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August 16th, 2014

8/16/2014

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I want to spend one more day shouting to the middle-class to WAKE UP!!!!!!  STOP LOOKING AT THE TV NEWS AND THINKING THIS MILITARIZED POLICING AND SPYING IS ONLY HURTING THE WORKING CLASS AND POOR.

The small government of neo-liberals and neo-cons gutted oversight and accountability and public justice.  We want to be clear----when equal protection disappears everyone is hurt but women and people of color the most.  The middle-class is seeing its life savings and investments shredded by fraud and corruption linked to this outsourcing of the public sector.  The unemployment in the US is at around 36% and is called a permanent fixture because that 36% is the middle-management that gave oversight and accountability to corporations and government.  All of this plays hard on people of color and the working class in the form of poverty issues, but it opens as well to the fact that 80% and soon 90% of American people will fall into this category.  Republican voters must see that small government effects all people's rights as citizens-----not just the poor and/or people of color.  It will come to your family!

WE MUST FIGHT AGAINST THIS ILLEGAL ATTACK ON OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS AS CITIZENS, EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER RULE OF LAW, AND OUR BILL OF RIGHTS.

Baltimore City State's Attorney does not even have a white collar criminal unit and no funds to build one.  Rawlings-Blake and City Hall are overseeing a systemic fleecing of government coffers and have no interest in public oversight and accountability.  Baltimore City is one of a few governments not having routine audits -----it all happens because Johns Hopkins controls public policy and revenue in the city and does not want oversight and accountability.  They want only to control the symptoms of the poverty this creates.


Baltimore City Will Hire 2 New Prosecutors To Reduce Violence

July 11, 2013 7:01 PM

Mike Hellgren WJZ general assignment reporter

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — A new plan of action. The recent spike in city violence sparks local and federal lawmakers to enact a new plan of action.

The mayor, police commissioner and U.S. attorney appoint two special prosecutors to target violent offenders.

Mike Hellgren has more on the new partnership.

These two new experienced prosecutors are veterans of the system. They have not yet been selected; background checks are underway now. They will have the full resources of the federal government.




I shared with everyone that Maryland's Attorney General Doug Gansler ran with an agenda item being dismantling the prosecutor's office assign to provide oversight and justice from government malfeasance and corruption.  This office was created as a result of the Agnew years.  Well, fraud and corruption never left and the attorneys running for these state's attorney and Attorney's General offices simply ignore and defund agencies tasked with public justice.  There is so much business fraud in Maryland against citizens that people have to work hard to find an honest contractor and then watch them like a hawk-----just because these public justice agencies are dismantled.  These are the same agencies that protect people's civil rights as with police brutality and unconstitutional policing.  So, THIS AFFECTS EVERYONE FOLKS!

THINK WHICH GROUPS IN MARYLAND BACK NEO-LIBERALS LIKE ANTHONY BROWN AND DOUG GANSLER ----AND REPUBLICAN HOGAN WILL DO THE SAME-----LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS IN MARYLAND BACK THE VERY POLS DOING THIS DAMAGE.  MARYLAND HAS NO LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS THAT ARE NOT CAPTURED BY THIS PROCESS.


People need to see that the white collar crime that empties the Baltimore City coffers----and this happens all across Maryland----is directly related to the crime and violence in low-income communities.  If billions are stolen by Baltimore Development Corporation and Johns Hopkins through fraud and corruption then cuts to social services and community programs occur.  If Johns Hopkins writes policy that floods the city labor market with immigrants who are then fleeced of their wages ----or workers brought from out of state to work in Baltimore
-----high unemployment drives crime and violence.  The middle-class in Baltimore are being hit with car/home break ins/robberies because people are not able to be employed.  RAIDING CITY COFFERS WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION AND THEN BRINGING LABOR TO BALTIMORE WHO ARE THEN FLEECED OF WAGES-----all involving suspended Rule of Law and public justice.  THIS WILL AFFECT EVERYONE.

IT IS NOT ONLY THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF POLICING--IT IS THE SUSPENSION OF RULE OF LAW FOR ALL WHITE COLLAR CRIME.


This report simply shows the pattern that exists throughout Baltimore City government.  If you look at the report on SAIC from yesterday and the corruption in that Hopkins corporation the problems are the same.  If you go further and look at the structure for Wall Street financial instruments filling our financial industry with fraud-----it is all the same model.  Creating multiple layers of service and responsibility and then claim it is all too complicated to audit.  Baltimore does not have a revenue problem----the revenue is being stolen and diverted to the same people.

IInside City Hall: What a federal audit tells us about city spending Baltimore ranks at the bottom of cities audited by HUD's Inspector General. Where, exactly, did the $9.5 million in homeless funds go?

Mark Reutter December 5, 2012 at 7:11 am


Homeless men and women sit near the city’s Harry and Jeanette Weinberg homeless shelter at 620 Fallsway.

Calling for audits has become a popular pastime at City Hall.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake wants one to look at Comptroller Joan Pratt’s Municipal Telephone Exchange office, while Pratt is calling for numbers crunchers to sift through the contracts of the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology.

Councilman Carl Stokes has called for audits of all city agencies, something the mayor and majority of the City Council don’t want to do. But the mayor and Council did agree over the summer to audit selective agencies beginning in year 2014.

Given all the fuss, wouldn’t it seem that when an audit does appear, elected officials would rush to find out what it says about how the city spends money?

Such a report arrived last month. The Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released an audit of Baltimore’s use of $9.5 million for homeless programs awarded under President Obama’s 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

A Crash Nobody Heard

City Hall seems to be pretending that this audit does not exist, like the proverbial tree that fell in the woods with a crash nobody heard.

There’s been no comment about the report by top officials, not least by Mayor Rawlings-Blake, whose Office of Human Services and Homeless Services Program stand accused of ineptitude and mismanagement by HUD’s auditors.

The report says that the city did not properly monitor the homeless funds, paid sub-providers based on a preset formula rather than on actual expenditures, lost track of money in several instances, and paid city staffers according to estimates, not on the actual time they spent on grant activities.

Calling 100% of Baltimore’s homeless expenditures “unsupported” by required documentation, HUD’s Inspector General is recommending that the city either provide proof that its homeless payments were legit or return the dough – all $9,472,118 – to the federal government.

The Inspector General faulted Baltimore’s homeless program.

“Baltimore Was Delinquent”

While Rawlings-Blake and her staff haven’t publicly responded to the audit, the Homeless Services’ rebuttal to HUD was published in the report.

It’s revealing. The city admits that it violated federal regulations because it did not have the staff to ensure compliance and because it found the program’s regulations too complicated.

“The City of Baltimore was delinquent in monitoring the program’s sub-providers as required because we lacked resources to conduct an appropriate level of monitoring, both fiscally and programmatically,” Kate Briddell, director of Homeless Services, wrote.


She acknowledged a number of management infractions. Among them: “the fiscal director improperly directed the fiscal staff to draft funds . . . to reimburse itself,” the Board of Estimates approved a homeless contract “in error,” the language of another contract “was not amended in title or terms to accommodate” the federal program, and funds “that appear to be drawn” improperly from one account were in fact used without documentation for a related program.

After making these admissions, Briddell went on to deny that they had any real consequences. “[W]hile some of the paperwork was not completed or kept in a standard we would like, no waste, fraud or abuse was conducted during the course of administering this project,” she wrote.

Briddell’s statement was flatly contradicted by her own acknowledgment that the Prisoner’s Aid Association of Maryland did not properly handle $270,550 in homeless funds – HUD claims the group was double billing the government for clients they had placed in emergency housing.

Perhaps that’s why HUD’s reply to Briddell begins so bluntly: “We disagree with the city’s statements.”

At the Bottom of Cities Audited


To check whether other cities shared Baltimore’s managerial shortcomings, The Brew reviewed a dozen HUD audits of city and county governments that also received funds under the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program.

Compared to Baltimore’s 100% “unsupported” expenditures, HUD’s Inspector General found that less than 1% of the funds spent by New York City, Houston and San Francisco to be “unsupported” or “ineligible.” The exact percentages were: New York (0.6%), Houston  (0.48%) and San Francisco (0.7%).

The Los Angeles Housing Department was also audited. HUD found $29,004 of the $29.4 million awarded was not properly documented, or less than 0.001%.

Even the worst offenders – Buffalo with 6.6% unsupported documentation and Newark with 8.5% unsupported, according to HUD – look like like fiscal angels compared to Charm City.

HUD certified in its audit of Baltimore that it followed generally accepted government auditing standards.

Coming Back for More

The lack of sufficient internal controls has been a longstanding criticism of Baltimore government.

City departments, including the Mayor’s various offices handling criminal justice, CitiStat operations, information technology, health and human services, are budgeted a certain amount of funds for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

But the practice of letting departments come back for more funds during the year, through supplemental appropriations approved by the Board of Estimates, undercuts fiscal discipline, critics say.

This coupled with the lack of oversight by the City Council – the Budget and Appropriations Committee chaired by Councilman Helen Holton has yet to reconvene a hearing concerning agency spending last year – and the necessary checks and balances are absent.

Farming Out Responsibility

A larger issue brought out by the HUD audit was the lack of programmatic oversight by the city.
The Mayor’s Office of Human Services did not even hand out the homeless grants. The task was farmed out to its fiscal agent, the United Way of Maryland.

That process split up management functions, which effectively meant that nobody was minding the store and determining whether the sub-providers were actually fulfilling the needs of the homeless as well as meeting the requirements of HUD.

Until effective accountability is instilled at the top, the future audits promised for city agencies are likely to suffer the same fate as the HUD homeless audit – official silence from those in charge, leading to more public cynicism about the workings of local government.

_____________________________________________



Below you see the supposed Democratic candidate for Maryland Attorney General.  If you look at the issues you will never see or hear the words----massive corporate fraud and government corruption as any justice candidate's platform.  You see selected justice issues that are always aimed at low level criminals such as scammers targeting senior citizens.  The subprime mortgage fraud targeted seniors and the parking ticket settlement was a disgrace yet Frosh never mentioned the injustice---he instead looked at individual solutions to foreclosures.  The fact that Maryland was the source of the fraud----MERS operated out of Frosh's Montgomery County as well as Virginia's Washington beltway----Maryland was the hardest hit by subprime mortgage fraud-----and it is the state with the highest number of foreclosures happening even now.  All of this shows there is no public justice at work in this particular case.  I choose Frosh and his statement on protecting seniors as a way to show how these issues mean nothing.  Sure, there are scammers targeting seniors but that exists because there is absolutely no public justice agency in place preventing these predations.  Maryland TV programming is filled with businesses that scam people.  Our local and state agencies of Licensing and Regulation DLLR is a skeleton crew and this is what allows for contractors to act criminal at will.  Frosh never mentions this and will not do anything to change this.

If you listen to Republican candidate for Governor Hogan he will use the fraud and corruption issue but as with Frosh-----he means he will look at low-level scams like Food Stamp and Pension fraud and never mentions the systemic culture of corporate fraud and government corruption.  So, don't vote for a Republican just because neo-liberals have made the Democratic Party so corrupt.....

GET RID OF THE NEO-LIBERALS!  THEY ARE ONLY PROTECTING WEALTH AND PROFIT AND WILL NOT HOLD POWER ACCOUNTABLE.


Neo-liberals always talk about gun violence and control but they are the ones implementing the policies that kill labor and justice....creating the conditions for this increase in crime and violence.  So, if a candidate simply shouts a mantra of gun control and gun violence without shouting that the Maryland Assembly and Baltimore City Hall passes policy that creates the conditions for crime and violence----he/she will do nothing about solving these problems.
  Now, FROSH is definitely better than Jon Cardin but the point is Maryland never has a candidate for public justice that will provide public justice.

Google  '
Frosh and government corruption and corporate fraud' and you will get nothing.

THE GOVERNOR HAS THE ABILITY TO CREATE SPECIAL TASK FORCES AND PRESSURE MARYLAND AGENCIES TO ENFORCE LAW-----


neo-liberals like Brown will protect the fraud and corruption----Cindy Walsh for Governor will fight and reverse it!



PETER FROSH FOR MARYLAND ATTORNEY GENERAL



Issues Protecting Kids Online


Information technology has made our world more connected and productive than ever before. Unfortunately, the anonymity and freedom of the Internet have also created greater opportunities for crime, exploitation, and abuse. As a father of two daughters, I know firsthand the threats the Internet brings into the lives of young people today. Through that expe...

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Protecting Seniors Our seniors deserve the respect and care that they have earned throughout their lifetime. Maryland's senior population will only continue to rise in the coming years. As a result, the number of crimes against seniors will also increase. Far too often, scam artists perceive senior citizens as vulnerable and relatively wealthy due to their ability to access...

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Making Maryland Safer Protecting people - it’s what I have done in the courtroom and in the legislature. My number one priority as Attorney General will be keeping Maryland families safe. I have been a leader in keeping Maryland families safe by: Leading the fight for the Firearm Safety Act, landmark gun safety legislation that will prevent gun violence and save thousan...

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Protecting Maryland's Environment We know that the beauty of our state isn’t just something we enjoy, but it is also one of the things that make our economy strong. Responsible and sustainable utilization of our natural resources should be a guiding principle for Maryland businesses and individuals. Everywhere I go, Marylanders tell me they want clean water to drink and clean air to...

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Protecting Maryland Consumers As a young man, I was taught the importance of justice and fairness, and to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. I have carried those values with me throughout my career in public service: championing laws to protect children from ingesting harmful chemicals in baby bottles and formula; expanding the Attorney General’s power t...

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The only oversight in Maryland comes from the Federal government and as we all know Eric Holder and Obama have made it their top priority to get rid of that with the help of Congress.  You see below that all of the agencies tasked with oversight and transparency are the ones cut in the attack of small government.  THAT IS ALL THESE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS CARE ABOUT---HIDING THE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION TRAIL.

This is third world.  It is what Trans Pacific Trade Pact does----eliminates a sovereign nation's ability to limit corporate profit in any way.  I had a young black Republican in Maryland tell me WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH PROFIT?  Well, you are being sold a bill of goods if you do not understand the power of Rule of Law and Equal Protection and Bill of Rights in everyone's life.



Continued cuts to legislative branch budget hurt transparency, accountability, and capacity

.
by Matthew Rumsey
  • policy
July 9, 2013, 4:16 p.m.


This morning, the House Appropriations Committee's Legislative Branch Subcommittee marked up its FY 2014 funding bill, agreeing to a plan that would cut funding for Congress and legislative support agencies well below FY 2013 levels, and even beneath sequestration levels for most offices.

Committee leadership claimed that cuts were necessary to "lead by example" and help get the government's "fiscal house in order,"
but, in reality, the cuts will likely limit accountability, access to information, and the ability of Congress and the legislative support agencies to do their jobs efficiently and effectively
. The shrinking budgets could also make it more difficult for Congress to implement a number of important transparency initiatives.

Specifically, the plan would continue several years of cuts to House operations and the Government Accountability Office that have diminished the capacity of both bodies.

The GAO exists to help Congress fulfill one of its most important functions,
overseeing and improving the accountability and efficiency of the federal government, and pays for itself many times over through the cost savings that it identifies every year. Unfortunately, Since major budget cuts began three years ago the GAO has lost more than 14% of its staff and seen its ranks fall to the lowest staffing level since 1935. The GAO cannot continue to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and help to save taxpayers billions of dollars every year if its budget keeps shrinking.

Meanwhile, the House has cut individual office budgets by more than 17% over the past few years, reducing Representatives' ability to understand and enact complex policy, communicate openly and efficiently with constituents, perform oversight, and do the job of governing that they were elected to do. Unfortunately, Congressional staffs have been shrinking since the late 1970's. These cuts will most likely accelerate that trend and further diminish Congress' policy expertise and ability to conduct oversight.

Finally, limited budgets could make it harder for Congress to move forward with important transparency reforms, including opening Congressional Research Service reports and reports from the Executive branch to Congress to the public.

The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up their Legislative Branch funding bill on Thursday. Hopefully they will push for funding necessary to ensure that Congress and its support agencies can do their jobs effectively.


_____________________________________________

The same forces dismantling public justice for citizens in poor communities is that dismantling oversight and accountability in government and corporations.  The idea is that chaos and unaccountability allows the few in the autocracy to control everyone else----and that is what people in third world nations
live with every day.  When my friends dread having to find a contractor to do simple work because everyone is fleecing consumers---the middle-class are losing  rights as the people in poor communities enduring 'stop and frisk', home invasions, zero tolerance, and now youth curfews......loss of citizenship.

EVERYONE NEEDS TO WAKE UP TO THE CULTURE OF CRIMINALITY WE HAVE IN GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS.


Below you see the political culture of neo-liberals and neo-cons.....O'Malley is the mirror of Cuomo and both are raging Wall Street neo-liberals----Clinton's farm team.  If you have leadership in government openly committing fraud as you do today---you have no
Rule of Law being enforced anywhere.


I went to the Baltimore Comptroller's office for FOIA request on a statement made by Mayor Rawlings-Blake during a Board of Estimates meeting.  The mayor's lawyer Nilson was there and stated out loud that the FOIA would be used against the people included in a lawsuit to which the BOA employee stated.....well, we can lose that information.  This is so pervasive that a lawyer feels no problem with suggesting that information disappear.
  You can just see how this behavior is mirrored in the Baltimore City Police Department.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL CONDUCT!  PROVE IT!


Wednesday, Jul 23, 2014 09:30 AM EST  Salon


Report: Andrew Cuomo under federal investigation for allegedly thwarting ethics inquiries

The governor of New York and possible future presidential candidate may have tried to shield his donors Elias Isquith

According to a new bombshell report in the New York Times, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, widely expected to coast to reelection this fall and long rumored to have presidential ambitions, is under federal investigation for allegedly trying to thwart his own anti-corruption commission after it began looking at his political allies.......


Why Is the Cuomo Administration Automatically Deleting State Employees' Emails?

Wednesday, 13 August 2014 10:23 By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica | Report

Governor Andrew Cuomo (Photo: Diana Robinson / Flickr)New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration — which the governor pledged would be the most transparent in state history -- has quietly adopted policies that allow it to purge the emails of tens of thousands of state employees, cutting off a key avenue for understanding and investigating state government.

Last year, the state started deleting any emails more than 90 days old that users hadn't specifically saved — a much more aggressive stance than many other states. The policy shift was first reported by the Albany Times Union.

A previously unpublished memo outlining the policy raises new questions about the state's stated rationale for its deletions policy. What's more, the rules on which emails must be retained are bewilderingly complex – they fill 118 pages – leading to further concern that emails may not be saved at all.

"If you're aggressively destroying your email, it looks like you're trying to hide something," said Benjamin Wright, a Dallas lawyer who has advised companies and government agencies on records retention.

ProPublica obtained the memo through a public records request.

In the June 18, 2013, memo, Karen Geduldig, the general counsel of the state's Office of Information Technology Services, described New York's decision to automatically delete emails as a way to cut down on the state's "enormous amount of email data."

But the state implemented the policy as part of a move to Microsoft's Office 365 email system, which offers 50 gigabytes of space per email user — enough to store hundreds of thousands or even millions of emails for each state worker. The state's version of Office 365 also offers unlimited email archiving.

The Office of Information and Technology Services declined to comment on the record. An official in the office said even though the state can store large quantities of email, it can still be difficult to manage.

"Just because you have a big house doesn't mean you have to shove stuff in it," the official said.

Geduldig's memo also pointed out that some federal government agencies and corporations automatically purge employees' email. "Such a system will aid the State in improving its email management," Geduldig wrote.

But many states take a different tack.

Florida, for instance, requires state employees to keep routine administrative correspondence for at least three years, and emails dealing with policy development for at least five years. Connecticut requires employees to keep routine emails for at least two years. Washington State requires workers to keep emails dealing with public business for two years, and emails to and from top officials for four years. Those states also do not automatically delete email.

"It shouldn't be an automatic process," said Russell Wood, the records manager for the Washington State Archives. "There should be some point of review in there."

Emails that qualify as "records" are supposed to be preserved under New York's policy. But determining which emails qualify and which don't — a task left up to individual state employees — can be mind-numbingly complicated.

The state's rules include 215 different categories of records — including two separate categories dealing with office supplies.

"We don't think it's plausible at all that agency personnel are going to meticulously follow" those rules, said John Kaehny, the executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany. If the rules for preservation aren't followed, emails will be purged by default.

The length of time emails are required to be kept varies by category. Any emails related to "human rights training," for instance, must be kept for six years. Emails concerning "agency fiscal management" must be kept for three years. Emails about "the development of internal administrative policies and procedures" must be kept for a year, but emails "used to support administrative analysis, planning and development of procedures" can be deleted as soon as they're "obsolete," according to the rules.

The governor's office has its own rules detailing which emails must be saved, with 55 categories, from emails of weekly reports to emails "related to Native-American affairs." Anything that doesn't fall into one of the categories "should be deleted" once they've been opened, the governor's office advises.

There is no internal or external watchdog to make sure the rules are being followed, Kaehny said.

The state also doesn't have a standardized system for preserving emails that do have to be saved, according to the Office of Information Technology Services official. State workers can save their emails by printing them out, pasting them into Microsoft Word documents or placing them in a special folder in the email program itself.

"Everyone does it differently, and some people are still learning how to do it," the official said.

Emails related to potential litigation and freedom of information requests are not supposed to be deleted under New York State's policy. But Karl Olson, a San Francisco lawyer who has represented news outlets including the Los Angeles Times in freedom of information lawsuits, said that deleting emails after such a short period of time might mean they're gone by the time reporters need to request them.

"It may take a while for evidence of misconduct to bubble to the surface," Olson said.

Emily Grannis, a fellow with the nonprofit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said New York's automatic deletion policy "strikes me as inconsistent with the goals of [freedom of information] laws, and to have such a short timeframe is particularly troubling."

Government agencies often adopt deletion policies to help protect themselves from potential lawsuits and freedom of information requests, said Mark Diamond, the chief executive of Contoural, a records management consulting firm. Getting rid of emails after 90 days, though, risks deleting correspondence that employees might need down the road. "I don't think it's a well thought-out strategy," he said.

Cuomo's aides have also developed a reputation for using their personal email accounts to conduct state business — a move that can make it more difficult to seek the emails under the state's freedom of information law. The Cuomo administration has denied that it does so, but a ProPublica reporter and others have, in fact, received such emails from officials.

New York isn't the only state that destroys unsaved email after 90 days.

California's governor's office, for instance, has automatically deleted employees' sent and received email after 90 days for more than a decade. But the office also requires employees to save far more than in New York, including official correspondence, memos, scheduling requests and other documents.







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July 18th, 2014

7/18/2014

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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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April 02nd, 2014

4/2/2014

0 Comments

 
FOLKS, PUBLIC JUSTICE IS GUARANTEED UNDER THE US CONSTITUTION AND AMERICA HAS ONE OF THE BEST WRITTEN LAW PROTECTING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS CITIZENS.  RULE OF LAW AND EQUAL PROTECTION ARE THE CORNERSTONE OF OUR DEMOCRACY AND NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE DISMANTLING THIS BECAUSE THEY NOW SEE THE US AS CONTROLLED BY GLOBAL CORPORATE TRIBUNALS AND NOT FEDERAL LAW.

IF WE DO NOT TAKE A STAND NOW BY VOTING FOR A GOVERNOR AND MAYOR/COUNTY EXECUTIVE WHO WILL SHOUT OUT FOR OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS WE WILL BECOME A TOTALITARIAN NATION.  AS NOAM CHOMSKY SAYS----A NATION RUN BY CORPORATIONS CAN ONLY BECOME TOTALITARIAN.

Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur all expect to continue this dismantling of public justice.  Do you hear Heather, the supposedly progressive candidate shouting about Maryland's dismantling of public justice? Stop electing the same people killing democracy and Rule of Law.

I spoke yesterday about the systematic dismantling of our legal system including the decline of law school grads and hiring of lawyers in the US.  Today I want to look at how the public justice system is being made the step-child of corporate law firms designated as providing  the public 'PRO BONO' JUSTICE. 



Regarding rebuilding Rule of Law in Maryland:

As WYPR's Basu tries to convince people that the US did rise out of recession and that all the economic data was not just the FED's crony policies moving massive corporate fraud out of the country through merger and acquisition overseas and part two of the massive subprime mortgage fraud called the bundled foreclosures fraud that drove the housing market boom......NO ONE BELIEVES IT!  A recovery based on the wealthy of the world sending the money looted from their nations Treasuries over to the US in real estate purchases is not a recovery and is why these several years showed only growth in wealth at the top.  It is also why most academic and financial analysts call all of this activity crony and criminal and the Wall Street/FED connection now a cartel.  It is acting separately from the American economy and acting under no Rule of Law.  All of this is reflected down the government chain at state and local levels.  Ergo, wealth inequity.  Corporate NPR/APM feels our pain as it states 1 in 7 Americans are on Food Stamps all just waiting for Rule of Law to bring back tens of trillions of corporate fraud with government watchdogs stating each citizen in America will receive a few hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud recovery.  

SIMPLY REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND RECOVERING CORPORATE FRAUD TAKES MUCH OF THE NEED FOR FOOD STAMPS AND IMPOVERISHMENT GOES AWAY.  EASY PEASY!!!

I spoke last time about rebuilding public justice in Maryland by using committee appointments and using the governor's bully pulpit to get state agencies to DO THE JOB OF SERVING IN THE PUBLIC'S INTEREST.  Outsourcing for lawyers and creating grants for law schools to expedite law grads steeped in white collar crime and public justice will have new public justice employees in just a few years.  It is easy for the governor to do with no help from the corporate Maryland Assembly.  

Let's look at the other structures of public justice that have been deliberately 'broken' so as to eliminate the people's ability to access justice.  Now, remember, public justice is not only the poor, working and middle-class people can no longer afford legal representation for most crimes so this issue is about all citizens of Maryland seeking justice for corporate crime and government corruption.

Below you see an article from Ireland that speaks to the same thing happening in the US.  We know law school tuition is rising to create exclusivity and we know law firms are raising their fees to a point that the average person cannot afford to litigate.  THIS IS DELIBERATE.  This places most Americans into the hands of public justice and when the State and City Attorney have no white collar criminal agencies or government corruption agencies-----you go to legal aid or public non-profit legal teams like the National Lawyer's Guild or Maryland ACLU.  If you live in Maryland you know that the Maryland ACLU is silent on most civil liberties and civil rights violations and the system of funding legal aid and public justice --------pro bono volunteering of private law firms to help the public----is crony and not intended to provide EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER LAW.


THE MONEY SENT BY THE STATE TO FUND PUBLIC JUSTICE IS A JOKE.  HAVING CORPORATE LAWYERS DECIDE WHICH CASES THEY ACCEPT AS PRO-BONO AS PUBLIC JUSTICE??????   REALLY????

This is the problem and it is a joke.  So, first we rebuild the State and City Attorney's Office white collar crime and criminal justice offices so that pro-bono work by private law firms will rarely be needed.




Law fees rise despite lawyers’ protests
Tynwald buildings

Tynwald buildings

Published on the 27 June
2013
11:45


Legislation to increase various fees for litigants in the island has been approved by Tynwald despite a formal letter of objection from many of the island’s advocates.

The change will see big price hikes in the cost of, for example, taking out a small claim.

Speaking in Tynwald, Douglas East MHK Brenda Cannell said the points raised in the advocates’ letter were valid and the motion was being proposed without a full appreciation of the likely impact.

Onchan MHK Zac Hall said the advocates’ letter had been sent with the blessing of the Law Society. It was endorsed by 12 firms and ran into eight pages.

‘This will create a society where unscrupulous people will believe they can get away with it and the most vulnerable sections of society will be affected by this,’ he said.

Alex Downie MLC said three quarters of small claims were under £1,000 and the fee increase for these was £10 to £20. But Mr Hall said for small claims in the higher band the cost would rise from around £649 to £7,500.

‘That’s an outrageous increase,’ he said.


An amendment proposed by Onchan MHK Peter Karran to refer the matter back to the Social Affairs Committee was defeated 14 to 10 in Keys and seven to one in Legislative Council.

Treasury Minister Eddie Teare said the points in the advocates’ letter had been raised ‘at the 11th hour’ and added: ‘Access to justice is determined not just by court fees but also by fees charged by legal advisors and I feel they need to have a look in the mirror. I have done what I said I would do in May and I’m sticking to my guns. This fees order is still very reasonable and competitive compared with other jurisdictions.’

The increases were approved by 15 votes to nine in Keys and by seven votes to one in Legislative Council.

Law Society president Kevin O’Riordan told the Independent he felt access to justice for many was being jeopardised by cuts in legal aid and increases in court fees.

‘It’s not something lawyers are championing, except on behalf of their clients,’ he said.

‘Sadly, there has been an unfortunate lack of consultation with the legal profession on this issue as well as others of relevance to us. I understand the need to control spending, but not the apparent reluctance of the government to recognise that lawyers may have a useful contribution to make to the debate.

‘It is the client who has to pay court fees, which go to the Treasury rather than to the lawyers, so that we are not directly affected. Those who feel the impact of these increases will be the growing number of people who do not qualify for legal aid but are still of relatively modest means.

‘I also have to register disappointment at the Minister beating that tired old drum about excessive lawyers’ fees. He seems to be unaware of how much legal work is done by many advocates pro bono or at significantly discounted rates.’

____________________________________________


Now, I do not want to insinuate that these pro-bono groups do not have the intent to serve the people.  Why would we have such a huge private non-profit system of public justice unless we had no public justice in our State and City Attorney General's office?  This is the problem.  When you have individuals deciding which cases to take as pro-bono instead of an Attorney General's office pursuing all laws broken as is the duties of this office......you have lost Rule of Law and public justice.  So, in Maryland you will see no pro-bono work involving government corruption, white collar fraud, or corporate and wealth tax evasions----the major problems for the public.  Have a landlord problem?  You may get help.



The Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, Inc..,

(PBRC) is the statewide coordinator of volunteer legal services. Our mission is to promote equal access to justice in Maryland by coordinating and supporting volunteer civil legal services, providing resources and support for legal advocates for the poor, and promoting cooperation within the legal community.

About Us

PBRC is a separate non-profit organization which serves as the designated “pro bono arm” of the Maryland State Bar Association (MSBA). PBRC works closely with legal services providers and local bar association pro bono projects throughout the state to help recruit, train, recognize and support pro bono lawyers. PBRC also provides support services (click HERE) to volunteers and programs in the way of free or discounted training, a Pro Bono and Judicare Litigation Fund, mentors and technical assistance.


We have compiled a list of pro bono programs offering a wide range of opportunities for attorneys interested in providing free civil legal services to the disadvantaged. In addition to direct client representation, several programs operate advice clinics and mentoring and training opportunities for volunteer lawyers. Most programs provide malpractice insurance.

___________________________________________



So, Maryland has a network of lawyers working for private businesses doing the public's legal work because the Federal,  State, and local justice offices are no longer doing that. 
Below you see the duties of all levels of public justice.

SEE WHERE EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER LAW HAS GONE?



What Are the Duties of the United States Attorney General?
By Angela M. Wheeland


Protecting the Public


    The primary duty of the United States attorney general is to serve the best interests of the public within the United States jurisdiction. He is responsible for enforcing civil rights, preventing unfair consumer practices and improving the lives of United States citizens by proposing environmental protection laws and changes in criminal procedures.

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

Now, Maryland's lawyers where ground zero for much of the subprime mortgage fraud and are indeed quite wealthy because none of the massive fraud has been recovered.  So, when lawyers 'donate' time for public justice, especially for subprime mortgage fraud and the foreclosures caused by these crimes.....there is a conflict here don't you think?  If I wanted to take to court the fact that these cases are not being pursued do I really contact these lawyers?  Of course not, that is the job of Maryland and Baltimore City Attorney.  IT IS THE DUTY OF THE STATE TO PROVIDE EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER LAW!

Do you think these law firms get tax write-offs for 'donating' this time?  YOU BETCHA!!!!!


The problem with foreclosure law is that the Maryland Attorney General signed off on settlements that were parking tickets and then sent the money to the state coffers where the money is now sent back to the banks for Enterprise Zone corporate development all creating profits for the banks committing the frauds.  Are these lawyers being trained to address this?  ABSOLUTELY NOT!

THIS IS THE JOB OF THE US ATTORNEY, STATE ATTORNEY, AND BALTIMORE CITY ATTORNEY----ERGO----PUBLIC JUSTICE.

The parking ticket settlements made these few years came with the requirement to rebuild white collar criminal justice agencies with these funds and Doug Gansler famously said 'I'll hire a lawyer to oversee the foreclosure process'.



 "Pro bono lawyers may be the only hope for many vulnerable or disadvantaged people throughout our state, many of whom have never before faced such dire circumstances."


IF NOT FOR THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS AMERICANS WOULD HAVE NO PUBLIC JUSTICE-----ONLY ALL THIS IS ILLEGAL AS THE US CONSTITUTION GUARANTEES EQUAL PROTECTION AND RULE OF LAW.  THE PUBLIC JUSTICE SYSTEM CANNOT BE DISMANTLED.





Maryland Bar Bulletin
Publications : Bar Bulletin : March 2010     

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Maryland Attorneys Donate 1.9 Million Pro Bono Hours to Help the State's Poor


~ Give close to $3 million in financial support ~

By Janet Stidman Eveleth

Despite the recession and our harsh economic times, Maryland lawyers donated close to 2 million volunteer hours in pro bono service in 2008, helping the state's poor with their legal needs. In addition, they contributed close to $3 million in financial support to increase legal services funding for the indigent. Traditionally, Maryland volunteer lawyers strongly support legal services to the poor and, when times are tough and people need help, lawyers step up to the plate and volunteer, giving their time, expertise and money to assist the needy.

One shining example of this is the state's Foreclosure Prevention Pro Bono Project where, in the six months this program was operational in 2008, 918 lawyers volunteered to first, undergo foreclosure training then help hundreds of Maryland homeowners in danger of losing homes to foreclosure. In 2008, these volunteers gave 13,737 hours in pro bono service to the Foreclosure Project and many accepted multiple homeowner cases.

According to the recently released 2008 Current Status of Pro Bono Service Among Maryland Lawyers Report (Report), Maryland-certified lawyers rendered 1,109,686 pro bono hours in 2008, an increase of 40,020 hours from 2007's 1,069,666 hours.  It also reports that 59.7 percent of Maryland's full-time lawyers volunteered for pro bono activity in 2008.  Over 22 percent gave 50 hours or more of pro bono service.

As always, lawyers hailing from rural regions like the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland rendered the most pro bono hours in the state while those in metropolitan areas tended to give the fewest. The Eastern Shore led the way with 80 percent of its attorneys giving pro bono service, followed by Western Maryland with 78 percent. The highest percentage of lawyers rendering 50+ hours also hailed from these two regions.

Somerset County captured the lead with 50 percent of its lawyers giving 50 hours or more of pro bono service, followed by Dorchester County with 45 hours and Queen Anne's and Talbot running neck and neck with respectively, 43.5 and 43.2.  "We are encouraged by the participation in these counties,"states Sharon E. Goldsmith, Executive Director of the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland, "becauseaccess to legal services is especially challenging in them."

Holding with tradition, the 2008 Report indicates that practitioners in Family/Domestic Law, Trusts/Estates/Wills, Bankruptcy, Personal Injury, and Elder Law give the most pro bono service and solo and small practitioners donate the most hours.  77.7 percent of Maryland's solo practitioners, and 71.4 percent of its small firm practitioners engaged in pro bono service in 2008, and about 17 percent of these practitioners volunteered for the Foreclosure Project.

Goldsmith, who oversees the Foreclosure Project, is delighted with its success. "The initial response of Maryland lawyers to the foreclosure crisis was unprecedented,"she exclaims. "These numbers indicate more than one third of the increase in pro bono hours in 2008 can be attributed to the Foreclosure Project."

"The Foreclosure Project continues to train and utilize volunteers in efforts to modify loans and identify creative solutions for sustainable homeownership,"she continues, "so we expect an even higher number of hours dedicated to the Project in the 2009 reporting cycle."

The Court of Appeals of Maryland has tracked attorney volunteerism across the state since 2002, reporting its findings each year in the Current Status of Pro Bono Service Among Maryland Lawyers Report. It is now in the process of compiling the 2009 results. All Maryland attorneys are required to file annual pro bono reports to the Court of Appeals. The 2009 forms were due February 15, 2010.

Attorney pro bono service is still voluntary in the state, but revisions to Rule 6.1 of the Maryland Rules of Professional Conduct, which took effect July 1, 2002, require all Maryland attorneys to file an annual Pro Bono Service Report with the Court. The form documents the number of hours of pro bono service the attorney rendered during the previous year. This pro bono summary gives the Court of Appeals a "snapshot"of the legal services landscape in the state.

Right now that landscape is very bumpy, given the bad economy, severe legal services funding shortages, the high unemployment rate and the soaring number of foreclosures. "In our current economic climate, legal services providers are being inundated with requests for help and have fewer resources with which to respond,"reports Goldsmith. "Pro bono lawyers may be the only hope for many vulnerable or disadvantaged people throughout our state, many of whom have never before faced such dire circumstances."

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Those poor people losing their retirements, houses, savings, and forced into debt all because of massive corporate fraud and no justice to recover it-----THAT IS WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT (TPP) IS ALL ABOUT---- there is no public justice with global corporate tribunals say Ivy League schools behind the 1%!


If you audited the money Maryland sends for this pro-bono work and for legal aid you will see that nothing is done with money that either ends up in other projects or are simply pocketed by people offering little or no help.  I went to legal aid in Baltimore and found them handing my instruction forms telling me what I could do for myself because they do not go to court with you.  Now, I am a pretty sharp cookie and often go to court as my own legal representative but I know the courts are not friendly to people seeking to represent themselves.  So, having an agency that simply informs people how the system works do nothing for these people.  ANOTHER DEAD END!  WHAT PUBLIC JUSTICE YOU SAY!!!


The reason formerly middle-class people are clients of these private firms is that public justice that should have protected them is silent.  DOUG GANSLER IS THAT FACE AND HE NOW HAS A WAR CHEST FOR GOVERNOR FROM THE VERY PEOPLE FLEECING MARYLAND CITIZENS.  He should be up for aiding and abetting crime and he is running for governor!
  The lawyers colluding with the banks and corporations committing these frauds are now deciding which pro-bono cases to take.

THIS IS WHAT THIRD WORLD SOCIETY LOOKS LIKE-----AFGHANISTAN HAS NOTHING ON MARYLAND FOR FRAUD AND CORRUPTION.


Clients are up, funding is down for free legal aid

October 24, 2011 at 7:23 am
By Barbara Pash
Barbara@MarylandReporter.com

As the economy has slowed, the demand for free civil legal services has risen, but funding for those services has not increased.

Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland logo“The situation is dire,” said Sharon Goldsmith, executive director of the Pro Bono Resource Center of Maryland. “The programs are feeling stretched beyond their limits. The funding is not there.”

The center — the pro bono arm of the Maryland Bar Association serving as a clearinghouse for lawyers’ volunteer services — is a statewide nonprofit entity. Nowadays, Goldsmith said, center volunteers are seeing “a lot” of formerly middle-income people who would not have qualified for free legal help before. This is “a whole new group of people” asking for help, she said, in addition to the low-income people already being served.

Demand rising

The center Groups providing free legal assistance served nearly 140,000 clients in fiscal 2011, 9% more than 2010. But during that same period, over 44,000 people seeking legal help were turned away for a variety of reasons like being a criminal, rather than a civil, case; over the income eligibility limit;  and not enough staff people and resources.

The Pro Bono Resource Center spearheaded coordination of volunteer legal services for the foreclosure prevention project, a 2008 state-wide initiative to deal with the home mortgage crisis. In 2010, the project was expanded to include mediation but the center continued to play a role in training attorneys and coordinating public workshops around the state.

In fiscal 2010, state and federal grants to the Maryland foreclosure mediation program amounted to $700,000; in fiscal 2011, the figure was $509,000 because of funding drops.

Although the number of foreclosure filings in court subsequently slowed down., since January 2011 they have begun to increase. “I doubt we will see an increase in funding,” said Goldsmith, who credits lawyers with stepping up their pro bono activity to compensate.

3,000 attorneys volunteer


Maryland Volunteer lawyer Services logoAt Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service, the demand for legal services rose 6% from fiscal 2010 to 2011, straining the approximately 3,000 attorneys who donate their time there.

Many of the lawyers who work with MVLS are in solo practices or small firms. Their ability to volunteer is being limited by their need to earn billable hours, said Richard Chambers, deputy director. Many are also changing careers, Chambers said. In the last three years, the number of attorneys taking cases has decreased 20%, although other volunteers have picked up the slack, he said.

MVLS has boosted its private fundraising among corporations and law firms, whose support now accounts for 40% of its budget.

“We’d love to expand our phone intake. We’d love to have more outreach to the lower Eastern Shore, to St. Mary’s and Frederick counties. We can’t do it. We are at capacity” for clients, said Chambers. “We know there are probably thousands of people who qualify for our services.”

Too many clients, too few chairs

Maryland legal aid logoAt Maryland Legal Aid, the jump in clients is apparent “in our lobby any morning,” said Wilhelm Joseph, executive director.

“We used to add chairs as the room got full,” Joseph said. “Now, we don’t have enough chairs for all the people looking for help.”

The private nonprofit law firm saw nearly 70,000 clients in 2011, versus 62,000 in 2010 and 42,000 in 2006.  Legal Aid also now has a broader client demographic, which now includes “the former working class and the middle-class,” Joseph characterized. “They’ve been out of jobs for several months and are facing issues like getting unemployment and food stamps, and mortgage foreclosure.”

Since 2008, Legal Aid has seen default on debt and wage garnishment cases rise 30%. Unemployment insurance cases are up 153%. Public assistance cases are up 156%, and food stamp cases have increased 72%. In the same time period, the number of cases where Legal Aid just gave advice to clients they could not represent — often because Legal Aid was operating at capacity — has risen 28%.

Legal Aid’s annual budget is almost $25 million, with funds from federal and state grants, contracts with local jurisdictions through state agencies, and private sources. While funding has risen steadily over the years, the situation overall “is getting worse,” said Joseph.

“There is increased demand, funding is getting much more difficult, and operating costs go up,” he said.

Maryland Legal Services Corporation logoSusan Erlichman is executive director of Maryland Legal Services Corporation, whose annual budget of about $16 million is distributed to 35 programs around the state.

The corporation’s major funding sources are, by statue, interest on lawyer trust accounts and court filing fee surcharges. It also receives a small amount from the state abandoned property fund.

Though the corporation’s major funding sources are set by statute, its funds have decreased with the economy. From 2009 to 2011, trust account interest revenue fell from $7 million to $2 million — about 70%, Erlichman said.

In 2010, the General Assembly increased the court fee surcharge at MLSC’s request. The new income filled the interest funding hole.

“Without the increased surcharge, the whole legal services delivery system in the state would be in danger of collapse,” said Erlichman.

Nonetheless, the increased surcharge is scheduled to sunset in 2013, and she and others in the legal services community are doing what they can to ensure it continues. “It would leave us in a devastating situation,” said Erlichman.

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Now, I have spoken about Barbara Mikulski and her role on the Senate Appropriations Committee in funding or not the budgets of justice agencies and as I have said the budget at the Federal level has never been smaller at a time of extreme corporate fraud against the US Treasury and American people.  She manages to get plenty of corporate welfare to the rich in Maryland but cannot get that funding for public justice even when democrats had a super-majority in 2009.

Below you see the same in Maryland.  As billions of dollars in Maryland are lost to fraud we just cannot seem to fund the agencies of public justice to recover that fraud.


SHEILA PUGH IS THE FACE OF THIS CRONYISM AND YET SHE IS NEVER CHALLENGED IN BALTIMORE.  SEE WHY MIKE MILLER LET'S HER PLAY THESE REINDEER GAMES!!!!

This is where all law that protects corporations from public justice happen as well.


Appointed by Senate President:
Thomas M. Middleton, Chair (410) 841-3616, (301) 858-3616
John C. Astle, Vice-Chair (410) 841-3578, (301) 858-3578

David R. Brinkley
Brian J. Feldman
Barry Glassman
Delores G. Kelley
Allan H. Kittleman
Katherine A. Klausmeier
James N. Mathias, Jr.
Catherine E. Pugh
Victor R. Ramirez

SENATE STANDING COMMITTEES FINANCE COMMITTEE

ORIGIN & FUNCTIONS The Finance Committee started in December 1831. Originally, it bore responsibility for reviewing all bills concerned with fiscal matters. In 1975, the review of budgetary and tax matters was assigned to a separate committee - the Budget and Taxation Committee.
Miller Senate Office Building, 11 Bladen St., Annapolis, Maryland, December 2003. Photo by Diane F. Evartt.


Legislation relating to banks and other financial institutions; commercial law, including consumer protection; credit regulation and consumer financing; economic and community development; and health and welfare matters is considered by the Committee. Bills concerned with horse racing and lotteries; insurance; labor and employment; State personnel issues; social programs; transportation; unemployment insurance; utility regulation; and workers' compensation also are reviewed by the Committee. The Committee has eleven members (Senate Rules 18; Code State Government Article, secs. 2-1103 through 2-1105).




Below you see why McFadden being challenged was a big deal for Mike Miller in keeping public justice out of the loop in Maryland Assembly.  He and Jones-Rodwell are on this committee because they are dedicated to keeping public justice away.  I'm not sure McFadden's challenger will be much better sadly as he is as crony.

It is the combination of Washington suburbs pols and the Baltimore City pols where most of the fraud and wealth from fraud go that give the state this completely third world crony system.


A governor can shout that these committees are not working in the public interest in funding and writing laws.  A government that protects wealth and profit are not working in the public interest and defunding public justice violates the US Constitution.
____________________________________________

Below you see Heather Mizeur on the Appropriations Committee where all of the policy that sends money to corporate welfare start.  This is why she supports public private partnerships and Wall Street credit bond leverage deals----she works for corporate welfare.  She was placed on this committee because she will tow the line.  At the same time this is where defunding of public justice occurs and is replaced by this idea of private pro-bono as public justice.  Note that Mary Washington------Johns Hopkins pol where all of state funding ends-----is on the Appropriations Committee too!

Now, the citizens of Maryland will have a hard time shaking all of the neo-liberal bugs from the rug at once, but the governor is the one that should be shouting that these committees and agencies are not working in the public interest and in fact much of these funding bills could be challenged in courts as not in the public interest.  This is how a first world democracy works.

When I asked Mary Washington to define fraud in the Maryland Assembly after the economic crash in 2008 caused by massive corporate fraud of which her employer, Johns Hopkins was a major recipient----she said-----OH, I DON'T THINK THEY WOULD WANT THAT!  OH, REALLY????? WHO ARE 'THEY' MARY?


THESE NEO-LIBERALS ARE NOT WARM AND FUZZY-----RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!

Appointed by House Speaker:
Norman H. Conway, Chair (410) 841-3407, (301) 858-3407
James E. Proctor, Jr., Vice-Chair (410) 841-3083, (301) 858-3083 Steven J. Arentz
Gail H. Bates
Wendell R. Beitzel
John L. Bohanan, Jr.
Steven J. DeBoy, Sr.
Adelaide C. Eckardt
Tawanna P. Gaines
Melony G. Griffith
Ana Sol Gutierrez
Guy J. Guzzone
Keith E. Haynes
Mary-Dulany James
Adrienne A. Jones
Tony McConkey
Heather R. Mizeur
Barbara A. Robinson
Theodore J. Sophocleus
Nancy R. Stocksdale
Kathy Szeliga
Mary L. Washington
John F. Wood, Jr.
Craig J. Zucker



__________________________________________________


SENATE STANDING COMMITTEES BUDGET & TAXATION COMMITTEE
Origin & Functions

Subcommittees

Miller Senate Office Building entrance, 11 Bladen St., Annapolis, Maryland, January 2014. Photo by Diane F. Evartt.


Appointed by Senate President:
Edward J. Kasemeyer, Chair (410) 841-3653, (301) 858-3653
Nathaniel J. McFadden, Vice-Chair (410) 841-3165, (301) 858-3165

Richard F. Colburn
Ulysses Currie
James E. DeGrange, Sr.
George C. Edwards
Joseph M. Getty
Verna L. Jones-Rodwell
Nancy J. King
Richard S. Madaleno, Jr.
Roger Manno
Douglas J. J. Peters
James N. Robey
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March 31st, 2014

3/31/2014

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DO YOU HEAR ANY OF MARYLAND CANDIDATES FOR STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL AND CITY ATTORNEY SHOUTING ABOUT ALL OF THE ISSUES AROUND DISMANTLING PUBLIC JUSTICE?  DO YOU HEAR THE MARYLAND CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR SHOUTING ABOUT ANY OF THESE ISSUES?

THAT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL PART OF A CRONY AND NEO-LIBERAL POLITICAL MACHINE

Trans Pacific Trade Pact TPP gives a global corporate tribunal the rights to write law and the enforcement of law will be international and corporate as well if neo-liberals are left to their ways.  This hits poor and people of color hardest but it will bring all Americans down to third world standards very quickly.  Remember, doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs in third world countries are just as poor as everyone else.



As I stated my last blog, it is reinstating Rule of Law and rebuilding oversight and accountability that will address all state and local structural budget deficits created by losing much wealth to fraud and corruption.  Having a governor keen to do this starts with the appointments to committees and with using the bully-pulpit to get public agencies to do their jobs.  The next step is bringing in the employees to do this job.  This means a legal team that looks to public justice and not corporate justice and protecting profit and wealth. 

I have searched under all rocks in Maryland to find a lawyer to support political and social justice.  If there are any they are buried deep in the mud no doubt because of the hostile environment for people looking for a little public justice.  So it appears the answer to rebuilding Maryland's public justice and oversight and accountability comes with the one outsourcing my administration will do -----albeit reluctantly.  Bringing law students and legal teams from other states willing to work for public justice to do the job.  One thing we know, law school grads are high among college grads today in unemployment because the intent to dismantle all of public justice leads to no lawyers available to public interest.  Only international law and corporate law need apply say neo-liberals and neo-cons.

ALL OF MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS HENCE THIS COMPLETE CAPTURE OF GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC JUSTICE.

Corporate NPR loves to let us know where we are in the move to third world autocracy and indeed gave us the stat that there are less than I think it was 35,000 lawyers graduating across the country today.  It made the point that Ivy League schools will provide the legal grads since Ivy League schools only focus on International and corporate law.  This should have people out in the street as they are saying------citizens of the US will have no legal recourse-----exactly what Trans Pacific Trade Pact TPP says.  The Ivy League schools said over a decade ago in anticipation to writing TPP that there is no American politics or law, only international and corporate law.  So, when you have Obama from Harvard Law, Anthony Brown from Harvard Law, and Doug Gansler from Yale Law all not able to see massive corporate fraud against the American people and government coffers, this is why.  So, why would citizens vote for these guys?  Do you hear your pundit/medi outlet or politicians shouting this? 

SEE WHY PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE DYNAMICS OF WHO THEY ARE VOTING?


Doug Gansler and Anthony Brown are so Wall Street and global empire as to be blinded to any motivation other than maximizing profit and US corporate power.  That is all they see.  Running for governor these two get most of the campaign funding because of this, they get all the media coverage, and they have endorsement from all of the labor and justice organizations in Maryland.

WAIT!  LABOR UNIONS AND BLACK MINISTERS AND UNIVERSITIES BACKING BROWN OR GANSLER?

Why would labor and justice back two pols dedicated to pushing labor and justice into ever deeper poverty?  That's the question we need to answer here in Maryland.  Much of it has to do with the fact Maryland has no public justice and these organizations are being forced to support candidates in the hope of getting a few progressive bones rather than having control of these decisions. 


WORKING FOR PROGRESSIVE BONES WHEN RUNNING LABOR AND JUSTICE WINS THE HONOR OF MAKING THE DECISIONS.


Gansler and Brown are perfect images of this neo-liberal vision of justice in America after TPP-----SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL AND I SEE NO FRAUD.

Let's look nationally, statewide, and locally to see justice dismantled and know we can reverse this EASY PEASY!


Below you see the mechanism for killing the public justice department----high tuition.  Think to yourself the costs of running a law school:

THERE ARE NO COSTS IN LAW SCHOOL.  MOST WORK IS DONE FROM DOCUMENTS AND IN DEVELOPING DISCOURSE IN COURTROOMS

I'm sure I will be hit with accusations of bias but this is the truth.  The costs for tuition in law schools are only driven by the intent to make law degrees elite.  As I was told just a few weeks ago in Baltimore------all lawyers are rich.

This is a continuation of corporatization of university campuses and part of the costs have to do with the focus on international law.  The need to intern in corporate settings provides the ability of those corporations to be paid to accept these law students.  Meanwhile, public justice from government oversight, to civil rights and liberties, to consumer protections, and white collar crime represent affordable programs and are disappearing.


Keep in mind the reason there are no jobs for lawyers is that the entire white collar criminal justice system/government oversight has been dismantled and criminal/public justice is now settled by plea deals by prosecutors. 


ALL VERY, VERY, VERY BAD FOR ALL PEOPLE NEEDING PUBLIC JUSTICE.

Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press The law school at Stanford University has increased its attention to hands-on training.

By ETHAN BRONNER Published: January 30, 2013

Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation.

The New York Times

As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000.

Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all.

“We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books,” said William D. Henderson, a professor of law at Indiana University, who has written extensively on the issue. “Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken.”

Responding to the new environment, schools are planning cutbacks and accepting students they would not have admitted before.

A few schools, like the Vermont Law School, have started layoffs and buyouts of staff. Others, like at the University of Illinois, have offered across-the-board tuition discounts to keep up enrollments. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School, who runs a blog on the topic, said he expected as many as 10 schools to close over the coming decade, and half to three-quarters of all schools to reduce class size, faculty and staff.

After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of “Failing Law Schools.”

The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market. Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge-based professions, namely the growth of the Internet. Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas.

In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer’s to fill them out.

In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major cities. Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam.

“Students are doing the math,” said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York School of Law. “Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the prospect of attaining a six-figure-income job is limited.”

Mr. Tamanaha of Washington University said the rise in tuition and debt was central to the decrease in applications. In 2001, he said, the average tuition for private law school was $23,000; in 2012 it was $40,500 (for public law schools the figures were $8,500 and $23,600). He said that 90 percent of law students finance their education by taking on debt. And among private law school graduates, the average debt in 2001 was $70,000; in 2011 it was $125,000.

“We have been sharply increasing tuition during a low-inflation period,” he said of law schools collectively, noting that a year at a New York City law school can run to more than $80,000 including lodging and food. “And we have been maximizing our revenue. There is no other way to describe it. We will continue to need lawyers, but we need to bring the price down.”

Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself — a failure to keep up with the profession’s needs.

“We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply,” said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones.”

She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see as the overly academic training at elite law schools.

The drop in law school applications is unlike what is happening in almost any other graduate or professional training, except perhaps to veterinarians. Medical school applications have been rising steadily for the past decade.

Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said first-time enrollments to master of business degree programs were steady — a 0.8 percent increase among Americans in 2011 after a decade of substantial growth. But growth in first-time foreign student enrollments — 13 percent over the same period — made up the difference, something from which law schools cannot benefit, since foreigners have less interest in American legal training.

In the legal academy, there has been discussion about how to make training less costly and more relevant, with special emphasis on the last year of law school. A number of schools, including elite ones like Stanford, have increased their attention to clinics, where students get hands-on training. Northeastern Law School in Boston, which has long emphasized in-the-field training, has had one of the smallest decreases in its applicant pool this year, according to Jeremy R. Paul, the new dean.

There is also discussion about permitting students to take the bar after only two years rather than three, a decision that would have to be made by the highest officials of a state court system. In New York, the proposal is under active consideration largely because of a desire to reduce student debt.

Some, including Professor Hadfield of the University of Southern California, have called for one- or two-year training programs to create nonlawyer specialists for many tasks currently done by lawyers. Whether or not such changes occur, for now the decline is creating what many see as a cultural shift.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school,” Professor Henderson of Indiana said. “Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won’t have the bodies we need to meet the payroll.”
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Below you see a comment from a national public justice organization calling the US Department of Justice on its deliberate mechanisms for ending public justice.  All of these bank fraud settlements have been unconstitutional as the public has been taken out of the entire process under the guise that the US Department of Justice is the agency for public justice.  Only, when it is run by corporate lawyers......not so much.

Better Markets sues Justice Department over JPMorgan dealwww.reuters.com


'The Justice Department cannot act as prosecutor, jury and judge and extract $13 billion in exchange for blanket civil immunity to the largest, richest, most politically connected bank on Wall Street," he said'.
____________________
Remember when people were told to get a health care degree like nursing and you will have no trouble getting a job.  Now, nursing has one of the highest unemployment.  This has to do with a type of outsourcing------immigrants brought to the US to take health care jobs but it is also the effect of downsizing health care staff to maximize profit according to the Affordable Care Act.  The same thing is happening in the legal profession.  Besides all public sector justice being dismantled, law is now outsourced all over the world.  So, the idea of elite schools having all the lawyers extends beyond the US to Ivy League Schools all over the world.  This is what Immigration reform was about-----bringing the Best of the Best in the world to the US and leaving American citizens unemployed.  We all know Best of the Best does not mean smarter or best qualified to do the job......it means having connections and working in a system rife with fraud and corruption and being quiet about it.

Imagine these law students sitting on the sidelines when the entire government and corporate system is full of fraud and corruption.   Then think what will happen when coming school admissions fall as people feel there is not future in law for most.  That is how you get a legal system run by only graduates of Ivy League schools......the Brown/Obama's from Harvard and the Gansler's from Yale.  Both having absolutely no talent except kissing the boots of Wall Street.



Inside the Law School Scam

Friday, June 8, 2012


Two out of three 2011 law school graduates did not get real legal jobs

NALP has released preliminary employment statistics for the class of 2011 as of nine months after graduation. They are, unsurprisingly, terrible.
12% of 2011 graduates were completely unemployed in February 2012, and another three per cent had re-enrolled in further graduate study, which can be treated as the functional equivalent to post-law school unemployment.  So the first takeaway from these numbers is the nearly 15% unemployment rate for people who got law degrees from ABA-accredited schools last year.  This compares with an 8.2% overall national unemployment rate, which, to my surprise at least, is also the unemployment rate among 25 to 34 year-olds (see Table A-10).  So getting a law degree correlates with a doubling of the risk that a young adult will be unemployed nine months after receiving it.
But of course this 85.6% “employment” rate includes every kind of job law graduates obtained: legal, non-legal, full-time, part-time, long-term, and temporary.   Let’s work with this preliminary data to make an estimate regarding how many 2011 graduates of ABA law schools had real legal jobs nine months after graduation, with a real legal job defined as a full-time non-temporary paying position requiring a law degree.
We can begin by eliminating jobs for which a law degree was not required.   24% of employed law graduates fell into this category, including the large majority of the 18.1% of all graduates who reported being employed in “business” (For most law graduates getting a job in “business” is short hand for either a low-paying service sector job that the graduate could have gotten more easily before going to law school, or in a smaller number of cases a good job that the graduate was qualified for prior to getting a law degree – indeed often literally the same job the graduate left in order to get a law degree).
What about those graduates of the 2011 class who had a job for which a law degree was required? Note that only 60% of graduates whose employment status was known were working full-time in a job requiring bar admission.  (Since it appears the status of somewhere around 7% of graduates was unknown, and since those graduates surely had far worse outcomes than average, this suggests that perhaps 56% to 58% of graduates had full time jobs requiring bar admission. 12% of all jobs, legal and non-legal, obtained by graduates were part-time).  Now consider how many jobs in this category have to be tossed out if we are limiting ourselves to real legal jobs, even liberally defined.  The 5% of all “jobs” funded by law schools themselves for their own graduates must be excluded, as should the 6% of all private practice jobs which consisted of graduates reduced to the desperate expedient of attempting the start a solo practice straight out of law school.  


NALP has not yet reported what overall percentage of jobs were temporary -- defined as being for a term of less than one year – but for the class of 2010 26.9% of all jobs were defined as temporary (To be conservative I’m going to treat all judicial clerkships as full-time long-term legal jobs, even though many state court clerkships are one-year way stations on the road to legal unemployment).  We do know that 7% of all jobs obtained by 2011 graduates were reported as both part time and temporary.


Then we have the always tricky category of jobs with law firms of two to ten attorneys.  A remarkable 42.9% of all graduates who obtained jobs in private practice (49.5% of all graduates went into private practice) were listed in this category.  Many of these positions are of course real, if generally low-paying, associate jobs with established several-lawyer firms.  But some are of a much more tenuous nature, including transient law clerk positions with solo practitioners, eat what you kill arrangements, in which people are given office space in return for a percentage of whatever they manage to bill, and basically fictional “law firms” consisting of two or three graduates banding together in a last-ditch attempt to avoid formal unemployment. But let’s be optimistic and assume that 80% of new graduates who were reported as obtaining jobs with firms of two to ten lawyers were in fact getting real legal jobs, liberally defined.
Thus once we exclude jobs that don’t require law degrees, law school-funded jobs, other temporary jobs, and part time jobs, and then make a generous estimate of how many private practice positions with very small firms were real legal jobs, the numbers look like this:
60% of all graduates whose employment status was known were in full-time jobs requiring bar admission.
Minus the 4% of all graduates in law school-funded temporary jobs.
Minus the approximately 15% of all graduates in temporary (less than one year) legal positions other than law school-funded jobs.
Minus an estimated 4.25% of all graduates in fictional “firm” jobs.
Minus the 3% of all graduates working as solo practitioners. 
This leaves us with 33.75% of all 2011 ABA law school graduates in real legal jobs nine months after graduation.   This is, in my view, a conservative estimate of the scope of the disaster that has overtaken America’s law school graduates.  It counts almost all positions with law firms and with government agencies as real legal jobs, even though we know some of these “jobs” are actually one-year unpaid internships.  (See for example these). Indeed it counts whole classes of time-limited jobs that are likely to leave graduates with no legal employment at their conclusion, such as most state judicial clerkships, as long-term rather than temporary employment.  Most of all, it makes what by now must be considered the questionable assumption that law schools are reporting these numbers accurately, rather than misreporting them to their advantage. 
Yet even this generous estimate of how many 2011 graduates of ABA-accredited law schools managed to get real legal jobs leads to the conclusion that two-thirds did not.

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This is why many US law school graduates are unemployed and unlike customer service call centers, losing our law students and graduates essentially ends the public's ability to access legal recourse which is what is happening today.

What happens when people stop going to law school in America?  Ivy League schools are the only ones graduating lawyers and indeed, as my local Baltimore commenter said-----LAWYERS ARE ALWAYS RICH.



U.S. firms outsource legal services to India

By Cynthia Cotts and Liane Kufchock Published: Tuesday, August 21, 2007

NEW YORK — Bruce Masterson, the chief operating officer of Socrates Media, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. About $400,000 was the firm's estimate. He rejected that cost and hired QuisLex, a firm in Hyderabad, India, that did the work for $45,000.

"It was good quality," said Masterson, whose company, which is based in Chicago, publishes legal forms on the Internet. "We've been working together ever since."

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Forrester Research in Boston.


"The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio," said Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York.

Profusek sends low-end work to the cheapest locations and plans to open a document center in India.

"Lawyers are service providers," he said. "We are not gods."

Companies with in-house legal departments in India include DuPont, Cisco Systems, and Morgan Stanley, according to ValueNotes Database, which is based in Maharashtra, India.

The Indian legal services industry will more than quadruple to $640 million by 2010 from $146 million in 2006, ValueNotes said.

General Electric sends about $3 million a year in routine legal work to its Indian affiliate, said Janine Dascenzo, the GE managing counsel for legal operations.

"India has very talented lawyers," she said. "But it's a misconception that you can just send work there and it gets done. You need proper supervision and security."

Kirkland & Ellis, a major U.S. law firm based in Chicago, works with offshore lawyers at clients' request, said Gregg Kirchhoefer, a senior partner in the firm's outsourcing and technology transaction practice.

"I'm not an advocate of offshoring legal services," Kirchhoefer said. "But having worked in this area for so long, I understand the value of the model."

Typically, he said, clients hire a provider and Kirkland helps manage the laywers.

One incentive for corporations to send legal work overseas is that ethics rules compel law firms to disclose their profit margins. Traditionally, law firms charge clients markups of as much as three times what they pay associates and contract attorneys.

"Law firms can earn more by using labor they can mark up without disclosure," said Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law. "Clients are knowledgeable about costs, and they want to negotiate the markup on these charges."

But not every law firm has accepted the trend.

"Some firms are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt," said David Perla, co-chief executive of Pangea3, an offshore legal-services company based in New York and Mumbai. "They see any competition as bad and they'll raise any issues as to why you shouldn't go offshore."

Of the 10 highest-grossing U.S. law firms, 7 declined to comment on outsourcing. Only one, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, also based in Chicago, said it did not use the practice.

Perla added: "I don't think law firms are ashamed of offshoring. The firms that are having success with it aren't talking because they view it as a competitive advantage."

Of about 100 third-party legal services providers in India, clients give top marks to Pangea3 and Integreon Managed Solutions, which is based in New York according to "The Black Book of Outsourcing," a survey published in July by Brown-Wilson Group, which is based in Clearwater, Florida.

About 80 percent of Pangea3's clients are corporations and 20 percent are law firms, Perla said.

"Some firms are coming to us because in-house clients suggested it or pressured them," Perla said. "Others want to come to the client first and offer a solution."

Integreon, which provides legal services in India, the Philippines and Fargo, North Dakota, has long-term contracts with about 45 companies and 15 law firms, said Liam Brown, the company's chief executive.

Law firms contribute 45 percent to offshore revenue, while corporate law departments contribute 36 percent, ValueNotes said.

Integreon recruits lawyers from second-tier law schools in India and managers from the litigation practices of firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Brown said. After training in India, managers relocate to New York or Los Angeles.

In India, legal education is based on common law and conducted in English, requiring two or three years of classes. The country produces about 80,000 law school graduates a year, according to ValueNotes, compared with about 44,000 in the United States.

Offshore companies charge $10 to $25 an hour on low-end work and $25 to $90 an hour on advanced jobs. Junior Indian lawyers might earn as much as $8,160 a year, according to ValueNotes, compared with the $160,000 average salary for associates in major U.S. cities.

Janice D'souza, a 26-year-old lawyer in Pangea3's litigation and research department in Mumbai, said her pay was three times as much as she would get at an Indian law firm.

"At an Indian law firm, generally your potential is not recognized at an early stage," D'souza said. "Here it's talent-based. In the near future, I think I will be a department manager.

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Keep in mind this national budget deficit and debt is all manufactured by Wall Street and allowed to be used by Congress as an excuse to dismantle all that is public.  Tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud can easily pay the entire national debt but as you can see, we have no public justice employees.

With Eric Holder simply using settlements as justice, the state and local prosecutors cutting plea deals for everything, and class action lawsuits being disallowed by the Supreme Court....there are no avenues for public justice.  When I asked a Law School professor what the US citizens do when the highest public justice in the land, the US Justice Department becomes captured and corrupt his answer was PEOPLE WITH POWER MAKE THE LAWS.

Well, I disagree because we have a US Constitution that says WE THE PEOPLE MAKE THE LAWS!


IN ORDER TO REMAIN CITIZENS WE MUST DEMAND THAT PUBLIC JUSTICE STAY IN PLACE!

Keep in mind public justice is not always urban youth being shuffled through an unjust criminal justice system.  It means you and I have no one to recover fraud, no one to protect election laws, no one protecting community zoning issues for example.
IT HAS AN EFFECT ON EVERYONE!!!

The Impact of Federal Budget Cuts on State and Local Public Safety

An anonymous respondent wrote, “As federal funds have declined and will obviously continue to do so it reduces our means to leverage and/or diversify funding to sustain discretionary programs and programming. In the business of juvenile and adult detention, we are losing and stand to lose more alternatives to incarceration and programs that provide evidence based and/or treatment pro-gramming. These are the less costly programs to avoid more costly and lengthy stays in detention. And these are the programs that help to reduce recidivism. For example, cutting residential community corrections beds that serve as a last chance to avoid prison for probation violators has resulted in a dramatic increase in prison admission and more jail time. Bottom line, the less costly and more effective alternatives to incarceration are closed and demand for prisons and jails goes up. It is a bad deal for taxpayers but the more progressive alternatives are discretionary and jails and prisons are all that is left...Sustaining prevention and early intervention programming for juveniles as well as effective rehabilitative programming is critical to public safety. Evidence based programming changes lives away from a criminal behavior. It is not costly but without encouragement through shared funding we are losing the means to sustain it.”• An anonymous respondent from New York wrote, “The real impact over time will be the lack of funding to support new approaches in criminal justice. The reductions in crime over the past 20 years have resulted from new approaches and research that was supported with federal grant dollars. Lack of funding will seriously curtail these efforts and diminish local communities’ ability to respond to new crime problems.”• An anonymous respondent wrote, “[We have] served 50 less at risk youth since budget cuts in 2010. This puts youth at higher risk of entering the juvenile justice system dropping out of school or abusing substances. The cost of treating youth is 10 times the cost of the prevention services lost for these youth. Reductions in federal funding greatly impact our ability to serve at-risk youth in the community. These reductions, coupled with reductions in local public funding have an impact well into the future for our community. Less youth served in diversion and prevention programming will only serve to dramatically increase the cost of providing more intensive and more expensive out of home services in the future. Federal funds directed at diverting youth from formal court processing and out of home placement pay significant dividends both financially and practically in reducing crime. Federal reductions now will only increase costs to federal entities and other public organizations in the future. Short sighted budget cuts now will cost governments more, by a factor of ten, in coming years.”• An anonymous respondent from Pennsylvania wrote, “The reduced funds have also taken their toll on our partnering and community outreach. In a couple of instances, we have needed to expand or enhance community services to juveniles and adults and the local non-profits have not partnered with us - stating that they simply do not have the resources to bring new/improved services to our target population. This means many of our juveniles and needy adults remain unserved and are unable to attain self-sufficiency and are at high-risk of returning to the criminal justice system... We anticipate our recidivism rates would increase greatly and, without any services or support to offer juveniles and adults, we fear the prison cycle will spiral out of control - impacting not only the offender, but also their family.

The Vera Institute of Justice is a research and policy organization that combines expertise in research, demonstration projects, and technical assistance to help leaders in government and civil society improve the systems people rely on for justice and safety.The National Criminal Justice Association represents state, tribal, and local governments on crime prevention and crime control issues. Its members represent all facets of the criminal and juvenile justice community, from law enforcement, corrections, prosecution, defense courts, victim-witness services and education institutions to federal, state, and local elected officials. As the representative of state, tribal, and local criminal and juvenile justice practitioners, the NCJA works to promote a balanced approach to communities’ complex public safety problems.In the summer of 2012, the National Criminal Justice Association (NCJA) and the Vera Institute of Justice conducted an in-formal nationwide online survey of 714 state and local criminal justice stakeholder organizations. The questionnaire’s purpose was to gather information from a wide range of jurisdictions about the impact of budget cuts, both already enacted, and anticipated cuts that would result from sequestration. This document is a summary of self-reported responses


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Sandra Day O'Connor famously made all these observations over a decade ago as she was leaving the Supreme Court.  She shouted out against plea deals and settlements, arbitration and loss of public justice and judicial funding.  So, this has been happening throughout Reagan/Clinton/Bush.  Obama has now decided to pretend this transition is official and not recognize any US Constitutional law and Rule of Law.  That's what they teach in Harvard after all!

Sandra has a wonderful solution.  We need all communities to follow her lead.  We know Race to the Top is taking all social studies lessons out and civics is one of those subjects.  Baltimore is the worst in making sure public school students do not receive social studies at most schools. 

THIS IS A MUST-------PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES MUST DO THIS AS WE WORK TO REBUILD OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND CURRICULA!





Sandra Day O’Connor champions civics education
by Donna Krache, CNN  
July 19th, 2012 06:18 AM ET

(CNN) - The retired Supreme Court justice is all business as she walks into our meeting room.

But inside, she’s got the heart of an educator.

Of course, Sandra Day O’Connor will always be associated with her historic “first,” as the first woman justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Prior to that appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she also served as a judge and a state senator.

Since her retirement from the high court in 2006, she has found a new passion – civics education.

How did she decide to become a champion of that cause?  O’Connor says that in her last year on the bench, she was “very much aware of the major issues and debates” being brought before the high court.  There were lots of complaints about the decisions, she says, and many were directed at the judicial branch – with some blaming the justices for certain outcomes.

“As you analyzed it, it appeared to show in many cases that the concerns were misdirected:  There was a tendency to blame the courts for things that were really not a judicial matter,” she told CNN.

The solution to that misunderstanding, she believes, is civics education – a subject she notes has changed through the years.  She remembers her own schooling in El Paso, Texas, and how she learned about Texas government.  Civics knowledge was helpful to her later in life, O’Connor says, and she’s disappointed that today, many schools have stopped teaching the subject.


But she believes young people do have a desire to learn civics because they want to participate in their government, to change things and better their lives. “There is an increasing appreciation that we do need to know how our government works:  national, state and local,” says O’Connor. “And that this is part and parcel of the things that every young person wants to know because they want to have an effect.”



It’s not just about learning facts and the processes, says O’Connor.  It’s about learning how to make a difference in one’s community, state, or nation. But, she adds, “Sometimes people don’t know what government entity is equipped to deal with the problem.”

“You can make a difference if you know how to bring a particular area of concern to the attention of people who can make a change. Then you’re learning to be in a position where you can cause public bodies to take action, the public bodies that have jurisdiction over that particular area. Maybe it’s a city council, maybe it’s a town planning and zoning commission… maybe it’s a state legislature… You have to be knowledgeable.”

“To understand how to define the issue, find out what level of government can have the biggest impact on it, where should you go with this problem.  Lastly, how to best approach that body and make your case - but that takes some knowledge and experience to get that far,” she says.

O’Connor advocates an analytical approach to an understanding of government that includes defining the problem or issue, identifying the government entity that is best able to address it, then determining a course of citizen action to effect change.

Identifying the problem, she says, is the first step toward change.

“We need to learn how to define a problem then tackle it as a local issue, a state issue, a national issue.”

O’Connor was in Atlanta to address the Education Commission of the States  and promote awareness for her project,  iCivics. iCivics aims to generate civic interest and knowledge among young people and is available to all teachers, free of charge.

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor helps a student learn as she plays a game on iCivics.

Students can play games and simulations on iCivics focusing on each of the three branches of government as well as individual rights and responsibilities.  For example, students can test their powers of persuasion in “Argument Wars” as they argue cases before the Supreme Court.  They can run for president in “Win the White House” while they learn about real campaigning, including raising funds, polling voters and crafting media campaigns. In “Immigration Nation,” students can guide newcomers through the path to citizenship.

The games are engaging and offer some opportunities for critical thinking.  All the while, students are learning about the Constitution and the branches of government.  There are about 70 lesson plans available for teachers, in addition to the games.

O’Connor and her team launched iCivics in 2009. She’s extremely proud of the site, and says teachers and students are “raving” about it.

O’Connor says she has always been interested in public service and wants to see young people engaged in it, too.  But in an age of social media and lots of distractions, what advice does she offer to parents who want their kids to be interested in civic participation and current events?

“Encourage kids to be involved in projects that get them to interact at some government level,” she told CNN.

Parents should “engage them in projects they care about, get them to interact in ways that illustrate as a practical matter how things can work and how you can be effective in creating change or adopting some policy that matters. Get them involved!”

After all, says O’Connor, “That’s what civics is all about.”

0 Comments

March 24th, 2014

3/24/2014

0 Comments

 
THIS 2014 ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR AND 2016 ELECTION FOR PRESIDENT ARE CRITICAL. IF WE DO NOT HAVE A PEOPLE'S PERSON IN OFFICE RATHER THAN THE NEO-LIBERALS WE HAVE NOW, ALL THAT IS PUBLIC WILL GO TO THE RICH AND ANY WEALTH WE HAVE WILL DISAPPEAR. 

SHAKE THE BUGS FROM THE RUG AND GET RID OF CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS!


Gansler, Brown, and Mizeur are all ready to protect wealth and profit.  DO YOU HEAR THEM SHOUTING EVER???


People always doubt when I give them the 35-45% unemployment number, but think to yourself, if over 175,000 new jobs must be created every month just to stay even.....the US has had very few of these weeks in years....each month unemployment numbers grow even as people fall off unemployment payments.  This is huge.  The FED gives the US Federal agencies these rates of 6.7%.

Remember, a third world country must impoverish 90% of people in order to control the population.  You see massive poverty with politicians promising hand-outs of basic human needs to get elected.  SOUND FAMILIAR? 

CONGRESS AND OBAMA IS BLEEDING THE PUBLIC DRY OF WEALTH WHILE PRETENDING TO ADVANCE SURVIVAL POLICY.  RULE OF LAW WOULD PAY THE NATIONAL DEBT WITH RECOVERY OF CORPORATE FRAUD MAKING FLUSH ALL PUBLIC TRUSTS AND GOVERNMENT COFFERS!

I spoke last time of Yellen and the FED policy meant to super-size wealth and keep unemployment high with the intent to bankrupt the public sector entirely with leveraged government debt and continuous fleecing of billions from government coffers.  All of this advances the neo-liberal goal of third world conditions here in America.  I use the leveraging of Baltimore City schools as an example, but all public projects in Maryland are leveraged and tied to Wall Street financial deals that will have the public sector fleeced just as people were of their homes and students were of their education/careers.

STILL, ALL YOU CAN HEAR ON MARYLAND MEDIA ARE 3 NEO-LIBERALS ALL SHOUTING TO LEVERAGE MORE, GIVE MORE TAX CREDITS, AND MARYLAND'S ECONOMY IS DOING FINE!


'The ultimate kicker is how closely the U.S. stock market is mirroring the market in 1929 (right before the Great Depression)'.


Actual U.S. unemployment is 37.2%, not "6.7%", record number of households on food stamps in 2013
RT
Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:04 CST © Andrew Burton/Getty Images/AFP


A girl pays for her mother's groceries using Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) tokens, more commonly known as Food Stamps, at the GrowNYC Greenmarket in Union Square on September 18, 2013 in New York City. As the White House proclaims a recovery is occurring, and the stock market has a head of steam, millions of Americans and their dependents are being left out of the recovery, according to a set of economic indicators.

Perhaps the most worrying yet least reported aspect of the so-called US recovery involves the national labor picture. Although the official US unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, this figure obscures the reality, according to an influential Wall Street adviser.

In a leaked memo to clients, David John Marotta calculates the actual unemployment rate of Americans out of work at an astronomic 37.2 percent, as opposed to the 6.7 percent claimed by the Federal Reserve.

"The unemployment rate only describes people who are currently working or looking for work," he said.

"Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2 percent. This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work," he and colleague Megan Russell reveal in their client report, which was leaked to the Washington Examiner.

Contrary to expectations, a drop in the unemployment rate, Marotta argues, is presently a sign that the unemployed are simply dropping out of the job market.

The "officially-reported unemployment numbers decrease when enough time passes to discourage the unemployed from looking for work," said Marotta andRussel. "A decrease is not necessarily beneficial; an increase is clearly detrimental."

The authors then take aim at the so-called Misery Index, which provides something of a pulse rate of American prosperity, based on unemployment and inflation. The Wall Street adviser said the Index, which he maintains is actually over 14, as opposed to the 8 advertised by Washington, fails to address how the US economy is being hugely subsidized by various schemes, including monthly bond purchases by the Federal Reserve.

"Today, the Misery Index would be 7.54 using official numbers," the two analysts wrote. However, taking into consideration the full unemployment picture, including workers who have given up the job search, which is 10.2 percent, together with the historical method of calculating inflation, which is now 4.5 percent, 'the current misery index is closer to 14.7."

© Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
Protesters hold replicas of food stamps during a rally in support of higher pay for low-wage earners outside the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, December 5, 2013.In food stamps we trust

Marotta's findings, which put the actual US unemployment rate at over 37 percent, seem more credible when viewed alongside other indicators, including the number of Americans who now rely on government assistance to make ends meet.

It has just been reported that a record 20 percent of American households were receiving food stamps in 2013, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The USDA data shows there were 23,052,388 households on food stamps in an average month of fiscal 2013, a jump of 722,675 from fiscal year 2012, when there were 22,329,713 households on food stamps per month on average.

Last year, according to data from the Census Bureau, there were 115,013,000 households. With 23,052,388 households - or 20 percent of the total number of households - now dependent on food stamps.

In just half a decade, the number of American households on food stamps has significantly increased. In fiscal year 2009, for example, the number of households receiving the government assistance program was 15,232,115. Five years later, in 2013, that number had surged by 51.3 percent to hit 23,052,388 households.

Meanwhile, the monthly average for individuals on food stamps hit an all-time-high of 47,636,084, according to the USDA. This is an increase of 1,027,012 over the 46,609,072 people who were getting food stamps in 2012.

In 2009, the number of individuals relying on the government program stood at 33,489,975. In 2013, the number was 47,636,084, an increase of 42.2 percent.

It should come as no surprise that spending on the US government's food stamp program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has reached an all-time high.

Last year, SNAP cost $79,641,880,000 - a 164 percent increase over the past decade.

During the last five years, the SNAP program exploded by 36.8 percent, from $58,223,790,000 in 2009 to $79,641,880,000 in 2013.


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Your media pundit and politicians, labor and justice leaders will say they never saw this coming.....but they did.  I have shouted it for years and it is obvious to all.  So, all of O'Malley/Brown's credit bond leveraging and TIFs were designed to suck all public wealth and leave governments controlled by corporations.  That is what O'Malley's terms have been about and indeed, all governors across the country have been getting ready for this next collapse.  Sadly for you and me neo-liberals control most state and city executive offices like O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake in Maryland.  The City and State are so mortaged and taxes so high on the working and middle class now, that when the crash comes there will be nothing to tap.  There will be great defaults.

Now, if you elect for
Governor of Maryland  someone who will work to make the corporations and rich pay down these debts.....we the people will be OK.  If you elect a neo-liberal like Gansler, Brown, and Mizeur......everything will go the the rich.




Safety First: Strapping on Your Seat Belt Before the Coming Economic Crash

February 23rd, 2014   Investment Watch


It has been a while since the Global Economic Crisis has been the headline in the news. That doesn’t mean that it has ended. In fact, the world is moving further into a Global Economic Crisis daily, but people’s senses are dulled by the other new headlines such as Justin Beiber’s recent arrest and the Winter Olympics. Although it may seem irrelevant right now, global economic problems are brewing to levels that we have never seen before. These problems will begin to affect the U.S. soon.

Part of the problem is the federal reserves reckless money printing. This money was being used to fuel emerging markets and economies and to keep other economies afloat:

The Fed essentially is printing $85 Billion per month, out of thin air, using that digital money to buy bonds up, and trade them out with cash reserves or ultra-short term notes. Banks and hedge funds that owned the original bonds are then supposed to pump that money into the economy, creating a virtuous cycle.

Now, that they have slowed this process. Investors are taking this as a cue that the fun is over. They are beginning to pull their money from the markets:

Emerging market stocks, bonds and currencies—long coveted by investors attracted by the prospects of faster economic growth and access to young consumers—had a rocky start to 2013 as expectations of reduced U.S. monetary stimulus spurred capital outflows. Economic activity in many regions has slowed and faster inflation has eaten into savings.

This is causing massive financial instability in markets all over the globe.

In the past when nations were having trouble they could turn to financial powerhouses like

China for help. This will not be an option this time around with problems in Europe and Asia continuing to grow. XI Jinping of China has decided to stop letting the market run wild and has a plan for deflation. Deflation would be horrible for many economies because:

-Price deflation results in a real increase in the value of debt and a nominal decline in asset values. Debt can no longer be serviced.

-Price deflation would lead to massive tax revenue declines for the government due to a declining taxable base.

-Deflation would have fatal consequences for large parts of the banking system.

-Central banks also have the mandate to ensure ‘financial market stability‘

With unemployment statistics hitting all time highs in Greece and France and businesses failing at an alarming rate it is easy to see why the people there are in a state of unrest. In developing countries like Venezuela it has gotten so bad that armed military groups roam the streets. Topping this list of economic woes is Ghana who is on the cusp of economic collapse with a prominent economist from the country predicting that the country’s financial market will collapse by June if something is not done.

What messes everyone up is that these crises are not isolated incidents. When these crises strike one nation they affect everyone because all nations are connected. Although popular media would like you to believe that all nations are against each other, it is not that clear cut. All nations are connected through investments they’ve made in each other. So, when one fails all nations feel a little pain that they would like to avoid, so in most cases they band together to help whoever is struggling. This can easily be seen in the relationship between the US and China. The two nations compete in many subjects from sports, education systems, and even in their economies. However, when the US was having some major economic problems China was there to bail the US out. This came with some benefits for China, but it also made China even more invested in the well-being of the US since it has put more assets into the US’s economy. Investment Officer Alexander Friedman explains it perfectly:

The twenty-first-century economy has thus far been shaped by capital flows from China to the United States – a pattern that has suppressed global interest rates, helped to reflate the developed world’s leverage bubble, and, through its impact on the currency market, fueled China’s meteoric rise. But these were no ordinary capital flows. Rather than being driven by direct or portfolio investment, they came primarily from the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), as it amassed $3.US Treasury securities…But selling off US Treasury securities, it was argued, was not in China’s interest, given that it would drive up the renminbi’s exchange rate against the dollar, diminishing the domestic value of China’s reserves and undermining the export sector’s competitiveness

A wise man once said that, “those who don’t learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them in the present. This statement rings very true. Especially, since all of these problems are being caused because the problems from the financial crisis of 2008 were never fixed. This is true everywhere considering the economist from Ghana was touching on the same principle when predicting why Ghana’s economy would crash:

The government is facing liquidity problems and if we don’t get the appropriate remedies to address the issues at hand the situation may worsen and by June the economy may crash…I said if they don’t address the fundamental problems facing the economy, by June the country’s economy will crash because the government has not even paid University Lecturers since last year among other pressing issues which needs to be address

The ultimate kicker is how closely the U.S. stock market is mirroring the market in 1929 (right before the Great Depression).

Remember Von Mises’s wise words:

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved

The first step in preparing for any crisis is awareness, so at least the readers of this article will know to hold on and to buckle their seat belts before this economic crash.

_____________________________________

Obama, neo-liberals in Congress, and the FED have spent these years since the economic collapse in 2008 making sure those richest had all the money they could to expand overseas.  Global corporations getting bigger and global markets expanding into developing worlds.  They need to build another middle-class to consume now that they fleeced Americans of all their wealth.

All those trillions of dollars in corporate tax breaks, job stimulus money, and all of the tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud never recovered have gone to these developing world markets.  Over $600 trillion in derivatives leverage just as in 2007.  All of this done knowing this massive collapse would come and all done so that those at the top would be shielded.  This is why Yellen comforted everyone with the idea that the US global banks will not be harmed by this next crash.



So, WYPR exposed you and I to corporate NPR/APM and Basu telling us that nothing was wrong with policies, that the economy was growing, that jobs were being created AND NONE OF IT WAS TRUE AND THEY KNEW IT!


 6 Signs That 2014 Will Be The Year Of The Super Crash

6 Signs That 2014 Will Be The Year Of The Super Crash Gold Silver Worlds | January 30, 2014

As we have finally arrived in the magic year 2014, in which almost every economic and business cycle is trending down, it seems that things are perfectly lining up for a melt down. If it would have been true that the debt crisis was contained (like our political leaders try to make us believe), then there is a huge divergence with recent trends.

Are we pessimistic? No. Are we optimistic? We do our best. Above all, we aim to be unbiased and neutral. In any case, this article is not an attempt to predict prices or to time any market. That is useless and serves only marketing purposes. This article looks at six different trends which are lining up for an historic sell off in the markets. As readers observe, we stay as factual as possible.

Trend 1:


Market distortions because of QE appearing in emerging markets Up until now, the vast majority of economic and financial pundits have been praising the Western central banks for their monetary miracles. The last two weeks, however, were extremely important as we got evidence of the direct destructive effects of monetary easing. In particular, the carnage in emerging markets and their respective currencies revealed that things can get out of hand and have the ability to spiral out of control (much faster than governments can intervene).

Bloomberg says this is the worst selloff in emerging-market currencies in five years, revealing the impact from the Federal Reserve’s tapering of monetary stimulus. “Investors are losing confidence in some of the biggest developing nations, extending the currency-market rout triggered last year when the Fed first signaled it would scale back stimulus. While Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa were the engines of global growth following the financial crisis in 2008, emerging markets now pose a threat to world financial stability.”

Once the destructive power of this monetary experiment starts manifesting itself, it is likely to see spill over effects to all markets. Monetary easing could still look like innocent and constructive, but the side effects are unknown at present, as this is the first monetary experiment at this scale. The most concerning fact is that nodoby has an idea about how exactly the markets will react on each slice of tapering, and the precise timing of all effects (including the unintended consequences).

Trend 2:


There are almost no buyers left in equities Equity markets have shown exceptional yields in 2013. In a world with no yields, investors are chasing assets which yield more than nothing.

It has been thought that quantitative easing would create bubbles, but as it looks now it is resulting in bubbles in specific asset classes, as Marc Faber correctly predicted a while ago. The problem is that sentiment in the stock market has become far too optimistic. It’s not surprising, nor are investors or traders to blame, in a zero-yield world. The first chart shows the extreme optimism based on a bull/bear ratio.



 Another red flag is related to margin debt, see next chart. It shows the level of leverage in the equity market. We are well past the previous peaks.



However, there are reasons to believe that a crash is not imminent. Equities have surged but the margin debt to equities growth ratio is not as extreme as in the 2000 and 2007 peaks. This metric suggests there is some room for more upside.



We all know what happens when there is nobody left to buy. That point could be very close.


Trend 3:


 Manipulation is entering the public debate Currency markets, LIBOR, base metals, energy, … almost every single market has been manipulated. That is no news, of course, but the fact that it has become widely accepted is an important trend. Consider these headlines in the last few weeks:

  • Federal Reserve Said to Probe Banks Over Forex Fixing (Bloomberg)
  • Deutsche, Citi feel the heat of widening FX investigation (Reuters)
  • HSBC, Citi suspend traders as FX probe deepens (Reuters)
Even the precious metals manipulation debate is going mainstream. Up until now it remained in the “dark corners” of the internet, in the “blogosphere” and “gold bull” sites. Now it is the German financial regulator Bafin who says that “Metals, Currency Rigging Is Worse Than Libor” (via Bloomberg).

The key is that it has the potential to undermine trust. As readers know by now, trust is the pillar on which the current financial system is built. Once there was a tangible asset backing up the monetary and financial system; it was called gold. Not so anymore. A large scale loss in trust will have disastrous effects.

Trend 4:


Banks are once again reporting losses Several mega banks have been reporting losses in the last weeks. Is this a repeat of the 2008 scenario?

Consider Royal Bank of Scotland, who faces £8bn in full year losses. BBC writes: “RBS may face full-year losses of up to £8bn, after the bank said it needed another £3.1bn for claims relating to the financial crisis. RBS boss Ross McEwan said: “The scale of the bad decisions during that period [the financial crisis] means that some problems are still just emerging.”

Another giant, Deutsche Bank, posted EU1.2 billion losses in the fourth quarter. Via Bloomberg: “Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, said this year will be challenging after a surge in legal costs and lower debt trading revenue spurred a surprise fourth-quarter loss. The shares slumped. Depressed interest rates in Europe and declining demand for banking services are also among the headwinds the bank is confronting in 2014, Co-Chief Executive Officer Anshu Jain said on a conference call with analysts from Frankfurt today.”

Wait a minute. The central banks of this world have injected close to $10 trillions in the banking system since March 2009, in order to prevent a melt down. They have reported happily that, by doing so, they not only saved the world but also generated economic growth. But at the time of victory, mega banks are reporting losses. Something does not add up here.

Trend 5:


The alarms of financial repression are deafening It is getting really ugly with financial repression.

Reuters reported this week that Germany’s Bundesbank publicly commented that countries about to go bankrupt should draw on the private wealth of their citizens through a one-off capital levy before asking other states for help. The Bundesbank’s tough stance comes after years of euro zone crisis that saw five government bailouts. There have also bond market interventions by the European Central Bank in, for example, Italy where households’ average net wealth is higher than in Germany.

“(A capital levy) corresponds to the principle of national responsibility, according to which tax payers are responsible for their government’s obligations before solidarity of other states is required,” the Bundesbank said in its monthly report. It warned that such a levy carried significant risks and its implementation would not be easy, adding it should only be considered in absolute exceptional cases, for example to avert a looming sovereign insolvency.”

The annoying part here is that the bail-ins debate is becoming mainstream. So it was no mistake from Dijselbloem a year ago when he said bail-ins will become the template for the future.

Moreover, some HSBC customers have been prevented from withdrawing large amounts of cash because they could not provide evidence of why they wanted it. The BBC writes: “Listeners have told Radio 4′s Money Box they were stopped from withdrawing amounts ranging from £5,000 to £10,000. HSBC admitted it has not informed customers of the change in policy, which was implemented in November. The bank says it has now changed its guidance to staff.”

Over to Russia, where, according to Zerohedge, the bank Lender has introduced complete ban on cash withdrawals until end of week, news agency reports, citing unidentified person in call center.

The subject is also going mainstream in the literature. A recent IMF working paper from Reinhart and Rogoff says: “The endgame to the global financial crisis is likely to require some combination of financial repression (an opaque tax on savers), outright restructuring of public and private debt, conversions, somewhat higher inflation, and a variety of capital controls under the umbrella of macroprudential regulation. Although austerity in varying degrees is necessary, in many cases it is not sufficient to cope with the sheer magnitude of public and private debt overhangs.”

The annoying part is that the financial repression story is intensifying. It is being accepted in the literature, among politicians and now we see an increasing number of initiatives being rolled out. Not good.

Trend 6:


Complexity theory points to a collapse Jim Rickards recently suggested that the world has become so interconnected that it has the looks of an extremely complex system. His research points out that complexity theory can be useful as an analogy to determine what comes next. Prior experiments in complexity theory suggest there is a point of no return: when things become too complex and interconnected, they can only come down.

Rickards sees a similar situation in the markets today. In fact, he saw something similar in 2006 and 2007. We all know what happened afterwards.

But what has the central bank noticed? Apparently nothing, as evidenced by their systemic risk model on the next chart. It is at an all-time high.



Should we be concerned when there is nothing to be concerned?

A valid question to ask is why Jim Rickars can detect things that the central bankers cannot. Rickards himself explains it in a very simple and short way: the Fed is using the wrong economic models. Their models could be fine theoretically, but they do not reflect reality.

Protect yourself Are six red flags enough to start protecting yourself? When things get out of hand, our world will become very selfish. The most likely outcome is that everything will come down initially, comparable to what happened in 2008. Chances are high that precious metals will recover fast.

The point in all this is that asset prices will be of secondary importance. Avoiding a total catastrophe could be far more important. There really is a reason why we advocate holding physical precious metals outside the banking system or open an offshore bank account with a debit card in gold or silver at a reserve bank.

_________________________________________

THIS IS WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE ELECTED OFFICIALS IN TOP OFFICES THAT WILL LOOK OUT FOR THE PEOPLE AND NOT CORPORATIONS AND PROFITS.  BERNIE SANDERS MAY BE THAT PERSON FOR PRESIDENT AND CINDY WALSH IS THAT PERSON HERE IN MARYLAND!

'He believes that the next financial crash will result in society realizing that “modern financial institutions cannot in general be trusted with either individuals’ money or the provision of financial services to viable economies”
'


2014: Renewed Economic Growth or Financial Crash? DEVELOPMENT & SOCIETY : Business, Economics, Energy, Risk 2014•01•17 Brendan Barrett United Nations University

Your instincts may be telling you otherwise, but the global economy will be strengthening in 2014, according to two major reports released in recent weeks.

In an improvement over 2013’s global economic growth of 2.1 percent, we will see a 3 percent rise this year and a bump up to 3.3 percent in 2015, predicts the United Nations’ World Economic Situation and Prospects 2014 report.

This positive news is echoed in the slightly more optimistic Global Economic Prospects report issued by the World Bank this week that states:

“Global GDP is projected to grow from 2.4 percent in 2013 to 3.2 percent this year, stabilizing at 3.4 percent and 3.5 percent in 2015 and 2016, respectively, with much of the initial acceleration reflecting a pick-up in high-income economies.”

At the same time, the World Bank projects that developing country growth will rise above 5 percent in 2014, with China’s economy growing by 7.7 percent, India’s by 6.2 percent, Mexico’s 3.4 and Brazil’s 2.4 percent.

Global economy: the patient shows signs of recovery The UN report reads very much like the medical examination results for a sick patient who has had to take some pretty strong medicine, but while still looking rather pale and tired, is showing some signs of recovery.

Inflation (like high blood pressure) remains benign worldwide, the report states. It has decelerated in the United States and euro-zone, dropping to 2 percent in the former, and 1 percent in the latter. This is causing concerns from the International Monetary Fund that we could be entering a period of deflation (overly low blood pressure) and that could undermine the global recovery.

In the developing world, inflation rates are above “10 percent in only about a dozen countries scattered throughout different regions”, according to the UN report, and that is arguably a good thing.

High unemployment is part of the explanation for the lower inflation figures and unemployment rates remain a serious challenge, particularly for the euro zone where they reached record levels at 12.2 percent in 2013, but as high as 27 percent in Greece and Spain. Renewed GDP growth in 2014 is projected to bring reductions in these rates in both Europe and the US, with the latter dropping below 7 percent. Again, a very good development, if it happens.

There are, however, major concerns for developing and emerging economies highlighted in the UN report. First, there has been a measurable decline in private capital inflows to “emerging markets, a sub-group of developing countries”. Second, volatility in these markets has increased with equity market sell-offs and local currency depreciation.

Risk and uncertainties: It could all go very badly wrong While delivering these positive forecasts, the UN and the World Bank devote half of their respective press releases to the risks and uncertainties facing the global economy.

The Chief Economist at the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, suggests that “one does not have to be especially astute to see that there are dangers that lurk beneath the surface”. Over at the UN, Shamshad Akhtar, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, claims that “uncertainties and risk coming from possible policy missteps as well as non-economic factors … could stymie economic growth”. By non-economic factors she is referring to the situation in Syria and the Middle East.

By far the biggest concern is the potential impact of the US Federal Reserve’s exit from the quantitative easing programmes. The aim of these programmes is to “inject money into the economy in order to review nominal spending”. This involves “purchasing financial assets from the private sector” using “new central bank money, in addition to boosting the amount of central bank money held by banks…”.

The problem is one of weaning the economy off these programmes with one danger being that the medicine itself could become a form of poison for the global economy. Rather than using the term weaning, the Federal Reserve talks about “tapering”, with the goal being to reduce the monthly amount of quantitative easing in the US, to gradually wind it down and to conclude their programme at the end of 2014.

The authors of the UN report are concerned, however, that tapering could lead to “a sell-off in global equity markets, a sharp decline in capital inflows to emerging economies and a spike in the risk premium for external financing in emerging economies”.

Andrew Burns at the World Bank argues that this decline in capital inflows to developing countries could fall by as much as 50 percent for several months “provoking a crisis in some of the more vulnerable economies”, specifically Brazil, Turkey, India and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, the UN report points to other risks including “fragility in the banking system and the real economy in the euro area and the continued political wrangling in the US on the debt ceiling and the budget”.

Neither the World Bank nor the UN consider that a crisis is inevitable but they do call for strengthened international policy coordination, renewed reform of the financial system and in some instances the tightening of fiscal policies.

Déjà vu – Feels like 2007/8 all over again Reading these reports, I am reminded of the situation back in 2007/8 when we first began work on the Our World magazine. At that time, I became aware of signals among noise about the state of the global economy when the era of cheap energy is over and decided that the magazine should focus on some of the major issues facing the world. One of those issues was the peaking of global conventional oil production.

So in 2007 we began working on the magazine and successfully launched at the beginning of July 2008, just before oil prices peaked at around US$147 per barrel. At the same time, the financial system was just beginning to unravel and a serious collapse looked imminent. Fortunately for us, the global leaders managed to rally around the problem and prevent the world from slipping into depression.

Now, I have that 2007/8 feeling all over again and you probably share it. Particularly, I am struck by a number of signals from financial commentators like Peter Schiff, author of The Real Crash, and Robert Wiedemer, author of Aftershock, who are warning that a second financial crash is just around the corner for the US.

They made similar predictions before the 2008 financial crash and you could argue that they are in the “economic collapse prediction business”, since they also offer their services as investment advisors. Their basic message is that you should try to save yourself and your money in difficult economic times, and if you buy their books you will know what to invest in and what to avoid.

It would be all too easy to dismiss these pundits were it not for the fact that the UN and World Bank reports mentioned above appear so cautious about their growth projections and about the fragile nature of the economic recovery. It is almost as if they are covering their options so that they can say, if things go wrong, “we did try to warn you about the risks we are currently facing”.

The question is whether our leaders are aware of these risks or blind to them.

Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance Coincidentally, I have just finished reading the most recent book from Jeremy Leggett – The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance. Leggett describes himself as a “social entrepreneur” and is the founder of a renewable energy company, SolarCentury. He maintains a blog called the Triple Crunch Log that covers the interaction between energy, climate and the financial crisis.

Using the log, which tracks events as far back as 2006, Leggett’s book presents a blow-by-blow chronological account of how these three factors have played out in the past seven years.

In the United Kingdom he appears to be viewed by politicians, government officials and the major energy companies as the acceptable face of the environment, climate and/or peak oil community. As he puts it, he is a pinstripe suited, Financial Times carrying, climate change and peak oil concerned capitalist.

In his book, he describes numerous meetings where he interacts with the British government and Big Energy, often behind closed doors. In some instances, his accounts of those interactions read like episodes from Armando Iannucci’s dark political comedy, The Thick of It shown on the BBC.

Here is one example. A group of concerned business leaders representing the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (that Leggett helped set up) meet with the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Together they agree on a proposal for the government to work with the Taskforce to develop an oil shock emergency response plan. Subsequently, the business leaders issue a press release to announce the collaboration, only to find limited media coverage. They then discover that the civil servants in the Ministry had been informing the press that no such agreement was ever made. It would be a hilarious episode of The Thick of It, were it not actually true (check it out in the book).

What Leggett describes in his dealings with our leaders in government and the energy sector is a tendency towards “risk blindness” around climate, energy and the financial concerns. He suggests that this tendency will push us towards a financial collapse in the next few years. On the energy front, he sticks to his earlier prediction of an energy crash by 2015.

Leggett points out that many financial commentators believe a second financial crash is imminent. “The weight of debt that we have allowed to accumulate around the world will prove just too heavy for the financial system,” he writes in his book. “As things stand, a seemingly small event holds the potential to trigger the mass failure of banks.”

One such event could be the private equity decline mentioned in the above reports. We have to acknowledge the important role the UN and the World Bank are playing in outlining the risks so clearly and can only hope that the leaders of the world are not blind to them. Leggett, however, suggests that the problems are more profound than even the UN and World Bank officials are willing to admit.

He believes that the next financial crash will result in society realizing that “modern financial institutions cannot in general be trusted with either individuals’ money or the provision of financial services to viable economies”
. He further argues that “light touch regulation” of the financial system no longer works. To get us through the next crisis, we are going to need, he explains, a critical mass of “presidents and prime ministers keen to sit constructively in a multilateral emergency room”.

But Leggett is an optimist. With crisis comes opportunity and Leggett would like to see that the road forward takes us to a renaissance based on people power, community interests and the explosive growth of clean energy. In this context, The Energy of Nations is essential reading for those concerned with the interaction of the pressing global issues of today.

If the caution expressed in the UN and World Bank reports is correct then we find ourselves in a time of great risks and uncertainty. If the financial pundits are right then an economic catastrophe lies just ahead. If risk aware business leaders like Jeremy Leggett are making reliable observations then we have “arrived irredeemably in a time of consequences”.




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March 03rd, 2014

3/3/2014

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CORPORATE FRAUD RECOVERY AND TPP ARE THE TWO TOP ISSUES IN THIS ELECTION RACE. IF YOUR POL IS NOT MAKING THAT FRONT AND CENTER....THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT-----LOOK BELOW AT BERNIE SANDERS SHOUTING FRAUD NEEDS TO BE RECOVERED!!!!


Regarding the continued error in the phrase 'wealth inequity':

Again Basu tries to inform listeners of regional economic prosperity while failing to speak of the economic balance that will come when massive corporate fraud of tens of trillions of dollars comes back to government coffers and individual's pockets.  Until that rebalancing occurs, we cannot know one region's economic health over another.  Now, it so happens that the areas listed by Basu are indeed the areas front and center in these massive frauds along with the national corporate headquarters around Washington DC.  

WE ARE TELLING PEOPLE REPORTING THAT THERE IS GREAT WEALTH INEQUITY THAT YOU DO NOT CLAIM A BANK ROBBER RICHER THAN THE BANK FROM WHICH HE STOLE THE MONEY.

If you listen to pundits or politically align media like neo-liberal MSNBC you will hear this mantra....WE HAVE TO REVERSE WEALTH INEQUITY and not once do they say IT'S RULE OF LAW THAT WILL DO IT! They are pretending we are back in the 1960s and simply need progressive policies as if the massive public wealth fraud never happened.  Robert Reich is a neo-liberal economist who was part of the Clinton Administration as Labor Secretary when all the policy creating this third world status of our country to gain hold.  Nafta and breaking Glass Steagall assured this massive wealth inequity and unaccountable global corporate rule would occur.  Neo-liberals like Clinton, Reich, and Obama work to see that wealth consolidation indeed occurs in any way possible...ergo, suspension of Rule of Law.

IF A POLITICIAN OR PUNDIT IS SHOUTING THERE IS WEALTH INEQUITY WITHOUT SHOUTING FOR JUSTICE FROM MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD-----WHICH WILL ITSELF REVERSE THIS WEALTH INEQUITY----THEY ARE WORKING FOR THOSE COMMITTING THE FRAUD.

We know of course that New York City is ground zero for the frauds and therefor little of the wealth they claim is actually theirs......it is our home equity, retirement, pensions, health care, and public assets.  WE OWN MUCH OF NYC WEALTH.  San Francisco has legitimate wealth with the TECH industry although they are evading taxes.  This area is ground zero for subprime mortgage, defense, and for-profit education industry frauds.  So, when all of that wealth is taken from San Francisco's economy....they will be ranked differently in wealth inequity.  Washington is of course ground zero for all of the Federal contract fraud in the trillions of dollars and with it are the headquarters of all of the global corporations fat with fraud.  When those fraudulent gains come back to the citizens and government coffers, that area will be ranked differently.  So, you can see that Basu's willingness to spout stats that have no basis in reality makes US media on par with the Romanian media in free press.  FREE PRESS HOLDS POWER ACCOUNTABLE....IT DOES NOT PROPAGATE PROPAGANDA.  If the people at the top think the American people are going to let the stealing of tens of trillions of dollars go------they are indeed out of touch!





Should the federal government being doing more to investigate fraud in the financial industry?  Bloomberg Poll

Yes - 93% (4385 votes)

No - 7% (322 votes)

Total Votes: 4,707 Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding





The assets of the big banks mostly belong to the public as bringing back fraud and recovering damages would make these global banks into the regional banks we need them to be.  There is not a bank executive known to play the most obvious roll in these massive frauds that is not back working in finance earning tons of money again.  THIS IS SUSPENSION OF RULE OF LAW AND WHEN A GOVERNMENT SUSPENDS RULE OF LAW, IT SUSPENDS STATUTES OF LIMITATION.

Below you see only an example of the costs of damages to the American people.....there are tens of trillions in actual corporate frauds yet to be recovered.  Imagine allowing rogue financial firms like Moody's and Standards and Poor (S & P)......tell government pension managers that pensions have to be cut because 1/2 their value was lost in financial fraud that has yet to be recovered.

 THIS IS THIRD WORLD AND SHOWS WE HAVE A KLEPTOCRACY IN PLACE AND WE NEED TO SHAKE THESE BUGS FROM THE RUG.  NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE THE BUGS MOVING ALL WEALTH TO THESE GLOBAL CORPORATE COFFERS.


Now, we know as well that all that time writing the Financial Reform Bill and yet not implemented and enforced has the economy ready to collapse yet again.  We know as well that neo-liberals took over from the neo-cons the oversight of corporate writing of TPP.  TPP negates all of what the Financial Reform Bill does.  Do you really think your pol did not know that ending US sovereignty with all the US Constitutional protections of WE THE PEOPLE AND BILL OF RIGHTS would of course make the Financial Reform Bill null and void?  OF COURSE THEY KNEW AS THEY SPENT THE TIME SUSPENDING FRAUDULENT ACCOUNTABILITY.  We will act as though we are doing something as we ignore that no justice in massive fraud occurs.





Five years ago today, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.


Instantly and inevitably, the house of cards otherwise known as Wall Street collapsed.

But after getting bailed out by the American taxpayers, Wall Street is doing just fine.

The people of Main Street? Not so much.

Here are some numbers to think about this Sunday morning.

    Amount the crash cost the U.S. economy: $22 trillion

    How much everyone would get if that $22 trillion were divided equally among the U.S. populace: $69,478.88

    Assets of the four biggest banks in America — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wachovia/Wells Fargo — when they were “too big to fail” in 2008: $6.4 trillion

    Assets of those four banks today: $7.8 trillion

    Of the 63 former Lehman Brothers employees identified by a bankruptcy examiner as being aware of an accounting scheme Lehman used to mask its true finances, number who are employed in senior financial services positions today: 47

    Number of the 25 banks responsible for the bulk of risky subprime loans leading up to the crash that are back in the mortgage business: 25

    Chances that an American voter thinks that regulating financial products and services is “important” or “very important”: 9 in 10

____________________________________________



BERNIE SANDERS IS THE ONLY NATIONAL POL THAT SHOUTS OUT RECOVERING CORPORATE FRAUD IS A MUST.  WHETHER DEFENSE INDUSTRY FRAUD TO PROTECT VETERANS....WALL STREET FRAUD RECOVERY....OR THE FEDERAL RESERVE....GROUND ZERO FOR GREAT FRAUD-----

IF A POL IS NOT SHOUTING THIS---THEY ARE AIDING AND ABETTING.

See why saying there is wealth inequity in America before justice reverses much of this fraud is propaganda?




    
The Fed Audit

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. "As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

Among the investigation's key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report. "No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president," Sanders said.

The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed lacks a comprehensive system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse.  In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans.

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed's board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.  Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed's emergency lending programs.

In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds.  One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said.

The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.  The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street."

To read the GAO report, click here.


_________________________________


Below is a good analysis of the problem in Europe which of course is the same as that in the US.  This analysis has a second value because it shows that the same model of throwing Europe into sovereign debt crisis is now being used by US neo-liberals for the next Bain's Capital gutting of wealth assets from the public sector.  Remember, it was Iceland that from the start simply allowed the banks to default from the fraud and their economy is well on its way to being healthy while the US and Europe are still held hostage by TROIKA and WALL STREET/FED.  American academics have the same analyses showing direct cause and effect....proof of conspiracy to defraud.  We have all the data needed to show all of this CDS policy was a planned conspiracy that can be easily tried in court and won.

WE NEED LABOR UNION LAWYERS TO START ACTING AS US JUSTICE DEPARTMENT IN TAKING ALL OF THIS TO COURT AND DECRYING THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENTS SUSPENSION OF RULE OF LAW!


Anyone as nerdish as I am will like this research and analysis of how the same financial scheme brought to us with the subprime mortgage loan fraud with trillions of dollars of fraudulent loans insured with Credit Default Swaps by mainly one large insurance agency.....AIG all the time knowing these loans were toxic and all would collapse.  So, the Dodd Frank financial reform was to address this and of course nothing has been done and these same people are now thinking the subprime mortgage loan fraud was such a success as tens of trillions of dollars in fraud was left with the looters now think......let's do it again.

This time rather than the goal of capturing all of the nation's real estate holdings and consolidating land ownership to a few at the top.....this fraud has as its goal blowing up the public sector by super-sizing municipal debt and imploding the economy to make a crash that would create huge sovereign debt default.  You can do that only if you again use the Credit Default Swap insurance so that as everyone else loses all their wealth, you have this insurance that protects the very people imploding the economy.  None of this is legal as banks deliberately hid sovereign debt and municipal debt with financial instruments so more debt could be taken on.....ergo, the implosion we have in Europe in 2008.

This is important because the same thing is now happening in the US these few years of Obama's term as US state governors and mayors.....like O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake are doing to you and me what was done in the PIIGS nations in Europe.  Loading up municipal debt while insuring it all with Credit Default Swaps.  You know this is a plan as municipal bonds and public debt have never been allowed to use these CDS and now they are.  So, as governors and mayors load our government coffers with tons of debt tied to Wall Street financial instruments, the investment firms are protecting themselves from loss when the economic crash comes while the public sector.......MECU and the State of Maryland/City of Baltimore will default on their terms and lose most of the investment.

AGAIN, THIS IS ALL PUBLIC MALFEASANCE....IT IS ILLEGAL AND ALL TERMS CAN BE VACATED BECAUSE INVESTMENT FIRMS KNOW THIS IS ALL FRAUDULENT.

This article below is great and it is very long so I could not copy it here.......go to the webpage to see it in its entirety to see how these 1% are working to steal all that is public!


Analysis of European Sovereign Credit Default Swap during theSovereign Debt Crisis in Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain.
 byBerkay OrenA dissertation submitted in partial of theMSc Finance and InvestmentAtThe University of BrightonFaculty of Management and Information SciencesBrighton Business School(May 2013)


  Abstract

This thesis has represented the determinants of sovereign CDS spreads during currentsovereign debt crisis in periphery countries namely Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The period of analysis is between 4 March 2008 and 3 May 2012. After the demise of LehmanBrothers, the sovereign CDS market has attached significant attention and the credit marketshave been issue to an unprecedented re-pricing of credit risk. Moreover, Lehman Brothersdevastated investor confidence and decrease in the availability of credit. Massive assistanceof the banks was heightened public sector deficit. Thus it has led to high level sovereign debt.This means that the risk of default of sovereign became real in periphery countries. Thisthesis has been classified three phases. Firstly an analysis of credit default swaps and their use in the financial World. Secondly development of the European periphery economy on amacro level in Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain. Finally the statistical approach of ordinaryleast square is to be analysed. Main purpose of this thesis will identify sovereign creditdefault swaps associated with the current sovereign debt crisis.


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We want to remember that the reason Clinton and Bush targeted the low-income mortgage market for the subprime mortgage frauds was first, they wanted to consolidate real estate ownership and second they used the Federal assistance for these loans over and over again....this is where a large part of the fraud fleecing government coffers came.  They did it on purpose because they knew they would have someone in office that would suspend Rule of Law....if not Obama, Hillary, or Romney.  Sending low-income people to higher education and placing them in homes.....under programs filled with fraud was only cover for this massive fraud.  WE KNOW IF THE INTENT IS TO DO GOOD, YOU DO NOT ALLOW MASSIVE FRAUD OF THE PROGRAM TO OCCUR.  The same is happening today in the GREEN industry as a good program is riddled with fraud allowing 1/2 of the green spending to be defrauded.  

IF NO OVERSIGHT IS GIVEN AND NO JUSTICE IN PLACE....THE INTENT WAS INDEED TO DEFRAUD.

Below is a look at just the subprime mortgage fraud....we know that financial fraud was widespread and across corporate industries as well.  So, the few hundreds of billions of dollars collected in 'settlements' does nothing for tens of trillions of dollars in fraud.  THIS IS WHY ALL PUBLIC PROGRAMS, SERVICES, AND ASSETS ARE BEING HANDED TO PRIVATE ENTITIES UNDER THE GUISE OF STARVED GOVERNMENT BUDGETS.



Wall Street Bank Fraud Massive

Details
    Written by Dan McGookey

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The New York Times reported this week that Wall Street is now predicting that its Banks will be anteing up over $50 Billion in settlement payouts with the government and others as a result of their massive fraud perpetrated through the securitized lending system during the first eight years of this Century. Even this astounding number doesn't begin to tell the story of how widespread that fraud was, or the toll it took on this Country's economy, however.

Consider the fact that tens of trillions of dollars of wealth changed hands from Main Street to Wall Street in less than a decade through the vehicle known as securitized lending. That is the process whereby a mortgage loan is magically transformed into a stock certificate or security simply by bundling it with thousands of others and then selling "mortgage-backed certificates" (or stock) in that pool of loans. The problem was that the Wall Street Bankers were able to sell the stock in the loan pool at 10-20 times the face value of the loans. And the reason we say that tens of trillions of dollars shifted from Main Street to Wall Street by virtue of the corrupt securitized lending system is because it was city and state governments, retirement funds, insurance companies and the like who were the suckers buying up the absurdly over-priced stock. In other words, the money was stolen out of the wallets and purses of all Americans.

Even through the estimated amount of the penalties is tantamount to a slap on the wrist for the Banks, it at least serves to highlight the significance of Wall Street's corruption. And the news reports of that corruption will no doubt keep coming with increasing frequency as the depth of the fraud continues to be exposed. All we can hope for is that as that happens, our own Government's complicity in the scandal will be exposed as well.

Reverse Bank Robbery

The Wall Street Banksters obviously never read or simply didn't take heed of the following preaching of Socrates:

"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud."

Avoiding the Foreclosure Trap

As a homeowner struggling for mortgage relief with your bank, don't forget to be mindful of the following time-honored sage advice; "Forewarned is forearmed". Realize that the fraud involved with your mortgage didn't end after your loan's origination. Because foreclosure is a profitable business, there is a very good chance the fraud is continuing, along with your victimization.


Kate Eyster and Lauren McGookey contributed to this article.

Copyright 2014 Daniel L. McGookey


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Let's look at one other corporate fraud...this one tax fraud that is wide-spread and easy to find.  The IRS could  pay down much of the national debt itself by recovering corporate tax fraud yet we are told by neo-liberals those bad republicans are defunding the IRS.....indeed, it is being starved.  Yet, the financial settlements in the hundreds of billions requires that a percentage of all settlements go to rebuilding and strengthening fraud detection and prosecution......IT IS SELF-FUNDING.  So, all we need are state pols that shout loudly that none of this is happening----IT IS THE VOICE OF PUBLIC OFFICIALS THAT WOULD FORCE THESE CROOKS TO DO THE RIGHT THING.  IT IS THEIR SILENCE THAT IS DUPLICITOUS.  

IN MARYLAND, IT WAS ALL OF THE CURRENT POLS IN OFFICE THAT ALLOWED THIS MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD TO HAPPEN AND INDEED MUCH WEALTH INEQUITY IN MARYLAND IS A RESULT OF THIS FRAUD AND LACK OF JUSTICE!

Joe Biden's Delaware and Harry REid's Nevada are the two states with the most international business geared to off-shoring and hiding wealth.

THIS BILL WAS PASSED IN 2006 JUST AS THE DISMANTLING OF OVERSIGHT AND DEFUNDING WAS AT ITS HEIGHT.  REMEMEBER, THE RECOVERY OF FRAUD BY THE IRS SUPPORTS ALL THE OVERSIGHT AND ACTION NEEDED. THE IRS HAS PLENTY OF MONEY TO DO THE JOB WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL FUNDING.

Trillions in fraud here....tens of trillions there.....makes for tons of lost revenue to the economy from corporate fraud at Federal, state, and local level.  When people like Basu or Robert Reich speak of wealth inequity as needing legislation and not Rule of Law...THEY ARE WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT.





Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud and Transfer Price Schemes Are Two Forms of IRS Tax Fraud That Can Be the Basis Of An IRS Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit



 by Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Lawyer and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawyer Jason Coomer

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud are two forms of corporate tax fraud that are committed by large multinational corporations.  The IRS is offering rewards and protections for IRS whistleblowers and IRS informants that work through Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyers, Multinational Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyers, and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyers to identify tax fraud schemes that cost the United States millions of dollars.

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, Multinational Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, Jason S. Coomer, works with corporate tax fraud whistleblowers, illegal offshore account tax fraud whistleblowers, transfer payment tax fraud whistleblowers, and other corporate tax fraud whistleblowers to expose corporate tax fraud and other forms of tax fraud.  If you are the original source with special knowledge of tax fraud and are interested in learning more about a tax whistleblower lawsuit, please feel free to contact Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer and Transfer Payment Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer Jason Coomer via e-mail message.

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Lawsuit, Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, IRS Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, Transfer Price Scheme Tax Fraud Lawsuit, IRS Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, & IRS Whistleblower Payment for Detection of Fraud Lawsuit Information

In 2006, the Tax Relief and Health Care Act that was signed into law included a whistleblower reward amendment that created mandatory reward language to the IRS to create a mandatory economic incentive to encourage tax fraud whistleblowers to step forward to help the government detect large scale fraudulent schemes.  By offering large potential rewards for reporting multimillion tax fraud schemes, the IRS has received hundreds of tax fraud tips from tax fraud informants regarding taxpayer fraud and massive violations of the tax code costing taxpayers Billions of dollars.  Many of the tips already received include fraud schemes of hundreds of millions and tens of millions of dollars.  It is estimated that this programs will result in hundreds of billions of dollars or even Trillions of dollars in tax fraud being detected.

The economic incentives in the Tax Whistleblower Reward Programs are designed to encourage insider tax fraud informants and tax fraud whistleblowers with knowledge and evidence of large tax violations and tax fraud schemes to step forward and report the massive tax fraud.  The IRS is hoping that there will be several tax fraud whistleblowers and tax fraud informants that will help them detect and collect on an estimated $3 Trillion in illegal offshore accounts as well as several other tax-avoidance schemes that have been perpetrated by billionaires and millionaires as well as large corporations.

The IRS Whistleblower Reward Amendment requires the Internal Revenue Service to pay rewards to whistleblowers who exposed large scale tax fraud and taxpayer fraud including major tax underpayments, violations of the Internal Revenue Code, or other fraudulent schemes to unlawfully not pay taxes.  The IRS Whistleblower Reward Program is aimed at large multimillion dollar fraud schemes and tax violations in that the total amount of fraud or underpayment of taxes in dispute would have to exceed $2 millions.

The IRS will pay the tax fraud whistleblower or tax fraud informant if the information presented substantially contributes to the collection of money by the IRS.  As such, the tax fraud whistleblower should have inside knowledge of and documentation of the tax fraud to be successful.     

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Lawyer, Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawyer, IRS Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawyer, Transfer Price Scheme Tax Fraud Lawyer, and IRS Whistleblower Reward Lawyer

Transfer pricing schemes involve the overpricing of imports and/or the underpricing of exports between related companies in different countries for the purpose of transferring profits or revenue out of the United States in order to evade taxes. The profits and revenue end up in a country that has a lower corporate tax rate than the US.  These fraudulent pricing schemes can be used both for stock manipulation and corporate tax fraud.  For more information on Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Actions, please go to the following: Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, IRS Tax Fraud Whistleblower Award Lawsuit, and Corporate Tax Fraud Lawsuit Information web page.

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Lawsuit, Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, IRS Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, Transfer Price Scheme Tax Fraud Lawsuit, IRS Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, & IRS Whistleblower Payment for Detection of Fraud Lawsuit Information

To qualify for a whistleblower award under section 7623 (b), the information must:

    Relate to a tax noncompliance matter in which tax, penalties, interest, additions to tax and additional amounts in dispute exceed $2,000,000.00

    Relate to a taxpayer, and in the case of an individual taxpayer, one whose gross income exceeds $200,000.00 for at least one of the tax years in question

If the information meets the above criteria and substantially contributes to a decision by the IRS to take administrative or judicial action that results in the collection of tax, penalties, interest, additions in tax and additional amounts, then the IRS will pay an award of at least fifteen percent, but not more than thirty percent of what the IRS collects.  26 U.S.C. at 7623(b)(1).

The IRS has authority to reduce the award to ten percent if the claim is based upon specific allegations disclosed in certain public information (e.g. government audits) and determines that the whistleblower's information was not the original source of information.  Further, the IRS also has the authority to reduce the award or not give an award if the whistleblower planned and initiated the actions that led to the tax underpayment.

The IRS Whistleblower Reward Program, Whistleblower Recovery Program, and IRS Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Rewards

The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, signed into law on December 20, 2006 amended the Internal Revenue Code to provide rewards for turning in tax cheats including corporations and people that are committing tax fraud.  According to the IRS, the primary purpose behind the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 "was to provide incentives for people with knowledge of significant tax non-compliance to provide that information to the IRS."  The new program generally requires the IRS to pay rewards to whistleblowers if the information presented substantially contributes to the collection of money by the IRS.  The law created the IRS Whistleblower Office to receive, evaluate, and determine whether to pay the whistleblower an award.

The IRS has funded a robust IRS Whistleblower Program.  The new program focuses on large tax fraud and tax underpayment claims.  To qualify for the rewards, $2 million of taxes, penalties, and interest must be involved.  Individual taxpayers must have $200,000.00 of taxable income in any year.   The reward is from fifteen to thirty percent of the tax collected, depending upon the extent to which the whistleblower contributed to the additional collection.  If the IRS determines that the whistleblower's information was not the original source of information, but still contributes to the additional collection, the IRS can still award up to ten percent of the amount collected.

It is interesting to note that Congress passed the original tax whistleblower rewards law in March 1867 for people who reported tax crimes.  The law was enacted prior to a federal income tax, but was not effective because payment of the tax whistleblower reward was voluntary and no rewards were paid out until the rewards became mandatory through the 2006 amendment.

SEC Violation Whistleblower Lawyer, Financial Fraud Whistleblower Bounty Lawyer, SEC Whistleblower Incentive Program Lawyer, SEC Violation Lawyer, and Securities Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer

As a Financial Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer and Securities Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, Jason S. Coomer commonly works with other powerful financial fraud and securities fraud whistleblower lawyers to handle large Securities Fraud Whistleblower Lawsuits, Securities Fraud Bounty Actions, Commodity Fraud Bounty Claims, and other Financial Fraud Lawsuits.  He also works on Medicare Fraud Whistleblower Lawsuits , Defense Contractor Fraud Whistleblower Lawsuits, Stimulus Fraud Whistleblower Lawsuits, Government Contractor Fraud Whistleblower Lawsuits, and other government fraud whistleblower lawsuits.

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Lawsuit, Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, IRS Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit, Transfer Price Scheme Tax Fraud Lawsuit, & IRS Whistleblower Reward Lawsuit Information
by Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Paid Informant Lawyer and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud Paid Informant Lawyer Jason Coomer

Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, Multinational Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, and Transfer Payment Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer, Jason S. Coomer, works with corporate tax fraud whistleblowers, IRS tax fraud whistleblowers, and other tax fraud whistleblowers that are stepping up and blowing the whistle on IRS tax fraud, corporate tax fraud, IRS code violations, and other forms of tax fraud.  If you are the original source with special knowledge of tax fraud and are interested in learning more about a tax whistleblower lawsuit, please feel free to contact Illegal Offshore Account Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer and Transfer Payment Corporate Tax Fraud Whistleblower Lawyer Jason Coomer via e-mail message.



_________________________________


Much of the wealth Basu speaks is tied to the Washington and San Franscisco, NYC is from this massive corporate fraud.  it is not real wealth.  Keep in mind that the defense industry budget is one of the largest.  NSA can see all, yet they could not build accountability into these computer systems.  Luckily, WIKILEAKS had a download of defense industry contracting and is now being reviewed by investigative journalists and international justice organizations.


JUST RECOVERING CORPORATE FRAUD WOULD PAY DOWN GOVERNMENT DEBT AT ALL LEVELS AND MAKE ALL PUBLIC TRUSTS AND PENSIONS FLUSH WITH MONEY! DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING THIS?


 Grand Theft Pentagon, Massive Waste and Fraud

Politics / US Military Nov 21, 2013 - 12:39 PM GMT

By: Stephen_Lendman

Politics

Longstanding Pentagon operations reflect a black hole of unaccountability. Reuters published a two-part report. In July, it discussed the Defense Department’s “payroll quagmire.”

It’s bureaucracy is stifling. It’s “unyielding,” said Reuters. Active duty and retired military personnel are routinely cheated. Pay errors are widespread.

Correcting “or just explaining them can test even the most persistent soldiers.” Weeks or months pass without resolution.

Some personnel are cheated on pay. Others are penalized for overpayments. Their earnings are “drastically cut” unfairly. Precise figures are impossible to calculate.

At issue is “the Defense Department’s jury-rigged network of mostly incompatible computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other,” said Reuters.

“The Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) still uses a half-century-old computer language that is largely unable to communicate with the equally outmoded personnel management systems employed by each of the military services.”

A December 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed unaccountable accounting. No way exists to assure correct amounts are paid. Errors can’t be tracked.

________________________________

As neo-liberals now pretend that wealth inequity exists and not simply a failure of justice to occur in moving money back to government coffers and individual's pockets, WE THE PEOPLE MUST SHOUT LOUDLY THE TRUTH---THAT JUSTICE WILL BE SERVED!!!



Bill Black: How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics



Posted on June 6, 2013 by Yves Smith

This article is part of an ongoing AlterNet series, "The Age of Fraud."

What do you get when you throw together economic fraudsters, plutocrats and opportunistic criminals? A financial crisis, that’s what. If you look back over the massive frauds that have swept the country in recent decades, from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to the 2007-'08 financial crash, this deadly combination always appears.

A dangerous cycle begins when prominent economists pander to plutocrats and bought politicians, who reward them with top posts, where they promote the perverse economic policies that cause fraud epidemics. Crises develop, and millions of people are ripped off. Those who fight for truth are ignored or ruined. The criminals get wealthier, bolder and more politically powerful, and go on to hatch even more devastating cons.

The three most recent financial crises in U.S. history were driven by a special type of fraud called “control fraud” — cases where the officers who control what look like legitimate entities use them as “weapons” to commit crimes. Each time, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, played a catastrophic role. First, his policies created the fraud-friendly (criminogenic) environment that produces epidemics of control fraud, then he failed to identify those epidemics and incipient crises, and finally, he failed to counter them.

At the heart of Greenspan’s failure lies an ethical void in the brand of economics that has dominated American universities and policy circles for the last several decades, a brand known as “free market fundamentalism” or the “neoclassical school.” (I call it “theoclassical economics” for its quasi-religious belief system.) Mainstream economists who follow this school assert a deeply flawed and controversial concept known as the “efficient market hypothesis,” which holds that financial markets magically regulate themselves (they automatically “self-correct”) and are thus immune to fraud. When an economist starts believing in that kind of fallacy, he is bound to become blind to reality. Let’s take a look at what blinded Greenspan:

    Greenspan knew that markets were “efficient” because the efficient market hypothesis is the foundational pillar underlying modern finance theory.
    Markets can’t be efficient if there is control fraud, so there must not be any.
    Wait, there are control frauds! Tens of thousands of them.
    Then control fraud must not really be harmful, or markets would not be efficient.
    Control fraud, therefore, must not be immoral. As crime boss Emilio Barzini put it in The Godfather, “It’s just business.”

As delusional and immoral as this “logic” chain is, many elite economists believe it. This warped perspective has spawned policies so perverse that they turn the world of finance into the optimal environment for criminals. The upshot is that most of our elite financial leaders and professionals have thrown integrity out the window, and we end up with recurrent, intensifying financial crises, de facto immunity for our most elite criminals, and the rise of crony capitalism. Let’s do a little time travel to see exactly how this plays out.

How to Stoke a Savings and Loan Fiasco

The Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California was at the center of the famous crisis that rocked the financial world in the 1980s. A once prudently run company morphed into a casino when S&L associations became deregulated and started doing risky business with depositors’ money. Businessman, GOP darling, and anti-pornography crusader Charles Keating, ironically nicknamed “Mr. Clean,” took over Lincoln in 1984 and got the casino rolling. (It was a special kind of casino where the games were rigged – and not in favor of newlywed brides who were the subject of sexual extortion in Casablanca.) In a classic case of control fraud, Keating devoted himself to turning the company into a weapon of mass financial destruction and a source of wealth for his family. Keating’s “weapon of choice” for his frauds was accounting.

Keating went on a spree buying land, taking equity positions in real estate projects, and purchasing junk bonds. In 1985, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), where I was the staffer leading the regulation efforts, grew alarmed at the new activities of savings associations like Lincoln. So we made a rule: S&Ls could not put more than 10 percent of company assets in "direct investments” – an activity that led to very large losses.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of an economic consulting firm at the time, urged us to permit Lincoln Savings to go full steam ahead. His memo supporting Lincoln’s application to make hundreds of millions of dollars in direct investments praised the company’s management (Keating) and claimed that Lincoln Savings “posed no foreseeable risk of loss.”

The FHLBB rejected Lincoln’s request to exceed the rule’s threshold because direct investments were a superb vehicle for accounting fraud – they made it easy to hide losses and to create fictional income. Nevertheless, Lincoln continued to violate the rule and created fictional (backdated) board consents with hundreds of forged signatures to make it appear that the investments were “grandfathered” under the rule. The hundreds of millions of dollars in unlawful direct investments were used for fraudulent purposes by Lincoln Savings’ controlling officers and caused enormous losses – many of them to elderly citizens who were conned into buying the junk bonds of Lincoln Savings’ holding company. The massive losses on Lincoln’s illegal direct investments were a major reason those bonds were worthless.

Hoping to use his political clout to continue the fraud, Keating hired Greenspan to lobby the senators who eventually became the known as the “Keating Five.” I remember well when these senators intervened at Keating’s request to try to prevent me and my colleagues from taking an enforcement action (or conservatorship) that would have saved over a billion dollars. (I took the notes of that meeting, which led to the Senate ethics investigation of the Keating Five.) The cronyism was so thick in Washington that William Weld, then a top Department of Justice official and later the Republican governor of Massachusetts, actually tried to gin up a criminal investigation of the regulators rather than Keating at the request of Lincoln’s lawyers who had just left the DOJ! Eventually, Keating and many of the senior managers of Lincoln Savings were convicted of felonies and Lincoln Savings became the most expensive failure of the S&L debacle.

When you look back on this expensive fiasco, you see that the work of respected professional economists was frequently called upon to support the fraudulent activities. One of the ways Greenspan tried to advance Keating’s effort to have the courts strike down the direct investment rule was to use a study conducted by a less famous economist, George Benston, who showed that S&Ls that violated the direct investment rule earned higher profits than those who didn’t. So he recommended the rule be dropped. Small problem: In less than two years all 33 of the companies Benston studied had failed. Most were accounting control frauds in which executives cooked the books to show fictional profits.

Keating had a talent for obtaining endorsements from prominent economists. He got Daniel Fischel to conduct a study that purported to show that Lincoln Savings was the best S&L in America. Fischel invoked the efficient market hypothesis to opine that our examiners provided no useful information because the markets had already perfectly taken into account any information to which we had access.  In reality, of course, this was nonsense, and Lincoln Savings was the worst S&L in the country.

Economists who pander to plutocrats have a great advantage over scholars in other fields: There is no reputational penalty among your peers for being dead wrong. Benston got an endowed chair at Emory, Fischel was made dean of the Univerisity of Chicago’s Law School, and Greenspan was made Chairman of the Fed. Those who got control fraud right and fought the elite scams and their powerful political patrons – people like Edwin Gray, head of the FHLBB, and Joe Selby, head of supervision in Texas – saw their careers ended.

Consider what that perverse pattern indicates about how badly ethics have fallen in the both economics and government.

How to Create a Regulatory Black Hole

Alan Greenspan was Ayn Rand’s protégé, but he moved radically to the wacky side of Rand on the issue of financial fraud. And that, friends, is pretty wacky. Greenspan pushed the idea that preventing fraud was not a legitimate basis for regulation, and said so in a famous encounter with Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Brooksley Born. “I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,” Born recalls Greenspan telling her. Greenspan actually believed the market would sort itself out if any fraud occurred. Born knew she had a powerful foe on any regulation.

She was right. Greenspan, with the rabid support of the Rubin wing of the Clinton administration, along with Republican Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm, crushed Born’s effort to regulate credit default swaps (CDS). The plutocrats and their political allies deliberately created what’s known as a regulatory black hole – a place where elite criminals could commit their crimes under the cover of perpetual night.

Greenspan chose another Fed economist, Patrick Parkinson, to testify on behalf of the bill to create the regulatory black hole for these dangerous financial instruments. Parkinson offered the old line that efficient markets easily excluded fraud — otherwise, they wouldn’t be efficient markets! (Parkinson would later tell the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2011 that the “whole concept” of a related financial instrument known as an “ABS CDO” had been an “abomination”). Greenspan’s successor richly rewarded Parkinson for being stunningly wrong in his belief: Ben Bernanke appointed Parkinson — who had no experience as a supervisor or examiner — as the Fed’s head of supervision.

Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the SEC, told me of Greenspan’s infamous question to his group of senior officials who met at the Fed in late 1998 or early 1999 (roughly the same time as Greenspan’s conversation with Born): "Why does it matter if the banks are allowed to fudge their numbers a little bit?" What’s wrong with a “little bit” of fraud?

Conservatives often support the “broken windows” theory of criminal activity, which asserts that you stop serious blue-collar crime by cracking down on minor offenses. Yet mysteriously, they never apply the concept to white-collar financial crimes by elites. The little-bit-of fraud-is-ok concept got made into law in the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which created the regulatory black hole for credit default swaps. That black hole was compounded by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under the leadership of Wendy Gramm, spouse of Senator Phil Gramm.

Enron’s fraudulent leaders were delighted to exploit that black hole, because they were engaged in a massive control fraud. They appointed Wendy Gramm to their board of directors and proceeded to use derivatives to manipulate prices and aid their cartel in driving electricity prices far higher on the Pacific Coast. In a bizarre irony, the massive increase in prices led to the defeat of California Governor Gray Davis (the leading opponent of the cartel) and his replacement by Governor Schwarzenegger – a man who was part of the group that met secretly with Enron’s leadership to try to defeat Davis’s efforts to get the federal regulators to kill the cartel.

How damaging was Greenspan’s dogmatic and delusional defense of elite financial frauds in the case of Enron? If you look closely, you can see that Enron brought together all the critical elements of a financial crisis: big-time accounting control fraud, derivatives, cartels, and the use of off-balance sheet scams to inflate income and hide real losses and leverage. On top of all that, many of the world’s largest banks aided Enron and its extremely creative CFO Andrew Fastow to create frauds. The Fed could have responded by adopting and enforcing mandates to end the criminal practices that were driving the epidemic, but it didn’t. Instead, Greenspan and other Fed economists championed Enron’s leadership and cited the company as proof that regulation was unnecessary to prevent control fraud. They were so extreme that they attacked their own senior supervisors for daring to criticize the banks’ role in aiding and abetting Enron’s activities.

Later, when risky derivatives activities and control frauds at large financial institutions were pushing us toward the catastrophic crash of 2007-2008, the Fed took no meaningful action based on the lessons learned from Enron. Greenspan and the senior leadership of the Fed had learned absolutely nothing, which shows how disabling economic dogma is to regulators – making them worse than simply useless. They become harmful, again attacking their supervisors for criticizing the banks’ fraudulent “liar’s” loans. When Bernanke placed Patrick Parkinson (an economist blind to fraud by elite banksters) in a supervisory role at the Fed, he sealed the fate of millions of Americans whose financial well-being would be sucked right into that regulatory black hole – and removed the ability of the accursed supervisors to criticize the largest banks.

How to Protect Predatory Lenders

Finally, we come to the mortgage meltdown of 2008, when the entire housing industry went into freefall. Central to this crisis is the story of the liar's loan — mortgage-industry slang for a mortgage that a lender gives without checking tax returns, employment history, or anything else that might reliably indicate that the borrower can make the payments.

The Fed, and only the Fed, had authority under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to ban liar’s loans by all lenders. At a series of hearings mandated by Congress, dozens of witnesses representing home mortgage borrowers and state and local criminal investigators urged the Fed to do this. The testimony included a study that found a 90 percent incidence of fraud in liar’s loans.

What did Greenspan and Bernanke do? Exactly nothing. They consistently refused to act.

Greenspan went so far as to refuse pleas to send Fed examiners into bank holding company affiliates to find the facts and collect data on liar’s loans. Simultaneously, the Fed’s economists dismissed the warnings from progressives about fraudulent liar’s loans as “merely anecdotal.” In 2005, the desperate Fed regulators, blocked by Greenspan from sending in the examiners to get data from the banks, resorted to simply sending a letter to the largest banks requesting information. The Fed supervisor who received the banks’ response to that letter termed the data “very alarming.”

If you suspect that the banks would typically respond to such requests by understating their problem assets significantly, then you have the right instincts to be a financial regulator.

By 2003, loan quality was so bad that it could only be explained as the inevitable product of endemic accounting control fraud and it continued to collapse through 2007 until the bubble burst. By 2006, over two million fraudulent liar’s loans were originated annually. We know that it was overwhelmingly lenders and their agents who put the lies in liar’s loans. Liar’s loans make the perfect “natural experiment” because no governmental entity ever required a lender or a purchaser (and that includes Fannie and Freddie) to make or purchase a liar’s loan. Banks made, and purchased, trillions of dollars in liar’s loans because doing so lined the pockets of their controlling officers.

The Fed’s leadership, dominated by economists devoted to false theory, was enraged when the Fed’s supervisors presented evidence of endemic control fraud by the most elite lenders, particularly in the making of fraudulent liar’s loans. How dare the supervisors criticize our most reputable bank CEOs by showing that they were making hundreds of thousands through scams?

Bernanke finally acted under Congressional pressure on July 14, 2008 to ban liar’s loans. He cited evidence of endemic fraud available since early 2006 – evidence which would have been available way back in 2001 had Greenspan moved to require examiners to study liar’s loans. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, Bernanke delayed the ban for 18 months — one would not wish to inconvenience a fraudulent lender, after all.

We did not have to suffer this crisis. Economists who were not blinded by neoclassical theory, like George Akerlof (who won the Nobel Prize in 2001) and Christina Romer (adviser to President Obama from 2008-2010), had warned their colleagues about accounting control fraud and liar’s loans, as did criminologists and regulators like me. But Greenspan (and Timothy Geithner) refused to see the obvious truth.

Alan Greenspan had no excuse for assuming fraud out of existence, and his exceptionally immoral position on fraud and regulation proved catastrophic to America and much of the world. We cannot afford the price, measured in many trillions of dollars, over 10 million jobs, and endless suffering, of unethical economists.
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February 05th, 2014

2/5/2014

0 Comments

 
I wanted to take today to look at what many people will consider dry and boring.....yet it is what makes you and I citizens.....civics 101 is knowing your Constitution and what your elected officials are legally bound to do in your name.  What I have shown is that none of this is happening at the Federal, state, or local level. 

YOU CANNOT BE A CITIZEN IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE CONSTITUTION AND DO NOT HOLD YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS RESPONSIBLE.  STOP BEING A COUCH POTATO.....WAKE UP.....AND GET ENGAGED!!!!!


Regarding Maryland acting as if TPP is already in force:

Now that everyone knows that neo-liberals have as a goal to end national sovereignty and create a system of City States in the US with global corporations running these fiefdoms......Johns Hopkins obviously being the Medici of our region, its good to know all of this can and will be reversed as all of it was built with a suspension of Rule of Law, Equal Protection under Law, and elections of politicians knowing acting against the public's interest....politicians are public servants required to work in the public's interest our they are committing public malfeasance.


Today I would like to give a brief civics lesson on State Constitutions to show how the state of Maryland politics today has absolutely no legal and Constitutional standing as public officials are openly allowing massive fraud and corruption permeate the business and government systems in the state and where all public policy is now written by corporate interests in the guise of quasi-governmental organizations I am sure are not legal in and of themselves.  The public has been locked out of public debate, writing public policy, and even have private corporate-run non-profits running our communities.  NONE OF THIS IS LEGAL------IT IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL -------AND THE PUBLIC ASSETS AND WEALTH BEING LOST THROUGH THE NEGLECT OF RULE OF LAW CAN AND WILL COME BACK.

What this means is that Johns Hopkins does not get to run the Baltimore region.  It does not get to write law, to have politicians hand all that is public into the hands of Johns Hopkins, or to openly allow massive fraud and corruption keep we the people and our government coffers empty.  ALL OF THIS IS ILLEGAL AND CAN BE REVERSED.

So, Johns Hopkins as VEOLA ENVIRONMENT taking control of water and waste......Johns Hopkins as Port of Baltimore taking all control of Inner Harbor commerce.....Johns Hopkins as public health taking control of all health care administration with no public transparency or input ................ Johns Hopkins taking control of all public education and schools with corporatization policy that sends profit directly to Hopkins-related education businesses........and Johns Hopkins as solicitor and installer in chief of national private corporate non-profits taking control of all aspects of public policy with directors in place to support all policy moved by the Hopkins-run Baltimore Development Corporation.


FOLKS......IT LOOKS AS IF IT IS DAUNTING TO TAKE CONTROL BACK FROM WHAT WE CAN A GREAT BLOOD-SUCKING SQUID WITH TENTACLES AROUND EVERYTHING.....BUT IT IS EASY PEASY.

All we have to do is break up the political machines in Baltimore and Maryland that keep these henchmen and women in office allowing all of this consolidation and control to be taken.  ALL OF MARYLAND'S POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS...THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS AND WE SIMPLY NEED TO RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL ELECTIONS.....STOP ALLOWING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY MACHINE IN THE STATE TO CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES WHILE IT IS CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS!

THESE POLITICIANS ARE SWORN TO SERVE THE PUBLIC!


You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that handing all that is public to consolidated private hands at great loss to the public and a suspension of Rule of Law with no public justice is NOT IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST AND ALL CONTRACTS SIGNED UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES ARE NULL AND VOID.  So, handing the Port of Baltimore and all its tens of billions in profit once coming to the state and now going to HighStar's leading shareholder Johns Hopkins.....NOT LEGAL.
NO CONTRACT DOING THAT IS LEGAL.

Handing all of the region's water and waste to VEOLA ENVIRONMENT with HighStar's leading shareholder Johns Hopkins ........NOT LEGAL.  NO CONTRACT DOING THAT IS LEGAL.

Billions of dollars lost to the State of Maryland and City of Baltimore from massive and systemic fraud and corruption for years and years.....NO STATUTES OF LIMITATION BECAUSE GOVERNMENT SUSPENDED RULE OF LAW AND EQUAL PROTECTION.


Now, if you look at Maryland's


WIKILEAKS
Malfeasance in office, or official misconduct, is the commission of an unlawful act, done in an official capacity, which affects the performance of official duties. Malfeasance in office is often grounds for a for cause removal of an elected official by statute or recall election.

The Maryland Constitution's Requirement to take the Oath of Office

and The Actual Oath of Office Public Servants in Maryland are Required to Take

Article 1, Elective Franchise

SEC. 9. Every person elected, or appointed, to any office of profit or trust, under this Constitution, or under the Laws, made pursuant thereto, shall, before he enters upon the duties of such office, take and subscribe the following oath, or affirmation: 

I, _______________, do swear, (or affirm, as the case may be), that I will support the Constitution of the United States; and that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the State of Maryland, and support the Constitution and Laws thereof; and that I will, to the best of my skill and judgment, diligently and faithfully, without partiality or prejudice, execute the office of ________________, according to the Constitution and Laws of this State, (and, if a Governor, Senator, Member of the House of Delegates, or Judge,) that I will not directly or indirectly, receive the profits or any part of the profits of any other office during the term of my acting as ___________ (originally Article I, sec. 6, renumbered by Chapter 681, Acts of 1977, ratified Nov. 7, 1978).




Statutory Law Listing Which Public Servants Must Take This Oath

§ 16-102. State Government

(a)  The oath prescribed by Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution shall be taken and subscribed before the Governor by:

(1)  the Adjutant General;
(2)  the Attorney General;
(3)  the Comptroller;
(4)  the judges of the Court of Appeals and their clerks;
(5)  the judges of the Court of Special Appeals and their clerks;
(6)  the Secretary of State;
(7)  the State Reporter; and
(8)  the Treasurer.

(b)  On or as soon as practicable after the third Monday of January next after the election for Comptroller, the successful candidate for that office shall qualify by taking the oath prescribed by Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution.

(c)  The Secretary of State shall maintain a book that records the oaths taken and subscribed under this section.

And, yes, the Governor must take the same oath:


§ 16-101. State Government

(a)   The Governor and Lieutenant Governor shall take and subscribe the oath prescribed by Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution:

And Many Other Public Servants Must Take This Oath, as well

§ 16-105. State Government

Except for an officer specified in §§ 16-101 through 16-104 of this title, an officer elected or appointed to any office of trust or profit under the Maryland Constitution or a law of this State, including a mayor or other chief magistrate of a municipal corporation, shall take and subscribe the oath required by Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution before a clerk of the circuit court or before a sworn deputy of the clerk.

Appointed Officials Must Take Constitutional Oath

§ 4-908. Governor - Executive and Administrative Departments

Each person appointed under this subtitle, within thirty days after his certificate of appointment has been issued and before entering upon the duties of his office, shall take and subscribe the constitutional oath of office before the clerk of the court in the county or Baltimore City, where the commission may be received. The clerk of the court shall transmit to the Secretary of State a certificate indicating that the person commissioned has taken the constitutional oath of office.



§ 3-202. State Personnel and Pensions


(b)  Before taking office, each appointed member shall take the oath required by Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution.


Treasurer Must Take Another Oath in Addition to This Oath

§ 5-101.1.  State Government

In addition to the oath specified in Article I, § 9 of the Maryland Constitution, the Treasurer shall take an oath to discharge the duties of the Office of Treasurer faithfully, diligently, and honestly.




_____________________________________________



CONSTITUTION OF MARYLAND


DECLARATION OF RIGHTS. We, the People of the State of Maryland, grateful to Almighty God for our civil and religious liberty, and taking into our serious consideration the best means of establishing a good Constitution in this State for the sure foundation and more permanent security thereof, declare:

Article 1. That all Government of right originates from the People, is founded in compact only, and instituted solely for the good of the whole; and they have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter, reform or abolish their Form of Government in such manner as they may deem expedient.

Art. 2. The Constitution of the United States, and the Laws made, or which shall be made, in pursuance thereof, and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, are, and shall be the Supreme Law of the State; and the Judges of this State, and all the People of this State, are, and shall be bound thereby; anything in the Constitution or Law of this State to the contrary notwithstanding.


Art. 4. That the People of this State have the sole and exclusive right of regulating the internal government and police thereof, as a free, sovereign and independent State

Art. 6. That all persons invested with the Legislative or Executive powers of Government are the Trustees of the Public, and, as such, accountable for their conduct: Wherefore, whenever the ends of Government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the People may, and of right ought, to reform the old, or establish a new Government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

Art. 7. That the right of the People to participate in the Legislature is the best security of liberty and the foundation of all free Government; for this purpose, elections ought to be free and frequent; and every citizen having the qualifications prescribed by the Constitution, ought to have the right of suffrage (amended by Chapter 357, Acts of 1971, ratified Nov. 7, 1972). Art. 8. That the Legislative, Executive and Judicial powers of Government ought to be forever separate and distinct from each other; and no person exercising the functions of one of said Departments shall assume or discharge the duties of any other.

Art. 9. That no power of suspending Laws or the execution of Laws, unless by, or derived from the Legislature, ought to be exercised, or allowed. Art. 10. That freedom of speech and debate, or proceedings in the Legislature, ought not to be impeached in any Court of Judicature.

Art. 18. That no Law to attaint particular persons of treason or felony, ought to be made in any case, or at any time, hereafter. Art. 19. That every man, for any injury done to him in his person or property, ought to have remedy by the course of the Law of the Land, and ought to have justice and right, freely without sale, fully without any denial, and speedily without delay, according to the Law of the Land.


_____________________________________________

Keep in mind that it is the Governor and the Mayor of Baltimore charged with assembling a legal team to serve the interests of the public.  It is the same who would shout loudly and strongly if a State or City Attorney could not see fraud.  Could you imagine massive fraud and corruption going without justice if O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake used their bully-pulpit to out the AIDING AND ABETTING of crime?  Of course not.  So, these are the two executive offices that are failing to serve and as such are guilty of malfeasance.  If the entire system is corrupt what does a citizenry do?  First, make sure these executive positions are working for you and me.

The next problem for citizens at both the national and state/local level is the suspension of public justice.  Now, Congress and the Maryland Assembly can cut funding to public justice but as we all know RECOVERING CORPORATE FRAUD PAYS FOR ITSELF....NO FUNDING NEEDED.  So, while O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly pretends to fund public justice in the form of paying private lawyers to do PRO-BONO WORK.....which is where all the state's funding goes for public justice......the National Lawyers Guild....with state and local offices are supposed to be protecting WE THE PEOPLE against all of what I speak.



The Maryland Bar Association is so corrupt that if you look at all the fraud that happens in the state....it is the lawyers in the state getting much of the wealth.  Subprime mortgage loan fraud with MERS at the center?  Mostly involving Maryland Bar lawyers.

Now, every single Maryland Bar lawyer is not crooked of course, but to practice law in Maryland you must be a member of the Maryland Bar and as we know.......THERE IS NO PUBLIC JUSTICE COMING FROM EITHER THE NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD OR THE MARYLAND BAR.
  Also remember, that the judge appointed by O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly nominating committee are choosing from this Maryland Bar population for the positions.  When you have a corporate state enforcing law selectively as if corporations run the state.....then the lawyers and judges will run their offices as such. 

YET, NONE OF THIS IS LEGAL.  LAWYERS CANNOT SIMPLY SUSPEND US CONSTITUTIONAL LAW TO PRETEND A COUP AGAINST THE US CONSTITUTION WITH PACIFIC TRADE DEALS IS ALLOWED AND THEN FOLLOW THOSE TRADE DEAL LAWS....WHICH IS WHAT IS HAPPENING IN MARYLAND BEFORE THE TPP IS EVEN PASSED.


Judges who knowingly facilitate unconstitutional law with rulings that pretend to be subjective when they are completely re-writing law are doing so illegally.  DOES ANYONE BELIEVE THAT THE MERS OPERATION IN MARYLAND'S WASHINGTON SUBURBS WAS A LEGAL METHOD OF TRANSFERRING HOUSE TITLE?  ABSOLUTELY NOBODY BELIEVES THAT and this needs to be appealed to higher court.  This is an example of courts ruling in ways that have nothing to do with existing law just to protect corruption in the state.

WE THE PEOPLE MUST GET ALL THESE SYSTEMS BACK TO WORK AND IT IS NOT HARD.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO SHAKE THE BUGS FROM THE RUG BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AND STOP ALLOWING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS CHOOSE OUR CANDIDATES!


I want to end by saying that lawyers within the National Lawyers Guild are not bad people for not taking this on.  It is a huge problem that needs the whole of the communities to provide the support for these lawyers wanting to do good.  I  am a skeptic about the capture of these kinds of private organizations by people with no intent of serving the mission....so no doubt a little of both is happening!

National Lawyers Guild

From Wikipedia

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association (ABA) in protest of that organization's exclusionary membership practices and conservative political orientation. They were the first US bar association to allow the admission of minorities to their ranks.

The group declares itself to be "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system . . . to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests."[1]



National Lawyers Guild

409 Washington Ave, Baltimore, Maryland
(410)494-8119
University of Maryland School of Law
This page developed and maintained by National Lawyers Guild, University of Maryland Law Student Chapter


________________________________________

I speak to people I know are lawyers about running for State/City Attorney to put public justice back on the map in Maryland and I hear time and again.....the problem with corruption and the suspension of public justice is that the Maryland Assembly is full of lawyers.  Indeed, it is.  Lawyers have always been the butt of jokes about trustworthiness and ambulance chasers.  Their job is to serve a client by making the law work in ways that benefit that client.  In Maryland, the Maryland Assembly is working for global corporations and corporate profit so whether is is written law, legal oversight, enforcement.....they will work against you and I to maximize profit for corporate shareholders.  Keep in mind, US corporations have spent these Obama years getting all kinds of free money from the FED and Congress and are buying back their corporate shares as fast as they can.  That means shareholders are increasingly Corporate Board members all part of that cabal of the richest.  So, when I say a neo-liberal is working for shareholders......that increasingly means only a very few people.  We know our pensions are simply used as fodder so when that is the case....you really are not a shareholder.

NOTE THAT ALL THE CANDIDATES FOR STATE AND CITY ATTORNEY ARE ALL PART OF THIS CRONY POLITICAL SYSTEM....WE NEED REAL PUBLIC JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN THIS COMING PRIMARY.....FEBRUARY 25TH IS THE DATE FOR FILING!


Lawyers in the Maryland General Assembly

SENATE OF MARYLAND (12). Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr. (D), Calvert & Prince George’s Counties; Senator Brian E. Frosh (D), Montgomery County; Senator Norman R. Stone, Jr. (D), Baltimore County; Senator Allan H. Kittleman (R), Carroll & Howard Counties; Senator Robert J. Garagiola (D), Montgomery County; Senator Lisa A. Gladden (D), Baltimore City; Senator Robert A. Zirkin (D), Baltimore County; Senator Jamie Raskin (D), Montgomery County; Senator Joseph Getty (R), Baltimore & Carroll Counties; Senator Victor Ramirez (D), Prince George’s County; Senator Roger Manno (D), Montgomery County; Senator Bill Ferguson (D), Baltimore City.

HOUSE OF DELEGATES (32). Delegate Kevin Kelly (D), Allegany County; Delegate Jon S. Cardin (D), Baltimore County; Delegate Elizabeth Bobo (D), Howard County; Delegate Frank S. Turner (D), Howard County; Delegate Kathleen M. Dumais (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Brian J. Feldman (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Susan C. Lee (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Luiz R. S. Simmons (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Joseph F. Vallario, Jr. (D), Calvert & Prince George’s Counties; Delegate Mary-Dulany James (D), Cecil & Harford Counties; Delegate Susan K. McComas (R), Harford County; Delegate Michael D. Smigiel, Sr. (R), Upper Eastern Shore; Delegate Jill P. Carter (D), Baltimore City; Delegate Samuel I. (Sandy) Rosenberg (D), Baltimore City; Delegate Curtis S. (Curt) Anderson (D), Baltimore City; Delegate Keith E. Haynes (D), Baltimore City; Delegate Doyle L. Niemann (D), Prince George’s County; Delegate Dana Stein (D), Baltimore County; Delegate Jeff Waldstreicher (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Ben Barnes (D), Anne Arundel & Prince George’s Counties; Delegate Joseline Pena-Melnyk (D), Anne Arundel & Prince George’s Counties; Delegate Aisha N. Braveboy (D), Prince George’s County; Delegate Stephen W. Lafferty (D), Baltimore County; Delegate Kirill Reznik (D), Montgomery County; Delegate C. William (Bill) Frick (D), Montgomery County; Delegate H. Wayne Norman, Jr. (R), Harford County; Delegate Sam Arora (D), Montgomery County; Delegate Geraldine Valentino-Smith (D), Prince George’s County; Delegate C.T. Wilson (D), Charles County; Delegate Cathy Vitale (R), Anne Arundel County; Delegate Keiffer J. Mitchell, Jr. (D), Baltimore City; Delegate Luke Clippinger (D), Baltimore City.

0 Comments

January 29th, 2014

1/29/2014

0 Comments

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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




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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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




VEOLA ENVIRONMENT
Incineration Services

If you’re looking for an efficient way to destroy hazardous organic compounds and deal with a wide variety of waste materials, no other method matches the effectiveness of high-temperature incineration. Veolia Environmental Services provides the most environmentally compliant, safe and cost-effective incineration service in the industry. And, once incinerated, the resulting ash and other residue is stabilized and placed in permanent land disposal.
Safely Incinerate without Burning Through Your Budget

Our incineration services provide benefits such as:

    Destruction of hazardous waste at a cost-effective price
    Access to our network of incineration facilities, strategically located across the U.S. and fully permitted to meet all applicable regulations and requirements
    The security of complete cradle-to-grave services, from collection and transportation of your hazardous waste materials, through the final disposal of any ash or other residue in a secure land disposal facility
    A full-range incineration system that includes both rotary kilns and fixed-hearth incineration technology for the ultimate in flexibility for handling your most difficult hazardous wastes
    The ability to handle bulk or drummed wastes, eliminating the expense of special containers or special packaging of your wastes
    In many areas, access to the efficiencies and cost savings of rail transportation



Medical Waste Disposal

Manage all your medical waste disposal needs with a partner that can ensure your staff’s safety and your company’s regulatory compliance. Medical waste treatment can take place at Veolia facilities, if the waste is both medical and RCRA, or at audited and approved third party partner facilities. We also provide SHARPS+PAK® medical waste disposal services via U.S. mail, which is mainly designed for businesses with smaller waste quantities.
Medical Waste Disposal Services Customized for You

First, we conduct an initial medical waste review and breakdown analysis to help your company reduce waste and minimize your costs. Once your unique needs are determined, our partners train your staff on waste stream segregation, procedures and safety. Services offered include:


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

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


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

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


Court Considers Natural Gas Exports From MD Terminal  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sierra Club appealed the decision.

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

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

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

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

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

Others worry about the risk of an industrial accident.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Erlangen, Germany, May 05, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wind power is an important feature of Siemens’ environmental portfolio. In 2008, revenue from the products and solutions of Siemens’ environmental portfolio was nearly EUR19 billion, which is equivalent to around a quarter of Siemens’ total revenue.
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January 03rd, 2014

1/3/2014

0 Comments

 
OBAMA'S POLICIES HAVE DELIBERATELY CREATED THE ENVIRONMENT TO HAND ALL REAL ESTATE TO THE WEALTHY.  IT WAS PLANNED AND IT IS ALL ILLEGAL.  FOR THOSE MIDDLE-CLASS ABLE TO KEEP YOURS---WHAT HAPPENS WHEN RULE OF LAW IS IGNORED?

IT GOES AFTER EVERYONE!  DO YOU KNOW THAT MORE WOMEN/SENIORS AND CHILDREN SUFFER FROM THIS FRAUD AND ITS LACK OF JUSTICE THAN ANYTHING IN RECENT HISTORY?

THE MARYLAND ATTORNEY GENERAL IGNORING ALL OF THIS -----DOUG GANSLER -----IS NOW RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR.  AIDING AND ABETTING CRIME AND STILL RUNNING FOR PUBLIC OFFICE!


Have you noticed the market on housing has been climbing these few years with the FED's  QE  mortgage bond buying moving interest rates to zero?  Did you know that all that buying is a result of bundled foreclosures bought by the investment firms enriched by creating the massive subprime mortgage fraud?  Did you know the other group buying are foreign and wealthy?  Did you know that these same investment banks/firms have yet to lend to small businesses and individuals so none of the people impoverished by these frauds has been able to buy homes at these lowest interest rates ever?

What has happened during Obama's term besides the massive frauds remaining in the hands of the fraudsters is that a massive movement of investment wealth created from those stolen funds has caused wealth at the top to sky-rocket. 

OBAMA SAYS HE IS GOING TO START TO WORK FOR THE MIDDLE-CLASS NOW!

More importantly for middle/working class America is that all of the US housing and real estate has been transferred to those 1% and now we have POTTERSVILLE landlords as rental houses.  All this happened with suspended Rule of Law.  Those investment firms should not have had the money to do this and the FED should never have been allowed to use crony and corrupt policy to expand this wealth.....AND THAT IS ALL THIS IS!

WE CAN REVERSE THIS BY SIMPLY REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND CLAIMING ALL THESE HOUSING INVESTMENTS AS RECOVERY OF FRAUD!  WE MUST DO THIS OR MOST PEOPLE WILL BE CRUSHED BY RISING RENTALS!

This housing bubble for the rich is of course far more dark than this!  We know that the subprime loan fraud targeted the poor and working class and the middle-class was drawn into it with the extended stagnation.  But cities all across the country and Baltimore especially are working to force people into foreclosure and handing over property to the city often by illegal means.  It is incredible to think a US government would openly commit fraud to get hold of people's property, but that is what is happening in Baltimore.  It is all part of this drive to hand control of all real estate to these few people at the top and that is especially so in urban areas like Baltimore.  The city is creating wide bundles of real estate taking much of low-income communities and handing them to these investors that then rehab and rent at huge profit and control who lives in an area by rent prices.  Keep in mind that the people victimized by these frauds have gotten little or nothing and often are homeless because no justice came!




Dec. 20, 2013, 12:49 p.m. EST

All-cash home sales reach new high Why the Fed tapering may help drive more all-cash buyers

  By Quentin Fottrell, MarketWatch

More Americans are buying homes in all-cash deals, according to a new report. But real-estate experts say this increase may not be a good sign for the health of the housing market, which may also be impacted by the Federal Reserve’s decision to pull back on its bond-buying program.


Bloomberg All-cash purchases accounted for 42% of all sales of residential property in November 2013, up from 39% during the previous month, according to data from real-estate data firm RealtyTrac released Friday. “This is still a very cash- and investor-driven market,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.

The cities with the biggest month-over-month jumps in the number of all-cash sales, according to RealtyTrac, included Florida (63%), Georgia and Nevada (both 51%), South Carolina (50%) and Michigan (49%). This helped boost overall sales of U.S. residential properties, which sold at an annualized pace of 5.1 million in November 2013, a 1% increase from the previous month and a rise of 10% from a year ago.

The decision by the Federal Reserve Wednesday to reduce its bond-buying program to $75 billion per month starting in January, from $85 billion per month currently, may also encourage more cash-purchases — at least for those who can afford it, Blomquist says. “They’re going to do everything they can to keep interest rates low, which may be tough to do,” he says. To reduce cash buyers, he says there will need to be low interest rates and a cooling off in home price appreciation. “Otherwise, you’ll see the market skew even further toward cash buyers,” Blomquist says.

When interest rates went up slightly in June, there was a notable increase in cash sales, Daren Blomquist says. “Some markets are more interest-rate sensitive than others based on affordability,” he says. “Just a slight increase makes homes a lot less affordable.” In fact, another report by Goldman Sachs in August was even more strongly in the cash-is-king camp, estimating that cash sales now account for 57% of all residential home sales versus 19% in 2005. Walt Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, says that the association’s estimate of the share of the market made up by all-cash buyers is lower than others’, at 31% in July, but that it’s still at an all-time high.

Molony says that investors make up 32% of all-cash buyers (70% of all investors pay cash), up from 31% in October and 30% in November 2012, while retirees who’ve built up equity in their homes or paid off their mortgages account for around 12%. The rest include vacation-home buyers and foreign buyers.


While cash buys help explain the surge in home sales over the past year, some experts say it’s an unsustainable trend — and one that should be greeted with caution. “The rise in cash sales is not a good long-term trend for the housing market,” Blomquist says. Although RealtyTrac doesn’t identify who has cash-in-hand, experts say wealthy Americans and downsizing retirees account for some of these all-cash deals. Investors who are keen to make a profit by buying low and renting those properties — or flipping them — also drive up the number of all-cash deals, he says. None of these three groups — flippers, retirees and the wealthy — are big enough to sustain the market in the long run, he says. If it remains dominant in the long run, cash buying “will have a chilling effect on home sales and prices,” Blomquist says.


If tapering does lead to higher mortgage rates, some home buyers might buy with cash rather than a mortgage, says Jed Kolko, chief economist for real-estate firm Trulia. However, many cash buyers are investors, and now that prices have risen, investor activity is also starting to decline, he says. (House prices in 20 American cities rose more than 13% in the 12 months leading up to September, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of property values, the biggest rise since February 2006.) “On balance, the all-cash share of purchases will probably decline next year, as fading investor activity outweighs the impact of higher rates.”

Another challenge for the housing market in 2014: The pool of potential buyers is being limited thanks to a combination of tight lending standards and rising interest rates, experts say. “Cash is king in hot markets where getting the sale done now matters and where investors are driving price recovery,” says Susan M. Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Cash’s dominance is a sign of the fact that it’s more costly and hard to get financing, she says, “that’s a bad thing.” On the upside, interest rates are still historically low, she says. “Now is a time to lock in if you are a buyer.”



_____________________________________________

Now, if you followed this debacle you would know it is no accident that bills from hundreds to thousands went out to city residents and when people complained about the faulty bills they were ignored.  This was huge and it was devastating to low-income people who were not able to pay and then fight.  They were thrown from their houses for what was the city's faulty billing. 

The reason I say it is deliberate is that I became involved with a few of these and found the Water Department openly acting deceitfully in trying to retain the money they knew was overbilling.  I also know it had to do with development because the people losing their homes were heavily found in Enterprise development zones.

THE CITY OF BALTIMORE ACTUALLY COMMITTED FRAUD TO GET PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HOUSES AND THEN GAVE THOSE HOUSES TO DEVELOPERS FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR.


None of this is legal and it can be reversed by simply reinstating Rule of Law!

Moratorium Proposed On Water Bill-Based Property Liens Baltimore City Council President Cites Audit Uncovering Billing System Flaws
UPDATED 9:15 AM EST Mar 06, 2012 Baltimore Sun



BALTIMORE —Baltimore City Council President Jack Young took what he called a "bold step" Monday in response to an audit that uncovered flaws in the city's water billing system.

Young introduced a resolution requiring a moratorium on placing liens against properties based solely on unpaid water and sewer bills.

The audit revealed that more than 38,000 customers were overbilled, totaling $4.3 million, while some customers weren't billed at all.


Young said he wants the moratorium in place for two years or until a "viable and fair" billing system is created.


__________________________________________
Now, the problem with Baltimore City water billing is that most of the public workers have been dismissed and they are using what they call averaging....never knowing what people actually use.  THE PROBLEM IS STAFFING YET THEY ARE TELLING US THE SOLUTION IS SMART METERS.  Now, those who follow me know the problem with Smart Meters but what can be said simply is that the same corporations defrauding us right and left are behind Smart Meters!

All this has to do with the article above that says the housing market is climbing and cash payments are fueling it.  These homes go into foreclosure because they cannot pay thousands of dollars for water and then the rich come in and pay cash for these stressed homes.
  If you think this is all accident-----THEN WHY ARE THESE CASES NOT FIXED IMMEDIATELY?  This is not simply a case of dishonest water department employees-----this is from City Hall!


Unpaid Water Bills Leading to Foreclosed Homes

Nov. 12, 2012 By MARK GREENBLATT, GERRY WAGSCHAL, and LAUREN PEARLE Mark Greenblatt

Actor and musician Richard Burton is facing foreclosure on his Baltimore home, but not because he didn't pay his mortgage on time. In his case, he says it all began with an overdue $1,037.42 water bill.

Burton lost his job playing "Shamrock" McGinty on HBO's "The Wire" when the show went off the air. He couldn't afford the bill and claims it was incorrectly inflated to begin with.

However, the cash-strapped city of Baltimore turned to a controversial way to collect. The city sold his unpaid debt to a private company that also inherited a lien on Burton's home. Then, the company tacked on 18 percent interest and more than $2,000 in legal charges.

"You have no choice but to pay or you lose your home, that can't be right," Burton said.



A Colorado Springs-based company called LienLogic is trying to foreclose on Burton's home if he doesn't pay.

The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) says thousands of homeowners all over the U.S. are threatened with foreclosure every year because of unpaid utility bills.

"Someone could actually lose their home for the failure to pay a $200 or $300 water bill or sewer bill," said John Rao, an attorney with the NCLC.

The NCLC released a report this year citing a Rhode Island senior citizen who fell behind on a $474 sewer bill. A private company took possession of the home she had lived in for 40 years, only to turn around and sell it for $85,000.

Back in Baltimore, Vicki Valentine lost her home over a partially paid water bill. Her family had the home for 33 years. She took possession after her father passed away. Valentine sank into a serious depression following that death and paid the wrong amount on her bill. When she tried to make payments to catch up, they were not enough, and the city sold her debt off as well.


Eventually, Valentine lost the home and says she ended up on the streets.

"And that's not a fun place to be," she said.

LienLogic, the company that bought Richard Burton's debt, makes $100 million a year from its lien business, which it operates in multiple states.

The company initially declined an interview with ABC News, forwarding us to the National Tax Lien Association for comment. The executive director of that organization agreed to an interview, and then backed out.

So ABC News flew to Colorado and tracked down one of LienLogic's co-founders, Erik Carlson. When approached by an ABC News reporter, Carlson would only say: "Like I said, I declined the interview."

ABC News followed up, but Carlson declined to answer our questions about people his company tries to take homes from following the non-payment of small water or sewer bills.

Not all cities sell unpaid debts to private companies. In Houston if you don't pay your water bill, the city will shut your water off and try to get you help. Officials there would never give someone the potential right to take your home away if you don't pay.


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


Edgemere Man Receives $15,000 Water Bill

WBFF News

A Baltimore man is stunned by a $15,000 water bill that he says he does not owe. Otto Hart received a delinquent notice Monday morning at his home in Edgemere saying he owes over $15,000. Hart says his water bills average about $25-$30 a quarter but in June he was mistakenly billed $96. After speaking with the Department of Public Works about the mistake, he got a bill for $0 in September after an adjustment. Now, three months later, a delinquent notice for $15,000. But this time when he contacted Public Works, he was told that the matter would be forwarded to another department to be investigating and someone would contact him in 4-6 weeks. "Well, if you owe money, within 4 to 6 weeks, a lot can happen. I mean, you could basically end up having a lien put on your house or your credit could go right down the tubes and there's nothing you can do about it," Hart said. A spokesman with the Baltimore City Department of Public Works says the billing department is reviewing the matter.



_________________________________________

Below you see residents donating their homes for the cost of a few hundred in taxes and property bills.  These homeowners have no chance in selling homes without the city's investment in their communities and the subprime loan fraud settlement should have done that.  Rather than rehab and sell cheaply to low-income people having lost their homes....the only choice for the existing homeowners in blighted communities is to hand over these houses for nothing to be handed to rich developers.

IT IS THE SAME PEOPLE WHO CREATED THIS SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD AND WAS ENRICHED BY IT THAT ARE COMING IN AND BUYING ALL THIS CITY REAL ESTATE AND CITY HALL USES THESE WATER BILL SCHEMES TO GET EVEN MORE!


All of this can be reversed by simply reinstating Rule of Law.  All these homes in these blocks of real estate should go to those losing their homes to fraud!


Woman’s Home Confiscated Over Small Water Bill
The Other Foreclosure Menace


By Fred Schulte, Ben Protess and Lagan Sebert

May 21, 2010 "
Huffington Post Investigative Fund" --  One raw day in early February, Vicki Valentine stood by helplessly as real estate investors snatched her West Baltimore home over what began with an unpaid city water bill of $362.As snow threatened to fall, she watched a work crew hired by the new owners punch out the lock on her front door. A sheriff's deputy was on the scene while Valentine and her teenage son piled whatever they could into a borrowed car.

Running out of time, Valentine scrambled to pack up clothing and mementos. The home had been her family's for nearly three decades, and her father had paid off the mortgage in 1984. "It's hard to say goodbye to this house," she said. "It's like someone forcing you out of something that belongs to you. I don't get it."

Valentine lost the two-story brick row home after the city sold her debt to investors through a contentious and byzantine legal process called a "tax sale." This little-known type of foreclosure can enrich investors as growing numbers of property owners struggle to pay their bills.

WATCH Vicki Valentine's Eviction Day:


 These foreclosed homeowners are not the families making headlines for taking on mortgages they could ill afford. Families ensnared in the tax sale sometimes are unable to overcome relatively small debts owed to local tax collectors.

Rather than collect the overdue money they are owed, many local governments are selling tax liens. Buyers range from behemoths such as JPMorgan Chase & Co, and some regional banks and law firms, to small-fry investors lured by late-night television commercials promising quick riches. Investors generally bid in an auction for the right to collect delinquent taxes and other municipal debts on property owners, sometimes by paying only a few hundred dollars. When owners can't pay, investors can pick up property at bargain prices

It can be a good deal for everyone except the property owner. Selling the debts to investors can help governments efficiently ease budget woes without having the added expenses of debt collection, foreclosing and being a landlord.

Investors, meanwhile, can rake in hefty profits. That's because they can tack on fees and steep interest rates, which can amount to 18 percent annually in Baltimore.

In Valentine's case, legal fees and other charges climbed past $3,600 - nearly 10 times her original bill.

Investors purchased an estimated $30 billion of real estate tax debt held by governments across the country in 2009, double the amount a year earlier, according to the Florida-based National Tax Lien Association. Altogether, 29 states and the District of Columbia can sell tax lien debt to investors.

Lien sales in Baltimore have nearly doubled since the housing bubble of 2006. On Monday, the city sold 12,689 liens - a probable record. Properties ranged from boarded-up shells and vacant lots to row homes in gentrified neighborhoods and some commercial buildings.


Last February, Vicki Valentine was evicted when she couldn't pay $3,603.41 to rescue her Baltimore home. Valentine's wasn't a typical foreclosure -- the mortgage was paid off. But when she failed to pay a $362.28 water bill, the city auctioned her debt off in a tax lien sale. An investor now owns her home. City records show that one in five of these liens on properties is for unpaid taxes or other municipal bills amounting to $1,000 or less. If Baltimore's 2009 tax sale is any indication, hundreds will stem from delinquent water bills; there were 666 such liens last year.

Although the brisk tax lien trade thrives beneath the radar, largely unnoticed, it has occasionally drawn scrutiny from law enforcement authorities.

Some of Maryland's most prominent tax sale investors have been swept up in a criminal investigation into bid rigging at the sales. Federal prosecutors allege that those investors agreed in advance which properties to bid at some auctions, improperly reducing the money earned by municipalities.

So far, Justice Department prosecutors have secured three convictions in the ongoing investigation. At a May 4 sentencing hearing for two of the defendants, a witness for the government was lawyer John Reiff, part-owner of the company that currently owns Valentine's lien. He was not charged in the case.

Investing in liens can be risky, with profit on a particular property anything but certain. Investors generally compensate for such uncertainty by buying in large volumes, sometimes at a clip of thousands of liens each year.

Two of the investors who pleaded guilty in the bid rigging case made at least $10 million from fees and other costs collected from owners of some 6,000 property liens they bought over six years, according to federal prosecutors.

Prosecutors said in court filings they suspect bid-rigging occurs in other areas of the country. A JPMorgan subsidiary called Xspand and at least two other companies received grand jury subpoenas last year as part of a Justice Department anti-trust investigation in New Jersey, according to Bloomberg.

'Unintended Consequences'

Some state lawmakers have questioned the fairness of the tax sale foreclosure process, which often sticks homeowners with thousands of dollars in legal fees and other costs. But cities and counties in Maryland earlier this year fended off an effort to keep water bills out of the tax sale, arguing that without the threat of losing homes many people would fail to pay their bills.

Revenue collectors defend their tax sales as a necessary, if sometimes distasteful, means for feeding the public treasury. In aging cities such as Baltimore, there's also hope that new owners will rehab decaying or abandoned properties, restoring them to the tax rolls.

Investors say they aren't the bad guys - they're providing a service that helps plug holes in municipal budgets. Homeowners should face consequences for failing to pay their bills, they argue, noting that people faced with losing property have many opportunities to redeem it. The mounting fees, they say, reflect the costs involved in navigating complex legal requirements, tracking down property owners and taking them to court to enforce the liens. In Valentine's case, they noted, a judge approved the fees.

"We are essentially the city's bill collector," said lawyer and tax lien investor Reiff.

Critics of tax sales question the morality of government tax collectors acting to enrich private investors at the expense of property owners with low incomes or facing hard times. They ask whether it's the best way to compel people to honor their debts -- especially involving relatively paltry public utility bills.

After all, when water bills go unpaid, some cities and counties simply shut off service. In Baltimore, officials often leave it on. Another alternative would be to have private collection agencies track down debtors.

"This is a case where good intentions have led to severe unintended consequences," said Debra Gardner, of the Public Justice Center in Baltimore, a non-profit advocacy group for minorities and the poor.

Asked about Valentine's story, David Vladeck, director the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection in Washington, said it was "just horrifying to me."

While noting that his comments did not reflect agency policy, Vladeck said he believed more recession-wracked homeowners across the country could face a similar plight. "It's beyond tragic that this poor woman lost her home."

Pleas - and More Fees

Valentine was incredulous when the price to keep her property shot past $3,600. Jobless and lacking the savings to pay, she said she could do little to stave off the day of reckoning.

That day arrived on February 3, when a Baltimore City Sheriff's Department deputy served her with a court-issued "writ of possession" stripping her claim to the home.

Valentine, a former mental health counselor and rehab specialist with four children, said she moved back to her childhood home about a decade ago to care for her ailing father, Charles L. Turner. A retired brewery worker, he had Alzheimer's disease.

As his condition worsened, he tended to hide bills from the family. (City records confirm that Turner often fell behind in meeting his obligations during the final years of his life and nearly wound up in the tax sale as early as 2000 over unpaid water bills and property taxes.)

When her father died in 2003, Valentine took over the home and stayed there with her son, Dimitrian, now 17. She said she fell into a serious depression in the wake of her father's deteriorating health and death, and was unable to work or pay her bills on time. She has worked only sporadically since his death. Though she made partial payments on the water and sewer account in 2006, she acknowledges her failure to pay a bill of $462.28 in full. She went down to city hall and paid $100, but never took care of the balance.

When the deadline passed for paying up, the city added 2005-2006 property taxes of $287.92, interest and city tax-sale processing charges. That brought the total she owed to $710.57, according to city records.

The City of Baltimore washed its hands of Valentine's debt in May 2006 when it sold the lien to Sunrise Atlantic LLC, an arm of the BankAtlantic in Fort Lauderdale. The Florida bank has bid on tax liens in a range of states, from Florida to Illinois, though it has largely sold off its Maryland lien portfolio and is not implicated in the bid-rigging case. BankAtlantic did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Unlike mortgage foreclosures initiated by banks, there's no appealing a tax sale debt once it is sold off; a property owner has no option other than to abide by the investors' terms and pay the fees. The lien holders also have little incentive to be flexible about repayment terms.

Maryland law gives property owners six months to redeem a tax lien with only minimal added costs. But if they don't pay by then, lien holders can sue to seize the property and stick the homeowner with a slew of fees, including legal bills incurred in taking the matter to court. Sunrise Atlantic filed such a case on Valentine's home in Baltimore City Circuit Court in December 2006, records show.

More than a year later, the court awarded the property to Sunrise Atlantic.

At that point, Valentine sent a handwritten letter to the court, begging for mercy and more time to repay.

In the letter, dated Feb. 9, 2008, Valentine described being unable to work because of depression and other problems. "For now, this is the roof over my son and my head. I am trying to get the money together to catch up on my delinquent bills." She added: "Please allow more time to pay all bills connected with the foreclosure of said property."

But the longer she waited and the more she protested, the more legal fees and other charges she incurred.

In 2008, Baltimore attorney Anthony De Laurentis, who represented Sunrise Atlantic, submitted itemized charges to the court: $305.91 in interest on the lien; a $1,500 bill for responding to Valentine's requests to cut the fees and other legal work; more than $1,000 in assorted expenses, including $325 for a title search of the property and $79 for photocopies, according to court records.

The price list passed muster with a judge, who on Sept. 19, 2008 ordered that Valentine pay $3,603.41 - or forfeit her property.

She asked for another hearing, which delayed the process for more than a year.

While the case dragged on, the Florida bank started divesting its tax lien certificates from Maryland, eventually transferring the lien on Valentine's home to a firm called Montego Bay Properties. Part of the firm is owned by a trust set up to benefit members of the family of lawyer De Laurentis. Reiff, one of De Laurentis' law partners, also owns part of the firm.

In an interview in their Baltimore office, De Laurentis and Reiff said 90 percent or more of property owners eventually pay whatever is necessary to keep their homes.

They said most of the properties they take over are vacant and thus nobody is displaced. They also said they had repeatedly tried to settle the matter with Valentine and showed Investigative Fund reporters a thick file of court papers and other records as well as notes of more than a dozen contacts with her to make arrangements to clear the debt.

"We bent over backwards for her," Reiff said, adding that his staff had tried for more than two years to "work something out" to no avail.

Feds Say Bids Rigged

Though Valentine had no way of knowing it, some investors rigged the 2006 Baltimore tax sale auction that led to her eviction, federal prosecutors alleged in court.

The roots of that conspiracy run deep, prosecutors said. For years, a handful of Baltimore real estate lawyers and their investment partners quietly dominated Maryland tax sale auctions, with few questions asked about their bidding tactics or collection policies.

That changed after The Baltimore Sun used city records and court filings to report in March 2007 that hundreds of mainly low-income city residents had been kicked out of their homes over small unpaid bills, ranging from water and sewer charges to minor environmental citations. Some people were driven from family property because they couldn't afford to pay thousands of dollars demanded by lien holders.

The Baltimore newspaper also documented for the first time that while dozens of parties bid in Baltimore tax auctions in 2006 and 2007, just three investment groups had won about two-thirds of the liens.

Prosecutors went on to charge three men with conspiring to rig bids at 21 auctions in Baltimore and four other jurisdictions, including Montgomery and Prince George's counties in the suburbs of Washington D.C. between 2002 and 2007. All three have since pleaded guilty. No other charges have been filed.

Another investment group involved in the conspiracy was DRT Fund, according to court filings by federal prosecutors. DRT is owned in part by De Laurentis and Reiff. DRT participated in a dozen of the 21 fixed auctions, though not the Baltimore City auction in 2006 in which Valentine's lien was sold, according to court filings.

The Justice Department filed no charges against DRT, which came forward in the fall of 2007 and "fully and truthfully reported their own wrongdoing and that of their co-conspirators and terminated their part in the conspiracy," prosecutors wrote in court papers filed last month.

DRT went on to sign an amnesty agreement with the Justice Department that commits it to "pay restitution to any person or entity injured as a result of the bid-rigging activity being reported in which it was a participant," court records state.

Neither De Laurentis nor Reiff would discuss DRT's settlement with the Justice Department.

Water Bill Woes

Some lawmakers have tried for years, with modest success, to rein in the tax-sale fees that can steamroll low-income homeowners. Maryland legislators passed a bill in 2008 that raised the minimum lien sold from $100 to $250. But a bill to prohibit cities and counties from selling delinquent water bills to investors failed in the state Senate earlier this year by a single vote.

Legislators also rejected a bill that would have prevented the sale of any lien of less than $750, as happens in some other locales outside of the state.

Both bills failed, lawmakers said, largely due to fierce opposition from tax collectors and officials in Baltimore, which conducts the largest tax sale in the state.

Andrea Mansfield, of the Maryland Association of Counties, testified that the tax sale process provides "a much-needed device to ensure that property owners remit payment for their fair share of taxes and charges connected to public services."

Eliminating water bills from the tax sales would result in more "deficient accounts," and lead to "increased rates on citizens who properly pay," she wrote.

Sen. James Brochin, a Democrat from Baltimore County who co-sponsored the legislation that would have banned the sale of delinquent water bills to investors, vehemently disagrees. "It's just disgusting. It's highway robbery. It's dead wrong. It's immoral," he said.

While city officials publicly defend the practice, he said, in reality "they're humiliated and embarrassed by it. Deep down they know how immoral it is."

Baltimore's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, declined requests for an interview on the topic with the Investigative Fund.

City officials were more talkative earlier this year when they sought to block lawmakers from banning the sale of water bill liens. Mary Pat Fannon, a lobbyist for the mayor's office, said in prepared testimony for a February 5 hearing that the city had begun offering repayment plans for water bills to help homeowners avoid tax sale.

She said that the 666 water bill liens sold by Baltimore City in 2009 was way down from the 1,129 sold to investors the previous year and credited the repayment plans for the reduction.

And she went further, testifying that nobody had lost a home due to an unpaid water bill from either sale in 2008 or 2009. What Fannon neglected to mention: Because of the lengthy transfer process in the courts, it was too early for those groups of property owners to begin losing their homes. Most tax sale lawsuits have taken longer than two years to resolve through the courts.

Fannon also said that without the tax sale, the city would need to file debt collection lawsuits against each delinquent property owner, which she said "would be very expensive, time consuming and flood the courts."

Two days before Fannon's testimony at the state capital, Valentine stood watching as her belongings piled up on the sidewalk in Baltimore.

A Neighborhood's Decline

More than three years after Valentine's small debt drew her into the tax sale, neither the city nor the investors seem to have won much.

The property is unlikely to be fixed up any time soon. Instead, it adds to a sense of decay that permeates some parts of urban Baltimore. On Valentine's old block in the Sandtown neighborhood, all but a handful of houses, abandoned long ago, are boarded up.

Such decline has summoned other ills. "Drugs moved in and replaced the good with the bad," said Valentine, who is living temporarily with her mother. Many of her possessions are in storage.

De Laurentis and Reiff now hold a "writ of possession" for a property that's in need of substantial repair. Though the home is assessed at $46,000, in such dilapidated condition the investors said they probably would have trouble selling it for more than $16,000.

In addition, investors could be on the hook for a $7,000 water bill of their own. Just how that happened is unclear; there may have been an undetected leak in Valentine's home. Last month, the city finally turned off the water.

If the investors take the final step to secure a deed to the property, they would have to pay the city roughly $6,300, which the city is then supposed to turn over to Valentine. The law entitles original property owners to receive at least some compensation.

De Laurentis and Reiff say they're still willing to work with Valentine to resolve the matter. Reiff said he gave her a key to the new lock so she could have more time to remove her belongings as a good faith gesture.

"We'll definitely work something out with her," Reiff said.


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November 20th, 2013

11/20/2013

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WE CANNOT HAVE DEMOCRACY WITHOUT RULE OF LAW. WE CANNOT BE FIRST WORLD WITHOUT RULE OF LAW......we are neither right now. Make sure a Rule of Law candidate is running in State/City attorney general races! Maryland and Baltimore does not have any good people running.....they are all crony!


Regarding the Baltimore Board of Estimates crimes against humanity:


THAT'S RIGHT JACK YOUNG------RUN OUT OF THIS MEETING!  This was shouted at the Baltimore City Board of Estimates meeting that ended with shouts of fraud and corruption by business and justice.....


I talked with a member of the media forced to witness this den of thieves who stated he hated having to come to this meeting and watching the garbage that is Baltimore City public works.  You would have to be a blind beggar from South Baltimore not to see what is absolute fraud and corruption.  Luckily, the Maryland Minority Contractor lawyer has been pushed to shout out as his clients become an endangered species in Baltimore and Maryland.  We welcomed his and his client's outburst of charges of fraud and corruption at the end of a protest of yet another openly preferential bid award.  Yet another contractor was left speechless at the level of injustice in this awarding process that is completely arbitrary-----no Rule of Law in this process!

FORTUNATELY FOR THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE WE ARE GOING TO SEE PUBLIC JUSTICE MOVE THIS TO COURT TO CHALLENGE THIS BOARD OF ESTIMATE'S PROCESS OF BID AWARD.  WE WILL NEED TO TAKE IT ALL THE WAY.

For those not familiar Baltimore has a Finance Department with people having duties of taking a long list of 'OBJECTIVES' that need to be met in moving the bid forward through award.  It is this list of OBJECTIVES that makes the entire process so arbitrary as to allow this Finance Department to send the bid anyway it chooses.  This Board of Estimates does not stop there-----it completely ignores even the most basic of standards required in the process.  So, a contractor meets minority guidelines but then it doesn't-----a contractor is low bid and then it isn't------a contractor fails to complete application properly and is disqualified and then it isn't.  IT IS ONE GREAT BIG MESS WITH NO RULE OF LAW----IT IS COMPLETELY ARBITRARY.

So, today's victim of these bid award violations made clear that the problem and protest was about X and the mayor's lawyers kept turning it to Y.....which is what they do all the time.  They spin the argument away from the issue put forward just as a politician asked a question on an issue and then answers in a way having nothing to do with the issue.  SAME THING.  So, both the contractor and the lawyer pointed each time to the spinning of point ------the issue most apparent for people not familiar with details being that most contractors bidding for this work were disqualified for one reason or another but the contractor winning the award had a clear violation that disqualified them but  the Board moved that bid forward anyway.  So, they pretended the contractor winning the award was not disqualified.  The protesting contractor tried to make other points on a constantly moving bid amount that I do not know the specifics but on face seemed legitimate.

The point of value for citizens of Baltimore is that the bidding process is so rigged that contractors either do not even bid anymore....which is the purpose of this level of corruption, or if they lose with prejudice, they do not protest because you are making the same people using an arbitrary system mad and they will blacklist you.  VOILA-----A CAPTURED PUBLIC WORKS BIDDING PROCESS.   THIS IS WHAT THEY DO IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES!  I spoke earlier about the constant use of a contractor winning an award for low bid and coming back for extensions over and over.....

The solution is REBUILD THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC WORKS FOR GOODNESS SAKE!  WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU ALLOW A SYSTEM LIKE THIS EXIST JUST SO PRIVATE CONTRACTORS CAN GET RICH ON FRAUD AND CORRUPTION?  We need to stop outsourcing our public works and services and simply rebuild a public sector -------public employees that are the consultants, public employees that are the designers, public employees that know the logistics......THAT WORKED THROUGH THE MOST EXPANSIVE PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS IN THE MID-1900s!  It was in the late 1970s-1980s that gave us this move to privatization of all that is public.  We attracted the best of the best to public service with strong wages and benefits----we had projects done with little waste and fraud because the people directing it were on salary, not working for profit (OK, I know there was public fraud but not pervasive).  THIS IS THE GOAL WE HAVE TODAY---A RETURN TO A STRONG PUBLIC SECTOR WITH REGULATIONS AND PUBLIC JUSTICE but you will not get that with neo-liberals and crony pols!


SIMPLY RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AGAINST NEO-LIBERALS!



Baltimore is a NYC wanta-be and is run by Bloomberg and Wall Street by the extension of Johns Hopkins. The same thing happening in this article is happening in Baltimore. THESE ARE NEO-LIBERAL STATES FOLKS------STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!

N.Y. City Council Infested With Fraud, Corruption
April 29, 2008 |



City Council members in New York have legally steered millions of tax dollars to relatives, spouses and friends thanks to a city measure that grants lawmakers large slush funds to be spent however they please.

Each of New York’s 51 council members gets a chunk of cash that can be spent at the discretion of the council member. Ideally, the money is supposed to provide valuable community services but no one bothers to follow up, leaving the system rife with fraud, corruption and conflict of interest.

So far, at least seven of the city’s 51 lawmakers have been caught distributing millions of public dollars to relatives, spouses and friends. One lawmaker, Larry Seabrook of the Bronx, actually gave nearly $1 million to a suspicious group—Bronx African American Chamber of Commerce—with the same address as his office.

A pair of councilmen from Manhattan and Queens, each gave questionable nonprofits $400,000. One group was operated by the lawmaker’s top aides and the other featured the councilman’s sister on the board of directors. A Brooklyn Councilman gave $356,000 to a nonprofit operated by his chief of staff, who got caught embezzling $145,000 and another Brooklyn councilman gave a group that employs his wife nearly $200,000.

Incredibly, the council’s speaker acknowledges that some of the council’s so-called discretionary funds were assigned to fake nonprofits to hold the money for future distribution to real groups. A local paper sums the scandal up quite well, writing in an editorial that “the stench of waste, fraud and corruption wafting out of the City Council grows ranker by the day….”

_________________________________________________
The cronyism is top down which is why local politicians think they have no worries.  We know that all public service systems are now outsourced and government agencies are run by directors who hand those agencies over to corporations to run.  This is why nothing works when the government is doing it------THE GOVERNMENT IS NOW ALL PRIVATE CONTRACTORS WORKING SIMPLY TO MOVE MONEY TO CONNECTED PEOPLE, NOT GETTING THE BEST PEOPLE FOR A JOB.  See how that corresponds to my Baltimore Board of Estimates meeting?

We elected Obama to clean this up-----he ran on a holding corporations responsible campaign-----and he ignored it and has become the biggest VISIGOTH in US history.  Huffington Post stated this administration is the most corrupt in US History!

WE CAN CHANGE THIS BY NOT ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DNC CHOOSE OUR CANDIDATES------WE MUST RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!

We have tens of trillions in stolen corporate fraud to recover for goodness sake-----stop letting them do this!



August 23, 2012
Whistleblowers (2011) claims DOD official is incompetent and tyrannical rings a sympathetic chord with DSS’s problems (2012) 

I ran across this story from August 29, 2011 (in my mail box, sent to me by a reader), which is remarkably like what I am being told is going on in DSS (Defense Security Service). 

Note similarities, those of you familiar with the problems DSS seems to be propagating at an alarming rate: 

Managers pushing out senior employees who have the knowledge, training and experience to do the job in order to make room for often unprepared, untrained, equally incompetent cronies from another work environment.  Cronyism can be hiring relatives, or can be hiring members of a same church, college class, club, or military service branch etc.  It does seem like DSS is having more than its share of such problems. 

It seems like within DSS, as in this story, some crony seeking managers like people around who can spy on other employees for them, and be loyal to the manager in charge, even if they aren’t capable of doing the job they ostensibly were hired to do.  In the case of DSS, how is this helping DSS protect our technology and oversee government contracts?  (Answer:  It’s not! But it may well be meeting the goals of certain defense contractors who don’t want any oversight anyway.)  GFS

__________________________________________

This article shows how bad the fraud and corruption is in Baltimore.  Much of the fraud and corruption that passes through the Board of Estimates involves Baltimore real estate.  As I've said before, there is an orchestrated effort to move downtown and city center real estate into the hands of connected people.  Real Estate agents in communities hit hard with foreclosures.....mainly underserved and black communities.....say they cannot earn a living because the real estate is being captured by the city and handed by the city to selected developers.  You read in meeting minutes of one private non-profit after another getting these houses for a $1 when taxpayers often paid tens of thousands to get the property and maintain it.  THIS IS NOT VACANTS TO VALUE.....

WE HAVE PLENTY OF REVENUE IN THE CITY TO BUILD OUT MUCH THAT IS GIVEN AWAY.  CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT RECOVERING BILLIONS IN CORPORATE FRAUD AND STOPPING FUTURE FRAUD WOULD MAKE THE GOVERNMENT COFFERS LOOK LIKE?


The Most Powerful Man in Baltimore Real Estate?

2
October 16, 2011 by Baltimore Slumlord Watch

An interesting way to describe Paul Graziano, director of Baltimore’s Housing Authority.

We received an email from the Baltimore Real Estate Investors Association, inviting us to a meeting where Paul Graziano will speak to the group (including slumlords and owners of blighted vacant homes) and address questions regarding Section 8 housing, vacant homes, and other topics of interest to property investors.

It’s inappropriate for the head of a city agency to be addressing a group that is run by a man whose business practices are questionable at best.  Joe DiMaggio is currently fighting a lead paint lawsuit, has failed to register rental properties, and other housing code violation lawsuits.  He also has an open warrant for failing to appear in housing court.

Again, Mr. Graziano has shown bad judgement by agreeing to address this group as a colleague and not as the head of a regulatory agency — and he has again shown his lack of ethics by maintaining relationships with people who have shown such a blatant disregard for our city and its taxpaying residents.
__________________________________________


HIS HEAD WOULD SPIN IN BALTIMORE!!!



Originally published August 07, 2013

How Deep is Corruption?  by Harry C. Alford

    Harry C. Alford, co-founderpresident/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce and NNPA Columnist. (Courtesy Photo)

I have seen examples of corruption throughout my life. Some has been petty and some had potentially serious implications and outcomes.

I have avoided or turned down 96 percent of the attempts made on me but I am sure there are many who haven’t. How do you avoid it? It is easy, according to then-Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano: “Don’t pay any bribes; there won’t be any bribery.” In other words the offers will be made to us all and the key to avoiding it is to just turn them down and walk away. I have taken his advice to heart.

A great spawning grounds for corruption are the minority business programs throughout our nation. City, county, state and federal governments-- and corporations-- have some form of outreach and technical assistance for businesses owned by racial/socio economic disadvantaged groups. Most require participants to be “certified” as a minority, female, etc. type of business ownership. There is so much fraud involved in many of these applications that we can’t count them all. Cheating applicant, cheating employee overseeing the program and usually a cheating White- owned seasoned business conspiring with the others. Every one of these programs has some form of corruption in their daily process. Some do it for quick bucks and some do it to prolong their racist attitudes and/or greed.

I have had experience with mayoral offices during my travels. The Thomas Barnes administration in Gary, Ind. was a trip. They would demand my members who had won contracts competitively to pay a “fee” before they received payment. One protesting member was told by an employee in the deputy mayor’s office, “What? Do you think we just give these contracts away?” He finally got his money after filing a claim in court. They gave him a check for the money due as he walked up the court house steps.

My experience with Mayor Willie Brown’s office of San Francisco was quite interesting. We set up an introductory meeting with the mayor. While I was waiting in the mayor’s office, a unscrupulous guy comes up to me and said, “I’m Charlie, best friend and adviser of the mayor, you need to meet with me outside before your meeting.” As we went outside the building I stated, “I know what you are trying to do. So, just go to hell and I am out of here.” (I don’t know for a fact that Mayor Brown was aware of what Charlie was doing.)

There was a similar experience with Mayor Marc Morial’s office in New Orleans. We called for a meeting and they said to wait for a formal response. A couple of days later, I received a phone call from this private attorney. He said that the mayor would like me to see him first. So, I went to his office and we had a discussion.

What it amounted to was that the NBCC must hire him and use him as the communicator with the mayor. Paying legal fees in order to speak to an elected official? I don’t think so! A few years later this attorney was indicted for his shenanigans and spent some good time in prison. (Again, I can’t say the mayor knew that he was soliciting work from us.)

There is much corruption going on with the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This is similar to a free trade treaty. AGOA-certified nations in Africa may export goods to America without paying any duties. There are two big abuses going on. 1. German auto manufacturer BMW has built a plant in South Africa for the sole purpose of shipping the product to the United States duty free. In essence, a European firm is benefitting from a program meant for African firms.

India has jumped into this AGOA action. The Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius has been given “nominal status” as an African nation. India ships tons of raw products to this island of mainly Indian expatriates. The finished products are shipped to the U.S. under AGOA benefits.

How many trillions of dollars are taken out of our general economy because of corruption? How many good decisions and acts of leadership are lost to bribery, kickbacks and many other forms of corruption? It is an attitude that focuses on greed, quick money and a life style of cheating. You can’t get to Heaven living that way. Sooner or later most of the corrupt operators will get their justice. Too bad, most will be replaced with others of the same ilk. Just how deep is corruption?


Too deep!


Harry Alford is the co-founderpresident/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce

___________________________________________

The US now has the categories listed below as a former Rule of Law nation.....but we know all categories below have no active justice.

What is the Rule of Law?

The rule of law is a system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:

  1. The government and its officials and agents as well as individuals and private entities are accountable under the law.
  2. The laws are clear, publicized, stable and just, are applied evenly, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property.
  3. The process by which the laws are enacted, administered and enforced is accessible, fair and efficient.
  4. Justice is delivered timely by competent, ethical, and independent representatives and neutrals who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.
These four universal principles which comprise the WJP's notion of the rule of law are further developed in the nine factors of the WJP Rule of Law Index.

Why the Rule of Law Matters to Everyone The rule of law is the underlying framework of rules and rights that make prosperous and fair societies possible. The rule of law is a system in which no one, including government, is above the law; where laws protect fundamental rights; and where justice is accessible to all.

To learn more about how the rule of law impacts the lives and work of all people, click here.

Factors Limited Government Powers

In a society governed by the rule of law, the government and its officials and agents are subject to and held accountable under the law. Modern societies have developed systems of checks and...
Learn more

Absence of Corruption

The absence of corruption - conventionally defined as the use of public power for private gain - is one of the hallmarks of a society governed by the rule of law, as corruption is a manifestation...
Learn more

Order and Security

Human security is one of the defining aspects of any rule of law society. Protecting human security, mainly assuring the security of persons and property, is a fundamental function of the state....
Learn more

Fundamental Rights

Under the rule of law, fundamental rights must be effectively guaranteed. A system of positive law that fails to respect core human rights established under international law is at best “rule by...
Learn more

Open Government

Open government is essential to the rule of law. It involves engagement, access, participation, and collaboration between the government and its citizens, and plays a crucial role in the promotion...
Learn more

Regulatory Enforcement

Public enforcement of government regulations is pervasive in modern societies as a method to induce conduct. A critical feature of the rule of law is that such rules are upheld and properly...
Learn more

Civil Justice

In a rule of law society, ordinary people should be able to resolve their grievances and obtain remedies in conformity with fundamental rights through formal institutions of justice in a peaceful...
Learn more

Criminal Justice

An effective criminal justice system is a key aspect of the rule of law, as it constitutes the natural mechanism to redress grievances and bring action against individuals for offenses against...
Learn more

Informal Justice

For many countries it is important to acknowledge the role played by traditional, or ‘informal’, systems of law — including traditional, tribal, and religious courts, as well as community-based...
Learn more


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

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