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September 03rd, 2014

9/3/2014

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MARYLAND LEADS IN COMMISSIONS, BOARDS, AND COMMITTEES THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PUBLIC INTEREST OR OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY----THEY ARE THERE TO MAKE SURE THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN!

I want to spend a few days looking at individual government commissions at each level of government to show how dysfunctional they are.    Policy goes there to die or it is called one thing while doing another.
  You see just that in the article below about Massachusetts and its commissions.....I give an example of the same in Maryland.

The surge in states creating commissions and quasi-status for NGOs was a step towards moving the business of legislating away from state and local legislators and handing major public policy decisions to whatever appointee a Governor or Mayor made. Fast forward to neo-liberals and neo-cons controlling our major parties and you have global corporate pols appointing corporate people working in corporate/shareholder interest and against public interest. WE DO NOT WANT COMMISSIONS ETC CIRCUMVENTING OUR LEGISLATURES. This same process has Congress with appointed committees that write entire policy ------ten pols writing critical public policy and then taking it to the floor of Congress to 'tweak'. NONE OF THIS IS REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY.

A DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN WOULD NOT SUPPORT THESE CENTRALIZED POLICY-MAKING ENTITIES. GET RID OF THE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.

Meanwhile the committees that were once filled with the general public in local communities/boards are languishing.  In their place----private corporate non-profits headed by directors appointed by corporations funding an issue.  As the article below states, and this is true in Maryland-----no oversight or accountability or even attention to staffing is happening with public committees and community groups.

In Maryland, the commissions that are active and filled with appointees by Governor or Mayor have most of their meetings behind closed doors calling issues proprietary and minutes reflect that lack of transparency.  This is why Maryland citizens never know what is happening in policy until it comes to vote......too late to organize and protest.


Imagine if all of those boards and committees met in our local schools in the evenings to discuss the issue assigned to these committees.......that is what we used to do.  This is the democratic discussion of issues that has been allowed to wither as boards meet during a workday in places not convenient to the general public. 

WE NEED EVERYONE DEMANDING PUBLIC COMMITTEES AND BOARDS AND GETTING OUT TO PARTICIPATE.  YOU ARE THE ONE WHO LEGISLATES.


State study confirms unfilled job boards


By Todd Wallack  | Globe Staff   July 30, 2014

Massachusetts is failing to properly staff and track hundreds of state boards, committees, and commissions, a Senate panel concluded in a report released Wednesday, resulting in what some call “zombie boards” that never meet.

The Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight discovered dozens of state panels that have not met or produced reports in years, alongside new committees that have not been able to start because of empty seats, while still other panels appear to be redundant. The review found that 48 boards are probably no longer needed either because they have completed their work or outlived their missions, such as one that issued its final report on the future of Boston Harbor beaches in the 1990s.

“I was surprised that we hadn’t taken action earlier,” said Senator Cynthia S. Creem, the Newton Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight, who added that many people count on state boards to champion issues they care about. “I think it’s been neglected.”

The Senate researchers’ work was complicated, however, by the fact that the governor’s website for boards and commissions omitted some panels where the governor does not make appointments. And information for the roughly 700 boards that were listed was “often absent, incomplete, out-of-date and/or incorrect.”

“The Commonwealth’s current system for appointing commission members and monitoring commissions’ activities is inadequate,” the report found.

The Senate launched the review last spring after the Globe reported that more than one-third of the seats on state boards and commissions were either vacant or filled with holdovers whose terms had officially expired months or years ago — a figure that took many state officials by surprise. The Globe also found that some boards had not met in decades (including at least one with a member who was dead), while others struggled to gather a quorum because of the vacancies.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that Massachusetts appears to have far more boards than other states its size, according to a Globe survey of a dozen other states,making it difficult to keep track of them and fill all the vacant positions.

Senator Robert L. Hedlund, a Weymouth Republican on the post audit committee, said he believes lawmakers and the executive branch have become too eager to set up commissions and too reluctant to eliminate them when they are no longer useful.

“It seems as though government in general expands and it never really contracts,” said Hedlund, the assistant minority leader. “I would like us to be a little more serious when we form a commission and be judicious, so that when we do form a commission it is taken seriously.”

Officials in the governor’s office, which controls the majority of board appointments,
said they are already working on ways to eliminate unneeded boards.

“We have made tremendous progress in deactivating boards and commissions that are no longer current, where it is within our power to do so,” said Heather Nichols, a spokeswoman in the governor’s office. “Where it is not, we are happy to work with the Legislature to sunset those boards and commissions that have already served out their purpose.”

Patrick administration staffers said they do the best they can to fill vacant positions, but noted that it can be challenging because the vast majority of positions are unpaid and require significant hours to attend meetings, often during the day. Many vacant seats are also controlled by state lawmakers and other officials outside the adminstration’s control.

The Senate review made a number of recommendations to address the problems, some of which would require legislation:

■ Requiring the governor’s office and departments to review whether commissions are riddled with vacancies, struggled to gather a quorum, have not met in a year, or are no longer needed;

■ Creating a sunset review commission to determine whether boards or commissions should be dissolved because they are redundant or defunct;

■ Streamlining the background check for new board members;

■  Giving the governor more flexibility to fill seats when he cannot find someone meeting all the requirements specified in state law;

■ Reappointing holdover members to new terms if new members cannot be found;

■ Making greater efforts to update the state’s boards and commissions website, as well as to add details on panels that are currently missing;

■ Posting meeting agendas, minutes, and reports for all commissions online;

■ Changing the law to automatically eliminate special commissions after they have issued their final reports.

But Hedlund, the Republican committee member, worried that the government has become so lax about following up on commissions that it probably will not follow through on the Senate panel’s recommendations either.

“It will be treated in the same way,” Hedlund predicted. “Tomororrow, it will be yesterday’s news.”


__________________________________________
This is one example of a commission on fracking created by O'Malley and neo-liberals under the guise of protecting Maryland from fracking abuses.  Neo-liberals support fracking and O'Malley led the Governor's Commission on exporting natural gas----an action that places fracking on steroids.  So, we have pols painted as being 'green' because they formed a commission that did absolutely nothing and never had any intent to protect Maryland Marcellus Shale from fracking.

The millions of dollars sent to this 'study' more than likely went to subsidize natural gas exploration in Maryland to find the best land to frack and then allowing the same connected people to buy that land.



For Immediate Release Thursday, April 3, 2014 - 4:05pmFood & Water WatchContact: Jorge Aguilar – 202-683-2529; JAguilar@fwwatch.org
Rich Bindell – 202-683-2457; RBindell@fwwatch.org

Fracking Health Study Narrow, Hasty, and Underfunded Say Health Experts

Call On Gov. O’Malley and Maryland Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission To Extend Deadline On Health Study

WASHINGTON - Today, a commissioner from Governor Martin O’Malley’s Marcellus Shale Commission joined three leading medical advocacy groups at a press conference in Baltimore in critiquing the timeline and scope of a study on the possible health impacts of shale gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” that is scheduled for release in June.

Representatives from the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments (ANHE), Maryland Environment Health Network (MdEHN), Concerned Health Professionals of New York  (CHPNY), Food and Water Watch and Ann Bristow warned that the study is poised to fall woefully short of meeting international standards and health study guidelines for protecting public health.

They called on Governor O’Malley to commit more resources and to extend the health study deadline in order to fully assess the potential health effects to all Marylanders. They also noted that the study is limited to investigating possible impacts on public health only among residents of Western Maryland, even though exploitable shale gas reserves are located across the state.

“We are watching the emerging science from other states show increasing harms from fracking. We’re hearing about poisoned drinking water and radioactive waste, as well as smog in places that used to have pristine air.  So it is clear that an eight month study period, funded at $150,000 does not suffice to assess even the top tier of costly health impacts that fracking will likely have in Western Maryland, let alone the rest of the state,” said Rebecca Ruggles, Director of the Maryland Environmental Health Network said.

 “As it currently stands, the State of Maryland is conducting a flawed, rushed, and superficial study that will not help inform Maryland residents—nor their elected officials—about the full burden of possible health risks from the entire process of shale gas extraction,” said Katie Huffling, a registered nurse and the director of programs for the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. “As nurses, we are also gravely concerned that they will not be including a health cost assessment in their study. If the public is being asked to assume health risks from fracking, it deserves a comprehensive investigation of those risks and their economic costs, not a fig leaf."

Health professionals across the country have argued that a Health Impact Assessment (HIA)—a specific National Research Council-sanctioned process developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization (among others)—must be conducted to inform any decision as critical as whether or not fracking should be permitted in states.

“Drilling and fracking operations are inherently dangerous and pose demonstrable risks to health, especially for children, pregnant women and other vulnerable people living nearby,” said Sandra Steingraber, PhD and cofounder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York. “The proper tool for investigating these impacts is a comprehensive Health Impact Assessment with its vetted protocols and seal of approval by national and international public health institutions. A comprehensive HIA with full public participation, not a rushed study with a political deadline, is what the people of Maryland need and deserve. “

The Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission is currently scheduled to make a final recommendation on fracking in August to Governor Martin O’Malley that will include the health assessment report. 

Ann Bristow, a current commissioner on the Advisory Commission, also joined the medical advocates in calling for more time.

“As a member of Governor O’Malley’s Safe Drilling Initiative Commission, I am very worried that we are moving too fast and not getting all the health data we need to make protective recommendations to the residents of Maryland," said Bristow. “Several commissioners have repeatedly asked for more time and a more thorough scope of work on these critical health issues. If the health study team were on schedule, we would have received the baseline health assessment, with public commentary, last month. We need more time and a guarantee of transparency and public participation."


Food & Water Watch Southern Region Director Jorge Aguilar added that the O’Malley administration should pay attention to the demands of the health community.

“After two years of a largely unfunded process, Governor O’Malley’s administration now seems to be rushing through the final year, when specific studies just got started,” said Food & Water Watch Regional Organizing Director Jorge Aguilar. “The health study team has already missed its first deadline and it’s not clear that the health community will have time to comment on the final report.  The writing is on the wall: this will be an inadequate study unless the time line is drastically modified to address the concerns of the health community.”

###Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.


____________________________________________

You will note that it was an out-of-state organization that outed this commission for failing to do its duties on the mission tasked----not any Maryland organization.  Note as well Heather Mizeur is on this commission and ran as protecting Marylanders from fracking. 

YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ON THIS COMMISSION IF YOU WANTED TO DO THAT.

Now, as this out-of-state organization says----this commission ----NARROW, HASTY, AND UNDERFUNDED----never meaning to find anything.  What this commission should be is a long-term, citizen-filled exploratory group committed to research and planning for the public interest.  This is why public committees and boards
tasked with doing just that are languishing without support.

WE MUST ENGAGE IN POLITICS----BE THE CITIZENS FILLING THESE BOARDS, COMMITTEES, AND COMMISSIONS IF WE ARE GOING TO REMAIN CITIZENS.


MARCELLUS SHALE SAFE-DRILLING INITIATIVE ADVISORY COMMISSION


David A. Vanko, Ph.D., Chair (appointed by Secretary of the Environment & Secretary of Natural Resources)

Appointed by Secretary of the Environment & Secretary of Natural Resources:
Shawn Bender; Ann R. Bristow, Ph.D.; Stephen M. Bunker; George C. Edwards; Margaret J. (Peggy) Jamison; Jeffrey F. Kupfer, Esq.; Clifford S. Mitchell, M.D.; Heather R. Mizeur; Dominick E. Murray; James M. Raley; Paul Roberts; William R. Valentine; Nicholas Weber, Ph.D.; Harry Weiss, Esq. Montgomery Park Business Center, 1800 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, Maryland, February 2004. Photo by Diane F. Evartt.


Staff: Brigid E. Kenney c/o Department of the Environment
Montgomery Park Business Center, 1800 Washington Blvd., Baltimore, MD 21230
(410) 537-3085
e-mail: bkenney@mde.state.md.us
web: www.mde.state.md.us/programs/land/mining/marcellus/pages/index.aspx

  • Maryland Marcellus Shale Public Health Study, July 2014
  • Interim Report, July 2014
  • Initial Report, December 2011
Final Report (with Dept. of the Environment & Dept. of Natural Resources) due Aug. 1, 2014.

In June 2011, the Governor created the Marcellus Shale Safe-Drilling Initiative Advisory Commission (Executive Order 01.01.2011.11). With the Department of the Environment and the Department of Natural Resources, the Commission is studying the short-term, long-term and cumulative effects of producing natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation. This formation underlies portions of Western Maryland: Allegany and Garrett counties being the only parts of the State with natural gas reserves in Marcellus Shale. Drilling for natural gas from the Marcellus shale involves a process called hydraulic fracturing. This requires very deep wells with long horizontal sections through which pressurized water, sand, and chemicals are blasted to crack rock and release the natural gas.

Authorization for the Commission extends through May 1, 2015.

_______________________________________
Keep in mind who supports O'Malley and neo-liberals every election in Maryland-----labor and justice leaders.  Anthony Brown will be worse than O'Malley if that is possible.  Of course all of these corporate policies are Republican so you do not vote Republican to get environmental policy.

Let's look at who these people are that O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly placed in charge of Departments that protect our land and water.


Keep in mind, this happens all the time and all Maryland pols know this is what Maryland Assembly and neo-liberals and neo-cons do with all these commissions.


Department of the Environment

21 August 2014

doe    DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Governor Martin J. O'Malley

Water Management      Jay G. Sakai
Robert M. Summers            Secretary

Guess what!  Sakai is from Baltimore with Baltimore's Public Works and a Hopkins graduate.  Hopkins is VEOLA Environment----privatizing public water works and Hopkins is a great big shareholder in natural gas and exporting raw energy.
  That is someone you would put in an agency to make sure commissions like this Marcellus Shale protects the fracking interests.

DO YOU HEAR MARYLAND ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS SHOUTING THIS COLLUSION WITH CORPORATIONS THAT KILL THE ENVIRONMENT?  I DON'T.



Previously, Mr. Sakai also directed the technical support functions for the City of Baltimore’s Department of Public Works, an agency with more than 3,400 employees, where he administered application development contracts and large-scale information technology implementations.

He serves on the board of the Maryland Association of Municipal Wastewater Agencies. Mr. Sakai is also a member of the American Water Works Association and the American Public Works Association.

Mr. Sakai succeeds Robert M. Summers, Ph.D., who is now MDE’s Deputy Secretary. A licensed professional engineer, Mr. Sakai holds a Master of Science in Business and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.


WOW------another Johns Hopkins grad in Natural Resources---water agency.  Don't forget, Hopkins is behind the collapse of our Baltimore water system as all of state and city revenue that should have gone to upgrading infrastructure went to building Hopkins global corporation...... and it's bid to take Baltimore Harbor global will kill the Chesapeake Bay with invasive species and pollution.  The Baltimore Harbor recently received an 'F' in pollution, and it was this Department of Natural Resources with the Department of Environment that approved the construction at Harbor Point on toxic waste dump.
  So, it takes lots of failed policy to remain at 'F' in environment for decades.

SEE WHY THIS MARCELLUS SHALE COMMISSION IS KNOWN FOR BEING NARROW, HASTY, AND UNDERFUNDED.





Dr. Summers received his B.A. (1976) and Ph.D. (1982) in Environmental Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Maryland’s environmental programs, he worked as a post-doctoral research associate at the State University of New York, Marine Sciences Research Center in Stony Brook, NY and as a research assistant at the Johns Hopkins University’s Chesapeake Bay Institute.




DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES


Governor Martin J. O'Malley

Joseph P. Gill    Secretary


Land Resources    Kristin Saunders Evans



Mr Gill is a Georgetown grad in law with a history of leading a quasi-public land trust.
  Now, if you live in Maryland you know that public land is disappearing faster than ever usually under the guise of public private partnerships.  You place M and T Bank Stadium on public land and it is no longer public land.  You give the Port of Baltimore to a private investment firm and you no longer have public land/water.  You hand public land to expand natural gas export terminal and you lose public land.  You place a private residential high-rise on public housing land and you no longer have public land.  You privatize public schools to private charters and you no longer have public land.  You hand all waterfront property in Baltimore and National Harbor et al to private developers and you no longer have public land.  You give public parks/mansions -----public universities over to private non-profits and you no longer have public land.  You privatize public water and waste----you give private rights to natural gas, BGE, and CSX lines and the public loses large swaths of land.  All this is happening today in Maryland.  Baltimore is seeing all of its public land handed to private developers.

What is Maryland Environmental Land Trust?  Well, the development in Maryland is anything but environmental.



Maryland Environmental Trust


Company Description:

 The Maryland Environmental Trust (MET) is quasi-public statewide land trust established in 1967. Staffed with funds from the Department of Natural Resources, it is directed by an independent Board of Trustees. This unusual structure has resulted in the protection of over 100,000 acres of privately-owned forest, farm, and open space land across the State of Maryland with permanent, donated easements.



Below you see Ed Rendell of PA.....a state totally destroyed by fracking and a pol handing complete control of public land to fracking corporations.....teamed with Anthony Brown---do you hear Maryland Environmental Trust going crazy over all this?  Not a word.  They are represented on this Marcellus Shale commission by Mr Gill's appointee.

Maryland’s New Public-Private Partnerships



Date: Thursday, May 9, 2013 « Back to Events Start:May 9, 2013 8:30 amEnd:May 9, 2013 11:30 amCategory:News

Maryland’s New P3 Legislation Maryland’s New Public-Private Partnerships Legislation Maryland’s newly passed P3 Legislation sets the stage for Public-Private
Partnerships to increase investment in the state. This is the best and first
chance to hear about Maryland’s new P3 law from people who know what this means
for Maryland’s economy. The panel, moderated by Ballard Spahr, includes leaders
from the public and private sectors with extensive P3 experience in commercial
and institutional development, as well as infrastructure projects. Keynote
speakers include Maryland’s Lt. Governor Anthony Brown and former Pennsylvania
Governor Ed Rendell.
Plan to join us on May 9 at the BWI Hilton. We will be announcing the panel in
the near future, so check baltimore.uli.org for details and updates. Featured Speakers:
· Maryland Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown
· Ben Stutz, State of Maryland
· Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell

Moderator: Brian Walsh, Ballard Spahr
· Chuck Watters, Hines
· Andy Garbutt, KPMG
· Leif Dormsjo. Acting Deputy Secretary, MDOT
· Chris Guthkeltch, Skanska USA
· Tom Rousakis, Goldman Sachs

Master of Ceremonies:
· Sandy Apgar, Apgar Company


__________________________________________
Below you see a Department of Natural Resources staff charged with such things as appointing members of commissions like the Marcellus Shale with a long history of bad environmental results.  All of Maryland's environment is at risk because the Department of Natural Resources has such a skeleton staffing that no oversight happens.  As you see below stewardship of the land is not key in this public agency.

When we elect pols like O'Malley who are simply working for corporations they will staff agencies with people looking to move money to the right people and not to doing the work of the public.  Then, you compound that by having these same appointees choosing who participates on these commissions and you get the results outlined at the top. 

Public commissions, public committees, and public boards should have people passionate about the issues from the public perspective, not corporate profit.

YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS KEEP SUPPORTING THE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS CREATING THESE POLICIES-----PLEASE GET RID OF THESE INCUMBENTS!


Below you see who will be involved in these fracking and land use issues and who is appointed to commissions developing plans.

Remember, Maryland is one of the richest states in the nation----plenty of money for this stuff being lost to fraud and corruption.


   Kristin Saunders Evans

Secretary for Land Resources.


Study finds Md.'s parks, after deep cuts in staff and services in recent years, need an infusion

State parks in peril


November 09, 2007|

By Candus Thomson | Candus Thomson,Sun reporter



"I don't think anyone was surprised by the findings," said Kristin Saunders Evans, assistant secretary of the Department of Natural Resources who oversees parks. "We're trying to the best of our ability and resources, but in some instances we've let our stakeholders down."


Below you see yet another 'nationally recognized program' in Maryland that does not really exist.  It is all propaganda to make Maryland look progressive.
  Our Health Care reform and our Education reform is all called 'a national model' and is a mess because we have no oversight and accountability or pols in office working in the public interest.  JUKING THE STATS makes everything done a national model.


Indoor projects raise questions

Md. auditors criticize use of funds designated for open-space projects


August 08, 2008

|By Laura Smitherman | Laura Smitherman,Sun reporter

Program Open Space, Maryland's nationally recognized effort to create outdoor recreational opportunities and preserve untouched lands, has been spending money on the indoors - including golf-course building renovations, community centers and an indoor aquatic center.

Call it Program Enclosed Space.

State auditors criticized the longstanding practice in a report yesterday on the Department of Natural Resources and said that the General Assembly's counsel advised them that the use of open-space funding for indoor recreational facilities doesn't appear to be within the law.

Agency officials told auditors that they believed the indoor projects qualified for funding because the facilities accommodate recreational activities, such as swimming, that are typically done outdoors. And, agency officials noted, the public would be able to enjoy year-round use of the indoor facilities, making them a better investment.

John R. Griffin, natural resources secretary, promised to seek clarifying legislative language in the next General Assembly session to ensure that such expenditures follow the letter of the law. Nonetheless, agency officials said they were surprised by the dispute.

The open-space program has been used to build or acquire indoor facilities since the 1970s, they said, and state lawmakers are typically enthusiastically supportive, attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies for the projects throughout the summer. They said the indoor facilities must be related to the mission of the program and are often nature centers or recreational facilities.

"Bottom line is, this has been going on for a long time, and this is the first time we've seen it raised by legislative auditors,"
said Eric Schwaab, the agency's deputy secretary. "These local projects have long been supported. It's not like this has been conducted in secret."

In recent months, $2 million in open-space funding has been approved for Calvert County's first indoor aquatic center, $1.4 million for the purchase of the Sonic Sports Arena in Cecil County and about $240,000 for indoor tennis lights in Montgomery County.

Program Open Space, established in 1969, is funded through transfer taxes on real estate transactions. The money is split between the state government and local communities based on a complicated formula, and much of it goes toward buying large tracts of land for preservation or parks. About $276 million has been allocated to the program over the last two years.

Local governments develop long-range plans on land preservation and recreation, and individual projects for which they seek reimbursement must be approved by the state's Board of Public Works. Public comment can be made at several times in the process.


"It's a wide-open, very public process," said Kristin Saunders Evans, assistant secretary for land resources at the natural resources department.






Logging GRSF 3

In the coming months, the Forest Service will publish the FY2011plan for the Green Ridge State Forest. As with previous plans, the Forest Service will propose cutting down more than 200 acres of trees in several sites.Most of the logging will leave about six trees per acre.DNR cuts trees that are 90-100 years old, far short of their biological maturity,1with the stated goal of optimizing production of timber.2Other goals, such as encouraging wildlife growth and breeding, providing healthy forests for Maryland citizens, stabilization of soil, or sequestering carbon are subsidiary or have not been considered.


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August 30th, 2014

8/30/2014

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As the article stated yesterday---costs for PIP are not going up----there is simply more fraud and corruption lifting the costs as with Medicare and Medicaid.  We are reforming Medicare and Medicaid because the health industry fraud sucked the Trusts dry.  That is what is happening with PIP.  The insurance and health industries are inflation costs by fraud with soaring profits and then claiming PIP needs to be dismantled because it is too costly.....same as Medicare.  So, rather than having the costs of your health care covered with this auto insurance that is required by law---you are now going to be pushed into Medicaid which now mostly covers only preventative health care.  This eliminates yet another outlet for health coverage for the working and middle-class while insurance and health industry profits soar.

Notice the Maryland Assembly is about to end PIP and push Maryland citizens into the most private and profit-driven health system in the nation---Medicaid and preventative care.
  The No Fault auto premiums are no small payment---as many times as people use it the total premium amounts paid often covered costs.

Think that at the same time, your rates go higher and higher for simply being in an accident no matter it wasn't your fault.  That is what deregulating the insurance industry looks like.  It gives them the ability to charge anything they want as laws are on the books requiring you to have some kind of insurance.  Deregulating while making insurance mandatory----watch that disposable income disappear with rate hikes.

Tort-based auto insurance means the ambulance-personal injury lawyers that you see on TV will be the only recourse for paying medical bills and we all know these lawyers pocket most of the money won in the lawsuit with the plaintiff often receiving pennies on the dollar.  So, this will cost health care more and that money will go to lawyers and it will come from taxpayer Medicaid.
So, now the insurance, the health care, and lawyers are getting a cut money that always went to actual care for the patient who will be bankrupt and/or left with little access to care.

THESE ARE NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CON POLICIES MOVING ALL MONEY TO CORPORATE PROFIT ON THE BACKS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.


All Maryland pols are neo-liberal and neo-cons doing all of the above.

'Rates did go down initially'---before the fraud and corruption sent them soaring.

PIP and No-Fault Auto Insurance Reform


More and more states are abandoning the PIP/No-Fault form of auto insurance in favor of a tort-based set of laws. PIP/No Fault originated in the 1930s as an alternative to the often slow and expensive process of litigating claims. The intent was to speed up the process by shifting the dispute resolution from the courts to the insurance companies. In theory, this was supposed to reduce insurance rates—and rates did go down initially.

By the mid-70s, almost 20 states had some form of no-fault insurance laws. However, over time, rates again rose until "No-Fault" states had higher rates than tort-based states. Beginning in 1980, states started repealing their no-fault laws, and now only nine states (Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota and Utah) have mandatory no-fault laws. Eleven states plus the District of Columbia have hybrid laws (Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia), which are a combination of no-fault and tort systems.

The pendulum seems to be swinging back to tort-based auto insurance. What does this mean for you as a policyholder?

The Good News

Tort-based systems, in theory, give you more choices for medical payments and could save you substantial amounts of money. As an example, depending on the insurance company and coverages selected, those with Colorado car insurance (the most recent state to revert to a tort-based system) could see savings of 10 percent to 30 percent, according to several recent Denver Post articles.

The Choices

PIP, or Personal Injury Protection, is still available (in most cases), should you wish (or need) to pay for it. If you choose to drop this coverage, or if you are already under a tort-based system and don't have this coverage, you can still purchase it with most policies to cover medical expenses. However, coverage will be limited, with a general ceiling of $50,000. This additional coverage, if purchased, will pay expenses incurred by you and your immediate family for injuries resulting from an at-fault auto accident.

Since many drivers are uninsured or underinsured, it is essential that you understand the ramifications of this and make an informed decision about the "Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists" coverage option.

What if?

What happens if you are at fault? Your auto policy should pay the other person's claims. Companies normally negotiate this with each other. If you have insufficient coverage, you may have to go to court—thus displaying the tort aspect of the law. Either you or your health insurance company will pay medical expenses for you and your family once those expenses exceed your auto policy coverages.

What if you are injured by another driver who is at fault? Generally, the two auto insurance companies will work together to determine fault and pay benefits accordingly. This resolves the problem in most cases. If not, or if the amounts paid are insufficient, it may be necessary to resort back to the court system to recover damages.

What if the other driver is at-fault and has no (or inadequate) insurance? Your insurance company normally covers your medical expenses. This protection is provided under the uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. If you do not have this coverage, your health insurance usually pays the bills, or you can sue the other party.

Consider the "Deductible Gap"

Generally, under a tort system, medical payments from your own policy are limited. However, in most cases you can choose "additional medical payments" and "Uninsured/Underinsured Motorists" coverage as part of your auto insurance policy.

After years of rising rates, many people may choose to forgo any additional coverages. Adding these coverages creates financial strain if you have high-deductible health insurance, or no health insurance at all. However, there is a potentially huge gap between the amount paid under a tort-based policy and your health insurance deductible. If you have no insurance, the out-of-pocket costs could be staggering. If you are not at fault in the accident, the tort-based system allows you to go to court to receive compensation for these costs, as well as for pain and suffering. But you must do so within a specified time period, and a lot of out-of-pocket expenses may be involved.

What does this mean for health insurance?

As more costs are shifted to the health insurance system, your insurance costs are likely to rise. This also means more people will be without health insurance.

So, what is next?

This is a good time to look at your health insurance to make sure you will have adequate coverage if you drop your PIP/No-Fault coverage. Don't wait until you're in an unpleasant situation to find out if you need more insurance. Be prepared!

_______________________________________________

This is when PIP was working in the interest of citizens and government coffers.  Insurance corporations were earning profits in the millions while the Uninsured auto insurance pool was bursting at the seams with revenue. 

NOW, HOW CAN WE DIVERT THE MONEY PAID INTO THIS FUND FOR HEALTH CARE INTO PROJECTS THAT BENEFIT DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS.

This is when a good program was targeted for fraud and corruption just as with the other Federal programs Medicare and Federal Housing Authority.  Working well for citizens, leaving government coffers flush to handle future events, allowing millions in profits to be earned---BUT THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH.  You see the article below was written in 1993----HERE COMES NEO-LIBERAL CLINTON TO DEREGULATE ALL THAT HE CAN SEE......this is the deregulation that sent all of this surplus in the Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund to development corporations like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  There's Donald Schaefer funneling money from Transporation Trusts and now MAIF to balance the budget with the public's designated money.  Baltimore Development paraded all kinds of working class and poor out to praise Schaefer who was behind creating Baltimore Development Corporations to funnel all the city's revenue from where it was to go----to where they wanted to send it.

You see the insurance corporations were able to move more and more people into MAIF clearing its rolls of all but the best of drivers.  It went from helping low-income people to subsidizing the costs of these auto insurance corporations.  It was gutted of its funds for
pet projects.  I know Ravens fans love their stadium----but most of the fans are the ones no longer affording auto insurance because of the subsidy.  Note that the Uninsured Motorist insurance had high premiums and should have paid all health care costs when needed.

Remember, this was done through fraud and corruption because this money was not to be fungible.  It needs to come back to this government coffer.



I KNOW---LET'S SEND THIS PIP MONEY TO BUILD THE NEW FOOTBALL FIELD.----M AND T STADIUM AND BALANCE THE BUDGET WITH IT.


MAIF's embarrassment of riches

March 04, 1993|
By Frank A. DeFilippo  Baltimore Sun

THE Maryland Automobile Insurance Fund has a big-time problem. It's rich. So rich, in fact, that other state agencies are itching to get their hot little hands on MAIF's $118 million surplus.

MAIF's been approached about financing a new football stadium in Baltimore. Sen. George W. Della Jr. of Baltimore has sponsored a bill that would shift $50 million of MAIF's money to the general fund. And the Schaefer administration is pilfering $5.4 million from MAIF to help balance the budget.

MAIF is Maryland's state-run insurer of last resort. Any Maryland motorist who's turned down by at least two commercial insurers is automatically MAIFed.

MAIF's rates aren't cheap.
Depending on how bad a motorist's record is, the driver's age and ZIP code, bare-bones coverage can range from $2,559 to a stick-it-to-'em high of $8,677 a year.

That MAIF should be suffering such an embarrassment of riches during a time of budget cuts and deficits is an embarrassment itself. MAIF's $118 million surplus is larger than the $100 million budget shortfall that's being plugged with keno proceeds and other money.

In theory, at least, MAIF is supposed to be non-profit. It was created in 1973 as an antidote to the no-fault insurance craze at the time, kind of an everybody's-fault approach. It's run by a board of trustees and receives no state funds, nor are its assets part of the state treasury. To settle claims, MAIF has the power to attach salaries and seize property.

Over the years, the commercial insurance companies in Maryland have pumped $137 million into MAIF. In effect, good drivers subsidize the insurance of bad drivers. In 1980, MAIF had 30,000 policies. Today it has 135,000.

Much of MAIF's excess is due to changes in the way it does business as well as some shrewd investments. At the same time MAIF has reduced rates over the past three years, it's also lowered awards. MAIF is also now doing all of its work in-house instead of farming it out to free-lance adjusters and collectors.

So it should come as no surprise that the Schaefer administration's pie-slicers approached MAIF about lending the Maryland Stadium Authority $100 million to help finance a new football stadium if Baltimore wins one of two NFL expansion franchises.

There are serious legal questions about whether the Stadium Authority has a funding mechanism for another stadium if the city is awarded a team. Because of a change in the tax code, the use of tax-free bonds to finance stadiums expired at the end of 1990.


The authority argues, though, that it's confident that it can float tax-free bonds because there have been a number of test cases around the country that might allow it.

Moreover, the authority has a bonding limit of $220 million, of which it has already used $170 million to build the new baseball stadium. The authority will pocket another $30 million over three years from lottery proceeds -- on top of the $50 million in bond money left over from the ballyard -- a total of $74 million. But a new topless football stadium will cost about $130 million. Put a lid on it, and it'll cost millions more.

So here's the catch: If the authority can't float tax-free bonds, it will have to go to market with bonds at a much higher interest rate. But before it can go to market with bonds, the authority will need the General Assembly's approval to increase its bonding capacity. This could hoist the total bond package over the spending affordability limit. Allowing this is action the legislature is reluctant to take.

It's for this reason that Gov. William Donald Schaefer is bypassing the spending affordability limit and proposing the use of transportation bonds to finance improvements to Baltimore's Convention Center. Now he's trying to scoot around the spending limit again just in case there's a football team in the city's future.

So drive carefully. Get MAIFed, and the premiums you pay could wind up helping to finance some government geegaw.

Frank A. DeFilippo writes every other Thursday on Maryland politics.

_______________________________________

Here we are just a handful of years later and what the first article stated was in fact true in Maryland----it was the hybrid model Maryland adopted that sent auto insurance money to lawyers and doctors.

Now, they are working to end hybrid and make it all tort. 
People not being able to afford strong health coverage will be preyed upon -----80% of the American people.

Again, another public program that worked fine for the people gutted and dismantled by neo-liberals and neo-cons.  Profit over people every time

Again, we are at the height of Reagan/Clinton's deregulation frenzy.
I wonder if those voters wanting small government wanted to be pushed out of driving because they can no longer afford car insurance? 

Your Public Trusts are being gutted by small government and deregulation.


Why car insurance is so high Law suits: System encourages excessive litigation, raises premiums $130 to $150 a year

.
December 23, 1996  Baltimore Sun

WANT TO LOWER your car-insurance premiums? It could happen -- if legislators in Annapolis stop catering to powerful special interests. More than 60 percent of your premium covers liability. Of that amount, 19 percent could be saved if excessive litigation and fraudulent claims were eliminated.Sadly, state legislators yawned at the problem when a gubernatorial commission sought reforms this year. Too many of them want to please trial lawyers and doctors who vigorously fight for the status quo. These special interests know that lower insurance premiums would come out of their pockets.



_________________________________________



I have talked about AIG spinoff HighStar and its connection with the Ivy League schools like Johns Hopkins.  The subprime mortgage fraudulent loans were insured here with the idea that HighStar would break from AIG with the equity and leave taxpayers to pay 100% on the dollar for the fraudulent Credit Default Swaps.   This article does a good job doing this.  Geithner was the NY FED chief that watched as trillions of dollars of fraud ran through the mortgage industry and did nothing about it----he aided and abetted the massive fraud.  What many people may  not know AIG was more a Life Insurance agency with this HighStar hedge fund sucking all its profits into their bank accounts.  Indeed, the taxpayer bailout of AIG saved the shareholders and those insured by CDS-----but it left an AIG still in business and limping along saying it is healthy when indeed it is not.  AIG Life Insurance advertises on Free TV---you know , where you get life insurance with no checkup.  Like you get a house without having a job. 

SAME THING.  THIS IS THE SUBPRIMING OF LIFE INSURANCE.


They are simply selling as many policies as they can and gaining those monthly payments knowing the coming economic collapse will bankrupt them again.

You are guaranteed to get back what you put into this Life Insurance plan-----OH REALLY????  They will spin that Life Insurance money off as they did with HighStar----probably to HighStar just as the economy is ready to crash.  THEN WE WILL HEAR----WE CAN'T PAY YOUR PREMIUMS BACK!


They will keep doing this with every business sector until you and I get rid of the neo-liberals and neo-cons that have allowed this corporate system to be deregulated with no oversight and accountability.

AIG's Collapse: The Part Nobody Likes to Talk About


Hester Peirce JUN 16, 2014 12:00pm ET

  Earlier this month, American International Group announced the departure of Robert Benmosche, the CEO who led the company through most of its recovery from the financial crisis. Now that the company’s postcrisis chapter is underway, it is worth taking a fresh look at AIG’s downfall and rescue and the implications for reform.

The standard AIG story lays all the blame for the company’s problems on AIG Financial Products—an allegedly unregulated, irresponsible, derivatives dealer hiding within an otherwise solid insurance company.

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner repeats this traditional line in his recent book, where he recounts how an aggressive “hedge fund-like subsidiary called AIG Financial Products” brought the otherwise healthy insurance company to its knees and ultimately drove it into the Fed’s welcoming arms. Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made a similar claim when he told Congress how angry he was about AIG’s Financial Products unit—“a hedge fund attached [to] a large and stable insurance company.” And former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, with typical dramatic flair, explained that AIG’s “subsidiary, AIG Financial Products, operating out of London, brought down the company and nearly toppled the U.S. economy.”

This widely repeated narrative ignores or downplays a critical aspect of AIG’s downfall--the insurer’s securities lending program run for the benefit of its regulated life insurance subsidiaries.

An endnote in Geithner’s tome explains that securities lending was one of “AIG’s major liquidity needs” at the time of its rescue. As I describe in a recent working paper, the company got itself into hot water by lending securities from its life insurance companies’ portfolios. AIG took the cash collateral it received for these short-term loans and—in a departure from insurance industry practice—invested much of it in longer term, illiquid residential mortgage-backed securities.

The securities lending program grew from about $10 billion at the end of 2001 to over $80 billion by the end of 2007. When borrowers stopped renewing the loans, returned their securities, and asking for their cash back, AIG was in a bind—the borrowers’ cash was tied up in reinvestments. 

To meet borrowers’ demands, AIG lent more securities and used the cash collateral from new borrowers to return to existing borrowers. This solution only aggravated the problem. When CEO Robert Willumstad took the reins of AIG in June 2008, the cash drain from securities lending worried him more than AIG Financial Products’ liquidity needs.

Losses from the securities lending program threatened the viability of a number of AIG’s regulated life insurance subsidiaries. To save them from falling below minimum capital requirements, AIG pumped billions of dollars into these units.

Government rescue money was critical to this recapitalization effort. Taxpayer funds were also critical in meeting securities borrowers’ demands for cash. Securities lending counterparties received $43.8 billion in the last quarter of 2008, comparable to $49.6 billion in collateral postings and payments to AIG’s derivatives counterparties.

As consequential as it was to AIG in a time of crisis, nobody likes to tell the securities lending part of the story. First, it doesn’t feed as nicely into the vilification of derivatives that laced crisis narratives and fueled calls for an intense derivatives regulatory regime. Second, the fact that heavily regulated insurance companies got into trouble does not support the call for greater reliance on government regulators. Finally, the rescue of a deeply troubled company is less defensible than the rescue of a healthy insurance company with a troubled derivatives subsidiary.

The Fed’s contention that its loan was adequately secured rested on the supposition that apart from the derivatives unit, AIG was sound. The banks that went in to AIG in September 2008 to assess whether it was worth rescuing concluded that it was not.

As one of the private bankers subsequently explained, “The value of the company in its entirety was not necessarily sufficient to cover the liquidity need that the company had.”


Geithner recounts in his book that—looking for confirmation that a loan to AIG would comply with the legal requirement that “the Fed can only lend against reasonably solid collateral”—he asked Warren Buffett “what he thought about the earning power of AIG’s traditional insurance subsidiaries.” Buffett “was pretty positive about their underlying value, which made [Geithner] more confident that [the Fed] could meet the legal test of being secured to [its] satisfaction.” Buffett’s words of assurance to Geithner weren’t matched by a willingness to put his own money on the line; he refused AIG’s overtures to invest during 2008.

AIG was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy when the Fed stepped in with a better deal for shareholders and creditors. The government subsequently re-rescued the company by devoting additional taxpayer funds to it and softening the lending terms.
 At any of these re-rescue points, the government could instead have let the company go through bankruptcy.

By continuing to prop up AIG, the government shielded the company from the toughest regulator of all—the markets. AIG’s problems were not confined to one unregulated corner; problems also arose in full view of insurance regulators. Rather than assuming the Fed will be better than AIG’s other regulators, we ought to allow the truly superior regulator—the market—to do its job.







_____________________________________________

I spoke yesterday about Life Insurance corporations being the most leveraged and ready to collapse of the insurance industry but guess what is the next in line of threatened insurance corporations-----

THAT'S RIGHT----WORKMAN'S COMP.

They have been allowed to create the same over-leveraged financial status that will have them bankrupt with this coming economic collapse.  No more worker's compensation----

THAT'S HOW YOU GET RID OF THE NEW DEAL SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS!  BLOW THEM UP AS WE DID THE HOUSING MARKET WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION!


Coming after more public wealth and no public justice in place to protect or give us recourse....that is what neo-liberals and neo-cons have been building these few decades-----Clinton and Obama taking the people's party and handing it to Wall Street.  Run and vote for labor and justice in all Democratic Primaries!  WE CAN REVERSE THIS!


Rapidly writing new contracts for worker's comp that they could not afford----sound familiar?


IMPLODING ALL OF THE NEW DEAL PROGRAMS TO PROTECT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DURING HARD TIMES.


After Tower Group collapse, lingering concerns about industry’s reserve adequacy

By Adam Cancryn and Saurabh Nair, SNL Financial Posted: May 6, 2014

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

Most of the concern centers on long-tailed commercial lines, particularly workers’ compensation. Claims behavior takes longer to develop than in other sectors, making it more difficult to tell how much money should be set aside even years after a policy is written. Misjudging those reserving needs can be disastrous. SeaBright Holdings Inc. sold in 2013 after reserve charges pressured its operations, and Meadowbrook’s stock dropped nearly 35% from 2012 through 2013 amid several quarters of reserve charges. Tower Group served as the highest-profile example of reserving gone wrong, with its shares losing more than 80% in the six months before it hastily agreed to a sale.

Those companies ran into problems with business written during a softer market between 2007 and 2011, when they grew their books rapidly just as the rates being charged for coverage were at their most inadequate. When claim costs far outstripped the rates they originally charged, the insurers had to quickly build up their loss reserves. Analysts now consider the 2010 accident year one of the worst performers of the cycle, attributing the troubles to low prices and more expensive claims driven by high unemployment.

“The troubles they have now is on stuff they wrote years ago,” Keefe Bruyette & Woods analyst Robert Farnam told SNL.


The 10 workers’ comp insurers with the greatest adverse development in 2013 reported an aggregate $702.6 million in charges. SeaBright and Meadowbrook did not make that list. Tower Group was also absent, as it has not yet submitted all of its filings, but it said in February that its U.S.-taxed subsidiaries recorded $269.2 million of 2013 reserve charges.

Despite the issues, the sector continues to steadily release reserves.
Companies argue that Meadowbrook and Tower Group in particular are isolated situations, driven just as much by reckless growth as the broader industry conditions.
The rest of the industry, they contend, was more prudent in writing business during the soft market, leaving it with less risk and the ability to make up for a few unfavorable accident years with better results from other parts of their books of business. The insurers themselves are also working with much more detailed data than analysts and outside actuaries, they say, allowing them to most accurately evaluate their reserves.

“We look at it on a much more granular basis, and we think we have certainly better information,” W. R. Berkley Corp. Vice President of External Financial Communications Karen Horvath told SNL. Analysts have singled out W.R. Berkley’s reserving position as one of the more concerning in the industry, predicting that its quarterly releases would soon slow. But the company in the first quarter released about $25 million, extending a string of favorable reserve development that dates back to 2007.

Even so, skeptics are not quite willing to accept insurers’ assurances as fact. They worry that companies are already drawing down their reserves for the 2012 and 2013 accident years to supplement earnings or balance out problems in earlier years, without enough data to be sure about how those most recent years will ultimately perform.


“There is just no way a company would know or have the type of certainty under which they would be able to release reserves from some of the most recent business,” said Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Siddhartha Ghosh, who warned that the workers’ comp sector will eventually have to strengthen reserves significantly. “We don’t think that’s a prudent way of addressing reserves.”

He pointed to the previous market cycle, when workers’ comp companies released $12.4 billion of reserves between 1994 and 2000 and then had to scramble to add back $10.6 billion from 2001 to 2005 to make up for their overconfidence.

The sector’s fortunes over the next several years will depend heavily on whether insurers can keep raising prices, analysts said.
The workers’ comp business is still not reliably profitable despite recent pricing actions, and low interest rates continue to pressure investment income. If companies can continue to move their prices considerably and consistently higher over the next couple years, the new premium should be enough to cover costs. If the rate hikes falter and claims from recent policies start piling up, though, the reserving actions that insurers used to buoy earnings for so long could stick them with a deficit that will take years to fill.

“It’s a simple equation,” Ghosh said. “The premium coming in has to be higher than the losses going out.”


________________________________________________
This is a pretty good analysis of the coming bond market crash.  Notice it states that the insurance market will be taken out----Life Insurance the first to go.  See why you are seeing all those Life Insurance ads requiring no medical checkup or anything-----

THEY ARE SIMPLY GOING TO POCKET THOSE MONTHLY PREMIUMS.


This was written in 2013 acting as if the crash would come in 2014 but Bernanke allowed the QE bond bubble machine to continue another year and Yellen is now having to address it as the FED is leveraged out.  The crash will come soon......the FED is simply manipulating the inevitable.

'The most vulnerable are those who can least afford to suffer losses: Seniors who are approaching or in retirement, who have shifted large amounts of their money into fixed income investments.

Your tax-free municipal bonds could tank.

Your annuities and other insurance policies could turn to dust.

Your money invested in bank and insurance company stocks could vanish right before your very eyes'.


All of this is pretty important----yet, we do not hear a thing about it from media, labor or justice, our pols---and all of these national leaders know it is coming.  Their policies created this mess and labor and justice leaders are constantly backing neo-liberals.
  It is important to have Governors and Mayors that will work through this in the people's interest and not corporate interest.

This article is not
hyperbole---it will happen.
I did edit out his marketing ---

The Next Great Bubble about to Collapse

Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. | Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 7:30 am

130 Senator Orrin Hatch warns that the bubble has the power to “destroy the retirement savings of millions of Americans.”

Famed economist Leonard E. Burman of Syracuse University is warning the U.S. Senate of “disastrous consequences for ourselves and the rest of the world.”

Goldman Sachs … Bank of America … Morgan Stanley … Royal Bank of Scotland … JPMorgan … and Oppenheimer Funds are all warning that it could bankrupt millions of investors.

Congressman Ron Paul says, simply, “this country will be ruined.”

These and many other authorities are talking about the greatest financial bubble in human history:

A bubble that is now more than EIGHT times larger than all the stock exchanges in the United States combined.

A bubble so massive, it is four times larger than the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the housing bubble of the 2000s combined.

Now that bubble has begun to burst.

As it implodes, it will launch interest rates into the stratosphere … crush the feeble U.S. economy … destroy major U.S. banks and insurance companies … drive your cost of living through the roof, threaten your standard of living and financial security … and push the U.S. government to the very brink of financial collapse.

But the best defense is a strong offense -- and this crisis will also create windfall profit opportunities for a select group of investors who make the right moves now.

Just a few days ago, Weiss Research analyst Tom Essaye hosted a special online summit meeting to explain exactly how, and I’ll give you a transcript of the meeting in a moment.

In our online summit, he was joined by Safe Money editor Mike Larson and Real Wealth editor Larry Edelson. Here’s the transcript…

The Next Great Bubble about to Collapse
with Tom Essaye, Mike Larson and Larry Edelson — abridged transcript

Tom Essaye: If there’s anyone who knows how to capitalize on bursting bubbles, it’s our firm, Weiss Research.



For nearly a year now, I’ve been sounding the alarm again; NOT for the bursting of a bubble in the tech sector or housing sector … but in a market that is many times larger than all the stock exchanges in the United States COMBINED.


Debt is created in the bond market. That’s where the government goes to borrow money. So do states and local governments. Companies, too.

Borrowers sell bonds — or notes and bills — that guarantee investors a certain rate of interest or “yield” over time.

Since the turn of the century, the U.S. bond market has simply exploded in size — adding $20.7 trillion in new debt.


But now, despite massive new initiatives by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the meteoric rise in prices that characterized the debt market since the turn of the century has sputtered, stalled and is now dead in its tracks.

Millions of investors all over the world — including many of the world’s richest central banks — have started to stampede for the bond market’s exit.

And now, we’re beginning to see the first cracks appearing in this massive bubble.


This chart of the PIMCO Total Return Bond Fund is a perfect picture of the bubble in the bond market — and also the beginning of the crash.

On the left side of the chart, you can see the bubble in the bond market being inflated.

On the right-hand side, you can see how prices just plunged well below their support levels.

And just look at this chart of the iShares Municipal Bond ETF: It just fell off the proverbial cliff, giving back every penny it gained since last July!

But this crash has barely begun. The last few Treasury auctions showed that bidding from foreign central banks is plunging to the lowest level in years.

In addition, U.S. investors are starting to turn bearish on Treasuries. A recent report from a top industry watchdog showed that nearly 20% of all Treasury investors have started to cut back their holdings.

Even Fitch — the normally conservative ratings firm — is warning that a massive bubble has been created in the bond market.

This is huge. Bubbles are like an enormous Ponzi scheme: They collapse when the money stops flowing in.

The moment that happens, it’s over. And it’s beginning to happen right now!

As this bubble — the greatest bubble mankind has ever seen — implodes, the consequences will be devastating for millions of unprepared investors, just like the tech bubble was and just like the housing bubble was.


The most vulnerable are those who can least afford to suffer losses: Seniors who are approaching or in retirement, who have shifted large amounts of their money into fixed income investments.

Your tax-free municipal bonds could tank.

Your annuities and other insurance policies could turn to dust.

Your money invested in bank and insurance company stocks could vanish right before your very eyes.






0 Comments

August 27th, 2014

8/27/2014

0 Comments

 
Here in Baltimore the media and watchdogs expose scandals and corruption all the time and nothing happens.  If you go to a Baltimore Board of Estimates meeting you will see no one protesting anymore because the Board has worn down all of the contractors seeing what is widespread bid rigging and inflation.  I was at a meeting where an out of state contractor's bid was so much lower and he was as qualified and was incredulous as he was turned away from protest.  People no longer go to the meetings because they are so closed to justice there is no way through normal public channels to seek justice.  This is what happens on the state and Federal level as well.  Now that global corporations are getting contract bids from all levels of government and subcontracting ----they are the only ones pocketing all of this fraud and corruption.  Local contractors are left to the status of subcontractor having to bid so low as to not be able to earn a profit.  They then lower the standards for their workers so everyone is effected by this massive and systemic fraud.  Let's take a look again today at a local fraud and then national.  Remember, your pols are creating these conditions.  They could shout loudly, place pressure on the people in the process or the Attorney General to give due process and equal protection but the laws they are passing moves to further keep the public from accessing justice. 

NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND NOT YOU AND ME!  STOP VOTING FOR THE SAME INCUMBENTS AND RUN FOR POLITICAL OFFICE!

Below you see how our public utilities are being corrupted by this privatization push.  My concern for Smart Meters is they are set to gather data to sell and that the goal will be to ration water and electricity.  Even greater than that is that the process has already been filled with fraud and corruption.  California, Texas, and Arizona were ground zero for this privatization and installation of Smart Meters and tons of articles exist speaking of billing inflation-----the high cost of the product and installation----all when the public system we used for a century has worked just fine until the last decade when public employees were fired and bills were 'estimated'. 

When global corporations commit fraud----no one goes after them.  Imagine a $600 utility bill and how you would get that back?  Well, those already exposed to this are shouting -----YOU DON'T GET IT BACK AND YOUR STATE WILL NOT HELP YOU!


In Maryland, O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly are so neo-liberal as to pass laws that fine you for opting out and making those fines grow too costly to have a choice.  They say----YOU WILL CONNECT---WE WANT THAT DATA!


Another Attorney General exposes "smart" meter scam
Written by Donna Hancock
Date: 04-22-2013
Subject: Big Brother
Sent from at reader:

“What the record sadly lacks is a discussion of competing considerations regarding the program or the necessity of the program and its costs as related to any net benefit to customers.”
~ Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette

Warren Woodward

55 Ross Circle

Sedona, Arizona 86336

928 204 6434

April 20, 2013

Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC)

Docket Control Center

1200 West Washington Street

Phoenix, Arizona 85007

Re: Docket # E-00000C-11-0328

Commissioners;

           In addition to both the Attorneys General of Illinois and Connecticut, the Attorney General of Michigan has also issued a statement calling into question the efficacy of “smart” meters and the “smart” grid.

           Salient excerpts:

·         “A net economic benefit to electric utility ratepayers from ... smart meter programs has yet to be established.”

·         “Any assumption that large numbers of residential customers will have the time, ability and motivation to attend to, and act upon daily or even hourly changes in their electrical is questionable.”

·         “What the record sadly lacks is a discussion of competing considerations regarding the program or the necessity of the program and its costs as related to any net benefit to customers.” [italics in original]

           The Michigan Attorney General's statement (enclosed and available online here: http://efile.mpsc.state.mi.us/efile/docs/17000/0408.pdf) reinforces what I have said repeatedly: the only benefit of the “smart” grid is to utilities, not ratepayers. Utilities are gaming the system through their 8 to 10% guaranteed rate of return on so-called “capital investments”.

           Of course another part of the scam is the proven over-billing of “smart” meters. California's KION/FOX35 TV did a three month side-by-side comparison of a “smart” meter and a calibrated mechanical analog meter. After three months the “smart” meter showed an extra 37 kilowatt hours. The test is consistent with anecdotal over-billing reports I receive from Arizonans. Do the math. I calculate a similar rip-off in Arizona would net APS over $20 million more per year. (“PG&E Smart Meter Side By Side Test Final Results” – http://www.kionrightnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=14016659)

           What a miserable pity for Arizona ratepayers that the ACC never followed through on its 2007 decision that called for the costs and benefits of the “smart” grid to be considered. Indeed, “What the record sadly lacks is a discussion of competing considerations regarding the program or the necessity of the program and its costs as related to any net benefit to customers.”

           When will it be admitted that the ACC made a colossal mistake by allowing the utilities to install “smart” meters without any regulatory oversight or examination? How much more ratepayer money will be wasted on this utility scam, while the already bloated salaries of APS executives are set to double and triple? (“APS offering executives potential bonuses for 2013” - http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2012/12/28/aps-offering-executives-potential.html?ana=yfcpc)

Sincerely,

 Warren Woodward

Cc: Governor Jan Brewer, Attorney General Tom Horne



_____________________________________________
I had a friend run into these problems where late water bills end in your house being placed for auction.  The City Hall allows citizens homes to be handed to an investment firm buying the debt.  My friend asked 'DO YOU WANT MY HOUSE' to which the City Council person said----yes they do.  It's in a valuable section of the city.  The article below is from 2012 but it is still happening today.  Nothing has changed.

Baltimore uses fraud and corruption to take people's houses from them and it of course hits those struggling financially as it is.  WHEN GOVERNMENT PREYS ON THE PUBLIC FOR REVENUE RATHER THAN COLLECT IT FROM CORPORATIONS----

You have a neo-liberal or neo-con working City Hall.  GET RID OF THEM!


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE         Contact: Lester Davis Monday, March 5, 2012        410-396-4804 (office)   443-835-0784 (mobile)
Council President Young Calls for Moratorium on Placing Liens Against Properties Based Solely on Unpaid Water or Sewer Charges
Legislation comes after audit reveals dozens of homes were placed under lien based on estimated water bills


BALTIMORE
, MD –City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young has taken the bold step of calling for a moratorium on listing properties in the City’s annual tax sale based solely on unpaid water or sewer charges.

Council President Young will introduce a resolution at tonight’s City Council meeting requesting a moratorium on placing liens on properties with unpaid water or sewer charges. The moratorium would be in place for a two year period, or until the Departments of Public Works and Finance are able to create a viable and fair system for billing the more than 400,000 city and Baltimore County customers served by DPW. Tonight’s resolution will be followed on Monday, March 26, 2012, by the introduction of an ordinance that would enforce the moratorium through a change in city law.

Council President Young’s legislation was prompted by a recent audit that found widespread problems with the integrity of the billing system used by the Department of Public Works to charge residents for water and sewer usage.

Some of the troubling findings from the audit include:

  • 38,000 customers in Baltimore City and Baltimore County were over-billed, resulting in refunds totaling more than $4 million.
  • More than 18,000 properties were billed based solely on estimates, with no actual meter readings for a year or longer.
  • More than 2,600 customers were billed based solely on estimated meter readings for at least 4 ½ years.
  • Efforts by customers to correct these billing issues by requesting actual meter readings often resulted in the customers subsequently being over-billed.
  • $31.7 million, or 25 percent, of the total adjusted water billings for the year examined resulted from estimated billing.
Council President Young has a history of working to solve long-standing problems with the city’s water billing system. As recently as 2010, Council President Young supported legislation by Maryland State Sen. James Brochin that sought to stop the forced sale or foreclosure of properties due to unpaid water or sewer bills. Council President Young has also introduced legislation in the City Council to address this persistent problem.

“I’ve encountered too many constituents on fixed incomes, who routinely have to choose between feeding their families and buying needed medication or paying improperly estimated water bills, which if left unpaid have the danger of forcing them into homelessness,” Council President Young said. “It’s time we do something serious to remedy this situation, which has driven too many Baltimoreans further into poverty.”

In May 2010, 851 properties were included in the city’s tax sale based solely on estimated readings for one or more years. Some of these bills were for just hundreds of dollars, and a DPW review suggested that in at least one instance a property would not have been eligible for the tax sale if actual readings, instead of estimates, had been used.

Ms. Lelia Ellerbe, who has lived at Alameda Place in North Baltimore for 18 years, said that she recently contacted Council President Young’s office after growing increasingly suspicious about inflated water bills. Ms. Ellerbe said her research showed that nearly a dozen of her neighbors had received identical water bills over several billing cycles, despite differences in their water consumption.

“If you’re on a fixed income, a discrepancy with your water bill could be extremely detrimental,” Ms. Ellerbe said.

Placing unnecessary financial burdens on families during difficult economic times is harmful and unacceptable, but overcharges on water and sewer bills are especially dangerous because the charges, if left unpaid, are routinely converted into liens against the properties. The liens can then be sold or foreclosed on, which could lead to a family losing its home because of an unpaid water or sewer bill.

Click here for a copy of Council President Young’s resolution

_____________________________________

If corporations are not paying taxes, getting all kinds of subsidy, and committing huge frauds-----we need the working and middle-class paying lots of fines and fees to state and local government.  That is what speed cameras is about.  In Baltimore it became so corrupt and fraudulent that thousands of people were ticketed without cause and we could not get City Hall to turn off the cameras.  It took a huge upswell of citizen rage to have these faulty cameras turned off.

Again, a public employee used to do just fine randomly setting up speed zones to keep citizens aware.  THAT IS ALL THAT IS NEEDED.   Now, you have no idea when an infraction happens and almost no way to fight it.

The reason all this exists is no oversight and accountability and no public justice makes the conditions for a free-for-all in corporate operations.  Remember, all these businesss getting these contracts are global corporations.


This article is long but it does a great job at showing how massive the corporate grab for money has become.

Speed Cameras: A Scam the Motorist Cannot Win

It's all about the revenue

May 9, 2013 by Doug Gill

So glad we are all better drivers these days. No cell phone calls, no texting, no smoking with the snowflakes present, mandatory seat belts, helmet laws, the crackdown on drunk drivers, sobriety checkpoints, red light cameras, work zone cameras, speed cameras – why, getting behind the wheel these days is the motoring equivalent of being a babe in its mama’s arms.

Well, one may think that is so – especially the way the elected ninnies tout all the “safety” regulations they’ve enacted, particularly when it comes to traffic surveillance.
But the truth? Well, the reality belies what our lawmakers are shoveling, as 2012 saw the highway death total climb faster than at any time since 1975.

Yet, fudged safety stats notwithstanding, the real truth about traffic cameras lies not in the amount of lives saved and accidents avoided, but in the enormous amount of revenue it supplies both the camera manufacturer and the jurisdictions that embrace these forms of policing for profit.

And in most instances the profits roll in whether the cameras are accurate or not… and these contraptions are proving to be anything but precise.

The evidence of that inaccuracy is overwhelming.
In mid-April, Baltimore City became the latest jurisdiction to join the ever-growing list of cities/municipalities that are revamping, reevaluating or in some cases eliminating their revenue-generating speed camera programs.

The Department of Transportation issued a news release saying Baltimore City has temporarily suspended use of its red light and speed cameras because “the devices haven’t been accurate.”
Of course, that explanation reeks of dishonesty; if accuracy was the true reason for shelving the automated cash-snatchers they would have been abandoned six months after implementation.

As of April 1, more than 580 communities had welcomed some form – red light, speed, work zone – of traffic enforcement cameras. And while 29 states currently have no camera enforcement laws on the books, only 12 states have banned the use of speed cameras.
Seven states currently prohibit red light cameras.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 66 bills related to photo enforcement have been presented nationwide so far in 2013.

But at the same time, the critical chorus against these boxed money-grabs is growing exponentially.

In New York, the same state senate that nearly always accepts Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Liberal credit card put the kibosh on a plan for cameras in New York City, prompting Emperor Michael Bloomberg to throw a hissy and announce that the next time a speeder kills a kid it will be the legislature’s fault.

Shocking, I know: Bloomberg desperate to support for-profit businesses other than his own.

In Ohio, Judge Robert Ruehlman ordered the Elmwood Place township to halt usage of the cameras saying they are “a scam” and described the issuing of thousands of $105 citations as a “high-tech game of 3-Card Monty.”

Similar rulings have ignited debate from sea to strobe-flashing sea, and Baltimore’s actions are now at the forefront of the discussions.

Not only did the city suspend use of the cameras, officials also agreed to nullify more than 6,000 tickets that had been mailed to the alleged violators.

Total cost? Over 300 grand. In the last fiscal year the city’s speed cameras – just the speed cameras – generated $19 million.

Gesture, meet token.

Obviously, the business partnerships between camera companies and cities willing to deliberately tweak their speed limits, camera locations and caution lights for maximum ticket profits, rather than for safety, are thriving in spite of symbolic damage control.
“The cameras have never really fully been tested,” Gene Simmers, a retired Maryland State Highway Administration employee, told CBS Philadelphia. Simmers was referencing a state report that found the cameras were not tested as many times as they should have been and that the type of speed detection equipment used by the cameras in highway work zones was not approved by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Pennsylvania media is interested in the thoughts of a former SHA employee because the state legislature in Harrisburg had been considering expanding the automated enforcement programs.

Now, thanks to some of the laughable examples of Baltimore City’s camera follies, even AAA Mid-Atlantic has joined the anti-camera chorus.

“It wasn’t even moving and it got a ticket,” AAA spokesperson Jenny Robinson told CBS News, referencing a Baltimore delivery truck that was issued a citation for traveling 57 miles-per-hour in a 25-mph zone even though video from the camera showed the truck was nearly at a standstill.
“That’s one example of the concerns that we have with automatic enforcement,” Robinson continued. “If it’s not accurate then there’s no point in using it.”
But there is a point in using them, and that purpose is to continue reaping the benefits of the $6 billion per year that Americans pay for speeding violations.

According to an extensive investigation by The Baltimore Sun we’ve learned – through the former camera company’s own admission – that the error rate for these devices exceeds five percent. And more than 1.6 million tickets have been issued since 2009.
And the city nullified 6,000.


“The troubles with Baltimore’s speed camera system have raised the eyebrows of motorists, legislators and traffic safety advocates,” wrote AAA spokesperson Ragina Averella, “and have truly called the integrity of the city’s entire program into question.”
But it’s not just Baltimore. Prince George’s County is taking action to stop Fairmount Heights from issuing any camera citations because the town appears to be in violation of a state law that allows photo enforcement only in school zones and requires that cameras are properly announced via signage.

In Laurel, the city is under fire for circumventing state requirements for independent calibration of the cameras.

Dozens of other national jurisdictions are waking up to elected officials trying to follow the lead of former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty who, in 2010, accelerated the revenue-vs-safety debate when he raised traffic fines – in one instance from $50 – $125 – to help balance his city’s budget.
And why not? In a report released by AAA one camera on one stretch of the District’s New York Avenue raised $11 million in two years.

That kind of cash comes in mighty handy when you need to grease the lobbyists that help government skim the taxpayer.

If the actions of Fenty and other such kindred governmentals don’t offer proof enough of automated enforcement offering no more than a direct line to your wallet, witness the actions of the Maryland Legislature during the just-concluded General Assembly sessions.
Delegate John Cluster (R – Baltimore County) introduced a bill that would have imposed a daily calibration check on the cameras. Delegate Jon Cardin’s (D – Baltimore County) legislation would have forced the courts to impose a $1,000 fine on the camera company if it were found that a citation was issued erroneously. Delegate Frank Conaway (D – Baltimore City) wanted those who maintain the speed enforcement systems to pay a $250 penalty to the motorist who received said erroneous ticket.

Various speed camera bills were introduced by Sen. James Brochin, Sen. E.J. Pipkin, Del. Carolyn Howard and Del. Mike Smigiel and they not only addressed accuracy and effectiveness, but some also called for outright elimination of the program.
When the confetti dropped (made from shredded taxpayer dollars) in early April to signal the end of the session not a single traffic camera bill had passed, including a final version that would have placed stricter limits on where local governments could put speed cameras, required appointments of ombudsmen to hear complaints, and strengthened language prohibiting governments from entering into new contracts under which they paid private companies for each ticket issued.

Noting the bill’s failure, Sen. Brochin told the Baltimore Sun that the final product would have helped protect Maryland drivers from abuses of the camera system.
Of course, Marylanders are use to having elected officials that continually fail to do the right thing – even if it is our own fault for sending the same repeat offenders back to Annapolis.

No amount of information – no amount of facts counteracting the myths of these devices – will prevent lawmakers from trumping-up the safety angle while gorging at the predatory revenue trough.
“We’ve been able to achieve a pretty significant reduction in traffic fatalities,” Gov. Martin O’Malley weighed in on the safety aspects of traffic cameras in Maryland. “I think part of that has to do with better technology and all of us taking it a little slower. We are saving a lot of lives and reducing traffic fatalities.”

Well, save for that pesky spike in 2012 – and even though he ignored the numbers that showed fatal crashes on state highways dropped in 2006, 2007 and 2008.

State wide use of speed cameras wasn’t authorized until 2009.

In Baltimore the focus remains on getting the cash IV back into the arm of the motoring public. In January the city switched from its current camera provider – Xerox State & Local Solutions – to Brekford, a Maryland-based “upstart” in the industry that has been contracted to install/replace 72 speed cameras throughout the city. In addition to costing $2.2 million, the contract will allow a vendor to share in the proceeds of the fines collected – for every $75 traffic ticket generated by the cameras and collected by the city, Brekford is rebated $21. For every $40 ticket, Brekford gets $11.20.
Also of interest is an April 19 report by Baltimore Brew that notes that members of Brekford’s board include Douglas DeLeaver, a former chief of the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) Police; Jessie Lee Jr., executive director of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (which has longstanding ties to the Baltimore City Police Department).

The Brew also reported that the head of Brekford’s speed camera division, Maurice Nelson, was hired from Montgomery County’s automated traffic enforcement program.
In addition, the $2.2 million was handed over to Brekford even though that company’s “clerical mistakes” (and software compatibility issues) are what resulted in an undisclosed number of erroneous tickets given out to motorists.
And, Brekford scored all the repeat business without having to jump through the hoops of competitive bidding
.

“We decided it was not practical to seek competitive bids on these additional cameras,” Timothy M. Krus, the city’s chief purchasing agent said in response to City Comptroller Joan Pratt questioning the process.

When it comes to the cameras themselves as well as the government officials who vote to authorize them, it becomes more apparent that Judge Reuhlman’s said it best: automated traffic enforcement is “a scam the motorist cannot win.”


0 Comments

August 18th, 2014

8/18/2014

0 Comments

 

NEO-LIBERALISM AND NEO-CONSERVATISM HAVE DECLARED WAR ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE US AND AROUND THE WORLD.  CLINTON AND OBAMA ARE THE FACE OF NEO-LIBERALISM AND CONGRESS IS CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS.  TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!


I will talk a few days about neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism and women.  Yesterday I shared a piece from an International Women's meeting in Europe--- for openDemocracy 5050  from the Nobel Women's Initiative conference.  I also want to remind people that Maryland League of Women Voters leaders knew all the candidates in Maryland's race for Governor ----Brown, Gansler, and Mizeur -----were neo-liberals.  It is critical to take back these organizations tasked with protecting labor and justice. 

If you listened to Tom Friedman and other neo-liberal economists over these few decades after Reagan/Clinton neo-liberalism joined the Bush neo-conservatives you would have heard that US sweat shops in developing worlds were good for those poor peasants.  Now that US corporations are being pushed out of these developing worlds and coming back to the US under the guise of job creation----they will bring these same conditions.  Do you know that many low-wage workers in the US both domestic and immigrant do not bring home much more than the developing world's $10 a day after wage theft and fraudulent independent contractor status is laid on them?  Indeed-----and Maryland leads in these policies.


THIS IS NEO-LIBERALISM AND NEO-CONSERVATISM.....IT IS NOT DEMOCRATIC OR REPUBLICAN AND IT KILLS WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND FAMILIES.


If you are going to push women back into poverty and out of the workforce in a meaningful way the first thing to do in a formerly first world where women gained freedom and independence because they were able to work and graduate to high positions is pretend they are winning in the race to the bottom.  Women paid more in part time jobs as women become the majority of part time workers.  As job creation becomes service industry this means poverty jobs.  Just a quick look locally I have noticed a change in banks in Baltimore---it seems that the once abundance of women bank management behind desks now looks to be all men.  I seriously have seen no women in my M and T banks except as tellers.  When jobs are made scarce you will see that mentality that men need the jobs because they are the breadwinner come back and that is what is happening.  Is it bad to remove financial freedom from women in the US?  Well, let's look at the rate of domestic violence, rape, and sexual harassment growing in the US -----the growing sex traffic of women in the US to see abusing women comes with neo-liberalism.

  IF NO RULES/RULE OF LAW AND NO PUBLIC JUSTICE EXIST-----WOMEN LOSE.


This Is The One Area Where Women Earn More Than Men
  • Alison Griswold

  • Nov. 7, 2013, 9:28 AM


There's one area where the gender wage gap is irrelevant and even reversed. Women consistently earn more than men in part-time jobs, which women are also more likely to have.


_______________________________________________


Look below at the article written by Korean women rights groups to see the history of subjugation of women in that country to see where neo-liberalism is taking the US.  We are pummeled with news that women are graduating from college in higher numbers than men but we do not get the big picture.  First, college grads represent a large percentage of the 36% unemployed in the US and women more so than men.  So, women may be graduating in larger numbers but they represent those students with large student loan debts as well.

What we see is a gender change in careers that have been mostly female and paying the most to that of men.  Nursing and teaching are two careers that have paid well for women and these jobs are being taken more and more by men.  Then there comes the pay inequity within the same job categories.....women paid less.  What this all represents is the movement of women out of the workforce and into what will be increasingly part time or unemployed status....just as the Korean women state in the article below.  That is what neo-liberalism does----it marginalizes women and creates the poverty for women that dis-empowers.
  Now, Republicans have always pushed policy for women in the home----the problem is that with neo-liberals pushing 80% and more of Americans into poverty------women become trapped and abused----as in all third world countries. 
So, when neo-liberals place women pay equity on their policy stance as they knowingly push everyone into poverty with a loss of Rule of Law and Equal Protection and Trans Pacific Trade Pact moving US citizens to third world status----THEY ARE HANDING YOU PROPAGANDA. 


THAT IS WHERE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE TAKING WOMEN AND THEY ARE SIMPLY PROVIDING STATS THAT MAKE IT SOUND LIKE WOMEN ARE DOING GREAT.


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



Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation

(2012) AAUW

Foreword
Women are paid significantly less than men are in nearly every occupation.



Because pay equity affects
women and their families in all walks of life, it is not surprising that many women consider the issue
important. Many business leaders also believe that pay equity is “good business,” because it improves
morale and productivity. Yet progress in closing the gap between men’s and women’s pay has been slow
and, in recent years, has stagnated.
For more than 130 years, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) has advocated
for gender equity in education and the workplace. During this time, women have gone from a small
minority on college campuses to a majority of the student body. Today, women make up half the workforce,
but they continue to earn less than men do throughout their careers.

Why does this gender pay gap persist? This question is a focal point of AAUW’s research and advocacy
work. Graduating to a Pay Gap finds that women working full time already earn less than their
male counterparts do just one year after college graduation. Taking a closer look at the data, we find
that women’s choices—college major, occupation, hours at work—do account for part of the pay gap.
But about one-third of the gap remains unexplained, suggesting that bias and discrimination are still
problems in the workplace.
At AAUW, research informs action. As an organization of college-educated women, we believe that
the pay gap among college-educated workers and its ramifications—starting with higher student loan
debt burden immediately after college graduation—are of great importance. AAUW is proud to share
research that you can trust. We hope this report will inspire you to join us in taking action to eliminate
the pay gap.
_________________________________________

Keep in mind that the media presenting all of this news knows what the goal of neo-liberalism is---they know women will be targeted for impoverishment.  Yet, they pretend it is just that nasty stagnant economy!!!!  Neo-liberals pretend Republicans cause the stagnant economy ----Republicans pretend its the Democrats---when it is neo-liberals working with neo-cons deliberately creating the stagnant economy because they want US citizens to overwhelmingly become impoverished....third world.


Student Debt Weighs Down Women More. Blame The Wage Gap

by Jessica Glazer

April 06, 2014 5:18 AM ET NPR


When Kristine Leighton graduated from a private college five years ago with a degree in hospitality, she owed $75,000 in student loans. Each month, she paid the minimum amount of $450 and lived at home with her parents on Long Island, N.Y.

At first, she was working at a hotel for $10 an hour; money was tight. Even after she got a job in Manhattan making $75,000 a year, she still couldn't afford to move out. She funneled her earnings into car payments, credit card bills and debt, and a monthly commuter train pass. The loan payments left little extra money for things like an emergency fund.


______________________________________

Women are not choosing to stay home----they are being pushed out of the workforce and marginized into poverty careers and part time.


Global markets allow corporations to profit from a small number of very rich in nations around the world while keeping the majority of people in each nation in poverty.  That is what the Clinton Foundation has worked to do after his pushing of NAFTA and breaking Glass Steagall to grow global corporations and empire-colonialization.


You do not create an environment of suspended Rule of Law, corporate rule, and pervasive fraud and corruption, war and violence from poverty if you have good intentions.



The Mythical ‘Choice’ of the Stay-at-Home Mom

The fact that so much anger erupts at any perceived slight tells us many women are not truly choosing to be home with the kids



By Judith Warner @judithwarner  Time

The mood has shifted considerably on last week’s Ann Romney–Hilary Rosen fracas, with poll results showing that most women don’t really care about what Washington insiders have to say about Rosen’s word choice or, for that matter, how Romney chose to spend her time once she had children. Women are shrugging off political attempts to rekindle the tired old “mommy wars” debate, and are getting on with their busy and complicated lives.

I was shocked, nonetheless, by the degree of rage contained in some of the e-mails I received in response to my column last week. I was also deeply surprised this week when a readers’ panel I participated in on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show on the 1899 Kate Chopin novel, The Awakening, devolved, very quickly, back to Rosen-and-Romney talk once again.



The proximate cause: disagreement over the character of Edna Pontellier, a wealthy young New Orleans woman stifling within her loveless marriage and unstimulating, toil-free life (I believe I can say “toil-free” without unduly again stirring the pot: Edna’s children and home are cared for by ample domestic help), who, after experiencing an emotional and sensual “awakening” through infatuation, escapes her husband and children by taking her own life.

Some readers around the country, and I, distanced ourselves from Edna’s “selfishness” in abandoning her children. Others felt we owed much greater compassion to a woman who had such a stark lack of choices. All of which somehow looped back to Rosen and Romney, and maternal stay-at-home loneliness and despair. Diane Rehm, the radio talk-show host, and Jane Holmes Dixon, suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, recalled the stifling isolation they’d felt as mothers 50 odd years earlier; they could strongly relate to Edna, as could a number of listeners.

It quickly became clear that the link between this more-than-a-century-old fictional character and these moms writing or calling in to express their solidarity with Edna was simple: misery. It was feelings, current or remembered, of depression, of the sense of a vital loss of self and of a deep maroonedness. Rehm and Dixon, who have known each other for many decades, remembered how important it had been to be able to get together way back then and talk their way through all these feelings. It is still a great unifier of stay-at-home mothers today.

This reality, I think, fuels much of the anger, the desire for recognition, the demand for respect we’ve heard so often of late from this minority of mothers — only 30% of whom, in the U.S., are home full-time with children under 18. Recent research has shown that this group is considerably less happy than working mothers, and less contented than part-time working mothers in particular. Working moms are healthier and less depressed, the American Psychological Association reported late last year. Why they feel this way isn’t hard to imagine. Stay-at-home mothers give up their financial freedom, and with it many feel their sense of agency slip away. Their position of equality with their husbands is by necessity somewhat eroded. They lose the sense of strength that comes from knowing that, come what may, they can keep themselves and their children afloat economically. They lose intellectual stimulation (assuming that they were lucky enough to have it in their jobs anyway), the easy companionship and structure of the workplace, and recognition from the outside world. And if they don’t have the money to outsource domestic jobs, their freedom from paid work comes at the cost of repetitive thankless tasks — laundry, cleaning and the like — that test their patience and can chip away at their self-worth. The pleasure in this life of course is time with the children, but school-age kids leave a void that many find hard to meaningfully fill.


In the past, women lived constricted lives because society didn’t afford them much by way of choice. Today, our society in theory offers them a plethora of choices — so many, “that they’re overwhelmed by the stress of so many choices,” as Maureen Dowd said in her New York Times column this week — but in practice, far too many of these choices are false. A woman who ends up staying home with her kids because her work pays so badly that she can’t afford decent child care really has no choice. Ditto for a woman who has a special-needs child requiring constant medical visits and attention and whose husband earns more than she does, making her the natural, if not necessary, primary parent. The woman whose 55-hour-a-week job combines with her husband’s equally demanding career to produce a level of busyness that makes having a connected family life all but impossible unless one of them (the lower-paid one, of course) stays home isn’t really free in her choices either. How many women, after all — or men, for that matter — are in the enviable position of being able, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, to leave work at 5:30 p.m. in order to make it home for a nice dinner with their kids? If more could, we’d probably see women’s workforce participation sharply increase — economy permitting.


If women were truly choosing to be home full-time, I think there would probably be a whole lot less emphasis on the hard work involved in doing so and a lot more talk about the privilege that choice would then clearly be. The fact that so much anger — masking so much unhappiness — erupts at any perceived slight to stay-at-home mothers’ efforts should tell us that the condition of full-time motherhood is one we should talk about a great deal more — not through Hallmark-worthy platitudes, but with concern and an eye toward change.

____________________
This is why neo-liberals and neo-cons are working hard to privatize all public agencies charged with oversight and accountability.  No data is being generated from US universities that now dismantle sociology and humanities that created this data.  In Maryland, all of our data is questionable as we find time and again that stats reported one year are found to be skewed and/or false a few years later.  Create the headline with faulty data say neo-liberals and then bury the fact that the data was found false.

Whether women in the military, women on college campuses, women in marriages, women being used in sex traffic----these are US women being attacked and it all has to do with increasing poverty and suspension of Rule of Law, Equal Protection, and Bill of Rights by neo-liberals and neo-cons.
When neo-liberals in Congress pretend to try to fund these programs but it is the 'republicans' that keep them from doing it ----tell them

TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD FROM LAST DECADE WOULD PAY OFF THE ENTIRE NATIONAL DEBT AND MAKE GOVERNMENT COFFERS FLUSH WITH MONEY-----JUST RECOVER THE FRAUD!



US: Soaring Rates of Rape and Violence Against Women
More Accurate Methodology Shows Urgent Need for Preventive Action December 18, 2008


The National Crime Victimization Survey, based on projections from a national sample survey, says that at least 248,300 individuals were raped or sexually assaulted in 2007, up from 190,600 in 2005, the last year the survey was conducted. The study surveyed 73,600 individuals in 41,500 households. Among all violent crimes, domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault showed the largest increases. Except for simple assault, which increased by 3 percent, the incidence of every other crime surveyed decreased.

"The numbers in this survey show an alarmingly high rate of sexual violence in this country,"
said Sarah Tofte, researcher for the US Program at Human Rights Watch. "This should serve as a wake-up call that more must be done to address the problem in the US."

The projected number of violent crimes committed by intimate partners against women increased from 389,100 in 2005 to 554,260 in the 2007 report. By comparison, the number of violent crimes against men by intimate partners went down.

"Domestic violence is often a hidden crime, and these numbers are a stark reminder of how serious and widespread this problem is," said Tofte. "The Obama-Biden administration should make prevention and protection against all forms of domestic and sexual violence a top priority."

The National Crime Victimization Survey is conducted every two years, with data gathered in phone calls made to a sample of households across the United States. Due to criticism from experts in the subject, the survey's methodology was adjusted in 2007 to capture more accurately the incidence of gender-based violence. The authors say in the report that the higher numbers may reflect the new, more accurate methodology rather than an actual increase. Two major shifts were to describe types of sexual assault to those being interviewed, and to replace "computer-assisted telephone interviews conducted from two telephone centers" nationwide with interviews "by field representatives either by telephone or in person."

"The new numbers
indicate that previously, the government significantly underestimated the number of individuals affected by domestic and sexual violence in this country,"
said Tofte. "Authorities should urgently adjust public policies, law enforcement, and provision of support services accordingly."

Human Rights Watch is currently investigating and monitoring the criminal justice response to sexual violence. The organization's recent work includes investigating the backlog in untested DNA evidence collected in rape cases in the US. In Los Angeles City and County alone, there is a combined total of at least 13,000 untested sets of evidence, known as rape kits, sitting in storage.

Human Rights Watch's national recommendations include:

  • The Obama administration should appoint a special adviser on violence against women in the US;
  • Congress should restore full funding to the Office on Violence Against Women;
  • The Department of Justice, through the National Institute of Justice, should authorize comprehensive studies that more accurately track sexual and domestic violence in the US, especially among individuals who are least likely to be surveyed by the National Crime Victimization Survey;
  • Congress should increase funding for sexual and domestic violence prevention, intervention, and treatment programs;
  • Congress should amend the federal Debbie Smith Act, a grant program designed to eliminate the rape kit backlog, but that states can and have used for other kinds of DNA backlogs;
  • The US should ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which obligates states to prevent, protect against, and punish violence against women.
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Below you can see what is coming to the US----Korea was taken neo-liberal after the Korean War in the late 1950s and shows the progression as it hit full-scale in the 1990s---Reagan/Clinton.  Koreans use the term 'irregular worker' for part time. This is long but please glance through because you will read in this history of Korea's takeover by neo-liberals exactly what is happening today.  It is women and children who's wealth fell the most in the last decade of corporate fraud---women are the majority of job losses----and the majority working part time in the US.  Indeed, women now make up a majority of the poor.  Given that women in the US make up a little over 50% of the population----the numbers in poverty are very high.

This is why you have women hitting the political races who are neo-liberals pretending to feel the pain of women driven into poverty by neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

HILLARY AND OBAMA REPRESENT THE TWO GROUPS KILLED BY NEO-LIBERALISM AND THAT IS WHY NEO-LIBERALS ARE PUTTING BLACK, HISPANIC, AND FEMALE FACES ON THEIR CANDIDATES.


Remember, less than 10% will be allowed to escape poverty as administrators of this global corporate mess.  Don't vote for a candidate because of race or gender!  Your chances of remaining in that 10% is slim to nothing.

NEOLIBERALISM THRHOUGH THE EYES OF WOMEN
Joo-Yeon Jeong & Seung-Min Choi, PICIS*


There is no place on Earth where neo-liberalism has not poisoned. It has allowed a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize personal profit. It has poisonous effects especially in the Third World, where imperial powers continue to pirate natural and human resources to fill the pockets of transnational capitalists. Initiated by Reagan and Thatcher, for the last two decades, neo-liberalism has become the dominant economic and political trend for much of the leftist (so they identify themselves) governments as well as the right.

However, as women fighting against global capitalism and its new phase, as women yearning for a better world where we will not be exploited and abused, we must go a step further into looking into this 'neo-liberalism' through the experiences of women. And it is not just about how women linearly experience it - we must go into the depths to manifest how neo-liberalism operates in a very gender-biased way.

WOMEN WORKERS AS SCAPEGOATS


In Korea, the process of being absorbed into global capitalism began earlier than the economic crisis, during the economic 'hyper '-development era of military dictatorship of Park Jung-Hee, with quite a bit of help from the US. Fluctuating together with global economic crises, the Korean economy started to show signs of a recession from the early 90s, as rate of profit decreased. Thus, capitalists started to adopt policies of introducing flexibility to the labour market. It was 'experimented' on women workers first before taking full force on the entire working class at the end of the millennium.

Jobs where women were predominant started to be transformed in the 1980s, beginning in the form of dispatch labour and eventually expanding to generalisation of irregular labour. However, this process was mainly targeted at women workers and the male-oriented labour movement did not give much importance to it, even though women worker's movement consistently called for the address of the issue.

Although the incorporation of Korean economy into the global capitalist system had already started around a decade ago, Korean people came to experience its destructive nature during and after the economic crisis of 1997. The structural adjustment program of the IMF shook the labour market and massive lay-offs were implemented. In particular, women workers were laid off first, and the working conditions of women workers fell to the ground.

The methods that the management used was subcontracting or abolishing those production lines and business sectors where women were predominant. Women in these places were usually typists or clerical assistants, who were considered not important and cumbersome, and thus provided the logic and justification for the lay-offs. Many companies would lay-off these women, and instead employ workers from dispatch companies - thus providing the management with ways in which to decrease labour costs and evade provision of insurances and benefits. Or in the case of banks, the same worker would be reemployed, but on a contract basis as irregular workers, again to decrease labour costs. Another method of laying off women workers or transforming them into irregular workers, was targeting foremost women who were married to someone in the same workplace, and also those who were pregnant or were on their maternal leave. They provided the management with strong justifications based on patriarchal values of 'women's place is at home'. This process of unjust and discriminatory lay-offs at the onset of the economic crisis saw the deterioration of maternal protection and women worker's rights in general. The achievements that the women worker's movement had accomplished over the last couple of decades were undermined.

"FLEXIBILITY" OF WOMEN WORKERS


The massive lay-offs that occurred after 1997 was obviously not 'inevitable' on the part of the management,
but was a calculated process of increasing the rate of profit through flexibility of the labour market. Because the need for lay-offs did not come simply from decrease in production, workers who were laid off were re-employed, but as irregular workers. And because flexibility measures were implemented foremost on women, women were also absorbed again in masses into the labour market, but this time as irregular workers with low wages and low protection.

Attaining flexibility of women workers was backed up by the patriarchal ideology of 'male as breadwinner'1 . Through this ideology, women workers are considered not really as workers, but as 'assistant income providers', the ideology that contributes to devaluation of women's work. And this in turn provided the justification for the primary lay-offs of women and transforming women's jobs into irregular jobs - a justification that quelled the possibility of resistance from the working class. Recently, capitalist institutions and mainstream media elaborate that the rate of women's employment is increasing faster that the rate of men. On one hand, this is due to the increase in absolute number of jobs-irregular jobs for women, but also due to the fact that women do not have much choice than take up highly unstable jobs without any hesitation to earn a living, whereas men can afford to be more 'selective'.

Now, the percentage of irregular workers is risen to higher levels than regular workers. In analyzing a census on the economically-active workforce implemented by the Korean Statistical Office in August 2001, the Korea Labor & Society Institute (www.klsi.org) estimated the number of irregular workers to be 7.37 million, constituting 55.7% of the total workforce2.According to studies made in 2000, out of entire irregular workers, the percentage of women is higher than that of men at 53%, and within the entire women workforce irregular workers take up 70%. These official statistics exclude specially employed labour (for example, the type of jobs that capitalists characterise as self-employment) such as private tutors, insurance sales, golf caddies etc., so if these jobs are included, the rate of irregular women workers will definitely rocket.

Irregular work pertaining to capital's flexibility measures has brought deterioration of working conditions and impoverishment for workers of both genders. But it has affected women workers more severely. At the moment, most of irregular women workers are employed in small enterprises of less than 10 employees. It has driven women's work into the ditches and has also increased mental stress from lack of self-confidence and the fear of losing their jobs. One feminist scholar was interviewing irregular women workers and told of how the interviewees were in constant fear of being seen throughout the interview. Many social psychologists point out that the increase of irregular work and the mental stress that comes from it is becoming a serious social problem that is bound to affect the whole society.

Moreover, with the automation of production lines and transfer of factories in capital's constant search for cheaper labour, many women workers who had originally constituted a large proportion of the workforce in the manufacturing sector are now being absorbed into the service sector - in areas such as the so-called 'entertainment' businesses and as domestic workers. The service sector has rapidly expanded over the last few years in Korea, and many women are being employed as narrator models, telemarketers, and as servers and entertainers in bars. These jobs are not only unstable, low waged and physically strenuous, but they also enforce the use of 'femininity' and sexuality to raise sales, making women more vulnerable to possibilities of sexual abuse and exploitation. Also, because the service sector has always shared a very thin borderline with the sex industry, it is not very surprising that more and more women workers, both young and aged, are being drawn into the sex industry. For example, many married women in their 30's and 40's are employed in the so-called 'telephone rooms (jeon-hwa-bang)' and are forced to have phone sex with men. Many other married women were employed as 'pager women', who are paged to come to bars to 'entertain' men. This became a very heated issue when Daewoo Motors unionists went to a bar, paged women, and came face to face with familiar faces. When Daewoo workers were laid-off, the wives had to find jobs to sustain their families and the only ones available were as 'pager women'. The ruling elite and the conservative media are enthusiastically deploring the moral collapse of Korean women, but the reality is that it is the capitalist system that is corrupting the people.

The situation is not much different on the international arena. Neo-liberal globalisation has paved the way for increase in migrant women workers, international trafficking and enforced sex work in the Third World. In Korea, many women from the Philippines and Russia come to Korea as domestic workers and 'entertainers', and then are tricked into providing sexual services to Korean men and the US military.

WIDENING GAP BETWEEN WOMEN


Neo-liberal globalisation has also impeded the widening of gap between different classes of women. The living standard between women in the developed countries and those in the Third World is now incomparable, as is the situation inside Korea. Rich women of the bourgeoisie can afford to wear fur coats that cost tens of million won, shop in department stores in their imported cars, buy US produced baby food, send their children to expensive private English language schools so that they are reproduced as the minority elite who rule the world of globalisation, and employ women from South-east Asia as housemaids. This is how the minority of women in Korea live, and furthermore, they are not living on the wealth that they had accumulated themselves, but on the wealth accumulated by their husbands. And this in turn is the wealth accumulated from exploiting women workers in Korea and elsewhere in the Third World. In contrast to the minority of women who enjoy the outcome of neo-liberal domination in a good part of the world, majority of women cannot find a proper job no matter how hard they try, and when they do find a job, it is an unstable job in slave-like conditions that can get snatched away from them. They cannot afford domestic help or a nanny - they work for long tiring hours outside and then come home to find piles of dishes to be washed and children to be fed. Also, studies by women's organizations have found that domestic abuse has increased, as husbands and fathers who have lost jobs turn to expressing their anger at their daughters and wives, and resort to violence.

CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL BACKLASH


To quell mass resistance against economic globalisation that has brought about increase in unemployment, decrement of public services, downfall in wages and deterioration of quality of life, the ruling elite has manipulated cultural conservatism to solidify its dominance over society.
Cultural conservatism in Korea is represented by Confucian patriarchy. The economic crisis of 1997 saw the rise of this ideology that came together with the capitalist form of 'male as breadwinner' model, and acted to cover up the oppression of women while highlighting the need for women to make more sacrifices for the sake of saving the crumbling economy. In the meanwhile, unemployment of men was highlighted as a serious social problem. Thus the role of women was limited to that of 'comforting' the suffering man in the family, while the sufferings of women both as wage workers and non-wage workers were ignored. The Korean mainstream media and the conservative ruling elite alike have neglected the seriousness of women suffering from sexual abuse on the basis that women should have perseverance, but has spotlighted those desperate women who left home after losing all hopes as destructors of family values. Women who had replaced their husbands as the breadwinners end up in the sex industry, after being rejected from any other type of work, but then are stigmatised as being morally corrupt. The severity of unemployment of male youths appear in the news everyday, whereas female students are not only ignored but are blocked altogether from the labour market. Many right-wing sociologists and economists actually suggested that marriage for women should be more emphasized by the government so as to block women from entering the labour market - and thus lowering the official unemployment rate. The media focuses evermore on the fantasies of marriage, and the 'marriage business' is now enjoying its 'Belle Epoque'.

A CRITIQUE OF KIM DAE-JUNG'S POLICIES ON WOMEN


Kim Dae-Jung's government has been portrayed as being democratic and pro-feminist in and outside of Korea. There were high hopes for this president with his long history of fighting for democracy, and from the beginning, many civil and women's organizations decided to give him 'critical' support. However, his promise of establishing a ministry specific on women's issues was replaced by the Special Committee On Women's Affairs with no legislative powers, much to the disappointment of women's groups. As his presidential term is coming to an end, he did launch the Ministry of Gender Equality during the first half of this year, with a prominent figure from a major women NGO seated as the Minister. However, the policies that the Ministry is adopting are those that will hardly benefit majority of women suffering at grassroot levels.

This was recently manifested in the revisions that were made to the maternity clauses in the Standard Labour Laws in June. The Ministry had announced that it will expand public childcare so as to decrease the burden on working women. With support from major women NGOs3, the Ministry proposed revisions to maternity-related clauses in the Standard Labour Laws, and the clauses were changed for the first time since 1953. There were basically two major improvements - maternity leave was increased from the present 60 days to 90 days, and prohibition on employment of women in hazardous workplaces was expanded. This may seem like a big step, but the fact of the matter is, these laws came in exchange for further flexibility of women's labour. In exchange for increase of maternal leave, the Ministry also agreed to abolish the clauses restricting overtime work and night work, paid familycare leave and menstruation leave.

In a situation where 70% (or perhaps even higher and ever increasing) of women workers are irregular workers, how many women workers will actually benefit from the revision? The majority of working class women are outside legal boundaries. The Ministry and women NGOs argue that they will fight for the application of the laws to irregular workers, but without questioning the neo-liberal characteristics behind the legislation, there is really no chance that this will actually take place. Many women activists had fought hard for these laws for the last decade and they are congratulating themselves in finally achieving their objective, but in the meantime, a vast majority of women workers have fallen into the ditches of irregular work and the demands of the majority have been neglected to benefit a few. Capitalists have learnt to 'sacrifice' a few laws for the sake of obtaining further flexibility. Despite the argument that these revisions will open new opportunities for women, without questioning the essence of Kim's government and its support for neo-liberalism, the revisions that were recently made will only expedite the flexible usage of women workers and thus further deteriorate the working conditions of irregular women workers. The Ministry and the NGOs do not realize that the laws, along with others that were made during the recent years4 , are all in compliance with neo-liberalism.

It has only been one year since the Ministry of Gender Equality took off, but those benefiting from it are middle-class, elite women, and only the minority of women workers who are lucky enough to be in a regular job. The presidential elections take place next year. Despite that the Ministry is conforming to neo-liberal policies and trying to confuse the workers about the essence of its policies, it does have some significance amidst the severely patriarchal political scene of Korea - which may well be undermined by any of the major right-wing political parties that take office - including the ruling New Millenium Democratic Party of Kim Dae-Jung, which still receive a lot of support from NGOs. This will merely lead to more lack of hope for state-led labour policies.

FIGHTING AND ORGANISING


Neo-liberalism was not something that hit Korea suddenly in 1997, but is a historical development of capitalism that has gradually taken form during the last few decades. It had been women workers who had felt the effects of globalisation first and thus were the first ones to resist. It was the women workers of Korea, who fought militantly during the 70s and early 80s for a democratic union and worker's rights. Women workers formed the foundation for the modern labour movement, although this fact often tends to be forgotten. During the late 80's, the Korean economy reconstructed itself into focusing on export-oriented heavy industries, whose workers were predominantly men, and women workers were left behind.

The onslaught of neo-liberal globalisation and the impoverishment that came with it was also felt first by women workers. Just after the economic crisis, the women worker's movement moved a big step forward when independent women's trade unions began to beformed5 . The unions came out of the need to address the specific issues of women workers that could not be properly dealt with in a general union -organising irregular workers, the unemployed, domestic workers and those women who worked in small companies where there are no unions. The percentage of women participating in unions still remain at a meagre 5%, due to the fact that general unions do not accommodate workers who are not regular workers. It was only in 1997, when the IMF enforced austerity measures and structural adjustment programs also affected male workers, that the people's movement in Korea fully realised the destructive nature of neo-liberalism. From then on, flexibility of labour has become the main target of struggle for the working class. Spotlight was finally thrown on the fact that neo-liberalism attack women workers foremost, but unfortunately the longtime demands and struggles of women workers are being put aside, as the struggles against 'irregular labour' is again being organised in a male-oriented fashion.

The establishments of these unions are very significant in the history of the Korean labour movement and also in the women's movement. Just as the strategies of capitalists change, the organisation of the working class also much change to resist effectively. The essence of neo-liberalism and its gender-bias cannot be resisted through the traditional method of organization concentrating on male, regular workers from big enterprises.

However, these newly formed women's unions still have further developments to make and many obstacles to overcome, in their struggles against national and international capital. The unions must question the role of neo-liberal globalisation and its strategy of incorporating flexibility measures into the labour market, for a full understanding of the situation of women workers and organizing of more radical struggles that go into the fundamental core. And at the same time, the worker's movement of Korea must go through structural changes to accommodate the ever increasing irregular workers, and must also make more effort into overcoming the patriarchal values that are still prevalent inside people's movement. Many women activists and unionists have started to address the issues of gender discrimination and sexual violence inside the people's movement, which up until now had been covered up. Over the years, many fervent and militant women activists have had to leave the movement because of discrimination and violence. It was always considered women's fault, or victimized women were forced to 'forgive' for the 'greater cause'. Many women activists, workers and unionists are uniting themselves and are calling upon the movement to tackle the problem of hierarchy, discrimination and violence.

TOWARDS ORGANIZING GLOBAL RESISTANCE OF WOMEN


As we have seen, neo-liberal globalisation affects all areas of society, to attain flexibility of the labour market solely for the interests of transnational capital. In the case of Korea, this process of enforcing structural adjustment and flexibility has devastated the lives of the people, especially women. Capitalist industrialisation has brought about the rise of the women's proletariat and neo-liberal globalisation has further feminised the proletariat while at the same time impoverishing the proletariat into the verge of slavery.

This is not a matter of women merely being affected 'more' - we must look at the mechanisms of neo-liberalism that operate in a gender-biased way. Indeed, neo-liberal globalisation itself feed upon gender discrimination and effectively use traditional patriarchal values to exploit women further. Patriarchal ideologies act to crush any attempts of women to politicize and form resistance.

However, the essence of neo-liberalism is slowly being manifested and women have begun to fight back. Feminisation of labour and feminisation of poverty signify increased exploitation of women, but precisely because of that, provide the possibility for organization and resistance, nationally and internationally. Women must now go forth as subjects in uniting the people in our fight against neo-liberal globalisation. Instead of being incorporated into a ready-made movement of men or middle-class elite women, instead of taking the problems of discrimination for granted, women workers, farmers, indigenous peoples, migrants and other grassroot peoples of the Third World must form a broad solidarity. We must analyse globalisation from women's perspective, plan strategies that conform with the particular needs of women, propose alternatives that include women as equal subjects, keep to the principle of internationalism, and unite with other oppressed groups in the mass resistance in the fight against neo-liberalism - and go beyond in creating a world based on equality.

* Joo-Yeon Jeong & Seung-Min Choi are with the Policy & Information Center for International Solidarity (PICIS), Korea. This paper was presented at the International South Group Network (ISGN) Asian Workshop on Women and Globalisation, 22-24 November, Manila.

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August 14th, 2014

8/14/2014

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


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


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

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

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



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


State Police, or Police State? --Nathan

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

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


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

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


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

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


Belong to the most formidable International NETWORK for Security Professionals

ISIO Demographics

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


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

* Bank Security

* Border Security

* Building Security

* Business and Commercial Security

* Cargo Security

* City Security

* Control Station Security

* Event Security

* Homeland Security

* Hospital Security

* Hotel, Casino & Landmark Security

* Military and Defense Security

* Industrial Security

* Law Enforcement Security

* Oil and Refinery Security

* Port Security

* Prison Security

* Rail/Tunnel and Subway Security

* Retail and Store Security

* School Security


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

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

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

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

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



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

Thursday, February 15, 2007

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

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

[....]

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


__________________________________________

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

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


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


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

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


Just How Corrupt is SAIC?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
0 Comments

August 13th, 2014

8/13/2014

0 Comments

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Jacob Fishman, Baltimore


_________________________________________


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

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

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

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



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


Water Privatization in Baltimore

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

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




The Dangerous Return of Water Privatization

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


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

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

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

It hasn’t always been this way.

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


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

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

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

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

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

________________________________________________

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


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

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




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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

______________________________________________



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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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




________________________________________________


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

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



Fracking Spreads Worldwide

By Nidaa Bakhsh and Brian Swint November 14, 2013


Bloomberg Financial

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

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



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

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

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


_______________________________________________

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

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


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

Contaminated freshwater systems caused by ‘fracking’

Friday, April 4, 2014 13:52

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


0 Comments

August 12th, 2014

8/12/2014

0 Comments

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

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

Make a good life for your children and grandchildren.


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


October 18, 2007, 10:28 am  PR WATCH


Corruption widespread in India, says US report |

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

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




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


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

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

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



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






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


_________________________________________________

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

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


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


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

by 

Robert Freeman


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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











_____________________________________________

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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

From The New York Times:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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




John Danilovich

Secretary General
International Chamber of Commerce



0 Comments

August 05th, 2014

8/5/2014

0 Comments

 
To end on media for now I want to revisit what Obama and neo-liberals in Congress are doing besides ending net neutrality-----selling off all public airwaves because those tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud last decade off-shored to accounts overseas means we need to sell public assets to replace the stolen money.


Raise your hands if you understand you do not sell public assets to cover massive corporate fraud---EVERYONE.


In order for wireless and internet to have more air space for millions of cat memes and APPs no one uses---every book in every library digitized so we can get rid of libraries......we need to hand more and more of public air waves to these communications corporations.  Public access TV/radio----free TV ----- no profit there say neo-liberals and neo-cons.  Besides, there is all of that ' journalism IS ONLY by professionals working for media corporations' that takes away from the public needing air waves.

BYE-BYE PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND PUBLIC AND FREE TV!  WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS----A DEMOCRACY?

FCC to expand wireless spectrum





Published Sep 29, 2012 at 05:00AM / Updated Nov 19, 2013 at 12:31AM



WASHINGTON — The government took a big step Friday to aid the creation of new high-speed wireless Internet networks that could fuel the development of the next generation of smartphones, tablets and devices that have not even been thought of yet.

The Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a sweeping, though preliminary, proposal to reclaim public airwaves currently used for broadcast television and auction them off for use in wireless broadband networks, with a portion of the proceeds paid to the broadcasters.

The initiative, which the FCC says would be the first in which any government would pay to reclaim public airwaves with the intention of selling them, would help satisfy what many industry experts say is booming demand for wireless Internet capacity.


Mobile broadband traffic will increase more than 30-fold by 2015, the commission estimates.


shaping the future



Ensuring Viewers' Are Not Denied New and Better TV Services


The future of TV is bright, and we want to ensure it stays that way. Viewers are just beginning to realize the full potential of digital TV, including the best quality HD, additional free channels and mobile TV. And ultra HD and 3D television is on the horizon.

But decisions made by the federal government about how the airwaves are used could impact television's ability to innovate.

Wireless companies claim that they need more spectrum (or airwaves) – including airwaves that local TV stations currently use to provide free services – to meet the demands of increasing wireless Internet services. In response, Congress passed a law in 2012 allowing an auction of broadcast TV airwaves for those stations that choose to participate.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of advocates like you, the law includes protections to help prevent viewers from losing access to free broadcast TV and all of the news, emergency information, sports and entertainment you expect and deserve.

Now, it is up to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to implement the legislation, and we must ensure that they follow through on that promise to ensure viewers like you are not harmed.

Broadcasters are excited about the future; we are innovating and developing new technologies and integrating new platforms to deliver the best shows on TV when and where viewers want to watch them.

We want to ensure that TV viewers have access to the great services they currently receive and those on the horizon. Sign up to learn more about this issue and find out what you can do to help ensure government actions don't threaten your local TV service.

Learn more about spectrum (or airwaves) with Spectrum 101 (in Spanish).

_______________________________________
FORGET THE REPUBLICANS-----IT'S THE NEO-LIBERALS WHO ARE KILLING YOU AND I

Of course neo-liberals are taking the lead in this policy because selling public air waves is all about paying for unemployment benefits you know.  Always looking of for the little people those neo-liberals.  Gillibrand doesn't want to go to Wall Street to collect the fraud ---she says let's take public assets!  Long term unemployment created by FED policy and global corporations---NO, Gillibrand says----the public airwaves must go to maximize corporate profits. 

70% of American people living at poverty and neo-liberals are working to take away even the ability to watch free TV....no means of communication for the masses!  Take away the public Post Office and most American people will be using smoke signals to communicate!  When you are moving the US to third world status you must keep people in the dark!

ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS---


Congress to Sell Public Airwaves to Pay Benefits



Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, both Democrats, on Thursday before a news conference on an emergency communications network to be created by auctioning airwaves.

By EDWARD WYATT and JENNIFER STEINHAUER Published: February 16, 2012 227 Comments

WASHINGTON — The need for revenue to partly cover the extension of the payroll tax cut and long-term unemployment benefits has pushed Congress to embrace a generational shift in the country’s media landscape: the auction of public airwaves now used for television broadcasts to create more wireless Internet systems.


_________________________________________________

The switch to DTV was done completely with no discussion as to how this policy will affect the future generations.  We were simply exposed to flashes of public service announcements to get what was needed for this change.  People never knew what was going on behind the scenes and once again-----THERE IS BILL CLINTON AND NEO-LIBERALS----IN 1996 and now with Obama and neo-liberals in Congress-----in one of the largest grabs of public assets in history.

I bet you didn't even know this......didn't teach it in school.....no discussion in public policy meetings for the public.....no labor and justice leaders outraged over this attack on their memberships......

This is serious folks---global corporations and their pols are taking away every means the majority of citizens have to communicate and get news.


THIS HAPPENS BECAUSE THE MEDIA IN MARYLAND IS SO CAPTURED AS TO KEEP PEOPLE UNINFORMED.


A Democratic Party leadership and Governor would rebuild those channels in public media and in community town halls because Democrats have a platform of working for labor and justice.  Neo-liberals and neo-cons work for wealth and profit.


Glen Ford, editor of the online Black Agenda Report calls the DTV transition “the biggest squandering of public broadcast resources in the history of the United States.”


August 05, 2009

The DTV Transition Puts Corporate Profits Ahead of the Public Interest Privatizing the Airwaves


by STEVE MACEK And SCOTT SANDERS

The much-delayed switchover to digital TV is now behind us. On June 12, all full power TV stations in the country ceased their analog broadcasts and made the final switch to a digital only format.

In the lead up to the DTV transition, the public’s attention focused almost entirely upon ways of mitigating the switchover’s effect on the elderly, the poor and non-English speakers who rely on over-the-air television far more than the general population. In response to such concerns, the federal government created a coupon program that subsidized most of the cost of digital-to-analog converter boxes, but then failed to fully fund it. When it became clear that millions of households would not be ready for DTV by the original February 17 deadline, Congress pushed back the transition date.

The extra time — together with an additional $650 million appropriated by Congress for more converter boxes and more public outreach — seems to have done the trick. Though some viewers have reported losing the signals of individual stations in certain markets, the vast majority of Americans weathered the shift to DTV without losing service or being excessively inconvenienced.

Yet, there is another problem with the DTV transition, one that has never gotten the sort of headlines that the shortage of converter box coupons did.
The fact is that the shift to digital television represents a massive government giveaway to a handful of powerful media conglomerates.

The Clinton-era 1996 Telecommunications Act which mandated the change to DTV stripped away most media ownership concentration limits and gave away huge swathes — up to $90 billion worth — of publicly owned digital broadcast spectrum to incumbent TV license holders. In return for giving up a single analog channel, each of these broadcasters received up to 10 digital channels in return. For free. Only one new public service requirement was added — a modest increase in children’s programming.

To make matters worse, most digital subchannels run by the big network-affiliated stations air duplicative services such as sitcom reruns, old movies, weather, home shopping programs or cooking shows.

That is, if they run anything at all. Despite recent failures such as their flawed coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq, none of the commercial broadcasters have announced plans we’re aware of to use the new channels to expand or improve their public affairs or news programming.

Where are the digital channels for women and people of color, and the set asides to support independent programming by and for youth and other less advantaged groups, local C-SPANs and other experimental services? Where are the new public affairs programs designed to showcase the perspectives normally marginalized on commercial TV?

Such diversity on the airwaves is needed now more than ever. People of color make up 34 percent of the U.S. population, but only around 3 percent of commercial full power TV license holders, with women holding just 5 percent.


Glen Ford, editor of the online Black Agenda Report calls the DTV transition “the biggest squandering of public broadcast resources in the history of the United States.”


Steps should be taken to ensure that corporations are not the sole beneficiaries of the digital broadcasting age. The value of the broadcast spectrum that Congress simply handed over to the big corporate media ought to be recovered through appropriate means (taxes, license fees, etc.) and used to subsidize a democratically run, decentralized public media system, the sort of media that will provide a forum for the minority and dissident viewpoints sorely missing on mainstream TV.

Many talented professional journalists are unemployed or waiting tables right now due to the deepening crisis of the corporate journalism model. We need to foster partnerships between professional and citizen journalists and public TV and radio outlets, PEG access centers, community and micro-radio stations, and other community media. Picture a local public media homepage that looks sort of like a daily newspaper but with prominent live TV and radio streams, lots of links to article and program related resources and social media, with the feel of an online public library and town commons.

And no commercial advertisements whatsoever.

A functioning fifth estate is essential to the maintenance of democracy.

We can and must fix this bad DTV deal, and create and permanently fund various new and extensively reworked public media outlets and centers.


We must collectively piece together a system with the highest measure of accountability for every community across the nation as if lives depend on it. Because they do.

Steve Macek is an associate professor of speech communication at North Central College.

Scott Sanders is a longtime Chicago media and democracy advocate.


_____________________________________________
Here is the original push for keeping air waves in the public domain.....it took Clinton to make the move to handing all to Wall Street.

This proclamation on the public domain may be too politically correct for some but what these FCC regulations do is offer the public control of whether a media outlet should have a license, place controls that most think are needed in a civil society, and it keeps corporations in check as to control of the airwaves.  All of this is what neo-liberals and neo-cons are dismantling.  Consolidation beyond monopoly/anti-trust is creating a not-ready-for prime time media with so many commercials.....so many rerun channels....so many paid advertisement shows.....
that people are viewing TV less and less.  Remember, to blow up a public service load it with fraud and corruption----have you seen those paid advertisements?----cut quality and access-----and VOILA----there goes public access and public airwaves.

LYING, CHEATING, STEALING, DEATH AND SURVEILLANCE -----ARE ALL REOCCURRING THEMES THESE DAYS.  WONDER WHY??


Air Waves “are in the Public Domain”: Public Television Advocacy in the 1950s


Although educational radio stations flourished in the early 1920s—more than 200 existed prior to the introduction of network radio in 1926—most faltered shortly thereafter. One reason was the alignment of the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), created by legislation declaring that the airwaves belonged to the public, with commercial interests. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) replaced the FRC in 1934, educational, religious, and labor groups promoted an amendment requiring the allocation of one-fourth of all broadcast licenses to nonprofit organizations. The amendment failed to pass, and by 1937, only 38 educational radio stations remained in operation. In 1948, as sales of televisions skyrocketed, Freida B. Hennock, the first female FCC commissioner, began a campaign to assign channel frequencies for nonprofit, educational use. Advocates backing Hennock documented the high number of acts or threats of violence shown to children every week on commercial television broadcasts. Consequently, when the FCC in 1952 added UHF (ultra high frequency) channels to the existing VHF (very high frequency) channels, they reserved 10 percent for use by nonprofit educational organizations. In the following testimony to a 1955 Congressional subcommittee, Hennock advocated oversight of commercial television by governmental and civic bodies and championed educational television. The testimony from the general manager of a new Pittsburgh educational station, William Wood, follows. Wood emphasized the lack of violence in his ‘poverty stricken’ station’s programming and included excerpts from fan mail praising an acclaimed children’s show, The Children’s Corner, a program co-produced by Fred Rogers, who later created, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Until 1967, however, when the Federal government established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to appropriate funds for public television, non-commercial stations struggled to survive.

STATEMENT OF HON. FRIEDA B. HENNOCK, MEMBER OF THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION . . .

As I state on the first page, I know of no field where there is more important work to be done by the Senate than in juvenile delinquency, and the attention this committee is giving to this critical problem is most timely. Nowhere can this committee be more effective in stemming the excessive, concentrated and exaggerated portrayal of crime and violence than in radio and television. For the air waves over which broadcasters send their signals are in the public domain. The broadcasters acquire no vested interest in the air waves, and are issued licenses of no more than 3 years' duration.

The FCC requires broadcasters to operate in the public interest, and it must take programming into full account in issuing and renewing their licenses.

Here I want to say, Mr. Chairman, that in 1938 the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee was opposed to superpower, large AM broadcasting stations.

Senator Wheeler was then the chairman. By the mere passage of the resolution of that committee, which the FCC has ever since honored, the FCC never has gone in for superpower AM stations—just the mere passage of a resolution of that committee.

Now, this is the public domain, and I am going on from here as to what your committee can do as far as we are concerned, the FCC and the broadcasters and the public.

Broadcasters who apply for station licenses and for license renewals are required to report in detail the percentage of time devoted to different types of programs such as entertainment, religion, news, education, discussion—I did not list them all—and those that are sustaining and commercial, and so forth; that is when they apply for a license.

Now, the objective is to insure balanced programming responsive to the needs, interests, and tastes of the communities served by the licensees.

In addition to the foregoing, the FCC should have a brand-new requirement which we do not now have, but which is clearly indicated as a result of the hearings you have had here, and that is, I think, we should require the broadcasters to tell the number of acts and threats of crime and violence on all their programs throughout the broadcast day.

Moreover, the FCC should pursue a rigorous policy of refusing renewal of the licenses of offending stations which disregard their public-service responsibilities by continuing to victimize immature audiences with a concentrated and profuse deluge of crime, brutality, sadism, and outright murder.

The programming standards set out in the code of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters are excellent, but they have little effect on programming as the code is voluntary and the NARTB is not in a position to enforce it effectively. . . . < p>In addition, I urge the following steps:

1. Women’s organizations and all other civic, educational, welfare, and religious groups should supplement the activities of established monitoring organizations in viewing and listening to TV and radio programs. All such groups should press the stations, the networks, the program sponsors and the FCC itself to bring to a halt the broadcast of pernicious programs which are making a significant contribution to the rise of juvenile delinquency.

2. These public-service groups should study the reports of the FCC licensees. . . .

3. A National Radio and TV Children’s Week should be proclaimed during which there should be an evaluation of all radio and television programs in terms of their suitability for children.

4. An alert and articulate public should, as of right, present positive and constructive suggestions to licensees and sponsors as to its radio and TV program preferences for adults and children alike. . . .

The public should no longer take its radio and TV programing for granted, or continue to accept passively anything the networks and broadcasters choose to offer.

5. Since radio and TV operate in the public domain, the FCC should set up proper programing standards for both as soon as possible, and insure their implementation by rigorous enforcement. . . .

And last, of course, you expected me to say something about educational television, I am sure. .........



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July 28th, 2014

7/28/2014

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



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

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

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


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

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

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

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



Mayor Rawlings-Blake Wants To Sell Garages For Revenue


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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

Mark Reutter June 29, 2012 at 4:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Costs Vary Among Garages


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

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

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

The charges for maintenance also vary widely.

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

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

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

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

Quasi-Public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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contesting baltimore city parking tickets?

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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



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

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


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



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


Tags Wednesday Jul 9th, 2014

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

Mayor,

Baltimore City

250 City Hall - Baltimore Maryland 21202

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

Better Schools. Safer Streets. Stronger Neighborhoods.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT

Caron A. Brace

(443) 853-0957

caron.brace@baltimorecity.gov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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


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

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




Maryland Speed Camera Fraud

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Tony McConkey

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




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

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

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

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


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

Related Issuers
Maryland Transportation Authority


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



RATINGS RATIONALE

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



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




STRENGTHS

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHALLENGES

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

* Significant regional competition from other Washington area airports.

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

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

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

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



Outlook

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



What could change the rating--UP

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



What could change the rating--DOWN

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




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



REGULATORY DISCLOSURES



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



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



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

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

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


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


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

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July 24th, 2014

7/24/2014

0 Comments

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



UMUC’s Mission in Asia


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

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



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


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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

                    

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


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




By Nayana Davis, The Baltimore Sun

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

nadavis@baltsun.com



________________________________________________

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


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



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

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



Study: MOOCs Viewed Positively Among Employers

April 2, 2014 Inside Higher Education

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

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


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


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


Are MOOCs really dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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