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October 31st, 2012

10/31/2012

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We are hearing the political debate framed as follows:

Rivlin/Ryan as bipartisan entitlement reform
Simpson/Bowles as bipartisan debt reduction reform

The problem is that Rivlin and Bowles are Third Way corporate politicians who are not Democratic on fiscal issues.  So, these are not bipartisan plans in either case.  CLINTONITE RIVLIN/BOWLES ARE TRYING TO END ENTITLEMENTS JUST AS THEY ENDED WELFARE....SOCIAL SECURITY TO BOOT. 
'I am a democrat' says Rivlin......HOOEY!!!!!!


Obama is leaning this way if we do not shout loudly and strongly against protecting corporate fraud and profit over people's quality of life!

I showed last time that in Maryland they have a private system that ensures corporate profit in health care by ending access for lower income people.  The article said that this is indeed the plan for affordable healthcare.  Affordable health care means a health system that eliminates the drivers of health cost in order to maximize the health industry profits.  Pre-existing conditions?  Only if you have private health insurance and most people won't.  Corporate health plans are disappearing and public sector benefits are slowly being eliminated, so who will have insurance to assure full health coverage in the medium term?   The upper middle-class.....$200,000 and up.  Everyone else will be on Medicaid.  So, while you might think the poor shouldn't expect coverage......your family will be in the same boat.
Last time we saw Johns Hopkins and a Catholic hospital listing continuous profits, making Maryland's system a model........WHY ARE NON-PROFITS MAKING PROFITS WHILE PEOPLE DIE FROM LACK OF CARE?  WHY ARE THEY ALLOWED TO EXPAND WHEN THEY CAN'T CARE FOR THE PEOPLE IN THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES?  THEIR MISSION IS EXPANSION.....NOT CARE.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!

For those of us trying to shout out what bad policy this health reform push to consolidate the health industry into mega-institutions will be, this is a poster child.  As health systems are allowed to grow and consolidate they will become as unaccountable as the Wall Street banks.  At the same time, the likelihood that they will care for the poor and elderly decreases because they are more and more profit-driven.  For those who say Hopkins is a non-profit, remember, it is only one law that allows them to become private.  Hopkins fits most descriptions for 'for-profit' now.  When you have one operation running all aspects of health care with no oversight or accountability, this is what you get.


How a private entity can control Medicaid dispensement to subcontractors mirrors the practice  for all Baltimore Board of Estimates bidding and subcontracting.  It is a bad way to do public policy.  We know that entitlement fraud in Maryland reaches billions of dollars each year and we know that Hopkins oversees much health care for the poor in the state.  We know that the public has no ability to demand access to records from these private non-profits and we know that government never does.  There is an inherent lack of transparency they know exists.

The reasons for discontinuing the contract below may have to do with Hopkins' expansion of their company Chase Brexton providing the same service...itself a conflict.  PRIORITY PARTNERS IS HOPKINS AND ACTS AS ONE OF THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS IN DOING GOVERNMENT WORK.  SO IT IS NOT TAXED AS A BUSINESS, IT'S OPERATIONS ARE NOT TRANSPARENT.

Priority Partners is one of seven Managed Care Organizations authorized by the State of Maryland to provide health care services for over 200,000 Medicaid, Maryland Children’s Health Program (MCHP), Medical Assistance for Families and Primary Adult Care (PAC) recipients.

Priority Partners is proud to provide outstanding health care services for our members. No-cost benefits that are offered include:

  • Doctor’s visits
  • Immunizations
  • Lab tests, screenings, and x-rays
  • Low cost prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications
  • Substance abuse services



WHAT WE SEE IN BALTIMORE IS A WHOLESALE POLICY OF NOT HIRING BLACK WORKERS OR BUSINESSES.  IT IS FACT, NOT FICTION.  THIS EXTENDS TO ALL LOW WAGE, SMALL BUSINESS COMMUNITIES, BUT IS PARTICULARLY OBVIOUS WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY.  WHETHER HEALTH AND SENIOR COMMUNITY CENTERS BEING HANDED TO HOPKINS/CARLYLE GROUP OR COMMUNITY REC CENTERS CLOSED AND NEW ONE OPENED UNDER PRIVATE NON-PROFITS......ALL THESE ORGANIZATIONS BEING CLOSED HAVE LONG BEEN OPERATED AND STAFFED BY THE BLACK COMMUNITY....IT IS HOW THEY FIND EMPLOYMENT.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!
WHY WAS THIS ORGANIZATION ALLOWED TO WORK FOR A YEAR WITHOUT PAYMENT?  IF WORK STANDARDS WERE QUESTIONED, HOPKINS WOULD HAVE ENDED THE SUBCONTRACT EARLIER.  WE WILL BE WRITING HOPKINS AND THE BALTIMORE HEALTH DEPARTMENT AS TO WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY?

Protesters accuse Hopkins of withholding Medicaid funds Turning Point substance abuse program says it is owed more than $100,000


By Andrea K. Walker, The Baltimore Sun 7:17 p.m. EDT, October 18, 2012


The owner of a Baltimore substance abuse center led a protest of more than 120 people Thursday morning at the doors of Johns Hopkins Hospital, saying the medical giant owes his organization more than $100,000 in Medicaid payments.

The Rev. Milton E. Williams, who operates the Turning Point Substance Abuse Clinic in East Baltimore, said his organization had provided hundreds of patients with free care because a Hopkins affiliate has not reimbursed it for treating Medicaid patients.

The Hopkins affiliate, Priority Partners, is one of several managed-care organizations that has a contract with the state to manage Medicaid claims. Much like an insurance company, Priority Partners pays clinics, doctors, hospitals and other organizations that treat Medicaid patients.

Williams said Priority Partners will not reimburse it for costs to assess and conduct drug evaluations on new patients.

"We are here to make our voices heard," Williams roared to the protesters, including many recovering addicts. "Friends, everyone needs to know the hypocrisy of the world's greatest health care institution."

The group said it has tried more than a year to get the unpaid funds, but Hopkins has resisted.

Hopkins officials would not answer questions on whether Priority Partners withheld payments from the clinic. The hospital said in a statement it had recently ended its partnership with the substance abuse treatment organization.

"We're disappointed that Rev. Williams chooses to voice his dissent in very public and unproductive ways." Hopkins said in a statement. "We strive to help our members pursue quality treatment in a professional environment, and we regret any inconvenience this may cause for them."

Williams said he also had tried to work with the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversees the Medicaid program, with no luck. He accused the state of being afraid of Hopkins' influence and "political punch." 
PEOPLE DO NOT COMPLAIN  BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF LOSING CONTRACTS OR POLITICAL BACKING......IS THAT A FREE AND DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM?

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said the department had never been contacted about problems receiving payment. 

The protesters arrived in a caravan of white vans beeping their horns as they approached the front of the facility. They carried signs that read "Don't Stand in Our Way" and "Get Out of My Way of Recovery."

Many of the protesters are recovering addicts who credit Turning Point for their transformation. They worry the clinic will not be able to help so many people if it is not completely reimbursed for care.

Romaine Vance said she started using heroin in college during parties and quickly found herself addicted. The 40-year-old said she tried many times to quit. It was only Turning Point's holistic approach to treatment that worked, she said.

"It wasn't just the addiction and drugs," Vance said. "I was beaten up inside. That is why I am here today protesting. They helped me, so I am helping them."

Williams said his group will continue to protest Hopkins.

"Even though Medicaid will pay for their care, these folks can't receive treatment because you, 'Big John,' keep their money instead of paying Turning Point for their treatment," Williams said.

______________________________________________________

It is important to know that Chase Brexton is Johns Hopkins and their expansion looks to be only in neighborhoods that are affluent or slated to become affluent soon.  This is important for two reasons.  One is that health care reform is about building global mega-health institutions that will be profit-driven and not interested in the poor and elderly.  So, as we watch this one case of an institution that has served the poor now moving into the affluent market we see just that shift. 

Secondly, we are seeing affluent development again being funded by grants and tax breaks given for helping the underserved communites.  Billions of dollars in the Enterprise Zones they know will not help the underserved.  We are watching as the development downtown expands from corporate infrastructure on the waterfront to corporate infrastructure in health care.

We want monies designated for the poor to actually help the poor not just a selected, very small group of people.  I am watching as the poor are intimidated and harassed in Mt Vernon now as affluent development expands and they won't be allowing the poor to flock to this Chase Brexton health center as advertised.


BUILD AFFLUENT INFRASTRUCTURE WITH PRIVATE MONEY.....THESE GRANTS AND TAX CREDITS ARE FRAUD!

MY COMMENTS TO TO MARYLAND DAILY RECORD, ALSO CARRYING THIS ARTICLE BELOW:

Chase Brexton is a Johns Hopkins Medical institution that was built on taxpayer money to help the underserved and now seems to be expanding into areas all being or soon to be affluent.  It is very much like the Hopkins movement into the boutique health care field and the global marketing to the world's wealthy 'health tourists'.

Now, one might say that trillions of taxpayer research money and entitlement money built Johns Hopkins Medical Campus so, when do we stop thinking of Hopkins as a non-profit and start getting all that public investment back?


Chase Brexton is a Johns Hopkins Medical institution that was built on ... Joint Commission accredited, Federally Qualified Health Center (a ...
Read the Full Page: Chase Brexton Clinic Inc. in Baltimore, MD 21202 - Find Reviews & Ratings
AllAboutCounseling.com



Chase Brexton begins renovations on new headquarters


Lt. Governor Anthony Brown joins staff from Chase Brexton Health Services as they break ground on a new building (October 5, 2012)

By Andrea K. Walker 12:59 p.m. EDT, October 5, 2012  Baltimore Sun


Chase Brexton Health Services
began renovations this week on a new location in Mt. Vernon that will allow it to see four times as many medical patients.

The community health center is moving next year a few blocks from its current building to the historic Monumental Life Building on Charles Street.


Lt. Governor Anthony Brown and Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot joined Chase Brexton staff Thursday to celebrate the beginning of renovations.


The expansion into the 95,000-square-foot building will allow the 35-year-old organization to offer more services, including dental care to two times as many patients and behavioral health care to four times as many patients.


Chase Brexton was founded in Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood in 1978 as a volunteer-run gay men’s health clinic. It now provides health care to more than 24,000 Marylanders.

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October 29th, 2012

10/29/2012

0 Comments

 
NOW THAT INCUMBENTS FEEL SAFELY REELECTED THE FACTS OF DEFICIT CUTTING ARE STARTING TO BE DISCUSSED.  CAN YOU IMAGINE THESE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS LAST WINTER BEFORE PRIMARIES WHEN WE HAD A CHANCE TO VOTE THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS OUT AND BRING A FISCAL PROGRESSIVE IN?  FIRST: HEALTH CARE AND ENTITLEMENTS


The corporate democrats are hitting the media circuits preparing everyone for the grand bargain that almost made it through during the debt ceiling crisis.  Third Way Democrats want to be sure we know that corporate taxes will be cut and as such, entitlements will see big cuts to pay for it.  Alice Rivlin is a Clinton Administration leftover as is Bowles of Simpson-Bowles and both are fiscal, Reagan Republicans.  As such the plan they advocate mirrors that the Clinton Administration made during his term.  He stated Welfare had to go and used that to pay down the deficit Reagan had left and pretended to make a compromise in making the rich pay by raising taxes on the rich.  Well, as is true each time these pols do this, all the subsidies and loopholes that made the rich and corporations pay their fair share reappeared in just a few years and we know they ended up like bandits.  The poor who depended on Welfare, everyone knew would not be able to find work or work that would support them fell into the deepest poverty ever experienced in the history of the US and remain there today.  The poverty is third world and that is what expanded the push to black market drug dealing and criminal activity as the only means of support.  Yet, that is praised as good policy by fiscal Republicans like Bowles and Rivlin.

Well, they are back to get the second part of the poverty programs of Johnson and Kennedy.....the entitlements.  That is indeed the purpose of this fiscal cliff charade.  Making it appear that limiting these programs must be done.  When Rivlin appeared on several NPR/APM programs as the Democrat of the panel, I wrote in describing Rivlin as such, demanding that they have a fiscal progressive on these panels and the moderators did indeed bring my comment forward to which Rivlin scolded.....'I am a Democrat'!  HOOEY!

Make no mistake, these cuts Third Way Democrats are going to pretend they have to make will effectively end these programs because people will not be able to access most health care if they are forced to co-pays that go up in Medicare's case and for Medicaid.....they plan to eliminate that.  Even now in Maryland there was an article that says health costs were lower, meaning the state paid less but at the same time Medicaid clients are writing they can no longer get cancer treatment or afford Asthma medication.  People are dying already in Maryland from lack of care.  Now, Baltimore already has one of the greatest longevity GAPS between rich and poor.....20 years.....because they have never had much coverage, but what we are seeing now is a setup that is basically public health checkups that monitor whether the public has transferable (communicable) disease like Typhoid/Polio/HIV/Whopping Cough and many more people are falling into this category.  This will fast become Medicare as well as these corporate pols are working for global businesses that are profit-makers.  They are not working for the poor and elderly.

What we are seeing already as far as the next massive health care fraud is the primary care emphasis on diet as prevention of disease like diabetes and heart disease.  So to continue receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they should as they have these past decades, they are bringing these seniors and poor patients in every three months for office checkups where they review blood draws and analysis for diet related levels like Vitamin D, Cholesterol, or sugars.  If someone questions all those visits and draws, the doctor and office becomes indignant as if the patients may lose access to this doctor.  The costs to the poor are huge and the Medicaid funds lost to this fraud means that coverage for real threats won't be there.

IT IS CRITICAL THAT WE SHOUT OUT THAT WE WILL NOT TOLERATE OUR HEALTH CARE ACCESS BE CUT WHEN CORPORATIONS/DOCTORS OWE FRAUD AND DO NOT NEED BILLIONS IN PROFIT FOR PUBLIC SERVICES LIKE HEALTH CARE.  ALL OF MARYLAND'S POLS WILL VOTE FOR CUTS!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!!





For those who think their incumbent won't vote for this.......they have already said they would.......now, we can reverse this but you need to get rid of the farm team!


The Health Care Blog

  By JOHN GOODMAN, PhD 

Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have proposed an entitlement spending reform plan that is striking both for its boldness and its left-right-coming-together origins. There are a number of interesting parts, but I want to focus on the three most important:

  • Medicare would, for the first time, be transformed into rational insurance. Beginning in 2013, all enrollees would be protected by a $6,000 cap on out-of-pocket expenses; in return they would pay for more small expenses on their own.
  • After a decade, people newly eligible for Medicare would receive a voucher to purchase private insurance instead. The value of the voucher would grow at the rate of growth of GDP plus 1% (note: for the past four decades, health care spending per capita nationwide has been growing at about GDP growth plus 2%).
  • Medicaid would be turned into annual block grants to the states. The value of the block grants would also grow at GDP growth plus 1%.
Bottom line verdict: This is a good proposal that deserves serious attention. To guarantee its success, however, more needs to be done to (1) allow the private sector to control costs through economic incentives, competition and entrepreneurship and (2) allow young people to save for the growing share of expenses they will be expected to bear.

How Does This Plan Compare with the Affordable Care Act (ACA)? Given that Ryan has been previously attacked by Paul Krugman and others on the left because of his ideas about voucherizing Medicare, a natural question arises. How does the Ryan/Rivlin slowdown in Medicare spending compare to the health reform bill Congress passed last spring — a bill supported by some of the very people attacking Ryan?




Answer: Ryan/Rivlin reduces government spending on Medicare by less than the ACA does! As previously reported, the health reform act begins slowing the rate of growth of Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals almost immediately. By the end of this decade, Medicare rates will fall below Medicaid rates for everyone enrolled in Medicare! As the Medicare actuaries office has affirmed this will affect access to care for all seniors, not just new enrollees in future years.

Under Ryan/Rivlin, by contrast, everyone 55 years of age and older is grandfathered, so to speak. Lower spending only kicks in for people under the age of 55.

[Note: The CBO score of Ryan/Rivlin assumes that the proposal will be tacked onto the ACA, which is current law.]

How Does This Plan Compare to Other Entitlement Reform Proposals? Clearly, Washington is in the mood to talk about entitlement reform. We previously analyzed the Bowles/Simpson deficit commission report [see PowerPoint and full report], which was followed by a Domenici/Rivlin report. All these plans try to limit federal spending to the growth rate of GDP plus 1% — the ACA, by reducing fees for providers; Domenici/Rivlin, by having enrollees pay larger premiums; and all three private sector proposals, by a premium support approach, under which the federal government makes available a fixed number of dollars (or vouchers), beneficiaries add to that amount from their own resources and health plans compete against each other. The ACA, by contrast, limits spending to the growth rate of GDP and has no premium support!

Will any of this actually work?

Are the Cuts in Medicare Spending Realistic? Everyone agrees we are on an unsustainable path. But if we don’t get off the path, efforts to limit government spending will only unload costs onto the private sector. That is, costs won’t be controlled; they will only be shifted.

The ACA makes incentives more perverse for patients (by making more care free of deductibles and copayments), leaves provider incentives (to maximize against reimbursement formulas) largely in place, creates hurdles for private sector efforts to control costs (e.g., by blocking attempts to reduce benefits or increase cost sharing) and puts all its cost-control faith in the federal government’s ability to conduct pilot programs, do comparative effectiveness research and other unlikely initiatives.

Domenici/Rivlin shifts premium costs to the beneficiaries but gives no new tools to patients or providers to control spending.

Both Bowles/Simpson and Ryan/Rivlin reform Medicare by capping catastrophic expenses and increasing patient exposure for small medical bills. (There is an across-the-board deductible of $600 in Ryan/Rivlin.) This by itself will dampen spending, as patients are forced to compare the cost of small dollar care with the value they place on other uses of money. It would probably also obviate the need for Medigap insurance, which, after all, only exists because gaping holes in Medicare expose beneficiaries to catastrophic costs.

Still, we could do much better.

Making the Proposal Better. We have previously proposed a way of building on these ideas and going further to liberate 310 million patients, 800,000 doctors and countless other provider personnel to solve the problems before us with three fundamental Medicare reforms:

  • Using a special type of health savings account, beneficiaries would be able to manage at least one-fifth of their health care dollars, thus keeping each dollar of wasteful spending they avoid and bearing the full cost of each dollar of waste they generate.
  • Physicians would be free to repackage and reprice their services — thus profiting from innovations that lower costs and raise the quality of care.
  • Workers (along with their employers) would save and invest 4 percent of payroll — eventually reaching the point where each generation of retirees pays for the bulk of its own post-retirement medical care.
In the paradigm case (the one defining government’s contribution, say, for Medicare Advantage insurers) beneficiaries would face a $2,500 deductible and they would be able to deposit $2,500 in an aftertax (Roth) health savings account.

These reforms would dramatically change incentives. Whether in their role as patient, provider or worker/saver, people would reap the benefits of socially beneficial behavior and incur the costs of socially undesirable behavior. Specifically, Medicare patients would have a direct financial interest in seeking out low-cost, high-quality care. Providers would have a direct financial interest in producing efficient, high-quality care. And worker/savers would have a financial interest in a long-term financing system that promotes efficient, high-quality care for generations to come.

With assistance from NCPA Senior Fellow Andrew J. Rettenmaier, we have been able to simulate the long-term impact of some of these reforms. The bottom line: Under reasonable assumptions, we can reach the mid-21st century with seniors paying no more (as a share of the cost of the program) than the premiums they pay today and with a taxpayer burden (relative to national income) no greater than the burden today.

What about Low-Income Beneficiaries? Ryan/Rivlin have a nice idea here. For Medicare beneficiaries whose low income also qualifies them for Medicaid (the dual eligibles), forget Medicaid and deposit $6,600 for each of them in a health savings account. This gives them the financial resources to pay the $6,000 in out-of-pocket expenses they are potentially exposed to plus $600 to boot.

This post first appeared on John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog.

John C. Goodman, PhD, is president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis.  He is also the Kellye Wright Fellow in health care. The mission of the Wright Fellowship is to promote a more patient-centered, consumer-driven health care system. Dr. Goodman’s Health Policy Blog is considered among the top conservative health care blogs on the internet where pro-free enterprise, private sector solutions to health care problems are discussed by top health policy experts from all sides of the political spectrum.



_________________________________________________

This basically ends health coverage for most people.  Remember, these costs will go up as the world becomes the patient for which these health systems work.  JUST ONE INCIDENT WILL WIPE OUT THE CAP.  It will work just like gas as far as supply and demand.....not on what is good for society.  America is the only first world country doing this
IT IS EVIL.........GET THESE CORPORATE POLITICIANS OUT OF OFFICE!!!!
  COSTS ARE LOW BECAUSE MANY PEOPLE DIE 20 YEARS EARLY DUE TO LACK OF ACCESS..... IT'S CALLED THE THIRD WORLD MODEL....AND THEY THINK THIS IS A GOOD NATIONAL MODEL!!!!

MARYLAND'S ACCESS, HEALTH WAGE, AND QUALITY OF CARE ALL RANK LOW BECAUSE OF THE EMPHASIS ON PROFIT-MARGIN FOR THE INSTITUTIONS OVER THE QUALITY OF CARE AND QUALITY OF LIFE FOR ITS EMPLOYEES.


Health care costs How Maryland keeps its costs down Mar 3rd 2010, 16:52 by M.S.



MAGGIE MAHAR reports on how Maryland has bent down the curve on healthcare inflation.

In 1977, Maryland decided that, rather than leaving prices to the vagaries of a marketplace where insurers and hospitals negotiate behind closed doors, it would delegate the task of setting reimbursement rates for acute-care hospitals to an independent agency, the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission. When setting rates, the Commission takes into account differences in labor markets and how much a hospital pays in wages; the amount of charity care the hospital does; and whether it treats a large number of severely ill patients. For example, the Commission sets the price of an overnight stay at St. Joseph Medical Center in suburban Towson at $984, while letting Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore Maryland, charge $1,555...Since the program started, the Wall Street Journal reports that Maryland hospitals have enjoyed a steady profit margin, unlike hospitals in other states that often make more money during boom years and less during a recession...

What is most remarkable is how state regulation of prices has contained costs. When the program began in 1977, the state's hospital costs were 25% higher than the national average. Today, Maryland's hospital costs are 2% lower than the national average.  MARYLAND'S HEALTH WORKERS ARE THE POOREST PAID AS WELL.  THE BLIGHTED NEIGHBORHOODS AROUND JOHNS HOPKINS WERE FILLED WITH HOPKINS' POVERTY LEVEL WORKERS

In contrast, Ms Mahar writes, Massachussetts has some of the highest hospital costs in the nation. That's because brand-name hospitals like Mass General and Boston Women's and Children's know that insurers can't afford to leave them out of the provider network. They can thus negotiate reimbursement rates two or three times as high as their generic competition, even though their health outcomes are often no better.

Ms Mahar's article gibes with Ian Crosby's argument that insurance-company consolidation can make health care cheaper (since it allows insurers greater price-setting power), whereas producer consolidation makes it more expensive. Maryland's Cost Review Commission essentially removes the power of large, consolidated providers like Johns Hopkins to charge higher prices at will. Interestingly, this is essentially the same kind of system used in private-sector universal health-insurance systems in Europe to control costs. In the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and France, government price boards are crucial in keeping medical inflation down, and are part of the reason European countries have costs half to two-thirds as high as America's, with outcomes that are just as good. 
THE DIFFERENCE IS THAT ALL PEOPLE IN EUROPE HAVE EQUAL ACCESS AND IN BALTIMORE THE POOR DIE 20 YEARS EARLIER BECAUSE THEY CANNOT ACCESS CARE.  THE PRICE CONTROL IS TO ASSURE PROFITS, NOT COVERAGE!

The usual argument against cost controls is that they prevent the market from rewarding investment in services that have high demand. The argument fails to account for how different health care is from normal markets (a difference recognised by, among others, Friedrich Hayek). Costs are inevitably paid by third-party buyers (insurers or government) to ensure the moral guarantee that everyone have access to care. And doctors exercise such power over complex care decisions that neither patients nor insurers can usually decide whether drugs or procedures are worth the price. Ultimately, when trying to figure out how to hold health-care costs down, theory and ideology only get you so far; you have to look at what works. Clearly, whatever Maryland is doing, it works.

______________________________________________________


Maryland Bills adding major costs to State Employees health care by Dan Seiler on March 20th, 2011 This is a call for action: All State employees both active and retired need to contact their Delegates and Senators now.  Communicate your concerns about provisions contained in HB72, SB87 and SB628.  The following link is a good way to do that, http://mlis.state.md.us/mgaweb/mail32.aspx

Below you will find a copy of the letter that was sent to the Western Maryland Delegation Members.  If you would like to use any of the talking points, please do so. You may copy and paste all or any part of the below letter onto your email that you are sending to your local State Senators and Delegates.  If you would like your personal letter posted on this site, please send it to Dan Seiler at dan.seiler@copscorp.com

_____________________________________________________________________________

Here is a letter from a public employee.....A STATE TROOPER.... about state pension benefits.  Keep in mind that O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake have for decades defunded these pensions with the knowledge that they would be renegotiated.  As the letter writer says access to health care will be extremely affected......THAT'S FOR WHAT THESE THIRD WAY POLS ARE GOING  ......FEWER PEOPLE GETTING ACCESS!


To: Maryland Legislature

Date: 3/20/2011

From: Dan Seiler

I am a retired State Trooper who retired with the expectation and hope that the State of Maryland would abide by legal or at least moral obligations to continue providing the same or better health care coverage.

During the time I served the State of Maryland, I would have never believed that the Maryland Legislature would ever propose bills that would reduce my standard of living!  My primary attraction to state service was a promise of life long health care.  This is why I am opposed to several sections in HB 72, SB87 and SB628 involving proposed cuts to retired and active State employee health care.

For many years the State of Maryland has made implied guarantees to provide State employees with health care that does not cause financial hardship.   The sponsors of these proposed legislative acts go against this promise.  The people most affected by these proposed bills would be the retired State employees.

For example a proposed provision in HB 72 and SB 87 allows the State to establish separate health insurance benefit coverage for retirees that differs from those for active state employees.  Proposed prescription drug coverage provisions in SB 628 show a drastically inequitable difference in coverage between active and retired State employees. This disparity would cause significant adverse financial impact on the retired State employees who are on fixed incomes and who do not receive full social security benefits.

As depicted in SB 628 any change in the current (COLA) Cost of Living Adjustment structure would aggravate even more the financial life altering burden on active and retired State workers making it difficult to keep pace with rising inflation.

I call on you as an elected member of the Maryland Legislature to find another way to balance the State Budget.

Respectfully,

Sgt. Dan Seiler – Retired
401 Thames Street
Hagerstown, Md.  21740

Email: dan.seiler@myactv.net



________________________________________________________

AS YOU SEE BELOW, THE PHYSICIANS FOR A NATIONAL HEALTH PROGRAM AS PUSHING FOR JUST THE PROGRAM WE NEED.  IN MARYLAND, OUR HEALTH CARE FOR ALL PUSHES THE PRIVATE HEALTH SYSTEM OF JOHNS HOPKINS WITH HEALTH CARE FOR THE VERY FEW AS INDICATED ABOVE.  WE HAVE NO ADVOCATES IN MARYLAND FOR UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE BECAUSE THE EMPHASIS IS FIRST PROFIT THEN PATIENT AND IT IS DRIVEN BY JOHNS HOPKINS.


YOU WILL NOTE THAT EVEN WHEN THE BEST ADVOCATE FOR THE PEOPLE SPEAKS,  A DOCTOR WILL NOT MENTION RETRIEVING TRILLIONS IN HEALTH FRAUD AS A STARTING POINT.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!



Physicians for a National Health Program, and founding member of Mad As Hell Doctors.

The Eighth Factor Driving Up Health Care Costs
By Samuel Metz, MD

The Bipartisan Policy Center, quoted in the Oct. 24 PBS NewsHour program, “Seven Factors Driving Up Your Health Care Costs,” missed the most expensive factor making the US the world’s costliest health care system, yet with the worst record in public health in the industrialized world.

Financing our health care system with American private insurance is an ongoing disaster. It leaves millions of us with limited or no access to health care. It consumes $350 billion in administration that might otherwise provide real health care. This factor dwarfs the effects of everything mentioned in the report.

Five of the factors described in this report (fee-for-service payment, increasingly older populations, demand for better treatment, limited information about best practices, and hospitals dominating a market) are also challenges in other industrialized countries. Yet these countries provide better care to more people for less money than we do.

A sixth factor in this study identifies a “strength”–the cost of patients  seeking care is low. That's because no other industrialized country uses high deductibles, high co-pays, excluded conditions, and lack of coverage for medications to discourage patients from seeking care. Apparently these more advanced countries believe that patients should not decide if they (or their family) need health care before seeing a physician, but that a physician should decide if a patient needs care after she sees the patient. Cost-sharing, or “skin in the game,” increases health care costs and worsens patient outcomes.

Yes, because barriers to seeking care are so low, patients in other industrialized countries see their physicians two to four times as frequently as we Americans do, and spend more time in the hospital. Yet these patients ultimately spend half what we spend, and they are healthier for it. Clearly, encouraging patients to seek care immediately brings costs down, not up, and improves public health.

What about the seventh factor, the ever-present spectre of lawsuits? Americans do pay far more to cover malpractice premiums and fund defensive medicine than our more civilized neighbors. But the $55 billion spent on premiums and unneeded treatment because of defensive practices is 2% of our $2.6 billion health care spending. We do need tort reform, but don’t expect tort reform to bring health care to more people or perceptibly reduce patient costs.

In contrast to this study, peer-reviewed comparisons of the US health care system to other industrialized countries identify one critical factor making ours the world’s worst: our insurance system that denies access to the sick, makes the healthy pay premium prices, and diverts premium dollars away from patient care and into administration.

American health care is not the industrialized world’s worst because our population is sicker, older, or abuses tobacco, alcohol, or food. Japan has an older population and their care is less. Americans have the lowest rate of smoking in the industrialized world (except for Sweden), and our high obesity rate is rapidly being approached by every other country. And what about the costs of these poor habits? The $350 billion lost to financing by American private insurance is more than what we spend on tobacco and obesity-related diseases combined.

American health care is not the industrialized world’s worst because our nurses, doctors, and hospitals are the worst in the world. On the contrary, wealthy people come to the US for some of the most advanced care in the world. The problem is that our citizens can’t access that care because they don’t have the money that wealthy foreigners do.

And that’s our more important problem in health care. Unlike the rest of the civilized world, we are alone in rationing care by the amount of money you have. Yes, we have the best care that money can buy, but if you have no money, you get no care. It’s that simple.

That points to the simple solution neglected by the Bipartisan Policy Center. A publicly funded, nationwide, universal health care system with no financial impediments to patients seeking care would provide comprehensive health care to every American for less money than we spend on health care now.

Eventually, each of the factors listed by the Bipartisan Policy Center deserves attention;  correcting them as best we can will improve efficiency. But if we want guaranteed lifetime access to care for our families, reduced costs to us, and better results, we must focus on the big enchilada, not the small potatoes: eliminate the American private insurance industry and create publicly funded universal care.

To help make this a reality, please visit Health Care for All-Oregon. We are an alliance of over 60 organizations who want this vision of better health care to start right here in our state. Find out how you can become an advocate for your family’s health care needs, how you can play a vital role in changing our health care system for the better, and help us turn Oregon into a shining example of cost-effective comprehensive health care for everyone. Join us!


Samuel Metz is a private practice anesthesiologist, HCAO representative from the Portland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, and founding member of Mad As Hell Doctors.





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October 27th, 2012

10/27/2012

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WHILE WE MUST VOTE FOR OBAMA OVER ROMNEY WE ARE WORKING TO BE RID OF THE INCUMBENT FARM TEAM......OUR POLITICIANS FOR LIFE.  AS WE MOVE AMERICA BACK TO BEING A DEMOCRACY AND A RULE OF LAW NATION, WE NEED TO BE RID OF ALL THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT INCUMBENTS.......WHICH ALL MARYLAND DEMOCRAT INCUMBENTS ARE! 

THE HIGHEST COMPLEMENT FOR ME IS HEARING SOMEONE TELL ME THEY WERE TOLD NOT TO BELIEVE THE BLOGGERS! IT MEANS WE ARE HAVING AN IMPACT.

REMEMBER, WE ARE MOBILIZING TO PETITION TO REFERENDUM IN BALTIMORE A RETROACTIVE TERM LIMIT ON ALL BALTIMORE'S ELECTED OFFICES AND THE RIGHT TO RECALL ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS IN BALTIMORE.  WE NEED TO ORGANIZE FOR SIGNATURE COLLECTION.  THE NEXT ELECTION IS IN TWO YEARS!!!!!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!

WE ARE VOTING FOR A WRITE-IN AGAINST CARDIN, SARBANES, AND CUMMINGS THIS ELECTION TO SEND THE MESSAGE THEY ARE NOT WORKING FOR THE PEOPLE AND BECAUSE:

THEY VOTED TO BREAK THE GLASS-STEAGALL BANKING WALL THAT UNLEASHED MEGA-CORPORATIONS THAT ARE UNACCOUNTABLE AND WORK TO IMPOVERISH PEOPLE.  THESE POLS KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN.

THEY HAD THE CHANCE WITH A SUPERMAJORITY TO ADDRESS ALL THE PROTECTIONS NEEDED FOR PEOPLE'S PENSIONS, RETIREMENTS, ENTITLEMENTS, AND SAFETY NET FUNDING.  NONE OF THESE PROTECTIONS HAPPENED.

THEY SPENT 2 YEARS ON FINANCIAL, HEALTH, AND EDUCATION REFORM ALL OF WHICH PROTECTS CORPORATE PROFITS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PEOPLE.  FINANCIAL REFORM HAS BEEN GUTTED BY BANKS.  HEALTH CARE REFORM IS ABOUT CREATING MEGA-HEALTH SYSTEMS THAT WILL PREY ON THE OLD AND POOR JUST LIKE WALL STREET BANKS.  IT IS MEANT TO MARGINALIZE MOST PEOPLE INTO PUBLIC HEALTH LEVEL OF CARE.  EDUCATION REFORM IS ABOUT PRIVATIZING/VOCATIONALIZING ALL PUBLIC EDUCATION.  THESE GUYS CHAMPIONED THIS!

THEY KEPT SILENT AND PRETENDED THERE WAS NO MASSIVE FINANCIAL FRAUD WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD SHOUTED AND PROVIDED COPIOUS PROOF OTHERWISE.  THEY WORKED TO CREATE THE CONDITIONS FOR FRAUD AND THEN PROTECTED THE FRAUDULENT PROFITS AND PEOPLE COMMITTING FRAUD.......THAT IS AIDING AND ABETTING ------A CRIME IN AND OF ITSELF!

THEY ALL PLAN TO CUT ENTITLEMENTS AND SAFETY NETS AS A COMPROMISE IN DEFICIT REDUCTION WHILE MASSIVE FRAUD NEVER COMES BACK AND TAXES ARE EVER LOWERED FOR THE CORPORATIONS CAUSING THE DEBT.  MAKING THE RICH PAY WHAT THE PEOPLE DO IS NOT A STRATEGY TO REVERSE INCOME INEQUITY.....IT INSTITUTIONALIZES IT.

THEY ARE SILENT AS BASIC DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS LIKE FREE ELECTIONS/FREE MEDIA/CIVIL LIBERTIES/RULE OF LAW ARE TOSSED ASIDE MOVING AMERICA EVER CLOSER TO THIRD WORLD STATUS.  AS AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA SAID.....THE US WILL LOOK LIKE THE MIDDLE EAST BY 2020.

THEY ARE PUSHING PRIVATIZING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC UNDER THE GUISE OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS WHICH ARE SIMPLY A WAY TO HAVE TAXPAYERS PAY FOR ALL CORPORATE INFRASTRUCTURE, OFFER FREE JOB TRAINING AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AND  BI-PASS ALL LABOR LAWS.  YOUR FIRST BORN CHILD IS NEXT!!!


REFERENDUM ISSUES:


1 AND 2.  WE ARE VOTING AGAINST REDISTRICTING MAP AND GAMBLING BECAUSE THE GERRYMANDERING WORKS AGAINST MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS CITIZENS AS IT WORKS TO GIVE CORPORATE INCUMBENTS GREATER STRENGTH AND GAMBLING EXTENDS THE FINANCIAL ECONOMY THAT IS PERVASIVELY CRIMINAL.  WE WANT AN ECONOMY THAT CREATES SOMETHING TANGIBLE AND PROVIDES QUALITY OF LIFE........IPADS VS SLOTS.

3 AND 4. WE SUPPORT THE DREAM ACT AND THE MARRIAGE EQUALITY ACT BUT IF THEY ARE VOTED DOWN WE INSIST THAT LIVING WAGE BE ADDED TO THE CIVIL/HUMAN RIGHTS AGENDA TO PASS NEXT YEAR!

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October 26th, 2012

10/26/2012

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I WILL END MY TALK ON TAX POLICY TODAY AS I KNOW IT IS BORING, BUT THE LOSS OF CORPORATE TAX REVENUE IS THE CAUSE OF STRUCTURAL BUDGET SHORTFALLS AT ALL LEVEL OF GOVERNMENT.  IF WE DO NOT TURN THIS AROUND AND RETURN TO CORPORATIONS AS GOOD CITIZENS WE WILL CEDE ALL SOCIAL PROGRAMS AND SERVICES THAT GIVE US A FIRST WORLD LIFE.

LAST YEAR THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY BROUGHT A BILL FORWARD THAT WOULD ADDRESS ONE OF THESE LOOPHOLES.....COMBINED REPORTING.....BUT IT FAILED TO PASS.  OUR LEGISLATORS THEN PROCEEDED TO TELL US THEY WOULD NOT BE ADDRESSING TAXES AGAIN FOR YEARS.  THEY WERE ABLE TO PASS LOTS OF TAX HIKES ON MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS MARYLANDERS AND A TEENY, TINY TAX ON THE RICH THAT O'MALLEY NEEDED IN ORDER TO SAY HE MADE THE RICH PAY IN HIS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN, BUT CORPORATIONS IN MARYLAND CONTINUE TO HAVE A FREE RIDE IN THE STATE.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!

PLEASE READ SO YOU CAN TELL YOUR INCUMBENT WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE!!!  PLEASE NOTE THAT THE STATES OF DELAWARE AND NEVADA.......THIRD WAY CORPORATE POLITICIANS JOE BIDEN AND HARRY REID ARE THE TOP CORPORATE AND WEALTH TAX HAVENS/OFF-SHORE SHELTER STATES IN THE COUNTRY!

Close Corporate Tax Loopholes

Maryland PIRG

PERVASIVE TAX AVOIDANCE—Across the country, some of the nation’s best-known companies—including GE, Google and Goldman Sachs—have avoided paying the taxes they owe, costing Marylanders $2.1 billion last year.

LOOPHOLES COST MARYLANDERS $2.1 BILLION No company should be able to game the tax system to avoid paying what it legitimately owes. And, yet, establishing shell companies in offshore havens for the purpose of tax avoidance is becoming more the rule than the exception for at least 83 of the nation's top 100 publicly traded companies. GE, Google, Goldman Sachs and dozens of others have created hundreds of phantom entities with nothing more than a clever tax attorney and P.O. box.

Official estimates of how much we lose in tax revenue are between $70 billion and $100 billion per year. That's money that is shouldered by average taxpayers, either through additional taxes today or additional debt to be paid by the next generation.

It’s not illegal, but it’s not right.

The result? The average taxpayer paid $472 more this year to cover the $100 billion that GE and others that use offshore tax havens skipped out on. And small businesses and companies that don’t use these schemes have to struggle to compete with those that do.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly and Congress are considering deep cuts for essential public programs — from education, to health care, to clean air and drinking water. They’re asking us to tighten our belts and make sacrifices while giving the tax haven crew a free ride.

We are pushing for common-sense changes that simply say that if corporations are based here and generate profits here, then they should, like all of us who earn income here, pay the taxes they owe.
___________________________________________________
  THIS IS WHAT CORPORATIONS HAVE PAID IN MARYLAND AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL STATE REVENUE FOR DECADES.  IF I HAD 2010 I BET IT WOULD BE LOWER.
 
Share of Total State Taxes Contributed by Corporate Income

  1979                      1989                           2000 


5.5%                         5.3%                          4.2%


THIS STUDY DOES A GOOD JOB EXPLAINING WHAT STATES NEED TO DO TO MAXIMIZE CORPORATE TAX REVENUE.  IT ALSO SHOWS THE DOWNSIDE WHEN THEY DON'T.  THERE ARE THREE EASY POLICY CHANGES THAT WOULD BRING BILLIONS MORE IN REVENUE.


Center For Budget and Policy Priorities  2003

Option 1
Some States Unnecessarily Cede Their Right to Tax Some Nonbusiness Income


Some 13 states (Maryland) levying corporate income taxes do not distinguish in their corporate tax laws between business and nonbusiness income.  These states require all multistate corporations that are subject to income taxation to apportion all of their income through the use of a formula.  This is a beneficial policy with respect to income earned in connection with extraordinary or irregular transactions by multistate corporations that are headquartered out of state.  In effect, the statutes of these 13 states require such corporations to treat as apportionable income all profits earned in connection with extraordinary transactions that the states are not barred from taxing by U.S. Supreme Court decisions — precisely the policy recommended by legal expert Walter Hellerstein.  (See the body of the report.)[34]

Nonetheless, with respect to corporations that are headquartered within their borders, these 13 "full apportionment" states may be unnecessarily ceding their ability to tax some corporate profit that they have the legal authority to tax.  For example, a multistate corporation headquartered in Delaware but with sales and facilities in other states might have a "35 percent Delaware apportionment factor."  This means that Delaware's apportionment calculation results in a finding that 35 percent of this corporation's nationwide income is to be taxed by Delaware.  Assume that this corporation earns a large capital gain from the sale of an asset that truly is non-apportionable income under U.S. Supreme Court standards, and assume further that no state other than Delaware would have the legal authority to tax the gain.[35]  Delaware would only seek to tax 35 percent of the gain because it treats all income as apportionable.  The other 65 percent of the gain would be "nowhere income" — profit untaxed by any state.  This result occurs despite Delaware's legal authority to tax 100 percent of the gain on the transaction.

Beyond resulting in an unnecessary relinquishing of revenues they could be collecting, the fact that 13 states do not seek to tax irregular income items received by corporations headquartered within their borders to the fullest extent permitted by Supreme Court decisions arguably has quite adverse consequences for the other corporate income tax states.  The tantalizing possibility that a substantial portion of a multi-billion-dollar capital gain could end up as "nowhere income" arguably encourages corporations to engage in much more aggressive tax-avoidance efforts than they otherwise might.

Take, for example, the recent case of Hercules, Inc., a Delaware-based chemical manufacturer.  Hercules was subject to a corporate income tax in at least four other states in addition to Delaware — Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.[36]  Hercules wanted to get out of the business of manufacturing a particular chemical.  It first spun-off the division manufacturing the chemical into a separate corporation, Himont, that was jointly owned with another corporation in the same business.  Then, a few years later, Hercules sold its 50 percent share of Himont to its partner, reaping approximately a $1.5 billion gain.  Right up to the time Hercules sold its interest, it was actively involved in the management of Himont and continued to purchase large amounts of the chemical from Himont as an input into other products Hercules continued to manufacture.  These facts lead many commentators to argue that the gain was apportionable income under both U.S. Supreme Court standards and the traditional "business income" definition.[37]  And, indeed, the court in Wisconsin so held.

Despite facts that strongly supported the conclusion that Hercules' gain on the sale of its Himont stock was apportionable business income, Hercules in fact reported the gain as nonbusiness income to Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.[38]  Leaving aside differences in corporate tax rates between Delaware and the other states in which Hercules was taxable, if Delaware's corporate tax law had required Hercules to allocate 100 percent of the Himont gain to Delaware as nonbusiness income, Hercules would have been largely indifferent as to whether it treated the gain as apportionable business income or allocable nonbusiness income; 100 percent of the gain would have been taxed in either event.  However, the fact that its headquarters state of Delaware was a tax haven with respect to nonbusiness income arguably provided a strong incentive for Hercules to take the aggressive position that the Himont gain was nonbusiness income.  If Hercules could block any of the states in which it was taxable from re-categorizing the Himont gain as business income, a portion of the gain would go untaxed by any state.  Hercules' aggressive posture paid off; courts in Illinois, Maryland and Minnesota held that the Himont gain was nonbusiness income that those states had no right to tax.

In sum, the states whose laws treat all corporate income as apportionable have — intentionally or unintentionally — implemented a beggar-thy-neighbor tax policy that may well encourage corporations to report as nonbusiness income certain major income items they would otherwise report as apportionable business income.[39]  (These 13 states include such major corporate headquarters states as Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, and Massachusetts.)  If these states enacted laws to implement a distinction between apportionable business income and allocable nonbusiness income, together with the expansive definition of business income recommended by Professor Hellerstein, they would realize additional revenue and reduce the amount of untaxed "nowhere income" received by major multistate corporations.

YOU CAN SEE APPORTIONABLE INCOME IS REPRESENTED BY MOST OF MARYLAND'S INDUSTRIES.

What is apportionable income?

Apportionable income is earned from engaging in the following activities:

  • Service and other activities,
  • Royalties,
  • Travel agents and tour operators,
  • International steamship agent, international customs house broker, international freight forwarder, vessel and/or cargo charter broker in foreign commerce, and/or international air cargo agent,
  • Stevedoring and associated activities,
  • Disposing of low-level waste,
  • Insurance producers, title insurance agents, or surplus line brokers,
  • Public or nonprofit hospitals,
  • Real estate brokers,
  • Research and development performed by nonprofit corporations or associations,
  • Inspecting, testing, labeling, and storing canned salmon owned by another person,
  • Representing and performing services for fire or casualty insurance companies as an independent resident managing general agent licensed under the provisions chapter 48.17 RCW,
  • Contests of chance,
  • Horse races,
  • International investment management services,
  • Aerospace product development,
  • Printing or publishing a newspaper (but only with respect to advertising income),
  • Printing materials other than newspapers and publishing periodicals or magazines (but only with respect to advertising income), and
  • Cleaning up radioactive waste and other by-products of weapons production and nuclear research and development, but only with respect to activities that would be taxable as an “apportionable activity” if this special tax classification did not exist.
__________________________________________

Many major corporations have implemented a corporate income tax avoidance strategy that is based on transferring ownership of the corporation's trademarks and patents to a subsidiary corporation located in a state that does not tax royalties, interest, or similar types of "intangible income."  The subsidiaries often are referred to as "passive investment companies" — "PICs" — and they are most often established in Delaware and Nevada.  (Delaware has a special income tax exemption for corporations whose activities are limited to owning and collecting income from intangible assets.  Nevada does not have a corporate income tax at all.)  Profits of the operational part of a business that otherwise would be taxable by the state(s) in which the company is located are siphoned out of such states by having the tax-haven subsidiary charge a royalty to the rest of the business for the use of the trademark or patent.  The royalty is a deductible expense for the corporation paying it, and so reduces the amount of profit such a corporation has in the states in which it does business and is taxable.  Moreover, the "profits" of the PIC often are loaned back to the rest of the corporation, and a secondary siphoning of income occurs through the payment of deductible interest on the loan.

Option 2: Closing the Trademark Income-Shifting Loophole

The other 22 corporate income tax states — Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin — and the District of Columbia could realize additional corporate income tax revenue if they adopted combined reporting or enacted laws modeled on those of Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio to shut down this widespread, abusive, and costly tax-avoidance technique.


________________________________________________
ALL OF THIS IS A GREAT BIG DEAL BECAUSE WE HEAR TIME AND AGAIN THAT THESE CORPORATIONS NEED EVEN MORE TAX REDUCTION TO STAY COMPETITIVE ABROAD.  THE US CORPORATE TAX IS NOT ONEROUS....IT IS IN THE MID-RANGE FOR ALL DEVELOPED COUNTRIES AND DOES NOT NEED TO GO LOWER.

IF WE DO NOT SHOUT LOUDLY AND STRONGLY TO STOP THIS.....YOUR FEDERAL INCUMBENT WILL LOWER CORPORATE RATES NEXT YEAR.  THAT ALSO EFFECTS WHAT STATES GET.

Why These Three Particular Loopholes May Warrant High-Priority Attention

There are a number of reasons these three particular corporate tax loopholes may warrant higher-priority attention from policymakers than other potential changes in state corporate income tax laws that also could raise additional revenue for states.  (Again, Table 2  (THIS WILL TAKE YOU TO THE REPORT) summarizes the states for which these three possible changes in corporate tax law are relevant.)

  • As measured by corporate tax revenue foregone, it seems likely that these provisions are among the most costly loopholes in state corporate tax systems.
  • Each of these loopholes can be closed easily, without any alteration of the basic structure of a state's corporate tax.  Indeed, two of the three changes — enacting the throwback rule and amending the definition of apportionable business income — usually involve adding or modifying a single sentence of text in the corporate tax law.
  • Making these changes in corporate tax law is likely to begin generating additional revenue fairly quickly.  There is relatively little ambiguity involved in what the changes require of corporations and thus relatively little discretion for corporations to interpret the new provisions in ways that would allow them to mitigate the impact of the changes on their tax liability.  Because the changes are relatively straightforward, corporations are likely to comply on their own rather than being compelled to comply by an audit and, perhaps, litigation.  As a result, states may well begin to receive additional revenue from these changes in the first quarterly estimated tax payments made by corporations after the changes go into effect.[30]


Finally, these changes enable states to pull into their corporate tax bases profits that currently are avoiding taxation completely.  This is inherently true with respect to enacting the throwback rule and eliminating the deduction for royalties and interest paid to related corporations in "tax haven" states.  It is also likely true of the third proposed change — adopting a more expansive definition of apportionable "business income."  (Again, see Appendix B for a discussion of how some states are effectively tax havens for nonbusiness income.)

Revitalizing the corporate income tax is likely to be a long-term project for most states, requiring numerous small reforms as well as fundamental changes in the underlying structure of the tax.  The current fiscal crisis provides an opportunity and an incentive for states to take some important first steps down this path.  The three corporate tax loopholes discussed in this report are among the most egregious provisions of any state tax.  All corporations benefit when states educate their future employees, protect their property, maintain the roads they use to get their products to market, and provide the court systems that adjudicate their contract disputes.  Before state policymakers deprive citizens of vitally-needed services or ask current taxpayers to pay higher taxes to close current budget gaps, they hopefully will make sure that all corporations are paying their fair share of the cost of state services that make an essential contribution to corporate profitability.






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October 25th, 2012

10/25/2012

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PLEASE PROTEST, RALLY, SHOUT TO YOUR POLS THAT WE WILL NOT LET CORPORATIONS PUSH ALL THEIR CORPORATE EXPENSE OFF ON THE PEOPLE!  WE WANT THEM PAYING 39% RATE WITH NO LOOPHOLES!


WE ARE GOING TO TALK TAXES/REVENUE FOR A FEW DAYS.  I MOSTLY FOCUS ON THE COPIOUS GIVE-A-WAY OF BUSINESS TAX CREDITS AND THE FACT THAT MUCH FRAUD IS HAPPENING.  AS WE KNOW, FRAUD AND CORRUPTION IS PERVASIVE IN MARYLAND AND AS SUCH WE DON'T HAVE TO LOOK FAR TO FIND MORE OPPORTUNITY FOR THE WEALTHY TO GET AWAY FROM PAYING TAXES. 

AS WE KNOW, MANY BUSINESSES DOING BUSINESS IN BALTIMORE COME FROM THE WASHINGTON SUBURBS (CAPITAL OF FRAUD) AND IF NOT THERE, THEN THE CORPORATIONS AND THEIR SUBCONTRACTORS ARE GENERALLY FROM OUT OF STATE.  IT IS THE RARE BIRD INDEED THAT GETS TO BE FROM THE BALTIMORE AREA AND BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN A SUBCONTRACTOR.  SO HOW DO ALL THESE BUSINESSES PAY TAXES?  FIRST, WE KNOW MARYLAND LOSES TAXES WHEN IT GOES WITH ALL THESE NATIONAL CORPORATIONS WHO SEND TAX MONEY BACK TO THEIR HOME STATES....CORPORATE AND EMPLOYEE.  THESE COMPANIES DO OWE SOME TAX FOR DOING BUSINESS IN MARYLAND.  LARGELY IT IS THE WASHINGTON SUBURB BUSINESSES THAT HAVE TAX RESPONSIBILITY FOR DOING BUSINESS.  THE TRICK IS THAT MOST OF THESE CORPORATIONS ARE DESIGNATED S CORPORATIONS AND AS SUCH, ALTHOUGH THEY DO OWE EMPLOYEE TAXES, THEY GET TO PUSH ALL TAXES ON PROFITS ON TO THEIR SHAREHOLDERS.  AS THE ARTICLES BELOW SHOW, IT IS HIGHLY LIKELY THAT NONE OF THESE ENTITIES ARE PAYING THOSE TAXES AT THE FEDERAL OR STATE LEVEL.

WE SEE THAT MARYLAND HAS A CORPORATE NET INCOME TAX RATE OF 8.25%.  I'M GOING TO ASK OUR STATE COMPTROLLER FRANCHOT HOW HE MAKES SURE THESE TAXES ARE PAID.  LOOK AS WELL AT THE PERSONAL NET INCOME TAX RATES TO SEE THAT A THIRD WAY DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP REFUSES TO TAX WEALTH AT A RATE WE NEED TO SEE TO REVERSE INCOME INEQUITY.  THE BRACKETS ADDED WERE UNDER A MILLION AND MARYLAND HAS LOTS OF WEALTHIER CITIZENS.

THE ARGUMENT IS THAT THESE CORPORATIONS OR WEALTHY PEOPLE WILL LEAVE THE STATE IF TAXES ARE HIGHER AND JOBS WILL BE LOST.  WE HAVE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WAITING TO OWN BUSINESSES THAT WILL GLADLY TAKE WHAT BUSINESS IS LEFT.  RIDDING OURSELVES OF THE STATE'S 1% WOULD BE CELEBRATED!

TAKE A LOOK AT THE END WHICH POLITICIANS IN ANNAPOLIS ALLOW THIS TAX SCAM TO HAPPEN AND WITH NO OVERSIGHT.  DEMAND THAT LAWS BE ENFORCED AND THAT EVERYONE PAY WHAT IS OWED FROM THE PAST, PRESENT, AND INTO THE FUTURE.  THIS HAS BECOME STATUS QUO BECAUSE THE SAME PEOPLE ARE SEND BACK YEAR AFTER YEAR!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE

FRANCHOT, MCFADDEN, BRANCH, JONES-RODWELL, AND JON CARDIN.......WHY ARE YOU NOT SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY ABOUT ALL THE TAX REVENUE LOST ON S CORPORATION LAW AND LACK OF OVERSIGHT AT BOTH THE FEDERAL AND STATE LEVEL?

Maryland Business Corporate Tax, Maryland Personal Income Tax, Maryland Sales Tax Rates

What is the Maryland corporate net income tax rate(s)? 8.25%

What is the Maryland personal net income tax rate(s)?
0-1,000 2%
1,000-2,000 3%
2,000-3,000 4%
3,000-150,000 4.75%  MOST OF US FALL HERE
150,000-300,000 5%
300,000-500,000 5.25%
500,000-1 million 5.5%
1 million + 6.25% MOST OF MARYLAND'S WEALTH IS HERE...ONLY 1.5% HIGHER THAN US EVEN FOR BILLIONAIRES

There are also a lot of local income taxes with a average rate of 3%

What is the average Maryland sales tax rate(s)? 6%

______________________________________________________________________________

BELOW YOU SEE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STATING THAT THERE IS CONCERN AS TO WHETHER CORPORATIONS AND SHAREHOLDERS ARE PAYING THEIR TAXES.  MOST CORPORATIONS THESE DAYS ARE S CORPORATIONS BECAUSE, AS YOU SEE BELOW, THEY CAN GET AWAY MORE EASILY FROM PAYING ANY TAXES.  NOW, WHILE S CORPORATIONS MOVE THE BURDEN OF TAX PAYING ONTO SHAREHOLDERS, THEY ARE STILL REQUIRED TO PAY TAXES FOR THE WORK THAT SHAREHOLDERS DO IN THIS PROCESS.  NOT ONLY ARE THE SHAREHOLDERS NOT REPORTING THESE GAINS, THEY ARE NOT REPORTING WORK DONE AND TAXES OWED BY CORPORATIONS.

SO, YOU LOOK AT MARYLAND WHO HAS AN 8.25% S CORPORATION TAX ON MARYLAND BUSINESSES AND BUSINESSES DOING BUSINESS IN MARYLAND.  WHAT ARE THE CHANCES THAT A STATE HAVING HARDLY ANY OVERSIGHT AND AUDITING HAS EVEN LOOKED INTO THIS?  THAT'S RIGHT......NIL.

LET'S ASK THE STATE COMPTROLLER THIS QUESTION......FRANCHOT.



IRS study of S corporation reporting compliance 

Wikipedia

In 2005, the IRS launched a study to assess the reporting compliance of S corporations[7] The study began in late 2005 and examined 5,000 randomly selected S corporation returns from tax years 2003 and 2004. The IRS intends to use the results to measure compliance in recording of income, deductions and credits from S corporations, and to formulate future audit criteria to better target likely non-compliant returns. This is part of a larger IRS effort to improve tax compliance and reduce the estimated $300 billion gap in gross reported figures each year. A large portion of that gap is thought to come from small businesses, and particularly S corporations, which are now the most common corporate entity, numbering over 3 million in 2002, up from about 750,000 in 1985.     _________________________________________________
NOW, WE ARE SEEING A GREAT DEAL OF MARYLAND'S AND BALTIMORE'S CONTRACT BIDDING GOING TO BUSINESSES OUT OF STATE.  IF THEY ARE IN STATE, THEY WILL BRING SUBCONTRACTORS IN FROM OUT OF STATE.  SO, WHO TRACKS TAX OBLIGATIONS IF SHAREHOLDERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAXES AND THESE COMPANIES ARE REGISTERED IN OTHER STATES?

YOU CAN SEE THIS IS A COMPLEX FINANCIAL INSTRUMENT AND THERE IS A 99.999% CHANCE THAT NO ONE IS PAYING TAXES THAT ARE OWED.  THIS IS WHY THEY DO IT.  MARYLAND COMPANIES WORK ELSEWHERE AND ESCAPE ALL SCRUTINY.  ADD TO THAT THE IDEA OF INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS WHICH IS A GROWING JOB CLASSIFICATION AND YOU SEE WE ARE LOSING ALL CORPORATE TAX REVENUE.  THE BUSINESS TAX CREDITS SIMPLY EXTEND THAT TO PROPERTY TAXES AND LOCAL SERVICE TAXES.
                          

Maryland    

Tax Rate                   Brackets      
   8.25%                         $0 


Pass-Through Entities A pass-through entity is required to file Maryland Form 510, Pass-through Entity Income Tax Return, if the entity is formed or incorporated in Maryland, does business in Maryland, or has Maryland income (or losses). The following are pass-through entities:

  • Partnerships, as defined in § 761 of the Internal Revenue Code.
  • Limited liability companies (defined under Title 4A of the Corporations and Associations Article of the Maryland Code Annotated) classified as partnerships, as defined in § 761 of the Internal Revenue Code, and not taxed as a corporation or disregarded as an entity.
  • S corporations, as defined in § 1361 of the Internal Revenue Code.
  • Business trusts, treated as partnerships, as defined in § 761 of the Internal Revenue Code.


Nonresident members

If a pass-through entity has a nonresident member and any nonresident taxable income, then the pass-through entity is subject to the Maryland income tax. The pass-through entity is taxed on the nonresident taxable income, which is the sum of the nonresident members' distributive or pro-rata shares of the pass-through entity's income allocable to Maryland.

A "nonresident member" includes a nonresident individual member (defined as a person or fiduciary) and a nonresident entity member. A nonresident entity member is a corporation or pass-through entity that is not qualified or registered with the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation to do business in Maryland or not formed under Maryland law.

If you meet the federal tax law requirements to operate as an S corporation, the IRS allows your business to "pass through" its income to the shareholders. This means that your business will not pay any corporate level federal income tax. However, you'll have to claim your entire share of the business income on your personal federal income tax return even if you did not take any money out of the business.  DO YOU THINK THAT CHECK IS MADE? In Maryland, the law extends this favorable tax treatment to state corporate income tax liability for resident members and S corporations with only resident members will not be subject to the corporate income tax.



HERE ARE THE RESULTS OF THE STUDY FROM 2005.  WHAT WE SEE IS ACROSS THE BOARD DISREGARD TO THESE TAX LAWS AND HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS/TRILLIONS IN TAX REVENUE LOST AND THIS HAS BEEN THE STATUS QUO FOR DECADES.  SIMPLY AUDITING AND BRINGING THIS MONEY BACK TO GOVERNMENT COFFERS WOULD MAKE THE WEALTHY PAY THEIR FARE SHARE.

HAVE YOU HEARD YOUR INCUMBENT SHOUT LOUDLY ABOUT MASS DISREGARD OF TAX PAYMENTS BY CORPORATIONS/SHAREHOLDERS AS THEY TELL YOU THEY MUST CUT PUBLIC SPENDING TO PAY DOWN THE DEFICIT?


Tax Gap Actions Needed to Address Noncompliance with S Corporation Tax Rules GAO-10-195,
Dec 15, 2009
Contact: Michael Brostek
(202) 512-9039
contact@gao.gov
Office of Public Affairs
(202) 512-4800
youngc1@gao.gov

S corporations are one of the fastest growing business types, accounting for nearly 4 million businesses in 2006. However, long-standing problems with S corporation compliance produce revenue losses in individual income taxes and employment taxes. GAO was asked to (1) describe the reasons businesses choose to become S corporations, (2) analyze types of S corporation noncompliance, what IRS has done to address noncompliance, and options to improve compliance, and (3) further analyze the extent of shareholder compensation noncompliance and identify options for improving compliance. GAO analyzed IRS research and examination data; interviewed IRS officials, examiners and other knowledgeable stakeholders; and reviewed relevant literature.

An S corporation is a federal business type that provides certain tax and other benefits, including a single level of taxation, limited employment taxes, and the ability to pass through business losses to shareholder returns. Single-level taxation can reduce overall taxes assessed based on business income, and applying business losses to individual returns can decrease shareholder tax obligations. S corporations also benefit from limited liability protection. According to IRS data, about 68 percent of S corporation returns filed for tax years 2003 and 2004 (the years data were available) misreported at least one item. About 80 percent of the time, misreporting provided a tax advantage to the corporation and/or shareholder. The most frequent errors involved deducting ineligible expenses, which could decrease S corporation shareholder tax liabilities. Even though a majority of S corporations used paid preparers, 71 percent of those that did were noncompliant. Stakeholder representatives said that preparer mistakes may be due to the lack of preparer standards as well as their misunderstanding of the tax rules. Shareholders of S corporations also made mistakes in calculating basis - their ownership share of the corporation - when taking losses passed to them from the corporation, potentially decreasing their total taxes. IRS officials as well as stakeholder representatives said that calculating and tracking basis was one of the biggest challenges for shareholders, and that S corporations themselves were in a better position in most cases to calculate basis for their shareholders. Some S corporations also failed to pay adequate wages to shareholders for their labor for the corporation, which led to underpaying employment taxes. Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) reports show that inadequate shareholder wage compensation is a significant issue. Using IRS data, GAO calculated that in the 2003 and 2004 tax years, the net shareholder compensation underreporting equaled roughly $23.6 billion, which could result in billions in annual employment tax underpayments. Stakeholder representatives, IRS officials, and TIGTA have indicated that determining adequate shareholder compensation is highly subjective and hinders compliance and enforcement. IRS provides limited guidance on determining adequate compensation. Stakeholder representatives indicated that specific IRS guidance for both new and existing S corporations could help improve compliance. Additionally, IRS examiners often were not taking advantage of certain techniques in examining shareholder compensation. Analyzing a random sample of IRS examinations, GAO found that in cases where IRS examiners did document a form of analysis, they were more likely to make an adjustment than when no evidence of such analysis existed. Currently, IRS does not require specific documentation of their analysis for shareholder compensation by examiners. Legislative options exist to improve compliance with shareholder compensation rules; however, these options also raise notable trade-offs.


THESE POLITICIANS BELOW SHOULD BE SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY THAT THESE S CORPORATIONS ARE NOT ONLY AVOIDING OVERSIGHT AT STATE AND NATIONAL LEVELS, THE SHAREHOLDERS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE TAX ARE AS WELL.  WE WANT OUR MONEY FROM THESE PEOPLE/CORPORATIONS FROM THE PAST AND IN THE FUTURE!


Senate Budget and Taxation (B&T)


Chair: Edward J. Kasemeyer

Vice Chair: Nathaniel J. McFadden
                   David R. Brinkley Republican, District 4, Carroll & Frederick Counties  

Nancy J. King Democrat, District 39, Montgomery County

Richard F. Colburn

Richard S. Madaleno, Jr.Democrat, District 18, Montgomery County

Ulysses Currie Democrat, District 25, Prince George's County

Roger P. Manno

James E. DeGrange, Sr.

Douglas J. J. Peters

George C. Edwards

James N. Robey

Verna L. Jones-Rodwell

Delegate Ways and Means (W&M)

Chair: Sheila E. Hixson

Vice Chair: Samuel I. Rosenberg Kathryn L. Afzali

Anne R. Kaiser

Kumar P. Barve

Eric G. Luedtke

Joseph C. Boteler III

Aruna Miller

Talmadge Branch

LeRoy E. Myers, Jr.

Jon S. Cardin

Justin D. Ross

Mark N. Fisher

Andrew A. Serafini

C. William Frick

Melvin L. Stukes

Ron George

Michael Summers

Glen Glass

Frank S. Turner

Carolyn J. B. Howard

Jay Walker

Jolene Ivey
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October 24th, 2012

10/24/2012

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THIS IS MY LAST FOR NOW ON EDUCATION.  PLEASE REALIZE THAT WHAT IS HAPPENING TODAY IS 20 YEARS IN THE MAKING AND IT IS SOLELY MEANT TO CHANGE EDUCATION IN AMERICA FROM DEMOCRATIC TO VOCATIONAL.  WE CAN STOP IT.  SIMPLY SHOUT OUT LOUDLY AND STRONGLY AND

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!
BEING ABLE TO READ, WRITE, AND DO MATH IS A BASIC RIGHT IN AMERICA THAT CAN'T BE IGNORED BECAUSE OF COST.  THAT IS FIRST WORLD.

AS ONE WHO RIDES PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION I CAN ATTEST TO A PATTERN OF POLS WANTING CHANGE LETTING THINGS HAVING POPULAR APPEAL ERODE AND THEN DECLARE THEM UNMANAGEABLE.  WE SEE THAT WITH PUBLIC PENSIONS, CITY COMMUNITIES, AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS.  I GRADUATED IN 1992 WITH AN ADVANCED EDUCATION DEGREE AND MY INSTRUCTOR SAID TO THE CLASS 'THESE ARE DARK TIMES FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION'.....IN 1992.  THAT IS WHEN THE 1% ELITE SCHOOLS CHANGED TEACHING STYLE IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS TOWARDS ANTI-TEXTBOOK/READING AND NO BAD GRADES SO AS TO MOVE KIDS ALONG UNPREPARED.  THIS WAS A DELIBERATE POLICY TO CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE THE PUBLIC WOULD BE DESPERATE FOR ANY CHANGE IN SCHOOLS....WHICH IS WHERE WE ARE NOW.  PARENTS THINK PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE TERRIBLE SO A CHANGE WILL BE BETTER......THAT WAS THE PLAN.  LOWER QUALITY EDUCATION MAKES FOR HIGH REMEDIAL NEEDS AFTER K-12 GRADUATION.  TODAY, WHEN YOU ARE MAKING EDUCATION COST EFFECTIVE, REMEDIAL HAS TO GO.  SO WE ARE SEEING GED CLASSES BECOME JOB TRAINING AND NOW COLLEGE REMEDIAL DISAPPEARING, PUSHING THOSE STUDENTS INTO 'CAREER COLLEGES'.  YOU'LL NOTE THAT CONNECTICUT IS THIRD WAY DEMOCRAT AND RICH JUST LIKE MARYLAND.  WHY THE HIGH REMEDIAL RATE IN RICH DEMOCRATIC STATES?

MARYLAND IS ENDING REMEDIAL STUDIES AT COLLEGE LEVEL.  THESE 'DEVELOPMENTAL' COURSES THAT SEND THE STUDENT RIGHT TO CREDITED COURSES IS NOT A BAD IDEA BUT WHAT IT DOES IS CAUSE MANY STUDENTS WHO WOULD BE APPLYING DECIDE AGAINST.  THAT MAY BE WHY STATISTICS THAT LOOK AT IMPROVED ACHIEVEMENT EXIST.....YOU ONLY KEEP THE MOST ABLE IN THE PROGRAM.  THAT IS NOT BAD IF YOU ADDRESS THOSE WHO ARE LEFT WITH A HIGH SCHOOL DEGREE BUT CAN'T READ, WRITE, OR DO MATH.  THAT IS THE CATCH.....TO SAVE MONEY THESE PEOPLE WILL BE SENT TO LOW-END VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS WITH NO FURTHER OPPORTUNITY TO ADVANCE.  WAS REMEDIAL EDUCATION FAILING OR WAS IT JUST DEEMED A COST TO BE CUT?
Does U.S. School Reform Need to Be Reformed?
By: Kelly Chen AMERICAN GRADUATE -- October 5, 2012 at 10:47 AM EDT

The Obama Administration's effort to turn around failing schools under the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program is in need of drastic reform, says a new report by the National Education Policy Center.

The report argues that the SIG program forces schools to "run like corporations" by emphasizing student test scores to demonstrate improvement.
PLEASE READ THIS REPORT!

Since 2009, school districts have been able to tap into $3 billion of SIG funds to aggressively and rapidly overhaul underachieving schools by following one of four intervention models:

  • Turnaround: The principal and at least half of the school's staff are replaced.
  • Restart: The school closes and reopens as a charter school.
  • School Closure: The school shuts down and students are transferred to a better achieving school.
  • Transformation: Under leadership of a new principal, schools focus on teacher development, job training and community-based engagement.
The authors of the brief, Tina Trujillo of the University of California-Berkeley and Michelle Renée of Brown University, argue that the "SIG program treats our lowest-performing schools as corporations and fails to engage educators and families in the most racially and socio-economically segregated communities."

At an event at the National Press Club on Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan defended the program, citing that many schools under the SIG program have made great improvements, especially when it comes to gains in reading and math.

BELOW YOU SEE TWO THIRD WAY DEMOCRATIC, WEALTHY AND CORPORATE STATES TAKE ON EDUCATION REFORM IN AN EFFORT TO REIGN IN COST.  REMEMBER, WE SHOUTED FOR DECADES THAT SCHOOLS WERE UNDERFUNDED AND NOW WE SEE THESE POLS CUTTING EVEN MORE......ALL BECAUSE OF MASSIVE FRAUD AND CORPORATIONS NOT PAYING TAXES!

How to End Remediation
April 4, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain  Inside Higher Ed

Depending on whom you ask, a remedial education fix on the table in Connecticut is either appropriately bold or a ham-handed flop in the making.

What’s certain is that the legislative proposal to end separate remedial classes at public colleges – all of them – is the first such policy experiment of its kind. Some colleges around the nation have embedded remedial education in conventional, credit-bearing classes, and done so with successful results in selected courses, generally assisted by grants. But no state has previously sought to completely abolish remedial classes, observers said.

The bill in Connecticut, which the General Assembly’s higher education committee passed last month, would require the state’s public institutions to eliminate non-credit stand-alone remedial classes by the fall of 2014. Under the policy, students who need remedial (or developmental) coursework would be placed into entry-level, credit-bearing courses and receive “embedded remedial support.” They would also be required to take an “intensive college readiness program” before the semester’s start. Currently an estimated 70 percent of students at the state’s 12 community colleges take at least one remedial class during their first year of enrollment.

I SPOKE WITH SEVERAL STUDENTS OF THE CCBC  IN THE ARTICLE BELOW.  THEY SHOWED ME THEIR TEXT WHICH IS JUST A BINDER WITH LOOSE PAGES, THEY TOLD ME HOW THEY SAT AT THE COMPUTER AND WORKED AND WORKED, AND THEY SAID THEY HAD ALMOST NO CONTACT WITH AN INSTRUCTOR.  ONE STUDENT FELT HE SPENT TOO MUCH OF HIS OWN TIME HELPING OTHERS....HE WAS THE CLASS AID.  NONE THAT I INTERVIEWED LIKED OR FOUND THIS PROCESS GOOD.

Maryland Community Colleges Taking A Different Approach To Remedial Coursework: PBS Posted: 06/22/2012 1:22 pm Updated: 06/22/2012 1:24 pm

  About 1.7 million students nationwide are enrolled in remedial courses at a cost of $3 billion to U.S. taxpayers. These developmental classes -- often taken on a non-credit basis -- are largely unsuccessful at catching students up so that they are adequately prepared for ensuing credit-earning coursework. Many at the community college level end up dropping out.

According to Stan Jones of Complete College America, remedial classes bring in much-needed tuition revenue that in turn supports other academic departments. In this way, remediation operates as a cash cow for colleges.

PBS NewsHour producer John Tulenko profiled two Maryland community colleges that are taking different approaches to the problem of developmental coursework.

At Anne Arundel Community College, instructors gave students the opportunity to take classes online, to account for the fact that many come in having received varying levels of instruction in different subjects. By taking classes on a computer, students are “working where they need to work,” according to math department chair Alicia Morse.

“Lecture classes don’t allow that flexibility,” she says.

The computer provides small video lectures, power points and step-by-step solutions. Students at Anne Arundel Community College attend lab classes once a week, but can also work online or on their smart phones in order to finish the course sooner.

The community college also offers mini modules — short, computer-based courses targeting areas of weakness — as an alternative to semester-long remediation.

The passing rate for basic skills math is up from 50 percent to 60 percent thanks to the college’s online initiative.

At the Community College of Baltimore County, remedial writing courses had a nearly 70 percent dropout rate, prompting Peter Adams — who teaches basic skills writing — to propose a new approach.

Today, developmental students are immediately enrolled in a full-credit English 101 class, along with their better-prepared peers. Afterwards, students in need of more help meet with the teacher for an extra hour of instruction.

“The student no longer sees the developmental class as a hurdle keeping them from English 101. They’re in English 101, and the developmental class is something they’re taking that will help them in the class. So you no longer have to say ‘This will be really useful next semester.’ It’s useful right now,” Adams says.

Basic skills writing has gone from a 70 percent failure rate, to a 70 percent pass rate.


_______________________________________________________
BELOW YOU SEE AN ARTICLE FROM 1992, THE YEAR THIS 'DUMBING DOWN' OF PUBLIC EDUCATION WAS EMBRACED FULL FORCE AND AS YOU SEE TODAY, IT HAS CREATED SUCH A WIDESPREAD LEVEL OF MISSED ACHIEVEMENT TO STYMY A FEW GENERATIONS AND LEFT PEOPLE TO BE FUNNELED INTO VOCATIONAL FUTURES RATHER THAN PROFESSIONAL.  REMEMBER, THE ELITE SCHOOLS AS LEADERS DON'T WANT THOSE PESKY EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EDUCATION POLICIES IN THE WAY.....WHICH CHARTER SCHOOLS WORK AROUND.  NOW, THIS WAS NOT RACE SPECIFIC, IT WAS CLASS DRIVEN AND IT EXTENDED WELL INTO THE MIDDLE-CLASS SCHOOLS.

SCHAEFER STARTED THE MOVE TOWARDS MEGA-WEALTH /MEGA-INSTITUTIONS AS CLINTON WAS COMING INTO OFFICE AND DOING THE SAME ON A NATIONAL LEVEL.  THE INNER HARBOR WENT FROM BEING A MIX OF LOW/MIDDLE-CLASS BUSINESSES TO A GROUP OF NATIONAL CHAINS AND IS ON OVERDRIVE NOW THAT THE MASSIVE FRAUD MOVED TRILLIONS TO THE TOP.  THIS ALL ADVANCED FROM THE REAGAN/THATCHER YEARS WHEN EMPIRE BUILDING TOOK HOLD.  THE THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS STARTED AT THIS TIME.  ALTHOUGH ALL THIS WAS A GRAND PLAN KNOWN AT THE TOP, THE MEDIA FAILED, AND IS STILL FAILING TO EDUCATE PEOPLE AS TO THE POLICY GOALS.

IT MAY HAVE SOUNDED LIKE A NOBLE GOAL IN 1992, BUT WE SEE WHERE IT IS LEADING TODAY!



Businesses urged to help schools Governor calls on businesses to improve public schools.

January 07, 1992|By Harry Milling | Harry Milling,Special to The Evening Sun

Gov. William Donald Schaefer has challenged Maryland's business community "to mix it up" with the state's politicians to improve Maryland's ailing public school system.

The challenge came yesterday at the State House in Annapolis as the governor and the Maryland Business Roundtable for Education launched a joint venture by the corporate community and the state to improve education.

The Roundtable is under the auspices of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce and Maryland Economic Development Associates, a quasi-public economic development group more commonly known as MEGA.

After urging the roomful of business leader to actively support politicians campaigning for educational reform, the governor said:

"This is the greatest opportunity we have. Nancy Grasmick [the state superintendent of schools] can do it, but you have to help her. You have the power."

The state and the Roundtable, more than 50 representatives from some of Maryland's largest firms, have agreed on ways in which corporate expertise in management and technology can be used to improve school management and teaching instruction on a statewide basis.

For such partnership programs to improve public education, said David Kearns, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and former chief executive officer of the Xerox Corp., they must lead to systemic changes in a public educational system that is hostile to change.

Among the recommended priorities would be to use corporate expertise to improve mathematics and science instruction and to provide management training to principals to improve school-based management.  MIND YOU THIS WAS 20 YEARS AGO.

"This is a way of bringing people [in education] into the business world to tell us what's needed in education," said Norman R. Augustine, co-chairman of the Roundtable and chairman and chief executive officer of Martin-Marietta. "There is already a lot going on . . . [but] those in the trenches know the problem better than those observing from afar."

Any statewide programs created by the partnership will work toward reaching the educational standards set for the state by Maryland's educational reform initiative "Schools for Success" and by the national educational reform initiative "America 2000," officials said.

Because Maryland corporations hire graduates of the Maryland public school system, businesses must help to create a top-notch public school system, Augustine said.

"Higher education and business are spending more on remedial education, and remedial education is [now] becoming institutionalized," Kearns said. "For example, one can get college credit for remedial courses."  THAT'S BECAUSE THESE CLASSES WERE INTEGRATED JUST AS THEY ARE DOING NOW (ABOVE)

Some members of the Roundtable characterized the public education systems of some Asian and European countries as superior to American education. They linked improvement of public education in Maryland with the ability of Maryland businesses to compete in a global economy.  WHAT THESE GUYS LIKED WAS EUROPE'S EMPHASIS ON VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS WHICH WAS/IS THEIR DIRECTION.  SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT WAS NOT THAT BAD BACK THEN.

Members of the partnership's working committee, composed of Roundtable members and state education officials who will be setting the partnership agenda this year, are telling corporations to urge their employees to participate in mentoring programs at public schools and to start playing an active role in their children's schools.

Augustine said the Baltimore schools that are not close to corporate offices or well attended by children of corporate executives still could benefit from these programs.

Donald P. Hutchinson, president of MEGA, said the partnership programs will be equally accessible across the state since it is working toward sponsoring training programs in which teachers could participate statewide.

In a speech, June Streckfus, director of educational and governmental affairs for MEGA, imitated cartoon character Elmer Fudd and the CEOs erupted in laughter, but they were silent when the floor was opened up to their suggestions.

Augustine said this did not reflect their skittishness. Roundtable members have been discussing issues concerning the partnership within the Roundtable's working committee, he said.






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October 23rd, 2012

10/23/2012

0 Comments

 
BELOW YOU'LL SEE MY COMMENT AND A COMMENT FROM A UNIVERSITY TEACHER REGARDING ALL THE PRESS THAT PAINTS THIS EDUCATION FUNDING CRISIS ON DECLINING STATE AND LOCAL FUNDS.  WE WATCH THE EDUCATION JOBS STIMULUS TAKE THE FORM OF UNIVERSITY CONSTRUCTION  AS QUALITY EDUCATION FAILS TO REACH THE GENERAL PUBLIC. WE MUST BE AWARE THAT THESE POLICIES ARE NOT ABOUT GIVING QUALITY EDUCATION TO YOUR FAMILY AND MINE, IT IS ABOUT MARKETING EDUCATION GLOBALLY TO ATTRACT PEOPLE WHO CAN PAY THE HIGHEST PRICE AND IT IS ABOUT MOVING THE COSTS OF CORPORATE OPERATIONS TO THE PUBLIC.  WHETHER WE LOOK AT K-12 OR TODAY AT UNIVERSITY, THE COMMON THEME IS THAT TEACHERS AND STUDENTS ARE GETTING LESS AND CORPORATIONS/THE AFFLUENT ARE GETTING MORE.

WE KEEP SAYING AFFLUENT LIKE IT IS A DIRTY WORD.  IT WOULDN'T BE IF THESE POLICIES WERE FAIR AND NOT EXPLOITATIVE.  THE AFFLUENT ARE CATEGORIZED AS THE 'SHAREHOLDER CLASS'....THE 5%.... MAKING ABOUT $200,000 OR MORE.  IN OTHER WORDS THEY HAVE MONEY ENOUGH TO LIVE A GOOD QUALITY LIFE AND HAVE THE DISPOSABLE INCOME TO HAVE SIZABLE INVESTMENTS IN THE STOCK MARKET.  THEY ARE FOR WHOM CORPORATE POLITICIANS WORK.  OBAMA'S POLICIES AS IS TRUE OF MARYLAND'S POLICIES ARE GEARED TO THIS GROUP AND THEY ARE ONLY 5% OF THE POPULATION!  THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE NOW IN THE RANGE OF $40,000 TO $100,000 AND WITH MORE AND MORE COSTS LIKE HEALTH CARE CO-PAYS, COMMUNICATIONS,  AND RISING RETIREMENT, TUITION, AND COMMODITY COSTS, THESE INCOMES ARE NO LONGER PROVIDING GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE OR MUCH DISPOSABLE INCOME.

AND MOST OF THE JOBS THEY ARE SENDING OUR WAY LOWER SALARIES EVER MORE SO MORE AND MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING PUSHED INTO THIS CATEGORY.  IF YOU ARE NOT SHOUTING ABOUT THIS IT WILL CONTINUE TO GET WORSE. YOU SEE BELOW A COLLEGE PROFESSOR THAT SPEAKS OUT AGAINST SLAVE LABOR.....THIS IMPOVERISHMENT IS PERVASIVE AT ALL LEVELS.

IS YOUR INCUMBENT SHOUTING AGAINST THIS OR VOTING FOR IT....IN MARYLAND, THEY ARE ALL VOTING FOR IT.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!


We all know the money lost by states and localities in corporate taxes and corporate fraud is the reason state funding is dropping.  We know the 'innovation centers' designed to move corporate R and D and job training to the public created huge administrative costs that are transferred to the student's tuition.  Stop all that and invest in the classrooms and teachers!


JOIN ANA BY SIGNING HER PETITION AND START YOUR OWN!
IT IS VERY SERIOUS WHEN THE TEACHERS ARE SIMPLY BUSINESS PEOPLE BECAUSE A LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IS ABOUT BUILDING CITIZENS NOT WORKERS.

Ana M. Fores

"Because state funding is likely limited in many other states, other public universities are trying to find some other benefit they can extract in exchange for holding tuition steady." Why don't they look at their construction, or their overburdened administration, which gets paid bundles, and look less at increasing their overstaffed and underpaid contingency academic force --the educators who really should be paid much better than they are-- to balance their budgets? Right now universities are using over 70% adjunct labor, equalling the "migrant force" of academia. They should be ashamed of the tactics they use. Don't be fooled. These slave labor wages they pay have not driven down tuition dollars, yet they will drive down students' education. Sign and share my petition, and make it spread like wildfire: only in returning the university to its educators, and not to a burgeoning and fattened administration where it is now, will students really be able to learn. http://signon.org/sign/better-...

Ana M. ForesNFM, Southern Region

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AS WE SEE WITH MARYLAND'S GOVERNOR AND BY EXTENSION BALTIMORE'S MAYOR SINCE SHE HANDED BALTIMORE'S SCHOOLS TO GOVERNOR O'MALLEY, THERE IS A PUSH TO STAFF ALL OF STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC EDUCATION AGENCIES WITH CORPORATE-MINDED PROFESSIONALS.  HISTORICALLY ACADEMICS LED THE SCHOOLS AND NOW WE SEE A PUSH TOWARDS PEOPLE WITH MBA's.  SHOUT OUT AGAINST THIS STAFFING OF OUR SCHOOL ADMINISTRATIONS WITH CORPORATE TYPES!

Connecticut Regents Disavow Purported Buyouts of 2-Year-College Chiefs

October 17, 2012 - 3:00am  Inside Higher Ed

The chairman of the board that governs Connecticut's public four- and two-year colleges has rescinded a proposed buyout that officials of the public-college system purportedly offered to presidents of the state's community colleges last month. That incident, which infuriated some of the two-year-college leaders, triggered a series of events that led to the resignations of the top two officials of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, President Robert A. Kennedy and Michael Meotti, the executive vice president. "The Board has not authorized any such arrangement and to the extent such an arrangement was offered at that time or thereafter, it is hereby rescinded," Lewis J. Robinson, chairman of the Board of Regents for Higher Education, said in an e-mailed statement late Tuesday.

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SO AS WAYS TO BRING DOWN THE COSTS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION ARE YOUR INCUMBENT'S PRIORITY, THE POLICY REDUCING THE COSTS OF HIGHER EDUCATION FOR ELITE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS GET STRONGER.  NOT ONLY WILL THE AFFLUENT WRITE OFF MUCH OF THEIR HIGH UNIVERSITY TUITION PAID FOR BY YOU AND I, THEY ARE GETTING LARGE TAX WRITE-OFFS FROM POLICY THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT IS TARGETING THE LOWER/MIDDLE CLASS.  THIS IS HAPPENING WITH DEMOCRATIC SUPERMAJORITIES WITH THIRD WAY LEADERSHIP.  REMEMBER, THIS IS THE SAME TIME THAT ALL LEGISLATION THAT WOULD PROTECT SAFETY NET/RETIREMENT/LABOR RIGHTS FOR THE MOST OF US WENT WITHOUT DISCUSSION.  NOW YOU HEAR THESE INCUMBENTS CALLING FOR THE RICH TO PAY.....DO YOU BELIEVE THAT IS THEIR INTENT?!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!


Tax credits for tuition growing rapidly
November 16, 2011 - 3:00am By
Libby A. Nelson  Inside Higher Ed 

WASHINGTON -- One federal effort to make college more affordable cost almost $15 billion in 2009. Almost half of its benefits went to families making more than $75,000 per year. Yet as potential budget cuts hover over many financial aid programs, this one is left unmentioned.

The difference: the benefits are distributed through the tax code, not the financial aid office.

When the American Opportunity Tax Credit took effect in 2009, the tax savings claimed by students and families for college expenses more than doubled, climbing from $6.6 billion to $14.7 billion, according to the
College Board’s Trends in Student Aid 2011 report last month.

The explosive growth of Pell Grants in the same time period generated discussion, debate and an
uneasy consensus that the $37 billion program is unsustainable in its current form. The parallel climb in spending on tax credits has attracted little notice.

As the “super committee” for deficit reduction studies revenue and spending, and the budgets tighten for Education Department financial aid programs, the question is whether the tax credits will continue to escape unscathed.

“It’s sort of like the third part of the budget,” said Jason Delisle, director of the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project. “You’ve got the tax part, you’ve got the spending part, and then you’ve got the tax spending part.”

The credits have many fans, including middle- and upper-middle-class families who are ineligible for Pell Grants, subsidized loans and other traditional forms of federal financial aid. Compared to other tax expenditures, such as the $484 billion mortgage interest deduction, the tuition credits and deductions are relatively small.

Still, others question whether that $15 billion could be better used, whether for deficit reduction in lieu of Pell cuts or to better target aid to low-income families.

“Rather than thinking about them totally separately, we should be thinking about who are the students who are getting the subsidies,” said Sandy Baum, a financial aid policy analyst. “We should have less of a bright line between the tax credits and the grants.”

The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which consolidated and expanded tax breaks for college expenses that were established during the Clinton administration, gives taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of up to $180,000 a credit of up to $2,500 for tuition, fees and course expenses. Unlike previous tax credits, it is refundable: filers who do not owe taxes can receive a maximum refund of $1,000.

The previous, nonrefundable tax credits overwhelmingly benefited families at the middle of the income range or above, because only families with tax liabilities were eligible to benefit -- a frequent criticism of the program. In 2008, the last year before the new tax credit took effect, only 5 percent of savings went to families with an an adjusted gross income of less than $25,000, while 18 percent went to those making more than $100,000. The refundable credit was intended to address those concerns, and the share of low-income families who benefited from the tax credit grew substantially.

Still, even with the refundable credit, the highest savings went to those making more than $100,000 in adjusted gross income, and the highest earners' share of tax savings grew as well. In 2009, 17 percent of recipients were filers making less than $25,000 in adjusted gross income (whether because they had low wages or because they could almost eliminate their tax liabilities through other deductions). But the share of the savings going to families in the middle quintiles -- those with adjusted gross incomes between $25,000 and $50,000; $50,000 and $75,000; and $75,000 and $100,000 -- all dropped, and families making at least $100,000 received 26 percent of the savings.

The students whose families qualify for the tax credit frequently are ineligible for other kinds of federal and institutional aid, particularly if their test scores and grades aren’t high enough to qualify for academic scholarships, said Claude Pressnell, president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association and a former member of the federal Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.

“This is one of the few benefits that reaches up into the middle income range of families, which I think is a benefit,” he said. “It appears to be targeting the right population -- a population that is grossly underserved by other aid programs.”

But tax credits have not been proven to affect whether students enroll or persist in college. Because taxpayers have to wait until the next calendar year to receive any benefit, tax credits are unlikely to be a deciding factor in getting people to go to college, Baum said.

“What it is for the middle class is extra money to make sure they can have a vacation that year, or they can buy another TV, or a nicer car,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has studied the impact of financial aid programs on student enrollment and persistence. “It is not for putting food on the table, and it’s not paying the heating bill, and it’s not deciding whether or not the kid goes to college.”

So far, the tax breaks have escaped notice because governmental policies and public perception view grants and tax credits as separate entities, rather than essentially similar, Delisle said.

Unlike outlays for Pell Grants and other programs, tax credits are not handled by either the Education Department or the Congressional appropriations committees. Federal financial aid eligibility is based on the “estimated family contribution” from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid; eligibility for the tax credit is based on adjusted gross income. And to taxpayers, a tax credit is a way to keep money they would otherwise owe the government, while a grant program provides a more immediately tangible benefit: a check.

Still, tax credits function basically like grant programs: they take away money that would otherwise be used for other government priorities and redirect it to certain areas (such as college tuition costs). A grant program would be a more logical way to provide that benefit, in part because students would get the money up front, but it would be politically unacceptable to propose grants for families making up to $180,000 per year, Delisle said.

“It’s acceptable to everyone that you can provide tax breaks to middle class people and even higher income earners for tuition assistance,” Delisle said. “But you can’t do grants.”

Some changes to the program could make its benefits more visible to taxpayers, such as a box on the FAFSA notifying families who will not receive grant aid that they might still be eligible for the tax deduction, Pressnell said. But it is likely to remain a largely invisible program.

Congress extended the American Opportunity Tax Credit through 2012, at a cost of about $13 billion per year. The “super committee” on deficit reduction is said to be considering both spending and revenue changes in order to reduce the nation’s short-term debt, but any change to the tax credit is more likely to come as part of a larger tax reform bill, Delisle said.

Meanwhile, the budget crunch for federal financial aid programs will continue.

“It’s not whether it’s good or bad, but it’s under the radar screen,” Baum said. “It’s hard to understand why people are looking at Pell Grants but not so carefully at these dollars.”


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IT DOESN'T TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO LOOK AT THE STATE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND FUNDING TO KNOW THAT THIS FEDERAL EDUCATION LAW BELOW HAS NOT BEEN ENFORCED AND HAS BEEN LEFT UNFUNDED FOR DECADES.  WHY IS MIKULSKI SPEAKING TO THIS NOW?  REMEMBER 'ENTERPRISE ZONES?   HEALTH ENTERPRISE ZONES?  NOW WE WILL SEE EDUCATION ENTERPRISE ZONES. WITH EACH ONE YOU SEE A MECHANISM OF SENDING FEDERAL AND STATE MONEY TO HELP BLIGHTED  UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES THAT ARE TARGETED FOR GENTRIFICATION TO AFFLUENT COMMUNITIES.  I BET YOU THIS WILL BE WHAT HAPPENS IN BALTIMORE....MORE TAXPAYER MONEY FOR AFFLUENT DEVELOPMENT. 

SAN FRANCISCO, NEW YORK CITY, AND NOW CHICAGO AND BALTIMORE FOLLOWING ARE GOING TO BE TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOU AND I TO LIVE.  SAN FRAN AND NYC HAVE TRAILER-SIZED APARTMENTS (250 SQ. FT.) FOR THE MIDDLE-CLASS TO LIVE. THAT IS WHERE ALL THIS ENTERPRISE ZONE MONEY GOES.  WILL THESE SCHOOLS HELP YOUR FAMILY IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE THERE?

SHOUT OUT AGAINST DEVELOPMENT THAT TAKES MOST PEOPLE OUT OF A COMMUNITY.  CAN YOU AFFORD A $3,000 A MONTH RENT CHARGED IN BEST IN THE WORLD CITIES ENVISIONED BY THESE INCUMBENTS?

Mikulski Hosts Roundtable Discussion on Education with School Stakeholders in Baltimore City
Senator hears from teachers, parents, volunteers and school leaders as Congress prepares to reauthorize federal education law

March 28, 2011

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), joined by Baltimore City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, today hosted a roundtable discussion with teachers, principals, parents and volunteers at Lockerman-Bundy Elementary School, a part of the Baltimore City Public School System. As Chairwoman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions' (HELP) Subcommittee on Children and Families, Senator Mikulski is convening a series of roundtable discussions around the state as Congress prepares to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).   

"I always say, 'The best ideas come from the people,'" Senator Mikulski said. "Washington doesn't have all the answers when it comes to improving our schools. That's why I came to hear what Baltimore City teachers, parents, principals and volunteers think about the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I want to take their ideas back to Washington with me as Congress works to reauthorize this federal law. I will continue to stand up and fight for the needs of children in our urban school districts." 

Senator Mikulski recently was appointed Chairwoman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions' Subcommittee on Children and Families, which will play a major role in the reauthorization of ESEA. Last week, Senator Mikulski met with school superintendents from seven Eastern Shore counties to hear about how ESEA impacts rural school districts.  

Signed into law in 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) emphasizes equal access to education and establishes high standards for students. In 2002, Congress reauthorized ESEA as the No Child Left Behind Act with accountability measures for teachers, schools and school districts. Unfortunately, the law was chronically underfunded and too often applied a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges in education. This year's reauthorization is an opportunity to provide schools with the flexibility and resources needed to make improvements.      

"For the third year in a row, Maryland's school system was ranked first of all 50 states by Education Week," Senator Mikulski said. "The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is an opportunity to improve our schools even further and to make Maryland's education system a model for the rest of the country."

Fair Student Funding and Other Reforms
Baltimore’s Plan for Equity, Empowerment, Accountability and Improvement

REMEMBER, EDUCATION WEEK IS A CHARTER SCHOOL, PRIVATIZATION EDUCATION MAGAZINE THAT RANKS MARYLAND HIGH BECAUSE IT IS INSTALLING POLICY TO MOVE IN THAT DIRECTION.  THIS RANKING IS NOT GOOD FOR THE PEOPLE, IT IS AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR CORPORATIONS SAYING WE WILL HAVE VOCATIONAL K-12 FOR YOUR JOB TRAINING AND INNOVATION CENTER PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES FOR R AND D.
  FAIR STUDENT FUNDING IS THE TIERED FUNDING THAT GIVES THE MOST TO THE HIGHEST ACHIEVERS.  WELL, THAT MAY BE FAIR ONCE ALL BOATS ARE LIFTED IN ACHIEVEMENT LEVELS DON'T YOU THINK?

THIS IS WHAT MIKULSKI IS CHAMPIONING!!  REMEMBER, SHE HAS A SUPER-NOVA FOR BRINGING TRILLIONS OF TAXPAYER MONEY TO JOHNS HOPKINS!
0 Comments

October 22nd, 2012

10/22/2012

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REMEMBER, IF THESE POLICIES ARE IMPLEMENTED, THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION FOR MOST FAMILIES WILL FALL DRAMATICALLY AND OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WILL BE LOCKED INTO EVER  LOWER INCOME JOBS.  I HEARD THE 1% SAY '90% OF EDUCATION IS WASTED ON 90% OF THE PUBLIC....WE DON'T NEED TO PAY FOR THAT.'  THESE POLICIES ARE WRITTEN BY ALEC (CORPORATIONS)


Fair Student Funding is being piloted in several school districts and Baltimore is one because of its connection with
Wall Street through Johns Hopkins and Alonzo.  As I said last time, this policy simply creates a tiered funding system that identifies the Advanced Placement (AP) students as the ones needing the most resources/funding.  The idea of making each school independent and funding dependent on per pupil rather than staffing is to transition into what will be a privatized, profit-driven education systems that allow corporations and the rich to choose and then donate/fund specific schools all while getting taxpayer money for support.  This is of course what private schools do now and Alonzo/Wall Street wants that to replace the democratic system of funding we have today.  The reason Baltimore is chosen is first and foremost the existence of a captured political system and media.  Secondly is the drive to gentrify the city......move the poor out and the affluent in with this policy through charter schools.

THE GOAL IS HAVING MOST OF THE TAXPAYER MONEY GO TO THE MOST AFFLUENT SCHOOLS EVEN AS THE MOST AFFLUENT ARE PAYING LESS AND LESS IN TAXES.

Now, the next piece of legislation that moves in the same direction is Obama's Student Loan Forgiveness Program.  These corporations always have a catchy-plebian title for these programs.  Just as with the housing relief legislation involving mortgage principal write-downs and interest rate drops, this legislation is a windfall for the most affluent and helps the middle/lower class very little. That is the intent.  Having the wealthy shed most of their higher education costs to taxpayers ---you and me----while most can no longer afford to attend university.  It is perverse and perfectly elite-minded.

YOUR MARYLAND THIRD WAY INCUMBENT VOTED FOR ALL OF THESE.....BALTIMORE CITY COUNCIL, MARYLAND ASSEMBLY, AND FEDERAL POLITICIAN SUPPORTS THESE POLICIES THAT ONLY  BENEFIT THE AFFLUENT.  STOP REELECTING THEM!!!!!

WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD TO FIGHT FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL FUNDING.  IF YOU HAVE THE UPPER-CLASS PRIVATE SCHOOLS BECOMING 'PUBLIC' THROUGH CHARTERS WHILE REMAINING EXCLUSIVE AND WITH HIGHER FUNDING GOING TOWARDS ADVANCED PLACEMENT (AP) STUDENTS, THERE WILL BE A LARGE SUCKING SOUND OF PUBLIC EDUCATION MONEY GOING TO THE TOP..

ADD TO THAT THE OBAMA STUDENT LOAN BILL THAT SUPPOSEDLY HELPS ALL STUDENTS BUT GIVES HIGH END STUDENTS ENORMOUS BREAKS IN REPAYING FEDERAL LOANS AND AGAIN, YOU SEE ALL THIS SENDING HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY TO THE TOP EARNERS AND THEIR FAMILIES.  THE ARTICLE BELOW INDICATES THIS STUDENT LOAN BILL, BASED ON INCOME WILL ELIMINATE MOST OF THE ELITE STUDENT'S TUITION COSTS.


Census: Private School Enrollment Continues to Fall
By Sarah D. Sparks on October 12, 2012 8:07 AM  HECHINGER REPORT


Private school enrollment continues to drop, according to 2011 American Community Survey data released this week by the the U.S. Census Bureau.

As of 2011, the Census found 4.1 million students attended private elementary and high schools, a drop from both 4.8 million in 2005, the last count, and private schools' high-water mark of 6.3 million in 1965. This has in part been attributed to the growth of charter schools, which some families see as a free alternative to the local district school.

For example, private schools' share of kindergarteners dropped from 4.7 percent of all children ages 3 to 5 in 1965 to 2.2 percent of the same age group in 2009, the most recent count; during the same time period, public schools enrolled nearly one in four of those children in 2009, up from little more than 18 percent in 1965. This includes children in preschool, which in many states remains a private enterprise; private preschools enrolled 15.3 percent of 3- to 5-year-olds in 2009, compared to 21.3 percent for public preschool programs.


Obama’s Student Loan Program Is a Windfall for the Rich Study Says

By The Daily Ticker | Daily Ticker – Fri, Oct 19, 2012 8:55 AM EDT

By Nicole Goodkind

Chances are you know someone who has student debt. Two-thirds of all college graduates leave school with student loans. The average balance is $26,600 per student. Last year outstanding student loan debt reached $1 trillion.

Both President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney have addressed the rising cost of college on the campaign trail.

Unfortunately, according to Jason Delisle, director of the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project, neither Obama's nor Romney's proposals to lower student debt will work.

When asked what he will do for students, Romney is quick to point to the John and Abigail Adams Scholarship, the program he established as Governor of Massachusetts. The program pays the 4-year tuition fees for the top 25% of high school performers if they are enrolled full-time in a Massachusetts public college or university.

Jason Delisle tells The Daily Ticker that this plan is not viable.

"I'm not entirely sure that it would be a model for the country," he says. "There's a certain culture around these student aid programs. They are to provide open access and not necessarily direct aid to certain types of students based on their performance."

Obama's proposal to lower student loan debt centers on the income-based repayment plan (IBR). The initial plan was passed under the George W. Bush administration in 2009. IBR allowed college graduates to spend just 15% of non-discretionary income on student loan repayments with complete loan forgiveness after 25 years.

President Obama amended the program in 2010 so that graduates spend only 10% of non-discretionary income on loan repayment and are granted forgiveness after 20 years. The new rules are scheduled to go into effect in 2014 but the White House wants to implement the updated program by the end of this year.


Jason Delisle and Alex Holt have published a paper examining the effects of Obama's new proposal and the results are not promising.

The study found that under the new IRB rules there is no extra cost in borrowing an additional dollar after a student loan debts exceed $60,000, regardless of salary.

"This is the more you borrow the more you can have forgiven," explains Delisle. "The provision doesn't really have any safeguard so that someone earning a substantial income wouldn't be disqualified from getting loan forgiveness."

For example, a law school student with $120,000 in debt and a starting salary of $65,000 might have $160,000 forgiven after 20 years.

"On the one hand you have the Obama administration talking about the spiraling cost of tuition and that they have a plan to keep tuition low and stop the growth or slow the growth, but this goes in a completely different direction," Delisle notes.




Delisle suggests reverting back to the Bush-era plan for borrowers with high incomes and implementing the new Obama plan for borrowers with low incomes.

"Those two things alone should essentially take care of the issues that we've highlighted," he says. "That will leave the core of the Obama administration's proposal in place and essentially close the loophole for these high-income earners."

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YOU CAN SEE O'MALLEY AND YOUR INCUMBENTS SETTING THE STAGE FOR WHAT WILL BE 'SQUEEZING THE MOST PROFIT OUT OF A SERVICE'.

I WANT TO REMIND PEOPLE THAT YOUR INCUMBENT VOTED FOR THIS LEGISLATION 2 YEARS AGO AND ALTHOUGH WE HAVEN'T SEEN IT REAR ITS HEAD IN K-12 AS A GENERAL POLICY, IT IS ADVANCING AND STUDENTS USING IT ARE GENERALLY NOT IMPRESSED/MOTIVATED.........HOW BEST TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS THEN TO SIT KIDS IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER SCREEN.  MAYBE THAT IS WHY FUNDING BASED ON STAFF IS UNNECESSARY?  THAT IS WHY THEY PASSED IT.  IT WILL NOT BE ONLY COLLEGE-LEVEL CLASSES!

Legislation creating virtual schools becomes law without governor’s signature
May 24, 2010 at 11:54 am

By Erich Wagner
Erich@MarylandReporter.com

Gov. Martin O’Malley has allowed a bill authorizing the State Board of Education to open “virtual public schools” to go on the books without his signature because of the program’s lack of funding mechanism.

Bills in Maryland become law automatically 45 days after the end of the legislative session if the governor does not veto them, as he did a number of duplicate bills. But it is still noteworthy when a governor refuses to take a position on an issue by refraining from signing a bill.

O’Malley said in a letter to House Speaker Michael Busch that he was concerned about how the state would fund these virtual schools, which allow students to learn from an instructor over the Internet, instead of in a brick-and-mortar school. He added that the bill lacks any requirements for accountability or how teachers are to be involved in online learning.

“I support the use of online courses to meet specialized academic needs and I am open to the concept of stand-alone virtual public schools,” O’Malley said in the letter. “However, in its current posture, House Bill 1362 does not address critical components necessary to make a virtual school successful.”

State analysts estimate the bill will cost the state $53,700 in fiscal 2011 to cover the costs of developing regulations for state virtual schools. Local governments that choose to implement these schools will need to hire teachers and purchase software. Although it could cost less for a student to learn through an online program than at a physical school, analysts said, the possible influx of students currently home-schooled or at private schools could increase the state’s expenditures “substantially.”

O’Malley said he was allowing the bill to pass into law despite his concerns because the program will not go into effect until September 2011, allowing the legislature to codify virtual schools’ funding mechanism and regulations during next year’s session.

“There is ample time to address the above concerns during the 2010 Interim and develop clarifying legislation for the 2011 Session,” O’Malley said. “I will direct the Maryland State Department of Education to work with education groups to review and recommend changes to House Bill 1362 to ensure that Maryland’s virtual school law is well designed and successful.”
0 Comments

October 21st, 2012

10/21/2012

0 Comments

 
PLEASE LOOK AT MY PREVIOUS BLOG FOR EDUCATION....THIS IS MY WEEKEND POLITICAL ACTION:

TAKE A LOOK AT THE VIDEO/TRANSCRIPT BELOW AND ASK YOURSELF.......WHY AM I VOTING FOR THE VERY PEOPLE WHO TOOK THE COUNTRY IN THIS DIRECTION?  IN MARYLAND, HOYER, CARDIN, CUMMINGS, AND SARBANES ALL VOTED FOR THE REPEAL OF GLASS-STEAGALL KNOWING IT WOULD CREATE WHAT WE HAVE TODAY.  THEY WATCHED AS IT HAPPENED AND THEY HAVE NOT SHOUTED OR EVEN ACKNOWLEDGED THE FAILURE TO HOLD PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE.


WE MAY NEED TO VOTE FOR OBAMA BUT
VOTE FOR A WRITE-IN FOR THESE POLITICIANS THIS ELECTION!!!!!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!


IN MARYLAND WE HAVE A GOVERNOR IN MARTIN O'MALLEY WHO GLADLY ACKNOWLEDGES HE IS BEST OF FRIENDS WITH WALL STREET'S MAYOR BLOOMBERG.  O'MALLEY HAS WORKED FROM HIS YEARS ON THE BALTIMORE CITY COUNCIL, HIS TERM IN BALTIMORE, AND NOW AS GOVERNOR TO ADVANCE ALL OF WALL STREET'S INTERESTS.  WE SHOULD NOT SEE ANY SOCIAL JUSTICE/LABOR OR FISCAL PROGRESSIVES SPEAKING ON HIS BEHALF.  IN FACT, I ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO START EMAILING THESE GROUPS ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY ABOUT O'MALLEY'S RECORD BECAUSE YOU KNOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA WILL MAKE HIM A GOLDEN BOY!


America the Possible
Air Date: Week of October 19, 2012 Living On Earth/PRI

stream/download this segment as an MP3 file James Gustave Speth (Vermont Law School) Presidential advisor and Vermont Law professor James Gustave Speth has a new book out titled, America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy. Speth talks with host Steve Curwood about ways to reinvent the American economy as one that values nature and quality of life over GDP.

Transcript CURWOOD: James Gustave Speth chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality for President Carter, helped found the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, then ran the UN Development Program and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

You'd hardly think that he's a radical with a resume like that, but Gus Speth was arrested in front of the White House for protesting the XL pipeline in 2011. He's now a professor at the Vermont Law School, and writes that our politics are so corrupt and our environmental movement so weak that we are in peril. His new book is "America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy.”

SPETH: Do we want to merely revive the economy with all its failings or do we want to transform the economy into one where the real priorities of economic activities in our country are people and place and planet. And this old economy that everyone is struggling to revive was a pretty sad place, it still is a pretty sad place. During the period where economic growth went up 125 percent since 1980, we’ve had inequality mount, poverty mount, jobs fled our borders, we lost 42,000 manufacturing plants, the environment decline, life satisfaction flat-lined. I mean, that’s what happened in the old economy.

And, you know, it is now already higher GDP then it was before the Great Recession of 2008, and yet we still have all these problems. We need an economy that doesn’t simply prioritize growth, but more importantly puts a priority on sustaining people, sustaining place, sustaining planet.

CURWOOD: What’s wrong with GDP, why do you see it as such a threat to the environment and our society?




SPETH: Well, I have a chapter on that in “America the Possible” and, we need a new system of indicators that give us the right signals of whether we’re making national progress. Now Bobby Kennedy in 1968 made a powerful attack on GDP, pointing out that it is simply an aggregation of every economic transaction in a society, whether it’s good or bad or indifferent. And a lot of them are bad and you can ratchet up GDP by having an oil spill in the Gulf.

CURWOOD: Bobby Kennedy was running for president back then. His words on how we measure the economy still resonate today. Here they are:

[KENNEDY CLIP: Our Gross National Product now is over 800 billion dollars a year. But that Gross National Product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage, it counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them, it counts in the destruction of the Redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder and chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm.

And it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts with it rifles and fixed knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. The Gross National Product does not allow the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play, it does not include the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debates, or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit, nor our courage, neither our wisdom, nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.]

CURWOOD: Just months after he gave that speech, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And GDP is still the measure of America’s success. Again, Gus Speth.

SPETH: We need a really good measure of sustainable economic welfare that can go toe-to-toe with GDP every quarter. And there have been efforts to do that and what they show is that during the past few decades when GDP per capita went up and up and up, life satisfaction on average, a genuine progress indicator measure, flat-lined during that period.

CURWOOD: Lets talk about money. In your book, “America the Possible”, you’re quite critical of the way that money is created in this society by banks, detail to us what’s wrong with society in that process and how you would change it.

SPETH: Most money that’s in society is created by bank debt when people take out loans from banking institutions. So, it gives the banking institutions tremendous power, I mean, money is a system of power. And the banks determine who gets money, and overwhelmingly the process of investment in our society is chasing the highest financial return. That leads to many things that are highly destructive, such as investing in mountaintop removal, and tar sands and other things which the big banks are doing now. And it leads to severe underinvestment in social and environmental needs that don’t yield a high financial return.

CURWOOD: In a new America, how would we address social inequality?

SPETH: I think compared with Europe for example, we have a very weak unemployment insurance program. It reaches a very small portion of the unemployed and it compensates for a smaller percentage of wages, and we could certainly improve our unemployment insurance program, we could certainly improve the minimum wage program.

And through other means, including tilting the collective bargaining process and unionization process back towards organized labor, which we’ve tilted away from dramatically in recent decades, and of course the tax structure needs to be changed. In 1928, the top one percent of earners had about 24 percent of national income.

It went down by the mid 70s to about 7 percent of national income, but now, it’s gone all the way back up again to about 24 percent of the national income. So one goal that we ought to have for our society, in a way a minimum goal, is to return to the kind of income equality we had in the mid-70s. Not a terribly radical proposal, because we were there at one time, and it was a better place.

CURWOOD: And how does this affect the environment?

SPETH: The environment and the equity issues go together. People that are economically insecure find it really hard to address environmental issues when they have more pressing concerns with their pocket books. And when you try to do something like impose a charge, easily called a tax, on carbon emissions, and people see that that could raise gasoline prices and energy prices and they are already having trouble paying those bills, they become opponents of doing the right thing to save the planet’s climate. And so we need a more just economic system and I think that would provide the basis for more rigorous environmental protection.

CURWOOD: Now, in your career, you’ve worked closely with elected officials. President Jimmy Carter, you chaired the Council on Environmental Quality for him. Advised Bill Clinton. You’ve been close to electoral politics. In your view, what’s wrong with our democracy now, and how should we fix it?

SPETH: Well we certainly have what I call a creeping corporate-ocracy and plutocracy. You see the plutocracy, the money taking power in our politics everyday now. Corporations spend a lot more on lobbying then they do on campaigns - a lot more. We always have know that corporations were the principal economic actors in our system but I would say that they are now the principal political actors in our system and I think that there are things that we need to do.

We need to start by securing the voters. People automatically being registered to vote when the reach the age of 18, that’s common in advanced industrial countries. And we need to make voting easier, a longer time ahead of the election day to vote. Have a national holiday on Election Day. The other big thing we need to do is to enact a type of campaign finance reform that really works. And the latest proposal would be… if you make a small contribution, 250 dollars, to the president or someone running for Congress, the federal government would match that five to one. You know, if you had enough supporters, you could raise enough money to run a competitive campaign.

CURWOOD: So, your book, Gus Speth, America the Possible, a Manifesto for a New Economy, is a huge, broad vision that would change almost everything in America. The question is how do you get there from here? If the political system is broken, how do you make political change?

SPETH: Well, I want to make a prediction. Which is that when this election is over, there are going to be so many people fed up with what we have experienced in the process that there could well be a confluence of interests coming together to enact a set of pro-democracy political reforms.

I think we need an era to revive an era of protest, to revive an era of marches and demonstrations and non-violent civil disobedience. If it’s done in the right way, it can build support and it can dramatize the need for change. We saw that with the civil rights movement, and we need that kind of fervor again if we are going to build the America the Possible for our grandchildren.

[MUSIC: Brian Blade “Struggling With That” from Mama Rosa (Verve Music Group 2009).]

CURWOOD: Thank you, Gus, for coming in.

SPETH: Thank you, Steve.

CURWOOD: Vermont law professor Gus Speth. His book is "America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy."

___________________________________________________
Why are Maryland's candidates not speaking to the issues most important to people?  Because they are working against them!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!

Do you think it odd that WYPR has an abundance of political coverage for the elections in November but had a complete media blackout on political coverage for the primaries?  I am watching to see if that coverage continues.

What we will look for are issues being covered that aren't simply O'Malley/Rawlings-Blake issues.  These are the public issues in state and local politics:

1)  We have a state that is ranked at the bottom in the Center for Public Integrity study for fraud and corruption.  Indeed, billions are lost each year to the state and city from health care entitlement fraud and we have yet to receive billions from the massive mortgage fraud, having only the $25 billion interest payment last year on what all financial analysts place at $600-800 billion compromise settlement for trillions in fraud.

IT IS OBVIOUS THAT A CASH STRAPPED CITY LIKE BALTIMORE WHICH IS ALSO GROUND ZERO FOR THE FRAUD AS THE FRAUD IS DIRECTED AT THE POOR WOULD MAKE THAT A PRIORITY.  THE ONLY REASON IT WOULDN'T IS THAT THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE SHOUTING ARE BENEFITING FROM THE FRAUD.  THIS IS BIG NEWS AND PUBLIC MEDIA WOULD COVER THIS!

2)  2/3 of Americans want income inequity reversed.  It is the only path back to a strong middle-class.  We have corporate Third Way Democrats in leadership positions in the Federal and State levels, and our City Council is simply run by developers.  Given this, if WYPR only repeats what these leaders say as issue stances, then you are not stating public interest policy.  We have seen $3 trillion in corporate tax breaks as "job creators" with no jobs.  THAT IS AN IMPORTANT ISSUE FOR THE PUBLIC.  We see only tax policy to, at best, make the rich pay what we do when we need a strong progressive tax reform with 70% rate at the top.  No candidate is saying that and THAT IS AN IMPORTANT ISSUE FOR THE PUBLIC.  Instead we see increasing policy lowering the tax rates at the high end at local levels.

3)  Reestablishing Rule of Law in America must happen if we are to move back towards a first world status.  Bush gutted the white collar criminal agencies and sent all personnel to Homeland Security.  We have a skeleton crew in the agencies nation wide.  It is no coincidence that we have more money moved by fraud to the top income in human history.  THIS IS A GREAT BIG DEAL AND HUGELY IMPORTANT STORY FOR THE PUBLIC THAT WE NEVER HEAR ON WYPR......PUBLIC MEDIA.  ISN'T THAT ODD?

4)  Free market globalization was unleashed by Bill Clinton when he created Third Way Caucus and ended the Glass-Steagall banking wall.  He did it as people shouted loudly that it would create unaccountable businesses and massive income inequity.  He knew that the middle-class and unions would be killed and he knew democracy would be undermined by this inequity.  This is a person running as a Democrat.  THIS IS BIG NEWS AND IT IS CRITICAL INFORMATION FOR THE PUBLIC AND YET, WE HAVE NOT HEARD ONE DESCRIPTION OF THIS ON PUBLIC MEDIA.  AMERICA HAS HAD A 3 PARTY SYSTEM JUST LIKE THE UNITED KINGDOM FOR 20 YEARS.......CONSERVATIVES/LIBERALS/LABOR WITH LIBERALS BEING CORPORATE AND WORKING AGAINST LABOR ........AND YET THE PUBLIC DOESN'T KNOW THIS EVEN THROUGH THIS COMING ELECTION.  ISN'T THAT ODD?

5)  Health care reform is about creating mega-health industries through consolidation into global systems that will look like Wall Street.  It is happening now.  We all know that these will be profit-driven and prey upon the poor just as Wall Street does.....so, there will be no entitlements.......Medicare/Medicaid if these health systems are allowed to grow beyond regional size.  2/3 of Americans will not be able to access health care beyond public health status.  THIS IS A BIG DEAL TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC DON'T YOU THINK?  WOULDN'T PUBLIC MEDIA BE THE FIRST TO EXPLAIN THAT TO THE PUBLIC?  ISN'T IT ODD THAT IT ISN'T?

_______________________________________________
FROM MARTIN O'MALLEY:

Friend--

I wanted to make sure you saw this note from my good friend, Mayor Michael Bloomberg on why he's for question 6 here in Maryland. He, like thousands of Marylanders across our state, understands that this issue is about fairness and protecting everyone equally under the law. Check out his message below and sign up today to defend dignity. 



Martin -


Maryland will always hold a special place in my heart.  I went to college at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and have remained active in the Hopkins community.  So when Governor O'Malley asked me to support Question 6, I didn’t hesitate.  

As a business leader and Mayor of New York City, I do not believe that government has any business telling one class of couples that they cannot marry.  The 14th Amendment guarantees us all equal protection under the law, and that's what Question 6 does -- it treats all citizens equally under the law, while protecting religious liberty at the same time.
Two years ago, I was proud to support the effort to pass marriage equality in the State of New York -- and the bi-partisan support it received resulted in one of our state’s great civil rights victories.

Around the country,  a few legislatures and state courts have taken action to extend marriage equality to all couples, regardless of gender.  But never before have voters affirmed marriage equality in a statewide referendum.  By voting “FOR” on Question 6, I believe Maryland will become the first state in the nation to affirm marriage equality at the ballot box. 

On Tuesday, November 6th – Election Day – you will have an opportunity to make history.

The next great barrier to full equality under the law is marriage equality.  There is no doubt in my mind this barrier will fall, just as so many others have.  The question is not if, but when.  And it is my hope that you will answer that question for Maryland on Tuesday, November 6th. Please join me and support Question 6.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg


  VOTE FOR THE ISSUE AND 
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!
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October 20th, 2012

10/20/2012

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THIS ENTIRE EDUCATION REFORM IS BEING WRITTEN BY CORPORATIONS....IT IS NOT PEOPLE DRIVEN!


A high school student who took a vocational tract would take shop and math classes that would provide a foundation for entering a trade after graduating.  Then, he/she would decide a trade, say electrician, and apply to the union apprenticeship program and start an extended on-the-job training.  This successfully moved generations of blue collar workers into work with no college degree, but certification.  We have the same thing now.  Students can take computer tech classes and heaven knows they are tech savvy through their own social/personal web actions.  Now, there may be a shortfall in math, but it is ridiculous to say that this necessitates an entire career training via public education.  What we need are strong technical apprenticeships for STEM employment ON-THE-JOB. 

Looking at yesterday's blog that questions corporate funding of K-12 schools tied to yet another corporation, you see an effort to completely distort a system that worked for generations and gave strong, well-trained and committed workers that were well-paid.  What these STEM businesses are trying to do is remove the costs of training and the window of lower skill level from corporate costs.  THIS IS AN EDUCATION GOAL THAT IS PROFIT ORIENTED AND NOT PEOPLE ORIENTED AND IT IS TOWARDS WHAT YOUR THIRD WAY POLITICIANS ARE WORKING.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT QUALITY EDUCATION!!!!!!

If you watch free TV you will see one after the other ads for computer, online instruction geared to these trade jobs.  All are paid with taxpayer loans that the student will pay or will default and you and I pay.  This is the only direction being offered to a vast number of people.  THIS CHANGE IN APPROACH IS WHAT IS CALLED 'EDUCATION REFORM'.  IT IS MOVING FORWARD AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND IT IS WHERE ALL THE FEDERAL SPENDING ON EDUCATION IS MOVING.  YET, NO ONE WANTS IT AND WE DO NOT NEED IT.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!

As the article below explains, academics are fighting this concept with the argument the SCHOOLS ARE MEANT TO CREATE WELL-ROUNDED CITIZENS NOT WORKERS. THIS IS THE DYNAMIC THESE EDUCTION REFORMERS ARE WORKING TO CHANGE.  Do not let them use the excuse that government coffers are empty as they give copious money to corporations and turn their head to fraud.  Shout loudly for school funding
mechanisms to be strengthened and remain centralized.  Decentralization is simply meant to move away from equal funding and towards this 'gifting' to individual schools!

Do we need to cut administrative costs in education?  YES, especially at 'innovation center' universities.  Do we need each school as a separate business as Baltimore's Superintendent Alonzo is doing?  NO.


October 18, 2012
Pressed to bridge the skills gap, colleges and corporations try to get along

By Jon Marcus   Hechinger Report

WARWICK, R.I. — Angel Gavidia worked as a construction worker, an auto detailer and a taxi dispatcher before he found his calling as a computer-networking engineer, a high-paying job for which employers are desperately short of workers even at a time of stubborn unemployment.

Community College of Rhode Island

He found his way in spite of community-college advisors who at first steered him into other fields of so little interest to him that he quit school. Then Gavidia was accepted to a program in which an IT-services company called Atrion collaborates with the Community College of Rhode Island to help students get both a classroom education and on-the-job training.

The model, under which Gavidia worked as an apprentice at the company while taking on-campus courses, gave him a huge head start to a job by teaching him the real-world skills employers want but say they often can’t find in college graduates.

“I came into this position feeling like, we didn’t learn this in school, and we should have,” said Gavidia, who, at 26, now works full time at Atrion as an associate engineer.

It’s a rare example of a successful partnership between business and higher education, which otherwise often bicker about how to help the nation’s economy recover by better matching graduates’ skills with workplace needs.

Business officials complain that too many college students aren’t learning what they need to get jobs. Academics retort that their job is to provide knowledge, not vocational training—and that what future workers really need isn’t job-specific preparation, but the ability to think critically that comes from a well-rounded education.

Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn

“There’s been something of a rupture,” said Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. “On the higher-education side, we have sometimes not thought enough about how best to prepare our students for the jobs that will be available when they graduate. And employers haven’t always communicated clearly enough to universities what skills employees need.”

It’s not for lack of prodding.

“I hear from business leaders all the time who want to hire in the United States, but at the moment, they cannot always find workers with the right skills,” President Barack Obama told an audience at a community college in February. “Companies looking to hire should be able to count on these schools to provide them with a steady stream of workers qualified to fill those specific jobs.”

Despite high unemployment, however, the nation is surprisingly short of workers with the right educations. As of July, the most recent period for which the figure is available, an estimated 3.66 million jobs were vacant, and employers say they can’t find the people they need to do them.

Some economists question whether the figure is actually that high, saying companies are simply taking their time hiring. But most agree that there’s a significant mismatch.

In the IT industry alone, 93 percent of employers surveyed by the Computing Technology Industry Association said they couldn’t find workers with the right educations, and 80 percent said this affects productivity and customer service.

“There’s just a shortage of supply,” said Ryan Hoyle, whose job is to hire engineers and other skilled employees for the Detroit branch of an IT company called GalaxE Solutions, which, together with two neighboring tech companies, has 500 openings he said they can’t fill.

Before it teamed up with the Community College of Rhode Island, Atrion “found it very difficult to find the right combination of skills and talent, and frankly it was often at a cost,” driving up entry-level salaries and forcing the company to spend more and more money hunting for qualified prospects, said Patrick Halpin, its talent recruiter.

Yet even as demand for college degree-holders goes up, their numbers are leveling off. Enrollment appears to be flat or falling, even at community colleges that had been growing at double-digit rates. Once they are enrolled, only about half of students in four-year universities graduate within even six years, and fewer than 20 percent at two-year community colleges do so within three, according to the organization Complete College America.

“If you take a longer economic view, it’s clear that, unless something changes, higher education is not going to provide the kind of workforce we need 20 and 30 years down the road,” said Rosenberg, who is part of a business-higher education initiative in Minnesota looking for solutions to this problem there.

There are some models emerging of college and corporate collaborations like the one in Rhode Island. They’re broadly known as “learn and earn”—or, among educators, as “programs of study” that line up courses to lead to a specific job.

But most business leaders surveyed by Public Agenda and the Committee for Economic Development said they think American higher education is unable or unwilling to adapt to economic demands and lacks accountability, contributing to a shortage of qualified workers.

“There are growing and grave concerns about the system’s ability to remain a leader and produce the workforce our future economy demands,” said Steve Farkas, lead author of the Public Agenda report.

Business and higher education have traditionally spoken different languages, and they work at vastly different speeds, people in both camps acknowledge.

“There is this mismatch,” said Lee Todd Jr., former president of the University of Kentucky, who founded two high-tech companies before that. “In academics, you’ve got seven years to make tenure. In business, if you don’t have the next product ready by the next quarter, you’re in trouble.”

Even when they do try to satisfy marketplace needs, colleges and universities have trouble keeping up with them, said John Dorrer, a program director at the nonprofit organization Jobs for the Future.

“Sometimes you have this phenomenon of higher education being divorced from the reality, with faculty not spending enough time looking at developments in industry,” Dorrer said. “Technology is moving faster, the world is moving faster, markets are more unstable, and that instability and the pace of technological change [are] not well-aligned with what happens in institutions.”

Eduardo Padrón sees that, too, in his capacity as president of the second-largest single higher-education institution in the United States, Miami Dade College.

“What I hear from business leaders who come to us is that the universities place before them all kinds of excuses,” said Padrón, who works extensively with business. “They want to take three years to put a program together, and then they have all these excuses for not doing it the right way. It’s part of a tradition that’s not changing with time.”

Frustrations have reached such a level that major corporations have started their own college-level training and education programs. There really is, for instance, a University of Farmers, run by the Farmers Insurance Group. Corporations from Dunkin’ Donuts to Walt Disney World also offer college-level educations to workers, prospective workers, and even employees of other companies.

“If they can do it,” asked Brent Weil, senior vice president of the Manufacturing Institute, “why can’t colleges do it?”

But colleges and universities fire back that there’s plenty of blame to go around. They complain that what industry means by “job skills” is often vague. Surveys of company executives find that what they really seek in their employees isn’t a knack for widget-making, but such characteristics as critical thinking, innovation, and an ability to write and speak well.

“Those CEOs have to be more clear about the kinds of workers that they want,” said Rosenberg. “I’m not sure it always filters down even to their own HR departments.”

Nearly 90 percent of employers think colleges should place more emphasis on producing graduates who can communicate effectively, according to a 2009 survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Seventy-five percent say colleges should emphasize ethical decision-making more, while 70 percent want colleges to stress among students the ability to innovate and be creative.

Higher-education officials point out that the same companies talking about the value of employee education have been cutting back on their own professional-development and tuition-reimbursement benefits, shifting the burden of workforce training onto the very higher-education system that it’s criticizing.

In 1979, workers new to a job got an average of two and a half weeks per year of professional development, according to the consulting firm Accenture; now, Accenture says, at a time when people change jobs much more often, only about a fifth of employees surveyed reported receiving any training at all over the previous five years.

Meanwhile, the proportion of employers who provide tuition reimbursement has fallen from nearly 70 percent to under 60 percent in the last five years, reports the Society for Human Resource Management.

“Too many businesses pay lip service to education, especially higher education, but often are not willing to go the extra mile to make significant partnerships happen,” said Padrón.

While the two sides argue over who’s at fault, a new force is pushing them to pool their efforts: students and their parents, who want to know what career payoff to expect from spiraling tuition.

In an annual survey of first-year college students by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 86 percent said they enrolled “to be able to get a better job”—the top reason, above “to learn about things that interest me.”

It’s community colleges that have been most in the workforce-development spotlight. That’s because so many job vacancies turn out to be in “middle-skills” occupations for which an associate degree is often adequate, such as lab technicians, early-childhood educators, radiation therapists, paralegals and machinists. Almost half of all jobs now require an associate degree—a greater proportion than call for a bachelor’s degree.

Which raises yet another, more surprising, problem: Few corporate CEOs—or, for that matter, policymakers—went to community colleges, or send their kids there.

“They’re four-year grads. All the people they know are four-year grads. They don’t have experience with community colleges,” said Karen Elzey, director of Skills for America’s Future.

“We have to get business leaders to pay more attention to the institutions that are going to serve the populations that right now are not reaching the levels of attainment that we need,” said Joseph Minarik, senior vice president of the Committee for Economic Development.

“Educators understand that the world needs poets,” said Minarik, who was chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration. “Business leaders need to know that, too. And business leaders and educators also need to know that the world needs people who can work with sophisticated control systems on a factory floor.”

____________________________________________________
RIGHT NOW IT IS THE UNDERSERVED FAMILIES WHO ARE ATTENDING SCHOOL BOARD MEETINGS SHOUTING DOWN THESE POLICES THAT DO NO GOOD FOR THE PEOPLE THEY TOUT TO HELP.  THAT IS ONLY BECAUSE THE UNDERSERVED SCHOOLS ARE UNDER SCRUTINY.  THESE POLICES ARE WIDE-REACHING AND WILL SOON SEE MIDDLE-CLASS SCHOOLS COMPETING FOR FUNDING SOURCES AND OPERATING AS A PRIVATE BUSINESS RATHER THAN SIMPLY SPREADING THE FUNDING EQUALLY FROM A STRONG TAX BASE.  YOU THINK COMPETING WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE IS BAD, WAIT TO SEE WHAT YOU WILL HAVE TO CONCEDE TO IN ORDER TO RECEIVE ADEQUATE FUNDING!

THIS POLICY WILL REACH YOUR MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY IN A NEGATIVE WAY!

Baltimore school funding model gets national praise
By James Campbell, on September 10, 2012, at 8:00 am From Randi Feinberg, ERS [Education Resource Strategies] Updates, September 06 

In 2007, Baltimore City Public Schools implemented a bold plan. With the school system struggling, Superintendent Andrés Alonso proposed Fair Student Funding (FSF) and other reforms. His goal was to empower school leaders and create accountability for student learning. In just one year, the district implemented FSF for all schools. This meant allocating dollars (instead of staff) to schools based on their student population and school needs. The district also closed lower performing schools and reorganized and downsized the central office.

Five years after the reform was proposed, ERS, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, set out to understand whether the district met its goals and what other districts might learn from this experience. Among the many successes, we learned that the district succeeded in creating a more equitable distribution of dollars across schools and was able to move a significant amount of dollars from the central office to school level control. For all the details, read our paper “Fair Student Funding and Other Reforms: Baltimore’s Plan for Equity, Empowerment, Accountability and Improvement.” The paper explores the successes, the lessons and notes that implementing FSF is an ongoing process that requires time to develop the necessary support structure for schools and to renegotiate employee contracts. FSF cannot be a standalone initiative. Instead, as Baltimore models, it should be a key component of a larger coherent district strategy.

Any district considering the move to FSF will want to review the insights from Baltimore’s experience, and this new ERS publication is a good place to start.


WHAT WE ARE SEEING IN BALTIMORE IS JUST WHAT IS THE INTENT OF THIS POLICY; WE SEE STUDENTS BEING CATEGORIZED IN FUNDING.  THE DEFINITION OF STUDENT NEEDS IS RELATIVE.  POOR FAMILIES THINK THERE LIES THE NEED......THE EMPHASIS NOW IS ON ADVANCED PLACEMENT (AP) STUDENTS ALREADY HAVING THE BEST CHANCES OF SUCCESS.  WHEN THE POLICY SAYS THAT FUNDING FOLLOWS THAT CHILD, THEN NO MATTER THE SCHOOL, THAT CHILD WILL GARNER THAT LEVEL OF FUNDING.  SO THE DISABLED CHILD IS BEING ASSESSED AS NEEDING THE LEAST FUNDING AS THEIR PROSPECTS ARE LIMITED AND EVEN IF THEY ENTER THE BEST SCHOOL, THAT FUNDING WILL MEAN LOWER SUPPORT.  IT DOESN'T MEAN THAT THIS CHILD WILL NEED EXTRA RESOURCES TO BE GIVEN AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY.  WHEN YOU TRANSLATE ALL THIS TO THE PRIVATE, PROFIT-BASED CHARTER SCHOOL FORMAT TOWARDS WHICH THE PEOPLE PROMOTING THIS INTEND TO MOVE, YOU SEE THAT A CHARTER/BEST SCHOOLS WILL ONLY TAKE THE STUDENTS WHO BRING THE MOST FUNDING. 

THIS IS TOWARDS WHAT THIS PLAN WORKS!

ALL PARENTS WILL BE PRESSED TO CONTINUOUS COMPETITION FOR SCHOOL SLOTS RATHER THAN SIMPLY HAVING A GOOD LOCAL PUBLIC SCHOOL!

THESE PEOPLE ARE UNSCRUPULOUS CURS!

Student-based budgeting proposes a
system of school funding based on five key
principles:

1. Funding should follow the child, on a
per-student basis, to the public school
that he or she attends.

2. Per-student funding should vary
according to the child’s need and other
relevant circumstances.

3. Funding should arrive at the school as
real dollars—not as teaching positions,
ratios or staffing norms—that can
be spent flexibly, with accountability
systems focused more on results and less
on inputs, programs or activities.

4. Principles for allocating money to
schools should apply to all levels of
funding, including federal, state and
local dollars.

5. Funding systems should be as simple
as possible and made transparent to
administrators, teachers, parents and citizens.
In addition to the weighted student
formula, a full school empowerment
program includes public school choice
and principal autonomy. Every school
in a district becomes a school of choice
and the funding system gives individuals,
particularly school administrators, the
autonomy to make local decisions.
This autonomy is granted based on the
contractual obligation that principals will
meet state and district standards for student
performance. Student-based funding is a
system-wide reform that allows parents
the right of exit to the best performing
schools and gives every school an incentive
to change practices to attract and retain
families from their communities.
Under the weighted student formula
model, schools are allocated funding
based on the number of students that
enroll at each individual school, with
extra per-student dollars for students who
need services such as special education,
English language learners instruction or
help catching up to grade level. School
principals have control over how their
school’s resources are allocated for salaries,
materials, staff development and many other
matters that have traditionally been decided
at the district level. Accountability measures
are implemented to ensure that performance
levels at each school site are met. With its
emphasis on local control of school funding,
most teachers’ unions have been reasonably
supportive because the weighted student
formula devolves autonomy to the school
site and places responsibility squarely in the
hands of each principal.
In each district the local context has
flavored weighted student formula in its own
ways. Like most education policy, school
districts vary on the extent to which they
have implemented school empowerment
programs. Each district profiled in this
yearbook is rated based on ten benchmarks
of a robust school empowerment program.
The rationale for each benchmark is
described below. The benchmarks were
determined based on the author’s analyses of
the commonalities and best practices within
existing weighted student formula programs
and the recommendations of other studies of
student-based budgeting.2
School Empowerment Benchmarks
1. School budgets based on students not
staffing
Schools should receive revenue in the same
way that the district receives revenue, on a
per-pupil basis reflecting the enrollment at a
school and the individual characteristics of
students at each school. The current staffing
model used in most school districts is a very
inefficient way to fund schools and creates
dramatic inequities between schools.


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

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