 weeks or more hit 31.9 percent, and in the last quarter of 2011 the peak in the share of unemployed out of work for 99 weeks or more hit a peak of 15.1 percent.

All three numbers have come down since then. In the last quarter of 2014, 2.8 million people—or 31.6 percent of the unemployed population—were out of work for more than 27 weeks.

BLS finds that blacks, Asians and older Americans were more likely to be long-term unemployed. Interestingly, one's level of education didn't affect the risk of long-term unemployment. New York State has among the higher levels of long-term unemployment as a percentage of overall unemployment.