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August 29th, 2014

8/29/2014

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THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY IS THE NEXT VEHICLE FOR PREDATORY FRAUD AND GUTTING OF PUBLIC WEALTH. FOR OVER A DECADE CONGRESS HAS LOOSENED POLICY TO ALLOW INSURANCE CORPORATIONS TO OPERATE LIKE BANKS WITH THE MONEY THEY COLLECT.  THEY ARE NOW USING THEM WITH LEVERAGING SCHEMES AND COMPLETE DISREGARD TO THE SAFETY OF YOUR FUNDS.  A CRASH IS COMING THAT WILL CAUSE THESE CORPORATIONS TO GO INTO BANKRUPTCY JUST AS AIG INSURANCE DID IN 2008.  PLEASE CONSIDER THAT PLACING YOUR MONEY IN THESE POLICIES WILL RESULT IN THE SAME FRAUD AND USE OF FUNDS AS FODDER AS HAS HAPPENED WITH OUR PENSIONS. 


IFAwebnews.com > National >

P&C industry enjoys portfolio boost from soaring stocks in 2013

P&C industry enjoys portfolio boost from soaring stocks in 2013
By IFAwebnews Staff Posted: May 30, 2014


When Republican pols say they are going to rebuild oversight and accountability they mean they are going to stop all that Food Stamp or pension fraud by employees faking injury.  They do not mean they are going to stop the billions of dollars in corporate fraud from corporate fleecing of consumers and policy holders.  Neo-liberals simply say nothing and let it all continue because their goal is to empty government coffers to restructure for Trans Pacific Trade Pact and global tribunal rule.

I have shown so much data that shows the billions of dollars in corporate fraud and yet this corporation working for the insurance industry states that 90% of insurance fraud is by the consumers or 'non-professional' fraudsters.  That's the 99% for you and me.
  Given that most Americans were pushed into poverty with last decade's massive corporate fraud, no doubt some average Americans are looking for ways to survive the stagnant jobless economy.  Insurance corporations might want to join the fight to get rid of neo-liberals and neo-cons so we can rebuild a domestic economy and citizens have jobs to and consume.

Insurers continue to count the cost of soaring fraud

July 2012  Experian Identity and Fraud


'The vast majority of fraud – more than 90 per cent - is being carried out by consumers or ‘non-professional’ fraudsters, so-called first-party fraud'.

Below you see what is really happening----insurance corporations are creating reasons to get rid of all consumer protections regarding policies that create some level of cost protection.
You will notice that this article refers to pushing the cost of business onto Medicaid and the public as does health care reform.  Yet another move to send most Americans to Medicaid-level of care for all health care.

Is insurance fraud causing auto No-Fault premiums to rise, or are insurance companies price-gouging and trying to hide the truth?


February 20, 2012 by Steven Gursten

Insurance lawyer says truth is not what the insurance industry would like public to believe

There is a lie being spread by the auto No-Fault insurance industry in Michigan --
a lie that our auto insurance premiums are more expensive due to insurance fraud.

This from an insurance industry that is making record-breaking profits– and on the heels of a $1 billion raise. The insurance industry would love to divert attention away from its own profits and find something – anything – to blame the cost of our premiums on.

In a recent press release from the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI), the group stated that fraud is “forcing” drivers into paying more for their auto insurance, especially in states like Michigan:

Soaring medical bills, high attorney fees and rampant fraud and abuse are forcing drivers in (several of the nation’s largest states including Michigan) to pay significantly more for auto insurance than they should,” said Paul Blume, senior vice president of state government relations for PCI. “Over the last several years, fraud rings and abuses of the system have cost consumers over $1.6 billion in New York and Florida alone. This amounts to a “fraud tax” on hardworking citizens and the cost trends in these states are unsustainable.”

This fraud and abuse argument couldn’t be farther from the truth. The insurance industry always lumps Michigan into its paint-with-a-broad brush approach. Yet the insurance industry has not produced actual cases of No-Fault insurance fraud in Michigan.


Yes, there have been widely publicized abuses occurring in other states. Yes, I will be the first to say there are some No-Fault insurance lawyers who are too aggressive today, and from time to time I blog about these excesses as well.

But unlike what is happening in some states, in Michigan the insurance companies are making record-breaking profits. In other words, the real cost driver of auto insurance remains an insurance industry that is almost entirely unregulated in what it can charge Michigan drivers who are forced by law to purchase No-Fault insurance.


Want to really curb insurance fraud? I’d start with empowering our insurance commissioner to regulate clearly excessive premiums that insurance companies charge here in Michigan. And then watch the cost of No-Fault insurance premiums plummet.

There is no reason why insurance companies should make more money off the backs of Michigan drivers in this state than they do in any other state in the US.

And fraud goes two ways. If we are really serious about fraud, then why not start tackling the insurance company IME industry of cut-off doctors that find nothing wrong with anyone, and that always deny people their PIP benefits, no matter how serious the injuries?  THAT'S WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT!

There will always be accusations by the insurance industry’s spin doctors, but so far these accusations have been without any factual support. In fact, this report from the National Crime Insurance Bureau puts Michigan at the lower end of questionable claims.

Let’s control excessive insurance industry profits before we pass No-Fault “reform” Meanwhile, this same insurance industry wants to increase profits even more. There is a huge push by the insurance industry for No-Fault “reform” that would eliminate vital insurance protections. In exchange for the suggestion of lower premiums (they refuse to promise), drivers would be able to choose lower amounts of PIP insurance coverage that provide limited No-Fault (PIP) benefits – including levels clearly insufficient if someone is seriously injured in a car accident, truck accident or motorcycle accident.

These auto accident victims would simply be pushed onto Medicaid. And taxpayers will be stuck footing the bill.

So while the deep-pocketed insurance industry is aiming to take away our most important insurance protections – touted by the insurance industry itself as the best No-Fault system in the nation — I’d look to the insurance industry first as the reason why our No-Fault insurance premiums are so expensive.

It’s not because there’s rampant insurance fraud in Michigan. And it is not because of the cost of medical care or No-Fault attorney fees, as the insurance industry spin-doctors would like us to believe.

It is because, again, Michigan is one of the only states that does not allow our insurance commissioner the power to regulate excessive profit-gouging by our own auto insurance companies. To put it simply, our insurance is high because the insurance industry makes it that way, in order to charge more and make higher profits in Michigan than in any other state in the country!


- Steve Gursten is one of the nation’s top insurance attorneys handling auto accident lawsuits. He is head of Michigan Auto Law and president of the Motor Vehicle Trial Lawyers Association. Steve frequently writes about Michigan auto insurance and insurance company abuse, and is available for comment.

Related Information:

Help save Michigan No-Fault: Write your representatives


Charade over “savings” from Michigan No-Fault “reform” has finally stopped

Michigan No-Fault insurance resource center

Michigan Auto Law is the largest law firm exclusively handling car accident, truck accident and motorcycle accident cases throughout the entire state. We have offices in Farmington Hills, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and Sterling Heights to better serve you. Call (888) 996-0279 for a free consultation with one of our Michigan insurance attorneys.

__________________________________________

This is a great article written last decade by New York's Attorney General Spitzer known to be actually fighting for corporate responsibility at the time.  This shows the degree of fraud and corruption that existed before the economic crash of 2008------everyone knew AIG insurance corporation was loading itself with fraudulent debt----and it shows what exists today as no attempts to change this environment have happened.  In fact, neo-liberals Obama and Congress are making it worse.

So, when insurance corporations paint consumers as driving fraud in order to hide profiteering and fraud by these very corporations-----you have a free-for-all as regards Rule of Law and accountability.  The American people are being required by law to buy these No Fault Insurance plans-----or with Affordable Care Act----the Catastrophic Care policies with rates that just keep rising.  You cannot escape them unless you opt out of driving and/or accessing health care.
......WHICH IS THE POINT.


I actually cried when Spitzer was brought down with prostitution charges.  You can believe these charges came to light to get rid of him although his behavior was unexcusable.  The point now is that this corporate fraud is going to soar with Trans Pacific Trade Pact seeking to end all US Constitutional rights of WE THE PEOPLE.


This is only a partial post of this article----you should check out the whole article.



 
State Attorney Generals And Other Agencies ?Investigate? Insurance Industry "Widespread Fraud And Corruption" Charges

Extent Of Government Agencies Insurance Industry Investigations, Results
[Notes: the "Headlines" lists (below) tell the extent of the investigations for each agency.
"Articles Library" following the headlines lists (farther below) includes the articles full text.]





Introduction - AGs Investigations, Results (various states)

On October 14, 2004,

NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Announced A Lawsuit Brought Against Marsh & McLennan Companies, "The Nation's Leading Insurance Brokerage Firm", For "Fraud, Bid-rigging and Antitrust Violations".  The following Major Insurance Companies AIG, Hartford, ACE, and Munich American Risk Partners" were named in the Complaint as Participants." AG Spitzer said, "The insurance industry needs to take a long, hard look at itself."  "If the practices identified in our suit are as widespread as they appear to be, then the industry's fundamental business model needs major corrective action and reform." "There is simply no responsible argument for a system that rigs bids, stifles competition and cheats customers," he added, "alleging that it steered unsuspecting clients to insurers with whom it had lucrative payoff agreements, and that the firm solicited rigged bids for insurance contracts."  "The Attorney General's office has uncovered extensive evidence showing that it distorts and corrupts the insurance marketplace and cheats insurance customers." "Marsh, at times, solicited fake bids" "even as it claimed in public statements that its "guiding principle" was to always consider its client's best interests." The "immediate victims of the illegal practices were ... mainly large corporations seeking property and casualty coverage, but also small and mid-size businesses, municipal governments, school districts and some individuals." In a press conference, Attorney General Spitzer indicated, as referenced by the title of his Press Release, "Investigation Reveals Widespread Corruption In Insurance Industry", that as the investigation continues, it could proceed further into property & casualty, expand into auto, health and other areas of insurance. "Trust me," Spitzer said upon filing his complaint against Marsh, "this is Day 1".





Introduction - National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) and States Departments Of Insurance (DOIs) Investigations, Results (if any)
[also includes other related state and federal agencies as may be applicable].

It Is Proven Extremely Doubtful For Most DOIs, If Any, To Investigate Or Take Real Criminal Action Against Insurance Companies That They Are Supposed To Regulate, Which Historically They Have Had A Warm And Cozy Relationship With For 150 Years. If Ever, There Has To Be A Legal Action Taken And/Or Criminal Conviction First Before DOIs Might Take Any Meaningful Action, If Any, ... And That Is To Justify Their Reason For Being. Instead state DOIs' do occasional "Market Conduct Examinations" which is no more than fluff for the Press and to deceptively show state citizens that they are supposedly doing their jobs and to justify their Agency's reason for being and to protect their jobs. EXPECT the usual politically correct announcements of alleged cooperation with state Attorney General Probes, an alleged task force set-up to investigate that we will never hear from again ... and then, even after Attorney General investigations and criminal prosecutions take place, expect no actions from the state DOIs and NAIC. This section nonetheless will cover their deceptions and announcements of their intent to cooperate with state Attorney General probes (esp. as they have all of the state insureds complaints, etc.) even though they won't share these files or information or ultimately will not cooperate with their state Attorney General's investigation ... this section also includes comments, studies and reports from FBIC and outside industry experts.

Unfortunately, based on decades of industry knowledge and experience, one should not expect any meaningful new investigative or prosecutorial results from the NAIC or state DOIs with exception of a token prosecution from a few states DOIs … who know in cases that if they don't prosecute, NY Attorney General Spitzer's office will. Otherwise, expect "the usual deception, cover-up, well disguised lack of 'real' and 'meaningful' cooperation or actions in most if not all cases. Expect their appearances of going through the exercises to satisfy the media, possibly a few meaningless fines from insurance companies which usually each state DOI gets to keep, along with a meaningless company warning or reprimand and/or temporary suspension of an employee (with pay) ... But in the whole grand scheme of things, any actions will be meaningless and have no measurable effect or contribution toward reform and the final results ... in fact expect just the opposite and maintenance of the status quo.

The truth of the matter is the NAIC’s and state DOIs’ historical record of duplicitous rhetoric, consistently staunch, pro-insurer allegiance and secretive anti-consumer positions being well disguised to the contrary for decades as they deceptively continue to portray themselves as champions of the consumer and protectionists of the people. This deception has been well maintained under a strict industry non-transparent cloak of secrecy tightly hidden behind a wall of silence made possible by decades of successful industry legislative lobbying affording them unnecessary special laws and an exemption from federal laws that are exclusive only to the insurance industry.  Regardless, in the interest of objectivity, FBIC will look to report the announcements along with outcomes and results of the NAIC and state DOI investigations and cooperation with state Attorney General offices which NONE are expected ... and then let you be the judge. The investigations are indicated as of this writing and date have just begun ...


The NAIC's and individual states DOIs' past three decades actions and track record strongly indicates a strong biased favoring of insurers versus a near total lack of actions in the protection of consumers from the unscrupulous and unlawful actions by many of the country's largest and most powerful national interstate insurers which are indicated as bad faith insurers. From research, experience and input from the many thousands of Americans, FBIC knows not to expect any meaningful actions or any real cooperation by the NAIC or individual states DOI commissioners and the Departments they oversee. Instead, FBIC expects the usual politically correct press releases from them espousing the same rhetoric and hyperboles in the past, indicating the alleged actions they are supposedly taking to investigate the insurers related criminal activities. According to their alleged usual routine, they will issue these periodic press releases to the media which espouse and give the implication that investigations are underway, active, and ongoing. As usual they hope their press releases will be adequate enough to stave off the persistence of the Press looking for interviews and more specific details. Their preferred modus operandi in between press releases is the exact opposite, that is to run and hide quietly behind their vaulted tightly closed doors and remain as quiet as possible. But when given no choice by a persistent reporter for the Press, their canned routine is to comment only on their last press release, no more and no less.  When cornered and really pressured into a corner for comment, the occasional use of the "we never comment on ongoing investigations" appears to be most suitable.


_______________________________________


Below is a stat that has a broad range.....actually most government watchdogs place the amount at $400 billion a year and rising.  This amount is staggering and it is why neo-liberals and neo-cons are claiming that the Medicare Trusts will be empty in just a decade.  IT WAS LOOTED BY THE HEALTH INDUSTRY AND FRAUDULENT INSURANCE CLAIMS.  Then, neo-liberals allowed these same health institutions write the Affordable Care Act privatizing all public health and deregulating and making global corporations of our health care.

Please stop allowing neo-liberals to control the Democratic Party.  The people's party is the one that should put protecting public wealth first.



Industry Execs Targeted for Health Fraud
Posted in Health Insurance , Medicaid , Medicare


June 1st, 2011



Health care fraud, especially in the areas of Medicare and Medicaid, is known to be costly. In fact, the government is said to lose between $60 billion and $2 trillion to fraud every year.

We Must Stop the Rampant Fraud in the Health Care Industry

www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/we-must-stop...  

Jun 29, 2009 · What we have seen over the last several decades is the systemic fraud perpetrated by private insurance companies, private drug companies, and private for ...

_______________________________________

I am shouting about this corporate fraud because it is expanding into insurance industries like LIFE INSURANCE.  If you watch free TV the commercials are on Life Insurance corporation after another.  They are using the decline in American people's wealth as the scare tactic behind buying LIFE INSURANCE.....you don't want to leave your family with your expense.  This is the same industry that used AIG to bring down the economy and take millions of people's homes through the subprime mortgage fraud.  We got your house, now come to us to protect you after you die......OH REALLY?????

What they are doing is setting the stage for the exact economic collapse that took AIG into bankruptcy unable to pay its debt and having US taxpayers paying 100% of insurance bets on subprime mortgage loans.  Only this time, it will be Life Insurance.  They are taking all that equity you and I are paying each month and using it to leverage 1,000 times what they can afford and guess what?  AN ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IN THE BOND MARKET IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.  They will be taken into bankruptcy with your equity disappearing.

NEO-LIBERALS IN CONGRESS ACTUALLY PASSED LEGISLATION ALLOWING INSURANCE CORPORATIONS TO ACT AS BANKS WITH THE POLICY INSTALLMENTS----LEVERAGING BEYOND WHAT CAN BE COVERED.


ALL OF MARYLAND'S POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


This is a partial clip of a great look at how the insurance industry is being allowed to become as entwined and leveraged as the financial industry creating the same conditions of too-big-to-fail and propensity to collapse.

Systemic Risk and the U.S. Insurance
Sector

By J. David Cummins and Mary A. Weiss
Temple University




Systemic Risk and the U.S. Insurance Sector

Abstract

This paper examines the potential for the U.S. insurance industry to cause systemic risk events that spill over to other segments of the economy. We examine primary indicators that determine whether institutions are systemically risky as well as contributing factors that exacerbate vulnerability to systemic events. Evaluation of systemic risk is based on a detailed financial analysis of the insurance industry, its role in the economy, and the interconnectedness of insurers. The primary conclusion is that the core activities of the U.S. insurers do not pose systemic risk.
However, life insurers are vulnerable to intra-sector crises because of leverage and liquidity risk; and both life and property-casualty insurers are vulnerable to reinsurance crises arising from counterparty credit exposure. Non-core activities such as derivatives trading have the potential to cause systemic risk, and most global insurance organizations have exposure to derivatives markets. To reduce systemic risk from non-core activities, regulators need to develop better mechanisms for insurance group supervision.



By way of preview, the analysis suggests that the core activities of insurers are not a major source of systemic risk. However, there are several sources of exposure to intra-sector crises, which could potentially spill over into the broader economy if sufficiently severe. For example, a substantial proportion of insurers have very high exposure to one or a few reinsurance counterparties, suggesting the possibility of a reinsurance spiral that could lead to substantial financial deterioration. In the life insurance industry, the high leverage of the life insurers, exposure of surplus to reinsurance defaults, and insurer investment in mortgage backed securities raise concerns about sectoral stability.


MEANWHILE-----

While they are leveraging themselves to the point of collapse-----they have a new revenue source-----SELLING YOUR PERSONAL INSURANCE DATA
....a profit bonanza.  So, too-big-to-fail and emergency bailouts with bankruptcy clearing all that need to pay consumer LIFE INSURANCE policies and VOILA-----you have AIG all over again.

THAT'S WHERE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE TAKING US!


All of that data you send in that is supposed to be confidential?  FORGET ABOUT IT-----IT IS EARNING INSURANCE INDUSTRIES BILLIONS OF DOLLARS AS A PRODUCT.


How the Insurance Industry Should Leverage Big Data

  Posted February 27, 2014


The Insurance Industry generates vast amounts of data, from legacy systems, call centre dialogues to customer records and it is multiplying rapidly. It is time for the insurance companies to start getting access to all this available data and start analysing it. In this video, Laura Hay – National Leader Insurance KPMG, talks about the massive potential of Big Data, Mobile and Predictive Analytics for the Insurance industry.


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August 14th, 2014

8/14/2014

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WE CAN REVERSE ALL OF THESE POLICIES EASY PEASY BY SIMPLY VOTING FOR POLS THAT SHOUT OUT AGAINST GLOBAL CORPORATIONS DRIVING MARYLAND'S ECONOMY AND FOR REBUILDING RULE OF LAW


I have been speaking with and handing my research to Baltimore police officers for a few months now making sure they understand that Johns Hopkins has told City Hall and the Chief of Police Batts to move towards privatization of Baltimore police and fire departments.  Since the economic collapse Baltimore has seen an explosion of fraud and corruption that is taking a billion dollars a year from city coffers and we cannot afford to support public sector employees as middle-class when all the money is being sent to corporate fraud and subsidy.  The public union-busting by neo-liberals and neo-cons in Baltimore and Maryland-----those neo-liberals O'Malley/Brown and the Maryland Assembly with the neo-cons Rawlings-Blake and the Baltimore City Hall are now getting rid of our public police and fire.  Remember, Clinton, Bush, Obama have almost finished privatizing the US military.....the manufactured sequestration cuts for the military were all about getting rid of public military and their benefits so now these global corporate pols are doing the same at the state and local level.  When you are bringing a formerly first world nation to third world status you must have all security working for corporations and not loyal to the public as public sector employees say Johns Hopkins.


Baltimore Chief of Police Batts was brought to Baltimore to do just that.  The Hopkins-owed SAIC surveillance and security systems Batts installed in Oakland, California are now being installed in Baltimore.  Batts is paid a salary that looks like the corporate executive he is.  The Baltimore Police have been battered with wage and benefit cuts and changes in shifts and hours that have Baltimore police one of the worst work environments and pay in the state and that doesn't even include the crime and violence and chronic intra-departmental problems.  If one didn't know better it almost seems like they are trying to get Baltimore police officers with tenure and pensions to leave the city!  Talking with officers that is indeed what is happening.  Police officers with ten years invested in pensions are leaving because of the hostile environment brought by Hopkins and their pols at City Hall.  The more stress on the police the more stress on the job.  Baltimore City is a tinderbox as citizens are tired of crime and violence and the police ignoring civil rights and liberties in the communities.  All of this is caused by the public policy written at Johns Hopkins and played out in City Hall.  Deliberately high unemployment and a stagnant economy is impoverishing people and the police department is headed by a chief known for abuse inside and outside of the department.  Remember, injustice necessitates chaos and that is what neo-liberals and neo-cons are allowing to happen under the guise of budget cuts and small government.

The Baltimore Police Department has sent representatives to Europe to contract with an International Security Corporation to send private security workers to Baltimore to replace existing public forces.  The fire department will go next.  The citizens already have trouble with police acting outside of the Constitution and when International security forces come----they will be working under Trans Pacific Trade Pact-----which replaces the US Constitution say the neo-liberals and neo-cons. 

ONLY THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT IS ILLEGAL AND A COUP AGAINST THE US CONSTITUTION SO ANY ATTEMPTS TO INSTALL TPP CAN BE REVERSED AS ILLEGAL.



What does life under International Security forces look like?  Well-----third world.


State Police, or Police State? --Nathan

Eleven facts about police militarization:
1. It harms, and sometimes kills, innocent people.
2. Children are impacted.
3. The use of SWAT teams is often unnecessary.
4. The “war on terror” is fueling militarization.
5. It’s a boon to contractor profits.
6. Border militarization and police militarization go hand in hand.
7. Police are cracking down on dissent.
8. Asset forfeitures are funding police militarization.
9. Dubious informants are used for raids.
10. There’s been little debate or oversight.
11. Communities of color bear the brunt.

http://billmoyers.com/2014/08/13/not-just-ferguson-11-eye-opening-facts-about-americas-militarized-police-forces/


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A police representative going to Europe to talk International Security contracting for the Baltimore City Police force would no doubt find an organization like the one below.  This is a US global corporation that does much of its work overseas but we see these operations moving into Western nations under the guise of 'terrorism'.  The threat of 'terrorism' falls squarely with dissent and protest---crime and violence by American citizens.  As 70% of Americans fall into poverty from the massive corporate frauds and the deliberate global corporate stagnation of our domestic economy-----and with that 70% growing to 80% and more----this third world society will see people WAKING UP and this is the structure O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly and Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall are building.  It is of course coming to your neck of the woods as well!

As important as a militarized government structure is we need to think as well how much taxpayer money is being spent on all of this Stalin-like security buildup.  The article below states that so much taxpayer money was funneled
to SAIC to create this Hopkins corporation that much of what all taxpayers paid in taxes for years went into building this surveillance structure unrolling in cities like Oakland, Calif, NYC, and Baltimore, Maryland.


You can see the job categories to see this organization will take over all public security duties as a global corporation.  Our Bank of America in Charles Village Baltimore already has contracted International Security outside their bank branch.

ISIO - INTERNATIONAL SECURITY INDUSTRY ORGANIZATION
Security Case S
tudies and
Applications


Belong to the most formidable International NETWORK for Security Professionals

ISIO Demographics

Reach
increases world-wide. Security Directors, Managers, General Managers, Trainers, Staff in all sectors, namely, Military and Defence, Buildings, Mall and Security, Law Enforcement, Prisons, Investigators, Assessors, Consultants and Advisors for Ports and Cargo, Hotel and Casino Security landside and on ships. Location (289071)United States, (89152)United Kingdom, (38194)India (34709)Canada, (31546)South Africa


The Focused Security Professional, is able to identify companies that have experience in providing security solutions for [Their] region of interest.

* Bank Security

* Border Security

* Building Security

* Business and Commercial Security

* Cargo Security

* City Security

* Control Station Security

* Event Security

* Homeland Security

* Hospital Security

* Hotel, Casino & Landmark Security

* Military and Defense Security

* Industrial Security

* Law Enforcement Security

* Oil and Refinery Security

* Port Security

* Prison Security

* Rail/Tunnel and Subway Security

* Retail and Store Security

* School Security


PROVIDING INTERNATIONAL SOLUTIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES. ISIO Global is a boutique, international solutions provider headquartered in the U.S. with operations in North and South America, Africa and Asia. The ISIO Global team of Principals and associates is comprised of a unique and diverse set of professionals with backgrounds in government security, intelligence, logistics, political strategy, energy, finance, international trade, risk management, and the military.

ISIO Global provides comprehensive custom-tailored solutions to meet our clients’ needs. Our client list includes countries, presidents and other high ranking officials from both the private sector and the military, high net worth individuals, and Fortune 100 companies. Through our vast international experience and contacts, ISIO Global is uniquely positioned to quickly and efficiently design and implement comprehensive solutions for the most pressing problems and exciting opportunities around the globe.

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You can see how neo-con SAIC and Hopkins is with this connection to Bush/Cheney and Halliburton----the biggest fraudsters in the world.  The reason I speak now about what most people who study this knows is that this is what will be brought to Baltimore -----and has been in the works for a while-----and it is completely ineffective, corrupt, and will work with no transparency or with any regard to Rule of Law.  If you think Baltimore Police Department is lacking transparency or attention to Constitutional policing wait until this ISIO/SAIC consortium comes our way.

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CON FOR YOU----THIRD WORLD SOCIETY
. 

STOP VOTING FOR THEM.  REMEMBER, IN MARYLAND WE HAVE LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS BACKING THESE NEO-LIBERALS EVERY ELECTION.  VOTE FOR BROWN OR GANSLER SAY BALTIMORE MINISTERS AND MARYLAND LABOR UNION LEADERS----WELL, THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE PUSHING ON THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND.



This is an attempt to make a blog in which I comment on scientific issues.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Who or what is SAIC? Vanity Fair has a quite interesting article about SAIC, a company I had never heard about before.

Washington's $8 Billion Shadow
Mega-contractors such as Halliburton and Bechtel supply the government with brawn. But the biggest, most powerful of the "body shops"—SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war.
The article goes on to describe SAIC, and their less than stellar record. The article also touches on why such companies exist.
It is a simple fact of life these days that, owing to a deliberate decision to downsize government, Washington can operate only by paying private companies to perform a wide range of functions. To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.
This is hardly a new trend. In his 1980 book, Fat City, Donald Lambro describes much the same going on. It goes without saying that this is not a cost effective way of running things, and that it creates problems with oversight and conflict of interest, as the article also explains.
In Washington these companies go by the generic name "body shops"—they supply flesh-and-blood human beings to do the specialized work that government agencies no longer can. Often they do this work outside the public eye, and with little official oversight—even if it involves the most sensitive matters of national security.

[....]

SAIC's relative anonymity has allowed large numbers of its executives to circulate freely between the company and the dozen or so government agencies it cares about. William B. Black Jr., who retired from the N.S.A. in 1997 after a 38-year career to become a vice president at SAIC, returned to the N.S.A. in 2000. Two years later the agency awarded the Trailblazer contract to SAIC.
I highly recommend the article - go read it, and see what the US taxpayers' money is really used on.


__________________________________________

SAIC is Johns Hopkins and represents billions of taxpayer dollars sent to Hopkins in development funding and as you see below-----it operates world-wide just as Baltimore Board of Estimates operates here in Baltimore.  The corruption in cost overruns and bid-rigging is breath-taking and you see the same ethics permeates all of what these Ivy League Universities are involved. 

SAIC is the spying network behind the NSA that Snowden exposed to the world and it is in the consortium of security and surveillance groups that operate as ISIO above.  ISIO would be an example of what the police privatization in Baltimore would look like.  For decades SAIC and ISIO have operated in developing worlds but they are now moving into Western countries to control dissent of Americans et al to being taken third world.


Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin have worked hard to send Federal funds to build these kinds of systems through Hopkins.  HOW TOTALITARIAN OF THEM!


The article states that despite the known corruption in SAIC that Bloomberg of NYC handed a multi-million contract to the same and the reporter wonders why give business to a known criminal element-----WELL, HOPKINS IS BLOOMBERG.

'SO INEFFECTIVE'-----DOESN'T THAT SOUND LIKE GOVERNMENT IN MARYLAND AND BALTIMORE???


Just How Corrupt is SAIC?

Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 7:23PM
David Callahan The latest revelation in the CityTime corruption case offers yet more evidence that the Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, may have an unethical organizational culture. SAIC is one of the largest and most well-connected government contracting firms in the country, with 45,000 employees worldwide. It's incompetence in handling the CityTime contract, with hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns, appears to be part of a pattern -- with other clients, like the FBI, reporting similar experiences.

But now comes evidence of something darker. According to a files unearthed by New York City Controller John Liu, SAIC tried to exert improper influence over the top city official monitoring its work. Juan Gonzalez, the New York Daily News reporter who has been on top of this story all along describes the new revelations about SAIC:

On Jan. 28, 2002, Richard Valcich, then the director of the Office of Payroll Administration, wrote a one-page note to William Russell, a senior vice president for Virginia-based Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).

"I appreciated meeting with you to discuss SAIC issues that are pending with the Office of Payroll Administration," Valcich wrote. He then apologized to Russell "if I seemed rude and abruptly shortened your discussion on a future post city-employment position with SAIC."

"[I]t is inappropriate to discuss any post employment with a company that I do business," Valcich warned him.

Valcich went on to say that he was "flattered you would consider me for such a position with SAIC but there are restrictions due to the city's conflicts of interest rules."

Such restrictions include a lifetime ban against working on the same "matter" that a city employee handled while in government. 

Wow. Of course, those familiar with how big contractors and lobbyists corrupt government officials will not find any of this surprising. There is a long history of companies using offers of lucrative jobs to exert improper influence. These deals are simple and often hard to scrutinize: Do our bidding now, companies say, and we'll give you a job paying a million dollars a year (or whatever) down the road. A big focus of ethics reform in recent decades has been to crack down on "revolving door" enticements.

SAIC's tactic in this episode raises questions about its corrupt dealing around other contracts. Stay tuned for more on that topic. 

Gonzalez's latest article on the subject of SAIC includes a kicker near the end: 

Amazingly, despite years of red flags on the CityTime project, the Bloomberg administration confirmed yesterday it recently awarded a new $40 million contract to SAIC.

So what is it about Michael Bloomberg and SAIC?
Why is a mayor so famously focused on efficiency so forgiving to a contractor that is so ineffective? That is a question that deserves closer attention. 

 
0 Comments

August 13th, 2014

8/13/2014

0 Comments

 
Do you hear your labor and justice leaders shouting out against this?  NO, they are backing the neo-liberals who are embracing Trans Pacific Trade Pact pretending it will create jobs.  Well, you will be working as a third world Chinese sweat shop employee with these neo-liberals.

Below I show the local effect of PERESTROIKA of American citizen's assets by global corporations.  I have spoken before about the goal of privatization of public water.  We see the effect in Detroit, a city gutted with fraud and corruption just as in Baltimore.  The American people have paid loads of taxes over a few decades that would have rebuilt state and city infrastructure if that revenue was not being looted by Baltimore Development Corporation and Hopkins to expand global interests.  Now, they want to raise public water bills over double the amount to pay again for rebuilding infrastructure and guess what----the same Johns Hopkins is there to pocket the profits from this public work as VEOLA ENVIRONMENT.  Remember, these Ivy League universities made their billions in endowment profits from the subprime mortgage fraud and AIG investment firm that was spun to become HighStar.  So, all of that profit was based on fraud.  They used that money made from fraud to by VEOLA ENVIRONMENT from the French global corporation.  These same Ivy League universities like Hopkins are now pushing Baltimore City Hall to privatize public transportation to French Veola and privatize public water and waste to HighStar VEOLA ENVIRONMENT.  So, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, et al of the Ivy League are using those endowment funds to privatize public water and waste all over the world.  At the same time they are buying all fertile land and fresh water sources around the world at the same time contaminating US and world aquifers with fracking.....as in Maryland with the Marcellus Aquifer.


I am writing today after coming from the center of fraud and corruption----Baltimore City Hall and the Board of Estimates meeting.  I attended today because they are handing contracts to private corporations for public water service that everyone knows is only steps towards water privatization.  There is Jack Young and Mr. Black for Rawlings-Blake and Comptroller Pratt ready to vote for privatization of Baltimore city public water and waste.  All working for the most neo-conservative institution in the world----Johns Hopkins while running as Democrats.

PRIVATIZING PUBLIC WATER----HOW NEO-CONSERVATIVE OF THEM!!!!!


Jack Young as head of the Board of Estimates has worked hard to make sure public interruptions do not occur during meetings by placing a police officer to escort citizens out if they try to speak.  You know, the public is not allowed to speak about public policy in public in Maryland and especially in Baltimore.  So, instead of speaking during the Board of Estimates meetings on camera for all to see, people like Cindy Walsh must speak to the room before the meeting starts.  Only today, when I explained to all in the room what the goal of this privatization is and how Johns Hopkins is involved-----Jack Young called the police to drag me out BEFORE THE MEETING EVEN STARTED.  He works so hard to make sure no one knows what is happening that he was prepared to throw me out for just speaking in the City Hall room.  I of course reminded him that the meeting had not started and he could not throw me out of the room -----he immediately called the meeting to order.

YOU KNOW WHO LEADS IN PRIVATIZATION OF ALL THAT IS PUBLIC?  O'MALLEY/ANTHONY BROWN.  YOU KNOW WHO BACKED BROWN DURING THE ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR?  LABOR UNION LEADERS.  KNOW WHO WAS THERE TO PROTEST PRIVATIZED WATER----LABOR UNIONS.  ASK FRED MASON OF MARYLAND AFL-CIO WHY HE BACKS NEO-LIBERALS DOING ALL THIS DAMAGE?

We need labor union leaders working for their membership's interests when they support candidates.  You cannot support the neo-liberals installing these policies and then pretend to fight against them.  Union members and labor and justice need to see how VERY, VERY, VERY, VERY BAD THESE PRIVATIZATION POLICIES ARE FOR EVERYONE!

IT TAKES A SOCIOPATH TO PLAN THESE KINDS OF CORPORATE POLICIES AND THE POLS HIRED TO PUSH THESE GOALS INTO PLACE ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.
ALL OF MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


Don't privatize Baltimore water
[Letter]June 23, 2014

The presence of the private water industry at this week's United States Conference of Mayors meeting threatens public health and democracy in Baltimore.

Time and time again, experiences in other cities that have privatized their water systems have demonstrated that privatization fails to provide secure and equitable water access to residents. The industry's strategy of placing profits over the human right to water is reprehensible and undermines the democratic system.

As a voter and someone who calls Baltimore my home, I strongly urge Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to take a stand at the USCM and keep the private water industry out of our city.

Jacob Fishman, Baltimore


_________________________________________


Did you know that it is Johns Hopkins who is a major shareholder in Veola Environment through HighStar Investment firm that is pushing the privatization of public water and waste?  Did you know that Veola Environment and HighStar have Ivy League endowments in the other cities pushing the privatization of public water----like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley.  Privatization of public assets to maximize profits for these endowments.

Did you know the goal is to privatize water, end public subsidy of water as water rates rise, use SMART METERS to ration water to what the every growing impoverished public can afford all to maximize profits for Johns Hopkins endowment? 

You must be listening or reading Maryland media -----they make sure you do not know----especially Marc Steiner.

VEOLA ENVIRONMENT is a global corporation bought from the French global corporation VEOLA of transportation fame.  The one known for slave conditions for their workforce all over the world.  VEOLA ENVIRONMENT is working all over the world to privatize the world's public water and waste and in nations having the pleasure of a few decades of their presence water rationing with SMART METERS has been in what followed.  Now, Wall Street and Ivy League endowments want to bring it to America since they are taking the US to third world levels.  That Trans Pacific Trade Pact may not be in place in the US but Maryland and neo-liberals in Congress are preparing for it.



I wonder if an interview with Hopkins staff will let people know what the goal is and who is behind it?


Water Privatization in Baltimore

08/12/14 Marc Steiner
August 11, 2014 –

Segment 3 We turn to the topic of the possibility of water privatization in Baltimore, with: Lauren DeRusha, National Campaign Organizer of Corporate Accountability International; and Dr. Lester Spence, Center for Emerging Media Scholar-in-Residence and Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.




The Dangerous Return of Water Privatization

Community waters systems have sustainably provided safe drinking water for generations but corporations are now using local fiscal crises to push for water privatization. By Maude Barlow and Wenonah Hauter, from Sojourners
January/February 2014
  Utne


It’s time for an integrated, holistic national water policy, including the establishment of a federal water trust fund. Instead we face the cannibalization of our public utilities by private corporations.

The United States has one of the best public water supply systems in the world. More than 250 million people count on local governments to provide safe drinking water. Over the last 40 years, federal, state, and municipal governments have worked together to improve and protect water resources. The Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act have kept the U.S. on target for preserving rivers, lakes, watersheds, wetlands, natural aquifers, and other sources of fresh water.

Great strides have been made in managing waste water and storm water. More than 90 percent of community water systems in 2012 met all federal health standards. Public water utilities have been a tremendously successful model for the U.S. and continue to keep drinking water safe, accessible, and affordable for all Americans.

It hasn’t always been this way.

During the 1800s, private companies controlled the water systems of several large U.S. cities—to dire effect. Because the companies were more interested in making a profit than providing good service, many poor residents lacked access to water. As a result, cholera outbreaks were common in poor neighborhoods; water pressure was sometimes too low to stop fires, which destroyed both homes and businesses.


By the turn of the 20th century, city governments, including Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, and New York City, had taken over drinking water provision from private companies. The goal of government was to improve service, reduce waterborne diseases, and increase water pressure to better fight fires. New York City, for example, assumed control of its drinking water services from the bank and holding company called the Manhattan Company, the predecessor of JPMorgan Chase, after an outbreak of cholera killed 3,500 people and a devastating fire caused extensive property damage.

These cities learned the hard way just how important public water provision is for human and environmental health. The shift to a public utility system, responsive to community needs, allowed local public control of water and sewer services. Public utilities helped local governments manage water resources, growth, and development, and ensured that safe and reliable services were available to all.

Now, just past the turn of the 21st century, our national water framework needs rethinking with climate change and sustainability in mind. It’s time for an integrated, holistic national water policy, including the establishment of a federal water trust fund. Instead we face the cannibalization of our public utilities by private corporations.

Despite our success over the last 100 years, public water utilities face daunting challenges in the days ahead:

1. Water systems nationwide are aging and wearing out. Last summer more than 150,000 residents in the greater Washington, D.C. region faced the specter of being without water for days because of a stuck valve on a major water main. Delayed maintenance on the valve due to funding cuts led to the crisis.

________________________________________________

Ivy League university endowments were heavily invested in the subprime mortgage loans knowing they were fraudulent and would bring down the economy.  They took the profit made from those fraudulent loans and started buying land overseas with the intent of cornering the next market----privatized public works like transportation and water and waste.  They starved governments with massive frauds and corruptions just to pretend we now have to hand all that is public over to the same institutions creating and profiting from the frauds.


I'm picking on Ivy League universities today but there are plenty of other bad guys profiting from these policies.  Look how rich Ben Cardin and Nancy Pelosi are getting from Insider Trading for example!  Those Clinton neo-liberals who voted for global corporations and markets have worked two decades to advance these policies.  IT'S THE REPUBLICANS THEY SAY-----

WELL, MARYLAND IS ONE BIG NEO-LIBERAL STATE SO IT'S BOTH NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS.




US universities in Africa 'land grab' Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out
  • John Vidal and Claire Provost
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 8 June 2011 15.18 EDT


US universities are reportedly using endowment funds to make deals that may force thousands from their land in Africa. Photograph: Boston Globe via Getty Images Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.

Researchers say foreign investors are profiting from "land grabs" that often fail to deliver the promised benefits of jobs and economic development, and can lead to environmental and social problems in the poorest countries in the world.


The new report on land acquisitions in seven African countries suggests that Harvard, Vanderbilt and many other US colleges with large endowment funds have invested heavily in African land in the past few years. Much of the money is said to be channelled through London-based Emergent asset management, which runs one of Africa's largest land acquisition funds, run by former JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs currency dealers.

Researchers at the California-based Oakland Institute think that Emergent's clients in the US may have invested up to $500m in some of the most fertile land in the expectation of making 25% returns.

Emergent said the deals were handled responsibly. "Yes, university endowment funds and pension funds are long-term investors," a spokesman said. "We are investing in African agriculture and setting up businesses and employing people. We are doing it in a responsible way … The amounts are large. They can be hundreds of millions of dollars. This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive."

Chinese and Middle Eastern firms have previously been identified as "grabbing" large tracts of land in developing countries to grow cheap food for home populations, but western funds are behind many of the biggest deals, says the Oakland institute, an advocacy research group.

The company that manages Harvard's investment funds declined to comment. "It is Harvard management company policy not to discuss investments or investment strategy and therefore I cannot confirm the report," said a spokesman. Vanderbilt also declined to comment.

Oakland said investors overstated the benefits of the deals for the communities involved. "Companies have been able to create complex layers of companies and subsidiaries to avert the gaze of weak regulatory authorities. Analysis of the contracts reveal that many of the deals will provide few jobs and will force many thousands of people off the land," said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland's director.

In Tanzania, the memorandum of understanding between the local government and US-based farm development corporation AgriSol Energy, which is working with Iowa University, stipulates that the two main locations – Katumba and Mishamo – for their project are refugee settlements holding as many as 162,000 people that will have to be closed before the $700m project can start.
The refugees have been farming this land for 40 years.

In Ethiopia, a process of "villagisation" by the government is moving tens of thousands of people from traditional lands into new centres while big land deals are being struck with international companies.

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9% of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former US Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues.

In Mozambique, where up to 7m hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South Africans businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the US. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created.

"No one should believe that these investors are there to feed starving Africans, create jobs or improve food security," said Obang Metho of Solidarity Movement for New Ethiopia. "These agreements – many of which could be in place for 99 years – do not mean progress for local people and will not lead to food in their stomachs. These deals lead only to dollars in the pockets of corrupt leaders and foreign investors."

"The scale of the land deals being struck is shocking", said Mittal. "The conversion of African small farms and forests into a natural-asset-based, high-return investment strategy can drive up food prices and increase the risks of climate change.

Research by the World Bank and others suggests that nearly 60m hectares – an area the size of France – has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa in the past three years.

"Most of these deals are characterised by a lack of transparency, despite the profound implications posed by the consolidation of control over global food markets and agricultural resources by financial firms," says the report.


"We have seen cases of speculators taking over agricultural land while small farmers, viewed as squatters, are forcibly removed with no compensation," said Frederic Mousseau, policy director at Oakland, said: "This is creating insecurity in the global food system that could be a much bigger threat to global security than terrorism. More than one billion people around the world are living with hunger. The majority of the world's poor still depend on small farms for their livelihoods, and speculators are taking these away while promising progress that never happens."

______________________________________________



Why is Harper Selling Canada's Fresh Water Supply to French Companies?


Posted: 10/18/2013 12:35 pm EDT Updated: 01/23/2014 6:58 pm EST   Huffington Post


Prime Minister Harper has just signed the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), and Canadians who care about our freshwater heritage should be deeply concerned for three reasons.

First, the massive increase in beef and pork exports that have been negotiated will put a terrible strain on our water supplies. Beef producers can now export close to 70,000 tonnes of beef to Europe and an undisclosed but higher amount of pork. Meat production is highly water intensive. It takes over 15 million litres of water to produce one tonne of beef, for example.

Already Alberta's dwindling water supplies are over-taxed by a beef industry that is rapidly expanding and expected to double its water footprint by 2025, according to an assessment done before this deal was signed. Intensive hog operations in Manitoba are killing Lake Winnipeg, their waste creating nutrient overload that covers over half the lake in blue green algae. To protect our precious watersheds, what we need is more sustainable and local food production, not massive new trade deals that will strain our water sources beyond their capacity.

Second, this deal will give French companies Suez and Veolia, the two biggest private water operations in the world, access to run our water services for profit. Under a recent edict, the Harper government has tied federal funding of municipal water infrastructure construction or upgrading to privatization of water services. Cash-strapped municipalities can only access federal funds if they adopt a public-private partnership model, and several cities have recently put their water or wastewater services contracts up for private bids. If Suez or Veolia are successful in bidding for these contracts (and under the new deal, local governments cannot favour local bidders) and a future city council decides it wants to move back to a public system, as municipalities are doing all over the world, these corporations will be able to sue for huge compensation. Private water operators charge far higher rates than public operators and cut corners when it comes to source protection. Privatization of water services violates the essential principle that Canada's water is a public trust.

The same "investor-state" clause contained in the Canada-EU deal poses the third threat to Canada's water. The rules essentially say that if a government introduces new environmental, health or safety rules that were not in place when the foreign corporation made its investment, it has the right to compensation, which a domestic corporation does not have. For instance, an American energy company is suing Canada for $250 million in damages using a similar NAFTA rule because Quebec decided to protect its water by placing a moratorium on fracking. Moreover, transnational corporations are now claiming ownership of the actual water they require in their operations. Another American company successfully sued Ottawa for $130 million for the "water rights"; it left behind when it abandoned its pulp and paper operations in Newfoundland, leaving workers without jobs or pensions. The new deal with Europe will give large European corporations similar rights, further eroding the ability of governments to protect our fragile watersheds and ecosystems.

The Harper government has gutted every regulation and law we had in place to protect our freshwater supplies. Now this deregulation is locked in as corporations from Europe as well as the U.S. can soon claim to have invested in an environment without water protection rules and sue any future government that tries to undo the damage.

On a planet running out of clean accessible water, this is a really stupid way to treat our water.




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The same investment firms pushing to privatize public water and waste are behind these fracking industry expansions.  Exporting natural gas places fracking in the US and around Maryland on steroids as profits rise and that means more and more fresh water sources will disappear.  NO WORRIES.  VEOLA ENVIRONMENT will sell you water from overseas and if you cannot afford the price----they will use SMART METERS to ration what you can pay.

THAT JOHNS HOPKINS----LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING THEIR WAY TO PROFITS AND THEN USING THEM FOR EVIL-----



Fracking Spreads Worldwide

By Nidaa Bakhsh and Brian Swint November 14, 2013


Bloomberg Financial

The hydraulic fracturing of shale in search of oil and gas has hardly started outside the U.S., but that’s changing. A record 400 shale wells may be drilled beyond U.S. borders in 2014, with most of the activity in China and Russia, according to energy consultants Wood Mackenzie. (In contrast, thousands of shale wells will be drilled in the U.S. next year.) The number of rigs used onshore in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region has increased 10 percent over the past year, data compiled by oil services company Baker Hughes (BHI) show. Most of those rigs are meant for shale. “It’s likely there will be a revolution,” says Maria van der Hoeven, executive director at the Paris-based International Energy Agency. “But not everywhere at the same time. And you just can’t copy the U.S. experience.”

Fracking in the U.K. will start next year, after the government lifted an 18-month moratorium imposed when a fracking company found it had accidentally caused earthquakes. Two utilities—Centrica (CNA:LN) of Britain and GDF Suez (GSZ:FP) of France—have bought stakes in British drilling licenses to help bankroll the drillers and win a cut of any profit.



The shale boom has moved the U.S. closer to energy independence, added jobs, helped revive manufacturing, and lowered gas bills. Yet the conditions that fostered the U.S.’s success don’t exist elsewhere. In some countries, landowners don’t own the oil and gas in the ground: The state retains all mineral rights. Or a country may levy much heavier taxes on oil and gas profits.

Story: U.S. Shale-Oil Boom May Not Last as Fracking Wells Lack Staying Power Once they start drilling and fracking, though, countries such as China, Argentina, and Russia could experience new oil and gas booms. China has the largest shale gas reserves, estimated to be the equivalent of 212 billion barrels of oil. In shale oil, Russia tops the list with about 75 billion barrels, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says. Australia, Poland, and Algeria all have big reserves.

Fracking activity outside the U.S. is likely to be good for the big oil players. Royal Dutch Shell (RDS/A) teamed up with China National Petroleum Corp. this year to explore in Sichuan, the province that accounts for 40 percent of China’s shale reserves. Hess (HES) is exploring with CNPC in the western Xinjiang region. YPF (YPF), the Argentine oil company, has joined with Chevron (CVX) to tap deposits in Argentina’s vast Vaca Muerta formation. Says Edward Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup (C): “Within three to five years, there should be exponential growth in drilling as there was in the U.S.”


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As I stated with health care and the deliberate building of a perfect storm for antibiotic resistance and world health epidemics we see the same characters------Wall Street, Ivy League universities like Hopkins, and their neo-liberal and neo-con pols working to break our public health and environmental protections to profit from selling what will become a scarce resource.  Not to mention how large populations unable to obtain fresh water are easily managed when made desperate.

This is what Maryland Assembly and O'Malley/Brown and in Baltimore, Baltimore City Council and Maryland Rawlings-Blake are working toward.  They are neo-liberals and neo-cons who do not care about anything but maximizing corporate profits.


SIMPLY REVERSE ALL OF THIS BY VOTING THESE POLS OUT OF OFFICE AND REBUILD RULE OF LAW AND PUBLIC JUSTICE------AND REBUILD A DOMESTIC ECONOMY WITH SMALL AND REGIONAL BUSINESS WHILE KEEPING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AT BAY IN MARYLAND.

Contaminated freshwater systems caused by ‘fracking’

Friday, April 4, 2014 13:52

Fracking fluids from oil and gas extraction is contaminating our freshwater systems. http://www.blissful-wisdom.com/contaminated-freshwater-systems-caused-by-fracking.html

A local resident recently wrote about the monetary significance of hydrocarbon extraction and exportation.  What many advocates of the oil-dependence industry seem to ignore completely is the short-sighted and toxic process with which ‘unconventional oil and gas sources’ are being extracted. This process is known as ‘induced hydraulic fracturing’, or ‘fracking’ (for short).

There is growing peer-reviewed scientific evidence of the harmful effects of shale gas development.  ‘Pro-fracking’ opinions focus on the big bucks and ignore the detrimental effects on our limited, freshwater systems.


There are a million well sites in North America which have used fracking.  A horizontal well in a shale formation can use between 7.5 million to 19 million litres of water.  That water used for extraction in gas shale ‘plays’ becomes toxic by the addition of: water‐based fracturing fluids mixed with friction‐reducing additives; biocides to prevent microorganism growth and to reduce biofouling of the fractures; oxygen scavengers and other stabilizers to prevent corrosion of metal pipes; and acids that are used to remove drilling mud.   80 % of this fracking fluid comes back to the surface and 20 % stays in the shale excavation ‘play’. This fracking fluid is highly toxic and contaminates local well-water, rivers, and underground water systems. 

This is the part which outweighs the financial benefits of present ‘fracking’ and non-conventional oil extraction methods. Our North American water reserves are limited.  Toxifying our limited water resources is insanity to say the least.  No amount of remuneration can justify contaminating underground water beds and surface-water courses for coming generations.

As of 2012, 2.5 million hydraulic fracturing jobs have been performed on oil and gas wells worldwide!

Do an internet search on the topic of ‘fracking’ and why it is so controversial. Be wary of industry-backed politicians who would smooth over the environmental collateral damage left from ‘fracking’ practices.

  Water well testing must take place both prior to and after seismic testing operations
If a well-owner does not test and show healthy conditions were present prior to nearby  ‘fracking’, then there is no possibility of claiming damages when contamination does eventually occur.

For the last hundred years, water rights belong to the owner of the land.  Tough luck for  those landowners and city-dwellers downstream, since liability favors industry not local taxpayers.  High cancer rates and damaging side-effects to human and animal life occur where tailing ponds and fracking fluid has escaped into underground and above-ground waterways. 

How can we not seriously demand alternatives to oil/gas addiction and its collateral damage?  There is money to be made and jobs to be had, but it requires focusing on developing those alternatives.  Industry is not going to encourage that shift.  Politicians serve industry and corporate interests, not the long-term health of the nation.  And once again…fresh, drinkable water is becoming threatened by ‘fracking’ practices.


0 Comments

August 12th, 2014

8/12/2014

0 Comments

 
I want to take a few days to look at why Johns Hopkins and Harvard think 'if you are born poor you stay poor' and look at how neo-liberalism and neo-cons are working hard to reshape Western society to reflect this ideal.  The corporate frauds of tens of trillions of dollars in the US alone is mirrored all over the world wherever The Clinton Foundation moved in to recruit and educate people who were placed as leaders to do in those nations what was being done in the US.  You can follow Harvard graduates from other nations to see where the fraud and corruption emanates in those nations.  All over the world the same wealth inequity from fraud and corruption exists and it is because of the philosophy of neo-liberal/neo-conservative free and global markets.  No matter how many times a Republican states free markets can work, if you take away the oversight and accountability from corporations and government----they will become systemically criminal and corrupt as exists now in the US.  Baltimore and Maryland is at the bottom.  You'll notice that not one mention of fraud and corruption will be found in social research from universities.

This is the consolidated wealth.  What the American people need to remember is most of this involves criminal activity and lots of unconstitutional actions and all of this can be reversed and recovered.  A government aiding and abetting crime and suspending Rule of Law is denying citizens DUE PROCESS and therefore Statutes of Limitations are not in play.  So, just engage in politics and take back your government!
Rebuilding Rule of Law and public justice should be the top issue for every American.

Make a good life for your children and grandchildren.


Must Read: The Corporate State of America – Widespread Crime, Corruption and Fraud


October 18, 2007, 10:28 am  PR WATCH


Corruption widespread in India, says US report |

Business Line
 www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/international/... 

There is widespread corruption in India in all ... the Bombay High Court ordered that a special team be formed to investigate an alleged fraud in which money ...




EY raises alarm over cybercrime, widespread corruption ... www.vanguardngr.com/2014/06/ey-raises-alarm-cybercrime...    West Africa Leader of EY’s Forensic/Fraud ... respondents who perceive bribery and corruption to be widespread in Nigeria. 72 per cent of the ...


Compliance and law combine to stem corruption in Brazilian ...

www.insidecounsel.com/2014/06/23/compliance-and-law...   CachedJun 23, 2014 ·

A study has determined that 70 percent of Brazilian executives interviewed believe that corruption is widespread in ... fraud and corruption is ...



One in five executives thinks corruption is widespread in Canada’s business world, EY report shows
Claire Brownell | June 11, 2014 | Last Updated: Jun 11 5:29 PM ET Financial Post






US commission finds widespread waste and corruption in ... www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2011/0901/US...   CachedSep 01, 2011 · US commission finds widespread waste and corruption in wartime ... Afghanistan has resulted in as much as $60 billion in waste and fraud ... .


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This article does a good job summing up the war on the middle-class.  He cleans up his commentary by not declaring fraud and corruption as the problem and you can see an allegiance to Clinton when he points fingers at all the Presidential culprits but cannot name Clinton.  Rather he speaks of breaking Glass Steagall/deregulation/  Nafta without mentioning Clinton's name......and the massive subprime housing fraud was a transfer of wealth.  I do like how he identifies THE SEQUESTRATION AND FORCED BUDGET AGREEMENTS TO PAY DOWN THE $17 TRILLION DEBT as simply the final attack on public wealth by neo-liberals and neo-cons working together.  These trillions of dollars in cuts......the deliberate manipulation of inflation to zero etc are all assaults on what is left of the American middle/working class wealth and what we won't get will be handed away as corporate subsidy or lost to continuing fraud.

Here in Maryland all pols are neo-liberals and Maryland has moved further than most states in dismantling Democracy and public justice......


SIMPLY REBUILDING A DOMESTIC ECONOMY WITH SMALL AND REGIONAL BUSINESSES AND KEEPING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AT BAY ALONG WITH REBUILDING RULE OF LAW AND OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY IS ALL THAT IS NEEDED TO REVERSE THIS ATTACK!


It’s Official: Rich Declare War on the Middle Class

by 

Robert Freeman


For the past thirty years the rich have been waging war on the middle class.  It’s been astonishingly effective, partly because it has been undeclared.  But even that pretense is now being abandoned.  The President’s National Deficit Commission has effectively declared that the rich will now go after what is left of working and middle class wealth and will take whatever steps are necessary to seize it.  If allowed to succeed, their plan will reduce Americans to a state of serfdom.

Ronald Reagan began the war on the middle class with his “supply-side” economics.  Its very purpose, according to David Stockman, Reagan’s Budget Director, was to transfer wealth and income upwards.  It cut the marginal tax rate on the highest income earners from 75% to 35% while dramatically expanding spending for war.  The results were two-fold:  massive federal debt and an astonishing rise in the share of income and wealth going to those who were already the wealthiest people in the world.

The national debt quadrupled between 1980 and 1992.  George W. Bush would repeat Reagan’s policies and double it again between 2000 and 2008.  Meanwhile, the share of national income going to the top 1% more than doubled, from 9% to 24%.  The share going to the top one-tenth of 1% of income earners more than tripled.  We now have the most unequal distribution of income in the developing world and the inequality is growing rapidly.

Shifts of this magnitude over such short periods of time have never been seen in American history.  With the rich getting much, much richer, its means that everybody else is getting poorer.  And in fact, real wages for median workers are lower today than they were in 1973.  Indeed, while the inflation-adjusted income of the bottom fifth of workers fell by $6,900 between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% saw its annual income increase by $741,000!

To try to keep up with living standards Americans resorted to debt.  They increased their personal debt-to-income ratio from 62% in 1980 to 130% in 2008.  When housing prices fell 35% nationwide in the recent collapse it left Americans with a smaller share of equity in their homes, 48%, than at any time since the Great Depression.  The share they have lost has been taken by the banks.

In other words, all of the income and wealth gains for middle Americans from the “golden years” between 1945 and 1975 have now been wiped out.  Or more accurately, have now been transferred to the very rich.  The top 1% holds 34% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% holds just 2.5%.  The bottom 40% owns absolutely nothing.


These effects and numbers can be numbing, even dizzying.  But it’s important to understand that they have not been the result of random events or impersonal market forces.  Rather, they have followed as the intended consequences of the relentless application of a wide array of government and industry policies.

The massive run-up in debt is one such policy. The wealthy are net lenders. This means that massive public and private debt transfers interest income to them from the rest of the economy.  Another method for effecting massive wealth transfer:  Beginning in 1981 the Reagan administration effectively stopped enforcing anti-trust laws, allowing monopolies to gouge everyone who had to buy their products.

The government actually provided tax subsidies so that corporations could eliminate jobs in the industrial heartland and ship them to Mexico and later, China, India, and other low-wage countries, reducing wages and pitting American workers against each other for those jobs remaining.

The bank deregulation that began in the early 1980s reached its apex with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in the late nineties.  This set up the “casino capitalism” of the next decade that would spawn massive criminality and mortgage fraud by the nation’s leading banks—none of which has been prosecuted.  The result was the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression.

But even as more than five million homeowners have lost their homes, the wealthy had their losses covered by the Bush and later Obama administrations.  Bloomberg news estimates that the transfer to the banks through the financial bailout comes to some $13 trillion dollars.

We could go on and on and on with the roster of ways the wealthy have used the government to transfer national wealth to themselves.  Environmental and health laws that are not enforced.  Deals with the pharmaceutical industry so they don’t have to compete with foreign manufacturers.  Health care “reform” that forces tens of millions of Americans to buy questionable insurance products, even as insurers continue to kick legitimate claimants off their rolls.  Give-aways of the telecommunication spectrum worth hundreds of billions of dollars to media monopolies that ladle out state propaganda as if were news and never, ever challenge official narratives.

In these and a thousand other ways, the rich have conspired with the government they largely control to shift more and still more of the nation’s wealth away from the working and middle classes, to themselves.  It amounts to the most insidious class warfare and the most rapacious looting of public and private resources in the history of the world.

The result is vast impoverishment, demoralization, and the destruction of the American middle class.  One out of eight Americans are on food stamps.  One out of five people are in official poverty.  One out of four children are raised in poverty.  Twenty five million people cannot find enough work, while their skills atrophy and their families and communities are destroyed.  These are not figures describing a banana republic, a disaster-stricken region, or a third world country. They describe the United States of America after three decades of plunder by the rich.  And now they want to go in for the kill.

Not satisfied with the staggering wealth they have already siphoned away, the ultra-rich are now using Barack Obama’s National Deficit Commission to propose even more brazen plunder.  And the looting is no longer taking place behind closed doors or under the cover of arcane public policies.

The commission proposes to cut the federal government’s budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade.  But 75% of the “savings” will come from gutting programs that help stabilize the middle class and their communities.  None of it comes from policies that would harm the rich.

For example, the commission proposes cutting the tax deduction for mortgage payments.  Not only will this render housing much less affordable for millions of prospective home buyers, it will reduce housing prices, perhaps substantially, for without the tax writeoff, buyers will be able to afford much less house.  This will decimate the sole source of wealth of tens of millions of Americans.

It is housing wealth that undergirds retirement security for the middle class.  Or, at least it did until one out of four homeowners went underwater on their mortgage in the recent bank-triggered collapse.  Then, even as the Commission plans to decimate home prices and owner equity, it proposes cutting back benefits to Social Security recipients.

It would lower Social Security cost-of living adjustments while raising the minimum retirement age.  And this is being proposed at the very moment that the bank-owned Federal Reserve Board is beginning to print hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks from what’s left of their toxic assets still held from the housing crash.

The ensuing inflation is going to destroy the value of retirement incomes at exactly the moment that 77 million baby boomers head off into retirement.  It was exactly this process of money printing and bankrupting of retirees that destroyed the German middle class in the early 1920s, giving rise to Adolph Hitler.

The Commission’s proposals would increase co-pays and deductibles for Medicare, making it unaffordable to millions.  It proposes taxing as income the health insurance benefits millions receive from their employers.  The Child Tax Credit would be eliminated as would 10% of all federal government jobs.  This, at a time when more than 20% of the workforce is already underemployed and there are five workers trying for every available job.

We should be crystal clear:  these policies amount to a mortal assault on what remains of middle class solvency and the democracy that a vibrant middle class makes possible.

But even as it girds up for this assault, the Commission barely touches the ultra-rich on whose boards they serve and who have gained so much over the past 30 years.  And it cannot go without being said that it was these same professional predators who actually wrecked the economy, pitching it into its greatest collapse since the Great Depression.

The Commission’s proposals would actually lower the maximum tax on the highest income earners, from 35% to 24%.  The nominal tax rate on corporate income would fall as well, from 35% to 26%.  There is nothing proposed to raise taxes after so many decades of steadily amassed wealth.  No financial transactions tax (as the IMF recommends) to stanch the kind of tsunami of speculative buying and selling that brought down the economy.  Such a tax would raise over $700 billion over the next decade.

Of course, there will be no claw-backs of the trillions of dollars transferred to the rich under the phony duress of “saving the system” during the height of the financial crisis.  No proposal that the cap on earnings subject to Social Security withholding should be removed.  That proviso alone would raise more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade.

In fact, it is in comparison with other give-aways to the rich that the take-aways from the middle class by the Commission can be seen as so one sided and venal.  Remember, they propose to save $4 trillion over 10 years.

But the war in Iraq, which we now know was entirely premised on lies, will cost more than $5 trillion, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.  It has proven a huge boon to the rich weapons makers, bankers, logistics companies and oil companies that Bush used to coddle as his “base.”

As mentioned above, Bloomberg news estimates that the financial bailout cost some $13 trillion, all of it going to the very richest people on the planet.  There is not a syllable in the Commission’s report proposing getting any of that back to help reduce the deficit.

Or consider the notorious Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 where fully 40% went to the top 1% of income earners.  Obama once promised to overturn them but, as is his typically cowardly pattern, is now folding.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated that they will cost the government more than $18 trillion over their lifetime—four times what the Deficit Commission claims it will achieve in savings.  But God forbid we should ask for even a penny of that back to help battle the deficit.

In other words, there are many, many substantial and just ways that the savings the Commission proposes to create could be secured via small contributions from those who have gamed the system and gained the most over the past three decades.  But that is not the Commission’s plan.  And it is in that omission that its true intent is revealed.

There is no more time for stealth, no more need for subtlety.  Western capitalist economies are declining at a pace that is frightening their elite stewards and compelling such desperate, slovenly measures as the wholesale printing of money to postpone the inevitable.  While Obama sings lullabies of “hope” and “change” to tranquillize the suckers out front, the rich are backing the truck up to the vault in the back, no longer even deigning to disguise the heist.  And of course, why should they?  They have the additional diversion of the moronic Tea Party vigilantes (“Keep the government out of my Medicare”), ever ready to cut other people’s throats to cure their own nosebleeds.


The Commission’s proposal is the most naked, undisguised declaration of class warfare possible.  Its agenda is not to reduce the deficit but rather to reduce what is left of the American middle class and American workers, to a condition of servitude, of feudal peonage.  Their poverty will make them docile and subservient.  This will make possible the final looting of America by those whose sociopathic greed has brought it so low already.  The battle over this proposal is the last bulwark against the devastation and final destruction of America.  It must be fought and won or our freedom and security ceded forever.  There is no other choice.











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Below you see one quality of life issue being tackled by US corporate media.  You look above and you see why the middle-class is fading and you look below and you would never see that all of this simply needs justice to reverse who has the money.

In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins is pushing Michelle Rhee education privatization and that includes removing playgrounds from schools and building parks for the children to be 'reflective'.  There is often no recess,
yet amazingly the hype for education and health care reform in Maryland is wellness and fitness. 


The other stat that is interesting is that 20% of Americans are doing OK----FOR NOW.  They are moving for only 10% so you better watch out!  I point this out because it shows exactly the percentage of voters coming to the polls in elections.  THOSE 'LIKELY' VOTERS.  Indeed, 80% of Americans are disaffected because they are the victims of the frauds and corruptions listed above and those 20% doing OK are profiting from the fraud and corruption.  See why salaries for people in government are rising above $200,000?  Taxpayers are not paying for quality employees.....the rich are buying loyalty.  So, in Baltimore we have Baltimore Development Corporation and Johns Hopkins skimming billions of dollars of city and state revenue that means they have to allow those minions in City Hall skim thousands just as is done in Afghanistan.  Baltimore City Hall actually preys on Baltimore citizens with corrupt fines, fees, and taxes.  IT IS BREATH-TAKING.  This is what is happening in those nations listed above and the #1 winner----Wall Street banks and their investment firms.

If you notice, the conversation in college athletics is not why are coaches and sports departments being allowed to become corporations----it has become making the college athlete a paid worker.  There goes amateur sports.  Look below again and you see the real picture----the vocationalizing of K-12 with children tracked into sports training at youth.  That is what sports in America will look like just as it does in China say the neo-liberals and neo-cons.  We only need children playing sports if they can create profit as professionals!


WAKE UP!!!!!!  LET'S SIMPLY TURN THIS AROUND.


Sports & Leisure 2/03/2014 @ 5:11PM

As The Middle Class Fades, The Casual Youth Athlete Dies Out With It


As businesses are ignoring political debates and determining that climate change is real, so, too, are they stepping out of the arguments over income inequality by operating as if it exists. In particular, that there are two markets: the few and the wealthy, and the many and the not-so-wealthy. The market that doesn’t exist — or at least not like it used to — the middle class.

From The New York Times:


“Those consumers who have capital like real estate and stocks and are in the top 20 percent are feeling pretty good,” said John G. Maxwell, head of the global retail and consumer practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers .

In response to the upward shift in spending, PricewaterhouseCoopers clients like big stores and restaurants are chasing richer customers with a wider offering of high-end goods and services, or focusing on rock-bottom prices to attract the expanding ranks of penny-pinching consumers.

“As a retailer or restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be,” Mr. Maxwell said. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle. …

In 2012, the top 5 percent of earners were responsible for 38 percent of domestic consumption, up from 28 percent in 1995, [economic] researchers found.

I bring this up because I think the decline of the middle class, the greater presence (and acceptance) of an all-or-nothing economy, has something to do with why, according to one major report, fewer children are playing team sports.

The Sports & Fitness Industry Association, a trade group for what it calls “leading industry sports and fitness brands, suppliers, retailers and partners,” in January reported that since 2008, or around the start of the Great Recession, “team sports have lost 16.1 million participants or 11.1% of all team participants, measured by those who played at least once a year.” The sports taking the biggest hit in 2013 were the biggest sports: football, basketball and baseball — a trend that the National Sporting Goods Association, a retail trade group, noted in June (and that are increasingly being reflected in high school sports participation numbers).

The Sports & Fitness Industry Association is very sure of why that decline is happening. The issue is not so-called “core” athletes, who play frequently. In 15 out of 24 team sports measured, the number of core athletes increased (compared with only five out of 24 in 2011). But the occasional athlete, the weekend warrior, the kid just trying out a sport — those numbers are falling hard. From a news release quoting the association’s director of communications and research, VJ Mayor:

 “The degradation of the casual team sports participant cannot be ignored,” said Mayor. “Casual participation is the gateway to more core participants. We have already begun to see a decline in core participation among traditional team sports over the last five years which is alarming. The drop could be influenced by several factors including increased single sport specialization, overuse injury, athlete burnout, safety concerns, and the marginalization of the recreation player. …”

Actually, the several factors spelled out by Mayor are all related to one factor: the increasing professionalization of youth sports and younger and younger levels. Parents are savvy enough to know that their children, at very early ages, are being sorted by a well-organized system into the pile as future athlete, or the pile as future nonathlete. There is no third pile. And there are many businesses out there — not just sporting goods businesses — that know how to exploit the ambitions and/or fears of the parents who want their kids in the athlete pile.

Exacerbating this system is a top 20 percent (as Maxwell described it) willing to spend more on kids’ education — including sports careers — out of the willingness of any parents to do what they can for their kids, while also aware that their peers are doing the same thing and thus could squeeze their kids out.

As for the other 80 percent — well, while there are long-told tales of athletes using sports as their perceived only way out of poverty, the middle class is also looking at sports as their only perceived way for their kids not to slip into poverty. At the least, spending big for a college scholarship so they have a chance at graduating from school without mounds of loans to pay. But those 80 percent have to weigh, constantly, whether the cost of play is worth it, with that cost of play driven by the upper 20 percent’s ability and willingness to pay. So you end up with two populations — the one that’s all in, and the one that’s shut out.

Of course, in the whole of the population, there are kids who will opt out of the youth sports rat race because they’ve found other interests. But a nagging question is, if they had access to sports that weren’t hard-core, would they find joy and pleasure in them, and keep playing? Or would they have a chance to discover at a later age, like 10, that they might enjoy a certain sport?

We’ll never know, because like in the American economy as a whole, increasingly there is no middle ground in youth sports. So I would expect that participation surveys in future years will show more of the same — a few playing a lot, most playing not much at all.


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US Attorney General Eric Holder who along with Obama can see no corporate fraud really hates when his time is pulled back to the American people demanding justice as if they were still citizens with rights and the US Attorney General worked for public justice.  He is a corporate lawyer and his entire day is working for US global corporations and their legal issues around the world.  This is why corporate fraud and government corruption is rampant----our state and US Justice Departments do not do public justice.  A bone is thrown now and then to assuage the masses.

Below is for whom Obama and your neo-liberal Congress person works----it is for whom O'Malley in Maryland has dedicated all economic and development---the International Chamber of Commerce.  These are the corporations winning all Federal, State, and local contracts for work and they are the ones openly fleecing governments and individuals with no fear from neo-liberal or neo-con pols.


We must start at the state and local level to rebuild Rule of Law.  If Maryland becomes a Rule of Law state the Governor will demand the US Justice Department protect the citizens of Maryland.

DO YOU HEAR YOUR INCUMBENTS SHOUTING TO REINSTATE RULE OF LAW?  VOTE THEM OUT OF OFFICE IF NOT!


A word from our Secretary General Welcome to ICC, a unique global business organization.

ICC is – and has been throughout its long existence – a steadfast rallying point for those who believe, like our founders, that strengthening commercial ties among nations is not only good for business but good for global living standards and good for peace.

To that end, ICC provides a forum for businesses and other organizations to examine and better comprehend the nature and significance of the major shifts taking place in the world economy. We also offer an influential and respected channel for supplying business leadership to help governments manage those shifts in a collaborative manner for the benefit of the world economy as a whole.

While policy advocacy is a major part of ICC’s work, everything else we do is also devoted to promoting international trade and investment. Indeed, much of our work is of a very practical nature, focussed on making it easier for business to operate internationally. Our world-renowned commercial arbitration service is a form of impartial and dependable private justice that gives more security to commercial partners doing business across frontiers.

Drawing on the expertise and experience of its worldwide membership, ICC has also over time developed a large array of voluntary rules, guidelines, and codes – - sometimes referred to as ‘trade tools’ –- which facilitate cross-border transactions and help spread best practice among companies. A notable example is ICC’s famous Incoterms® rules –- first elaborated in 1936 –- which are accepted as the global standard for the interpretation of the most common terms used in contracts for the international sale of goods.


ICC strives to ensure that the emerging new world, with new poles of power and leadership, stays faithful to the precept that international trade and investment and the market economy system are key factors in raising and spreading wealth.

I remain convinced that the core values that led to the creation of ICC over 90 years ago are as relevant today as they were then. Those values will continue to provide a compass for our efforts on behalf of business to help shape the new world that is emerging.




John Danilovich

Secretary General
International Chamber of Commerce



0 Comments

August 08th, 2014

8/8/2014

0 Comments

 
'The TPP will re-regulate the pharmaceutical and medical device industry patent protections, eroding the affordability of life saving medicines.  Generic drugs will become less available. EVERGREENING drug patents will extend patents ensuring a never ending upward cost spiral sacrificing affordability for the many to the profit making on medicines exorbitantly priced for the few.  Surgical Techniques, laboratory tests and medical treatments can be patented restricting availability to people in need'.

There has also been concern about the problem of patent ‘ever greening’ — that the TPP will impose low patent standards ‘likely to lead to a proliferation of secondary patents being granted … preventing fair competition for long periods’. This would be an undesirable outcome, creating excessive opportunities for the extension of monopoly protections.

In Maryland it was Johns Hopkins that wrote the policies of Trans Pacific Trade Pact in health care and the structures being implemented by neo-liberals and neo-cons in the Maryland Assembly with Governor O'Malley.  It is the Hopkins private non-profit Maryland Health Care for All that pushed Affordable Care Act to deregulate and consolidate the health industry preparing for TPP.  Below you see Hopkins' associate Beilenson building the structure that will capture most Marylanders not able to access health care and it is the model of third world clinic care.  Above you see the term 'evergreening' meaning privatization and profiteering in TPP trade policies that create the conditions of dismantling public health.  Below you see Johns Hopkins and their use of the term as the name of the so-called private non-profits that will manage the masses not able to access health care in Maryland.
   The very institutions guilty of making the US health system the worst in the world are now writing policy to take the US health system third world.


At Evergreen Health we put your health first.


Evergreen Health is a new health insurance company in Maryland created to give you a better health care experience.

We were founded by local doctors who imagined a health care system that puts a patient’s health first – not corporate profits. Evergreen Health offers quality, affordable health insurance plans  for individuals and families in Maryland.  We also offer group plans for employees of your business who work in Maryland.


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The reason Beilenson thinks Evergreen is well-positioned is that if Affordable Care Act is implemented more and more people will be forced into these non-profit plans.  Evergreen will be the health structure people are forced to as Medicare, Medicaid, and people's corporate plans disappear.  As with evergreening in TPP-----it will move the American people to a third world platform of health care.  Beilenson is Johns Hopkins and Johns Hopkins is third world health care.  Baltimore doesn't have citizens dying 30 years too early because of good policy!

OH WELL------IT'S ONLY THE POOR!  WELL, IN THIRD WORLD NATIONS DOCTORS, LAWYERS, AND INDIAN CHIEFS ARE POOR.


Why do we need a private non-profit co-op to bring prices down when Medicare and Medicaid does just that?
  As Beilenson knows------he is there to replace these Federal programs and will not have to meet any Federal guidelines of care-----they are staged to downgrade a public health structure in Medicare that has served wonderfully for decades.  All we need to keep Medicare is to stop the health industry fraud by institutions like Johns Hopkins.

OH, LET'S CREATE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS TO TAKE OVER PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAMS LIKE MEDICARE AND MEDICAID THAT ALREADY WORK TO KEEP PRICES DOWN----
  if 1/2 of entitlement spending wasn't lost to corporate fraud.


In the land of neo-liberalism/neo-cons,  ending all Federal agencies that come with public protections is a must in order to allow global corporations to do anything they want in the US and to American citizens.

Evergreen faces challenges in delivering health insurance

Small businesses may be the future of health insurance co-op in MarylandOctober 29, 2013|By Meredith Cohn, The Baltimore Sun

Four weeks since it began selling health insurance on the state's new marketplace for the uninsured, Evergreen Health Cooperative Inc. has signed up only five people.

That's a long way from the nonprofit health insurance provider's first-year goal of 15,000 people, so Evergreen is already shifting focus.

Technical problems making it difficult for people to register for the state exchange culminated last week for Evergreen when its plans disappeared from the exchange offerings. The plans were restored after a short time.

Statewide, more than 3,100 people have signed up for health coverage on the exchange, according to the latest numbers released by the Maryland Health Connection. There are about 800,000 uninsured Marylanders.

Evergreen isn't waiting for the exchange to start working properly. For now, the co-op has switched focus from individuals buying its insurance on the exchange to small businesses buying plans directly from Evergreen, said Dr. Peter Beilenson, the former city health commissioner who started it. (The state's small-business exchange has been delayed until Jan. 1.)

"We obviously were predicating most of our business on the exchange market, which is not bearing fruit right now," Beilenson said. "That was a problem for us in two ways: financially in terms of generating enough members and for our mission. We did this for the middle class who would qualify for subsidies."

But the co-op was new and nimble enough to switch "almost overnight to small businesses," he said. "We think it will provide us with enough members to get through until the exchange is running smoothly."

Evergreen's small group rates were approved Oct. 25, so no group has enrolled yet, but the prices are below average and attracting attention from businesses and brokers, Beilenson said. The co-op will depend on enrollment to survive — members' premiums will pay to run the co-op and cover startup costs. Any profits would be returned to the plans.

The co-op's small-group rates are at the lower end of the spectrum, with an average premium of about $368 per insured, according to data from the Maryland Insurance Administration.

The lower rates may reflect Evergreen's model. The co-op employs its own doctors, who work in one of four centers for a salary rather than fee-for-service. The idea is to focus on prevention while managing multiple chronic conditions and staving off costly emergency visits and hospital stays.

Evergreen also offers a traditional plan using a network of doctors.

It's cost that matters most to small businesses, and a competitive premium will serve Evergreen well, said Karen Davis, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of health policy and management. There is a "fair amount of evidence" that shows Evergreen's patient-centered model cuts costs, she said.

But insurance tends to be dominated by large insurance companies, so it remains unclear whether Evergreen and co-ops in other states can slice off enough business.

"The major challenge is size and scale," Davis said. "But the advantage Evergreen has is that its model of care is more effective. … I think they're in a better position than most of the co-ops."

Nationwide, 24 co-ops received federal funding as part of the Affordable Care Act. Evergreen got $65 million in federal loans, but all but about $13 million will go to a required reserve fund

Others wanted to start co-ops in Maryland, seeing the potential to compete with traditional insurance companies and bring down prices. One was MedChi, the state medical society, which planned to start a co-op largely on the Eastern Shore but was stymied when Congress cut startup funding.

"We're very supportive of the idea of co-ops and think they can work really well," said Gene Ransom, MedChi's CEO. "I don't think they have an easy task ahead. We are rooting for Evergreen because more competition is good for the marketplace."

Beilenson said Evergreen has made other adjustments to survive. It has hired some staff from the insurance industry to serve as a balance with those employees who know more about public health. It has raised $5 million in startup money from private foundations and another $1 million from other private sources for marketing, including a new TV ad (federal law prohibits explicit marketing with government money).

"I think we're well-positioned," Beilenson said. "We think we know what we're doing. And we think we have a really good product."
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One of the elements in Affordable Care Act is the connection of generic drugs to Medicare.  Obama and neo-liberals in Congress told the American people that because massive health industry fraud of our Medicare Trust occurred over these few decades they would have to reduce our health benefits to cover the money stolen.  In the case of health care this means Medicare and Medicaid enrollees limited to what medications they can access.  Common drugs will no longer be available to 80% of Americans because of this ACA clause pushing people to generic drugs only.  IT SAVES MONEY AND LOWERS THE NATIONAL DEBT!  As the statement at the top shows this ACA policy corresponds to the TPP health policies making generic drugs less common and harder to get.  Neo-liberals and neo-cons are sending people to generics at the same time they are pushing TPP limiting access to generics.  It's the same policy as pushing NAFTA and global markets knowing it will cause massive unemployment and poverty at the same time ending Welfare as a safety net-----creating the deepest poverty in US history.  These are all Republican policies written for wealth and profit being installed by Clinton neo-liberals.  Republican voters who are shouting against lost US Constitutional rights and dismantling of Rule of Law------lost access to health care need to remember these are all Republican policies.  Don't vote Republican to fix this-----rebuild the Democratic Party at the national, state, and local level.


Below you see from what the Affordable Care Act is modeled......third world clinic care.  Baltimore has had this system in place for a few decades but the model is being expanded because of the huge number of citizens falling into poverty.  Only 1/2 of taxpayer money sent for social services are spent on the people meant to be served.....the rest has been funneled to Johns Hopkins and/or University of Maryland as profit.  This is why the poor in Baltimore have life spans equal to third world countries.  Neo-liberalism = third world poverty so 90% of Americans will be pushed into this system.   Below you see a neo-liberal solution to our exploding health care costs fueled by health industry fraud and profiteering------third world clinic care and using college students to replace the public sector health care and social services employees.  Health care outcomes in the US are at second and third world levels because of the dismantling of public health systems.  College students are not prepared to be the backbone of public/social services-----they need practical experience of working with public professionals.  Making volunteers and students the backbone of public health is a third world structure. 


The US is now on par with countries like Hungary and Slovenia because Reagan/Clinton neo-liberalism dismantles all first world structures the protect and serve the public and all taxpayer money is looted in corporate fraud and subsidy.  Simply rebuilding these oversight and accountability structures returns the US to first world status.


DEMAND EXPANDED AND IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL IN YOUR STATE TO KEEP OUR FEDERAL MEDICARE PROGRAM STRONG AND EVERYONE COVERED!  PUBLIC HEALTH IS WHAT KEEPS COSTS DOWN.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO REBUILD OVERSIGHT TO ELIMINATE 1/2 OF HEALTH SPENDING AS FRAUD.


Doctor and Patient What We Can Learn From Third-World Health Care

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D. July 26, 2012 12:01 amJuly 26, 2012 11:16 pm  New York Times


The young doctor had just returned from a month working in a country in Africa, familiar to the rest of us only through pictures of its impoverished population and news reports of recurring natural disasters and political upheavals. “You must feel exhausted but great,” a senior colleague commented. “You went in there and you really helped those people.”

Doctor and PatientDr. Pauline Chen on medical care.

But my younger colleague felt neither exhausted nor relieved to be back home, she confided when the older doctor had left the room. She had cared for dozens of patients with abscesses and broken bones, tumors and arrow wounds, relying on nothing more than a single rickety X-ray machine, a handful of battered surgical instruments and the aid of one well-connected local nurse.

“We could get so much done with so little over there,” she said. “It’s like we’re not doing something right over here.”


Put another way, the American health care system has become the great international paradox, spending more but getting less.

With all the most advanced technology and equipment, spending far more on health care than any other nation — a whopping $2.6 trillion annually, or over 17 percent of our gross domestic product — the United States consistently underperforms on some of the most important health indicators. Our infant mortality rates, for example, are worse than those in countries like Hungary, Cuba and Slovenia. Our life expectancy rates are not much better; in global rankings, we sit within spitting distance of Cuba, Chile and Libya.

This quality conundrum dogs us, even as our best and brightest have tried to imagine a more cost-efficient system. Some have pursued the carrot-and-stick route, linking quality measures to reimbursement. Others have attempted to reduce quality to its most basic parts, creating checklists and to-do lists. And still others have rearranged networks of hospitals, clinics, physician practices and payments, conjuring up a breathtaking array of combinations, permutations and bundles of care in order to create more cost-efficient systems.

But, according to an essay published this summer in The Stanford Social Innovation Review, we might have saved ourselves the huge effort, the expenses and the disappointments of only marginally successful initiatives, if we had first looked to countries traditionally viewed as needing our aid and learned from their successes in facing challenges similar to our own.

In the essay, Rebecca D. Onie, a founder and the chief executive of Health Leads, a domestic health care organization; Dr. Paul Farmer, a founder of Partners in Health, a Boston-based medical nonprofit group; and Dr. Heidi Behforouz, medical and executive director of the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment project, a community-based health care initiative in the United States that is part of Partners in Health, argue eloquently for “reverse innovation.” They contend that for decades, several nongovernmental and nonprofit medical organizations have delivered high-quality care in some of the most challenging circumstances possible. Applying the solutions these medical organizations have already discovered could allow us to bypass or at least foreshorten what has become an interminable trial-and-error search for the answers to our country’s health care woes.

Their own organizations offer several models of success. For nearly three decades, Partners in Health, for example, has delivered consistently high-quality care to more than 2.5 million people in a dozen countries like Haiti, Rwanda and Peru, places with widespread poverty, scarce numbers of providers and no health care infrastructure. But they have managed to achieve, among other successes, the highest rate of cure of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the world and better rates of adherence to treatment regimens and follow-up than in much of the United States.

The key to their success is an unabashed disregard for some of our most cherished assumptions about what constitutes good care. Instead of providing antibiotics, CT scans and high-tech interventions, Partners in Health considers basic necessities like food and housing as critical components of the group’s medical work. Instead of asking patients to travel miles to the only clinic and see only the doctor or nurse, they train cadres of community health workers who can monitor, administer and advise in the heart of local villages and in people’s homes.

Applied to organizations in the United States, this approach has proved startlingly effective, as the Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment, or PACT, program has demonstrated. PACT targets some of the poorest and sickest patients with H.I.V. and other chronic illnesses in the greater Boston area. Just like Partners in Health, PACT relies extensively on community health workers who are trained in tasks like helping patients take their medications and make it to clinic appointments as well as reviewing their pantries and teaching them to prepare healthy meals. Applying these broad definitions of care, PACT has significantly decreased the number of emergency room visits and life-threatening opportunistic infections, cut hospitalization rates by 60 percent and yielded a 16 percent savings for Medicaid.

Health Leads has stretched these definitions even further, giving the terms “provider” and “care” a millennial twist. Each year, Health Leads trains a selected group of technology-savvy and tenacious college students to staff “resource desks” in primary care and prenatal clinics in cities like New York, Baltimore, Boston and Chicago. With these Health Leads volunteers in place, doctors can, for example, “prescribe” housing assistance for a family whose child’s severe asthma has been exacerbated by a cockroach infestation, healthy foods and nutrition resources for a man suffering from obesity, or transportation to a drugstore for an elderly woman who needs diabetes medications. At the resource desk, a Health Leads volunteer then “fills” these prescriptions by finding the best solutions for the problems at hand, whether that means tracking down the appropriate agency, navigating complicated online application processes or providing support as the patient makes the calls. In clinics where a single social worker may be responsible for as many as 25,000 patients, Health Leads volunteers have more than doubled the services provided.

The successes of PACT and Health Leads are no secret. But what does remain mysterious as our health care system threatens to implode is why more of us haven’t done the same and rushed to apply the lessons learned and proved elsewhere.

“We keep trying to reinvent the wheel,” Ms. Onie observed. “The humbling reality is that we are trying to recreate innovations that have been robustly developed in the developing world.”

In other words, we have yet to deploy what could prove to be the most powerful weapon in the fight to contain costs and improve the quality of health care: our own humility.

$200- 400 BILLION DOLLARS EVERY YEAR ARE LOST TO MEDICARE AND MEDICAID TO HEALTH INDUSTRY FRAUD.  THAT IS WHERE THE HUMILITY NEEDS TO BE FELT!


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People must understand the neo-liberal jargon---- when they say they work for the middle-class they see the middle-class in the US as people earning $250,000 as a family.  They see Medicare and making it last longer for those 10% of people.  Needless to say the working and current middle-class are the only ones having paid payroll taxes into this Medicare Trust so the very people that should be getting full benefit are the ones being pushed out with the ACA.  That 'donut hole' will do no one any good if you cannot access or afford the kinds of PHARMA you need.  I already have friends having bad health effects because of being forced to use a generic that does not work for a chronic condition. 

THIS IS SERIOUS FOLKS.  THE SAME PEOPLE TRYING TO KILL PUBLIC HEALTH WORLD-WIDE WITH TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT ARE WRITING THESE HEALTH POLICIES.

Remember, the answer is not to vote Republican because the Affordable Care Act is Republican policy.  The solution is getting rid of neo-liberals in the Democratic Party.
  Do you hear your labor and justice leaders shouting out against neo-liberals?

In Maryland, Brown, Gansler, and Mizeur all supported these policies----while Cindy Walsh did not.

THE KING AND QUEEN OF NEO-LIBERALISM, BILL AND HILLARY CLINTON TAKING THE US FROM FIRST WORLD STATUS TO THIRD WORLD STATUS.


Which tier will your family fall?  In the US almost 70% of Americans are at poverty line meaning they will fall into the lowest 2 tiers.
  Don't forget that TPP will keep generic drug availability at a minimum and when they do come available they will be very outdated.  That's what the masses get say the neo-liberals and neo-cons.   Someone has to replace the trillions of dollars in health industry fraud from our Medicare and Medicaid programs....

ACA 5-Tier Drug List

For Individual PPO and Small Group HMO, POS, and PPO plans (including Marketplace/QHP plans) with ACA-compliant coverage becoming effective on or after January 1, 2014

About tiers

Most covered prescription drugs will be categorized into one of five tiers. The cost of drugs varies widely, even though several different medications may be used to treat the same condition. What you pay for the prescription depends upon what tier the drug is listed in. Health First offers many benefit plans that can vary in coverage for each tier. Details about your specific benefit for each tier are included in the Health First Summary of Benefits.

•Tier 1 — Preferred Generic Drugs •

Tier 2 — Non-Preferred Generic Drugs •

Tier 3 — Preferred Brand Name Drugs and some generics

•Tier 4 — Non-Preferred Brand Name Drugs and some generics (limited to a 30-day supply)

•Tier 5 — Specialty Drugs (limited to a 30-day supply, must obtain from Health First Family Pharmacy)


Generic drugs are prescription drugs that are identified by their chemical name. When the patent has expired on a brand name drug, the FDA permits new manufacturers to create an equivalent of the brand name drug and make it available to the public. Generally, more than one manufacturer will create generic versions, although often the same pharmaceutical firm that produces the brand name drug also makes the generic version. This prompts competitive pricing of the generic version and usually results in a less expensive drug. The Drug List is subject to change In order to continue to offer a safe and cost effective selection of prescription drugs, Health First periodically makes changes to the Drug List. These changes may include removing medications, adding restrictions, and/or covering a drug at a higher tier. The following list represents some of the most common scenarios in which changes to drug coverage will occur: •Throughout the year, new medications are approved by the FDA. It is the policy of Health First that new drugs will be excluded for 6 months from the date of FDA approval, during which time the Health First Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee can review the drug for safety and efficacy. •The Drug List may change when a medication is withdrawn from the market due to safety reasons or if it becomes available over-the-counter (OTC). At the time that a medication on the Health First Drug List becomes available OTC, it may be excluded from coverage from that point forward. •When a brand-name prescription drug loses its patent and the equivalent generic form is added to the Drug List, the brand-name drug may be moved to the highest non-specialty drug tier, which is generally Tier 4 or removed from the formulary.

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July 28th, 2014

7/28/2014

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THERE GOES ANOTHER PUBLIC ASSET-----PUBLIC PARKING.  RATHER THAN SERVE THE PUBLIC WITH AFFORDABLE PRICES BALTIMORE HANDS PARKING TO PREDATORY CORPORATIONS SO THEY CAN SOAK THE CITIZENS.



I was listening to people speak of how much money Johns Hopkins has and I ask myself-----does Hopkins really have that money or does most of it belong to the taxpayer and public?  The answer of course is that Hopkins is a publicly-owned entity with a small private college attached.  The reason Hopkins has the appearance of money is all of the fraud and corruption the last few decades that in the Baltimore and Maryland region moved to Baltimore Development and Johns Hopkins.  They are the local Visigoths who raided the US Treasury and US citizen's pockets.  Simply reinstating Rule of Law moves much of that money back.  Remember, the Ivy League schools and Wall Street did to the US what Gorbachev and Yelsin did to Russians-----PERESTROIKA moved all of the Russian people's wealth to connected families then called the Oligarchs.  All of those decades of hard work and investment by the Russian people was simply auctioned off and privatized.  This is what Wall Street and the Ivy League schools are doing in the US and it is why they have endowments in the billions of dollars with off-shore investments all over the world.  They are not universities----they are corporations that fleeced government coffers and people's pockets.  Baltimore City Hall has become so predatory on behalf of Johns Hopkins that they are sending out inflated water bills and passing laws to allow secure of people's homes simply because they owe a few hundred dollars in taxes and their cars for simply owing a few parking tickets.  Preying on the working class to take every last home owned is the goal.  These policies are now expanding to the middle-class who are struggling with this deliberate stagnation and high unemployment.

WHEN NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ALLOW POLICY THAT HAS ALL PUBLIC REVENUE GO TO CORPORATE TAX BREAKS AND SUBSIDY AND ALLOW MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION----THEY ARE TAKING YOU TO A THIRD WORLD STATUS.  THIS IS MARYLAND TODAY.

The latest move towards PERESTOIKA comes with Baltimore City Parking.  The city agency was handed to global corporations in a public private partnership a few decades ago and is now ranked as one of the agencies with the most fraud and corruption.  THE BALTIMORE PARKING AUTHORITY is simply a corporation that pays no taxes and allows the taxpayers to pay all operations and maintenance as with all public private partnerships. There is not one community in city center that is not metered or permitted so if you want to do business in these areas you have to park in one of these city lots which as privatized have become increasingly expensive.  Around the Inner Harbor and Enterprise Zone areas you can pay $25 to $40 a day to come and enjoy the waterfront.  When parking facilities are public-----the idea is to give people a convenient and affordable place to park that brings the city revenue to fill its coffers.  See the difference?


MAYOR RAWLINGS BLAKE PLANS TO SELL 4 PARKING DECKS IN DOWNTOWN FOR $40 MILLION SAY THE HEADLINES.

There is almost no publicly owned space in downtown Baltimore and these properties are in high value development zones so $40 million is a steal.  So, instead of that money coming into our government coffers it will now go to private global corporate profit and you can bet that $8-10 a day parking will soar.  Less affordable parking in downtown Baltimore.  At the same time the downtown area businesses are getting no consumer traffic and are struggling to stay in business----don't worry, City Hall will give more public money to keep you in business.  It couldn't be that no one wants to pay so much to come down town and the threats of parking employees standing at the wait to ticket you the minute that meter expires?

PEOPLE ARE NOT COMING DOWNTOWN BECAUSE THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT IS PREDATORY.

Oh, it's those roaming bands of youth they say.  NO, IT'S THE PREDATORY PUBLIC POLICY THAT FINES, FEES, AND TAXES THE PUBLIC TO DEATH BECAUSE ALL PUBLIC REVENUE IS BEING redirected to global corporations.



Mayor Rawlings-Blake Wants To Sell Garages For Revenue


July 27, 2014 8:04 AM BALTIMORE (AP) — Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to announce a proposal to sell four city-owned parking garages to generate cash for urgent priorities and infrastructure.

The mayor’s office says Rawlings-Blake will announce her plans Monday to introduce new legislation to sell the parking garages to generate $40 million to $60 million. The proceeds would be used for urgent priorities, such as eliminating blight, without adding to the city’s debt.

Also on Monday, Rawlings-Blake and members of the City Council will help open the city’s first new recreation center built in 10 years. The Morrell Park Community Center features a gymnasium, fitness room and outdoor green space.

It’s the first recreation center to be built from the ground since a 2010 taskforce recommended a transformation of the city’s aging recreation centers.

(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)


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Now, for what will $40 million pay?  Well, it would take $40 million to partially pay for the $100 million in Exelon Corporation tax break that was given for no reason at all------a pay-to-play.  Then, there is the few hundred million each year of taxpayer money subsidizing the Hilton that was never needed and will never turn a profit especially since we are heading towards a bond market crash and recession for years.  So, Rawlings-Blake is handing public assets for dirt cheap to pay for bad policy and fraud and corruption.  It's revenue  neutral to empty government coffers with corporate tax breaks and subsidy while handing all that is public to these same entities.  Let's look at the history of the Baltimore Parking Authority:

Meet the Parking Authority------BOOTED FOR FAILING TO PAY 3 PARKING TICKETS----FORGET YOU ARE HAVING TO GO TO COURT TO CONTEST MANY OF THOSE TICKETS OR SIMPLY GETTING THEM TOO FAST TO PAY.


Neo-liberals will try hard to make it sound as if these partnerships are with a local or regional corporation but as you see below all of the ones tied to Baltimore Parking Authority are national and global corporations.  Why do we want our local economy tied with corporations that take the profits out of the city and state?  This is why our government coffers are starved and it is deliberate global market policy.  If a French corporation comes to the US ---then a US corporation goes to France----both undermining labor and justice.  Partnered with the city they pay no taxes.


LAZ Parking’s success was founded on childhood friendships that grew into a nationwide customer oriented parking service.

Republic Parking System is a privately owned professional parking management company based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The company operates over 690 parking facilities in 87 US cities.[1]


PMS
PMS - Parking Management Services SA Votre spécialiste dans la conception, réalisation et gestion de parkings !
  • Markets Served Atlanta • Charlotte • Chattanooga • Dallas/Fort Worth • Ft. Lauderdale/Hollywood • Houston Indianapolis • Jacksonville • Kansas City • Miami New Orleans • New York • Orlando/Walt Disney World • Richmond • Scottsdale • Tampa

Inside City Hall: Parking garage operators get no-bid extensions A range of management fees charged to the Parking Authority.

Mark Reutter June 29, 2012 at 4:12 pm

In a little-noticed item approved without comment on Wednesday, the Board of Estimates signed off on no-bid extensions of management contracts to run some of the city’s main parking garages.

The deal, requested by the Parking Authority for Baltimore City, obliges the quasi-public agency to pay $3.57 million in management fees to four operators, led by the ubiquitous PMS Parking group headed by Amsale Geletu, a certified woman-owned business.

PMS, Landmark Parking, LAZ Parking Mid-Atlantic and Republic Parking Systems were awarded the management contracts some 15 months ago.

The contracts were set to expire tomorrow (June 30), but the parking agency blew the deadline for writing up new agreements. Hence, the old contracts will stay in effect until December 31, 2013.

The Penn Station Garage boasts the highest management fee per space under a contract approved by the Board of Estimates. (Photo by Mark Reutter)

All this was explained in the unique nomenclature of the Board of Estimates agenda: “. . . efforts [to write the new agreements] have been delayed due to the Parking Authority experiencing significant disruption in the personnel charged with oversight and administration of this and other management agreements, and the procurement of new management agreements.”

As a result, “This amendment to the original agreement provides additional funding to pay for anticipated operating expenses and compensates the organization during the extended term upon the original compensation structure.”

Costs Vary Among Garages


The breakdowns of the individual parking contracts provide some interesting reading. Take the cost of security over the 18-month extension period.

Republic Parking will be paid $211,000 for providing security at the Lexington Market parking garage. (Photo by Mark Reutter)

It ranges from a low of $4,000 for the Fleet and Eden Garage in Fells Point to a high of $211,000 for the Market Center Garage serving Lexington Market.

The charges for maintenance also vary widely.

PMS will maintain and repair the 376-space Franklin Street Garage for $275,888 under the extended agreement.

Landmark, on the other hand, is authorized to bill the city 2½ times that amount ($670,000) for the somewhat larger (525 space) Penn Station Garage.

Even with its high security costs, Market Center is not the costliest municipal garage under private management.

That honor goes to the Penn Station Garage used chiefly by Amtrak and MARC customers. The management fee over the next 18 months amounts to $1,533 per parking space.

Quasi-Public

The Parking Authority is one of those quasi-public governmental entities – others include the Baltimore Development Corp. and Baltimore Hotel Corp., owner of Hilton Baltimore – whose stated mission is “to enhance Baltimore City’s position in planning, development, management and operations of its parking institution.”

Its budget is not part of the annual city budget approved by the City Council. Its five-member board consists of four people appointed by the mayor and one by the City Council president. The direct link to the mayor is through Director of Finance Harry E. Black, who sits on the board.

In addition to administering 17 municipal garages and 23 surface lots, the Parking Authority operates the residential parking permit program.
_______________________________

Here is a breakdown of the fees to be charged for the extended contracts:

Caroline St. Garage, 325 spaces, operator PMS, management fee: $350,027, or $1,077 per space.

Little Italy Garage, 399 spaces, operator PMS, management fee: $387,363, or $971 per space.

St. Paul Place Garage, 500 spaces, operator PMS and LAZ Parking Mid-Atlantic, management fee: $533,668, or $1,067 per space.

Franklin St. Garage, 376 spaces, operators PMS and LAZ Parking Mid-Atlantic, management fee: $331,888, or $883 per space.

Market Center Garage, 606 spaces, operator Republic Parking Systems, management fee: $651,791, or $1,076 per space.

Penn Station Garage, 525 spaces, operator Landmark Parking,  management fee: $804,933, or $1,533 per space.

Fleet and Eden Garage, 815 spaces, operator, Landmark Parking, management fee: $507,273, or $622 per space.

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contesting baltimore city parking tickets?

09/17/07 at 1:36pm   after leaving my apartment this morning i found a $52 dollar parking ticket on my car, for apparently "parking in an unmarked crosswalk".  this is totally bullshit, imo, as there is no signage, crosswalk, or handicap accessible curb where my car was parked.  i'm planning to write a letter to contest the ticket, and was wondering if anyone out there has done this ... and to what effect.  did it get your ticket dropped?  did you still have to go to court to contest the ticket after submitting the letter?

There was an article a few years ago that had the City of Baltimore doing national searches to find people owing the city parking tickets.  As you see below, a $25 fine can become thousands of dollars in fees and your car can be impounded and sold.  Now, people should simply pay a parking ticket but to have a system in place that creates such a financial burden on citizens for minor offenses is predatory.  Towing fees of $400 on cars booted for 3 outstanding parking tickets has the City Impound flush with cars and they are making profits from working class citizens not able to pay.  Meanwhile, a corporation leaves Baltimore owing millions of dollars in water bills......probably never paid.

Combine the high parking meter fees, the ever higher parking garage fees, and the parking employees being right there when your meter time ends-----and you have a reason for not going downtown in Baltimore.


Four parking tickets on state vehicles cost taxpayers $2,263 Tickets go unpaid, and penalties grow


By Scott Calvert, The Baltimore Sun 9:33 a.m. EDT, June 8, 2012

Five years ago, a Ford Windstar assigned to the state Department of Juvenile Services got a $42 parking ticket in downtown Baltimore. The ticket was not paid on time. And in the weeks, months and years that followed, the penalties grew and grew and grew.

A week after The Baltimore Sun inquired to state budget officials on April 20, the agency finally ponied up. The tab: $970.

It was one of four unpaid Baltimore City parking citations the agency belatedly paid. Due to the delays, tickets amounting to $178 wound up costing state taxpayers a cool $2,263.



___________________________________________

Baltimore City is so starved of money from all of the corporate tax breaks, tax evasion, and fraud that it simply must take away free parking for the disabled.  Dismantling the public sector support for the disabled and creating tiered funding with special needs at the lowest level-----  can you imagine denying the disabled the pleasure of being soaked with parking fines, fees, and taxes to support corporate profit!  We are doing it to stop the theft of placards they say-----can the police not run a license check to see if a car is registered for disability?  Easy Peasy.  People are being pushed to use these tactics because it is too expense for many people to park.  If your business is with City Hall ----you will be there for hours; phone resolutions are deliberately hard to get.-----no, Baltimore and Johns Hopkins uses public policy to push the disabled out of Baltimore.  DEMOCRATS DO NOT DO THAT----NEO-CONS DO!  Why are Baltimore pols running as Democrats when they are neo-conservatives?

Take public transit you say-----sorry, it has been so defunded and funds diverted from public transit that the quality equals that of Central American bus service.  If you are not downtown-----it takes you hours to travel the shortest distance.  Can you imagine being disabled trying to wait for a dysfunctional public transit.


DISABILITY ACT AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY------NOT IN MARYLAND THEY SAY!  WE ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS WORKING TO SEND ALL MONEY TO THE RICH AFTER ALL!



Mayor Rawlings-Blake Announces Changes to City Parking to Address Misuse of Disability


Tags Wednesday Jul 9th, 2014

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Mayor,

Baltimore City

250 City Hall - Baltimore Maryland 21202

(410) 396-3835 - Fax: (410) 576-9425

Better Schools. Safer Streets. Stronger Neighborhoods.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT

Caron A. Brace

(443) 853-0957

caron.brace@baltimorecity.gov

Project SPACE Improves Access for Drivers with Disabilities; Aims to Increase Available Parking, Stop Theft, Abuse of Disability Placards BALTIMORE, Md. (July 9, 2014)—Today, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was joined by the Parking Authority of Baltimore City, the Mayor's Commission on Disabilities, the Downtown Partnership, and members of the disability community to announce Project SPACE, an initiative that aims to eliminate the abuse of disability placards, create more accessible parking for people with disabilities, and increase the general availability of on-street parking Downtown.

Project SPACE will require all drivers who utilize on-street parking in the downtown business district to pay the parking meter—even if a disability placard or tag is displayed. The cost and time limitations for on-street parking will be the same regardless of whether the driver is displaying a disability placard/tags.

"As we near the 24th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities (ADA) Act, we want to offer greater freedom of access for those with disabilities and their families," said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. "Baltimore should be accessible for everyone who wishes to enjoy the many attractions that are part of what makes our city a great place to live, work, and play. In addition to combatting the abuse of disability placards, Project SPACE, will ultimately create more parking spaces for everyone."

As part of Project SPACE, approximately 200 on-street parking spaces with highly accessible, ADA compliant single-space meters have been reserved for vehicles displaying a disability placard or tags. Additionally, all EZ Park meters throughout the Central Business District have been retrofitted to meet new ADA standards, making them even more accessible for people with disabilities. To meet state requirements, the time limit for all on-street parking spaces within areas affected by Project SPACE will increase to four hours.

Project SPACE is part of the solution to a major, ongoing parking problem in Baltimore City. Current policy allows individuals displaying a disability placard or license plates to park in metered on-street parking spaces free of charge. This often results in illegal use by motorists parking for long periods of time, and promotes theft of disability placards—which are now the number one item stolen out of vehicles. By removing the financial incentive to abuse a disability placard and requiring all drivers to pay for parking, Project SPACE aims to prevent placard theft and increase the number of available parking spaces for all drivers.

"We have performed a number of parking studies that have shown that, in certain city blocks, vehicles displaying disability placards often take up 100 percent of on-street spaces and remain parked there all day," said Peter Little, executive director of the Parking Authority of Baltimore City. "Stricter enforcement will create more parking turnover and increase the number of available parking spaces as abusers seek less expensive parking options off street."

While Project SPACE is launching in the Central Business District—an area defined as the streets bounded by Franklin Street on the north, President Street on the east, Key Highway on the south, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard on the west—the program will eventually expand to Fells Point, Harbor East, Federal Hill, Mount Vernon, and beyond.

"We work to promote equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities, including making sure people with disabilities have adequate access to accessible parking options in Baltimore City," said Dr. Nollie Wood, Jr., executive director of the Mayor's Commission on Disabilities. "The Mayor's Commission on Disabilities supports Project SPACE, because it helps accomplish our overall goal. We're looking for equal opportunity—not cheaper services."

For more information on Project SPACE, please visit www.MoreSpace4All.com. Project SPACE is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MoreSpace4All and on Twitter and Instagram at @MoreSpace4All.

About the Parking Authority of Baltimore City Parking Authority of Baltimore City (PABC) is a "quasi" governmental agency of Baltimore City and a registered 501(c)(3) organization with a mission to find, or create, and implement parking solutions for Baltimore City and to be the resource on all things "parking" in Baltimore. PABC oversees the management of 17 parking garages, numerous lots, over 800 EZ Park Meters, over 1,500 reserved residential handicap parking spaces, and 46 residential permit parking areas.

About the Mayor's Commission on Disabilities The Mayor's Commission on Disabilities was created by City of Baltimore Ordinance #93-237 to promote equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities. The Commission assists the City in assessing the accessibility of City facilities, programs, and services for citizens with disabilities; providing information and education programs to city government, businesses, and industries concerning issues relevant to citizens with disabilities; and complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).





____________________________________________________


Speed cameras as predator as the entire system is a failure ticketing massive numbers of people for no reason----sound familiar.  It took constant media shaming and wide-spread citizen outcry to stop the fraud and theft of public money.  So, you never know when you come to Baltimore if you are going to be fleeced by parking meters or speed cameras and then save a lot of time to fight it. 

PAY THE FINE THEY SAY----WE HAVE CORPORATE FRAUD, TAX EVASION, AND TAX BREAKS TO PAY FOR.


Add to that public policy that deliberately keeps unemployment in Baltimore high and you have no working economy.  Remember, the global corporations like Johns Hopkins do not want a thriving domestic economy----all the money is being made overseas.  It is deliberate policy meant to keep domestic citizens impoverished while all the revenue generated maximizes profits.  If you are not impoverished now---you and/or your children or grandchildren will be.  Think how these policies will get worse over time.

WE SIMPLY NEED A PUBLIC SECTOR PROVIDING OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY.  PUBLIC ASSETS DO NOT COST THE TAXPAYER----THEY BRING REVENUE TO GOVERNMENT COFFERS.




Maryland Speed Camera Fraud

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Tony McConkey

It is a violation of the public trust to continue to collect revenue from speed cameras that are inaccurate.  Baltimore City and other local governments should immediately issues refunds when a citation is false, and government has a duty to be proactive and to verify all cameras are working correctly.




Citation Payment Information
  • If your vehicle is currently booted or immobilized do NOT pay here. Instead, please call the Boot Release Line at 1-877-810-7907 to speak to an operator 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. (Call this number only for booted or immobilized cars.) If you pay on this website for a booted or immobilized vehicle, your car’s release will be delayed and it may be towed
  • Citations for most parking, red light, and speed camera violations are available for payment on this website the next business day. (Hand-written citations may take more than 1 month.)
  • Payments may not appear on this website for 3 business days. Payments take 1 to 3 business days to post, and this website reflects only posted payments. Unposted payments are not reflected on this website, which also may not reflect the $25 registration flag fee. Please call 410-396-4080 Monday–Friday (except holidays) 8:00am–4:30pm to verify your payment or confirm the amount due.
  • If you have 3 or more unpaid tickets more than 30 days old, your car may be immobilized or impounded.
  • Red Light and Speed Camera Citations with a violation date on or before December 31, 2012 are available at www.public.cite-web.com(External Link) (External Link). Enter your citation’s violation code and PIN number.
  • Red Light and Speed Camera Citations with a violation date on or after January 1, 2013 are available at www.ip360BaltCity.com (External Link). Enter your citation’s violation code and PIN number.
  • The CIty of Baltimore no longer faxes VR119 release forms to the Department of Motor Vehicles. All requests will be mailed within 2 to 3 business days.
Baltimore City provides online access to the public information maintained in its records. While the city has confidence in the accuracy of these records, Baltimore City makes no warranties, expressed or implied, regarding the information.

_____________________________________________
SEE WHAT O'MALLEY AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND RAWLINGS-BLAKE AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL ARE UP TO! 

THIS IS WHY MARYLAND AND BALTIMORE PARKING AUTHORITY IS SO PREDATORY AND INCREASINGLY PROFITEERING----THE MORE MONEY GENERATED THE MORE MONEY MOVED TO WALL STREET THROUGH BONDS PURCHASE.  TAKES THAT MONEY RIGHT OUT OF GENERAL FUNDS TO BE USED BY EVERYONE AND DIRECTS IT TO INVESTMENT FIRMS AND DEVELOPERS.

This is what I mean about hiding Maryland debt. Maryland looks like it has less debt because of these credit leverages.  Don't think only neo-liberals are doing this----this is actually a Republican policy that has gone neo-con/neo-liberal as global corporations are getting all the money.   There is not a public revenue maker in Maryland that is not leveraged to credit bonds and here we have our parking agencies tied to Moody's.  This speaks of the Maryland Parking Authority but Baltimore Parking Authority is doing the same.  When every revenue source in a state is mortgage with credit bonds as is Maryland, when these economics crashes happen defaults occur and taxpayers lose hundreds of millions of dollars----which is the plan.  There deals not only feed Wall Street----the private corporations partnered with public parking are stealing right and left and profiteering on the backs of Maryland citizens......and this is super-sized in Baltimore.


Please think about what these neo-liberals and neo-cons are building with this money------restaurants, retail stores, financial businesses.  None of this builds a strong, healthy economy.  It is what exists in third world countries....tourism economy.  Think how many small businesses could be started with the money tied up in these bonds.  Remember, a bond market crash is coming very soon.  Even the Maryland and Baltimore Parking Authority is mortgaged.

Related Issuers
Maryland Transportation Authority


  Rating Action: Moody's affirms the A2 on Maryland Transportation Authority's Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport Parking Revenue Refunding Bonds Series 2012A and B; The outlook is stable Global Credit Research - 25 Mar 2014 Approximately $182.02 million of debt outstanding affected New York, March 25, 2014 -- Moody's Investors Service has affirmed the A2 rating on the Maryland Transportation Authority's (MDTA) Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) Parking Revenue Refunding Bonds Series 2012A and B. The outlook is stable.



RATINGS RATIONALE

The A2 rating on the parking revenue bonds reflects the strong coverage provided by a pledge of the net parking revenues of all parking facilities operated by the Maryland Aviation Administration (MAA), notwithstanding downturns in passenger enplanements at BWI in the last couple of years. While the pledge of only parking revenues presents a relatively narrow revenue stream, the parking facilities are essential to the airport operations, given the lack of convenient alternatives to reach BWI and the long established customer trends for parking at the airport. The A2 rating also reflects the strong demand for passenger travel in a large, affluent service area, and strong debt service coverage levels.



The parking revenue bonds were issued by the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) on behalf of the MAA which operates BWI. The MDTA has entered into leases with the MAA, which obligates the MAA to remit parking revenues for the repayment of the debt.




STRENGTHS

* Service area contains some of the wealthiest counties in the US as well as a premium tourist destination in Washington, D.C.

*BWI remains a strong origination & destination (O&D) market which drives parking revenues; Southwest Airlines is the largest carrier at the airport with 71.4% of enplanements as of FY 2013

*Total enplanements have been on a mostly positive trajectory since FY 2010

* Airport operates efficiently, with airline costs per enplanement lower than regional competitors Reagan National Airport and Washington-Dulles International Airport (Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, A1/Stable). Low cost per enplanement is helped by the airport's absence of general aviation debt.

*Debt service coverage ratios (DSCR) have remained stable and are estimated to be maintained at similar levels in the next year

*There is no additional debt expected to be supported by parking revenues.



CHALLENGES

*Market strength could be challenged by possible cuts in federal government spending given the concentration of federal jobs in the immediate region.

* Significant regional competition from other Washington area airports.

* Highly concentrated airline market share, with the combined Southwest/AirTran airline accounting for over 70% of enplanements in FY 2013

*Off-airport parking lots could pose a competitive threat to transaction growth at certain MAA parking facilities, such as the express and long-term parking lots.

* Reliance on dedicated and more restricted parking revenue streams which tend to decline more steeply than airport enplanements and lag in recovery

*Declining O&D passenger base as a result of Southwest increasing use of BWI as a connector negatively affects highly sensitive and narrow dedicated streams of parking revenues



Outlook

The stable outlook is based on expectations that enplanement and O&D passenger base will remain around current levels, supporting DSCRs at similar levels. The outlook also anticipates the successful renewal of the parking agreement for another 5-year term.



What could change the rating--UP

The rating is well placed in its category given the narrow nature of the revenue flow to cover debt service payments. Nonetheless, a marked improvement in revenues due to a sustainable positive change in the fundamental strength of the O&D enplanement base at BWI Marshall could exert positive ratings pressure.



What could change the rating--DOWN

Strong DSCR is key to the current rating level. Hence, a weakening of revenues over more than one year period that reduces financial margins could place some negative pressure on the rating.




The principal methodology used in this rating was Generic Project Finance Methodology published in December 2010. Please see the Credit Policy page on www.moodys.com for a copy of this methodology.



REGULATORY DISCLOSURES



For ratings issued on a program, series or category/class of debt, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to each rating of a subsequently issued bond or note of the same series or category/class of debt or pursuant to a program for which the ratings are derived exclusively from existing ratings in accordance with Moody's rating practices. For ratings issued on a support provider, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the rating action on the support provider and in relation to each particular rating action for securities that derive their credit ratings from the support provider's credit rating. For provisional ratings, this announcement provides certain regulatory disclosures in relation to the provisional rating assigned, and in relation to a definitive rating that may be assigned subsequent to the final issuance of the debt, in each case where the transaction structure and terms have not changed prior to the assignment of the definitive rating in a manner that would have affected the rating. For further information please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page for the respective issuer on www.moodys.com.



Regulatory disclosures contained in this press release apply to the credit rating and, if applicable, the related rating outlook or rating review.



Please see www.moodys.com for any updates on changes to the lead rating analyst and to the Moody's legal entity that has issued the rating.

Please see the ratings tab on the issuer/entity page on www.moodys.com for additional regulatory disclosures for each credit rating.

Jennifer Meihuy Chang
Analyst
Public Finance Group
Moody's Investors Service, Inc.
250 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10007
U.S.A.
JOURNALISTS: 212-553-0376
SUBSCRIBERS: 212-553-1653


Chee Mee Hu
MD - Project Finance
Public Finance Group
JOURNALISTS: 212-553-0376
SUBSCRIBERS: 212-553-1653


Releasing Office:
Moody's Investors Service, Inc.
250 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10007
U.S.A.
JOURNALISTS: 212-553-0376
SUBSCRIBERS: 212-553-1653

0 Comments

July 24th, 2014

7/24/2014

0 Comments

 
Just a few more days on education policy------let's continue to look at higher education and Maryland is ground zero for the dismantling of our public education system at all levels.

Yesterday I showed that Economic students are demanding universities stop teaching only neo-liberal economics-----they said the field had become so narrow as to block all other thought.  Think how that translates to Common Core in our K-12.  They intend to do the same thing in our grade schools as they have done in universities.......narrowed the curricula to corporate policy.  'Competition' replaces personal best......'Getting the edge' becomes bullying........'Taking out the competition' becomes rape.  The level of aggression in our schools and universities is growing because of this corporate mentality.  Attacks on women are soaring even at universities because Chancellor Kirwan does not see himself as a public servant upholding public justice and Rule of Law-----


WE WILL SELECT WHOMEVER WE WANT TO BE HEARD IN ELECTION FORUMS AND THERE WILL BE NO DISCUSSION ON ANY UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CAMPUS THAT IS ANTI-NEO-LIBERALISM!

We heard recently that UMUC----the online college structure that O'Malley spent hundreds of millions if not a billion dollars to create is failing miserably.  No one wants online education yet neo-liberals funded by Bill Gates and Wall Street are going to push this until we have no choice they say.  O'Malley even went overseas to push our active military to use their GI Bill education benefits on these online degree programs----IT IS A DISGRACE.  As you will see below there is absolutely no research that shows these online education programs are providing any quality or creating higher achievement.  The data is not there.  The only reason they are creating these online venues for 90% of Americans is that it is cheap and only prepares for a job.

FORGET THE WELL-BALANCED EDUCATION THAT IS BROAD AND ALLOWS GRADUATES TO APPLY THEMSELVES TO MANY FIELDS.

First UMUC was going to be made a non-profit so the public could not see how it operates.....now University of Maryland is keeping a failed structure alive but wants to deregulate.  Bill Gates requires online instruction and neo-liberals are going to give it to him!
  The amount of education funding wasted on these global corporate policies mirrors O'Malley's tying the public to Hilton and Hyatt hotels in order to keep them from losing money.  Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are lost every year in all categories of industry in what is clearly public malfeasance and fraud against the citizens of Maryland.  Why do we need a UMUC Asia/Europe?

Meanwhile financial aid and grants are being cut and that aid given is being tied to these cheaper structures as WE THE PEOPLE see our strong public education dismantled by neo-liberals. 

DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN TO CHANGE THIS----THIS IS REPUBLICAN POLICY-----NEO-CONS ARE JUST AS BAD.



UMUC’s Mission in Asia


The mission of University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in Asia is to offer academic programs to United States military communities throughout Asia and the Pacific. While serving overseas, students can take a single course or many courses leading to a certificate, an Associate of Arts degree, a Bachelor of Arts degree, or a Bachelor of Science degree. Since University of Maryland University College is accredited by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, students can take courses with the intention of transferring their credits to other colleges or universities in the United States. Students may also continue their studies with UMUC online. Additional information is available at www.umuc.edu.

Although the educational setting is overseas, UMUC’s programs in Asia are in all respects comparable to those offered at public institutions of higher learning in the United States. Courses are taught by faculty whose credentials meet standards set by appropriate University of Maryland University College academic departments in Adelphi, Maryland. All UMUC courses taught in Asia carry University of Maryland University College resident credit. UMUC is committed to maintaining standards of academic excellence. The past 50-plus years demonstrate that those standards can be maintained in overseas settings.



UMUC Europe offers thousands of courses for students interested in associate's and bachelor's degrees and undergraduate certificates. UMUC also offers graduate-level certificates and several master's degrees in Europe. With UMUC's 150 locations worldwide, and extensive online offerings, students can begin and finish a degree with us regardless of where they are located.


I bet the citizens of Maryland did not even know UMUC was a global corporation.  Meanwhile fewer Maryland citizens are going to 4 year universities.


I don't hold any credence to these online workplace comment programs because they work like American Idol.  It is good to see a consistent referral to 'people needing to be treated with respect'. ' Low pay with no opportunity to grow'.  THIS IS NOT AN ENVIRONMENT WE WOULD WANT IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY.  THAT IS WHAT A CORPORATE STRUCTURE LOOKS LIKE.  That is because it IS  a corporate structure.  Under neo-liberals labor is treated as badly as if a Republican were in office yet every election Maryland labor unions get behind these neo-liberal pols.  We need the citizens of Maryland taking back the Democratic Party to reverse this failed neo-liberal/neo-con policy!



“Failing company, horrible management” Academic Advisor (Current Employee) Pros – Great vacation/time off. Get to become a state employee after 3 years.

Cons – Moral is so low! Micromanaged beyond belief, constant layoffs, not worth you time.

Advice to Senior Management – Treat us like the educated adults that we are. Learn to value your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Add Employer Response
  1. Apr 8, 2014
    • Culture & Values
    • Work/Life Balance
    • Senior Management
    • Comp & Benefits
    • Career Opportunities
     

    “Not good. Too many secrets and financial problems” Administrative Assistant (Current Employee) Largo, MD I have been working at UMUC full-time for more than 8 years


    Pros: Convenient location and great benefits Cons: Low pay and minimal advancement Advice to Senior Management: Treat the regular people like people No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company… More

                    

Below you see what the deregulation issues discussed by Mikulski and Kirwan will include----as you see again everyone in the system is in the dark as to what these discussions look like.  WE DON'T ALLOW CITIZENS IN MARYLAND KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


UMUC considering plan to become independent nonprofit with ties to university system
Under proposal, it would no longer be a state entity; president seeks input from university community




By Nayana Davis, The Baltimore Sun

7:54 p.m. CDT, July 10, 2014

The University of Maryland University College, which has been struggling with declining enrollment, is considering severing some ties with the state university system to avoid burdensome regulations and work more closely with the private sector.

Under the proposal, the university would become an independent nonprofit organization that retains an affiliation with the state system. The school's president, Javier Miyares, said during a Thursday town hall meeting in Largo that the idea came from a task force of experts organized by the university as a response to a shrinking student body.

UMUC, a mainly online institution, has struggled with a competitive online education market and a smaller military. Members of the military or their families make up about half of the college's students.



The main objective of the proposal is to more readily secure partnerships with the private sector, including working with companies to make courses more employer-friendly and building relationships to help students secure jobs. Miyares said such partnerships can be challenging to forge as a state agency.

"This way we would not be bound by all the regulations and statutes that apply to a public state agency," Miyares said.

University officials also hope the move would help it attract more students outside the United States, though it would retain the University of Maryland name. Based in Adelphi, UMUC offers courses to students in 24 countries.

The plan would allow the university to keep ties with the 12-institution University System of Maryland, but the details have not been worked out. "The validity and credibility you get by being part of the University of Maryland system is huge," Miyares said.

No immediate action will be taken on the task force recommendation, as the school begins a process of soliciting feedback from the college community. University officials said there are few concrete ideas on how the effort would be implemented at this stage; Miyares said he wanted to get input first.

UMUC has the support of the University System of Maryland to look into alternate business models.

"The university is facing some significant challenges," said William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the system. "They are appropriately addressing those challenges."

Kirwan said a more concrete proposal would need approval from the system's Board of Regents before implementation, and possibly the governor and General Assembly. The governor's office declined to comment on the plan.

But some higher education experts expressed concern about the university putting out such a proposal with few details.


Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said it's not uncommon for public universities to form private-sector relationships to outsource certain functions, but it's unclear what the change in status would mean for the university.

"Honestly, I don't know what to make of this," he said. "The decision to operate under a different set of rules is interesting. Whether the move is good, I don't know."

UMUC has been struggling with declining enrollment both stateside and overseas since fall of 2011. Although the rate of decline stateside has remained less than 10 percent in the past three years, overseas enrollment declined 20 percent for spring 2014.

The school has struggled to increase enrollment because of competition from traditional academic institutions that have started offering Web-based classes and popular massive open online courses known as MOOCs, university officials said.

A shrinking military, which is facing large-scale budget cuts, also is a factor in loss of enrollment.

University officials said that 90 percent of its budget comes from tuition and 10 percent from the state. Other colleges in the university system get about 30 percent of their budgets from the state.

"We don't know what the future is going to be like," Miyares said. "But if we don't adapt, we will go into a death spiral."

UMUC's struggles are "a reflection of how competitive online education has become," Kirwan said. "What we do need is to explore if operational flexibility is possible."


"UMUC has been quite unique in the university system," Nassirian said. "It had been mostly self-sufficient because it provides excess revenue back to the system, but that [online] business model has not fared well as of late."

Traditionally, changes in business models for colleges have occurred when a struggling nonprofit university becomes a for-profit venture after a large corporation acquires it. Nassirian gave the example of the Clinton, Iowa-based school Ashford University being purchased by Bridgepoint Education.

Miyares said the change could occur as early as next summer. Academic programs and staffing levels are not expected to be affected if the model changes, unless enrollment continues to drop.

The school laid off 70 staff members from departments at the Adelphi and Largo campuses earlier this year, and 58 the year prior. The university employs about 2,000 in the U.S.

"The whole goal is to get enrollment up," Miyares said. "If enrollment is fine, there should be no dramatic difference to the academic side. This is a pivotal moment in our history."

nadavis@baltsun.com



________________________________________________

The article above gives yet another spin----that UMUC and online colleges are being edged out by the popularity of MOOCs-----only MOOCs are not popular.  They are used less frequently then online UMUC.  We are being fed nothing but spin and this happens more and more because the public universities that would be the first to shout THAT IS NOT TRUE ----IT IS SPIN are now the ones handing us spin because they are corporations.  Maryland Assembly was the very first to pass laws that move the accreditation process towards making these online structures legitimate.  NO ONE THINKS THIS IS GOOD POLICY.  Needless to say when it comes to bad education policy it is Johns Hopkins pushing it in Maryland.  Indeed, Baltimore is cursed with a gorilla in the room that pushes the worst of policy all so they can make more profits.


This looks like a Gates Foundation study-------most employers in North Carolina have not heard of MOOCS but 3/4 of them think they are good. Meanwhile, there is no interest in the public for MOOCs outside of simple extracurricular help with existing university structures. Gates says he will buy these policy implementation yet! You know, because he is the 'good billionaire' as NPR always tells us.



All Hail MOOCs! Just Don’t Ask if They Actually Work | TIME.com

Why Do So Many Students Drop Out of MOOCs?www.brighthub.com/education/online-learning/articles/...



Study: MOOCs Viewed Positively Among Employers

April 2, 2014 Inside Higher Education

Most North Carolina employers haven't heard of massive open online courses, but about three-quarters of them view MOOCs as having a positive effect on hiring decisions, a survey conducted by Duke University and RTI International shows. The study, founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also suggests 71 percent of employers could see themselves using MOOCs for professional development.

Think about how the real world views MOOCs but the article in the Maryland media makes you think they are supported.  It happens all the time because they can get away with it.  Online resources for education are good----everyone thinks online instruction adds to the classroom at any level.  The problem is that corporations have as a goal to replace the classroom with these online products ------aiming at the 90% of Americans becoming trapped by Vocational K-12.......
With all public education funding going to subsidize corporate research and Human Resources we have to make the cost of educating the 90% as cheap as possible say neo-liberals and neo-cons!  Calling MOOCS a democratizing tool in a nation with the strongest public education system in the world is a mockery.  STOP DEFUNDING AND DISMANTLING PUBLIC EDUCATION.


The University of Maryland is now taking a look at bestowing transfer credit to those who are able to demonstrate a specific level of knowledge after completing a MOOC.


- See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/online-schools/can-moocs-be-a-solution-to-the-us-student-debt-crisis/#sthash.uhO1mk7Y.dpuf


Are MOOCs really dead?

  • By Jake New, Editor, eCampus News
June 6th, 2014 Recent studies suggest that MOOCs are very much alive, but are not a threat to traditional higher education For some educators and journalists, the rasping final breaths of massive open online courses (MOOCs) began late last year.

They followed nearly two years of hype and excitement that even the most skeptical of instructors and reporters got swept up in. Many of those who denounced the courses did so in a similarly frantic fashion, writing proclamations and open letters condemning MOOCs, as though they were caught in a great academic war.

Then, suddenly, a blow was struck. And it came from one of MOOCs’ most famous creators.

“Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger,” Rebecca Schuman wrote at Slate in November 2013.

It was a dramatic way of saying that Thrun had announced that his company, Udacity, would now focus its MOOCs more on vocational training rather than traditional liberal arts courses.

That Udacity was only one company of a growing number focused on MOOCs — and that many of these platforms, including its main competitor Coursera, still aimed to disrupt traditional higher education — did little to slow the wave of speculation.

It was the capper on a year of MOOC hand-wringing. If 2012 was the “year of the MOOC,” then 2013 was the “year of the MOOC backlash.” Those who trust Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” believed MOOCs were going through a common “trough of disillusionment,” that would soon be followed by a “slope of enlightenment.”

But by the start of 2014, many were already asking: “Are MOOCs dead?”

The answer is not as sensational as the question. MOOCs aren’t dead — not yet -- but they likely won’t be replacing any traditional means of higher education, either.




Here is the source of creating a massive online system of education for the 90% in Maryland-----Wall Street itself!  The quality of education drops each time they grow this online education industry.  Since it isn't working at the university level they are now talking of sending it to K-12 vocational.  Sitting children in front of computers for online classes the goal of education reform as vocational K-12----YOU BET


Johns Hopkins Offers Nine-Course Specialization in Data ...www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2014/coursera...   CachedThe series of nine MOOCs are now open for enrollment and free to anyone. ... 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205. ... Courses Careers Accreditation Web Policies ...

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July 23rd, 2014

7/23/2014

0 Comments

 
THE REASON MARYLAND IS SILENT AS THE REST OF THE NATION BRINGS OUT MILLIONS IN PROTEST OF NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CONS POLICIES IS THAT ERHLICH/O'MALLEY HAS WORKED HARD TO PRIVATIZE MARYLAND'S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.  IT IS HERE THAT HOLDING POWER ACCOUNTABLE BEGINS AND THAT IS WHY NEO-LIBERALS FROM CLINTON TO OBAMA ARE WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO MAKE THEM INTO CORPORATIONS.

We saw yesterday that it is University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan seeing the need to deregulate universities.  Maryland has allowed for-profit career colleges defraud for a few decades now because of deregulation of private career education so now we need to see the same in our public universities.  Kirwan says we are making money using taxpayer money to patent research but we need to super-size the profits from the products we are now sending to the corporate structures attached to our campuses----YOU KNOW---THE 'BIOTECH FACILITIES'.  Kirwan and Mikulski are not only talking about getting rid of a silly regulation that is out of date----they are intending to deregulate how universities can operate as businesses.  All those requirements for receiving taxpayer money for research that make the public partners in this research need to go.  We have proprietary patents now with that taxpayer funded research and it is heading for the open market for profit! 

Below you see what Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards.  Corporations are dismantling their research facilities because universities ARE THEIR RESEARCH FACILITIES.  University students are now paying tuition to work in a corporate research project for free supported by NIH and NCA research money.  IT'S ALL ABOUT CREATING JOBS!  Actually, college grads are as likely now to remain unemployed now as at the time of the 2008 crash because global corporations and neo-liberals are keeping the US economy stagnant.  So, these students are more likely to work as VISTAs then to get a job in the field for which they received a degree.  Meanwhile, the foreign students coming in to get degrees------doing OK especially if they go back home to work for the US corporation overseas.  FREE LABOR PAID FOR BY TAXPAYERS----NOW THAT MAXIMIZES CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.  See why taxes and tuition are soaring on the working and midde-class?  It costs lots to subsidize every corporate activity.

CORPORATIONS NO LONGER NEED RESEARCH FACILITIES------UNIVERSITIES DO THE RESEARCH AND ANYTHING THAT IS SUCCESSFUL COMES TO THE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS THROUGH STARTUPS BUYOUTS.  THE PEOPLE THEY HIRED TO DO THE WORK IN PRIVATE RESEARCH LABS ARE NOW STUDENTS PAYING TUITION.

The process of patenting university research while having corporations 'partnered' with these universities is a mockery as if people cannot see that this is why student tuition is soaring and all of taxpayer money is funding this 'university' research leaving no money for student financial aid and grants. Directors of these 'university' research facilities being paid like corporate executives.

LET'S GO BACK TO PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AS PUBLIC EDUCATION!


Below you see what deregulation Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards......making universities driven by profit-----



Colleges Urged to Count Patents in Tenure Reviews

April 29, 2014
  Inside Higher Ed


Universities should begin making patents and other industrial and commercial research count toward promotion and tenure, in an effort to stimulate such research nationwide, argues a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "There is a fundamental disconnect between technology transfer activities and incentives for faculty members in terms of merit raises, tenure and career advancement," Richard B. Marchase, co-author and vice president for research and economic development at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said in a news release. "Beyond the monetary benefit of licensing, which is small in most cases, there is presently little to no benefit to a faculty member's merit raises, tenure and career advancement."

The paper builds on a 2012 report from the National Research Council and other groups saying that business and industry have "largely dismantled large corporate research laboratories that drove American industrial leadership," and which argues that research universities must "fill the gap."
In the new paper, called "Changing the Academic Culture: Valuing Patents and Commercialization Toward Tenure and Career Advancement," the authors argue that filling the research gap will entail changing the university "rewards culture" to value not only large research grants but also professors' patents and other commercial activities. Co-author Eric Kaler, president of the University of Minnesota, notes that this kind of work should not replace but "add to" traditional means of assessing scholarly activity. The paper's lead author is Paul R. Sanberg, senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida and president of the National Academy of Inventors. An abstract is available here.


_________________________________________________

Keep in mind the same global corporations for whom University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan and neo-liberals work are the same entities keeping the US economy stagnant-----and it is deliberate.  Remember, the bond market is going to crash causing a greater recession is so there is no intent to employ these grads----but they do free work and pay to do it with ever-higher tuition.  THIS IS A SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND!

The media shout that all of this a great education policy.  That more students are being sent to college and graduating with skills that corporations need.  OH REALLY? 

THEY NEED THEM TO WORK FOR FREE WHILE PAYING FOR COLLEGE AND THEN FORGET ABOUT IT AFTER GRADUATION.

The structure neo-liberals and neo-cons are building have the job pipeline coming from the Ivy League schools-----business leaders now come from these schools and any startups that may come from the public universities are simply bought by those corporations in the portfolio of Ivy League schools.  Working and middle-class grads are largely being funneled into poverty jobs or the military.


University of Maryland Baltimore County and Grabinsky were front page news as UMBC is the face of this free labor as corporate university.  While Maryland says its unemployment is 6.1% we all know that is only the number of people receiving unemployment checks.  Maryland's unemployment is 36% and growing with this economic model.  Remember, these are Republican policies of placing corporate profit first so voting Republican will not help----Democrats simply need to shake the corporate neo-liberals out of the Democratic Party!


FOLKS----THIS IS A NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC MODEL THEY CALL THE 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY!

All we need is to rebuild state economies having domestic businesses driving the economy and all of this will disappear.


The Deliberate Low-Wage, High-Insecurity Economic Model submitted by pmcovay3 ScienceIndex.com  Dec 2012

In contrast to the general biases of orthodox economists, the jobs crisis in America is not inevitable or natural-and more important, does not contribute to more economic efficiency through lower wages or more productivity. It is the result of deliberate political policy choices the nation has made at least since the early 1980s, when productivity was rising on a secular basis at a slow rate. Also, the policy choices were made before the rise of very low-wage emerging markets like China’s. In sum, there has been a low-wage, high-unemployment policy regime in the rich world, and especially in the United States, for a generation.


Students Call for Reform of Economics Education


May 6, 2014  Inside Higher Ed

Economics students in 19 countries have issued a joint call -- published in The Guardian -- to change the way economics is taught. The students' analysis (similar to that of some professors in the United States and elsewhere) is that economics has become too uniform in its approaches and too removed from real life. "[I]t's time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the past couple of decades," the letter says. "This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century – from financial stability to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."



All academics and analysts now look at employment figures as below----the employment to population ratio.  We all know some adults of working age may choose not to work but that percentage is not too high.  So, if 58% of the population is working------42% are not.  36% unemployment is about right.  As this article points out----with wages at an all time low people are now forced to have two incomes in a family.  The employment data media and government provides is simply meant to conceal this deliberately high unemployment.

Do you know who is not fooled by the failure of neo-liberalism------ECONOMICS STUDENTS!

The article above shows that university students are fed up with universities that only offer neo-liberal economic models in economic degree programs.  As this article states----WHY STUDY A FAILED ECONOMIC MODEL?  It is the duty of public universities to hold power accountable and give the public real data and we see this is not happening because of this corporate capture.

That is what university heads like Kirwan are doing.....they are appointed to force global corporate policies that no one wants and it is the governor that appoints these people to public universities.

Unemployment Data Manipulation The Economic Recovery is a Lie!
  By Seth Mason
Friday, November 1st, 2013  Wealth Daily

I've argued time and time again that, due to the severity of job losses during the Great Recession, there cannot be a true economic recovery until the labor market has recovered.

Unfortunately, hiring was weak in September, continuing a slowing trend that began in the spring.

To make matters worse, the majority of jobs created last month were menial in nature (nearly 2/3 of them were truck drivers, bureaucrats, salespeople, and temps). These trends have been ongoing throughout this economic depression.

The number of new jobs wasn't enough to keep up with population growth.

And yet the unemployment rate fell.

So, all is well... right?

Clearly, the "headline" 7.2% unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole story about the sad state of the American labor force.

You have to take any data from the Fed with a grain of salt, anyway, as the Obama administration has a vested interest in presenting the best-looking unemployment picture possible, just as all administrations have.

The employment-to-population ratio actually provides a much more accurate gauge of the health of the American job market — and wouldn't you know, it's been showing unhealthy readings since the economy crashed five years ago...

The proportion of Americans in the workforce has barely budged since falling from 63% to 58% during the Great Recession, as you can see on the following chart:



A Precipitous Decline

The last time the employment-to-population ratio was 58% — in the early 1980s — a relatively small proportion of American households sent more than one income earner into the workforce.

Now, in a nation of mostly one-breadwinner households, the 58% employment-to-population ratio was reasonable.

Today, however, due to a decline in real personal income (thanks for the inflation, Federal Reserve), most households send multiple income earners into the workforce.

In fact, it's not uncommon these days for households to have more than two income earners.

Under this paradigm, an employment-to-population ratio stuck at 58% like it's 1982 (when "homemaker" was still a common job title) is very unhealthy.


  Also worth noting is that a large percentage of the 58% of Americans who do work are working lower-quality jobs than they were before the economy crashed.

Although the population of the United States has increased by approximately 20 million since 2008, there are 5 million fewer “breadwinner” jobs in this country than there were before this economic depression.

"Breadwinner jobs" are those positions with a base salary of $35,000 or more that enable one to live independently, however meagerly. 

So the real health of the labor force is even worse than the unsettling 58% labor force participation rate!

Here we are, more than five years since the fall of Lehman, and the job market is still awful... and it's started to backslide again.



Niagara Falls

The Fed's Niagara Falls-scale liquidity pumping measures (I say "liquidity pumping" as opposed to "printing" because QE is only one of the Fed's tricks) clearly haven't had much impact on unemployment — or the federal government's $787 billion spending binge, also known as the grand "stimulus," for that matter.

Remember the laughable estimates of unemployment with and without the "Recovery Plan"?

According to the White House's October 2009 estimate (the dark blue line on the chart above), the Fed/federal government's plan should have taken us back to pre-recession unemployment levels by now...

Yet the unemployment rate sits at an unacceptable 7.2%.

And keep in mind the 7.2% headline unemployment rate belies the true awful state of the job market.

Considering the pitiful 58% employment-to-population ratio and the 5 million fewer breadwinner jobs since 2008, it would be an understatement to say that Washington's stimulus measures have failed to reduce unemployment. (That's assuming they were created for that purpose. More about that in a future article.)

We should expect more of the same from our esteemed central planners.

The Fed, which has officially delayed "tapering," will continue to pump indefinitely.

Uncle Sam will continue to borrow and spend like mad, whether he's wearing a DEM or GOP hat.

As a result, the "mother of all bubbles," as Nouriel Roubini has called it, will continue to expand...

And we'll continue party like it's 2006, only with higher unemployment.

We'll keep ignoring the fact that 2008 is just a couple of years away.

Happy crash 2.0!

Until next time,

Seth Mason for Wealth Daily
_____________________________________________


Having a policy that brings more foreign students into the US with the goal of green cards and employment in high-skilled jobs does nothing for the American people, the high unemployment, or creating quality education and higher achievement in our US students.  It is purely a profit-making scheme that continues to consolidate the wealth at the top.

Maryland pols are all neo-liberals so whether Milkulsi and Cardin working in the Senate on legislation to build corporate universities and send trillions of dollars to expand overseas as corporations-----or the Governor of Maryland O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly appointing these corporate university heads and building the corporate structures in our universities-----

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLY REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN MARYLAND BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.



Currency February 21, 2014

Should Universities Profit From Student Research?
By John Bringardner  The New Yorker





In 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Cornell University and Israel’s Technion would jointly open a new school on Roosevelt Island to help boost New York’s tech sector. The first buildings of the new campus won’t open until 2017, but classes are already under way in borrowed space on the third floor of Google’s New York office. And, on Monday, Cornell Tech, as the school is called, plans to announce that it has enrolled its first batch of post-doctoral researchers in a one-year “Runway” program, designed to launch them into business ventures based on their specialties: urban planning, e-commerce, health care. In an unusual twist, the school will invest in the companies founded through the program, but also allow students to keep ownership of the intellectual property they create on campus; typically, universities profit by keeping the rights to such property.



Cornell Tech isn’t the only institution to invest in student startups. Stanford announced last year that it would invest in companies founded by its students. M.I.T. also takes an equity stake in companies developed on campus. But Stanford and M.I.T. both require those companies to pay royalties on any technologies the students patent while in school.
Rather than negotiate complex patent-licensing rights with their researchers, Cornell Tech will treat the value of each post-doc position it awards—about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as an angel investment in any business spun out of the program; in exchange, Cornell Tech expects to get an average of a five-per-cent stake in each business. The Runway program echoes the accelerators and incubators popular among venture capitalists—three- or four-month programs in which entrepreneurs get resources to build new startups in exchange for a stake in their companies.

Universities didn’t always have the right to the spoils of the research they sponsored. The government spent heavily on research and development at U.S. universities during the Cold War, but new technologies developed with federal cash became government property. By 1980, the federal government had amassed twenty-eight thousand patents but licensed fewer than five per cent to companies that could turn them into products. That year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to keep and profit from the patents their students and researchers developed on campus using federal funds. The Economist called it “perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation in America over the past half-century.”

Soon, offices focussed on “technology transfer” opened up in schools around the country, staffed with lawyers who poked around campus research labs and flipped through student notebooks to suss out patentable research that they could license to corporations. A new chemical combination might become a blockbuster drug; a technological breakthrough could lead to smaller, faster semiconductors.

In 2012, American universities earned $2.6 billion from patent royalties, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. The tech-transfer model is entrenched in medical schools and in biotech development. But its usefulness in the software world has been less clear. The success of a software startup often depends less on any particular innovation than on how several pieces of technology fit together and appeal to users. A company’s value usually becomes apparent years after it has developed and refined its business model, not at the moment it files a patent application. Plus, the very concept of a software patent hangs in the balance: in December, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case that could eliminate them altogether.

Cornell Tech’s approach—taking an equity stake in each company instead of licensing rights to a handful of patents—may be a more straightforward way for the school to profit from spin-offs. “Universities look to place a value on technology at its inception, finding a fair rate for splitting royalties between the school and the inventor, but that’s not the way digital startups work,” Cornell Tech’s Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, said. “I think intellectual-property protection, especially in software and digital tech, is a very small piece of commercialization, one that becomes too big a part of the conversation when universities are involved.”

The Runway program is designed to turn deep academic research into a marketable product; its first post-docs have already spent years in the lab, sometimes running into dead ends and starting over in a way that pure academic research allows but investors don’t. “A principal mission of Cornell University is the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit and use of society,” the school’s existing intellectual-property policy reads. Whether society benefits most when knowledge is turned into an I.P.O. is an open question.

“The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” the historian and Stanford professor David Kennedy told Ken Auletta in 2012, in a report from Stanford. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.” And when students showed up for their first classes at the temporary campus, in January, 2013, Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell in Ithaca, told the Times, “The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s. Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.” (“Such potential for conflicts is quite manageable with the appropriate procedures in place, enabling this very effective interaction between students, faculty, and companies,” Huttenlocher told me.)

Yet universities are forging ahead with more business-oriented models. Over the past decade, angel investors, the main source of capital for startups, have made high-risk bets, providing money for startups to get off the ground in exchange for the right to a piece of the company’s equity if it succeeds. Most never do. Venture capitalists call their strategy “spray and pray,” sinking money into lots of different startups in the hope that at least one will be the next Facebook. It’s a gamble, but it could be a better way for universities to take advantage of the work their students are doing. The amount of revenue schools generate from patent licensing is small compared with over-all university budgets. Alumni philanthropy brings in far more money. “What would happen if schools gave up rights to their students’ intellectual property?” Adam Shwartz, the director of Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, which runs the Runway program, asked. “Their patent revenue goes to zero, but down the line the successful alumni give back far more money. Here we have the first controlled experiment of this nature.”

Rendering of Cornell Tech by Kilograph.
____________________________________________

Below you see how bad the success rate of this model is for the student /school so a corporation directs the research it wants to fund----gets free labor and a taxpayer funded research facility----and VOILA all the failures are paid for by you and me.  No need for corporate R and D.  In lieu of corporate taxes these investment firms just send there money to these university projects and we are told this is the best mechanism for funding universities.

All work on campus is now product-driven-----professors are judged on patenting rather than academics or teaching.  Tenure is tied to being this corporate executive.  Students are engaged only in what will pay off and not with a broad education limiting their futures.  As this article shows it is the student that loses and graduates with the tuition debt and limited focus degrees.


What is sad is that the student's future success with whatever they create requires handing a percentage of future earnings to these university/venture capitalist and the few that do create successful businesses simply hand them to these global investment firms.  This is all simply universities as corporate facilities.

THE ENTIRE ACADEMIC MODEL HAS BEEN RUINED AND THE US IS AGAIN ON THE BOTTOM ACADEMICALLY IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS.  THIS IS WHAT MIKULSKI AND KIRWAN ARE SITTING DOWN TO BOLSTER.

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS: Here's How Bad Your Odds Of Success Are
  • Henry Blodget  Business Insider

  • May 28, 2013, 11:03 AM

As a wise investor puts it: "Many turtles hatch. Few make it to the sea."


Everyone knows that starting companies — and investing in startups — is a risky way to earn a living. But few people appreciate just how risky it is.

Thanks to a recent tweet from Paul Graham, the founder of "startup school" Y Combinator, we now have a better idea.

Graham says that 37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million.

Most entrepreneurs would probably view creating a company worth more than $40 million as a success (unless the company raised more capital than that). And, on its face, the "37 companies" number seems relatively impressive.

In fact, however, the number tells a scary and depressing story.

This number suggests that a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.

(Not all companies that sell for less than $40 million are "failures," obviously. Assuming a company hasn't raised much capital, a sale between $5 million and $40 million could be considered a success. But a high percentage of Y Combinator companies likely end up being worth zero. And for companies that are hand-picked by very smart investors, the 93%-below-$40 million rate is still surprisingly low). 

A company accepted by Y Combinator, therefore, has less than a 1-in-10 chance of being a big success.

More alarmingly, the companies accepted by Y Combinator are only a tiny fraction of the companies that apply.

Some have estimated that Y Combinator's acceptance rate is 3-5%.

If we use the 5% rate, we can estimate that Y Combinator has received about 10,000 applications for the ~500 companies it has chosen over the years.

Assuming Y Combinator has even a modest ability to pick winners, therefore, the odds that a company applying to Y Combinator will be a success are significantly lower than the odds of success of the companies accepted into the program.

If only 37 of the companies that have applied to Y Combinator over the years have succeeded, this is a staggeringly low 0.4% success rate.

Put differently, only one in every 200 companies that applies to Y Combinator will succeed.

The reality is that Y Combinator probably misses a few winners, so the actual odds are probably slightly higher.

But in case any entrepreneur or angel investor is deluding themselves into thinking that startups are an easy way to cash in, they might want to think again.









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July 18th, 2014

7/18/2014

0 Comments

 
from subprime mortgage fraud to municipal bond fraudFRO
FROM SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD TO MUNICIPAL BOND FRAUD-----NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE ALL ABOUT MOVING MONEY TO THE TOP ANY WAY POSSIBLE

Let's compare again the 2008 subprime mortgage crash and the coming bond market crash to see it is neo-liberals working with neo-cons deliberately manufacturing these crashes with the goal of moving ever more public assets to the top.  Clinton's administrative team with Robert Rubin at Citigroup created the subprime mortgage plan with Greenspan and Tim Geithner and the Federal Reserve's Bernanke with Obama created this bond market crash.  Both required the neo-liberals in Congress to pass the laws allowing the conditions.

As we know the foreclosures on homes are still going strong and Maryland leads the pack.  Remember, almost none of the parking ticket of a settlement for subprime loan fraud made it to the victims of fraud---it is being sent back to the banks paying the settlement in the form of development subsidy.  So the transfer of homeownership has never stopped since we elected a super-majority of neo-liberals.  A ridiculous attempt at refinancing with a program called HARP delayed dispensing money for years and is now advertizing to help through the same mortgage lenders having committed the frauds.  Most people have of course lost their homes through yet again a fraudulent foreclosure process.  Can you imagine handing HARP to the same institutions defrauding trillions from the FHA? 

THESE CORPORATE POLS COULD CARE LESS WHAT YOU AND I THINK----THEY THINK THEY HAVE ELECTIONS CAPTURED AND WE CANNOT MAKE CHANGE!  THEY ARE WRONG!



'So, have QE and the ballooning debt been a fantastic success or a Questionably Effective policy designed to recapitalize banks and the financial elite at the expense of most others, including pension funds, retirement accounts, savers, and bond funds'?

QE is simply a policy to allow the FED to leverage debt to buy the toxic subprime loans from Wall Streets accounts making them look as though they have recapitalized.  Those trillions that the FED bought are the most toxic of subprime mortgage loans.  The second goal was lowering the interest rate for selling homes because after all Wall Street had tens of millions of foreclosed homes coming to them and they needed to sell them as cheaply as possible to maximize bank profits.  So while neo-liberals in Congress bailed out the banks---they left Main Street in mass foreclosure all designed to move these homes to Wall Street where they were bundled and resold to the same investment firms creating the mortgage frauds.  QE lowered interest rates to zero and the only ones benefitting were those banks peddling foreclosure bundles and the foreigners laundering their looted wealth from their country to US real estate.  That was the rising sales you heard on TV news.  We see it in Baltimore as developers are buying huge tracts of communities for next to nothing ----these communities being the ones devastated by the subprime loan fraud and foreclosures.  Consolidated ownership of property is good for no one.

The FED has a mission of economic stability and low unemployment and it is fraud and malfeasance when the policies they push do the opposite.  They pretended unemployment went down when it is now at 36%----they pretended they were keeping inflation low when it is at 5% ---and they certainly will not be able to claim economic stability when the market crashes in 2015 from the bond implosion. 

ALL INSTITUTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH GOVERNMENT ARE OPENLY WORKING AGAINST THE MISSION OF PROTECTING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND ONLY A FEW ARE BEING MADE RICH FROM THIS MALFEASANCE.

For those thinking their pensions have made gains to replace losses from 2008-----those gains are about to disappear and then some.


QE: Quantitative Easing or Questionably Effective

-- Posted Tuesday, 8 July 2014
By GE Christenson

We all know the S&P 500 Index has been on a 5+ year rally to all-time highs – thanks to ultra-low interest rates and the levitating wonder of “printing money” via QE – Quantitative Easing.  Examine the following chart of the S&P for the past 20 years.

If you were a member of the top 5 – 10% and had a large investment in the stock market, you increased your nominal net worth. However, if you were in the bottom 90%, then the wonders of QE did not “trickle down” to you and your family, except as higher prices.

Pension and retirement funds benefitted to the extent of their stock investments but they were hurt by generational low interest rates in their bond portfolios.  Simply put, the stock market rally benefitted a narrow band of society – mostly the political and financial elite and upper middle class.

But how does the massive rally in the S&P look when priced in barrels of crude oil?  Examine the following chart of weekly S&P divided by weekly Crude Oil prices – both smoothed with a 52 week moving average.


That rally in the S&P, when priced in barrels of crude oil, does not look nearly as impressive.  Remember – a small percentage of people benefit from higher stock prices, but everyone pays when oil prices rise.  The price of crude oil affects food prices, gasoline prices, shipping costs, home heating costs, mining and manufacturing costs, and so many more. 

When we look at the S&P in terms of crude oil, we see:

1)    The ratio is DOWN over 75% from its peak.

2)    The ratio has been essentially unchanged since 2006.

3)    The price of crude has risen for the last 14 years - much more rapidly than the S&P, along with a massive increase in debt and the money supply.

4)    A few people benefitted from the nominal rise in the S&P and most people were hurt by the rising costs of energy, gasoline, manufacturing, food, and so on.

5)    The overall US economy seems to be sputtering, unless you believe what financial television is “selling.”

So, have QE and the ballooning debt been a fantastic success or a Questionably Effective policy designed to recapitalize banks and the financial elite at the expense of most others, including pension funds, retirement accounts, savers, and bond funds?

QE looks like it produced a toxic cloud of dangerous mal-investment, debt and currency bubbles, higher consumer prices, and a weakened economy. 

___________________________

The FED was busy taking trillions of subprime mortage loans off banks accounts leaving the FED leveraged to the max right before this coming bond crash.  What happened when the insurance corporation AIG was tethered to this same fraud?  Taxpayers paid the debt and indeed the FED's debt will be handed to taxpayers with this coming bond crash.

The other stash for toxic loans was Freddie and Fannie and rather than making banks write off those fraudulent loans to clear the debt on these public/private entities-----Obama and neo-liberals are embracing the debt as public debt and taxpayers are paying off yet another trillion in fraudulent loans there.

Friday, September 14, 2012
 
QE Infinity: Fed Buying More Toxic Assets From Banks Will NOT Help Main Street Dees Illustration

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve announced an open-ended bailout for the banks yesterday by a new mechanism called QE Infinity where they plan to purchase $40 billion of toxic mortgage-backed securities per month "until further notice".

Shrouded in confusing language like "unlimited stimulus" or "quantitative easing", this unprecedented move and rule change by the Fed was said to be warranted because employment remains weak even though they still maintain the false notion that "economic activity has continued to expand at a moderate pace in recent months."

As stated in the FMOC press release:
If the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases, and employ its other policy tools as appropriate until such improvement is achieved in a context of price stability. Of course this move "to foster maximum employment and price stability" does nothing to directly help job creation, and will continue to hurt main street by inflating the price of everything purchased by dollars. Yet it will clearly reward the investor class who already own most of the dollar-based assets.

The theory is that by removing toxic assets from the bank's books they have more liquidity to offer more credit, or to purchase more government debt. Somehow this is supposed to trickle down and help improve unemployment, which real numbers show to be in the 20% range when all factors are considered.

After a combined $2.3 trillion from
QE1 ($1.7T) and QE2 ($600B), plus over $16 trillion is secret bailouts to recapitalize banks with absolutely no measurable improvement in the economy, how could any thinking person believe this policy will be beneficial?


Since mortgage-based assets total a conservative $600 TRILLION, QE Infinity is nothing more than an endless giveaway to the criminal banks at the expense of struggling taxpayers. Wall Street will obviously celebrate the move and stock prices will go up, along with food and energy prices.

It is so blatantly a policy that will steal from the poor to give to the rich.  It also makes one wonder how can the government cry poor when it comes to paying for food stamps, healthcare, education, and other benefits for the needy when they have endless trillions to prop up the banksters?

Significantly, this announcement comes on the heels of a census report that shows median incomes have fallen to levels of the
late 1960s and early '70s. Of course, the mainstream version is they've only fallen to 1989 levels, which is hardly any better.

ShadowStats.com
The census report showed that the middle class is struggling with a median family income of $50,054. In 2010, Michael Snyder decisively proved that it is flat impossible for a family of four to survive on this income in America, and prices for essentials have only increased over the last two years primarily because of the Fed's reckless money printing.

This policy is an absolute disgrace and represents the final looting of the American people. There will simply be nothing left to the value of the dollar, and all of the important assets will be funneled straight up to the elite banksters.

You think you are slaves now?  Just wait.

______________________________

JUST WAIT says the article above.  Below you see how Obama and neo-liberals in Congress passed the laws creating the conditions for this bond bubble knowing a crash would hit Federal, state, and local governments the hardest.  As I question Maryland politicians about these bond leverage deals that place the taxpayer in charge of debt for decades and telling them the bond market is getting ready to crash----they tell me----OH, THAT WON'T EFFECT A PLAIN VANILLA BOND DEAL LIKE THIS!  Plain vanilla bond deal?  When Obama and Congress created terms for bonds that made the world want to buy them the bond bubble soared.  Then, the FED QE made them soar.  Remember, when the subprime loan crash came we found all of Wall Street investors in these loans had Credit Default Swaps-----insurance against losses ----with AIG being the corporation served up in sacrifice for the fraud.  These toxic policies were insured for 100% on the dollar and Obama and Geithner made sure that 100% was paid by taxpayer bailout.

Below you see the same thing happening.  The boom market now in insurance is Bond Insurance.  We see this corporations looking to be the AIG of this bond fraud as it insures bond deals against losses at 100%.  We all know the crash is coming so why are these insurance deals happening?  Taxpayers will come in to bailout this insurance corporation when the bond crash occurs. 

As you see Moody's and the other rating corporations are still in the game rating these bonds and the insurance no doubt AAA as it does Maryland and its financial picture. 


THIS ENTIRE BUSINESS DEVELOPED IN RESPONSE TO THE POLICIES IMPLEMENTED BY OBAMA, CONGRESS, AND THE FED.  IT IS THERE SIMPLY TO ALLOW THESE BANKS TO CREATE BOOM AND BUST WITH NO LOSSES FOR THE PEOPLE DOING IT.


Answers to Questions about the Novation of CIFG Assurance North America, Inc. Municipal Bond Insurance Policies to Assured Guaranty Corp.
 
December 12, 2011

In January 2009, CIFG Assurance North America, Inc. (CIFG) and Assured Guaranty Corp. (AGC) entered into a reinsurance transaction whereby AGC provides reinsurance to CIFG with respect to certain U.S. public finance and infrastructure bond insurance policies (the "covered policies").  CIFG and AGC also agreed that they would use commercially reasonable efforts to novate the covered policies to AGC.  CIFG has begun sending requests to the issuers of insured obligations (or to the applicable trustee of the bondholders) seeking consents for the novation of the covered policies. 

The novation is being implemented in two phases.  In the first phase, consents are being solicited for bonds insured in the primary market.  Bonds insured in CIFG’s secondary market custodial receipt program will be solicited in the second phase.
To the extent regulatory filings or approvals are required in connection with the novation of any policy, requests for consent will only be sent after any applicable waiting periods have elapsed or any required approvals have been obtained.

What are the benefits of novation?

Novation gives bondholders the direct protection of AGC’s claims-paying resources.  Once a municipal bond insurance policy has been novated,
AGC will request, and expects to obtain, an AGC insured rating from S&P, Moody’s or both depending on which originally provided a CIFG insured rating for the related bonds.  Although AGC already provides 100% reinsurance for the covered policies and administers the policies on behalf of CIFG, CIFG remains the insurer until the policies are novated, and the bondholder remains subject to credit risk of CIFG.

As a bondholder, do I need to take any action for the bond insurance policies to be novated?

In general, bondholders are not being asked to take any action at this time.  If there is a trustee for an issue insured by CIFG at origination, the trustee has been asked to execute a consent to the novation.  If there is no trustee (as is true for many municipal general obligations that utilize a paying agent), then the issuer has been asked to execute such consent.  If an insurance policy was written by CIFG after the bonds began trading in the secondary market, the custodian bank holding the custodial receipt that associates the policy with the insured bonds will be asked to execute the consent. Bondholders may be contacted directly by the applicable trustee, issuer VIEW LIST OF COVERED POLICIESor custodian bank as part of the consent process.

The offer to novate a particular municipal bond insurance policy will be open through the date specified in the offer unless such date is extended or the solicitation is earlier terminated at the sole discretion of CIFG and AGC.   Bondholders should contact the trustee, issuer or custodian to inquire about the status of the request and whether any action has been taken.  Bondholders are also encouraged to send their contact information, together with the name of the issuer, CUSIP number, original par, series and other identifying information concerning the insured bonds, to CIFG at novationteam@cifg.com in order to facilitate the novation process.

How will I know if the insurance policy has been novated? 

Novated policies will be identified in a list of covered policies maintained on this page of the Assured Guaranty website, which may be reached at www.assuredguaranty.com/novation.  Additionally, once S&P and Moody’s have issued new insured ratings for a given issue, those ratings should be reflected on data services such as Bloomberg.

VIEW LIST OF COVERED POLICIES
What happens to the insurance policy when novation takes place?

All of the terms and conditions of the policy will remain unchanged, except that AGC will be the insurer in full substitution for CIFG and, because of that substitution, AGC will have all of the rights and obligations of CIFG under the policy and related documents and CIFG will be fully released of its obligations under the terms of the policy. The consent form signed by AGC and the issuer, trustee or custodian, as the case may be, and a notice of effective date issued by AGC following receipt of the signed consent form will become part of the policy.

Will all the municipal bond insurance policies be novated at the same time?

No.  Except as described below, the effective date for each policy’s novation is the date on which CIFG receives an executed consent form for that policy.

If CIFG issued a debt service reserve fund surety bond or a swap insurance policy in connection with my CIFG-insured bonds, will that be novated, too?

Separate consent requests are being sent to issuers, trustees or swap counterparties, as appropriate, for each debt service reserve fund surety bond and swap insurance policy.  In cases where a debt service reserve fund surety bond or a swap insurance policy was issued in connection with a bond insurance policy or policies, CIFG must receive the executed consent forms for each bond insurance policy, debt service reserve fund surety bond and swap insurance policy, as applicable, before the novation of such policies and surety bond shall become effective.  (Where there is no debt service reserve fund surety bond or swap insurance policy, multiple bond insurance policies issued in connection with a single bond transaction may be novated independently.)

________________________________________________

Do you see anything below that leads you to believe the FED is acting in the public interest?  It is Obama and Congress that appoints these FED chairs.  DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING THE FED IS ACTING CRIMINALLY?

If you do not hear your pols shouting about this rogue FED policy they are neo-liberals working for wealth and profit ----NOT DEMOCRATS FOR GOODNESS SAKE.  GET RID OF THEM!


Mission
The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It was founded by Congress in 1913 to provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system. Over the years, its role in banking and the economy has expanded. Today, the Federal Reserve's duties fall into four general areas:

  • conducting the nation's monetary policy by influencing the monetary and credit conditions in the economy in pursuit of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates
  • supervising and regulating banking institutions to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers
  • maintaining the stability of the financial system and containing systemic risk that may arise in financial markets
  • providing financial services to depository institutions, the U.S. government, and foreign official institutions, including playing a major role in operating the nation's payments system

Is the Federal Reserve accountable to anyone?
 
The Federal Reserve is accountable to the public and the U.S. Congress. The Fed has long viewed transparency as a fundamental principle of central banking that supports accountability. In the area of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve reports
twice annually on its plans for monetary policy. In addition, the Chairman and other Federal Reserve officials often testify before the Congress. To further foster transparency and accountability in monetary policy, the Federal Open Market Committee publishes a statement immediately following every FOMC meeting that describes the Committee's views regarding the economic outlook, and provides a rationale for its policy decision. Full minutes for each meeting are published three weeks after each FOMC meeting. Full verbatim transcripts of the FOMC meetings are made available with a five-year lag. Further, the Federal Reserve Chairman holds press conferences after selected FOMC meetings to discuss the monetary policy outlook.

The Federal Reserve is transparent and accountable in its other functions as well. The Board of Governors prepares an
Annual Report summarizing activities of the Board and all Reserve Banks; the annual report is delivered to the Congress. To ensure financial accountability, the financial statements of the Federal Reserve Banks and the Board of Governors are audited annually by an independent outside auditor. In addition, the Government Accountability Office, as well as the Board's Office of Inspector General, frequently audit many Federal Reserve activities. Weekly, the Board of Governors publishes the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. During the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve provided information about its lending programs on its public website and in a special monthly report to Congress.







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July 17th, 2014

7/17/2014

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THESE ARE SOME OF THE THINGS TO WATCH FOR AND THINK ABOUT THESE NEXT MONTHS AS THE BOND MARKET PREPARES TO COLLAPSE.  I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT AS WITH THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE LOAN COLLAPSE YOUR POLS NOT ONLY KNOW IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN----THEY ARE CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR THE CRASH.  THAT IS BECAUSE THEY WORK FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND PROFIT.  GET RID OF THEM!



Keep in mind the entire financial system of frauds is based on tricking people, or allowing others to trick people into taking on more debt than they can handle knowing the end result will be a collapse in market that leaves people/government unable to pay the debt. With the subprime mortgage fraud the banks targeted low-income homeowners not only to gain control of real estate in urban areas but to target the Federal Housing Authority and its taxpayer payments of fees and loans.  This coming municipal/sovereign debt fraud collapse targets again government coffers and taxpayers as corrupt neo-liberal politicians load the states and cities with debt knowing this crash in 2015 is a sure thing.  Public officials take an oath to serve and protect the Constitution and citizens and none of this meets this oath.  They are aiding and abetting a crime by knowingly placing the public in harms way.  Remember, we can build Baltimore schools by simply ending the billion in fraud and corruption each year so there is plenty of taxpayer money for these infrastructure projects.  It is the leverage needed to implode the state and city economy.

AGAIN, WE CAN REVERSE THIS----WE SIMPLY NEED TO ELECT POLS THAT REBUILD RULE OF LAW AND OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY.  EASY PEASY.


I want to make sure people understand that all of this was known years ago---below you see in 2011 financial analysts were advising to prepare for the collapse.  During that time think how many credit bond and leveraging deals have been made in Maryland and Baltimore---including the big $1 billion deal to rebuild public schools.  I was shouting and writing to show the public knew this was malfeasance so we are under no obligation when the crash comes to hand everything to investment firms as they plan.  We must have Rule of Law to provide that protection.  This is why these elections are critical these next few election cycles and it is why Maryland was willing to allow systemic election violations for Governor to make sure the right person was in place to protect the fraud when this collapse comes.


Keep in mind the FED controls when this crash occurs to the extend of ending QE and allowing the manufactured  inflation be replaced by real inflation numbers . This will create the environment for mass exodus from the bond market and she has no way to stop this as it has maxed and is now unable to be contained.  She may delay it, but it will come and it appears likely 2015 will be the longest she can delay.  Inflation which is now thought to be 5% or so will jump to some of the highest levels in US history and it is all because of FED policy and Congress and Obama passing laws that made municipal bond markets artificially attractive.  They sold our bond market to the world just as they sold toxic subprime mortgage loans to the world.  They earned trillions and the American people lost everything as will happen this time around.


This article refers to the last time the FED considered ending QE in 2011.... as we know Bernanke decided to extend the death sentence and allow Yellen to handle the collapsing economy.
 

SHE WILL HAVE NO CHOICE AS THE FED IS MAXED IN DEBT AND INFLATION IS NOT CONTAINABLE. IT'S ONE BIG PONZI SCHEME.

O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly sold citizens out statewide and Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore City Hall sold citizens out locally as they did during the subprime mortgage loan fraud.

The Coming Bond Market Crash: The Three Moves Every Investor Must Make
  • By Martin Hutchinson, Global Investing Specialist, Money Morning  ·   July 1, 2011 



Since last November, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been buying U.S. Treasury bonds at a rate of about $75 billion a month. That's part of Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke's "QE2" program, under which the central bank was to buy $600 billion of the government bonds.

But QE2 ended yesterday (Thursday), meaning the Fed will no longer be a big buyer of Treasury bonds.

So starting today (Friday), the U.S. Treasury needs to sell twice as many Treasury bonds to end investors as it had been.

But the problem is, who's going to buy them?

Not China, which is diversifying its trillions in assets to get as far away from the U.S. dollar as fast as it can.

Not Japan, which is trying to rebound from its March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster - and is focusing all its spending on reconstruction.

And - as we've seen -neither is the Bernanke-led Fed.

I'm telling you right now: We are headed for an epic bond market crash. If you don't know about it, or don't care, you could get clobbered.


But if you do know, and are willing to take steps now, you can easily protect yourself - and even turn a nice profit in the process.

Let me explain ...

A Timetable for the Coming Crash I'm an old bond-market hand myself - my experience dates back to my days at the British merchant bank Hill Samuel in the 1970s - so I see all the signs of what's to come.

Having the two biggest external customers of U.S. debt largely out of the market is a huge problem. Unfortunately, those aren't the only challenges the market faces. The challenges just get bigger from there - which is why I'm predicting a bond market crash.

Latest Comment^ It is 2013, QE3 is out so maybe his timing is off but with all the printed mon…

Steadily rising inflation is one of the challenges. Inflation is a huge threat to the bond markets, and is almost certain to create a whipping turbulence that will ultimately infect the stocks markets, too.

Many pundits will tell you that if investor demand for bonds declines, and investor fear of inflation increases, bond-market yields could increase in an orderly fashion.

But I can tell you that the bond markets don't work like that. Price declines affect existing bonds as well as new ones, so the value of every investor's bond holdings declines. And with many of those investors heavily leveraged - especially at the major international banks - the sight of year-end bonuses disappearing down the Swanee River as bonds are "marked to market" will cause a panic. That's especially true when end-of-quarter or end-of-year reporting periods loom.

That's why we can expect a bond market crash at some point. If you ask me to make a prediction, I'd say that September or December were the most likely months for such a crash.

A Boxed-In Bernanke One sad - even scary - fact about what I'm predicting is that Fed Chairman Bernanke won't be able to do much about it ... though he'll certain try.

Consumer price inflation is now running at 3.6% year-on-year while producer price inflation is running at 7.2%. In that kind of environment, a 10-year Treasury bond yielding 3% is no longer economically attractive. Since monetary conditions worldwide remain very loose, inflation in the U.S. and worldwide will trend up, not down.

The bottom line: At some point, the "value proposition" offered to Treasury bond investors will become impossibly unattractive. When that happens, expect a rush to the exits.

If Bernanke attempts "QE3" - a third round of "quantitative easing" - he will have a problem. If other investors head for the exits, Bernanke may find that the U.S. central bank is as jammed up as the European Central Bank (ECB) currently is with Greek debt: Both will end up as the suckers that are taking all the rubbish off of everyone else's books.

There's a limit to how much Treasury paper even Bernanke thinks he can buy. And if everyone else is selling, that "limit" won't be high enough to save the bond market.


With Bernanke buying at a rapid rate, the inflationary forces will be even stronger,
so every Bureau of Labor Statistics report on monthly price indices will be marked by a massive swoon in the Treasury bond market.

Eventually, there has to be a new head of the Fed - a Paul A. Volcker 2.0 who is truly committed to conquering inflation. Alas, it won't be Volcker himself since, at 84, he is probably too old.

But it might be John B. Taylor, who invented the "Taylor Rule" for Fed policy. The Taylor Rule is actually a pretty soggy guide on running a monetary system. But it has been flashing bright red signals about the current Fed's monetary policy since 2008.

However, since a Fed chairman who is actually serious about fighting inflation would be a huge burden for current U.S. President Barack Obama to bear - and could badly hamper his chances for re-election, any such appointment is unlikely before November 2012.

How to Profit From the Bond Market Crash


Given that reality, it's likely that Bernanke will attack any bond market crash that occurs ahead of the presidential election just by printing more money; there won't be any serious attempt to rectify the fundamental problem, meaning inflation will continue to accelerate.

For you as an investor, this insight leads to two conclusions that you can put to work to your advantage. The scenario I've outlined for you will be:

Very good for gold and other hard assets. Challenging for Treasury bonds; prices will remain weak no matter how vigorously Bernanke attempts to support them.

So what should you do with this knowledge? I have three recommendations.

First and foremost, if Bernanke were not around, I would expect gold prices to fall following a bond market crash. But since he's still at the helm at the Fed, I expect him to do "QE3" in the event of a crash. And that means gold - not Treasury bonds - would become an investor "safe haven."

You can expect gold prices to zoom up, peaking at a much higher level around the time Bernanke is finally replaced. Silver will also follow this trend. So make sure you have substantial holdings of either physical gold and silver or the exchange-traded funds (ETFs) SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE: GLD) and iShares Silver Trust (NYSE: SLV).

Second, if you want to profit more directly from the collapse in Treasury bond prices, you could buy a "put" option on Treasury bond futures (TLT) on the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The futures were recently trading around 94, and the January 2013 80 put (CBOE: TLT1319M80-E) was priced around $4.50, which seems an attractive combination of low price and high leverage.

Finally, if you don't already own a house, you should buy one - and do so with a fixed-rate mortgage. A U.S. Treasury bond market crash will send mortgage rates through the roof, so today's rates of about 4.8% will represent very cheap money, indeed. Even if house prices decline by 10%, a 2% rise in mortgage rates would increase the monthly payment (even accounting for a 10% smaller mortgage), by a net 11.8% (the payment on a $100,000 mortgage at 4.8% is $524.67; that on a $90,000 mortgage at 6.8% is $586.73).

Needless to say, the same benefits apply to rental properties financed by fixed-rate mortgages: With lower home ownership and rising inflation, rents are tending to rise significantly.

There's a storm coming in the Treasury bond market. But by recognizing its approach, we can turn the bond market crash to our advantage.


_________________________________________________

HMMMMMM.....reduce reserve funds and raise public debt.....all to augment the billions of dollars lost to the Maryland economy to fraud each year.

The debt takes the form of state leverage for projects and services----they have even leveraged the public pension funds all with no indication that 2015 will bring a major recession/depression.  DIDN'T SEE THAT COMING YOUR NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS WILL SAY!


All that leverage supposedly balanced the state budget and O'Malley pretended to be saving public sector jobs and pensions all while knowing this economic crash will lead to huge layoffs and end public sector pensions.
  Labor union leaders know this dynamic and still go with the neo-liberals doing it!
  As we all know each year since this 2010 article the public debt and leverage has increased.  Again, Republicans in other states are doing the same thing so do not listen to Maryland Republicans playing this card---they would do the same.

Maryland Governor’s Budget Cuts Reserve Payments, Boosts Debt

by Patrick Temple-West JAN 20, 2010 8:44pm ET Bond Buyer


WASHINGTON — Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley yesterday released a proposal for the state’s fiscal 2011 budget that would reduce reserve fund contributions and increase public debt by 7.1% over fiscal 2010.




Below you see what is only the tip of the iceberg with tax credits that commit a level of tax forgiveness for decades that starves our government coffers.  O'Malley cut higher education aid and public transportation funding to pay for just a few of these corporate subsidies all in the name of jobs.  Well, when the bond market crash comes and the jobs are gone because of the recession global corporations will still be receiving tax breaks as they do business/make profits overseas. 

WHO CARES ABOUT LEVERAGE AND STATE DEBT WHEN THE IDEA IS TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.

We'll just cut more services, programs, sell public assets, and let global corporations handle the business of government that now has no revenue.

I'm not going to format since one can just look down very quickly to see all of the development is done with tax credits. They all are supposed to create jobs and help low-income people all of which will be killed by the coming economic crash from the credit leverage in these very policies.  Attracting global corporations to Maryland is the answer to jobs and a strong economy say neo-liberals-----only it does the opposite.  Most of these tax breaks will go to large corporations.

$2 million in tax credits for creating 10 poverty jobs......hmmmmmm.

Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development

economic development and the creation of jobs. MVF targets emerging technology-based businesses including biotechnology, information technology, telecommunications, software development and advanced materials.• Challenge Investment Program – $650,000 to ten start-up firms.• Enterprise Investment Fund – $2.2 million – three new firms and follow-on funding to five companies.Federal IncentivesCommunity Development Block Grant Program – Economic DevelopmentThis program assists local governments in implementing commercial and industrial economic development projects. Approved program funds are disbursed to eligible local jurisdictions as conditional grants and used for public improvements for business start-up or expansion or business loans. Projects must create jobs with the majority targeted to individuals from low to moderate income or eliminate blight conditions that impede commercial and industrial development. Fund uses include acquiring fixed assets, infrastructure and feasibility studies. • CDBG-ED funds of $2.2 million supported seven closed projects to create or retain 185 full-time jobs. Three projects worth $1.3 million were approved, representing 129 new or retained jobs.Maryland Economic Adjustment FundMEAF assists small businesses with upgrading manufacturing operations, developing commercial applications for technology, or entering new economic markets. Eligible businesses include manufacturers, wholesalers, service companies and skilled trades. Funds can be used for working capital, machinery and equipment, building renovations, real estate acquisition and site improvements. •Four Maryland Economic Adjustment Fund projects totaling $703,000 were approved and five transactions totaling $726,500 were closed.Tax Credit ProgramsOne Maryland Tax Credit Program Businesses can qualify for up to $5.5 million in income tax credits under the program when they invest in an economic development project in a “qualified distressed county.” Qualified Distressed Counties currently include: Baltimore City, Allegany, Dorchester, Garrett, Caroline, Somerset and Worcester. The business must create at least 25 new full-time positions at the project within 24 months of the date the project is placed in service. The business must be engaged in an eligible activity and incur eligible project or start-up costs. • FY2009 – 3 final certificates of eligibility issued for businesses that created 219 new jobs.Job Creation Tax CreditEncourages businesses to relocate to or expand in a Maryland Priority Funding Area by providing income tax credits based on new jobs created. Subject to various restrictions and conditions including location, wage levels and number of jobs created the credit may be for 2.5% up to $1,000 per job or 5% of annual wage up to $1,500 per job. • FY2009 – 7 final certificates of eligibility issued for businesses that created 307 new jobs.Enterprise Zone ProgramBusinesses located in a maryland enterprise Zone may receive income and real property tax credits in return for creating jobs. Local governments apply to the Department to designate Enterprise Zones. The ten-year real property tax credit reduces taxes on property improvements for ten years. The income tax credit for creating new jobs is$1,000 per new worker; for hiring economically disadvantage employees, up to $6,000 per new employee (over three years).• As of June 2009, there were 29 Enterprise Zones and two focus areas. • FY2010– 753 businesses will receive property tax credits totaling $26.3 million.– State share to reimburse localities will be $13.1 million, assuming the State’s full obligation is met.– Credits are based on real property investments totaling $1.945 billion.AGENCY MISSION & ACTIVITIES (contintued)

_____________________________________________

Here you see for whom neo-liberals and neo-cons in Maryland work---as they say we do not need to bring money home to pay taxes and  build infrastructure---we have plenty of business overseas thanks to O'Malley's 8 years of sending all of Maryland's revenue to building global structures for development.  We are exporting education and health care businesses none of which grows jobs in Maryland.

This is why neo-liberals are not concerned about the coming economic crash----it will not hurt these global corporations and it will provide excuses to hand more public operations/assets to these global corporations
.  Dulaney and neo-liberals are trying as hard as they can to repatriate global tax requirements in schemes to build infrastructure.  Remember, if they paid taxes we would have the money for infrastructure.  Domestic businesses pay taxes so the answer is GET RID OF GLOBAL CORPORATE CONTROL OF YOUR ECONOMY!  Dulaney is a Clinton investment banker who knows banks owe tens of trillions of dollars in fraud but does not seem to want to offer that solution.  Buying Treasury bonds when the bond market is preparing to collapse?  REALLY MR DULANEY?

Raise your hand if you know the answer is to get rid of global corporations from the Maryland economy rather than pretending to need to beg them for their taxes!!!!!  EVERYONE.  Raise your hand if you understand that tax breaks in exchange for bond purchases just when the bond market is ready to collapse will simply allow corporations to enter a bond market at the bottom for tremendous profits just as happened in 2008 with the stock market crash.  THAT'S WHAT THESE POLICIES ARE ALL ABOUT!


Everyone knows as well that the main avenue for recovering those tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud is HIGHER CORPORATE TAXES but as this article shows neo-liberals and neo-cons only intend to lower corporate taxes....you know, its all about job creation.


Md. Companies Have Billions in Assets Overseas Business Top News — 28 March 2014 By Fola Akinnibi
Capital News Service

6 WASHINGTON – The president’s budget, released in early March, called for the creation of a national fund to finance repair of the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges and other infrastructure — an idea also proposed by a freshman Maryland congressman.

Rep. John Delaney, D-Potomac, wants to fund infrastructure repair by bringing home billions of dollars in foreign earnings from U.S.-based corporations.  The congressman said he has been long concerned about decaying infrastructure.

Delaney’s Partnership to Build America Act would create a new way to pay for these repairs. Corporations would provide the money by buying bonds in The American Infrastructure Fund.


In exchange, they would be allowed to bring back money locked up overseas without paying the full 35 percent corporate tax rate.

Delaney’s bill could come as a relief to corporations with large foreign operations that have deferred paying U.S. corporate taxes on their overseas earnings indefinitely. For example, 10 Maryland-based multinational corporations, including Columbia-based MICROS Systems Inc. and Baltimore-based Under Armour Inc., are holding a combined $3.5 billion overseas, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While it would mean a major tax savings, none of the 10 publicly held Maryland companies contacted would comment on the proposed legislation.


One expert said there’s little incentive to bring the funds back with so much business opportunity overseas. Instead, it makes sense for U.S. companies to let the overseas funds stay put and postpone a U.S. tax bill.

“It’s better to defer,” said Michael Faulkender, a finance professor at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.

Further, the Delaney proposal is out of sync with many plans to overhaul the U.S. tax code, he said. “Every proposal on the table is for the corporate tax rate to go down, not up.”

Rich Badmington, W.R. Grace & Co.’s vice president of global communications, said most of the Columbia chemical company’s revenue comes from international operations. The company plans to continue investing in those operations.

“We are able to do that without bringing cash back to the U.S. because we are continuing to invest,” Badmington said. “(Research and development) is a function that requires continuing investment and we have quite a lot of that outside the U.S.”

President Barack Obama’s latest budget plan called for the creation of a government-owned entity to finance infrastructure projects. Delaney said the president’s support for something similar to his bill was “great,” and said it shows how much momentum the bill has.

“We’re very optimistic about it, we have strong bipartisan support,” Delaney said.

The bill has 57 co-sponsors in the House and 12 in the Senate, including Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo., head of the Senate Finance Committee’s Taxation and IRS Oversight subcommittee. Hearings have not been scheduled for the bill.


Under the tax code, corporations can avoid paying taxes on foreign earnings as long as the money is being permanently reinvested overseas. When the corporations decide to bring these funds back home, a process called “repatriation,” the money then is subject to U.S. taxes.

Originally, the tax exemption was meant to help U.S. corporations compete overseas, said Mitchell Kane, a tax professor at New York University’s School of Law. Companies claimed paying taxes in two countries would put them at a disadvantage and the government responded with the exemption, he said.

The plan was to have the companies pay foreign taxes, which in many cases are lower than the U.S. tax rate, and then pay U.S. taxes when the money was repatriated. After this process, the company would receive a credit for any foreign taxes paid, Kane said.

Allowing such an exemption has created an incentive for companies to keep their money overseas and defer the U.S. corporate tax, said Jane Gravelle, an economist with the Congressional Research Service. But parking money offshore isn’t a long-term solution for companies, she added.

“They may think they can hold their breath forever and borrow money,” Gravelle said. “How long are they going to be able to do that? Shareholders eventually want dividends.”


This exemption could result in $265.7 billion in lost revenue for the federal government through 2017, according to a 2013 report by Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation.

For now, however, companies aren’t likely to repatriate without a major tax discount.

W.R. Grace has more than $1.1 billion held overseas and would have to pay $149.7 million in taxes if it was repatriated, according to SEC filings. That money will remain overseas, except in instances where repatriation would result in minimal or no U.S. taxes, the company said in its most recent SEC filing.

MICROS Systems, a Maryland-based computer hardware and software producer,
has about 61 percent of its cash and cash equivalents, $385.8 million, held internationally with no plans to repatriate, according to the company’s most recent filings with the SEC.

Maryland-based apparel company Under Armour has $95.2 million, or 27 percent, of its cash and cash equivalents held overseas with no plans to bring it back.

Spokespersons from MICROS and Under Armour could not be reached for comment.

Other companies have begun to repatriate their foreign funds, which Kane said could help cover corporate expenses. McCormick & Company, a spice, herbs and flavoring manufacturer, repatriated $70 million in 2012, according to the company’s most recent SEC filings. Even still, most of the company’s cash is held in foreign subsidiaries, the filings said.

A spokesperson for McCormick and Co. could not be reached for comment.

Some of the largest U.S. corporations make about half of their money internationally, Delaney said. The bill is just a way to get some of it back.

“It creates a way for some of that money to come back, which is good for our economy,” Delaney said. “And it creates this large-scale infrastructure fund, which is good for our country.”


Instead of government funding, the American Infrastructure Fund would raise cash through a $50 billion bond offering.
Companies would buy the bonds at a 1 percent fixed interest rate and a 50-year term, in exchange for a chance to repatriate a certain portion of overseas earnings tax-free for every dollar spent on bonds.

A bond to repatriation ratio would be determined by an auction and could result in companies paying an effective 12 percent tax rate, Delaney said. Money raised in the bond sale could then be leveraged and loaned to state and local governments for projects.

The auction process will benefit both the infrastructure fund and the corporations, which will be able to find a price that is right for them, Delaney said.

“We’ve talked to them and they’re very supportive of it,” he said.

The American Business Conference, Associated Equipment Distributors and Terex Corporation are among those supporting the bill.

Tech giants and pharmaceutical corporations have lobbied for a repatriation holiday since the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act allowed them to repatriate at a discounted rate. Because of the intellectually-based capital that these companies thrive on, it is sometimes easier for them to keep assets overseas.

For example, Apple has $124.4 billion held overseas, according to the company’s most recent SEC filing.

The 2004 bill reduced repatriation taxes to 5.25 percent if corporations promised to invest the money at home. The one-year holiday is widely regarded as a failure because it spurred an increase in repatriation, but not an increase in jobs or investments, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.

“The argument was that it would be a stimulus” to the U.S. economy, Gravelle said. “Most people who studied this found out it was being used to repurchase shares.”

Share repurchases are a common way to boost stock prices.

Corporations used the money to pay stockholders dividends and pay off debts, which doesn’t make for a good stimulus, she continued.  Instead, the holiday created a “moral hazard” and companies have parked money overseas, waiting for the next holiday, Gravelle said.

Delaney’s bill has short-term benefits but doesn’t address the larger problems with the tax code, Faulkender said. Corporations will want to move more and more operations overseas if they can find discounts on U.S. taxes, he added.

“If you signal that firms are going to realize a lower tax rate, even after repatriation, on their foreign operations than on their domestic operations, you’re going to incentivize even more offshoring,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s good for the U.S. economy.”


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

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