Citizens' Oversight Maryland---Maryland Progressives
CINDY WALSH FOR MAYOR OF BALTIMORE----SOCIAL DEMOCRAT
Citizens Oversight Maryland.com
  • Home
  • Cindy Walsh for Mayor of Baltimore
    • Mayoral Election violations
    • Questionnaires from Community >
      • Education Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Housing Questionnaire
      • Emerging Youth Questionnaire
      • Health Care policy for Baltimore
      • Environmental Questionnaires
      • Livable Baltimore questionnaire
      • Labor Questionnnaire
      • Ending Food Deserts Questionnaire
      • Maryland Out of School Time Network
      • LBGTQ Questionnaire
      • Citizen Artist Baltimore Mayoral Forum on Arts & Culture Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Transit Choices Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Activating Solidarity Economies (BASE)
      • Downtown Partnership Questionnaire
      • The Northeast Baltimore Communities Of BelAir Edison Community Association (BECCA )and Frankford Improvement Association, Inc. (FIA)
      • Streets and Transportation/Neighbood Questionnaire
      • African American Tourism and business questionnaire
      • Baltimore Sun Questionnaire
      • City Paper Mayoral Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Technology Com Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Biker's Questionnair
      • Homewood Friends Meeting Questionnaire
      • Baltimore Historical Collaboration---Anthem Project
      • Tubman City News Mayoral Questionnaire
      • Maryland Public Policy Institute Questionnaire
      • AFRO questionnaire
      • WBAL Candidate's Survey
  • Blog
  • Trans Pacific Pact (TPP)
  • Progressive vs. Third Way Corporate Democrats
    • Third Way Think Tanks
  • Financial Reform/Wall Street Fraud
    • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau >
      • CFPB Actions
    • Voted to Repeal Glass-Steagall
    • Federal Reserve >
      • Federal Reserve Actions
    • Securities and Exchange Commission >
      • SEC Actions
    • Commodity Futures Trading Commission >
      • CFTC Actions
    • Office of the Comptroller of the Currency >
      • OCC Actions
    • Office of Treasury/ Inspector General for the Treasury
    • FINRA >
      • FINRA ACTIONS
  • Federal Healthcare Reform
    • Health Care Fraud in the US
    • Health and Human Services Actions
  • Social Security and Entitlement Reform
    • Medicare/Medicaid/SCHIP Actions
  • Federal Education Reform
    • Education Advocates
  • Government Schedules
    • Baltimore City Council
    • Maryland State Assembly >
      • Budget and Taxation Committee
    • US Congress
  • State and Local Government
    • Baltimore City Government >
      • City Hall Actions
      • Baltimore City Council >
        • Baltimore City Council Actions
      • Baltimore Board of Estimates meeting >
        • Board of Estimates Actions
    • Governor's Office >
      • Telling the World about O'Malley
    • Lt. Governor Brown
    • Maryland General Assembly Committees >
      • Communications with Maryland Assembly
      • Budget and Taxation Committees >
        • Actions
        • Pension news
      • Finance Committees >
        • Schedule
      • Business Licensing and Regulation
      • Judicial, Rules, and Nominations Committee
      • Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee >
        • Committee Actions
    • Maryland State Attorney General >
      • Open Meetings Act
      • Maryland Courts >
        • Maryland Court System
    • States Attorney - Baltimore's Prosecutor
    • State Comptroller's Office >
      • Maryland Business Tax Reform >
        • Business Tax Reform Issues
  • Maryland Committee Actions
    • Board of Public Works >
      • Public Works Actions
    • Maryland Public Service Commission >
      • Public Meetings
    • Maryland Health Care Commission/Maryland Community Health Resources Commission >
      • MHCC/MCHRC Actions
    • Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition
  • Maryland and Baltimore Development Organizations
    • Baltimore/Maryland Development History
    • Committee Actions
    • Maryland Development Organizations
  • Maryland State Department of Education
    • Charter Schools
    • Public Schools
    • Algebra Project Award
  • Baltimore City School Board
    • Charter Schools >
      • Charter Schools---Performance
      • Charter School Issues
    • Public Schools >
      • Public School Issues
  • Progressive Issues
    • Fair and Balanced Elections
    • Labor Issues
    • Rule of Law Issues >
      • Rule of Law
    • Justice issues 2
    • Justice Issues
    • Progressive Tax Reform Issues >
      • Maryland Tax Reform Issues
      • Baltimore Tax Reform Issues
    • Strong Public Education >
      • Corporate education reform organizations
    • Healthcare for All Issues >
      • Universal Care Bill by state
  • Building Strong Media
    • Media with a Progressive Agenda (I'm still checking on that!) >
      • anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com
      • "Talk About It" Radio - WFBR 1590AM Baltimore
      • Promethius Radio Project
      • Clearing the Fog
      • Democracy Now
      • Black Agenda Radio
      • World Truth. TV Your Alternative News Network.
      • Daily Censured
      • Bill Moyers Journal
      • Center for Public Integrity
      • Public Radio International
      • Baltimore Brew
      • Free Press
    • Far Left/Socialist Media
    • Media with a Third Way Agenda >
      • MSNBC
      • Center for Media and Democracy
      • Public Radio and TV >
        • NPR and MPT News
      • TruthOut
  • Progressive Organizations
    • Political Organizations >
      • Progressives United
      • Democracy for America
    • Labor Organizations >
      • United Workers
      • Unite Here Local 7
      • ROC-NY works to build power and win justice
    • Justice Organizations >
      • APC Baltimore
      • Occupy Baltimore
    • Rule of Law Organizations >
      • Bill of Rights Defense Committee
      • National Lawyers Guild
      • National ACLU
    • Tax Reform Organizations
    • Healthcare for All Organizations >
      • Healthcare is a Human Right - Maryland
      • PNHP Physicians for a National Health Program
      • Healthcare NOW- Maryland
    • Public Education Organizations >
      • Parents Across America
      • Philadelphia Public School Notebook thenotebook.org
      • Chicago Teachers Union/Blog
      • Ed Wize Blog
      • Educators for a Democratic Union
      • Big Education Ape
    • Elections Organizations >
      • League of Women Voters
  • Progressive Actions
    • Labor Actions
    • Justice Actions
    • Tax Reform Actions >
      • Baltimore Tax Actions
      • Maryland Tax Reform Actions
    • Healthcare Actions
    • Public Education Actions
    • Rule of Law Actions >
      • Suing Federal and State government
    • Free and Fair Elections Actions
  • Maryland/Baltimore Voting Districts - your politicians and their votes
    • 2014 ELECTION OF STATE OFFICES
    • Maryland Assembly/Baltimore
  • Petitions, Complaints, and Freedom of Information Requests
    • Complaints - Government and Consumer >
      • Sample Complaints
    • Petitions >
      • Sample Petitions
    • Freedom of Information >
      • Sample Letters
  • State of the Democratic Party
  • Misc
    • WBFF TV
    • WBAL TV
    • WJZ TV
    • WMAR TV
    • WOLB Radio---Radio One
    • The Gazette
    • Baltimore Sun Media Group
  • Misc 2
    • Maryland Public Television
    • WYPR
    • WEAA
    • Maryland Reporter
  • Misc 3
    • University of Maryland
    • Morgan State University
  • Misc 4
    • Baltimore Education Coalition
    • BUILD Baltimore
    • Church of the Great Commission
    • Maryland Democratic Party
    • Pennsylvania Avenue AME Zion Church
    • Maryland Municipal League
    • Maryland League of Women Voters
  • Untitled
  • Untitled
  • Standard of Review
  • Untitled
  • WALSH FOR GOVERNOR - CANDIDATE INFORMATION AND PLATFORM
    • Campaign Finance/Campaign donations
    • Speaking Events
    • Why Heather Mizeur is NOT a progressive
    • Campaign responses to Community Organization Questionnaires
    • Cindy Walsh vs Maryland Board of Elections >
      • Leniency from court for self-representing plaintiffs
      • Amended Complaint
      • Plaintiff request for expedited trial date
      • Response to Motion to Dismiss--Brown, Gansler, Mackie, and Lamone
      • Injunction and Mandamus
      • DECISION/APPEAL TO SPECIAL COURT OF APPEALS---Baltimore City Circuit Court response to Cindy Walsh complaint >
        • Brief for Maryland Court of Special Appeals >
          • Cover Page ---yellow
          • Table of Contents
          • Table of Authorities
          • Leniency for Pro Se Representation
          • Statement of Case
          • Questions Presented
          • Statement of Facts
          • Argument
          • Conclusion/Font and Type Size
          • Record Extract
          • Appendix
          • Motion for Reconsideration
          • Response to Defendants Motion to Dismiss
          • Motion to Reconsider Dismissal
      • General Election fraud and recount complaints
    • Cindy Walsh goes to Federal Court for Maryland election violations >
      • Complaints filed with the FCC, the IRS, and the FBI
      • Zapple Doctrine---Media Time for Major Party candidates
      • Complaint filed with the US Justice Department for election fraud and court irregularities.
      • US Attorney General, Maryland Attorney General, and Maryland Board of Elections are charged with enforcing election law
      • Private media has a responsibility to allow access to all candidates in an election race. >
        • Print press accountable to false statement of facts
      • Polling should not determine a candidate's viability especially if the polling is arbitrary
      • Viability of a candidate
      • Public media violates election law regarding do no damage to candidate's campaign
      • 501c3 Organizations violate election law in doing no damage to a candidate in a race >
        • 501c3 violations of election law-----private capital
      • Voter apathy increases when elections are not free and fair
  • Maryland Board of Elections certifies election on July 10, 2014
  • Maryland Elections ---2016

November 11th, 2013

11/11/2013

0 Comments

 
  PLEASE BE AWARE THAT NEO-LIBERALS ALWAYS USE THE PRIMARIES TO SOUND PROGRESSIVE BUT WE KNOW THE POLICIES THAT ACTUALLY PLAY OUT ARE WEALTH AND PROFIT!!!!  Tell these pols we are not going to be fooled by running and voting for labor and justice!!!

NEO-LIBERALS ARE GOING TO TAKE ALL WEALTH BUILT FROM DECADES OF LABOR AND JUSTICE GAINS.......ALL MARYLAND DEMOCRATS ARE NEO-LIBERALS!!!!!

As we go into election season across the country please listen to what is said and how the media portrays it!  We need everyone to shout out what the truth to these campaign issues are and how these neo-liberals do not meet what they are out on the campaign trail saying-----think Obama.  If we knew about Obama what we know about O'Malley for example we would have never voted for him!!!!!  The theme of these last few years has been neo-liberals moving all of public assets and wealth to the top and protecting that wealth from public justice.  Now, they are soaking the public with losses in retirements, pensions, education, and health care to pay for the loses to massive corporate fraud. 

DO NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN.  WE CAN REVERSE THIS BY SIMPLY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARY ELECTIONS!  WE HAVE HAD A FEW SUCCESSES, BUT TOO MANY NEO-LIBERALS ARE STILL WINNING!!!!


Below you will see campaign issues and how they are skewed.  These are vital issues for all Americans and we need to listen and research who these candidates are.  Please note that labor unions are being held hostage by neo-liberals as regards labor laws so they do not always do the right thing for labor and justice-----work with them to strengthen the unions but vote against all neo-liberals!

This is what a labor and justice victory looks like!  Remember, we do not need to have only socialists to reach justice, we need real progressive labor and justice candidates in all primaries challenging the neo-liberals holding the democratic party!!!


DAY FOUR: Sawant Wins 58.45% of Latest Ballots, Closes Gap With Conlin To 1,200 Votes

Posted by Clay Showalter 45pc on November 08, 2013 · Flag November 8, 2013 / 9:00 PM –

The latest ballot drop by King County elections has increased the likelihood that not only will Kshama Sawant defeat incumbent Richard Conlin in the race for Seattle City Council Position 2, but her margin of victory may be enough to avoid any recount!

The new numbers include Sawant gaining 58.45 percent of the newest ballot drop, bringing the overall total to 74,933 (49.49 percent) for Sawant and 76,170  (50.31 percent) for Conlin. After trailing by 6,136 votes on Election Night, Sawant has now cut Conlin's lead to only 1,237 votes - only a fifth of his original lead, with at least 30,000 votes left to count.

To win with 30,000 ballots to go, Sawant would need only 52.06 percent of those votes. In each of the last four ballot releases, Sawant has led by more than that margin. In each of the last three, her percentage has topped 55 percent.

King County Elections has now released six tallies of ballots in four days. The trend remains unmistakeable:

Ballot Drop Sawant Conlin

Election Night (Tues. 11-5) 38,116  46.13% 44,252  53.56% Day Two Afternoon (11-6) 7,862  49.69% 7,949  50.24%
Day Two Evening (11-6) 3,385  50.21% 3,342  49.57%
Day Three Afternoon (11-7) 6,950  52.79% 6,174  46.90% Day Three Evening (11-7) 5,747  55.92% 4,528  44.07%
Day Four Afternoon (11-8) 7,852  55.29% 6,338  44.63%
Day Four Evening (11-8) 5,021  58.45% 3,567  41.52%
Total 74,933 49.49% 76,170  50.31%

In close elections, a machine recount is triggered when candidates finish within half a percentage point and 2,000 votes of each other. King County Elections must do a manual recount if they're within 150 votes and a quarter of a percentage point.

To avoid a recount, with the assumption of 30,000 ballots left, the Sawant campaign must win 52.23 percent to win by more than a half percentage point, and 55.40 percent to win by more than 2,000 votes - both well within range given current trends. However, starting next week, counted ballots will include more challenged ballots cast earlier in the election period. This weekend, the Sawant campaign is holding volunteer and staff trainings to mobilize its large base of active supporters to help track down and verify challenged ballots, as a way to maximize the chances that the Sawant campaign can win the Position 2 race outright, without need for a recount. Read more about these trainings here, and please join us Saturday and/or Sunday at 11am at our Campaign Headquarters (1265 Main Street, Suite 205).

With the holiday weekend, King County Elections will release no further tallies until Tuesday afternoon, November 12, at 4:30 PM.

"The tremendous surge of enthusiasm for our campaign in its final weeks is being reflected in these results," Sawant said this afternoon. "This is what democracy looks like."

PS. All supporters should use the King County Ballot Tracker to ensure that your ballot has been counted without issue. It will save our Voter Protection Squad a trip to your house!


_________________________________________________
YOU WILL NOT ONLY HEAR NOTHING ON THIS TOPIC BUT IF THESE NEO-LIBERALS HAPPEN TO GET QUESTIONED ON THIS TOPIC IN PUBLIC-------THEY SIMPLY DENY IT HAPPENS.  MEANWHILE MARYLAND JUSTICE ADVOCATES MARCH AND PROTEST WITH PUBLIC TESTIMONY THAT IMMIGRANTS AND LOW-WAGE WORKERS IN MARYLAND ARE BEING HIT HARD WITH THIS PRACTICE!

You cannot have a politician passing laws like Dream Act or welcoming immigrants to come to Maryland to work and then turn their heads to exploitation.  IF POLITICIANS ARE GOING TO ALLOW IMMIGRANTS TO WORK THEY NEED TO HOLD EMPLOYERS TO THE SAME LABOR STANDARDS NOW!!!


Wage Theft Outstrips Bank, Gas Station and Convenience Store Robberies
By Laura Clawson, Daily Kos

10 November 13

 

America's workers face a crime epidemic-one in which the criminals are rarely even made to pay back what they've stolen. The crime epidemic in question is wage theft:

Gordon Lafer assesses some of the damage:

Fully 64 percent of low-wage workers have some amount of pay stolen out of their paychecks by their employers every week, including 26 percent who are effectively paid less than minimum wage. Fully three-quarters of workers who are due overtime have part or all of their earned overtime wages stolen by their employer. In total, the average low-wage worker loses a stunning $2,634 per year in unpaid wages, representing 15 percent of their earned income. And enforcement? Forget about it. At the federal level, there's just one agent enforcing wage laws for every 141,000 workers. More than half of the states have cut wage enforcement staff in recent years, and some states have tried to eliminate those positions entirely. For instance,

In 2010, Missouri's labor department collected $200,000 in restitution for minimum-wage violations and $500,000 for prevailing-wage violations, and issued 1,714 citations for child-labor violations. Yet [Republican state House Speaker Steven] Tilley charged that investigators were being "overzealous," particularly in prosecuting complaints of employers cheating on prevailing wages. For many Republican politicians, crimes committed by employers against workers don't really register as crimes at all in our political environment. And while the Obama administration has cracked down, the back pay it's collected is just a drop in the bucket of what workers have earned that their employers have taken.


____________________________________________


Do you know that O'Malley/Brown (O/B)oversaw the period that the MD Veteran's hospital in Baltimore was ranked bottom in the nation for service to vets?  Do you know that homeless people are often vets and there is a War on the Poor in Balt under  O/B.  Do you know that O'Malley travelled overseas to market MD online 'colleges' almost everyone regards as inferior education to vets having strong education benefits that would have taken them to good 4 year universities instead.  Vets are being targeted with this cheap online education that takes all their GI bill education benefits and advocates shouting loudly that this exploits our vets--O'Malley/Brown are the face of this bad policy!  Not that it would be any different with the other neo-liberal challengers.

O/B made health care reform about building private health systems that gave health institutions the right to write health policy that made sure profit at the expense of patient access ruled the day and vets will fall into that lack of access as consolidation of the health industry-the ACA goal -will have global health systems preying on the poor, elderly, chronically ill, and vets. 

If we want health care that holds everyone equal access and care--just as US citizens paid for in taxes-we want Universal Care in MD-and we need a labor and justice candidate running in the primaries!


Brown proposes tax break for veterans Military pension exemption is part of five-part plan


  • Comments 0
  •  3



By Michael Dresser, The Baltimore Sun 12:09 p.m. EST, November 11, 2013

Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Anthony G. Brown marked Veterans Day by releasing a five-part plan for former members of the armed forces, including a tax break and help with employment and housing.

Brown, the lieutenant governor, issued what he called his "Compact with Maryland Veterans" Monday with little fanfare on a day when he avoided scheduling campaign appearances and instead attended ceremonial functions in his official capacity.

As part of the plan Brown and his running mate, Howard County Executive Ken Ulman, joined his fellow candidates in promising a tax cut – though on a relatively modest scale targeted at veterans.

Brown, an Army veteran of the Iraq war, proposed the elimination of taxes on military pensions up to $150,000 a year – a break he would phase in over eight years. His campaign estimated the cost as of July 2018 at $17.5 million annually.

The lieutenant governor's Democratic rivals -- Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Del. Heather R. Mizeur of Montgomery County -- have each called for broader tax cuts. Gansler has proposed a reduction in the corporate income tax, while Mizeur has recommended income tax cuts for about 90 percent of Maryland taxpayers – offset by increases for those earning more than $500,000.

The three announced Republican candidates – Harford County Executive David R. Craig, Del. Ron George of Anne Arundel County and Charles County business executive Charles Lollar -- have also called for reductions in a variety of taxes and fees.

In addition to the tax preference, Brown proposed that the state step up its efforts to help veterans find jobs and to provide bridge loans to veterans whose disability claims are caught up in the Veterans Administration processing backlog.

The plan also calls for establishment of a Veterans Treatment Court – modeled after the state's drug courts – to help veterans who get in trouble with the law to receive treatment for addiction and mental health problems and to avoid jail. Brown would also expand the state's Rental Housing Works program and devote at least 20 percent of its funding to veterans.

The Brown campaign estimated the total cost of the tax exemption and new programs at $24.2 million as of what would be the end of his first term.

In releasing his plan, Brown also pointed to the initiatives adopted over the last seven years he has served as No. 2 behind Gov. Martin O'Malley. Among other things, he noted that the administration won passage of a bill intended to make it easier for veterans to use skills acquired in the military in civilian jobs.

_______________________________________
People-----these investors in public private partnerships are all global corporations from VEOLA et al to Wall Street......how does that make for a win for the public?  Remember, these same corporations owe the American people trillions of dollar in corporate fraud and simply need to pay that back to have government fund these projects!!!!

Purple Line: Public-private transit partnership would be one of the broadest in U.S. Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post - This stretch along Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase could be slated for additional development under current Purple Line rail plans.

By Katherine Shaver, Published: October 12

  Maryland transit officials’ proposal to have a private company design, build, operate and help pay for the light-rail Purple Line in the Washington suburbs would be one of the first such arrangements in the United States, raising questions about potential risks and financial impacts.

Only one other U.S. transit project, a commuter rail line in Denver, entails such a far-reaching public-private partnership, but it is still under construction.

Graphic

Map of the proposed Purple Line

Purple Line: Impacted properties

The Maryland Transit Administration will buy some strips of private land. Here are the affected properties.


ARCHIVES | See previous Washington Post coverage of Maryland’s Purple Line plans.

Purple Line would take 116 homes, businesses Katherine Shaver SEP 5

New study details environmental, community impacts of building light-rail line through Maryland suburbs.

Details of the 35-year Purple Line plan have begun to emerge as the Maryland Department of Transportation prepares to seek state approval Wednesday to pursue it. A consortium of private companies would be expected to contribute $500 million to $900 million to the $2.2 billion project.

The private team would be reimbursed for design, construction and equipment costs as work progressed over five years. The state would then pay the company $100 million to $200 million annually to operate and maintain the line for 30 years. The payments could be reduced if the company did not meet certain standards, such as providing reliable service and clean trains.

The private financing costs would be paid back over time with Purple Line fare revenue, officials said. If ridership on the 16-mile line between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties did not materialize as anticipated, fare revenue from other Maryland transit systems would make up the difference, state officials said.

Maryland transportation officials say such a partnership would take advantage of the private sector’s light-rail expertise and require the companies to assume the financial risks of any construction delays or cost overruns. The efficiencies gained from one private entity overseeing all aspects — from the drawing board to bulldozers to trains on tracks — are projected to save up to 20 percent over 35 years, officials say.

“There’s a really strong incentive for [the private companies] to focus on quality and durability,” said Maryland Deputy Transportation Secretary Leif A. Dormsjo. “They have to really own not just the construction project but also make sure we don’t have surprises once riders start to use it.”

The approach, while considered innovative, is drawing scrutiny. Five U.S. transit projects have used public-private partnerships in some form, Maryland officials say. However, the Purple Line would be the only one besides the Denver project to rely heavily on private financing.

The plan will get its first test of political support Wednesday, when the state Board of Public Works — comprising the governor, comptroller and state treasurer — is scheduled to vote on whether to allow the Transportation Department to seek private proposals.

State Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery), who reviewed the plan as a member of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, said he considers it a “very risky proposition.”

“It’s attractive. It’s an innovative approach,” Madaleno said. “But we don’t have very many, if any, examples of how this works out.”

Moreover, he said, communities along the line need assurances that a private company would fulfill promises by the state, such as to run trains on a bridge over Connecticut Avenue in north Chevy Chase rather than stopping traffic.




_______________________________________________

If you do not see the parallel to what is happening in the US to what the banks did in Europe you are not paying attention.  The pensioners are not the problem with the economy or government coffers-----it is the massive fraud of tens of trillions of dollars in fraud that targeted pensions as well that created this problem.  Yet, as you see neo-liberals are watching as this happens in a formerly democratic stronghold.

Look as well at the loading of all state and local governments with credit bond debt and you will see what happened to the southern European nations------deliberate debt designed to force a dismantling of public assets and wealth!!!!



'There are other steps that need to be taken, and soon, to prevent a cascade of municipal bankruptcies. The super-priority of derivatives in bankruptcy needs to be repealed, and the protections of Glass Steagall need to be restored. While we are waiting on a very dilatory Congress, however, state and local governments might consider protecting themselves and their revenues by setting up their own banks'.


The Detroit Bail-In Template: Fleecing Pensioners to Save the Banks

August 14th, 2013


by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.





Follow up:

Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG have been given priority over other bankruptcy claimants, meaning chiefly the pensioners, for payments due on interest rate swaps they entered into with the city. Interest rate swaps – the exchange of interest rate payments between counterparties – are sold by Wall Street banks as a form of insurance, something municipal governments “should” do to protect their loans from an unanticipated increase in rates. Unlike ordinary insurance, however, swaps are actually just bets; and if the municipality loses the bet, it can owe the house, and owe big. The swap casino is almost entirely unregulated, and it is a rigged game that the house virtually always wins. Interest rate swaps are based on the LIBOR rate, which has now been proven to be manipulated by the rate-setting banks; and they were a major contributor to Detroit’s bankruptcy.

Derivative claims are considered “secured” because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but “super-priority” in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as “unsecured” claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.

Systemically Dangerous Institutions Are Moved to the Head of the Line The argument for the super-priority of derivative claims is that nonpayment on these bets represents a “systemic risk” to the financial scheme. Derivative bets are cross-collateralized and are so inextricably entwined in a $600-plus trillion house of cards that the whole financial scheme could go down if the betting scheme were to collapse. Instead of banning or regulating this very risky casino, Congress has been persuaded by the masterminds of Wall Street that it needs to be preserved at all costs.

The same tortured logic has been used to justify the fact that the federal government deigned to bail out Wall Street but not Detroit. Supposedly, the mega-banks pose a systemic risk and Detroit doesn’t. On July 29th, former Obama administration economist Jared Bernstein pursued this line of reasoning on his blog, writing:

[T]he correct motivation for federal bailouts — meaning some combination of managing a bankruptcy, paying off creditors (though often with a haircut), or providing liquidity in cases where that’s the issue as opposed to insolvency – is systemic risk. The failure of large, major banks, two out of the big three auto companies, the secondary market for housing – all of these pose unacceptably large risks to global financial markets, and thus the global economy, to a major industry, including its upstream and downstream suppliers, and to the national housing sector.

Because:

  1. There’s not much of a case that Detroit is systemically connected in those ways, and;
  2. Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code appears to provide an adequate way for it to deal with its insolvency, I don’t think anything like a large scale bailout is forthcoming.
Holding Main Street Hostage Detroit’s bankruptcy poses no systemic risk to Wall Street and global financial markets. Fine. But it does pose a systemic risk to Main Street, local governments, and the contractual rights of pensioners. Credit rating agency Moody’s stated in a recent report that if Detroit manages to cut its pension obligations, other struggling cities could follow suit. The Detroit bankruptcy is establishing a template for wiping out government pensions everywhere. Chicago or New York could be next.

There is also the systemic risk posed to the municipal bond system. Bryce Hoffman, writing in The Detroit News on July 30th, warned:

Detroit’s bankruptcy threatens to change the rules of the municipal bond game and already is making it more expensive for the state’s other struggling towns and school districts to borrow money and fund big infrastructure projects.

In fact, one bond analyst told The Detroit News that he has spoken to major institutional investors who have already decided to stop, for now, buying any Michigan bonds.

The real concern of bond investors, says Hoffman, is not the default of Detroit but the precedent the city is setting. General obligation municipal bonds have always been viewed as a virtually risk-free investment. They are unsecured, but bondholders have considered themselves protected because the bonds are backed by the “unlimited taxing authority” of the government that issued them. Detroit, however, has shown that the city’s taxing authority is far from unlimited.  It already has the highest property taxes of any major city in the country, and it is bumping up against a ceiling imposed by the state constitution. If Detroit is able to cut its bond debt in half or more by defaulting, other distressed cities are liable to look very closely at following suit. Hoffman writes:

The bond market is warning that this will make Michigan a pariah state and raise borrowing costs — not just for Detroit and other troubled municipalities, but also for paragons of fiscal virtue such as Oakland and Livingston counties.

However, writes Hoffman:

Gov. Rick Snyder dismisses that threat and says the bond market is just trying to turn Detroit away from a radical solution that could become a model for other struggling cities across America.

A Safer, Saner, More Equitable Model Interestingly, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, Snyder’s Democratic opponent in the last gubernatorial race, proposed a solution that could have avoided either robbing the pensioners or scaring off the bondholders: a state-owned bank. If the state or the city had its own bank, it would not need to borrow from Wall Street, worry about interest rate swaps, or be beholden to the bond vigilantes. It could borrow from its own bank, which would leverage the local government’s capital into credit, back that credit with the deposits created by the government’s own revenues, and return the interest to the government as a dividend, following the ground-breaking model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.

There are other steps that need to be taken, and soon, to prevent a cascade of municipal bankruptcies. The super-priority of derivatives in bankruptcy needs to be repealed, and the protections of Glass Steagall need to be restored. While we are waiting on a very dilatory Congress, however, state and local governments might consider protecting themselves and their revenues by setting up their own banks.

___________________________________________

Let's remember, it is the neo-liberals on Capitol Hill pushing this as compromise in entitlement and Social Security 'reform' takes the lead since the Treasury is empty of the $4 trillion in payroll taxes paid since Reagan's time!!

Seniors would see smaller Social Security checks under Obama budget

By Tami Luhby  @Luhby April 10, 2013: 4:50 PM ET  CNN MONEY

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) Senior citizens would see their Social Security checks shrink under President Obama's latest budget proposal. The budget plan, released Wednesday, calls for changing the way the annual cost of living adjustments for Social Security and other federal programs are calculated. Shifting to "chained CPI" from the current inflation measure could reduce the federal debt by $230 billion, but it would also mean that seniors would get smaller increases in their Social Security payments each year.

The president's proposal would provide protections for the oldest seniors, low-income seniors and veterans, and those who are disabled. Seniors ages 76 to 85 would receive a supplemental payment annually to offset some of the slowdown in growth. Also, programs that are geared for those in or near poverty, such as the Supplemental Security Income, would be exempt from the switch to chained CPI.

But the change would still make a difference for many people. Chained CPI is expected to grow between 0.25 and 0.3 percentage points more slowly than the current CPI measure.

Initially, the reduction in the growth of Social Security checks would be quite small ... between $38 and $45 in the first year, for the average retired worker. But over time, that would grow into the hundreds of dollars.

Someone who started collecting the average Social Security benefit for a retired worker in 1999 would receive $12,972 in 2012. But let's say the Social Security Administration had already been using chained CPI -- that person would get only $12,336 this year, according to the National Academy of Social Insurance. That's nearly 5% less.

The difference gets bigger over time. According to the National Women's Law Center, a retiree who was collecting $17,520 last year would see 6.5% less, or $1,139, by age 85, if chained CPI were in effect. A decade after, their payments would be 9.2% smaller, or $1,612. These calculations do not include the supplemental payments, the details of which were not released until Wednesday.


For many seniors, these decreases aren't trivial. Nearly two in three recipients rely on Social Security for at least 50% of their income. And Social Security makes up at least 90% of the income received by 36% of seniors.

"For a lot of elderly people, Social Security is virtually their only source of income," said Paul Van de Water, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "A decrease of almost $600 a year ... for people in that situation is very significant."

That's especially true for older seniors, who have likely spent down their other assets and seen other income sources dry up. Also, these recipients are usually contending with growing medical bills, which chained CPI doesn't account for. The protections Obama is planning may mitigate the problems, but some experts don't think they'll fully shield this group.

  Krugman: Focus on deficit is 'destructive' "The older you get, the bigger the reduction you get,' said Gary Koenig, director of economic security for AARP's Public Policy Institute. "It's hitting at a time when folks can least afford it."

Women could get hit especially hard since they live longer than men and rely more on Social Security, said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security for the National Women's Law Center. For the typical single elderly woman, the switch would reduce her monthly benefit by $56 at age 80, not including the supplement. This is equivalent to a week's spending on food per month.

"The typical woman beneficiary is just barely above the poverty line," she said. "She has a really hard time meeting expenses."

Regardless of what one thinks of the magnitude of the cuts, switching to chained CPI is not the solution to reforming Social Security. Additional measures will be needed to extend the entitlement program's solvency since chained CPI addresses only about 20% of the gap.

And Peter Orszag, former budget director under Obama, says the difference between chained CPI and the current CPI is overstated -- that means Social Security benefits won't be cut by as much as is being forecast.


___________________________

Below is the Brookings Institute policy on entitlement and Social Security reform.  They think that now that these Trusts have been gutted with fraud, reforms are needed to cut American's retirements.  Note that the Brookings is the neo-liberal think tank that Clinton and Obama and all of democratic leadership subscribe to.  See why you hear all this manufactured crisis meant to hide what was always the planned policy?!

Social Security beneficiaries to get 1.5 percent raise


Eileen Ambrose 10:18 a.m. EDT, October 30, 2013

Social Security beneficiaries will receive a 1.5 percent raise next year, the Social Security Administration announced today. Also, the agency announced that the amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax is going up next year from $113,700 to $117,000.

According to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare, the typical beneficiary will receive a $19 per month raise.

“Seniors know all too well, their living costs often outpace the COLA increase and a 1.5% increase is anything but too generous,” said Max Richtman, president and CEO of the group.

The increase comes at a time when lawmakers are likely to take up whether to change how the government measures inflation as part of budget negotiations.

Some economists say the current yardstick overstates inflation. The result is that the government collects less in taxes than it should because income levels for tax brackets and deductions are higher than they should be, economists say. And, they add, the overstatement of inflation means that Social Security pays more to beneficiaries than it should, too.

Republicans have backed moving to the so-called Chained Consumer Price Index that tends to report inflation at a lower rate. This index takes into account that consumers will make substitutions when prices rise, such as switching from high-priced strawberries in the fall to cheaper pears.

President Obama has signaled his willingness to go along, provided seniors get periodic bump-up in benefits and other guarantees.



_____________________________________________



The Simple Arithmetic of Diverting Payroll Taxes to Individual Accounts

Many people favor the creation of individual accounts as a partial or complete substitute for Social Security. Some propose to fund these accounts out of general revenues. When some part of the pensions based on these individual accounts is used to reduce Social Security benefits, this approach can indirectly reduce the projected long-term deficit in Social Security. This is the approach used, for example, in the Archer/Shaw bill.

Other so-called "carve-out" plans, such as those of Senator Kerry and Governor Bush, would divert part of the current payroll tax from the Social Security system. Their plans would carve out part of the payroll tax, which would then be directed to individual accounts. They would cut Social Security benefits enough to restore projected long-term balance.


The first point to recognize is that by subtracting revenues from the Social Security system, these plans force larger cuts than would otherwise be necessary to restore financial balance in that system. On the other hand, pensioners would have the balances in their individual accounts with which they could (or, in some plans, would have to) buy annuities.

This trade raises several practical questions:

Will the individual-account-based pensions fully compensate pensioners for the Social Security cuts?

Will the individual-account-based pensions be inflation protected?

Will individual account holders be required to convert their accounts into annuities? If not, what happens to those who are imprudent or unlucky, exhaust their accounts, and find themselves dependent on much-reduced Social Security benefits.









0 Comments

October 22nd, 2013

10/22/2013

0 Comments

 
TODAY'S BLOG WILL BE LONG BUT I THINK YOU WILL BE INTERESTED.  THOSE OF YOU NOT FROM BALTIMORE SHOULD KNOW THE SAME THING IS HAPPENING IN YOUR CITIES!

KNOW WHO IS GOING TO GET MASSIVE PROFITS FROM AN INFRASTRUCTURE STIMULUS FROM CONGRESS----$1 TRILLION IS THE SUGGESTION SO FAR.  See why US cities allowed the infrastructure to decline even as last decade profits for government soared! 

Hopkins was building its global corporate campus


For those that do not know that all that is development in Baltimore is Johns Hopkins then this blog will clear that up.  We need to be clear.....all these development decisions that most citizens in the city hate.....all of their tax revenue used to advance these development plans...ALL END UP IN MASSIVE PROFITS FOR JOHNS HOPKINS AND PLACES THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE IN THE HANDS OF THIS CORPORATION IN EVERY WAY.....WE WILL BE OWNED BY THE COMPANY STORE!

What we have here is a tangled web of investment that starts with the AIG involvement in the massive mortgage fraud that brought down the economy.  Now, AIG made hundreds of billions of dollars selling insurance CDS for toxic mortgage loans everyone knew were bad.  All these CDS centered in mostly this one insurance corporations because Wall Street needed the public to be forced to bail it out so all the banks would be paid 100% on the dollar for those bad loans.  So, massive amounts of profit for AIG in selling CDS for fraudulent loans and a complete bailout when co-conspirators declared it TOO BIG TO FAIL.  Below you see a spin-off of this fraud fueled AIG----Highstar Capital.  All of AIG's wealth was allowed to be dismantled and rebuild as separate corporations and Highstar Capital was one of them.  Why is this corporation of interest in Baltimore?  IT HAS AN INTIMATE CONNECTION WITH JOHNS HOPKINS THROUGH A CEO AS ALUMNI TO BOARD MEMBERSHIP -----THEY ARE DEEPLY CONNECTED.  If you look at AIG Highstar before the 2008 crash it was loaded with Ivy League university endowments that were soaring in profits from this massive fraud.  After the collapse and the independence of this corporation-----along come all that wealth to invest in future projects.

Now, the goal of the massive fraud was to cripple government at all levels with municipal debt.  They wanted to appear to force governments to privatize all that is public and in Maryland, Hopkins had their old friend and former mayor O'Malley in the governor's office.  If you look at what the Baltimore Development Corporation has done in partnerships and deals.....it is not to be overlooked that Highstar Capital has been given all of the deals involving the public sector assets in Baltimore.

No, I have already spoken about Hopkins' involvement in SAIC as a security corporation.  I have also alluded to Hopkins as MedStar partners expanding across America.



Medstar Health Corporate Office & Headquarters 5565 Sterrett Place,5th Fl. Columbia MD 21044


Now I am looking at something that will shock and awe as Hopkins becomes the investor to profit from the Port of Baltimore, Veola Energy, Advanced Disposal, and Talyst, a health biomedical corporation that sells Hopkins' research patents.

O'Malley and now Rawlings-Blake are committed to privatizing trash collection, transportation, water and sewage, and the Port and in each case Highstar owns the corporations linked to this privatization.  Keep in mind this is happening across America as these same corporations take public assets and services.  Remember, the endowments attached are Ivy League universities like Harvard in Boston, NYC, and Stanford in San Francisco.....remember Oakland, Calif as piloting the SAIC surveillance? 

So, it appears that these Ivy League schools are taking the money made by the AIG fraud and now are trying to own all public assets for massive profits.

VEOLA is one corporation of which I speak as privatizing public transportation.  It appears that VEOLA sold controlling interest in VEOLA ENERGY and WASTE to Highstar and in exchange they were given the rights to privatize public transportations in all the above cities.  That is why we see VEOLA taking MTA bus routes all over the state, disability transport, taxis, and BWI transport.  At the same time Highstar's ownership of the Energy and Waste division is giving them Baltimore's/Maryland's public  Waste Management Water Management business.  So, this is why we are now paying for trash pickup and seeing all these Board of Estimate awards that make no sense as they control the water infrastructure development.

Keep in mind that Highstar has connections with another AIG spinoff-----in Houston Texas with the natural gas/oil pipeline corporation Kinder Morgan.  See why Maryland will be a port for exporting natural gas?  They are involved in the pipelines down the mid-west from Canada.  Have you noticed we have been getting a lot of Texas consultants and businesses coming to Baltimore to do business?

The Port of Baltimore was given to this Highstar group by O'Malley.  They own all the Ports we hear in the news with striking labor unions-----we know how much Johns Hopkins hates unions and paying anything other than poverty wages.

It is important to see the future with this kind of private ownership of an entire city by one corporation----Johns Hopkins.  It is why we are flooded with quasi-governmental organizations, private non-profits all working to circumvent the government coffers and launder corporate money into public policy written by corporations in Baltimore.

WE CAN REVERSE THIS EASY-PEASY!!!!! JUST VOTE ALL HOPKINS NEO-LIBERALS OUT OF OFFICE.....ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL ELECTIONS.      If you do not fight now this will become the Hopkins City State ruled by a global corporation that we know is not benevolent!!!


ARE ALL HOPKINS DOCTORS AND ADMINISTRATORS SHAREHOLDERS IN ALL THIS?  OF COURSE!!!!

AIG spin-out Highstar Capital looking at $2bn close for latest fund

AIG Highstar Capital

AIG Highstar, the New York-based private equity partnership with a focus on infrastructure-related businesses, has closed its latest fund, AIG Highstar Capital III, on $3.5bn.

Over 90 per cent of the fund’s capital commitments were sourced from non-AIG-affiliated investors, principally from a group of pension plans, endowments, financial institutions and family investment offices, according to a statement.



This table is intended to portray Highstar Capital PrivCo-covered market activity.

Click below for Deal Details and Private Company Reports.

DateTargetTarget IndustryDeal TypeTotal Deal AmountStatus


Nov. 2012Veolia ES Solid Waste Inc.Waste Management ServicesAcquisition
Add-On$1,909,000,000CompletedDetails

Jun. 2012Link_A_Media Devices CorporationMemory ChipsAcquisition$248,000,000CompletedDetails

Jun. 2009Xanodyne PharmaceuticalsPharmaceuticalsFunding$38,000,000
CompletedDetails

Jun. 2008InterGen N.V.Energy & Utilities (Traditional)Acquisition$1,100,000,000CompletedDetails

May. 2008Talyst, Inc.Health & Medical Software
Labels & Tags Manufacturing
Other Packaging & ContainersFunding$20,000,000CompletedDetails

Apr. 2008Link_A_Media Devices CorporationMemory ChipsFunding$22,000,000CompletedDetails

Apr. 2007AMPORTS, Inc.Marine TransportationAcquisition
Leveraged Buyout (LBO)UnspecifiedCompletedDetails

Jul. 2006Advanced Disposal Services Inc.Waste Management ServicesAcquisition$470,000,000Completed


________________________________________________
Lee is a Hopkins graduate but even more important is the Board membership between Hopkins the university and all of these investment arms.  The connection to Texas with another AIG spinoff has a trade in contracts and profit.

Christopher Lee Christopher H. Lee is the Founder and Managing Partner of Highstar Capital (Highstar)

, an independent, fourth generation fund manager with over five billion dollars of assets under management. Mr. Lee is a leader in infrastructure investments, with particular expertise in public private partnerships (PPP's). Since the 1980's Mr. Lee has worked on PPP's in Asia, Latin America and the United States. He has co-authored an Op Ed for Politico with Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley on Ports America's recent 50 year PPP in the Port of Baltimore and has appeared on CNBC's 'Street Signs'. Mr. Lee is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Johns Hopkins University where he graduated in 1974 with a BA in History. Sold!
www.southernstarcentralcorp.com, 11 July 2005 [cached]Commenting on the sale, AIG Highstar Capital Managing Director Christopher Lee stated, "Since our acquisition of the pipeline, AIG Highstar Capital and the Southern Star management team have established an independent brand for this company and significantly strengthened Southern Star's service, safety and customer focus. AIG buys port operations
www.waterindustry.com, 12 Dec 2006 [cached]"We have identified the marine terminals sector as a key element in our infrastructure investment strategy, and we believe that [P&O] is one of the leading operators in this sector in the United States," said Christopher Lee, AIG's managing director. AIG Global Investment Group ...
iwon.ccbn.com, 11 Dec 2006 [cached]AIG Global Investment Group Managing Director, Christopher Lee, stated, "AIG Global Investment Group and its affiliates have been a leader in acquiring strategic, regulated infrastructure businesses and assets.

**************************************************************
One does not have to imagine too long to see that this will be the vehicle to marketing Hopkins' health patents coming from research paid for by you and me!  It complements the DRONE business.


Talyst, Inc.
Private Company Ticker Symbol™: (TALYSTP) Next Actions on Talyst, Inc.:
 Business Summary Talyst, Inc. is a privately-held, venture capital backed healthcare solutions company engaged in providing easy-to-use, automated medication management systems that helps pharmacies manage the flow of medications in hospitals and clinics. Talyst automates the process of tracking drug inventory, package barcode store and filling prescriptions using smart management software and a touch-screen kiosk interface. Talyst was founded in 2002 and is based in Bellevue, Washington.



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

This is Hopkins' connection to exporting natural gas and oil from the mid-west pipeline. As you can see they are behind all that we environmentalists hate.....this while they call Baltimore the Sustainable City.

On August 28, 2006, Kinder Morgan

announced that it would be taken private in a management-led leveraged buyout totaling approximately $22 billion. Outside participants in the transaction include Fayez Sarofim, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and Highstar Capital (then owned by American International Group).[3]

Kinder Morgan is the largest midstream and the third largest energy company (based on combined enterprise value) in North America. We own an interest in or operate approximately 80,000 miles of pipelines and 180 terminals. Our pipelines transport natural gas, refined petroleum products, crude oil, carbon dioxide (CO2) and more. We also store or handle a variety of products and materials at our terminals such as gasoline, jet fuel, ethanol, coal, petroleum coke and steel.

In most of our businesses we operate like a giant toll road and receive a fee for our services, generally avoiding commodity price risk. Our customers include major oil companies, energy producers and shippers, local distribution companies and businesses across many industries. We invest billions of dollars each year to build new energy infrastructure and expand existing assets, as well as on integrity management programs to operate our assets safely.

The Kinder Morgan family of companies has four publicly traded entities:
Kinder Morgan, Inc. (NYSE: KMI), Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, L.P. (NYSE: KMP) (one of the largest publicly traded pipeline master limited partnerships in America), Kinder Morgan Management, LLC (NYSE: KMR) and El Paso Pipeline Partners (NYSE: EPB). Combined, the Kinder Morgan companies have an enterprise value of approximately $110 billion.


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


·  7/27/2012



Bought:  Star Atlantic Waste Holdings II bythe private equity firm Highstar Capital based in New York, also acquired Interstate Waste Services in 2006, according to Highstar spokeswoman Cassie Winn. After …

·  4/27/2007

AIG subsidiary buys Amports A subsidiary of AIG Highstar Capital has agreed to buy Amports Inc. from a private equity fund run by Lincolnshire Management Inc. Terms of the deal, involving Highstar Harbor Holdings II Inc …

·  8/25/2006

Solid waste company sold Private equity firm AIG Highstar Capital has closed on a $470 million deal to buy solid waste company Advanced Disposal Services Inc. Negotiations began in April, Advanced Disposal CEO Charles …

Advanced Disposal Services, Inc. Key Developments Advanced Disposal Services, Inc. Announces Executive Changes Aug 24 12 Advanced Disposal Services, Inc. has announced its senior leadership team, effective when the company closes its acquisition of Veolia ES Solid Waste. Charles Appleby, president and CEO of Advanced Disposal, will be chairman and CEO. Richard Burke, Veolia president and CEO, will be president. Scott Friedlander, general counsel of Interstate Waste Services, will be general counsel.

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


Below you see an announcement about expanding the policy of handing public assets and services to corporations for profit.  Look at who thinks this is a win for Maryland.  Keep in mind the public is treated with distain and have to be dragged from public meetings trying to voice their opinions....


Ballard Spahr, Hines, KPMG, Skanska USA, Goldman Sachs

Ballard Spahr, Ballard Spahr is a national firm with more than 500 lawyers in 14 offices in the United States. 

Setting the standard in real estate the world over. Hines is a privately owned, international real estate firm that has provided the highest level of quality, service and value to its clients and investors for more than 50 years.

Skanska.comwww.skanska.com 
Global. Skanska is a world leading project development and construction group.


The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. is an American multinational investment banking firm that engages in global investment banking, securities, investment ...
 
As principal of Apgar & Company, Inc. (ACI), I recently co-led the transformation of a local government agency to a private enterprise with a public purpose, ...



Notice that the people meeting with them are the governor of Pennsylvania and Anthony Brown in lieu of O'Malley.  Local government transposed to a private enterprise with purpose says Agbar.  It is clear they intend to make everything that is public private and those global players are on the boards and shareholders of all of the other global corporations. 

IT IS A VERY, VERY SMALL WORLD FOR PROFIT-MAKING WITH THESE PEOPLE!


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

_______________________________________________
 


Highstar Capital Agrees to Buy Veolia Unit for $1.9 Billion ...
www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/highstar-capital...   Cached [Jul 19, 2012]
 
Highstar Capital, a U.S. infrastructure fund, agreed to buy Veolia Environnement SA’s U.S. waste-management business for about $1.9 billion.~

Highstar Capital Agrees to Buy Veolia Unit for $1.9 Billion

 By Jeffrey McCracken & Sonja Elmquist - Jul 19, 2012 3:07 AM ET Stock Chart for Veolia Environnement SA (VIE) Highstar Capital, a U.S. infrastructure fund, agreed to buy Veolia Environnement SA (VIE)’s U.S. waste-management business for about $1.9 billion.

The transaction will cut Veolia’s net debt by $1.8 billion, the Paris-based world’s biggest water company said today in a statement. After the deal it will have completed 60 percent of its 5 billion euro ($6.1 billion) divestment plan, it said.

Enlarge image Highstar Capital Agrees to Buy Veolia Unit for $1.9 Billion Veolia via Bloomberg

Veolia ES Solid Waste Inc . has more than 300 locations that provide hazardous and non-hazardous waste management and industrial cleaning services, the company said on its website.

Veolia ES Solid Waste Inc . has more than 300 locations that provide hazardous and non-hazardous waste management and industrial cleaning services, the company said on its website. Source: Veolia via Bloomberg

Highstar, the infrastructure-focused private equity firm once affiliated with American International Group Inc. (AIG), beat bids from buyout firm Madison Dearborn Partners LLC and Brazilian conglomerate Estre Ambiental SA, said people familiar with the matter prior to the announcement.

Veolia is shedding the unit as it tries to cut debt by 20 percent to 12 billion euros by the end of next year. Chief Executive Officer Antoine Frerot said last month he wants to focus on “promising” countries and will pursue asset sales in the U.S. and U.K.

“The transformation of Veolia is progressing as planned,” Frerot said in the statement.

Veolia shares rose as much as 4 percent to 9.58 euros in Paris. The shares traded at 9.50 euros at 9:04 a.m. local time.

Cost Cuts Veolia plans to cut operating costs by 120 million euros in 2013 and narrow its geographic reach. On June 28, Veolia sold its U.K. regulated-water business to Infracapital Partners for 1.2 billion pounds ($1.9 billion).

The deal “will create a strong company with compelling growth prospects,” Highstar Capital Founder and Managing Partner Christopher Lee said in a separate statement. Highstar’s U.S. waste business will operate in 20 states with annual revenue of about $1.4 billion, it said.

Veolia ES Solid Waste Inc. has more than 300 locations that provide hazardous and non-hazardous waste management and industrial cleaning services, the company said on its website.

Highstar already operates U.S. waste management businesses Advanced Disposal Services Inc. and Interstate Waste Services Inc, according to the New York-based company’s website.

Deutsche Bank AG and Macquarie Group Ltd. advised Highstar on
0 Comments

October 17th, 2013

10/17/2013

0 Comments

 
ALL OF MARYLAND'S CANDIDATES WILL CONTINUE PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND LEVERAGED CREDIT BONDS AND TAX INCREMENTS THAT ARE MORTGAGING OUR FUTURE.

BROWN, GANSLER, MIZEUR ARE ALL NEO-LIBERALS!

FROSH, FRICK, AND JON CARDIN ARE VISIGOTH ATTORNEY GENERALS IN WAITING!

Below we see how this public private partnership is in fact a very, very, very bad deal for Maryland citizens.  As we see, this is a 50 year deal that gives Maryland a few million in lease while the private company operating the Port is in line to earn billions if the expansion occurs. 
HELLO!!!!!!
VISIGOTH ALERT!!!!


Below you see news on the Port of Baltimore from almost two decades ago and then from the last few years since O'Malley and neo-liberals have privatized the Port allowing a Swedish corporation run it while preparing to make the Baltimore harbor an international destination for massive cargo ships just so the 1% in Maryland can be part of a global enterprise.  As you can see, it has no value to citizens of Baltimore and and job development....it is purely designed to take a public asset and create a hugely profitable business for the very few.

You can listen to the Longshoremen's Union to understand this isn't about job creation and tax revenue for the state....IT IS ONLY ABOUT SENDING PROFITS TO THE 1% IN MARYLAND.

As is true with all Maryland media coverage over and again the headlines JOBS/TAX REVENUE INCREASES/DEVELOPMENT GOOD FOR THE CITY all over the place.  NONE OF IT IS TRUE!

In 1996 we see the Port of Baltimore claiming $2 billion in economic activity with 62,500 jobs tied to the port and $141 million in tax revenue.  The business that made these figures are leaving as the price of doing business in a global harbor is getting too steep.  The jobs created by the merger with this private corporation appear to be 2,700.  The Longshoremen have been on strike twice in ten years because the private partner is trying to union-bust and break wages and benefits.  As with other port privatizing they are outsourcing port jobs overseas while downsizing unions employees.  SO MUCH FOR JOB CREATION AND GOOD PAYING JOBS!  No doubt the wages and benefits can come down for these well-paid workers, but we know how low they intend to go.....it will be poverty....just like the MTA employees privatized with VEOLA.
So this is a huge issue for labor and no one I know likes the Port of Baltimore being turned into a destination for gigantic rust-filled ocean cargo ships.  Think what dredging will bring up and it is all because the 1% want profit from being part of global shipping.  IT IS ABSURD!


Just as Visigoth is that all of these Port Authorities across the country that privatize like this are already full of fraud and corruption and refusing oversight.  They are quasi-government for a reason you know!


Dredge or die Port of Baltimore: Navigable channel is essential in cutthroat maritime world.

.September 12, 1996  Baltimore Sun

ENVIRONMENTALISTS won't like aspects of the Glendening administration's plan to dispose of dredged material from Chesapeake Bay harbor channels. Neither will penny-pinching conservatives. Or some watermen. Yet implementing the program is key to keeping the Port of Baltimore competitive in a cutthroat maritime industry.This is no small matter. The port accounts for over $2 billion a year in economic activity. It creates employment for 62,500 Marylanders. It generates $141 million in state and local taxes.


This is the current stats given on state websites: Keep in mind this is a 50 year agreement.

...... the partnership between the MPA and Ports America has the potential to generate up to $1.8 billion in total investment and revenue to the State of Maryland over the life of the agreement.It will also generate $15.7 million per year in new taxes for Maryland.  2,700 permanent direct, indirect and induced jobs will come from the increased and sustainable container business that the Port will see upon completion of the 50-foot berth and the completion of the Panama Canal project
____________________________________________
SURPRISE----NO OVERSIGHT IN MARYLAND!!!


I DIDN'T SEE THAT SAYS MARYLAND'S ATTORNEY GENERAL GANSLER!!!!

What they are saying is that this partnership at the Port will allow the private company to simply lease from the state for $3.2 million a year and keep all profits generated from dredging into an international port.  Remember how gambling passed in Maryland because O'Malley said almost 60 percent of the profits would come to the state and schools?  Now, we have 25% coming from table games....the biggest revenue maker in gambling.  Profits for the corporations are huge.  So none of these public private partnerships is about jobs and creating revenue for the state or city----it is completely designed to maximize corporate profit.

ALL OF THE CURRENT CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR PLEDGE TO CONTINUE THESE PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND LEVERAGED BOND AND TAX INCREMENTS THAT ARE MORTGAGING OUR FUTURE!  ANTHONY BROWN/ULMAN.....DEPUTY DOG GANLER.....AND MIZEUR who is being painted the good neo-liberal cop!


Controls faulted at Maryland Port Administration

  Posted: 6:36 pm Mon, October 24, 2011
By Nicholas Sohr
Daily Record Business Writer

The Maryland Port Administration showed “significant deficiencies” in its oversight of more than $60 million in revenue and $15.3 million in payments in fiscal 2010, state watchdogs said in an audit released Monday. The issues raised “could adversely affect MPA’s ability to maintain reliable financial records [and] operate effectively,” according to the Office of Legislative Audits, ...





'After making an annual payment to the Maryland Port Authority, the port operator will receive the net revenues from the business developed by the expanded terminal facility'.


Audit Report Department of Transportation Maryland Port Administration

October 2011

..................................
In exchange, MPA will receive annual lease payments of $3.2 million with periodic increases based on the rate of inflation. The agreement also required the company to make a one-time payment of $140 million to the Maryland Transportation Authority, which owned the property being leased; in exchange, the Authority transferred ownership of the terminal to MPA to provide for the lease.


'during fiscal year 2010, cargo shipped through MPA’s port facilities totaled approximately 7.6 million tons, and overall port revenues totaled $69.3 million'


'The new contract will bring in 5,700 new jobs to the port, including 2,700 that will be permanent to handle increased container business and 3,000 that will be in place for three years'.

_____________________________________________

THIS IS WHO O'MALLEY THINKS WORKS FOR THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND!!!  WHAT A NEO-LIBERAL WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT ARE ALL MARYLAND DEMOCRATS!

 Global reach. Local results.

Ports America is proud to be the largest terminal operator and stevedore in the United States, operating in more than 42 ports and 80 locations.

We provide clients with a distinct competitive advantage, combining the flexibility of global connection with the efficiency of local expertise. We are dedicated to customer satisfaction, consistently delivering measurable results. And our commitment to safety in the workplace is second to none.




Port Uses Public Private Partnership to Compete Against West Coast Ports

Posted on October 12, 2013 by Larry Ehl 2The Port of Baltimore used a PPP to increase odds of capturing West Coast ports business.

Instead of waiting for federal help, some ports are turning to public private partnerships for transportation improvements to improve competitiveness. Last week the House Transportation’s Freight Panel heard about a recent PPP at the Port of Baltimore.

Many states – unlike my home state of Washington – are turning to transportation PPPs as the federal and state governments find it hard to increase transportation taxes, and fuels taxes revenue declines. In Maryland’s case, the Governor’s office led the charge to establish the PPP legislation.

Earlier this year the Port celebrated the completion of a new 50-foot-deep berth and the addition of four supersized container cranes capable of handling post-Panamax ships. Link to news release.

If Washingtonians think the Port of Baltimore is not a competitor, consider this from Maryland DOT:

“Currently, a large percentage of ships use West Coast ports, requiring manufacturers to send products by rail to markets throughout the country.  With the completion of the Panama Canal expansion in two years, it is expected that a larger number of ships, including new mega-ships, will travel to East Coast ports that have the infrastructure to accommodate them in order to reach customers more quickly and less expensively.”

Here is what the Freight Panel’s briefing memo stated:

A recent PPP at the Port of Baltimore provides a prime example of a freight transportation facility that was brought online as a result of cooperative planning and development between private industry and governmental entities.

In January 2010, the Maryland Port Administration and a private port operator entered a 50-year lease and concession agreement for the Seagirt Marine Terminal at the Port of Baltimore. Under the agreement, the port operator is responsible for daily operations and the construction of a new 50-foot berth, including four ship-to-shore cranes. The port operator will also make hundreds of millions of dollars of capital improvements to the terminal. After making an annual payment to the Maryland Port Authority, the port operator will receive the net revenues from the business developed by the expanded terminal facility.

The Port recently received a $10 million TIGER grant, which will be matched with $19 million in state funding.

The Port is in the midst of a record-breaking year. According to the Maryland Port Authority, nearly 15,000 people are supporting themselves and their families with direct jobs at the port. Business here supports another 40,000 jobs and statewide overall, 108,000 jobs are linked to port activities.

It appears the State of Maryland, and the City of Baltimore, appreciate the jobs and tax revenue generated by the Port.



_______________________________________________

THIS IS WHERE THE PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP WILL TAKE MIDDLE-CLASS LONGSHOREMEN!!!



ONE OUT OF TWO FAST FOOD WORKERS HAVE TO USE GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE TO LIVE.

AFL-CIO Learn more from UC Berkeley Labor Center about how fast food corporate greed costs us all: http://bit.ly/1anxtq3

Via Wisconsin State AFL-CIO
0 Comments

October 15th, 2013

10/15/2013

0 Comments

 
Regarding national debt 'crises' and Mikulski 'forced to compromise' on reforming Social Security and Entitlements:

Did you hear JP Morgan has offered to pay SS and Vet benefits if the budget scam results in a shutdown? In third world countries the 1% have a motto: keep the poor barely living and they will not revolt. We know that JP Morgan alone owes the American people trillions of dollars in fraud.....energy manipulation fraud....transaction rate manipulation fraud.....LIBOR fraud......subprime mortgage fraud. Then there are the profits made with that fraud. JP Morgan alone could be the recovery of corporate fraud that would pay down trillions in national debt. Rather, it is allowed to continue to defraud and offer to be the sugar-daddy to people impoverished by the corporation's bad actions. As we said.....it was Mikulski who heads the Appropriations Committee that funded the FBI white collar criminal agency at one of its lowest rates at a time of record fraud. Citizens groups like mine are trying to help these pols 'see the fraud' so they are not forced to reform public programs for lack of money.

We spoke of finding the cash assets of banks moving tens of trillions to offshore accounts....$35 trillion with the current database download. We spoke of Joe Biden and Delaware and Harry Reid and Nevada as the portal to hiding and secreting corporate wealth out of the country through offshore accounts and protecting wealth from scrutiny through dynasty plans that try to skirt estate tax and wealth tax laws. Lastly, we spoke of the worldwide network of investigators tracking the laundering of fraudulent gains through international real estate investments all totaling tens of trillions of dollars.

WE COULD PAY THE NATIONAL DEBT DOWN IN JUST A FEW YEARS IF THE US ATTORNEY GENERAL/STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL SIMPLY ASKED FOR THE DATA AND FOLLOWED OUR LEAD.

This is the reaction by the 1% to the news that we know where they live.....'it looks like we should close down the International Criminal Court' as it seems investigating and bringing to justice rogue international leaders and thugs may not be in the interest of the 1% any longer'.

Indeed, it is the International Criminal Court (ICC) to which the International Investigative Journalists and International Justice organizations would take these claims against the banks in moving the people's money out of countries to hide in shell accounts. SEE WHY THE ICC IS NO LONGER A POSITIVE ASSET FOR RESOLVING INTERNATIONAL CRIME? The Bush Administration removed the US from the ranks of those countries participating in the ICC joining Israel and the Sudan as the only nations in the world to do so. He did that because he was lying about Weapons of Mass Destruction to start wars, committing torture, private US contractors were openly bribing and committing fraud all around the world, and THE US BANKS HAD A MASSIVE FINANCIAL FRAUD OPERATING ALL AROUND THE WORLD. These are pretty good reasons for Bush to take the US out of the ICC. By now everyone knows Obama has done the same for the same reasons and has gone so far as to try to pass domestic laws protecting Bush and himself from any legal responsibility for all of the above.

THIS IS WHY THE HUFFINGTON POST RATED THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION THE MOST CORRUPT IN US HISTORY WITH BUSH RIGHT BEHIND.

So, you and I are supposed to allow Congress and the President to shutdown government over and over in a fake crisis each time taking billions from public services......negotiate reforms to Entitlements and Social Security because the Trusts have been emptied from fraud....all in order to pay for cuts to corporate tax rates at a time when corporations average 17% tax rate with tax breaks taking that even lower. THIS IS WHAT THE ENTIRE MANUFACTURED CRISES ARE ABOUT. REMEMBER, NEO-LIBERALS AND OBAMA WERE 'FORCED' IN 2010 TO ALLOW BUSH TAX CUTS TO CONTINUE SETTING THE TAX RATE AT ZERO FOR MUCH OF WEALTH AND CORPORATIONS GIVING A TRILLION IN TAX CUTS JUST THAT YEAR. They were forced to do that because of the US START Treaty with Russia that has never been spoken of again.


We simply need to get rid of the neo-liberals and take back the people's democratic party by running and voting for labor and justice in all elections! All of Maryland's democrats are neo-liberals....SHAKE THE BUGS FROM THE RUG!

FBI struggles to handle wave of financial fraud cases

By Eric Lichtblau, David Johnston and Ron Nixon

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country's economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials.

The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the U.S. economic woes.

The pressure on the FBI has recently increased with the disclosure of criminal investigations into some of the largest players in the financial collapse, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The FBI is planning to double the number of agents working financial crimes by reassigning several hundred agents amid a mood of national alarm. But some people inside and out of the Justice Department wonder where the agents will come from and whether they will be enough.

So depleted are the ranks of the FBI's white-collar investigators that executives in the private sector say they have had difficulty attracting the bureau's attention in cases involving possible frauds of millions of dollars.

Since 2004, FBI officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

According to previously undisclosed internal FBI data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.

Over all, the number of criminal cases that the FBI has brought to U.S. prosecutors — including a wide range of crimes like drug trafficking and violent crime — dropped 26 percent in the last seven years, going from 11,029 cases to 8,187, Justice Department data showed.

"Clearly, we have felt the effects of moving resources from criminal investigations to national security," said John Miller, an assistant director at the FBI "In white-collar crime, while we initiated fewer cases over all, we targeted the areas where we could have the biggest impact. We focused on multimillion-dollar corporate fraud, where we could make arrests but also recover money for the fraud victims."

But Justice Department data, which include cases from other agencies, like the Secret Service and Postal Service, illustrate the impact. Prosecutions of frauds against financial institutions dropped 48 percent from 2000 to 2007, insurance fraud cases plummeted 75 percent, and securities fraud cases dropped 17 percent.

Statistics from a research group at Syracuse University in New York State, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, using somewhat different methodology and looking only at the FBI, show an even steeper decline of nearly 50 percent in overall white-collar crime prosecutions in the same period.

In addition to the investigations into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the FBI is carrying out investigations of American International Group and Lehman Brothers, and it has opened more than 1,500 other mortgage-related investigations. Some FBI officials worry privately that the trillion-dollar U.S. bailout of the financial industry may itself become a problem because it contains inadequate controls to deter fraud.

No one has suggested that a quicker response would have averted the mortgage meltdown, but some officials said a faster reaction might have deterred more of the early schemes that seized on loose U.S. lending regulations.

"They were very late to the game," Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who has quarreled with the FBI over its financing priorities, said of the bureau's response to the mortgage crisis. "They were not on top of this, and they're just now starting to really do something."


_____________________________________________
'The FBI’s fiscal year (FY) 2013 budget request totals $8.2 billion in direct budget authority, including 34,083 permanent positions (13,018 special agents, 3,025 intelligence analysts, and 18,040 professional staff). This funding level continues increases provided to the Bureau in the past, most recently in FY 2012, allowing the FBI to maintain its forward progress, including targeting additional resources on investigating financial and mortgage fraud'.

The FBI’s fiscal year (FY) 2014 budget request totals $8.4 billion in direct budget authority, including 34,787 permanent positions (13,082 special agents, 3,026 intelligence analysts, and 18,679 professional staff). This funding level provides critical funding to address threats posed by terrorists, cyber attackers, and criminals.



Robert S. Mueller, III
  • Director
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation
  • Statement Before the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies
  • Washington, D.C.
  • March 07, 2012


Raise your hand if you understand that $8.4 billion is almost nothing as far as protecting the American people against attack from terrorism, from violent criminals, from every sort of white collar crime.  EVERYBODY!!!!!!  So, it looks like a staff of about 70,000 people are doing all of this.  Raise your hands again if you understand most of that budget is spent on terrorism and crimes against/protection of corporations.  EVERYBODY!!!!






Mikulski Chairs Appropriations Hearing on FBI Fiscal Year 2010 Budget

FBI Director Mueller testifies before CJS Appropriations Subcommittee

June 4, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), Chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) Appropriations Subcommittee, today chaired a hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) fiscal year 2010 budget. The hearing included testimony from FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Senator Mikulski’s prepared statement follows:

“Good morning and welcome. Today the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations Subcommittee will hear from Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller about the FBI’s budget and priorities for fiscal year 2010.

“First, I want to say that I am proud of the FBI. I am proud of how the men and women serving there fight to protect Americans, dismantle organized crime and drug cartels and combat gang violence that is destroying our neighborhoods. They solve kidnapping and extortion cases and rescue the vulnerable from illicit traffickers. I do not think that Americans don’t fully appreciate the full breadth of what the FBI does to keep America safe.

“After 9/11, the FBI was charged with a new mission. They were still required to carry out their domestic crime fighting role, but an agency within an agency was created to protect us from international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The FBI now has two principal jobs: fighting terrorism and fighting crime.

“As Chairwoman of CJS, I want our hearing with the Director to reflect these two huge priorities. We need to truly understand what it takes for FBI to carry out these extraordinary responsibilities. We will begin with an unclassified hearing that will focus primarily on the FBI’s domestic mission. Then, for the first time, we will move to a classified hearing to discuss the FBI’s new mission, much of which cannot be discussed in a public hearing. The CJS Subcommittee will include classified hearings in our annual appropriations process. We will also extend classified hearings to other federal law enforcement agencies when merited. We may even have another classified hearing later this summer to learn about other federal law enforcement needs.

“The President’s budget request for the FBI is $7.9 billion -- a $560 million increase above the 2009 omnibus level, or a 7.7 percent increase. Fortunately, the President’s budget reflects the ongoing needs and priorities of the FBI. This request funds important initiatives like fighting white collar crime and public corruption, protecting the U.S. – Mexico Border from drug traffickers and human smugglings rings, dismantling organized criminal organizations and enterprises and disrupting gangs and recruitment. This budget request includes funding for 12,325 special agents, including 407 new agents, and 2,635 intelligence analysts, including 321 new analysts.”

“The request is $2.4 billion for the FBI’s traditional crime fighting efforts--$133 million above the 2009 omnibus level. This funding will support FBI efforts to fight violent crime and organized criminal enterprises that threaten the safety of our communities and prey on the vulnerable. These criminals are sophisticated and transnational. They smuggle drugs, guns and even people across borders. They do anything to make a profit.

“Criminals are technologically savvy. They use the Internet, BlackBerrys and text messaging to communicate with each other and evade law enforcement. We need sophisticated agents and state of the art technology to track down and investigate these bad guys. The FBI is the premiere law enforcement agency that carries out this important mission. The President’s budget request for criminal activities will fund a total of 4,500 special field agents and 104 intelligence analysts.

“The FBI is playing a major role in protecting the U.S. – Mexico Border, with its Southwest Intelligence Group (SWIG), a clearinghouse of all activities to augment and unify existing FBI efforts with Mexico. It is increasing its focus on public corruption, kidnappings and extortion with a particular focus on Southwest border issues; yet, another major role FBI is playing to fight transnational crime.

“Not only is the FBI fighting violent crime on the border, but it is also fighting financial crimes, like mortgage fraud, which are destroying our communities. The FBI request provides $25 million above the fiscal year 2009 omnibus level of $50 million to hire 50 new agents and 61 new forensic accountants to investigate complex financial investigations. This increase is necessary and timely.

“As of April 2009, the FBI is investigating 2,000 mortgage fraud cases and 40 corporate fraud cases. Mortgage fraud cases are complex and resource intensive. An average mortgage fraud investigation takes one and a half years to complete. A corporate fraud investigation requires almost four years to complete. These financial fraud cases are only growing as the economy struggles. I want to know if your budget keeping up with this pace.

“I want to compliment Senator Shelby for sounding the alarm and working to provide funding for the Adam Walsh Act. The FBI plays an important role in Adam Walsh. The FBI is responsible for monitoring, targeting and arresting Internet predators. Innocent Images in Calverton, Maryland, is the FBI cyber headquarters. The FBI also is responsible for rescuing children who have been forced into prostitution, kidnapped and trafficked into and out of the United States.

“Since 2003, the FBI’s Innocence Lost initiative has developed 24 task forces in the U.S. that partner with State and local law enforcement to end child prostitution and trafficking. Efforts have resulted in over 575 children rescued and the conviction of more than 300 pimps, madams and their associates who exploit children through prostitution. Yet there is no additional funding for these important programs that have saved children’s lives. These two programs continue to be flat funded. I want to hear from you today about what resources you need to keep kids safe.

“Our nation faces a growing and pervasive threat from hackers, cyber spies and cyber terrorists. Cyber security is a critical component to our nation’s infrastructure. We need safe and resilient networks to protect our online banking, online commerce, electrical and power grids, air traffic control systems and digitalized records. The FBI is bringing to justice cyber hackers, cyber spies and cyber terrorists who operate in anonymity and with predatory intent towards the United States.

“Last year, we appropriated $75 million for the FBI’s cyber security efforts. This year, the request is $140 million -- a $65 million increase to add 107 agents, 42 intelligence analysts and 111 professional staff. We will hear more about the details on the FBI’s cyber security efforts in the classified session, but I am pleased that the FBI is a key component in guarding our nation’s cyber security.

“Finally, most increases in the FBI’s budget request are for the FBI’s counterterrorism and intelligence activities. We all agree this is a top priority. For counterterrorism, the budget proposes $3.13 billion; a $257 million increase above the 2009 omnibus level. Counterterrorism is over 40 percent of the FBI’s budget. For intelligence, the budget proposes an increase of $1.64 billion, or $154 million a 10 percent increase above the 2009 omnibus level.

“Given all of the FBI’s important roles and responsibilities, we must ensure that it has the resources needed to protect the lives of 300 million Americans. I would like to say it is a personal privilege to thank Director Mueller and the FBI for the leadership on effective interrogation methods that follow the rule of law, but also make sure we get the information we need to protect the American people. You provide advice and guidance on what are effective and legal interrogation techniques. We will leave it up to the Judiciary Committee to further investigate the previous Administration’s approach. Today, I just want to thank you for your leadership.”




________________________________________

As you see here the International Criminal Court has been less effective than it could be because of budget funding far lower than needed to do its job.  It has proven to be a valuable resource in providing a venue for criminal actions across international borders and would be used to recover this Visigoth looting of national Treasuries around the world.

It appears that the ICC sees these kinds of tasks in its future but as this article shows the nations charged with funding it are the very nations guilty of these massive frauds.  It will be critical to get funding from perhaps the BRIC nations.....those growing economies that are no less criminal but often victims of the Visigoth fraud none the less.



Dispatches: Big Budget Ask is Sign of Fresh Thinking at ICC

August 5, 2013 Elizabeth Evenson

  • 2011 Reuters Limited
In this age of austerity, the nearly 27 percent budget boost requested by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its prosecutor’s office leaps out. It’s the clearest sign yet of fresh thinking coming out of the office’s new leadership.

The ICC released an advance version of its budget request for 2014 last week. The Office of the Prosecutor – whose new prosecutor started in June 2012 – said the funding would be used, in part, to grow the size of its investigation teams and invest in new technologies.

The request will be debated by the ICC’s 122 member countries, who foot the bill for the court, and the budget will be finalized in November.

Given that the court’s big payers – like Germany and Japan – have in the past insisted that the court hold down growth altogether, it remains to be seen how states will react. In a separate report, the court, which overall is seeking a 9.5 percent increase in funding, has warned that if it doesn’t get more resources in 2014, it will be forced to shut down the equivalent of activities in two or three countries.

It’s the thinking behind the prosecution’s request that may matter as much as the figures.

According to the document, the office has concluded that its model of rotating small teams of investigators between cases is not effective in digging up the evidence judges want. This comes on the back of recent setbacks, including an acquittal last December in only the second ICC case to reach a verdict.

In the past we raised concerns that the office simply didn’t have the staff it needed to conduct investigations.

The office’s task is – to put it mildly – daunting, and resources are certainly not the only issue. But the office’s candid assessment that change is needed is perhaps the biggest sign yet of its new leadership.


__________________________________________
 As I described earlier, this massive corporate fraud of tens of trillions was orchestrated....it was not only excessive greed.  The goal was to move all wealth from low/middle income people to the top earners and that is what we have today.  So, at the same time this fraud was picking up steam Bush found a reason to dismantle most of the criminal agencies charged with oversight of white collar fraud.  Remember, it was Reagan and Clinton who set the stage for these global connections allowing money to be laundered out of the country and into hiding.  That was what bank deregulation and free trade did as banks went global.

Obama was elected with a supermajority because he ran on holding corporations accountable and then he did the opposite, working to make sure the fraud stayed where it was.

WHEN A GOVERNMENT SUSPENDS RULE OF LAW IT SUSPENDS STATUTES OF LIMITATIONS.


FBI Eases Up on White Collar Crime

Back to News inShare Tuesday, October 01, 2013 (graphic: stateofsearch.com)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used to be the go-to federal law enforcement agency for cracking down on white-collar crime. But both recent and historical data reveals that the FBI is pursuing far fewer of these cases.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan government watchdog located at Syracuse University, found that FBI white-collar crime cases recommended for prosecution are down significantly so far this year, based on government records obtained from the U.S. Department of Justice.

If the FBI maintains its pace for the remainder of 2013, the bureau’s total will be down nearly 7% from the previous year, TRAC concluded.

More importantly, the rate that the FBI pursues white-collar crimes could be down as much as 45% compared to totals from 2003—and nearly 59% from 1993.

TRAC attributed the decline to the FBI’s decision following the September 11, 2001, attacks to devote more resources and manpower to combating international and domestic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

To date, the FBI has sent 2,001 white-collar cases to the Justice Department for prosecution this year. The vast majority of these investigations have dealt with fraud, particularly those involving financial institutions, mortgages and health care.

-Noel Brinkerhoff




Justice Dept. Mistakes Slapping Wall Street Wrists for True Punishment for Fraud

 Monday, February 25, 2013 (graphic: stateofsearch.com)

Stung by criticism that it has given Wall Street a “Get out of Jail Free Card” despite its role in causing the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, the Justice Department (DOJ) is talking tough about what it calls a new model for going after Wall Street fraudsters. Instead of settling for consent agreements and fines, DOJ claims it is now insisting on actual guilty pleas to felony charges. But critics remain skeptical, particularly because there is no indication that corporate executives will be held responsible for the crimes committed by the businesses they run.  Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone called the new model “beyond laughable.”

The new approach, which surfaced in recent settlements with UBS and the Royal Bank of Scotland for their roles in the LIBOR rate-fixing fraud, involved demanding that their Japanese subsidiaries plead guilty to felony wire fraud. Now, prosecutors are said to be setting their sights on the Japanese subsidiaries of Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase.

“This Department of Justice will continue to hold financial institutions that break the law criminally responsible,” claimed Lanny A. Breuer, head of DOJ’s criminal division.

Critics retort, however, that none of the corporate parent companies involved in LIBOR pleaded guilty, nor did any of their executives. Even the impact on the Japanese units was softened, as Japanese authorities assured UBS that they would not de-license its subsidiary. While the plea has depressed its stock price, the subsidiary is operating normally and clients remain.

“Extracting a guilty plea from a wholly-owned subsidiary finally enables the Justice Department to look tough on financial institutions while sparing them from the corporate death penalty,” observed Evan T. Barr, an ex-prosecutor who now defends white-collar criminal cases at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson.

Barr’s reference to the corporate death penalty is telling, because the claim that job losses would follow strict enforcement of the law is one that DOJ officials themselves have cited in defending their lenient approach to Wall Street fraud.

As Taibbi has pointed out however, protecting jobs at fraudster firms may seem like a good idea in the short run, but “the long-term job losses are going to be much greater when investors around the world lose confidence in the U.S. financial system because they recognize that individuals do not face punishment for criminal activity.” 

This type of what economists call “moral hazard,” arises when an individual has no incentive to obey the law because he or she faces no risk of punishment, while others will actually bear the consequences of the law-breaking. That is what happened in 2008, and even under the DOJ’s new strategy, “the individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.”



____________________________________________


Mueller: I Crippled FBI Effort v. White-Collar Crime, My Successor Will Make it Worse

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Devin Smith  By William K. Black
(Cross posted at Benzinga.com)

FBI Director Robert Mueller is taking his victory lap as he steps down after 12 years of service.  I have done three articles in a series that explains how the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) conned the FBI into adopting the Tea Party’s mythology about the causes of the crisis – virginal banks beset by ultra-sophisticated fraudulent hairdressers.  The MBA created a faux definition of mortgage fraud under which the bank and its senior officers were always the victims instead of the perpetrators.



Mueller’s description of his tenure reveals that his obsession with one of the FBI’s tasks, anti-terrorism caused the FBI to fail catastrophically in many other tasks.  The FBI is essential in a wide range of fields.  We have, for example, roughly one million Americans employed in our criminal justice system.  Only the 2,300 FBI white-collar specialists, however, investigate elite white-collar crimes and we have over 1,300 industries (not firms).  We have over 500 fewer FBI agents working white-collar crime cases because Mueller transferred over 500 of them to national security tasks after 9/11.  (Mueller sought to move the best 500-800 of those white-collar agents by permanently or temporarily reassigning them to national security, so the true loss of capacity against sophisticated financial frauds was far greater than the bare numbers suggest.)  We can all understand that action, which was part of a transfer of over 2,000 FBI agents to national security that Mueller ordered in response to 9/11.

Senior FBI officials sought to replace the lost agents, but the Bush administration refused to allow the FBI the right to do so and Mueller never went to the mat to replace the loss of agents in fields other than national security because his focus was almost exclusively on national security.

“Robert Mueller, the FBI’s director since 2001, said mortgage fraud needed to be considered ‘in context of other priorities,’ such as terrorism. He told the Commission that he hired additional resources to fight fraud, but that ‘we didn’t get what we had requested’ during the budget process. He also said that the FBI allocated additional resources to reflect the growth in mortgage fraud, but acknowledged that those resources may have been insufficient. ‘I am not going to tell you that that is adequate for what is out there,” he said. In the wake of the crisis, the FBI is continuing to investigate fraud, and Mueller suggested that some prosecutions may be still to come’” (FCIC 2011: 163).

“Some prosecutions may be still to come” – what a forlorn hope.  Since he uttered the forlorn hope there have been zero prosecutions of the senior officers of the control frauds that caused the crisis.  “Terrorism” cannot be accepted as an excuse for failing in the FBI’s responsibilities, yet Mueller remains blind to the costs to the Nation of the FBI’s mono-focus on national security.

“‘I had been a prosecutor before, so I anticipated spending time on public corruption cases and narcotics cases and bank robberies and the like, and Sept. 11 changed all of that,’ he says.

It took him a while to realize how drastically the mission of the FBI had to change. Conversations with President George W. Bush and later with President Obama focused his mind on this thought: ‘What is the FBI doing to prevent the next terrorist attack?’”

Mueller’s comment reveals the critical error that caused the FBI to fail.  The “mission” of the FBI did not need to “change” in response to 9/11.  The FBI had always had the mission of preventing domestic terrorist attacks.  The 9/11 attacks should not have led to Mueller not “spending time” on the FBI’s other functions.  Mueller “drastically” redefined his mission as national security – period.  That cannot work when one runs an agency that is the only means of detecting, investigating, prosecuting, and deterring a vast range of dangerous crimes.  Mueller “locked-on” on a single “target” and lost broader “situational awareness.”

The obvious point, except to Mueller (and the media) was “what is the FBI doing to prevent the rapidly growing epidemics of mortgage origination and secondary market control frauds that are going to cause the worst financial and economic crisis in 75 years?”  The NPR program accepted uncritically the claim that Mueller had transformed the agency in a positive manner.

“And in a huge shift in mindset, he also set up an intelligence operation within the bureau to analyze threats.”

The FBI must prevent threats of fraud epidemics that cause over $12 trillion in losses in wealth and cost over 10 million American jobs.  Where was the “intelligence operation” that missed?

  1. The appraisers’ warnings – which began in 2000 – that the lenders were engaged in endemic appraisal fraud in order to inflate appraisals,
  2. Our driving liar’s loans out of the S&L industry in 1990-1991 because we recognized that only fraudulent lenders would regularly make liar’s loans,
  3. The FBI’s own twin warnings in September 2004 that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud and that it would cause a financial crisis were it not successfully contained – warnings that Mueller failed to heed
  4. The lending industry’s own anti-fraud expert’s five warnings about the endemically fraudulent nature of “liar’s” loans in early 2006,
  5. The fact that the industry called the loans “liar’s” loans behind closed doors.
There has never been a crisis with earlier warnings, from our crackdown on fraudulent S&L lenders making liar’s loans in 1990-1991 and from the appraisers in 2000 (over a year before Enron failed) and a more obvious “tell” (calling the fraudulent loans “liar’s” loans lacks subtlety).  The FBI never developed “an intelligence operation” “to analyze threats” of even epidemic fraud.  Mueller’s failure to respond to these exceptionally early, strong, and unambiguous warnings of the mounting epidemics of accounting control fraud, the same form of fraud that had driven the Enron-era crisis and the savings and loan debacle, represents the ultimate failure of leadership under the test that his supporters urge us to use.

“Former Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, who frequently held Mueller’s feet to the fire, says it has been a successful run for the director.

‘The measure of a tenure and the measure of a leader is whether when he learns of those problems, he fixes them,’ says Fine….”

Mueller did not fix the problems.  He dealt with only one set of problems, as did Fine after 9/11.

Mueller shows no recognition that he has created institutions that have reinforced his worst tendency to focus solely on terrorism.

“For nearly a dozen years now, Mueller has started his morning — every morning — with a secret threat briefing. So, what keeps him up at night?

‘Well, the thing I worry about most … is the possibility of a bomb on an airplane, here in this day and age,’ he says.”


The reporters never ask him how many times that morning “secret threat briefing” warned him about the control fraud epidemics.  Mueller’s saw banks only as the potential victims of terror.


“Lately, Mueller has been focusing his energy on a new area of work for the FBI: cyberattacks on banks, utilities and other ‘vulnerable’ areas. And in another pivot point for his agency, Mueller worries that the cyberthreat will soon overtake al-Qaida as the bureau’s biggest priority.

‘Before we have a substantial incident which would serve as a wake-up call, we need to do everything we can to prevent that happening,’ he says.

Mueller’s rare consideration of banks is doubly revealing.  First, notice that he ignores the lead role that bank control frauds play in assisting terror – particularly potential state-sponsored terror.  The HSBC and Standard Chartered cases – real cases of the world’s largest banks deliberately aiding the funding terror groups and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons (controversial, I know, but Mueller certainly believes it).  Second, Mueller ignores these real cases and worries solely about hypothetical cases where the banks might be the victims.  That hypothetical leads Mueller to declare that “we need to do everything we can to prevent that happening.”  But we apparently do not have to “do everything we can to prevent” the real actions by fraudulent banks (among the largest in the world) to aid terrorists in order to increase bank profits and their officers’ bonuses.  DOJ refused to prosecute HSBC and Standard Chartered and the hundreds of employees who committed tens of thousands of frauds for over a decade.

The 9/11 attacks caused a terrible loss of life, but the FBI’s duty is to prevent crimes (including white-collar crimes) that kill and maim far more people than do terrorist attacks.  An FBI leader must not focus on the politically sensitive cases and must counter the hysteria and grossly exaggerated fear that terrorism seeks to create.  Mueller was terrorized by terror.

Mueller portrays his mono-focus on national security as a virtue and impugns those who focus on all crimes or cared about constitutional rights as deficient in their humanity.

“As a prosecutor, he worked for years on the investigation of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

To ‘people who [criticize] our intelligence programs…I would say: Spend a few moments with families of those who have lost their loved ones, whether it be Pan Am 103 or Sept. 11 … and it puts it in a wee bit different context.’”

Every family member who loses a loved one suffers.  Only a tiny percentage of family members suffer that loss due to a crime are the collateral victims of terrorists.  It is clear that the Pan Am experience is the defining trauma of Mueller’s life.  Had he been the prosecutor in Bangladesh of the white-collar criminal who owned the clothing plant that collapsed and murdered thousands of workers Mueller might have become the scourge of control frauds.  One hopes, however, that in that alternative incarnation he would not have become so cavalier about harming constitutional rights in the pursuit of the control frauds.  The suffering of families who lose loved ones due to crimes does not put the constitution “in a wee bit different context.”  “

Mueller has never met most of the victims of our insane drug wars.  As with other attempts at prohibition it creates criminogenic environments that cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people.  Most of the families of these victims live in other nations.  The drug war also funds many terrorists so it is doubly stupid.  Ending the drug wars would free up investigators and to make the FBI more effective in every field (including anti-terror).  An FBI Director focused solely on terror cannot bring the strategic thinking essential to making these vital changes.

Mueller also explained that politics will exacerbate the FBI’s failure to hold elite bankers accountable for the frauds that drove crisis.  Mueller stated as an obvious fact that no FBI leader will cut the agents assigned to terror, so the sequester cuts will fall entirely on other programs.

“Over the past few months, something else has been on the mind of the FBI director, a problem he’s leaving for his successor: the budget crisis.

Mueller says there’s only so much the bureau can cut back on cars and travel and information technology upgrades. Furloughs for 2014, he says, are on the way. So is a tough conversation about priorities.

‘I expect the special agent in charge to make certain that there is no Mohamed Atta, terrorist, swimming in the waters in that division,’ Mueller says. ‘So what’s going to be hit is white-collar crime. What’s going to be hit is violent crime — we’re not going to be able to do as much as we’d want there. Organized crime.’”

This is significantly insane.  Why haven’t Mueller, Holder, and Obama been raging every day to the media about how irresponsible Republicans are to give a free pass to violent criminals, organized criminals, and elite white-collar criminals?  If the Democrats gutted the FBI the Republicans would be denouncing them every hour as traitors endangering the Nation and serving the interests of murderers, mob bosses, and criminal bank CEOs.  It is also insane that our counter-productive, unconstitutional, and immoral anti-terror programs are sacrosanct from budget cuts while the already understaffed FBI functions will be slashed again due to the (non-existent) “budget crisis.”  First on the Mueller’s list for further cuts:  “white-collar crime.”

White-collar crime investigations and prosecutions are massive money makers that reduce the deficit, but Mueller, Holder, and Obama refuse to make these points and refuse to prosecute the elite bank fraudsters.  On substantive and political grounds their actions are either inexplicable or all too explicable and support my readers’ belief that the FBI leadership no longer wants to investigate and prosecute the elite bank frauds.

Bill Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He spent years working on regulatory policy and fraud prevention as Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, Litigation Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Deputy Director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, among other positions.


0 Comments

October 03rd, 2013

10/3/2013

0 Comments

 
IT MATTERS WHO IS ELECTED GOVERNOR AND MAYOR AS THEY APPOINT ALL THE HEADS OF DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES.  MARYLAND IS A CORPORATE STATE BECAUSE OF THIS.  STOP LETTING THESE NEO-LIBERAL POLITICAL MACHINES CHOOSE WHO YOUR CANDIDATE WILL BE!  All governor candidates and MD AG candidates are neo-liberal incumbents!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARY ELECTIONS!


CORPORATIONS ARE WRITING YOUR HEALTH CARE LAWS!

As the Affordable Care Act goes into affect we need to look at what is happening with public justice in health care issues.  I spoke of the lowering level of access to care, the lowering level of training health employees are getting, the staffing shortfalls placing stress and impossible task assignments on these health workers.  Now, we have corporate universities working to patent medical research for profit and universities are of course the ones that in the past would provide the oversight to corporate R and D to see it worked in the public interest.  Now, universities are the corporate R and D.  With Federal agencies like the FDA and OSHA operating like the SEC in that they are now a skeleton crew that tends to do the bidding of the corporations they are supposed to monitor......NO ONE IS LOOKING OUT FOR THE PUBLIC PERIOD.....BUT ESPECIALLY IN HEALTH CARE.  In Maryland, those responsible for creating the health care structures for this reform are dismantling even the state and local public health agencies that would have given oversight for the public.  This at a time when they are handing all of health care over to private non-profits and national health chains all rife with patient abuse, malpractice, fraud, and lack of transparency.  SOUND LIKE A GOOD REFORM FOR THE PEOPLE?  OF COURSE NOT----IT IS HORRIBLE!

Below you see who is responsible state and locally for these appointments to agencies making these changes.  Whether it is the state court ruling in corporation's favor over individuals or the legislators writing the law, MD is a great, big, fat corporate state and its incumbents make it that way.  My district is filled with Johns Hopkins pols that make health care a profit industry at our expense.  Baltimore has the worst in health fraud, health access, and lack of oversight and its pols all work to see this stays as the status quo.  WE WANT THE ASSEMBLY TO WRITE A WELL-DEFINED CORPORATE FRAUD LAW!!!!!!  I said to Mary Washington right after the crash.  'Oh', she said......' I don't think THEY would like that'.  I said------MARY, YOU DO NOT WORK FOR HOPKINS, YOU WORK FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ELECT YOU!  She ran off at just the thought!


LOOK AT PETER FROSH WHO IS RUNNING FOR STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL----APPOINTING THE JUDGES THAT ARE OVERWHELMINGLY VOTING FOR CORPORATE INTEREST!


WE CAN REVERSE ALL OF THIS CORPORATE CAPTURE IN MARYLAND IF WE SHAKE THE BUGS FROM THE RUG AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!

Below you see the Baltimore City pols that approve the governor's appointments to all kinds of government positions.   Placing an energy executive on the MD Public Service Commission?  Fill the MD Depart of Education with education privatizers?  Appoint the heads of Depart of Health that are privatizing all public health and creating private health systems?  THESE ARE THE PEOPLE.  YOU CAN SEE THAT MOST OF THE POLS IN THE CHARLES VILLAGE DISTRICT OF JOHNS HOPKINS ARE THE ONES DOING ALL OF THESE NEO-LIBERAL APPOINTMENTS THAT GIVE PROFIT OVER PEOPLE!      Look as well at FROSH-----looking to be State Attorney General!


This is why Maryland is so corporate and all of its laws and the higher court almost always protects profit over people!  STOP ELECTING THESE NEO-LIBERALS!  RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN ALL PRIMARIES!


Executive Nominations Committee (NOM)

Examines all nominations for appointments made by the Governor that require Senate

confirmation. The committee reports its recommendations to the Senate, which

subsequently votes to confirm or reject the nominees.



2 East, Miller Senate Building, Annapolis, MD 21401

(410-946-5200 Annapolis/Baltimore or 301-970-5200 Washington, D.C.)

Chair: Delores G. Kelley Vice Chair: James E. DeGrange, Sr. David R. Brinkley Edward J. Kasemeyer
Richard F. Colburn Allan H. Kittleman Joan Carter Conway Katherine Klausmeier George C. Edwards Nathaniel J. McFadden Jennie M. Forehand Thomas M. Middleton Brian E. Frosh Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr. Rob Garagiola E. J. Pipkin Norman R. Stone, Jr.



Rules and Executive Nominations Committee (HRU)

Room 145, House Office Building, Annapolis, MD 21401

(410-841-3927 Annapolis/Baltimore or 301-858-3927 Washington, D.C.)

Chair: Hattie N. Harrison Vice Chair: Rudolph C. Cane Elizabeth Bobo Wade Kach
Talmadge Branch James E. Malone, Jr. Norman H. Conway Maggie McIntosh Dereck E. Davis
LeRoy E. Myers, Jr. Kathleen M. Dumais Anthony J. O’Donnell Brian J. Feldman Shane E. Pendergrass Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio James E. Proctor, Jr. Peter A. Hammen Samuel I. Rosenberg Sheila E. Hixson David D. Rudolph Carolyn J. B. Howard Nancy R. Stocksdale Adrienne A. Jones Joseph F. Vallario, Jr.


As we watch neo-liberals lowering the level and quality of care most people receive we are seeing laws that protect public justice over health malpractice being dismantled.  So, health malfeasance will soar with the health reform and protections of people disappear.  Neo-liberal Maryland is ground zero for this!  The Maryland Assembly works hard to make sure the public does not take away an corporate profit....health care included.

Below you see the start of medical clinical trials being replaced by the 'THROW IT OUT THERE AND SO WHAT IT DOES' approach to new medical developments.  So, instead of studying a new procedure with controlled and supervised clinical trials, the FDA simply approves a drug/procedure using the companies research results to justify safety concerns.  This started in the Clinton Administration and is part of the COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS that says policy should not cut into corporate profits embraced by neo-liberals like Clinton and now Obama.

What this says is that because the FDA OK'ed the use of this drug in 1999, but then found in 2011----twelve years later (the normal length of a clinical trial)....that it looked to increase bladder cancer, people dying from exposure to this drug have no recourse.  Mind you that the FDA is still doing this---Obama and neo-liberals have not changed the FDA's oversight and using corporate research to approve usage.

For those in Maryland it gets even worse because Maryland works hard to protect profit over people it has a law called CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE barring recovery of money in a tort lawsuit.  So, the family whose loved one died from bladder cancer in Maryland taking this drug will have the corporate lawyers saying that because this man smoked ( the contributory negligence) the bladder cancer could have come from that even though ACTOS has been identified as causing this cancer.  Just think how many things can be used for Contributory Negligence-----smoking, drinking, bad eating habits, air pollution. 

JUST ABOUT ANYTHING.


Contributory Negligence in Maryland
December 28, 2011 By mdlawyer

Maryland is one of only four states that recognize contributory negligence in personal injury claims. Contributory negligence means that you have contributed, in some way, to your injury. If you have contributed to your personal injury you are not permitted to recover any damages for the injury. This means that if you are only one percent liable, while the other party is 99 percent responsible, you cannot recover any money for medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, or anything else. Most other states recognize comparative negligence, which is where the fault of both parties is looked to in order to determine what amount of damages is fair for the injured party to receive. A Maryland accident attorney can help you to determine if you will be able to recover for a personal injury.

'For now, however, any plaintiff whose own negligence contributes to his or her injury is completely barred from recovery. The Court of Appeals has spoken, and contributory negligence remains the law in Maryland'.

__________________________________________________

Below you see how Maryland is among 4 states in the country that keeps this law that makes it almost impossible to sue a business for damages.  Remember, it is also the only state that opts out of Medicare requirements that keep Medicare oversight away.

WHEN IT COMES TO OVERSIGHT ----MARYLAND HAS EVERY BASE COVERED----LITERALLY!



Commentary: Contributory Negligence Remains the Law in Maryland

By James P. Steele and Andrew M. Williamson | August 6, 2013

On July 9, 2013, Maryland’s highest appellate court, the Court of Appeals, declined to abandon the longstanding common law doctrine of contributory negligence, which is a complete bar to recovery for any plaintiff whose negligence contributes to his or her injuries.

In Coleman v. Soccer Association of Columbia, a case that had been highly anticipated by Maryland’s legal community, the Court affirmed that it had the power to adopt comparative negligence as the law in Maryland but elected not to do so.

A word from our sponsor:

Allstar Financial Group writes surety and fidelity business as well as unique and specialty insurance products. Allstar operates 15 regional offices writing insurance and surety business in over 40 states. We maintain our own claims staff, legal team and audit group to assist our clients.
Click Here to Learn More.In comparative negligence jurisdictions, a plaintiff recovers only for those damages for which he or she is not responsible. The 15 page opinion was accompanied by a 51 page dissent and a 4 page concurrence.

The case arose as a result of injuries sustained by James Kyle Coleman, “an accomplished soccer player who had volunteered to assist in coaching a team of young soccer players in a program of the Soccer Association of Columbia (Association), in Howard County, Maryland.”

When evaluating the insured’s liability, insurers can continue to consider whether a plaintiff’s own negligence contributed to the alleged injuries, creating a complete bar to recovery. During a team practice, Coleman jumped up and grabbed the crossbar of a goal. The crossbar was not anchored to the ground, and Coleman fell backwards, “drawing the full weight of the crossbar onto his face.”

Coleman’s injuries included facial fractures that required three titanium plates in his face. Coleman sued the Association, which asserted contributory negligence as a defense.

At trial, the parties offered differing testimony about what, if any, duty the Association owed Coleman and whether Coleman’s injuries were caused solely by his own negligence. The Association’s evidence showed that it neither owned nor provided the goal in questions, and that the goal was not in an area that the Association controlled.

The Association also offered evidence that the goal’s condition was open and obvious and that Coleman was responsible for his own injuries. Coleman disputed this, arguing further that it is common for players to hang from crossbars, and the Association should have anticipated this and anchored it properly.

At the close of evidence, Coleman submitted a jury instruction on comparative negligence, which the judge declined to give to the jury.

The jury found that the Association’s negligence was a cause of Coleman’s injuries, but that Coleman’s own negligence also contributed to his injuries. Under Maryland’s doctrine of contributory negligence, Coleman was completely barred from recovery. The trial court denied Coleman’s motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict and entered judgment in the Association’s favor.

The Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case before it was briefed and argued at Maryland’s intermediate appellate court, the Court of Special Appeals.

Coleman’s sole issue on appeal was whether the Court of Appeals “should retain the standard of contributory negligence as the common law standard governing negligence cases,” in Maryland.

The Court of Appeals answered this question by noting that it “has the authority to change the common law rule of contributory negligence,” but it declined to abrogate this “long-established common law principle….”

Judge John C. Eldridge (Retired, Specially Assigned), who wrote the opinion, revisited the last time the issue of whether to replace contributory negligence with comparative negligence was before the Court.

In Harrison v. Montgomery County Bd. Of Educ., 295 Md. 442, 464, 456 A.2d 894 (1983), the Court ruled that contributory negligence remained the law in Maryland and that “any change in that established doctrine [was for] the Legislature.”

In Harrison, the Court reviewed the historical origins of contributory negligence, including early English cases. The Harrison Court noted that early American courts adopted contributory negligence because of concerns that high jury awards would stifle emerging industries.

Early courts also were wary of rewarding people who suffer injuries as a result of their own wrongdoing. Relying on these concepts, Maryland first adopted contributory negligence in an 1847 case, Irwin v. Sprigg, 6 Gill. 200, 205. (Maryland later modified the doctrine to note exceptions for injured persons under 5 years old and if the defendant could have exercised sufficient care to avoid the consequences of plaintiff’s carelessness.)

The Harrison court noted that in the early 20th century, Maryland’s legislature adopted comparative negligence for “certain perilous occupations,” but later repealed those provisions. In 1983, 31 of the 39 states that had adopted comparative negligence did so by statute.

While acknowledging that the trend favored adopting comparative negligence, the Harrison court noted that there are different versions and it is best to have the legislature decide which version, if any, to adopt.

The court also invoked the legal doctrine of stare decisis as weighing in favor of leaving contributory negligence as the law in Maryland absent legislative action.

Judge Eldridge noted that since Harrison, Maryland’s “General Assembly has continually considered and failed to pass bills that would abolish of modify the contributory negligence standard.”

This failure to act legislatively is “a clear indication of” and “very strong evidence that” the legislative policy in Maryland is to retain contributory negligence. Courts should not change common law contrary to Maryland’s public policy as set forth by the General Assembly.

In the concurring opinion, Judge Clayton Greene noted additional problems that would arise were the Court to throw out contributory negligence and adopt comparative negligence. How would it apply in cases of multiple tortfeasors? How would it impact the concept of joint and several liability? Would it destroy the viability of the Uniform Contribution Among Joint Tort-Feasors Act? Would it abolish the doctrines of last clear chance and assumption of the risk?

These questions, and the question of which version of comparative negligence to adopt, are best suited for the General Assembly to decide, in Judge Greene’s view.

Judge Glenn T. Harrell, Jr., in dissent, compared contributory negligence to a dinosaur that, in his view, the Court should have rendered extinct.

Judge Harrell invoked long standing criticism of the “all-or-nothing consequences” of contributory negligence. Citing many legal commentators, Judge Harrell called for a comparative negligence system that “apportions damages between a negligence plaintiff and negligent defendant according to each party’s relative degree of fault.” Ultimately, Judge Harrell would prefer adoption of pure comparative negligence.

Judge Harrell noted that even at the time Harrison was decided, the Court of Appeals recognized that jurisdictions that had transitioned from contributory negligence to comparative negligence did so with little difficulty.

Further, none of the judges on the Court of Appeals disputed that the Court had the power to make the change. Judge Harrell was unconvinced that stare decisis was sufficient reason to refrain from making the change and believed that the court need not defer to legislative inaction.

Judge Harrell wrote the dissent hoping that a future majority of the Court of Appeals would rely on it to abolish contributory negligence and adopt comparative negligence.

Coleman has implications for insurers and insureds alike. Insurers will not face the increased litigation that may have accompanied a switch to comparative negligence as Maryland sorted out implementing this new law.

When evaluating the insured’s liability, insurers can continue to consider whether a Plaintiff’s own negligence contributed to the alleged injuries, creating a complete bar to recovery. Further, the specter of a defense verdict based on the Plaintiff’s negligence can be useful to insurers during settlement negotiations.

Insureds remain able to avoid adverse liability findings for their negligence, but they also continue to risk looking like they are “blaming the victim” when they rely on contributory negligence as a defense.

It remains to be seen how, if at all, this opinion spurs any legislative action in the General Assembly to change Maryland to a comparative negligence jurisdiction.

For now, however, any plaintiff whose own negligence contributes to his or her injury is completely barred from recovery. The Court of Appeals has spoken, and contributory negligence remains the law in Maryland.

_________________________________________________________________________


THESE ARE THE MARYLAND COURT OF APPEALS APPOINTMENTS MADE DURING O'MALLEY'S TERM AS GOVERNOR-----they all voted for corporate interests.  It was Glendening's appointments that called this law a dinosaur!


  • Shirley M. Watts, 6th Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed July 3, 2013. Sworn in July 31, 2013, to replace Robert M. Bell, who retired July 6, 2013.

  • Mary Ellen Barbera, 7th Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed Chief Judge July 3, 2013. Sworn in July 8, 2013, to replace Robert M. Bell, who retired July 6, 2013.

  • Robert N. McDonald, 2nd Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed Dec. 22, 2011. Sworn in Jan. 24, 2012, to replace Joseph F. Murphy, Jr., who retired Sept. 30, 2011.

  • Mary Ellen Barbera, 7th Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed Aug. 7, 2008. Sworn in Sept. 2, 2008, to replace Irma S. Raker, who retired April 24, 2008.

  • Sally D. Adkins, 1st Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed May 27, 2008. Sworn in June 25, 2008, to replace Dale R. Cathell, who retired July 30, 2007.

  • Joseph F. Murphy, Jr., 2nd Appellate Judicial Circuit. Appointed Dec. 4, 2007. Sworn in Dec. 17, 2007,

Harrell noted that only Maryland, Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina and the District of Columbia still have the law.
Judge Glenn Harrell, writing in dissent along with recently retired Judge Robert Bell, compared the law to “a dinosaur.”

_________________________________________________


The federal Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 1999 to treat type 2 diabetes, and it became the diabetes drug of choice in 2007 after GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia was linked to a higher risk of heart attack. However, the FDA released a safety advisory on June 15, 2011, stating that using Actos for more than one year “may be associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer.”

Tuesday, September 3, 2013 Volume 124 | Number 229 Online at TheDailyRecord.com

Actos trial set for Md.


In first case to go to jury, Calif. judge set aside April verdict of $6.5 million
BYSTEVELASHSteve.Lash@TheDailyRecord.com

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday in a Baltimore family’s $10 million wrongful death lawsuit against the maker of the prescription diabetes medication Actos. Diep An’s widow and three children allege An died because Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A. Inc. and its affiliates did not meet its legal duty to warn doctors and patients that long­term use of the drug could cause blad­der cancer. Diep An, who began taking Actos in 2007 for type 2 diabetes, died on Jan. 14, 2012. Takeda denies the family’s allega­tions and said it plans to mount a strong defense of Actos during what attorneys expect will be a four-week jury trial before Judge M. Brooke Murdock in Baltimore City Circuit Court. Last April, in the first Actos trial to go to verdict, a California state jury awarded the plaintiffs $6.5 million. However, the judge in the case threw out the verdict in May, ruling there was insufficient evidence to link plaintiff Jack Cooper’s bladder cancer to his use of Takeda’s drug. The Deerfield, Ill.-based company is also fighting similar claims else­where, including more than a thou­sand in actions that were filed in feder­al courts nationwide and consolidated in the U.S. District Court in western Louisiana. “Takeda is confident in the thera­peutic benefits of Actos and its impor­tance as a treatment for type 2 dia­betes,” Kenneth D. Greisman, Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A. Inc.’s general counsel, said in a statement. “We have empathy for the plaintiff, but Takeda believes that we acted responsibly with regard to Actos,” Greisman added. “Patient safety is a critical priority for Takeda and we intend to vigorously defend Takeda against these lawsuits.” Failure to warn claim Actos has had a checkered history. The federal Food and Drug Administration approved the drug in 1999 to treat type 2 diabetes, and it became the diabetes drug of choice in 2007 after GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia was linked to a higher risk of heart attack. However, the FDA released a safety advisory on June 15, 2011, stating that using Actos for more than one year “may be associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer.” That same month, Germany and France suspend­ed distribution of the drug due to its suspected link to bladder cancer. In its lawsuit, the An family claims that Takeda knew of the drug’s risks before it was prescribed to Diep but did not warn him or his doctors. The Takeda companies “concealed and continued to conceal their knowl­edge of Actos’ unreasonably danger­ous risks from Diep An, his physicians, other consumers and the medical com­munity,” the complaint states. “Specifically, defendants failed to adequately inform consumers and the prescribing community about the risk of bladder cancer associated with the use of Actos,” the lawsuit adds. “Diep and his physicians would not have used Actos had defendants properly disclosed the risks associated with its long-term use.” The family’s failure to warn claim is one of several related allegations it makes against Takeda. The lawsuit also alleges design and manufacturing defects in the drug, as well as breach­es of express and implied warranties of safety by the company. Stuart Simms, an attorney for the family, declined to comment on the coming trial beyond citing the papers filed with the court since the initial fil­ing on June 8, 2012. “From all parties and all sides it would be inappropriate to comment prior to commencement” of the trial, said Simms, of Brown Goldstein Levy LLP. The Baltimore law firm is serving as co-counsel in the case, which was filed by attorney Michael J. Miller of The Miller Firm LLC in Orange, Va. The firm was also on Cooper’s legal team in the California litigation. The An family’s claim is one of at least three similar lawsuits that have been filed against Takeda in state and federal courts in Maryland. On March 2, 2012, the estate and family of John Dunlavey Sr. filed suit

0 Comments

October 01st, 2013

10/1/2013

0 Comments

 
PLEASE STOP ALLOWING THESE CORPORATE POLS AND MEDIA HIDE THE FACT THAT TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD AND TAX EVASION NEED TO COME BACK AND OUR GOVERNMENT COFFERS WILL BE FLUSH WITH MONEY.


Wonder why Congress would allow the US to be taken from first world to third world on about $150,000 salary plus health benefits?  Below you see why.  These pols are getting super-sized pay-to-play in a system that allows anyone to pay someone else through these offshore accounts.  DOES THAT SOUND LIKE GOOD PUBLIC INTEREST, DEMOCRATIC LAW?  Yet, your neo-liberal here in Maryland is all for this banking system.  We are fortunate to have International Journalists working with Wikileaks-like sites to locate lots of this money and to whom it is attached and we will pull together cases to claw this back.  We need to have a candidate that will connect the US to the International Criminal Courts so this massive fraud can be handled like the Holocaust looting.  These journalists are using the same structures to hunt and identify wealth according to country carted to these offshore accounts.

"According to the CBC, there was a massive leak of 'files containing information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries. The leak amounts to 260 gigabytes of data, or 162 times larger than the U.S. State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010...In many cases, the leaked documents expose insider details of how agents would incorporate companies in Caribbean and South Pacific micro-states on behalf of wealthy clients, then assign front people called "nominees" to serve, on paper, as directors and shareholders for the corporations — disguising the companies' true owners.' Makes a good read and there are some good interactive components. Perhaps Slashdot readers can figure out how the source of the leak, the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got their hands on this data."

The good news is that the American people can and will get this money back as we organize and reverse this corporate hold on government by getting rid of neo-liberals and rebuild the democratic party.
  Just think how much money Obama and neo-liberals could have brought back to government coffers and now, they are play-acting that there is a crisis around every corner to hide why they are dismantling the US public sector!

The first thing a neo-liberal supermajority in 2008 did was to protect the wealth inequity by massive corporate fraud. The next thing....make it easier to hide and/or keep the massive wealth the few now have. The estate tax and other legislation from the Depression era designed to keep a few from amassing this huge wealth we have today are being dismantled by neo-liberals. ALL OF MARYLAND DEMOCRATS ARE NEO-LIBERALS.

You see that the top states working hard to hide wealth are democratic leaders-----HARRY REID OF NEVADA AND JOE BIDEN OF DELAWARE. You know, those blue-collar kind of guys! WAKE UP AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!


America’s Most Wealth Friendly States Continue to Bid for Your Clients’ Trust Business

Posted by Jerry Cooper, Contributor - on January 15th, 2010

State legislatures are still enacting trust law enhancements to provide greater protection for your client’s wealth.

As more wealthy families cross borders to protect assets, they choose to set up personal trusts in states other than their own to take advantage of favorable trust laws.

According to recent data, 72 percent of U.S. households with more than $1 million in investment assets use trusts as a key component to their estate planning.  

The main reasons to cross borders are: 

• Some states don’t tax assets held in a trust, while distributions might be taxable in your home state. 

• Trust codes in some states seek to protect assets from lawsuits and creditors. 

• Some states allow “dynasty trusts” which permit future generations to avoid estate taxes.

Over the last few years a growing number of states have revised their trust codes to add features that provide for creditor protection, low or no state income tax and ability to establish a dynasty trust which allows for assets to pass to heirs for generations to come. 

Nevada recently revised its trust code to provide for directed trusts.  Directed trust statutes provide for an ability for the trustee to appoint an investment advisor to manage assets within the trust.  This provides for low trustee fees and minimal trustee liability and provides flexibility to the investment manager ultimately benefiting the client.

Steven J. Oshins, an estate planning attorney and author of several trust laws in Nevada says, “Nevada’s new directed trust statute is critical to high net worth investors.” He adds, “Nevada now offers everything Delaware offers and more because of the combination of its 365-year dynasty trust law, two-year statute of limitations on self settled asset protection trusts and no taxation.” 


Alaska revised its trust code to make it more difficult for divorcing spouses to grab trust assets.   State trust laws vary widely and clients should compare jurisdictions for features that best fits their needs.  Some of the most important trust features include whether or not a state has income tax.  

When setting up a trust arrangement having a trust in a state that has no income tax has a definite economic financial impact on your client’s family.  Therefore, no state income tax is amongst the most important. 

Dynasty trusts are important beginning next year when estate taxes resume at a 55 percent tax rate.  The general rule is the longer the period of time that the trust can exist the better it is.  

Other factors include the number of trust providers or independent trust companies in the state which is an indication of whether a trust center is beneficial to a client and the time zone from New York. 

But going out of state for a trust may not always make financial sense, especially for smaller trust accounts. Since the most favorable jurisdictions might be in states where you don’t know an individual trustee, you might need to hire a corporate trustee, which can cost about between ½ of 1 % to 1% or less of trust assets per year, depending on the size of the trust.

Moving an existing trust may also involve additional fees and may require court approval, depending on how the trust was originally drafted and state law. 

With great states spread around the country, one important factor to consider when seeking a home for a trust is the avoidance of state income taxes. Trust experts say one of the first factors to look for when examining where to set up a trust is whether the assets are subject to state taxes. 

The idea is to let trust investments grow for as long as possible free of state taxes, which can save significant sums of money, especially in high-tax states such as New York and California. (Beneficiaries, however, may be taxed on distributions, depending on whether their home state has an income tax.) Alaska, Delaware, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming are attractive because they don’t impose any taxes on trust assets. 

The following chart, the Best States for Trusts gives you a thumbnail view of which states are best.  It is divided into three tiers Tier 1 being the best, Tier 2 being good and Tier 3 being marginal.  Given that Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota are in Tier 1 they are probably your best choices for trust business.

 States bidding for trust business often will not tax those assets they are betting on increased economic activity which will bring other prosperity to the state such as job creation, corporate tax revenue collected from trust companies, corporate tax assessments from the trust companies.  

It is for this reason that state legislatures continue to sharpen their pencils and enact new laws designed to attract wealthy baby boomers and their parents’ estates for future generations.  Trust accounts have been an important port of the investment landscape.  

For wealth management organizations advisors can gain additional income and provide more value to their service by bundling trust services within investment management.  Last year several advisory firms launched their own trust companies in order to be better positioned to provide these services. 

This includes Wealth Advisors Trust Company and Dominion Trust Company in South Dakota, both new launches targeting wealthy clients from a wealth-friendly trust state.  This trend was featured in an Investment News Article last summer, More Advisory Firms Expected to Start Trust Companies.

Trusts can be created for a variety of other purposes including avoiding probate, passing on a family home to heirs, protecting money from creditors, caring for disabled child or even providing for a pet after one dies. Trusts continue to grow in popularity thanks to the aging population and more aggressive trust marketing by financial firms and the concerns about maximizing trusts’ growth performance. 

Asset protection trusts have gained in popularity as marketing vehicles for advisors over the last several years with Alaska, Delaware, Nevada and South Dakota being the most popular jurisdictions.  Doctors, business executives and other professionals have become increasingly interested in these trusts, advisors say. With these you transfer assets into a trust run by an independent trustee who can give your client distributions from time to time.  These trusts if set up properly are in most cases able to keep the assets of the trust out of reach of creditors.



_____________________________________________

If you notice, the three banks handling the most offshore accounts and wealth are the same 3 most guilty of the massive financial frauds of last decade with almost no penalty and lots of flooding of Fed money at the time of the crash.

We know much of the money is-----we only need Rule of Law reinstated to get it.  As the US Congress fights over the IRS tax scandal regarding political non-profits rage, the IRS is being defunded more and more so tax recovery does not happen.

THIS IS A NEO-LIBERAL ADMINISTRATION AND NOT ONE WORD FROM CONGRESS AS TO THESE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF TAX EVASION.


'The three private banks handling the most assets offshore are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs'


22 July 2012 Last updated at 12:20 ET

Tax havens: Super-rich 'hiding' at least $21tn


A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.

The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.

The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, for the Tax Justice Network.

Tax expert and UK government adviser John Whiting said he was sceptical that the amount hidden was so large.

Mr Whiting, tax policy director at the Chartered Institute of Taxation, said: "There clearly are some significant amounts hidden away, but if it really is that size what is being done with it all?"

Mr Henry said his $21tn is actually a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn. A trillion is 1,000 billion.

Mr Henry used data from the Bank of International Settlements, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and national governments.

His study deals only with financial wealth deposited in bank and investment accounts, and not other assets such as property and yachts.

The report comes amid growing public and political concern about tax avoidance and evasion. Some authorities, including in Germany, have even paid for information on alleged tax evaders stolen from banks.

The group that commissioned the report, Tax Justice Network, campaigns against tax havens.

Mr Henry said that the super-rich move money around the globe through an "industrious bevy of professional enablers in private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries.

"The lost tax revenues implied by our estimates is huge. It is large enough to make a significant difference to the finances of many countries.

"From another angle, this study is really good news. The world has just located a huge pile of financial wealth that might be called upon to contribute to the solution of our most pressing global problems," he said.

'Huge black hole' James Henry says his $21tn figure is a conservative estimate

The report highlights the impact on the balance sheets of 139 developing countries of money held in tax havens that is put beyond the reach of local tax authorities.

Mr Henry estimates that since the 1970s, the richest citizens of these 139 countries had amassed $7.3tn to $9.3tn of "unrecorded offshore wealth" by 2010.

Private wealth held offshore represents "a huge black hole in the world economy," Mr Henry said.

Mr Whiting, though, urged caution. "I cannot disprove the figures at all, but they do seem staggering. If the suggestion is that such amounts are actively hidden and never accessed, that seems odd - not least in terms of what the tax authorities are doing. In fact, the US, UK and German authorities are doing a lot."

He also pointed out that if tax havens were stuffed with such sizeable amounts, "you would expect the havens to be more conspicuously wealthy than they are".

Other findings in Mr Henry's report include:

  • At the end of 2010, the 50 leading private banks alone collectively managed more than $12.1tn in cross-border invested assets for private clients
  • The three private banks handling the most assets offshore are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs
  • Less than 100,000 people worldwide own about $9.8tn of the wealth held offshore.
Mr Henry told the BBC that it was difficult to detail hidden assets in some individual countries, including the UK, because of restrictions on getting access to data.

A spokesman for the Treasury said great strides were being made in cracking down on people hiding assets.

He said that in 2011-12 HM Revenue & Customs' High Net Worth Unit secured £200m in additional tax through its compliance work with the very wealthy.

He said that agreements reached with Liechtenstein and Switzerland will bring in £3bn and between £4bn and £7bn respectively.





__________________________________________________


Top Offshore Banking Locations for Enhanced Privacy and Protection

Emma Mackenzie | 7 Nov 2012 |

Offshore bank accounts are commonly misrepresented as a financial tool for the ultra wealthy. In reality, most individuals can establish offshore bank accounts that benefit from low minimum deposits, tax-free savings, increased privacy, and asset protection. Depending on your citizenship, your financial objectives, and your banking needs, the most appropriate jurisdiction in which you should select to set up an offshore account will vary.

Besides being an effective investment and tax friendly vehicle, an offshore bank account offers numerous advantages to account holders. Not only can individuals make use of offshore accounts to diversify their investment portfolios, but also they can benefit from tax savings, high interest rates, legal protection, and financial stability. However, knowing which jurisdiction to establish your account in is key to achieving your financial goals. Many countries require personal presence for the opening of an account, while other locations may require substantial deposits. Upon deciding on your primary banking goals, you can then ascertain the most suitable jurisdiction to bank with.

Here we provide the top five locations that offer unparalleled banking privacy to account holders.

#1 Seychelles The Seychelles is a renowned jurisdiction for the opening of offshore bank accounts; individuals can achieve asset protection in a financially stable and secure climate whilst enjoying 100% anonymity and heightened account privacy. One of the most favored aspects of the Seychelles as an offshore banking destination is that the jurisdiction’s governmental authorities have no direct access to bank information without a court order. In addition, there is no personal presence required to open a Seychelles offshore account.

Seychelles is favored not only for its high levels of privacy and banking protection, but also for its tax friendly climate; the country has 13 double tax treaties including Cyprus, Barbados, UAE and China. Further to this, the Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) is signed only with the Netherlands, making the Seychelles an excellent choice for individuals seeking tax and privacy benefits.

Additional features:

  • Online banking access
  • International wire transfer payments
  • 1-2 days to open account
  • Available banking currencies include but are not limited to USD, EUR, GBP and CAD
Individuals should note that the initial minimum deposit required is US $100,000.

#2 Cyprus Although Cyprus is an EU member state and thus operates in accordance with the EU Savings Tax Directive 2005, information regarding interest paid to legal entities including trusts and foundations are not subject to the directive and as such, cannot be passed over to tax authorities. In addition, Cyprus authorities cannot obtain any financial or banking information regarding an account holder without a court order.

Cyprus bank accounts boast 100% anonymity and no personal presence is required to open an account.

Additional features:

  • No initial minimum deposit is required
  • No minimum balance is required
  • Tax friendly jurisdiction with double tax treaties with 45 countries
  • Access to online banking
  • International wire transfer payments
  •  Banking currencies include USD, EUR, GBP and CAD
#3 Belize For individuals whose primary concern is banking privacy, Belize reigns as one of the best bank account choices. Not only is banking secrecy ‘strictly enforced by law’, but personal presence is not a requirement for opening an account. Authorities cannot access any bank information about an account holder without a court order, which can only bse obtained with good reason i.e. evidence that funds are a result of a crime.

Belize offshore bank accounts have a credible reputation as a safe financial vehicle for asset protection and wealth management purposes. Banking institutions, which provide offshore accounts, are regulated by the Belize Central Bank in accordance with:

  • The Banks and Financial Institutions Act 1995
  • The Introduction of the Offshore Banking Act 1996
  • The Money Laundering (prevention) Act 1996
Additional features:

  • International bank cards
  • Savings and time deposit accounts
  • Exempt from local taxes or exchange control restrictions
  • Accounts can be in any major currency including USD, EUR, CAD
  • Account can be opened in 1-2 working days
  • Access to online banking and bank cards
Account holders should note that a minimum initial deposit of US $1,000 is required, and a minimum balance of US $1,000 must be maintained at all times.

#4 Singapore Singapore’s domestic tax law favors offshore bank account holders in that the government of Singapore cannot access banking information on the account holders, information on investment gains, and bank-deposit interest activity under domestic tax law. Account holders therefore enjoy advanced levels of privacy and banking secrecy, as the government cannot pass over any financial information to the tax authorities of the account holder’s country of domicile.

As one of the world’s largest offshore financial centers, Singapore is widely regarded for its continued commitment to asset protection and banking privacy through the enforcement of strict secrecy regimes. One way of furthering your banking privacy is to open an offshore Singapore account under the name of a foreign entity such as a trust, foundation, or corporation. In doing this, certain situations may allow account holders to be exempt from reporting requirements on their personal assets.

Additional features:

  • Accounts can be opened in any major currencies including SGD, USD, EUR and AUD
  • Singapore remains a top financial center for stability and secure monetary controls
  • Lowest tax rates in Asia
  • Accounts can be held in gold
  • Access to online banking
  • International wire transfer payments
  • ATM bank card with worldwide acceptance
  • Quick set up (usually 1-2 business days)
Personal presence may be required in Singapore in order to open an offshore bank account (effective September 1st 2011).

#5 Dubai Dubai offers exceptional levels of anonymity and privacy for bank account holders. With banking secrecy at the forefront of Dubai’s banking institutions’ priorities, account holders can rest assured that their assets will be protected to the highest of levels. Dubai’s privacy policy regarding offshore bank account activity is highly regarded by investors on a global scale.

Additional features:

  • Online banking is available to all account holders, enabling transactions to be performed internationally
  • Choice of either corporate or private bank account to suit your needs
  • No fund transfer restrictions
  • No tax on interest, investment income, inheritance, exchange controls and capital gains
  • Dubai is a reliable and stable financial center with no tax exchange agreements with any countries
  • Flexible banking system
  • Dubai’s legislation favors the confidentiality and privacy of investors and account holders
Preservation of banking privacy Banking privacy cannot be taken for granted, and with ongoing agreements for banking and tax transparency in place, countries across the globe are facing difficulties in maintaining their reputation as a financial center for banking secrecy, stability and financial security.

Due to the European Union Tax Savings Directive 2005 – known informally as the automatic exchange of information – all EU countries are now restricted in the level of financial privacy they can guarantee to offshore investors. This has subsequently catapulted the popularity of banking in offshore locations, particularly in the Caribbean and Asia. Other agreements such as the Tax Information Exchange Agreement (TIEA) also adversely affect the financial privacy of individuals banking in countries member to the TIEA.

The future of offshore banking confidentiality Nevertheless, maximum banking privacy can still be achieved, legally, professionally and quickly by opening an account in one of the abovementioned locations. Not only will account holders enjoy anonymity, banking privacy and financial confidentiality with respect to their banking activities, but in many cases, they have the opportunity to open an account under the name of a corporation to achieve 100% anonymity and confidentiality.


0 Comments

September 19th, 2013

9/19/2013

0 Comments

 
PLEASE GO TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS BLOG TO READ A REALLY WELL-RESEARCHED STUDY OF HEALTH FRAUD.  IT SHOWS HOW SO MUCH OF ENTITLEMENT MONEY WAS LOST TO FRAUD AND NOW WE ARE WATCHING AS NEO-LIBERALS AND REPUBLICANS FIGHT TO DENY ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE FOR MOST PEOPLE!


Wouldn't it be better if O'Malley simply reinstate Rule of Law and follow the public money that is supposed to give health care to the poor and mentally ill, to the old and young and end the massive fraud that takes 1/2 of all taxpayer money sent for health care in these groups?

Maryland has a history of underfunding all social programs and then allowing what little it sends to be lost to fraud and corruption.  Whether the poor dying 20-30 years earlier than others from lack of access to care or whether Veterans who have to deal with a VA hospital worst in the nation, you can bet that mental health facilities are grossly underfunded and unable to operate.

Do you hear a repeated pattern in all administrative issues regarding the government in MD?  Remember, MD is one of the richest states in the nation so it is not the lack of funding....it is the lack of funding making it to the operation before it goes into someone's pocket....ergo, the wealth inequity in the state.

We need MD citizens to shake these corporate pols out of the rug..they are only working for wealth and profit.  A democrat does not allow these conditions to be systemic at huge expense to the people.  Whether repub or dem....incumbents need to go!  Rule of Law needs to be reinstated in MD so fraud and corruption in the state stops the short-changing of social programs and undermines quality of life for everyone!



Below you see an area of Maryland that has a high number of working class and poor and you know why patient numbers are down....they cannot gain access to hospital care but instead are being treated in clinics and by home health care. 

Salisbury hospital laying off 58; offering buyouts Peninsula Regional Medical Center says it is treating fewer patients

By Andrea K. Walker, The Baltimore Sun 2:17 p.m. EDT, September 18, 2013

Peninsula Regional Medical Center announced Wednesday that it will lay off 58 employees and offer buyouts to 130 as the number of patients it treats declines.

The employees who lose their jobs will be offered severance packages and the opportunity to apply for other jobs at the Salisbury hospital, the company said in a statement.

Peninsula Regional on average has 66 fewer patients in the hospital a day than last year. The medical center is licensed for 288 beds and expects that number to decrease to 250 within the next two years. The hospital was licensed for 363 beds four years ago.

Maryland has recently eliminated 703 licensed beds, including 406 in the past two years, the hospital said.

Peninsula Regional also said that it lost $4 million in lost revenue from Medicaid cuts as a result of federal sequestration. It also said that hospital rate increases approved by the state's Health Cost Services Review Commission have not kept up with inflation, also putting pressure on revenue.

Patient declines are occurring as more people are getting outpatient care rather than at a hospital where they stay overnight, hospitals officials said in the statement. Hospitals will soon be designed for the critically ill, complex surgeries and emergency care, Peninsula Regional officials said.

Peninsula Regional is among other hospitals, including
Johns Hopkins Bayview and the University of Maryland Medical Center, that has cut staff in recent months.

_______________________________________________

Across the nation we are seeing a disturbing fall in level of care and staffing as the health industry moves to profit over care with no regulation.
These neo-liberals are working to throw Medicare and Medicaid into these private health systems that will leave most unable to pay for quality caregivers and with no nursing homes.....you will get what they send to your home!

Career Diploma in
Home Health Aide


Our online Home Health Aide training course shows you how to help the elderly, the disabled and people in ill health to maintain their quality of life and independence at home. As a graduate of our online Home Health Aide (HHA) classes you’ll be prepared to take the Personal Care and Support Credential exam delivered by our partner, the Direct Care Alliance, certifying your professional-level knowledge.

  • Prerequisite: None
  • Study Method: eBook (Online Textbook & Exams)
  • Program Length: As few as 6 Months



Elder Abuse by In-Home Aids a Growing Problem

Jul 16, 2008 | Parker Waichman LLP

Elderly people who want to avoid nursing homes often employ in-home aids to help meet their day-to-day needs.  However, in many cases, the in-home aid industry is unregulated, and advocates for the elderly say that this situation has led to a growing number of cases of elder abuse, neglect or fraud in which home caregivers take advantage of the elderly.

A district attorney in San Diego County, Calif. told The Wall Street Journal that  he prosecuted at least 25 home caregivers in the past year, mostly for stealing from elderly clients.  Another, from Lake County, Calif., told the Journal that about 80 percent of his office's 74 prosecutions of elder abuse in the past year involved home aides.

In-home care has been touted as a way to keep older people  happier and healthier, and at a lower cost, than they would be in a nursing home. 
According to The Wall Street Journal, it costs Medicaid program about $6,000 per person per year for home care, versus about $20,000 for care in a nursing home.  About 1.6 million people are employed in home care, split about equally between those who provide basic health services, and those who provide housekeeping, cooking and nonmedical help.

Of the two types of aids, health aids are often certified nursing assistants who face licensing requirements and other regulations.  However, most in-home elder abuse cases involve non-medical aids, who require no special licensing, and are loosely regulated.

According to The Wall Street Journal, in California, Florida, Connecticut and at least 19 other states, nonmedical aides don't have to be licensed or pass a criminal background check to get a job. In other states where employment agencies are required to do some type of checks, applicants with criminal records can slip through the cracks, some research has found.

The problem goes deep.  A recent study sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services conducted at Michigan State University screened 214,167 people who held or sought jobs working with the elderly, including home care, in that state between April 2006 and November 2007. Of those, 5,462 had criminal histories that should have disqualified them.   Michigan is one of the states that does require background checks of caregivers for the elderly, but as the study shows, that requirement clearly doesn't go far enough.

Consumers seeking in-home help for an elderly loved should ask an employment agency exactly what a prospective caregiver has been screened for, and require at a minimum a state police criminal background check.  Those hiring on their own can also request a background check from state police, and references should always be checked.

____________________________________________


Who are getting the growing share of home health care worker jobs? Immigrants who have no labor protections and have their wages stolen.  What Wall Street wants is to have the elderly at home with no access to what we now know as retirement communities because no one will be able to afford them.   We are seeing the elderly now being told not to come to the hospital with symptoms that are not immediately treatable. 

NATIONAL LABOR UNIONS MUST TAKE THIS LACK OF ENFORCEMENT TO COURT TO PROTECT DOMESTIC WORKERS AS WELL.


News Release WHD News Release: [09/17/2013]
Contact Name: Jennifer Marion or Jason Surbey
Phone Number: (202) 693-5795 or x4668
Email:
marion.jennifer.r@dol.gov or Surbey.Jason@dol.gov
Release Number: 13-1922-NAT


Minimum wage, overtime protections extended to direct care workers by US Labor Department Nearly two million home health and personal care workers to benefit


WASHINGTON — Fulfilling a promise by President Obama to ensure that direct care workers receive a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a final rule today extending the Fair Labor Standards Act's minimum wage and overtime protections to most of the nation's workers who provide essential home care assistance to elderly people and people with illnesses, injuries or disabilities. This change will result in nearly two million direct care workers — such as home health aides, personal care aides and certified nursing assistants — receiving the same basic protections already provided to most U.S. workers. It will also help guarantee that those who rely on the assistance of direct care workers have access to consistent and high-quality care from a stable and increasingly professional workforce.

"Many American families rely on the vital services provided by direct care workers," said Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez. "Because of their hard work, countless Americans are able to live independently, go to work and participate more fully in their communities. Today we are taking an important step toward guaranteeing that these professionals receive the wage protections they deserve while protecting the right of individuals to live at home."

"Direct care workers play a critical role in ensuring access to high-quality home care that many people need in order to remain healthy and independent in their communities, and they should be compensated fairly for this important work," said Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. "We will continue to engage with consumers, states, advocates and home care providers in the implementation of this rule to help people with disabilities, older adults and their families receive quality, person-centered services."

The home care industry has grown dramatically over the last several decades as more Americans choose to receive long-term care at home instead of in nursing homes or other facilities. Despite this growth and the fact that direct care workers increasingly receive skills training and perform work previously done by trained nurses, direct care workers remain among the lowest paid in the service industry. There are an estimated 1.9 million direct care workers in the U.S., with nearly all currently employed by home care agencies. Approximately 90 percent of direct care workers are women, and nearly 50 percent are minorities.

Today's announcement extends minimum wage and overtime protections to all direct care workers employed by home care agencies and other third parties. Fifteen states already extend state minimum wage and overtime protections to direct care workers, and an additional six states and the District of Columbia mandate state minimum wage protections.

"The department carefully considered the comments received from individuals who receive home care, workers, third-party employers and administrators of state programs that support home care," said Laura Fortman, the principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, the agency that administers and enforces the FLSA. "In response, the final rule provides increased flexibility, and gives programs sufficient time to make any needed adjustments. Together these changes will allow the rule to better meet consumers' needs while better protecting direct care workers."

The final rule also clarifies that direct care workers who perform medically-related services for which training is typically a prerequisite are not companionship workers and therefore are entitled to the minimum wage and overtime. And, in accordance with Congress' initial intent, individual workers who are employed only by the person receiving services or that person's family or household and engaged primarily in fellowship and protection (providing company, visiting or engaging in hobbies) and care incidental to such activities, will still be considered exempt from the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime protections.

The rule will be effective Jan. 1, 2015. The Department of Labor has created a new web portal with interactive web tools, fact sheets and other materials to help families, other employers and workers understand the new requirements. These, along with information about upcoming webinars on the rule, are available at www.dol.gov/whd/homecare/.

  • Read this news release en Español.
  • _____________________________________________



This is what we knew would happen....when they say people will be covered they do not tell you the level of care you will receive and it is startling some of the basic care that will not for Medicaid.  Remember, most low-income people are on Medicaid.

Medicaid programs vary in coverage of preventive care, report says

Existing Medicaid beneficiaries have largely been left out of the health reform movement when it comes to preventive services that can ward off cancer, heart disease and other potentially deadly diseases, according to a new study by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS).

The study, which appears in the July issue of Health Affairs, notes that under the Affordable Care Act most private insurance plans, Medicare and Medicaid expansion programs are required by law to cover a full range of crucial preventive services such as screening tests for colorectal cancer, high blood cholesterol, HIV infection, and diet counseling that can prevent obesity. But state Medicaid plans are not required to cover such care for adults already enrolled in Medicaid—and this report suggests that those adults will not have access to the full range of preventive services.

"Preventive services save lives by detecting diseases before they can progress," says lead author Sara Wilensky, PhD, JD, special services faculty for undergraduate education in the Department of Health Policy at SPHHS. "Why should some Medicaid beneficiaries be left out when it comes to coverage for this kind of care?" Screening mammograms, colonoscopies, cholesterol screenings and other preventive services are aimed at staving off health problems early on rather than trying to provide costly health care for established and hard-to-treat disorders, she said.

Wilensky and her co-author Elizabeth Gray, JD, a research associate at SPHHS, reviewed Medicaid policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from June 2012 through November 2012. The initial review looked at all publically available information on coverage of preventive services. After that first review, the researchers then contacted state Medicaid officials to fill in any missing information about coverage for this population.

The researchers found that most states do not cover all of the preventive services recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel that looks at preventive care and offers guidelines for health plans and providers. In addition, it was often difficult to discern exactly which services were covered by Medicaid programs based on the vague language used by many programs. The report highlighted some serious gaps in coverage. For example, while most states provided coverage for screening mammograms, not all Medicaid programs offered such care to existing beneficiaries. In fact, three states don't cover preventive mammograms for this population at all—a shortfall that could mean low-income women will go without the test, the authors said.

The analysis also says that states appear to rarely cover other types of preventive care for breast cancer for those at high risk. Only 11 state Medicaid programs, for example, make it clear that they will pay for breast cancer susceptibility testing for the BRCA1 gene that increases the risk of breast and ovarian cancer. And just three states explicitly cover chemoprevention for such beneficiaries. This medication can be used to lower the risk of breast cancer, a disease that kills about 40,000 American women every year.

"The Affordable Care Act guarantees millions of low-income Americans access to mammograms, colonoscopies and other lifesaving preventive services, but that assurance does not extend to people who currently have Medicaid coverage," said Chris Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN), the advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society and one funder of the study. "States have a responsibility to ensure that all people in Medicaid have access to preventive care for a life-threatening disease such as cancer."

The authors of the study also say there is wide variation in coverage of tests for sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and the test for the HIV virus that causes AIDS. And in some states STD screening is limited to family planning visits, a restriction that means people visiting the doctor for some other reason or those who are not eligible for family planning services may not have coverage. Going without this screen, increases the risk that an infected person will not receive treatment and could unknowingly spread a disease to others, Wilensky said.

Many of the preventive services evaluated by the study, such as screenings for early signs of heart disease, depression or diabetes, were either not covered or it was unclear if they would be paid for by Medicaid. In some cases, state Medicaid officers said that the preventive services would be paid for only if deemed "medically necessary." But Wilensky says that these terms should not be used together because medically necessary tests are for instances when a provider has a reason to suspect an established health problem, while preventive tests are crucial in detecting an emerging problem in an otherwise healthy, asymptomatic person.

Such confusion could leave providers wondering if preventive services will be covered by Medicaid, says the report. In the end, providers may simply fail to provide care if they are uncertain about Medicaid coverage and/or payment for their services, the authors said.

"By lowering risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, Americans can reduce their risk of heart disease or stroke by as much as 80 percent," said Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, which also helped fund the study. "Evidence-based screenings play an essential role in identifying and reducing these factors. Without Medicaid coverage of preventative screenings and services, we could fall behind in the battle against the nation's No. 1 and No. 4 killers."

The authors conclude that there are many opportunities to increase the coverage of preventive services for this population. For example, managed care plans could choose to cover services that end up saving lives even if not required by state Medicaid programs. In states that do not clearly spell out covered preventive services or require providers to follow a specific standard of care, providers could choose to follow the guidelines of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. Alternatively, Congress could step in and give existing Medicaid beneficiaries the same coverage of preventive services as most other Americans enjoy under health reform, the authors point out.



__________________________________________________

Below you see a well-researched paper on health fraud.  Notice that the amount of fraud back in 1998 was $250 billion a year.....THAT WAS BEFORE CORPORATE FRAUD WENT ON STEROIDS IN THE 2000s


'It is clear to see why Americans consider this the biggest cause, when health care fraud was estimated to cost approximately $100 billion to $250 billion per year in 1998, or 10 percent to 25 percent of total health care spending'


Emily Fisher
April 2008

ABSTRACT
Health care fraud is an important and visible factor associated with increasing health care costs in the United States. Medicare and Medicaid contribute to a vast majority of those cost sand therefore must be heavily scrutinized. This thesis will investigate the types of fraud, who commits them, and why the health care system is more susceptible to fraud. More specifically, the problems and complications of current fraud investigation for Medicare and Medicaid are examined. This thesis will then evaluate how successful these initiatives were in reducing health care fraud and explore new suggestions for preventing health care fraud in the future.


INTRODUCTION
As elections approach Americans are hearing more and more about health care reform, and what needs to be done to fix the ailing health care system. The main problem candidates are trying to address is the dramatic increase in health care costs that are causing the number of underinsured and uninsured patients to increase across the country. Many different factors are related to the increase in health care costs. This paper will focus on health care fraud and abuse, and more specifically health care fraud and abuse within the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Health care fraud is an important and visible factor associated with increasing health care costs, because there is no positive side to it. Some of the other factors that increase costs, such as better technology, have positive implications, but health care fraud is only viewed as a drain on health care resources. Health care fraud and abuse costs the United States an estimated 110 billion dollars a year (Caldwell 1997). Because health care fraud has played such a vital role in increasing the cost of health care it has gained a lot of attention from the government and the United States people. In the 1990’s the Clinton administration began a health care reform campaign and focused a lot of resources on stopping and, furthermore, preventing health care fraud within the Medicare and Medicaid programs. This paper will investigate those reforms, and evaluate how successful they were in reducing health care fraud. This paper will also address some of the many different types of fraud, who commits them, why the health care system is vulnerable to fraud, the problems and complications of current fraud investigation, and explore new suggestions for preventing health care fraud in the future.



THE IMPACT OF FRAUD ON RISING HEALTHCARE COSTS


Since the 1960’s health care costs have risen from 28 billion dollars per year to an estimated 1.9 trillion dollars per year in 2004 (Snapshot, 2006). That rise in cost accounts for an average of 6,300 dollars per person per year spent on health care, compared to 3,600 dollars per person per year in 1994 (Snapshot, 2006). This substantial increase in cost causes a problem for most Americans because average income has not increased as steadily as health care costs, leaving many Americans unable to afford or access health care (Effect, 2007; Snapshot, 2006). The “health care cost inflation invariably exceeds growth in the economy as a whole” (Sage, 1999). Many factors have contributed to the dramatic increase in health care costs such as a cultural preference to focus on expensive treatment instead of preventative measures, technological advances, the ability to live longer thus using more resources, medical malpractice, and healthcare fraud.
Factors Increasing Health Care Costs
The first cause of rising healthcare costs is related cultural values and patient preferences. When it comes to health care, it seems like Americans are always looking for a quick fix. As obesity rates increase, Americans turn to easy ways to lose weight immediately, like liposuction or gastro bypass surgery, instead of focusing on changing their diet and increasing their activity. Americans celebrate beating cancer, and call those who do heroes, but very rarely stop to consider the lifestyle choices that may have contributed to the disease. People do not choose to get cancer, but in many cases, like most diseases, lifestyle choices play a big factor. Americans do not consider the possibility that expensive chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and possibly the whole disease itself may have been prevented if in some cases a person wore sunscreen, smoked less, drank less alcohol, ate healthier or stayed physically active. Instead of changing

unhealthy lifestyles and focusing on preventing disease, Americans continue to come up with innovative and often expensive ways to fix things. Because American culture continues to value expensive retrospective medicine instead of preventative medicine, health care costs will continue to increase.
The need to compete and have more innovative technology is also a contributing factor to the dramatic rise in health care costs. In the United States healthcare is treated like any other billion dollar business, and each facility strives to provide the best care. In order to provide the best care each facility spends a large amount of money each year purchasing new top-of-the-line equipment. They do this even though the equipment they are replacing is still useful and efficient and in some instances are still being paid off. Providers spend millions of dollars purchasing and advertising their new-top-of-the-line equipment in order to win consumers. The problem is that as each provider spends millions on every new piece of technology available they have to charge the consumers more to pay for their new technology. If healthcare facilities would collaborate more, costs would be less. Instead of each facility in the area competing for market domination in their cardiovascular department by spending millions of dollars on new innovative equipment, one could focus on oncology, while the other focuses on cardiovascular. Collaboration would decrease the need for each facility to have every single piece of new innovative equipment, put the focus back on the patient, instead of the competition, and decrease costs for all involved.
New technology does not only increase costs, it also makes it possible for people to live longer. The result is that the longer a person lives the more health care they need to maintain a normal quality of life. As a person ages their health care needs encompass more types of procedures, more types of physicians, their healthcare becomes more expensive, and their procedures and physician visits become more frequent. As a person ages they need more health

care, and even with government assistance they are often unable to pay for it. They are unable to afford healthcare, because most are unable to work, and often live their last 20 years or so in retirement, only earning small amounts of money from retirement funds and possibly the government. This is a huge problem, because the population who needs the most health care are the least able to afford it. We are beginning to see this trend as the baby boomers reach retirement. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians in 2000 there were 354,000 uninsured people 65 years and older in the United States, and that number is expected to grow (Surprising, 2004).As the growing number of elderly struggle and are unable to find ways to pay for the health care that they need the number of people who are uninsured or underinsured increases.
As the number of uninsured or underinsured Americans increase the cost of health care for all Americans increases. Even though uninsured and underinsured Americans can not afford health care, they still seek treatment in the emergency room, where federal law requires treatment under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The cost of their treatment is often expensive; because being treated in the emergency room usually is more expensive in general, and their condition may be more serious because they were unable to afford to see the doctor earlier in order to prevent their condition from worsening. Because the uninsured and underinsured can not pay for treatment in the emergency room and the law requires they are treated, the cost of their treatment is shifted to those who do have insurance or already pay for care out of pocket, which further increases the costs of health care for everyone else.
Another reason that health care costs are increasing is that medical malpractice insurance for physicians is on the rise. In order for physicians to practice they must have medical

malpractice insurance. Medical malpractice insurance is then used to pay for negligence or other claims against the doctor. As more and more people collect medical malpractice money, the rates rise, and as the rates rise for the physicians prices for the patients rise as well. Some states, such as Indiana, have enacted laws limiting medical malpractice claims to reduce the burden of litigation on medical practice. These laws have helped, but some physicians fear being sued for malpractice. To protect themselves from possible lawsuits, they make very conservative recommendations and utilize additional health care procedures. Over-utilization of unnecessary procedures further leads to an increase in health care costs.
Like the other factors discussed above, health care fraud also contributes to the increase in health care costs. Health care fraud can be committed many different ways by any person involved with the health care system. Since most Americans are involved with the health care system, whether they are providing health care, or consuming health care, most Americans have the opportunity to take advantage of the system and commit fraud. In 2003, Blue Cross Blue Shield released a survey stating that out of $1.7 trillion spent on health care, $85 billion of that was lost to health care fraud (Blue, 2004). That $85 billion dollars was essentially stolen. Health care fraud is the most obvious and often the most upsetting factor that has increased health care costs.



Health Care Fraud Defined


Out of all of the factors mentioned above, Americans believe health care fraud is the most significant reason for the rise in health care costs (What, 1997). It is clear to see why Americans consider this the biggest cause, when health care fraud was estimated to cost approximately $100 billion to $250 billion per year in 1998, or 10 percent to 25 percent of total health care spending

in 1998 (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). It is estimated that 25 cents of every dollar being spent on health care are supporting fraudulent practices, and that a family of four pays as much as 1,400 dollars per year on health care fraud related costs (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Health care fraud has been one of the fastest growing U.S. criminal activities of the last decade. Many criminals are abandoning credit card fraud, drug trafficking and other dangerous activities in favor of the safe, lucrative arena of health care fraud (Allmon, 2005; Coccia, 1997; FBI, 1995). Given the surge in health care expenditures, it is not surprising to find an increase in the number and complexity of schemes devised to steal from the health care system (Morris, 1993). With so much money at stake it is essential for the American people and the government to explore the reasons why the health care industry is at risk for fraud, how they can minimize the occurrences of fraud, and take positive steps to prevent fraud related costs in the future.
Health care fraud has become a main stream issue (Kalb, 1999). Because of this, the government has spent the last ten years focusing on investigating health care fraud with the goal of decreasing its occurrence, and they continue to initiate new policies, and investigative bodies to deal specifically with health care fraud. Health care fraud is a critical issue for the government for many reasons. First off, the government is the principal payer of health care, and health care fraud is a waste of taxpayer money. “Elimination waste, fraud, and abuse is one of the few steps about which “disparate political ideologies can agree” (Sage, 1999). Secondly, they are in charge of regulating the health care system. Finally, they are entrusted with protecting the American people from criminals. Because of these reasons the government has dedicated many resources towards researching and investigating fraud, and how it occurs with the hopes of identifying new ways to fix the problem.

The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA) has defined health care fraud as: “an intentional deception or misrepresentation that the individual or entity makes knowing that the misrepresentation could result in some unauthorized benefit to the individual or the entity or to some other party (Offen, 1999). This definition encompasses a broad range of activities. Through studying health care fraud cases from the past investigators have been able to define the specific types of fraud that are committed most often, and have attempted ways to stop them from happening. Research has also suggested that the health care industry is more vulnerable to fraud than most other industries, because the medical field is complicated and the lay person does not understand it, and the regulations that govern the health care industry are constantly changing and ambiguous.
Why the Health Care Industry is Vulnerable to Fraud
The Complexity of Medicine
As medicine becomes more technological, payment methods more ambiguous, and health policy becomes more complex, the average American often find themselves left in the dark. Because of this confusion, the health care industry is highly susceptible to fraud. Most Americans know very little about medicine, which procedures match which diagnosis or how insurance works. Until recently, the patient-doctor relationship was completely unbalanced. The doctor told the patient what to do, and the patient trusted the doctor completely without questioning the doctor’s treatment method. People had very little exposure to medicine, so they did not have any other option besides trusting the doctor (Sultz and Young, 2006).
With globalization and the internet, the doctor patient relationship has changed. Doctors are not the only ones with the answers anymore. Now, people can research symptoms on

WebMD, get a second opinion from an online doctor, or chat about different treatments with other patients who have experienced the same illness. Even with all of these new resources it is suggested that the average patient still ‘has neither the knowledge nor inclination to question a doctor’s recommendations” (Morris, 1993). The patient is weak and vulnerable, and just wants to feel better, so the doctor is able to take advantage of this. The physician is able to run pointless tests, try ineffective treatments, prescribe useless medications, and recommend the use of unnecessary equipment while charging it all to a third party payer who is oblivious to the “true” necessity of these things. Medical professionals are responsible for committing 72 percent of health care fraud (Stats, 2001).


The Ambiguity of the Payment System

The rules governing the coverage and reimbursement of medical services are ambiguous and always changing, which makes the rules confusing for all involved. In 1993 the Medicare program had 34 different carriers that administered Part B of the program, and each different carrier had the authority to set there own guidelines for coverage and reimbursement (Morris, 1993). The number of carriers administering the Medicare program has only increased, adding more complications and confusions for medical providers, and making excuses easier for those intending to abuse the system.
Sometimes medical providers are unaware of the mistakes they make. On the other hand, because of the confusion providers who intend fraud often rely on the excuse that it was an accident, and the government has limited means to prove otherwise. “Many billing disputes involve complex and ambiguous issues. Government suffers from what economists call “information asymmetries.” In other words, in many cases, and especially those involving coding, the government can find it hard to distinguish among proper billing, minor mistakes, and

a deliberate effort to skim off small extra payments from a large number of claims” (Stanton, 2001). Medical providers need better training on the correct ways to code, how to read the guidelines, and/or they need to have more options to hire an office administrator who has been trained in coding, third party payment systems, and reimbursement guidelines.


Limited Knowledge on Fraud

The United States only began to focus on health care fraud control in the past fifteen years. Because of this, experts know very little about health care fraud control as a science or an art. There are not many available experts for guidance in the field, causing us to always act after the fact, and most times too late to have the effect necessary (Sparrow, 1996). Until recently, there have not been any generally accepted fraud audit field standards, leaving investigators to make it up as they went along. The only thing that investigators really knew how to deal with was internal corruption (employee embezzlement), rather than outside corruption (criminal attacks) (Sparrow, 1996).
Fraud Investigators Limited Medical Knowledge
Another problem investigators have is challenging health care professionals. Investigators are often some kind of law enforcement who have very little experience in the medical field. When investigators find themselves challenging respected health care professionals they feel greatly disadvantaged (Sparrow, 1996).


Acceptable Targets

The United States health care system is very complex and part of what makes it so complex are the private third party payers, insurance companies. Insurance companies are often viewed as rich, greedy, exclusionary corporations out to take advantage of the working class

American (Sparrow, 1996). Often times because of this view, insurers are regarded by significant segments of the population as socially acceptable targets for fraud (Sparrow, 1996; Coccia 1997).
Fraudulent Techniques and Who Commits Them
Although fraud between medical professionals and patients is suspected to be the most common type of fraud, it is not the only type. Fraud exists in many areas of the health care system. It is estimated that health care facilities, such as hospitals and prompt care centers, are responsible for 8 percent of health care fraud, patients are responsible for 10 percent, while the remaining 10 percent are still unknown (Datawatch, 2000). However, it is suggested that health care fraud committed by patients/consumers is increasing as the number of underinsured and uninsured Americans increases (Farber, 1997)



Who Commits Health Care Fraud?

As the health care system expands, becomes more complicated, and involves more people, the acts of fraud committed also continue to become more complicated, involve more

people, and encompass many different sectors of the health care system. In order to decrease health care costs, fraud must decrease as well. It is important that we understand the types of fraud that have been committed in the past, so that we may initiate ways to stop those same kinds of fraud from happening in the future. In order to understand how the most common types of fraud are committed, one must recognize how medical professionals and health care facilities are reimbursed for their services. In most cases a patient does not pay for a service directly. Most payments to medical professionals and health care facilities are made by a third party payer, whether it is private insurance or a government program like Medicare. The third party payers and the health care providers have come up with a system made up of a series of numbers and descriptors which are used for reimbursement among many other things (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). This system is known as “coding”. Coding is very complicated, and encompasses more than 500 groups that include more than 3,500 medical procedures and 12,574 diagnostic codes (Liberman and Rolle, 1998).


Upcoding

Upcoding occurs when a healthcare provider claims a code that legitimizes a higher reimbursement level than they actually provided (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Upcoding is very easy to accomplish, and difficult to detect. All a physician has to do is embellish a patient’s diagnosis to justify higher payments from both the patient and the third party payer. It is easy to do, because the patients and the payers know very little about medicine and what the correct diagnosis should be. Upcoding accounts for an estimated 22 percent of health care fraud (Datawatch, 2000).

Phantom Billing


Phantom billing happens when providers are charging for services not actually provided to patients (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Phantom billing can happen two different ways. The first way happens when a physician codes that a patient has received a procedure, but does not provide the service. This type of fraud is simple to accomplish, because many patients are unaware of what they are billed for and third party payers often do not share the details with the patients. The second type of phantom billing takes place when a physician codes a procedure for a non-existent patient. This activity occurs frequently in home care and nursing homes. For example, a nursing home could submit claims for a patient who had died. Phantom billing accounts for an estimated 34 percent of health care fraud (Datawatch, 2000).

Bogus Billing

Bogus billing takes place when a billing code is altered to cover services that are not supposed to be covered (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Many providers do this when new drugs and experimental treatments are not yet covered under Medicare or private insurance. Instead, of coding them properly they code them as a similar drug or procedure that they know is currently covered and will be paid for by a third party.
Unnecessary Services
Billing unneeded services happens most in ambulatory care facilities (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Routine blood tests, urinalyses, and radiographs can be categorized as unnecessary billing when a patient does not need them, or they are perfectly healthy. These cases are sometimes hard to prove, because physicians can claim they were just erring on the safe side. Billing unneeded services accounts for an estimated 18 percent of health care fraud (Datawatch, 2000).

Double Billing


Double billing/unbundling occurs when duplicate bills are sent to the same payer or when the bills are sent to different payers (Liberman & Rolle, 1998). Double billing accounts for an estimated 4 percent of health care fraud (Datawatch, 2000).
Pharmacy Fraud
Pharmacy fraud can take place along two distinct lines. The first instance takes place when a generic brand of drugs is dispensed to a patient while the payer is charged for the brand name, which is more expensive. The difference can then be pocketed. Secondly, a pharmacy can fill prescriptions paid for by a third party, buy them back from the patients, and then sell them to other patients at a higher price (Liberman and Rolle, 1998). Pharmacy fraud accounts fro an estimated 8 percent (Datawatch, 2000).


Types of Fraud Committed:

Physician Defense to Health Care Fraud:
Because medical providers are responsible for 72 percent of health care fraud, there are many resources dedicated to the defense of physicians. These resources are often from the view point of physicians, and should be examined to offer a better understanding of why and how unintentional fraud is committed, and how it can be minimized.
Most physicians claim that the coding system is complicated and confusing, even to those who are supposed to be experts. It is suggested that many physician practices are busy and sometimes physicians erroneously code a service. They feel that they should not be blamed, because they were trained in medicine not in coding. Physicians also think that it is unreasonable to hold the physician responsible for the coding mistakes of employees. Physicians also feel as if they are treated as if they are guilty until proven innocent instead of the other way around. They feel like they have no chance to correct their error, before they are prosecuted (Friedman, 1996).
Even if they have a chance to defend themselves, some physicians feel it is still unfair because the government has a massive fraud enforcement program that has access to far more resources than they do leaving them at a disadvantage to defend themselves (Sage, 1999; Stanton, 2001). Physicians also have very little information to use for their defense. Because physicians are very busy and pressed for time, they often only write brief notes describing what was done for a patient and why in the medical record. So if they are prosecuted all they have as evidence is the chart with notes on it, and they see so many patients that they may not be able to remember exactly why they did what they did (Friedman, 1996).

THE PROBLEM: HEALTH CARE FRAUD WITHIN MEDICARE/MEDICAID


Many Americans who are unable to afford health care rely on the government for assistance through programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare and Medicaid are government assistance programs introduced in the 1965 through the Social Security Act. The goal of both programs is to supply and finance a range of medical benefits to specific populations of Americans who can not afford health care. In 2003 Medicare and Medicaid were responsible for financing 26.3 percent of health care in the United States (Grayson, 1998). Because, these government programs serve so many people and provided a significant portion of funding in the health care field, they are often targeted for fraudulent behavior. In 2004 Medicare and Medicaid estimate that 14 percent of their health care costs were spent fraudulently (Grayson, 1998). Since these programs spent about 2 trillion dollars total on healthcare, about 90 billion dollars were spent fraudulently (Allmon, 2005). In comparison, credit card fraud, widely perceived to be a huge problem, results in annual losses of 788 million dollars annually in 2004 (Allmon, 2005).
Health care fraud is a massive problem for the entire health care system, not just government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. But because of the large amount of money lost fraudulently every year through the Medicare and Medicaid programs the government has taken notice of the issue, and begun to make attempts along with other private entities to minimize and abolish its occurrence. The Department of Justice has declared health care fraud to be its second highest priority, following violent crimes (Kalb, 1999). In the past fifteen years the government has spent millions of dollars fighting health care fraud. The governments have committed millions of dollars more to fighting health care fraud in the future, new agencies have been created as well as new policies, and new ideas are always in development.
16
Medicare/Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Legislation
One of the first noticeable attempts at minimizing health care fraud came in 1996 through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The act was passed with the goal of decreasing expenses to the Medicare and Medicaid programs through various reforms, and by focusing on reducing the occurrence of fraud and abuse in the government health care programs (Faddick, 1997). Through these reforms the government wanted to gain more tools for detecting and weapons for fighting fraud and abuse, recover money that had previously been spent fraudulently, and produce settlements (Faddick, 1997).
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was created under good intentions, but from a practical perspective it has some problems. The new programs initiated under the HIPAA come with a substantial price tag. In 2002 the new initiatives cost an estimated 310 million dollars, without any sunset provisions for the future, which means the programs and costs of the programs have no definite end. HIPAA also has the potential to harm many health care providers by producing the unintended consequences of fewer settlements, more court battles, and the entanglement of the innocent in the intricacies of the governments new and very broad punishment tools (Faddick, 1997; Stanton, 2001).
HIPAA represents one of the most expansive programs the government has ever initiated to fight fraud and abuse in the health care system (Stanton, 2001). Specifically HIPPA focuses on fighting fraud and abuse proactively. HIPPA does this through these three major programs: the Fraud and Abuse Control Program, the Medicare Integrity Program, and the Beneficiary Incentive Program. HIPAA also amends the permissive exclusion provisions, provides certain minimum exclusions periods, expands the scope of civil monetary penalties, instructs the

Secretary to issue advisory opinions, protects certain risk-sharing arrangements from illegal anti-kickback penalties, creates new crimes relating to health care fraud, and establishes a national data base to house reports of adverse actions relating the delivery of health care services (Faddick, 1997).
The Fraud and Abuse Control Program was created through HIPAA to coordinate federal, state, and local health care anti-fraud enforcement programs. This program focuses on conducting investigations, financial and performance audits, inspections, and evaluations; and maintaining a public database, establishing and modifying safe harbors, and issuing advisory opinions. Specifically this program establishes a procedure to solicit recommendations at least annually, to publish proposals to modify existing procedures and add new safe harbors, and to issue special fraud alerts. This program is jointly administered by the Attorney General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It is funded through the Medicare Hospital Insurance (Part A) Trust Fund. Fines, penalties and other fraud and abuse recoveries also aid in funding this program (Faddick, 1997). So far this program has been successful at convicting health care fraud offenders, and collecting fines. Between 1997 and 2006 this programs has collected more than $10.4 billion in fines and restitution returned to the Medicare Trust Fund (United States. Dept. of Health, 2007) . Since this program began it has saved taxpayers more than $38 billion, and has increased convictions and other successful legal actions by more than 240 percent (Comprehensive, 1999).
Created though HIPAA the Medicare Integrity Program gives the Department Health and Human Services (HHS) the right to contract with private companies to perform fraud and abuse detection, cost report audits, provider payment determinations, and utilization reviews. The program also is in charge of providers, beneficiary, and public education; and developing a list of

durable acceptable medical equipment. This program is also administered by the Secretary of HHS, and funded by the Medicare (Part A) Trust Fund (Faddick, 1997). In 1997 alone, this program returned $14 for every $1 spent, and saved taxpayers an estimated $7.5 billion (Comprehensive, 1999).
HIPAA created the Beneficiary Incentive Program to entice Medicare beneficiaries and others to aid in identifying fraud and abuse. The program offers incentives such as monetary payments to beneficiaries who provide information that leads to monetary recoveries or other criminal or civil sanctions under the Medicare Program. This program has had some trouble with efficiency, because it struggles with a way to encourage beneficiaries to report incidents of fraud and abuse against the Medicare Program without reporting frivolous or irrelevant information. In order to encourage Medicare beneficiaries to be responsible for monitoring their own health care for fraud and abuse, this program provides each individual with an explanation of benefits for every item or service Medicare pays for. Then if an individual finds a discrepancy and reports it and that report leads to at least 100 dollars in recovery from the provider, they may receive a monetary reward (Faddick, 1997).
All of these programs aim at reducing fraud and abuse throughout the health care system. They increase the tools used for investigating fraud and abuse by unifying resources; setting standards; educating the providers, beneficiaries, and the public; working together with external entities; and by encouraging users of health care to get involved. HIPAA also discourages fraud and abuse by expanding the reasons and opportunities for penalties, increasing the amount of civil monetary penalties, increase prosecution and charges of criminal offenses, and by increasing the likelihood of exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid Programs (Faddick, 1997).

The Medicare and Medicaid Patient Protection Act


(Anti-Kickback Statute) was another statute created by the government to decrease fraud and abuse. This statute prohibits providers from knowingly and willfully paying or receiving any payment directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly, in cash or kind, in exchange for prescribing, purchasing, or recommending any service, treatment, or item for which payment will be made by Medicare, Medicaid, or any other federally funded health care program (Bennett and Medearis, 2003; Kalb, 1999). Violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute can receive up to $25,000 fines, 5 years in prison, or both. In order to convict a provider the government must prove that a provider solicited or received payments, the payments induced a referral related to a government program, and the transaction was knowingly and willfully entered into by the provider. Conviction under the Anti-Kickback Statute is often difficult, because the government must prove that the defendant acted with specific intent (knowingly and willfully). The program also protects against relationships that could result in conflicting interests, such as: discount arrangements, incentives given to providers, payments for services, and the practices of manufactures giving gifts and other business courtesies (Bennett and Medearis, 2003; Kalb, 1999).
The problem with this statute is that kickbacks are not specifically defined, which means that technically anything a provider receives from a manufacturer may be considered a kickback, even box of donuts or a pizza from a pharmaceutical company. This issue is being addressed presently by the American Medical Association (AMA). AMA suggests that providers only accept gifts that primarily benefit patients, such as educational materials (Bennett and Medearis, 2003; Kalb, 1999).



Another statute created to minimize fraud and abuse in the health care system was the False Claims Act. The False Claims Act is the most important law enacted by the federal government to enforce fraud and abuse legislation (Kalb, 1999; Stanton, 2001) The False Claims Act (FCA) has penalties for inaccurate billing practices and laws concerning false statements and overpayments, which penalize organizations that make false statements to the government or fail to return overpayments (Shane, 2000). If convicted of violating the False Claims Act, the government can receive up to three times the amount billed, and fines up to $10,000 for each false claim. These claims can be brought against any government contractor by the government or a private citizen. The act also includes qui tam provisions, which allows private citizens the right to file a lawsuit on behalf of the government and receive a monetary reward (up to 15%) from the recoveries (Bennett and Medearis, 2003; Cady, 2007; Kalb, 1999; Stanton, 2001). These types of provisions that encourage whistleblowers are important especially when addressing types of fraud like upcoding or bogus billing. Upcoding and bogus billing are hard to prove, because if caught providers can claim “honest mistake” (Stanton, 2001). Therefore, this type of fraud is best proven by the testimony of an insider (whistleblower), such as the billing clerk, who can outline the scheme and illustrate the provider’s fraudulent intent (Morris, 1993; Cady 2007, Stanton, 2001).

The Prescription Drug Marketing Act (PDMA) prohibits the sale or trade of drug samples. It was created by the government to correct abuse by individuals who repackage, distribute, and sell sample drugs that often resulted in misbranded and contaminated products. Violation of the PDMA can result in up to 10 years in prison, and fines of up to $250,000 (Bennett and Medearis, 2003). Due to the broad definition of “drug sample” these cases are often complicated and hard to prove.

Government Organizations Responding to Health Care Fraud


The government has committed numerous organizations to investigating health care fraud. A few of these organizations are: the U.S. Department of Justice (through the Criminal Health Care Fraud Division and the Civil Health Care Fraud Division), the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and state Medicaid fraud control units (Shane, 2000). These organizations along with the programs, listed above, and other internal anti-fraud programs such as corporate compliance programs have helped minimize fraud and abuse to an extent.
In 1998, alone, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained 322 criminal convictions, up from 105 in 1993, and recovered $480 million in fines, recoveries, and restitutions, representing $13.65 for each dollar spent on the actual investigation. In the same year the state Medicaid Fraud Control Units, secured 683 convictions and recovered $42.8 million in fines, restitution and overpayments. Meanwhile, the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services, recovered $5.4 billion in fines, settlements, restitutions, and other recoveries involving federal health programs, and excluded 3,021 individuals and entities from government programs (Kalb, 1999; Sparrow, 1996).
The conviction and recovery amounts continue to increase, as investigators understand more about fraud, and the public is educated further. From 2001-2005 the FBI alone recovered $3.8 billion in restitutions, $477 million in recoveries, $1.11 billion in fines, and $102.8 million in seizures (United States Dept. of Justice, 2005). In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) recovered $2.2 billion in judgments and settlements, and $378.4 million in recoveries (United States Dept. of Health, 2005). In 2000, the Health Insurance Association of

America revealed that 58 organizations responding have saved a total of $232 million through internal anti-fraud efforts, and had a return on investment of $11 saved for every dollar spent. Since 1994 the Federal Bureau of Investigation has quadrupled the number of health care fraud investigators, causing them to obtain 560 federal convictions for health care fraud, and recoveries around $290 million in 2001 (Stats, 2001). From 2001-2005 the FBI had 4,952 convictions, and 2,775 indictments (United States Dept. of Jusitce, 2007). As government organization continue to find success with health care fraud recovery they continue to increase the size and budget of the investigation units, with hopes of further recoveries made.
SUGGESTIONS TO PREVENT HEALTH CARE FRAUD
These programs and statutes have unified federal efforts to minimize fraud and abuse, encouraged education, given more tools to use for investigation and prosecution, and increased penalties and punishments for fraudulent behaviors, but it is not enough. It seems like all of these organizations have done a decent job of recovering money spent fraudulently, and they have done so with a reasonable cost to recovery ratio. However, recovering fraudulent money is not enough. Only 4 percent of fraudulent claims have been recovered or identified before payment (Allmon, 2005). It is important to anticipate weak spots in the health care system where fraud is likely to occur and continue to monitor and build in new ways to effectively prevent fraud and abuse from happening in the future.
As our health care system evolves and gets more convoluted the ways that fraud are committed evolve and become more complex. The health care system we have is mostly run by computers with minimal or no scrutiny of suspicious claims (Grayson, 1998). Often times because of this, once a computers fraud warning is triggered it is often too late to catch the

criminal. Most criminals simply disappear with their loot or even more troubling start more innovative schemes under different names and addresses (Grayson, 1998). Some new suggestions for preventing fraud are to implement a measurement program, use more human scrutiny of payment records and claims processes along with innovative deception detection software, encourage the use of corporate compliance programs, and involve consumers in the fight against health care fraud.
One way in which we can aim to prevent fraud from occurring is to implement more human scrutiny in the inspection of payment records and the claims processes. Many of the computer programs out there now are not able to detect some things that a trained human eye can. Often times the computer programs that are able to detect fraud as well as the human eye, are either too complicated or to expensive to be a practical purchase. Better detection technology is in the future, but while we wait we should increase training for individuals in fraud detection, coding, etc. and implement more individuals to inspect cost reports, payment records, and claims processes (Grayson, 1998).
Some of the new software systems being introduced to fight health care fraud are: advanced analytics software, decisioning technology software, and predictive modeling software. Advanced analytics software can scan million of records in seconds, comparing every transaction or claim with defined patterns, behaviors, and billing norms (Allmon, 2005). This software will be able to detect if there is any unusual service or payment pattern at a certain location. It will be able to tell if a certain physician charges a patient twice for the same service, if a physician seems to be doing too many mastectomies, etc. Decisioning technology software is being used by some private insurance companies to reduce fraudulent losses, improve productivity, and bottom-line results (Allmon, 2005). This software does analysis of data such as medical records

and claims, in order to find “errors”. It then converts the data into actionable results, and gives each provider or entity a score based on the rate of “errors”. Then claims adjusters, fraud investigators, case managers, and other personnel can focus their review on claims with the highest likelihood of fraud, abuse, or error (Allmon, 2005). This system if used correctly can also help providers, who are unintentionally making errors by showing them where there errors are and how to correct them before they are accused of fraudulent behavior. The most advanced type of software uses predictive modeling, a statistical technique that analyzes historical claims and claims-related data to predict the risk of fraud for each claim or behavior (Allmon, 2005). This type of software is able to detect fraud more accurately over time, thus giving organizations a better opportunity to catch fraud, abuse, and erroneous claims prior to payment and before losses mount. All of these software programs could be used to catch fraudulent activity before claims are paid. This software is important, and has the potential to drastically minimize the amount of money lost to fraud, because once claims are paid the time, effort, and costs of trying to recoup losses rise exponentially (Allmon, 2005).
Compliance programs are another way that many organization are trying to combat health care fraud. Health care compliance programs aid an organization in detecting and fixing health care fraud internally. They do this by creating a series of internal controls and measures to ensure that an organization is following federal, state and local statutes and regulations governing the federally funded health care programs (McKessy and Saner, 1998). More specifically, a compliance program may include: legal reviews of contracts and operating procedures, directives and training for employees, procedures for reporting violations of your specific compliance plan and/or government regulations, and monitoring and auditing mechanisms to discover violations (McKessy and Saner, 1998). In many cases compliance programs establish new positions for

corporate compliance officers to educate employees, develop standards of conduct, and monitor “high- risk” areas. Usually compliance programs also include an anonymous hotline to allow employees to report potential problems, and along with that there are policies requiring no retaliation to encourage reporting (Shane, 2000). Compliance programs are often successful, because they can be designed and/or customized by each individual organization to address their individual needs (Cantone, 1999). Furthermore, having a compliance program in place may help if the government does target a specific organization. Because a compliance program forces an organization to document their efforts to follow the law, it may help avoid criminal prosecution and exclusion from the federal health care programs, and provide an argument for lighter fines and penalties if a mistake is made (Cady 2007; Cantone, 1999; McKessy and Saner, 1998;). Overall compliance programs are very useful to prevent health care fraud. The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) have supplied resources like: the “Compliance Programs for the Small Group Practice” booklet, an employee educational program plan, packets of research and survey information on compliance in physician practices, a website dedicated to creating compliance programs, and a monthly compliance newsletter called the “Physician Practice Compliance Report”, that can be used to create compliance programs (McKessy and Saner, 1998). Many other organizations, including the federal government, have also developed resources for organizations to use to create their own compliance programs.
One aspect of health care fraud prevention that is not mentioned enough is the consumer’s role. Consumers need to get involved with there health care, beyond just going to the doctor and taking their medicine. They need to be educated on their insurance plan, how much they pay, the proper names of their ailments, and they need to keep track of the services they receive and why they receive them. Consumers can serve as important allies in the fight against

health care fraud as well. Some recommended methods for consumers to use to identify and reduce fraud are (Liberman and Rolle, 1998):
1.
Be wary of telephone solicitors who promise free checkups, testing, or medical equipment.
2.
Be cautious about rolling labs and health fairs, especially when a battery of tests is administered as opposed to a specific test.
3.
Do not provide a detailed medical history or sign multiple insurance forms that assign automatic reimbursement authority to a provider.
4.
Be skeptical when someone offers a free treatment. A provider may promise to waive part of the bill and suggest that the insurance company will cover the remainder of the cost. This may be untrue.
5.
Review all medical bills closely. Any billing discrepancies should be promptly reported to the clinician who provided the service.
6.
Do your research. Research each health agency contacted. Try to identify a provider who has been operating for at least five years, licensed by the state, certified by Medicare, and accredited by JCAHO.
7.
Report suspected fraudulent acts to proper authorities.



CONCLUSION
There has been some progress made toward minimizing health care fraud and abuse through government statutes and programs, and better education. However, as more money continues to be spent on health care more criminals will be attracted, and more fraud will be committed. As more people commit health care fraud, more complex types of fraud will be created. The best way to prevent health care fraud in the future is to address these issues now, and in order to do so Medicare and Medicaid must spend the money on the new deception detection technology along with hiring and training more fraud investigators. They must continue to research all aspects of health care fraud, train providers, and physicians in the correct way to code claims, and other parts of the claims process, continue to involve the public in their

health care, and pass legislation forcing every provider of health care to have and annually update a compliance program.
First, every step in the claims process needs to include regularly updated preventative deception detection software, in order to stay ahead of the new fraud techniques. Even though these programs are not able to detect everything, they have a good chance of flagging irregularities if linked with the national data base and alert system, created by the Fraud and Abuse Control Program. Along with the new technology we must also increase the number of fraud investigators in every aspect of the claims process, so that the irregularities that the deception detection technology flagged can be checked by trained investigators, and dealt with correctly. It is important that we update preventative deception detection software and hire and train more fraud investigators to achieve maximum success.
Secondly, we need to continue research of fraudulent activities, who commits them, why and how in order to continue to minimize their occurrence. The federal government should create a National Fraud Research Center to be in charge of funding and performing fraud research throughout the country, and training all of the FBI’s Fraud Investigators. The research center could be easily funded by the money that is returned from fraud convictions.
The National Fraud Research Center can also be responsible for accomplishing my third recommendation to prevent health care fraud: better education for everyone involved in the health care system. In order to better train providers, physicians, and administrators the National Fraud Research Center could hold mandatory conferences and training sessions throughout the country that each must attend in order to keep their licenses current. They could also pass legislation that forces physicians with a certain amount of patients to hire a certified

administrator who can then be responsible for all of the coding, billing, and claims. In order to educate the public legislation could be passed requiring insurance companies to hold public training sessions on how to read their specific summary of benefits. The National Fraud Research Center could also begin some kind of campaign to educate the public on health care fraud’s importance, and how they can aid in the fight against it.
Finally, the federal government needs to pass legislation forcing every provider of health care to have and annually update a compliance program. The legislation at a minimum will outline what is necessary in each program, and if a corporate compliance officer is needed depending on the number of consumers a provider/physician serves. It will also force each organization to do an internal audit to address their weaknesses. Compliance programs have been proven successful, and are relatively inexpensive. They have many benefits for the providers as well as the federal government, and should be easily initiated with all of the resources already available.
Throughout this paper it has been proven that fraud is a huge factor contributing to the growing cost of health care in the United States. If it continues more and more Americans will be unable to afford the health care that they desperately need. In order to stop fraud, it is imperative that the United States government and the citizens of the United States take an active role in pursuing more effective ways to identify and prevent fraud. If we all work together it is possible to control rising health care costs, and fighting fraud, through the ways mentioned above, is a good first step.

Works Cited
Allmon, Andrea. "Deception Detection. Intelligent Software Keeps Medicare Fraud in Check." Healthcare Informatics; the Business Magazine for Information and Communication Systems 22 (2005): 62.
Bennett R. S., and D.M. Medearis. "Health Care Fraud; Recent Developments and Timeless Advice." Texas Medicine 99 (2003): 50-56.
“Blue Cross Blue Shield Takes Aim at Health Care Fraud.” Congress Daily (2004).
Cady, Rebecca. “Health Care Fraud: A Primer for the Nurse Executive.” Jona’s Healthcare, Law, Ethics, and Regulation 9 (2007): 54-61.
Caldwell, Bernice. “Identifying and Preventing Fraud and Abuse.” Employee Benefits Plan Review 51 (1997) 10-11.
Cantone, Lisa. “Corporate Compliance: Critical to Organizational Success.” Nursing Economics 17 (1999).
Coccia, Regis. “Seeking a Cure for Health Care Fraud.” Business Insurance 31 (1997).
“A Comprehensive Strategy to Fight Health Care Fraud: Waste and Abuse.” FDCH Regulatory Intelligence Database (1999).
"Datawatch. Health Insurance Fraud Busters." Business and Health 18 (2000): 64.
The Effect of Taxes and Transfers on Income and Poverty in the United States: 2005 Consumer Income. US Dept. of Commerce. Office of Economics and Statistical Administration. Washington: GPO, 2007.
31
Faddick, Colleen, M. "Health Care Fraud and Abuse: New Weapons, New Penalties, and New Fears for Providers Created by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA")." Annals of Health Law 6 (1997): 77-104.
Farber, Neil J. “Confidentiality and Health Insurance Fraud.” Archives of Internal Medicine 157 (1997): 501-504.
“FBI: Health Care Fraud the Crime of Choice.” Hospitals and Health Networks 69 (1995).
Friedman, M. "Health Care Fraud; Your Risk May Be Greater Than You Think." Maryland Medial Journal 45 (1996): 825-826.
Grayson, Matt. "License to Steal: Combating Health Care Fraud." Spectrum: Journal of State Government 71 (1998): 1-3.
Kalb, Paul, E. “Health Care Fraud and Abuse”. Journal of American Medical Association 282 (1999): 1163-1168.
Liberman, A., and R., Rolle. "Alleged Abuses in Health Care in the 1990's: a Critical Assessment of Causation and Correction." The Health Care Supervisor 17 (1998): 1-11.
McKessy, Ana-Maria, and Robert J. Saner II. “Protecting Your Practice with a Medicare and Medicaid Compliance Program.” Family Practice Management 5 (1998).
Morris, Lewis. "Health Care Fraud: a Primer on the Schemes and the Tools to Fight Health Care Fraud." Journal of Insurance Medicine 25 (1993): 415-419.
Offen, Louis M. "Health Care Fraud." Neurologic Clinics 17 (1999): 321-323.
32
Sage, William, M. “Fraud and Abuse Law”. Journal of American Medical Association 282 (1999) 1179-1180.
Shane, Rita. "Detecting and Preventing Health Care Fraud and Abuse-We’ve Only Just Begun." American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy 57 (2000): 1078-1080.
“Snapshot Health Care Costs 101.” California Health Care Foundation (2006).
Sparrow, Malcolm, K. "Health Care Fraud Control; Understanding the Challenge." Journal of Insurance Medicine 28 (1996): 86-96.
Stanton, Thomas H. “Fraud-and-Abuse Enforcement in Medicare: Finding Middle Ground.” Health Affairs 20 (2001) :28-41.
"Stats & Facts. Exorcising Health Care Fraud." Managed Care Interface 14 (2001): 40-41.
Sultz, Harry A., and Kristina M. Young. Health Care USA: Understanding Its Organization and Delivery. Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2006.
“Surprising Number of U.S. Elders Do Not Have Health Insurance Coverage- Not Even Medicare.” American Academy of Family Physicians. (2004). 6 Apr. 2008. www.aafp.org/online/en/home/press/aafpnewsreleases/april/seniorsinsurance.html
United States. Dept. of Health and Human Services and Dept. of Justice. Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program Annual Report for FY 2006. Nov. 2007. 17 Apr. 2008 www.oig.hhs.gov/publications/docs/hcfac/hcfacreport2006.pdf.
33
United States. Dept. of Jusitce. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Financial Crimes Report to the Public. May. 2005. 17 Apr. 2008 www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report052005/fcs_report052005.htm1.
"What Americans Think?" Spectrum: Journal of State Government 70 (1997): 39
0 Comments

September 12th, 2013

9/12/2013

0 Comments

 
As you listen to all of the revisionism of the financial collapse in 2008 at the same time we are memorializing 9-11, take time to see how the two are tied to each other.  Jihadists attacked Wall Street because they see US markets as evil and dangerous.  Several years later we have the economic crash and see that Wall Street is evil and dangerous!

PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW THESE NEO-LIBERALS TO REVISE WHAT HAPPENED AS THEY TRY TO SKIRT THE TRUTH AS TO HOW CRIMINAL THE US FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS AND HOW TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FRAUD NEED TO COME BACK TO GOVERNMENT COFFERS AND INDIVIDUALS!



Regarding a revisionist look at the 2008 financial collapse:

I think anyone left listening to NPR/Marketplace on WYPR knows what was presented was propaganda and not journalism so I will just give snippets that show most of what was presented was untrue. We do want to thank public media journalists before the 2010 corporate takeover of public media for their professional and accurate journalism. We know they did so knowing their jobs may be in peril. Professionalism requires commitment to integrity and honesty and those journalists pre-2010 had just that!

In a Peabody Award winning program, NPR correspondents argued that a "Giant Pool of Money" (represented by $70 trillion in worldwide fixed income investments) sought higher yields than those offered by U.S. Treasury bonds early in the decade. This pool of money had roughly doubled in size from 2000 to 2007, yet the supply of relatively safe, income generating investments had not grown as fast. Investment banks on Wall Street answered this demand with products such as the mortgage-backed security and the collateralized debt obligation that were assigned safe ratings by the credit rating agencies.[59]

As we all know, this mortgage fraud was conceived at the same time Clinton and his Administrative team, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin were breaking the Glass Steagall wall and this fraud had as its goal the movement of massive amounts of wealth to the top earners through fraud. A goal was to clear the poor and working class from urban centers where Master Plans across the country set affluent development and blowing up the FHA with debt as Wall Street wanted control of all mortgage business.

For anyone not believing when this collapse happened that the entire massive fraud was not planned, there is no doubt today. As the current report on NPR pointed out.....every single bank had credit default swaps (insurance) for all of these mortgage investments with AIG. It is ironic that the 9-11 memory falls at the same time as the anniversary of the 2008 collapse. The jihadist attacked Wall Street for the very reasons that brought the economic collapse just years later!

Five years from the collapse we have the same conditions as existed then....no financial reform, 600 trillion dollars in derivative leverage......little capitalization and an economy ready to collapse this time with bond debt. Again, this collapse will be fueled by fraud as all of the municipal bond/sovereign debt that has happened these several years happened through public malfeasance in collusion with Wall Street just as with the pensions thrown into the stock market in 2007 as the market crashed. Loading municipalities with debt so the next economic collapse created by the bond bubble would move more public assets to the top earners. This is a second phase of wealth redistribution to the top. As everyone in Maryland knows, O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake have leveraged the state and city with so much bond debt that when this crash happens next year.....and it will be much bigger than the 2008 crash....there will be no Federal rescue. Don't worry for the banks.....they already have their credit default swaps for bond investments!

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE YET TO RECOVER TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FINANCIAL FRAUD FROM THE PAST DECADE. REMEMBER, WHEN RULE OF LAW IS SUSPENDED....SO IS STATUTES OF LIMITATION.

Why do you think Maryland is still listed as the state still having mortgage foreclosures? We were ground zero for the mortgage fraud with MERS operating from the Washington beltway. Gansler gave what was the parking ticket settlement of $1 billion to the state fund so O'Malley could claim he balanced the budget (O'Malley used huge cuts in Medicaid to do the same----what a guy...he did that for families!) The money that should have gone to communities and people effected by the fraud went to developers to pad the cost of building new and affluent homes. Baltimore now has such high homelessness, crime, and poverty because in part  politicians have refused to demand justice for the citizens of Baltimore and Maryland. Almost nothing has been done to mitigate the damages of job loss and personal savings lost from the massive mortgage fraud in Maryland. We will bring the corporate fraud back as we rebuild the public justice system state by state!

Below you see some articles that completely negate the report just given by NPR/Marketplace. There have been no real stress tests....there is no real bank capitalization.....none of the financial reform has been enacted and most has been watered away.....the banks are as leveraged and bigger than before.....AND THEY ARE STILL COMMITTING FRAUD EVERY DAY WITH NO JUSTICE!



Class Dunce Passes Fed’s Stress Test Without a Sweat.

Bank Stress Tests Viewed As Fed Deception By Critics

Posted on March 19, 2012 in Bank Lending, Banking News

Every banker knows that public confidence in the banking industry is essential.

With the banking industry approaching a near meltdown last year, the Federal Reserve decided to conduct a series of “stress tests” on the country’s largest banks in order to restore confidence in the banking system. After reviewing the results of the stress tests, many critics now say that the tests were a deception by the Federal Reserve designed to deceive the public into believing that the banking system is sound when, in fact, it is not.

Gary Shilling, who remains bearish on housing and the economy, argues that the fundamentals for the banking industry remain weak in
Bank Stress Tests Don’t End The Pain.

The business climate for major banks around the world has changed remarkably in just four years. Decades ago, they set off on a huge leveraging spree. Then, starting in 2007, many institutions holding bad private and sovereign assets had to be bailed out by central banks and governments to prevent a collapse of the global financial system.

Even with help from the release of reserves for bad loans, U.S. banks’ return on equity was 6.8 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with 15 percent in the pre-crisis salad days. Return on assets, which skips leverage, is 0.76 percent, down from 1.4 percent.

Banks will also be faced with low returns on their basic business as slow economic growth, falling house prices, small returns on stocks, low interest rates and a flat yield curve persist in the remaining five to seven years of global deleveraging that I foresee. Consumer loans will be repaid on balance, and record nonfinancial corporate liquidity and slow economic growth will continue to curb borrowing and mergers-and- acquisitions activity. Then there are the huge counterparty risks on derivatives and potential large further write downs of troubled assets.


Do current prices reflect the continuing deleveraging of banks, persistent slow loan growth, further write-offs of bad real estate and other assets, compressed interest-rate margins, increased capital requirements and increasingly stringent regulation? I’m not convinced they do.  NO!

Jonathan Weil argues in a Bloomberg article that Fed testing of regulatory capital has no connection to reality when it comes to big banks surviving another financial crisis since banks that failed or needed huge bailouts during the crash of 2008 were classified at the time as “well capitalized” by regulators.  Weil goes on to describe the Fed stress tests as a “joke” when they tested Regions Financial Corp which still hasn’t paid back TARP money and has a negative tangible common equity of $525 million


_________________________________________________

1000x Systemic Leverage: $600 Trillion In Gross Derivatives "Backed" By $600 Billion In Collateral

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/24/2012 10:07 -0400

There is much debate whether when it comes to the total notional size of outstanding derivatives, it is the gross notional that matters (roughly $600 trillion), or the amount which takes out biletaral netting and other offsetting positions (much lower). We explained previously how gross is irrelevant... until it is, i.e. until there is a breach in the counterparty chain and suddenly all net becomes gross (as in the case of the Lehman bankruptcy), such as during a financial crisis, i.e., the only time when gross derivative exposure becomes material (er, by definition). But a bigger question is what is the actual collateral backing this gargantuan market which is about 10 times greater than the world's combined GDP, because as the "derivative" name implies all this exposure is backed on some dedicated, real assets, somewhere. Luckily, the IMF recently released a discussion note titled "Shadow Banking: Economics and Policy" where quietly hidden in one of the appendices it answers precisely this critical question.
The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.
__________________________________________________


Keep in mind that US bank capital was as high as 70% before the Reagan/Clinton bank deregulation started and most financial experts wanted financial reform to have it restored to around 40%.  Neo-liberals moved it from what was 2% at the time of the 2008 crash to what you see below. I think these numbers are high. Needless to say.....this does nothing for bank health.

Bank capitalization means how much physical assets does a bank have to back loans and credit.  As we saw with the article above on the amount of leverage now....your neo-liberal and Obama found it hard to just raise the requirement to 9-10%.   This is what causes the need to bailout these banks....they  bet $600 trillion with just a few hundred billion of capital.

US Bank Capitalization

                                 2008       09         10         11          12
United States          9.3      10.9       11.1       11.2       11.3


__________________________________________________

Giant Banks Now 30% Bigger than When Dodd-Frank Financial “Reform” Law Was Passed
Posted on April 17, 2012 by WashingtonsBlog

Size of Banks Killing Economy … But Giant Banks Have Only Gotten Bigger Since Financial “Reform” Enacted


For years, many high-level economists and financial experts have said that – unless we break up the giant banks – our economy will never recover, real reform will be blocked, and democracy and the rule of law will be corrupted.

So how did the government respond to the financial crisis which started in 2007?

Let the giant banks get even bigger.

As Bloomberg notes, the five banks that held assets equal to 43% of the US economy in 2007 before the financial crisis and the bank bailout now control assets that equal 56% of the US economy:

Two years after President Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the danger of financial institutions becoming “too big to fail,” the nation’s largest banks are bigger than they were before the credit crisis.



Five banks – JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, equal to 56 percent of the U.S. economy, according to the Federal Reserve.

Five years earlier, before the financial crisis, the largest banks’ assets amounted to 43 percent of U.S. output. The Big Five today are about twice as large as they were a decade ago relative to the economy, sparking concern that trouble at a major bank would rock the financial system and force the government to step in as it did during the 2008 crunch.

“Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact,” said Gary Stern, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

That specter is eroding faith in Obama’s pledge that taxpayer-funded bailouts are a thing of the past. It is also exposing him to criticism from Federal Reserve officials, Republicans and Occupy Wall Street supporters, who see the concentration of bank power as a threat to economic stability.

***

The industry’s evolution defies the president’s January 2010 call to “prevent the further consolidation of our financial system.” Embracing new limits on banks’ trading operations, Obama said then that taxpayers wouldn’t be well “served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms.”

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, blames a “lack of leadership at Treasury and the White House” for the failure to fulfill that promise. “It’d be safer to break them up,” he said.

***

Regulatory burden could promote further industry consolidation, according to Wilbur Ross, chairman of WL Ross & Co., a private-equity firm.

“We think the little tiny banks, the 90-odd percent of banks that are under $1.5 billion in deposits, are pretty much an obsolete phenomenon,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 14. “We think they’ll all have to merge with each other, be acquired by bigger banks or something.”

***

In 2011, funding costs for banks with more than $10 billion in assets were about one-third less than for the smallest banks, according to the FDIC.

Some presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks have lambasted too big to fail. As Bloomberg notes:

In recent weeks, at least four current Fed presidents — Esther George of Kansas City, Charles Plosser of Philadelphia, Jeffrey Lacker of Richmond and Richard Fisher of Dallas — have voiced similar worries about the risk of a renewed crisis.

But the most powerful Fed bank – the New York Fed – and Bernanke’s Federal Open Market Committee, as well as Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department, have done everything possible to ensure that the the giant banks become too bigger to fail.



_____________________________________________

As those getting their news other than WYPR/NPR/Marketplace know.....the Fed policy and a bond bill written by Obama and neo-liberals in Congress is blowing up the bond market. THIS IS DELIBERATE....REMEMEBER, THE EUROPEAN DEBT IS SO BAD BECAUSE GOLDMAN SACHS AND DEUTSCHE BANK COLLUDED WITH FINANCIAL MINISTERS TO HIDE SOVEREIGN DEBT SO MORE AND MORE DEBT COULD BE TAKEN ON, JUST AS IS HAPPENING IN THE US TODAY!

Dennis Slothower – the financial analyst responsible for 2011's "Letter of the Year" according to MarketWatch.com - now warns...

Why Stocks Could Collapse...
Beginning as Soon as September 30th!

The Fed has propped up the equity markets for months...
but that could soon come to a disastrous end!

According to Marketwatch.com, Dennis Slothower is the guru behind “The investment letter that evaded the 2008 crash...(and) is now the top performer." -- Marketwatch.com, October 6, 2011

Right now, Dennis is issuing another dire warning.

His technical indicators suggest that the market manipulation we’ve seen over the last several months is about to come to an end.

And with very real threats to this artificially inflated market coming from a potential U.S. debt downgrade...for the possibility of a European collapse...and a sluggish U.S. economy - the bottom could fall out of the U.S. stock market at any time.

This correction could begin as soon as September 30th – so it’s important that you take action now to prepare yourself.

______________________________________________




Whiteout Press Independent News for independent thinkers and independent voters!

November 30, 2011  Special thanks to Bloomberg Marketplace for their detailed reporting.

$700 Billion Bank Bailout was Secretly $7 Trillion November 30, 2011. Washington.

In 2008, President Bush, Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke crafted a bank bailout program they termed TARP or the Toxic Asset Relief Program. It was created in the middle of the night, over a weekend, because if they didn’t act by Monday they said, there wouldn’t be an America anymore. With confusion and fear in his eyes, President Bush handed the reins of power to the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. And instead of limiting himself to the $700 billion Congress grudgingly approved, Hank Paulson printed $7 trillion dollars, funneled it through the Federal Reserve and handed it over to the world’s biggest banks with no strings attached and in total secrecy.

Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and architect of the bank bailouts

While watching Whiteout Press’ favorite morning business show, 'In Business with Margaret Brennan' on Bloomberg TV, the show was interrupted by a startling announcement. Bloomberg investigators had uncovered details that the most powerful men in Washington and New York were desperate to keep secret. In fact, Bloomberg had to sue the Federal government for access to the events of 2009 and 2010 regarding the US bank bailout. The Federal Reserve however, insisted all details of the largest bank bailout in the history of the world had to be kept completely secret from the American people.

The government fought releasing the secret details all the way the US Supreme Court. Earlier this year, Bloomberg won their lawsuit. Treasury and the FED weren’t going to surrender to the American people that easy however. The FED turned over 29,000 documents and details of 21,000 transactions made during the time period covered by TARP and the nation’s bank bailout. Attempting to handcuff Bloomberg investigators with an avalanche of documentation, imagine their surprise when Margaret Brennan’s show was interrupted yesterday with the unbelievable news that the bank bailout American’s were led to believe was only $700 billion, was actually $7.77 trillion. According to the NY Fed, the total amount of US currency in circulation in the entire world at the time was only $829 billion.

While the events are difficult to follow for anyone who’s not familiar with the strange way America’s banking and economic system works, not to mention all the government and Wall Street secrecy, here’s a novice’s view of what happened during the panicked early days of America’s economic collapse. When the $700 billion bank bailout authorized by Congress wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough to save banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America, Ben Bernanke and the FED opened up the nation’s discount borrowing window – to the tune of $7.77 trillion dollars.


Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) could do a much better job of explaining the almost criminal nature of the FED than this Whiteout Press author ever could. With his pledge to abolish the FED, Rep Paul might explain – imagine you Joe Citizen walk into your city hall and ask for a $10 billion dollar loan at zero percent interest. They give you, and only you, that loan because you’re ‘special’. You then loan that $10 billion out to others at 5, 10 or 20 percent yearly interest for things like homes, which are guaranteed by the taxpayers, so there’s no risk of nonpayment. When that $15 or $20 billion is paid back to you, you pay back the FED the original $10 billion and keep the rest.

Instead of loaning that $7.77 trillion to the American people as the American government intended, banks throughout the world took advantage of the US taxpayer and used that money to secretly cover massive losses the banks were suffering from their stupidly investing in their own worthless financial instruments – instruments the banks knew were worthless and doomed to fail. Like a modern day shell game, trillions of dollars floated from one banking institution to another, appearing to fill all balance sheet holes everywhere. Not all the banks used the money to fill holes however. Some used it to make massive profits.

The Bloomberg reporting revealed banks like Barclays, Banco Santander and BNP Parabas made a fortune on the US taxpayer program. Barclays turned their money into a $26.7 billion profit. Banco Santander profited $29.2 billion and BNP Parabas made $17.1 billion.

They weren’t alone. According to Bloomberg’s data, 97 different financial institutions around the globe turned their ‘discount window’ into profits during the two years of the financial crisis. The most suspicious part – the US government insisted on keeping every single transaction a secret. In one day alone at the end of 2008, the Federal Reserve gave out $1.2 trillion dollars to banks – the most on any day before or since.

For those who remember, Bank of America was accused of using its funds not to bailout underwater homeowners, but instead to purchase a bank in China. Bank of America made a profit of $14.2 billion using their ‘special’ discount borrowing privilege. Bank of America wasn’t the only player in the middle of the US financial collapse that made massive profits off the US taxpayer. Wells Fargo made $12.1 billion. JP Morgan made $13.8 billion, Goldman Sachs made $12.7 billion, American Express made $1.4 billion, Discover made $1.4 billion, US Bancorp profited $7.2 billion, HSBC made $11.6 billion, PNC Financial $1.4 billion, Lloyds made $9.6 billion and the list goes on and on.

Not all the banks that made massive profits off the US taxpayers during the peak of the financial crisis were well-known American brands. Foreign banks also made billions in profits, including the National Australia Bank, Bank of Toronto, Mitsubishi, Skandinavista, Chang Hwa, the Israel Discount Bank and dozens more.



Not all banks used the US taxpayers to make billions in extra profits. Some banks tried, and lost.

Among the banks that lost money on the secret loan program were Citigroup, losing $29.3 billion, Royal Bank of Scotland lost $45.3 billion, Credit Suisse lost $4.1 billion, Deutsche Bank lost $433 million, Fifth Third lost $1 billion, Wachovia lost $31.6 billion, Merrill Lynch lost $35.9 billion, Arab Banking lost $77 million, Allied Irish Banks lost $3.4 billion, Morgan Stanley lost $3 billion, Industrial Bank of Korea lost $559 million and the list goes on and on.

Readers can take their pick regarding which aspect of this story to be most angry about. Some will be outraged that for-profit banks are taking advantage of the US taxpayer and making billions in free money. Others will be angry that based on the above list, it appears the US taxpayer is also guaranteeing the profits of foreign banks all over the world. And some will be outraged by the fact that the entire story was kept secret from not only the American people, but also their representative in Congress and even officials at the FED.

Bloomberg asked one longtime critic of giant banks, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), to comment. “When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” she says, “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

Bloomberg also quotes other individuals who should have been aware of what was going on, but weren’t. Gary H. Stern, Minneapolis FED Chairman at the time, insists he, “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), member of the House Financial Services Committee, says, “TARP at least had some strings attached. With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

Misleading Shareholders

With hindsight being 20/20, Bloomberg looked at some of the biggest emergency borrowers and compared their financial situation with the outlook and forecasts made by the bank’s CEO’s to their shareholders. One such example is Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America. On November 26, 2008 he informed shareholders that BofA was, “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” We’ll let you the reader decide - Bank of America owed the US government a staggering $86 billion on that day.


Another example is JP Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon. On March 26, 2010, he reassured his shareholders that JP Morgan didn’t need a bailout and only participated in the program in the beginning, “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” In reality, JP Morgan was still taking advantage of the emergency program and owed the US government $48 billion dollars more than a year after the program began.

As far as the American people go, the two Representatives of theirs in Congress that should have been made aware of what was going on, weren’t. Both the Republican and Democratic overseers of the massive bank bailout, Rep. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), both confirmed to Bloomberg they were kept in the dark.

“We were aware emergency efforts were going on” Frank said, “We didn’t know the specifics.” Congressman Frank announced his retirement earlier this week. Rep. Judd Gregg simply responded, “We didn’t know the specifics.” Former Congressman Judd Gregg is now employed by Goldman Sachs.

What’s Changed

Most Americans couldn’t explain how banks function or how the bank bailout worked if their lives depended on it. But most assume the US taxpayer loaned billions to banks to save the industry and avoid economic collapse, rampant unemployment and a housing crash. But if one were to take a step back and look at the new landscape, a new picture emerges of what the bank bailout was really about. In the five years from before the crisis in 2006 to after the crisis in 2011, the six largest US banks increased their assets, or money and property they own, from $6.8 trillion dollars to $9.5 trillion.

Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher summed up the thoughts of many when he called that fact, “un-American”.




0 Comments

July 16th, 2013

7/16/2013

0 Comments

 
WHEN YOU HAVE PUBLIC AGENCIES THAT FEEL THEY CAN OPENLY LIE TO THE PUBLIC WITH NO REPERCUSSION.....YOU DO NOT HAVE A FIRST WORLD, RULE OF LAW COUNTRY.....YOU HAVE AN AUTOCRACY.



Regarding the rally and march in downtown Baltimore yesterday:

I attended the march yesterday and was able to talk to every news outlet on site.....WJZ, WBAL, WBFF, the AP, and Real News.  I spoke with each one about the history of news coverage that had Zimmerman with no injuries at the time of the killing and every one of them acknowledged knowing that ABC news feed showing the Sanford police department video.  I had some verbally say.....'she knows'.  Almost all of the people with whom I spoke at the rally remember that news feed except our Police Chief Batts.  Amazingly when I told him that as the representative for Justice in Baltimore it was his duty to shout out to US Attorney General Eric Holder to call for a mistrial because of judicial/prosecutoral negligence, his comment was 'I didn't see the video'.  For a police chief in a city with high racial profiling and harassment of people of color not to be familiar with this video is like a defensive football coach not reviewing another team's play action.  We can safely assume this intelligent police chief saw the video.  I directed him to my website just in case.

While at the City Hall rally we noticed undercover police pretending to be part of the crowd taking pictures of those at the rally.  There was no mistaking these two as undercover as they were built like special ops personnel and had a knife holster wrapped at the ankle.  I stood by them and watched as they snapped pictures all around them with their cell phones.  I then informed them that it is illegal for the police to take pictures of people protesting to put in a file.  After all, what are police doing with those photos if not putting them in a file?  We know that Governor Ehrlich was chastised for having the state police do the same thing...... because it is illegal.  The article below explains this law that the Baltimore police choose to ignore:

 Denver Police Keeps "Spy Files" on Peaceful Protesters

June 20, 2003  ACLU
Denver Police Keeps "Spy Files" on Peaceful Protesters


So, I basically shouted to all around these officers that these police were acting illegally and headed towards police positioned around the entire periphery of City Hall.  I told one officer that I needed him to write a report on the undercover police officers breaking the law by photographing peaceful protesters with the intent of including them into a file.  That officer blew me off by saying an officer can photograph and told me to get a lawyer if it bothered me.  I reported a crime and the officer refused to investigate.

My encounter for those few hours from Police Chief, to undercover police, to street police all involved negligence in acknowledging Rule of Law was being openly broken.  The good thing that is coming from all these rallies and protests is the city is becoming aware of the crime and corruption at the City Hall and throughout public agencies and are sick and tired.  As the megaphone directed time and again.....vote all those incumbents out of office.....and we will!



Denver Police Keeps "Spy Files" on Peaceful Protesters


June 20, 2003 Denver Police Keeps "Spy Files" on Peaceful Protesters  ACLU

Glen Morris, a Native American activist, learned in early February of 2003 that a rival faction of the American Indian Movement had once staged a plot to kill him.  He learned this after reading a secret file the Denver Police Department had kept on him for 16 years. The Denver Police knew about the plot but never bothered contacting him. 


His file was only the tip of an iceberg. 

On February 7, 2003, the Denver Police made public 1,500 pages of the so-called ""Spy File". More than 300 people jammed police headquarters, wondering whether they were the focus of police intelligence. Representatives of 70 groups also showed up. The document was the product of nearly five decades of intelligence-gathering and contained more than 3,200 people and 208 organizations. 

Many of those people did nothing more than attending peaceful protests and conferences. Some of them did more activist work, such as volunteering with Amnesty International and the American Friends Service Committee (both of which are recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize).

"These kind of practices have the potential to harm people's ability or willingness to freely express criticism of government policies, chilling free speech." - Mark Silverstein, Legal Director of the ACLU of Colorado

The ACLU filed a class action in state court to challenge the Denver Police Department's custom and practice of spying on peaceful protesters, maintaining the "Spy Files" and disseminating information from the files to third parties. 

Another released document showed that Denver intelligence officers spied on the participants of a conference by collecting the license plate numbers of their vehicles in the parking lot, and then listed their corresponding names and home addresses in the Spy Files.

At yet another instance, the Colorado Springs Police Department supplied the information of 80 participants of a peaceful demonstration, along with the license plate numbers of 30 of them, to the Denver intelligence Bureau. James Wattles, a Denver Intelligence officer subsequently produced a document that listed the corresponding names and addresses of the 30 participants.

The ACLU of Colorado also obtained documents that indicate that the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) has been gathering information and creating files on the activities of peaceful protesters who have no connection to terrorism or any other criminal activity.

The terms of agreement ACLU reached with the Denver Police to resolve the Spy Files lawsuit became effective on May 7, 2003 with Judge Nottingham's signed order:

""Denver has agreed to put an end to its decades-long practice of monitoring and keeping files on peaceful critics of government policy who have no connection to criminal activity,"" said Mark Silverstein, Legal Director of the ACLU of Colorado. ""The end of this political spying enhances the professionalism of the police department and is a victory for the First Amendment and for the civil liberties of all people in Denver. 

______________________________________________
This is why agencies like the police and justice department no longer pay attention to the public.....they no longer see themselves working for you and me....they work for the executive (corporate CEO)....when this happens and elections are no longer free and fair because incumbent political machines control all politics in a state.....you have autocracy, not democracy!  This is how the Chinese Politburo works.


Why the U.S. Executive Branch Is a Clear and Present Danger to Our Democracy Congress, judiciary and the mass media no longer provide constitutionally mandated checks and balances; they are largely extensions of Executive power.

July 16, 2013  |           Editor's Note: The following is the latest in a series on the Executive Branch of the United States.  

Edward Snowden's revelations have illuminated the most critical political issue facing America today: how an authoritarian U.S. Executive Branch which has focused on war abroad for the last 50 years now devotes increasing resources to surveillance, information management, and population control at home, posing a far greater threat to Americans' liberties than any conceivable foreign foe.

Snowden's view of the basic issue  is that "I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship,is recorded. That's not something I'm willing to live under."

Whether millions of other Americans accept the new surveillance status quo will determine the future not only of privacy but democracy in this nation. For even the critical issue of U.S. government of surveillance is only a part of a far larger pattern of undemocratic and unaccountable Executive Branch behavior, at home and abroad. The problem is not only that the Executive Branch operates in antidemocratic secrecy, with an “ Insider Threat Program” that even requires its employees to inform on each other or risk losing their jobs. It has also subverted the Congress, judiciary and mass media, so that they no longer provide constitutionally mandated checks and balances, and are instead largely today extensions of Executive power.

How do you feel about the fact that as you read these words the U.S. Executive Branch is storing information about your phone calls and Internet messages which, even years from now, could be used to embarrass, control and/or harass you, defeat you in an election, cause you to lose a job, break up your marriage, or even threaten you with imprisonment? Many say “I have nothing to worry about, I’m not a Muslim terrorist.” But this displays a naïve complacency about the massive pools of data the Executive is collecting that have nothing to do with protecting us from a relative handful of Muslim terrorists, and could easily be misused by secret and unaccountable government agencies in the future.

Even centrists like  Tom Friedman and Bob Woodward have warned that America could turn into a "police-state" should another 9/11 occur. And the Executive Branch has created more of an  infrastructure for such a state than ever in our history under a Democratic president who professes a belief in civil liberties. Should a Republican become president in 2016, with a Cheney-like mindset using  “unitary Executive theory” to grab even more power, democracy could become little more than a pleasant daydream.

What is most troubling about America's political class today, who have mostly castigated Snowden but not even dared criticize a Dianne Feinstein for keeping U.S. Executive surveillance secret from the American people she theoretically represents, is not only that they are "willing to live under" a Surveillance State. It is that they don't even want to know.

They shoot the messenger rather than dare face his message, displaying precisely the kind of complacency that causes democracy to die.

Even decent pundits who oppose excessive wiretapping have buried their heads in the sand about Executive threats to democracy. N.Y. Magazine's  Jonathan Chait has  put it in the category of just another "non-scandal" like Benghazi or the IRS, writing "but when the president is carrying out duly passed laws and acting at every stage with judicial approval, then the issue is the laws themselves, not misconduct." This is seconded by Paul Krugman: "as Chait says, NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the right wing wants."


_____________________________________________
No one in Baltimore will forget just last year when Mr Anderson was horribly kicked to death by police and all evidence pointed to the police lying about the incident and the City Attorney refused to bring charges even as the the City Examiner declared his death a homicide. 

Below you see we have been dealing with this for far too long and as we see today....it is getting worse, not better.  When the City Council and Mayor bring to Baltimore a Police Chief that has a decades long record for corrupt administrations and police brutality you see the problem.....CITY HALL!


November 24, 2009
Police integrity stings -- another failure

Baltimore prosecutors today dropped criminal charges against a Baltimore police officer who was caught in an undercover integrity sting. It's another in a string of failures over the years in police attempts to target corruption this way.

Like other cases in years past, the one against Officer Michael Sylvester appeared to be clear-cut. As Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton writes:

According to charging documents, the Police Department's Integrity Testing Unit placed a call to a police dispatcher about 9:45 p.m. Sept. 2, reporting a suspicious person -- in reality an undercover officer -- who was "acting strange" at the intersection of Carlisle Avenue and Mt. Holly Street. Sylvester was dispatched to the call with a police officer trainee and quizzed the undercover detective. He ordered him to empty his pockets and sit on the curb while Sylvester searched his vehicle.

The undercover officer had been given $259 in marked departmental money, which he put in his pants pocket, and $135 that had been placed in the armrest of his vehicle. After Sylvester let the undercover officer go, the undercover detective determined that $50 was missing from his pocket and $20 was missing from the vehicle.

Officers wrote in charging documents that the entire incident was recorded on video and audio with multiple officers listening in, and officers conducted surveillance on Sylvester throughout his shift. On Sept. 3, officers executed a search warrant, finding the $70 in marked funds and another $90 in Sylvester's possession. In his locker, police said they found a zip-lock-type bag containing a rock substance suspected to be cocaine.

So why did city prosecutors in the State's Attorney's Office drop the case? We don't know and no one is saying. The officer's defense attorney said he hadn't gotten discovery so he doesn't know any details. Prosecutors would only say there were "inconsistencies" in the case compiled by police. And police declined to comment (the officer still has to face administrative charges).

Hundreds of integrity tests are done, some at random, others targeted at officers for whom complaints have been lodged. I've looked back through our newspaper clips and can find only one case, in 2003, in which an officer pleaded guilty -- to administrative charges of misconduct.

That same year, 2003, an officer was acquitted in court of planting drugs on an innocent man. That case too appeared clearcut. The officer wrote under oath that she saw the suspect plant drugs behind a bush when in fact an undercover detective had put the drugs there and then called 911 to report drug activity. But the officer's lawyer said police complicated their case by broadcasting a fake description that gave the officer probable cause to stop and question somebody.

In 2000, police charged Agent Brian L. Sewell in a similar case, planting fake drugs on a park bench which the officer later used to plant on a burglary suspect. But that case too got compromised by a series of blunders and prosecutors quickly dismissed the charges.

The history of these stings is problematic:

A succession of Baltimore police commissioners have argued that these stings are important to keeping cops honest, and that they've done hundreds without uncovering corruption means they are effective in preventing abuse. Police union officials and some former commanders have argued the stings, especially random ones, are useless and a waste of time.

In some cases, undercover officers plant money and see if officers take it. In other cases, they plant fake drugs and see if the cops use those drugs to charge someone else. But even if this is an effective way of preventing or combating corruption, the department's track record on convictions is dismal.

And the refusal of anyone to talk about why cases, such as this latest one today, are failing even before they get to court raises serious questions about the department's internal affairs operation. There obviously is something they're not doing to help prosecutors win cases, and the public and the cops deserve to know more details about what's being done.

Cops and the public deserve good police but if the department feels these stings are necessary and effective, they at least need to assure both the public and the police that they're being carried out fairly and competently. That prosecutors are simply dropping the cases is unfair to the cop, who is now tainted by what appears to have been a badly investigated case, and unfair to the public that can't be assured its police force is being properly monitored.




0 Comments

July 08th, 2013

7/8/2013

0 Comments

 
WHEN IT COMES TO BEING RANKED AT THE BOTTOM NATIONALLY IN FRAUD, CORRUPTION, AND TRANSPARENCY.....STATE ASSEMBLYMEN JON CARDIN AND PETER FROSH WORK TO PROTECT THE FRAUDSTERS AS DOES ATTORNEY GENERAL DOUG GANSLER WHO IS RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR 

WRITE TO MICHAEL GREENBERGER AT U OF M LAW SCHOOL AND TELL HIM MARYLAND WANTS A RULE OF LAW ATTORNEY GENERAL!!!



I want to move away from the attack on health care in America to reminding people that all of the austerity cuts, rise in local and state taxes, cutting and privatization of public programs and assets are all caused by revenue lost to corporate fraud with no attempt by Justice to recover.  When they give a press release saying they are fighting fraud and give an amount of a few billion.....largest ever.....we know there are tens of trillions of dollars owed the American people.  WE CANNOT LET STAND THE THEFT OF WHAT IS OUR AND OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE.

Do not believe the corporate media favorite for health fraud numbers.....80 billion dollars,......we all know that number is more like $600 billion each year for these few decades.  So it is clear, if anything is done with health care costs....they need to use universal care to bring back all that stolen taxpayer and individual health care money!


In Maryland, our State Attorney General Doug Gansler who has the distinction of being the deputy dog for a state ranked at the bottom for fraud and corruption and has suspended Rule of Law in Maryland has a campaign sign with his picture saying he is fighting for health insurance coverage for the little guys.  This is such garbage as to make the strongest stomach weak.  He single-handedly ignores all health fraud that has billions of dollars lost in Maryland alone to fraud and he is silent as Maryland Assembly makes sure the laws protect the health industry from public ability to recover fraud.  GANSLER IS AIDING AND ABETTING CORPORATE FRAUD AND RUNNING FOR HIGHER OFFICE!


We are going to see over this next year a release of millions of bank and government documents from Wikileak and from NSA Snowden that give the public ever more of a view as to the extent of criminal fraud whether corporate tax evasion or other fraud.  I am sure we will see as well that NSA was not only surveilling for terrorist activity....they were data mining to give US corporations advantage in markets.....all of which is illegal.  You are not seeing any attempts at stopping the economic chaos and it is because we have neo-liberals who 'WIN AT ALL COSTS' when it comes to corporate profits!

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE AT ALL LEVELS....DO YOU HEAR YOUR DEMOCRATIC POL SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY TO PAY ALL GOVERNMENT DEBT WITH RECOVERY OF CORPORATE FRAUD?  THEN THEY ARE NOT A DEMOCRAT WORKING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!


Medical Fraud’s Staggering Price Tag


August 18, 2009

As the nation engages in a contentious debate over health care, one thing that almost everyone agrees on is the need to fight rampant fraud.  Rip-offs add billions of dollars a year to the tab for health care in America. How much money could be saved by eliminating fraud?  "It's just an extraordinary sum," Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University told National Public Radio. Unsure if fraud costs $100 billion or $600 billion, Sparrow told NPR he is sure that whatever the first digit is, it has 11 zeroes after it. To address the problem, the Senate health committee on July 23 voted 23 to 0 for an amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders  that would double penalties for health care fraud. “What we have seen for many years is the systemic fraud perpetrated by private insurance companies, private drug companies, and private for-profit hospitals ripping off the American people and the taxpayers of this country to the tune of many billions of dollars,” Sanders said.

Sanders’ amendment would authorize double the current penalties under the False Claims Act for fraudulently billing new health exchanges created by the reform bill. Convicted companies would face fines of up to six times the amount of the fraud. “I worry very much that for many international corporations getting hit with treble damages may well be worth it and passed along as a cost of doing business,” Sanders said. “What we have to tell these big multi-national corporations is that if they are going to engage in fraud they’re going to pay for it dearly.”

Virtually all of the major hospital chains, private insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies have been involved in massive health care fraud over the past decade, the senator added. He also pointed to a string of criminal and civil cases against many of the leading corporate health care providers in the country, including:

  • Earlier this year, a jury found Pfizer owed Wisconsin $9 million for violating the state Medicaid fraud law more than 1.4 million times by purposely overcharging the state for prescription drugs. The company faces potential fines from $140 million to $21 billion.  (Now, how does the public have any faith in these figures up to $21 billion, as we are never allowed to see these settlement details....the answer is we should have no faith)!
  • Also in 2009, UnitedHealth, a leading insurance company, paid $350 million to settle lawsuits brought by the American Medical Association and other physician groups for shortchanging consumers and physicians for medical services outside its preferred network.
  • In 2003, GlaxoSmithKline paid $88 million in civil fines for overcharging Medicaid for its anti-depressant Paxil.
  • Also in 2000, Humana paid $14.5 million to settle federal charges of overcharging government health programs.
  • In 2000, the Hospital Corporation of America agreed to pay $745 million to settle civil charges that it systematically defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and other federally-funded health programs.
    (The head of HCA when this fraud happened is now Governor of Florida having a field day with health care reform....HCA has the most profit of all health care companies)
In addition to the Sanders Amendment, other initiatives to fight fraud include a new Obama administration task force made up of officials from the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services. A House version of the health care overhaul bill also includes anti-fraud provisions, such as $100 million a year to fight fraud and increased penalties for perpetrators, according to NPR.

To give an idea of what $100 million to fight fraud would do....we have one business in Baltimore getting $100 million in tax breaks.  It is nothing.  But all of fraud recovery would pay for itself, no republicans or taxpayer money needed.
________________________________________________


We must not let this stand as we allowed ourselves to lose political representation by not paying attention to whom we elected......from Clinton on we simply sent neo-liberals back to work with republicans to hand the country over to corporate interests!  These pols have watched as all fraud was left without justice, the financial oversight agencies worked double-time to protect Wall Street from loses and manipulated great gains while the rest of the country falls into poverty.  NONE OF THE FINANCIAL REFORM HAS HAPPENED AND NO JUSTICE FOR TENS OF TRILLIONS IN BANK FRAUD HAS OCCURRED.  THIS IS TREASONOUS AND YOUR POLITICIAN IS AIDING AND ABETTING CRIME!

Wall Street Dodges Financial Reform Again --

By Erika Eichelberger

| Fri Jul. 5, 2013 2:01 PM PDT  Mother Jones
    30

The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, the law designed to clean up the abuses that led to the financial crisis, celebrates its third birthday this month. But only about a third of the rules required by the legislation have been finalized so far, and even those are not going into effect as scheduled. This week provided a perfect example of why that is: The Federal Reserve granted Goldman Sachs a two-year extension to implement a key Dodd-Frank rule that would require banks to move risky trading into separate affiliates that are not backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Several other of the nation's biggest banks won the same exemption last month.

Financial reformers are not shocked. "Quelle surprise!" quips Bart Naylor, a policy advocate at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. "The Federal Reserve decides to heed the crush of Wall Street lobbyists."

The Dodd-Frank rule, which Goldman Sachs was supposed to implement by July 16, requires FDIC-insured banks to move most of their derivatives trades into separate firms so that when a trade goes bad the bank will have to handle the fallout, not taxpayers. (Derivatives are financial products with values derived from underlying variables, like crop prices or interest rates; they were a major catalyst in the economic meltdown of 2008.) In its request for an extension, Goldman told the Federal Reserve—the main overseer of derivatives dealers—that complying with the deadline would mean the firm would need to either divest or stop a big portion of its swaps trading; a transition period, Goldman said, would be needed to ensure that the rest of the economy is not damaged by the shift. On Tuesday, the Fed agreed.

There is a provision in the Dodd-Frank law that allows banks to request a two-year transition period, if complying with the rule will damage the wider financial system. But banks were already given three years to phase in compliance with the rule. "If the regulators hadn't let them waste [that] three-year period…then they could have been prepared to execute [the rule] in a way that was less disruptive," says Marcus Stanley, policy director at the financial reform advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform. "It's like saying I need an extension on my homework because it would be disruptive for me to to have do it all the night before," he adds. "This is just a generalized excuse for postponing action."

In June, other major banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, were granted two-year extensions on the same rule. Along with Goldman Sachs, those banks control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market.

"The procrastination of both regulators and the banks on this portion of Dodd-Frank has been pretty amazing," Stanley told Bloomberg Businessweek in January.

This particular Dodd-Frank rule is also under assault by Wall Street's allies in Congress. A bill that would exempt a large number of derivatives trades from the so-called pushout rule sailed through the House financial services committee in May. It could come to the House floor for a vote as soon as next week.


_____________________________________________

Freddie Mac was the dumping ground for all of the millions of dollars of fraudulent subprime loans along with AIG Insurance insuring these same fraudulent loans against default.  Both are taxpayer liabilities as AIG was nationalized and Freddie is a private company that partners with the government so the taxpayers can pay all costs.....just as with all public private partnerships!

The massive subprime loan fraud involved trillions of dollars in fraud and Freddie and Fannie had/have $600 billion in bad loans on their books.  If we had a Rule of Law nation the banks would have been forced to write down/off those bad loans on Freddie's books as they were criminal and the taxpayer would have taken a far lesser hit for this Wall Street Freddie.  Rather, Obama and Third Way corporate neo-liberals worked hard to see that banks and shareholders lost little or nothing....actually gaining from the massive fraud.  We saw a nationalized AIG pay 100% on insurance claims which never happens to a bankrupt corporation.  So while main street was losing big time in investments, lost homes, and jobs.....the neo-liberals turn the banks fraud into massive gains.  The Federal Reverve's policy of QE was simply a way of removing all toxic loans from the banks balance sheet and all of those trillions in bad debt are going to the Treasury for the taxpayer to pay.  Now, the taxpayer is going to lose on the fraudulent Freddie loans that were never written down/off because they are auctioning at a huge loss those loans and it will be the same banks and investment firms that will buy these discounted loans that they created through fraud.  Remember as well, these few years have seen foreclosures bundled and sold in bulk to these same players at discount.

Sp these 5 years of Obama's term and a neo-liberal Senate has seen all the massive mortgage fraud stay with the criminal banks, watched as the Fed and Treasury turned those fraudulent gains into a watershed of profit through manipulated markets, and sold most of the millions of homes involved in fraud and foreclosed because of the economic crash back to the same people.  The money made by all of this fraud and corruption is in the trillions and the cost to taxpayers stuck with the fraud debt and economic damage in the tens of trillions.  THIS IS JUST FOR THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD.  IT DOES NOT INCLUDE ALL OF THE TENS OF TRILLIONS IN CORPORATE FRAUD.

YOUR LONG-TERM THIRD WAY NEO-LIBERAL HAS WORKED ON THIS SCHEME SINCE THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION ALONG WITH BUSH.....OBAMA AND THE SUPERMAJORITY OF NEO-LIBERALS COULD HAVE PROTECTED THE PEOPLE SIMPLY BY APPLYING RULE OF LAW.


RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE NEXT ELECTIONS!  IF YOUR LABOR LEADERS AND JUSTICE LEADERS ARE NOT RUNNING CANDIDATES IN PRIMARIES AGAINST NEO-LIBERALS.....THEY ARE NOT WORKING FOR YOU AND ME!




Freddie Mac to $3 billion bills July 8
(Reuters) - Freddie Mac, the No. 2 U.S. home funding company, said it will sell $3 billion of reference bills on Monday.

Freddie Mac said it plans to sell $1 billion of three-month bills due Oct. 7, 2013, $1.5 billion of six-month bills, due Jan. 6, 2014, and $500 million of 12-month bills due July 7, 2014.

The bills will be sold over the Internet in a Dutch auction. In such uniform price auctions, successful bidders pay only the price of the lowest accepted bid rather than the actual price as in a conventional multiple-price auction.

Bids will be accepted from authorized dealers until 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT).

Settlement is July 9.


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Reference Bills® securities are unsecured general corporate obligations. This program supplements our Discount Notes program.

  • Provide a predictable supply of short-term debt at popular maturities, from one-month through one-year
  • Are offered in sizeable volumes on a regular, standardized issuance cycle
  • One-month Reference Bills auctions will be optional each week, with a minimum of one auction per month. Three- and six-month Reference Bills will be auctioned every week. Auctions of 12-month Reference Bills securities will be optional each week
  • Are globally sponsored and distributed
  • Are intended to encourage active trading and market-making
  • Facilitate term repo market development
  • Are designed to offer predictable supply, pricing transparency and liquidity, thereby providing premium-quality alternatives to Treasury bills.
________________________________________________

We really need to know that what is happening with the TPP and with the recent Supreme Court rulings violates the US Constitution.....it is not another interpretation, it is rewriting.  Corporations are not people, they cannot be allowed to circumvent Constitutional rights simply by including a clause in a business contract, and they cannot be given the rights of writing law that excludes the people's rights to legislate change.  All of this is a COUP by the politicians you re-elect each year......THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFITS AND NOT FOR THE PEOPLE!!

In Maryland we are starting to hear lectures in the community that describes Maryland as a corporation and that as a colony in the times described below they were chartered by the Queen as a corporation.....and that is what they are trying to do right now with all these public private partnerships.....make the state into one big corporation with the 1% as shareholders and the citizens as peasants!  THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE....IT IS HAPPENING!  WE NEED TO SEE PEOPLE FORMING DEMOCRACY NOW ORGANIZATIONS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES!

What We Can Learn From America's First Tea Party About Countering Corporate Power

Saturday, 06 July 2013 09:57 By Thom Hartmann, Yes! Magazine | News Analysis

(Image: Wikimedia)Before there was Citizens United, a modern Tea Party movement, or national momentum to ban corporate personhood, Thom Hartmann shows that resistance to corporate power is just as patriotic as Boston’s original Tea Party.

On a cold November day, activists gathered in a coastal town. The corporation had gone too far, and the two thousand people who'd jammed into the meeting hall were torn as to what to do about it. Unemployment was exploding and the economic crisis was deepening; corporate crime, governmental corruption spawned by corporate cash, and an ethos of greed were blamed. “Why do we wait?” demanded one at the meeting, a fisherman named George Hewes. “The more we delay, the more strength is acquired” by the company and its puppets in the government. “Now is the time to prove our courage,” he said. Soon, the moment came when the crowd decided for direct action and rushed into the streets.

That is how I tell the story of the Boston Tea Party, now that I have read a first-person account of it. While striving to understand my nation's struggles against corporations, I came upon a first edition of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773, and I jumped at the chance to buy it. Because the identities of the Boston Tea Party participants were hidden (other than Samuel Adams) and all were sworn to secrecy for the next 50 years, this account (published 61 years later) is the only first-person account of the event by a participant that exists, so far as I can find. As I read, I began to understand the true causes of the American Revolution.

I learned that the Boston Tea Party resembled in many ways the growing modern-day protests against transnational corporations and small-town efforts to protect themselves from chain-store retailers or factory farms. The Tea Party's participants thought of themselves as protesters against the actions of the multinational East India Company.

Although schoolchildren are usually taught that the American Revolution was a rebellion against “taxation without representation,” akin to modern day conservative taxpayer revolts, in fact what led to the revolution was rage against a transnational corporation that, by the 1760s, dominated trade from China to India to the Caribbean, and controlled nearly all commerce to and from North America, with subsidies and special dispensation from the British crown.

Hewes notes: “The [East India] Company received permission to transport tea, free of all duty, from Great Britain to America…” allowing it to wipe out New England–based tea wholesalers and mom-and-pop stores and take over the tea business in all of America. “Hence,” he told his biographer, “it was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity ... The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course ... ”

A pamphlet was circulated through the colonies called The Alarm and signed by an enigmatic “Rusticus.” One issue made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England's largest transnational corporation and its behavior around the world:“Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain. The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have entered their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.”

After protesters had turned back the Company's ships in Philadelphia and New York, Hewes writes, “In Boston the general voice declared the time was come to face the storm.”

The citizens of the colonies were preparing to throw off one of the corporations that for almost 200 years had determined nearly every aspect of their lives through its economic and political power. They were planning to destroy the goods of the world's largest multinational corporation, intimidate its employees, and face down the guns of the government that supported it.

The Queen's Corporation

The East India Company's influence had always been pervasive in the colonies. Indeed, it was not the Puritans but the East India Company that founded America. The Puritans traveled to America on ships owned by the East India Company, which had already established the first colony in North America, at Jamestown, in the Company-owned Commonwealth of Virginia, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi. The commonwealth was named after the “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth, who had chartered the corporation.


Elizabeth was trying to make England a player in the new global trade sparked by the European “discovery” of the Americas. The wealth Spain began extracting from the New World caught the attention of the European powers. In many European countries, particularly Holland and France, consortiums were put together to finance ships to sail the seas. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth became the largest shareholder in The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake.

The investment worked out well for Queen Elizabeth. There's no record of exactly how much she made when Drake paid her share of the Hind's dividends to her, but it was undoubtedly vast, since Drake himself and the other minor shareholders all received a 5000 percent return on their investment. Plus, because the queen placed a maximum loss to the initial investors of their investment amount only, it was a low-risk investment (for the investors at least—creditors, such as suppliers of provisions for the voyages or wood for the ships, or employees, for example, would be left unpaid if the venture failed, just as in a modern-day corporation). She was endorsing an investment model that led to the modern limited-liability corporation.

After making a fortune on Drake's expeditions, Elizabeth started looking for a more permanent arrangement. She authorized a group of 218 London merchants and noblemen to form a corporation. The East India Company was born on December 31, 1600.

By the 1760s, the East India Company's power had grown massive and worldwide. However, this rapid expansion, trying to keep ahead of the Dutch trading companies, was a mixed blessing, as the company went deep in debt to support its growth, and by 1770 found itself nearly bankrupt.

The company turned to a strategy that multinational corporations follow to this day: They lobbied for laws that would make it easy for them to put their small-business competitors out of business.

Most of the members of the British government and royalty (including the king) were stockholders in the East India Company, so it was easy to get laws passed in its interests. Among the Company's biggest and most vexing problems were American colonial entrepreneurs, who ran their own small ships to bring tea and other goods directly into America without routing them through Britain or through the Company. Between 1681 and 1773, a series of laws were passed granting the Company monopoly on tea sold in the American colonies and exempting it from tea taxes. Thus, the Company was able to lower its tea prices to undercut the prices of the local importers and the small tea houses in every town in America. But the colonists were unappreciative of their colonies being used as a profit center for the multinational corporation.

Boston's Million-Dollar Tea Party

And so, Hewes says, on a cold November evening of 1773, the first of the East India Company's ships of tax-free tea arrived. The next morning, a pamphlet was widely circulated calling on patriots to meet at Faneuil Hall to discuss resistance to the East India Company and its tea. “Things thus appeared to be hastening to a disastrous issue. The people of the country arrived in great numbers, the inhabitants of the town assembled. This assembly, on the 16th of December 1773, was the most numerous ever known, there being more than 2000 from the country present,” said Hewes.

The group called for a vote on whether to oppose the landing of the tea. The vote was unanimously affirmative, and it is related by one historian of that scene “that a person disguised after the manner of the Indians, who was in the gallery, shouted at this juncture, the cry of war; and that the meeting dissolved in the twinkling of an eye, and the multitude rushed in a mass to Griffin's wharf.”

That night, Hewes dressed as an Indian, blackening his face with coal dust, and joined crowds of other men in hacking apart the chests of tea and throwing them into the harbor. In all, the 342 chests of tea—over 90,000 pounds—thrown overboard that night were enough to make 24 million cups of tea and were valued by the East India Company at 9,659 Pounds Sterling or, in today's currency, just over $1 million.

In response, the British Parliament immediately passed the Boston Port Act stating that the port of Boston would be closed until the citizens of Boston reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they had destroyed. The colonists refused. A year and a half later, the colonists would again state their defiance of the East India Company and Great Britain by taking on British troops in an armed conflict at Lexington and Concord (the “shots heard 'round the world”) on April 19, 1775.

That war—finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace—would end with independence for the colonies.

The revolutionaries had put the East India Company in its place with the Boston Tea Party, and that, they thought, was the end of that. Unfortunately, the Boston Tea Party was not the end of that. It was only the beginning of the power of corporations in America.

The Birth of the Corporate “Person”

Fast forward 225 years.

The American war over corporate power is heating up again. A current struggle centers on the question of whether corporations should be “people” in the eyes of the law.

In October 2002, Nike appealed a lawsuit against it to the Supreme Court, asking it to rule that Nike's letters to newspapers about treatment of workers in Indonesia and Vietnam are protected by the First Amendment.

In Pennsylvania, several townships recently passed laws forbidding corporate-owned farms. In response, agribusiness corporations threatened to sue the townships for violation of their civil rights—just as if these corporations were persons.

Imagine. In today's America, when a new human is born, she is instantly protected by the full weight and power of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Similarly, when papers called articles of incorporation are submitted to governments in America (and most other nations of the world), another type of new “person” is brought forth into the nation.

The new corporate person is instantly endowed with many of the rights and protections of personhood. It doesn't breathe or eat, can't be enslaved, can live forever, doesn't fear prison, and can't be executed if found guilty of misdoings. It is not a human but a creation of humans. Nonetheless, the new corporation gets many of the Constitutional protections America's founders gave humans to protect them against governments or other potential oppressors. How did corporations become persons?

After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson proposed a Bill of Rights with 12 amendments, one of which would “ban commercial monopolies,” forever making it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, to do business in more than one specific product or market, and thus forever preventing another oppressive commercial juggernaut like the East India Company from arising again in North America to threaten democracy and oppress the people.

But Jefferson's amendment failed and the corporations fought back. Now those corporations use the club of the amendments that did pass to influence elections and legislation favoring them—in the name of their rights as persons.

An Historic Goof?

What most people don't realize is that this is a recent agreement—and it is based on an historic error. Only since 1886 have the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment been applied explicitly to corporations. For 100 years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad included the statement “Corporations are persons.” But looking at the actual case documents, I found that this was never stated by the court, and indeed the chief justice explicitly ruled that matter out of consideration in the case.

The claim that corporations are persons was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, called “headnotes.” Headnotes have no legal standing.

It appears that corporations acquired personhood by persuading a court reporter and a Supreme Court judge to make a notation in the headnotes of an unrelated law case. In Everyman's Constitution, legal historian Howard Jay Graham documents scores of previous attempts by Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field to influence the legal process to the benefit of his open patrons, the railroad corporations. Field, as judge on the Ninth Circuit in California, had repeatedly ruled that corporations were persons under the 14th Amendment, so it doesn't take much imagination to guess what Field might have suggested Court Recorder J.C. Bancroft Davis include in the transcript, perhaps even offering the language, which happened to match his own language in previous lower court cases.

Alternatively, Davis may have acted on his own initiative. This was no ordinary court reporter. He was well-connected to the levers of power in his world, which in 1880s America were principally the railroads, and had, himself, served as president of the board of a railroad company.

Regardless of how it happened, an amendment to the Constitution, designed to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War, passed by Congress, voted on and ratified by the states, and signed into law by the president, was re-interpreted in 1886 for the benefit of corporations. The notion that corporations are persons has never been voted into law by the people or by Congress, and all the court decisions endorsing it derive from the precedent of the 1886 case—from Davis' error.

Other legal errors have been corrected with time. The notions that women aren't persons under the law, (affirmed, for example, in the 1873 Bradwell v. State case) and that blacks aren't entitled to equal protection (decided in the Dred Scott and Plessy cases) were superseded by court cases affirming the full rights of African Americans and women under the law. The establishment of corporate personhood, on the flimsy foundation of a court reporter's insertion of a phrase into a legal summary, may be the next mistake to be corrected, particularly if grassroots efforts continue to challenge the legitimacy of corporate personhood.

(Adapted from Thom Hartmann's book Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and The Theft of Human Rights)


_________________________________________________

THIS IS FROM A WIKLEAKS RELEASE....THERE ARE MILLIONS OF PAGES FROM HACKED BANK DATA THAT IS TRICKLING OUT.....REMEMBER, MUCH OF THESE TRILLIONS STASHED IN OFFSHORE ACCOUNTS ARE FRAUD.

Below you see just the tip of the iceberg with corporate tax evasion......the wealthy have all their wealth in corporations and these corporations are avoiding all taxes.  As is said below....there are lots of ways to get that money back other than hunting and taking these corporations to court!

DO NOT STOP SHOUTING FOR JUSTICE IN GETTING THIS MONEY BACK INTO GOVERNMENT COFFERS....IT IS WHY THEY ARE CUTTING ALL PROGRAMS AND SERVICES FOR PUBLIC INTEREST AND LOCALLY RAISING TAXES ON THE MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS TO MAKE UP FOR LOST CORPORATE REVENUE!


You will be taxed to death and get nothing for it if we do not reverse this
!


Commenter on the article below:


Sigh, what a racket Submitted by beowulf on Tue, 01/18/2011 - 1:00am If this were something the government was serious about stopping, they'd treat these accounts like they do any cash held by suspected drug mules. They take the money (even if they let the suspect go) and tell them, if you want the money back, you can sue us and explain to the judge where the money came from.

One of my pet peeves about the tax system is that the capital gains tax, which is already taxed at a lower rate than earned income, does not apply to unrealized (or "accrued") capital gains. And since capital gains tax liability dies with the capital holder, their heirs inherit the property with all prior capital gains wiped clear. That's kind of a big tax loophole. For liquid property like stocks and bonds, cap gains could easily be taxed annually (so-called "accrual taxation"). For illiquid property like real estate or closely held company stock, cap gains could still be taxed at realization but with an interest penalty for every year their accrued cap gains were not taxed ( "retrospective taxation"). And if you don't sell it, death should be a realization event (last year when there was no estate tax, for once, heirs WERE required to pay capital gains taxes on the accrued gains).

For anyone who thinks its unconstitutional or impracticable to write accrual or retrospective taxation into the tax code, they're both already in the tax code. Futures contracts are taxed on an accrual basis and retrospective taxation already applies to passive foreign investment company stock.

What I'm driving out is, if the government traced the money from offshore bank accounts to offshore stock holdings, there would be a LOT of unpaid taxes owed simply from the interest penalty. Since they won't do that, if Congress simply applied accrual taxation to all securities and retrospective taxation to all other property. It would at least triple (key words being "at least") the $100 billion in capital gains taxes collected now without raising tax rates. I expect Lambert to get a tax credit for his compost pile before we see that happen.

Accrual taxation, 26 USC 1256 "contracts marked to market"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/u...
Retrospective taxation, 26 USC 1291 "interest on tax deferral"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/usc...


Check Out Who's Hiding $32 Trillion in Offshore Accounts
  • Greg Madison, Associate Editor - May 1, 2013


More than two million emails that shed light on the biggest tax dodge in history - trillions of dollars hidden in offshore accounts - have been uncovered by the British newspaper The Guardian and the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Some $32 trillion has been hidden in small island banking hubs which host a bevy of trust funds, shell corporations and other tax havens, the Tax Justice Network estimates.

This money is to the financial world what the Higgs boson and dark matter are to particle physics: It's tough to prove it's there, but the universe doesn't make much sense without it. It's just a matter of connecting the money to the people hiding it.

That's been a tall order... until now.

An Unprecedented Tax Dodge Next to this bombshell, Wikileaks looks like a first-grader's game of Telephone.

In fact, the leak contains more than 200 gigabytes of data, compared with Wikileaks' two gigabytes.

The information is still being sifted through, even as it's being released to the public, but here's some of what's been found so far:

  • American Denise Rich, ex-wife of pardoned tax cheat Marc Rich, has been uncovered as the settlor and beneficiary of two large trusts based in the tiny Cook Islands. The ICIJ found that Denise Rich gave up her American citizenship in 2012. Her citizenship was convenient enough when President Clinton had the authority to pardon her ex-husband.
  • French President Francois Hollande, ardent socialist and tireless champion of the 75% marginal tax rate, appears in these documents, mostly by association. His campaign co-treasurer, Jean-Jacques Augier, has been forced to reveal the name of his Chinese business partner in a Caymans-based distribution company. Augier says he used his offshore company to make a large investment in China.
  • Australian actor Paul Hogan, of "Crocodile Dundee" fame, has lost about $35.3 million from an account that he used to offshore his "bonza" film royalties. His once-trusted tax adviser Philip Egglishaw ran off with Hogan's sizeable hidden offshore stash.
  • French banking scion Elie de Rothschild, of the famous banking family, has been named in the leaks. He was instrumental in setting up some 20 trusts and 10 holding companies in the Cook Islands, all extremely opaque in nature. His heirs have, not surprisingly, refused comment.
  • Brigitte Bardot's third ex-husband, Gunter Sachs, a millionaire industrialist, has been revealed as the owner of a huge, obscure wealth-masking machine: trust upon shell company upon holding company, almost ad infinitum, mostly based in the Cook Islands. The ICIJ has constructed an interactive map of Sachs' extensive offshore holdings and business networks. The network is fairly representative of the steps that many on this list have taken to hide their wealth away. You can marvel at its imponderable complexity here.
And these names are barely the tip of the iceberg. The shockwaves have already begun to spread through the corridors of wealth and power all over the world.

How Much is $32 Trillion? It bears repeating: $32 trillion has been stashed away, off the books, by corporations and wealthy individuals.

Let that sink in for a moment. The implications are stupefying. The real effects of this are far more subtle, and pernicious, but this makes for a fun thought exercise - even setting aside the fact that only some percentage of this huge sum would be fair game for the tax man.

In the extremely unlikely event that all $32 trillion was added to government coffers, that would be enough to give every man, woman and child alive on Earth today a roughly $4,600 "stimulus" check.

Maybe we could all enjoy a two-week vacation in the British Virgin Islands. After all, it seems to be the destination of choice for monied types...

A Bright, Sunny Hub for Dark Business The British Virgin Islands appear to be at the epicenter of this huge offshore stash.

The small Caribbean islands specialize in tourism and financial services. Along with far-flung places like Liechtenstein, Sark in the English Channel, the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, the Caymans and others, the British Virgin Islands are home to thousands of shadowy front companies, trusts and funds that host the bulk of this $32 trillion stash.

As of 2000, the last year verifiable data was available, roughly 400,000 companies were listed in the BVI offshore registry. The number certainly has increased. Some of these countries remain underdeveloped, their citizens impoverished, even though they have high per-capita GDPs, and trillions flow to and from their shores.

Tax havens like these tend to have in common secretive banking laws and loose residency requirements, which make them appealing to those with money to hide. In once extreme case, The Guardianlocated an erstwhile British subject, Sarah Petre-Mears, who was the "nominal director" of nearly 1,200 companies across the world.

Less a captain of industry and more a shill for dodgy investors, Petre-Mears ran companies fronting everything from porn sites to time-share vacation properties. She used dozens of different addresses across the globe, with most turning out to be post office boxes and mail drops.

The consequences of this enormous tax dodge are hard to calculate. How does one reckon who's entitled to what? Which country's tax rate do you use - Canada? Azerbaijan? Slovenia?

There's almost certainly an impact to national budgets, from highway construction to military spending to social programs.

It's safe to say that whenever anyone anywhere feels the sting of budget cutbacks, whether a brigadier-general in South Africa or a primary school teacher in England, they'll have a world-class selection of tax cheats in part to blame.

Journalists are still sifting through the data contained in this massive leak, but as they go along, there're no telling who will appear in the data - and those people are running out of time and places to hide.

________________________________________________

Neo-liberals will be working with republicans and Obama to lower the corporate tax rate and gave $4 trillion in corporate tax breaks in the past 4 years!
  They are moving to end all corporate taxes and have

Despite National Crackdown On Whistleblowers, IRS Relying On Informers To Report Tax Fraud
By Martin Michaels | September 13, 2012



In this Jan. 8, 2010 file photo, Bradley Birkenfeld, a whistleblower in the tax evasion case against Swiss bank UBS AG, pauses during a press conference outside the Schuylkill County Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville Pa, before reporting to the federal prison. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File )

(MintPress) — The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is increasingly relying upon the whistleblower program to investigate cases of tax evasion and fraud. While estimates vary, wealthy U.S. citizens could be hiding up to $5 trillion in offshore accounts, according to a Senate report published in 2008. By providing rewards for successful indictments, the government could significantly reduce the multi trillion dollar deficit by recovering lost tax revenue.

While the program has netted more than $5 billion, critics believe the U.S. government is promoting an unfair double standard. Despite being financially compensated, those who expose tax fraud are still subject to prosecution despite bringing valuable information to the attention of authorities. This has occurred at a time when the Obama administration has cracked down on a record number of whistleblowers.

Bradley C. Birkenfeld, a former employee at UBS AG bank was awarded a $104 million “whistleblower award” earlier this week for reporting widespread tax fraud committed by his former employer. During his career at the financial services firm, Birkenfeld helped thousands of wealthy Americans move their money to Swiss banks in order to avoid taxation by the U.S. government.

UBS tax evasion The UBS case is one of the biggest cases of tax fraud in U.S. history. In 2009, UBS was found to have helped 19,000 clients move more than $20 billion to Swiss bank accounts, tax shelters outside the purview of U.S. financial regulation and taxation. Birkenfeld an employee of UBS at the time, played an integral role in helping UBS clients move their money to these tax shelters.

Birkenfeld would later divulge the details of widespread UBS fraud. After his testimony, the bank was forced to pay more than $780 million in fines. UBS closed the division responsible for the tax evasion and also agreed to hand over account information for more than 4,500 clients. An additional 33,000 tax evaders chose to report offshore accounts on their own accord, generating an additional $5 billion.

Birkenfeld, who himself was complicit in the tax fraud as a UBS employee was tried and sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role. Earlier this week the IRS rewarded the 47-year-old for his efforts in the UBS case, a case that many tax experts believe could lead to investigations in other financial institutions.

Stephen Kohn, Birkenfeld’s co-counsel in the case commented on his client’s actions in a recent interview, saying:

“It’s the largest whistleblower award in history. But Birkenfeld turned in the largest financial fraud. He turned in 19,000 felons, and $20 billion in one unit. We also know that 33,000 people are turning themselves in. The total amount of U.S. dollars in illegal offshore accounts is over $5 trillion. That is the estimation by a Senate report.”

Although Birkenfeld was rewarded generously for his cooperation, Kohn believes that it was wrong of the Justice Department to prosecute his client, adding, “When the Justice Department prosecuted Bradley Birkenfeld in one of the most absurd and misguided efforts, they took an asset, a person who turned in the keys to the kingdom, the first whistleblower to expose exactly how illegal Swiss banking worked, and instead of using him, they persecuted him.”

However, Swiss authorities believe that the U.S. government has displayed “hypocrisy” for prosecuting Birkenfeld, then later rewarding him. Pirmin Bischof a member of the upper house in the Swiss Parliament commented, saying, “It’s the height of hypocrisy if the U.S. is one day sentencing the guy to 40 months in prison and the next give him the highest reward.”

Regardless of the duplicitous actions by the U.S. government, Kohn’s client is by no means the the only whistleblower to be prosecuted for exposing crimes, fraud and misdeeds.

Crackdown on whistleblowers Other whistleblowers reporting crimes have similarly been prosecuted for their actions. Bradley Manning, a member of the U.S. army has been held in solitary confinement since 2010 on 22 charges, including conspiracy and “aiding the enemy.” Manning allegedly released a cache of documents exposing U.S. military corruption and the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A video titled, “Collateral Murder,” was released in the vast cache, implicating the U.S. military in the murder of innocent Iraqi civilians and members of the international press. Filmed in 2007, the video has gone viral, viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube. While the video has stirred controversy, there have been no arrests or prosecutions since the video’s release.

Similarly, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is currently involved in a diplomatic standoff, unable to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Assange’s WikiLeaks project has brought to light hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables exposing corruption and war crimes committed by the U.S. armed forces and the U.S. government. U.S. authorities have sought his extradition for releasing classified information despite his being granted asylum in Ecuador last month.

The cases of Assange and Manning are, of course, different than that of Birkenfeld. However, all three are subject to a crackdown that occurs when the U.S. government has been found guilty of committing crimes, or has proven unwilling to prosecute crimes committed by its own citizens.

Unlike other whistleblowers, Birkenfeld received relative leniency for his crimes and was later compensated generously for his cooperation. While the case could lead to more investigations into offshore banking fraud, the unwillingness to properly tax major corporations remains a much larger, unaddressed issue.

Closing corporate tax loopholes Major U.S. corporations are able to move their corporate headquarters outside the U.S. while maintaining production and sales inside U.S. borders. When headquarters are moved offshore, corporations can avoid taxation despite being subject to other government regulations.

Consumer advocacy groups believe that this major loophole has cost the U.S. government more than $100 billion in annual tax revenue. U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group, has advocated for closing corporate tax loopholes, a necessary component of tax reform, saying on its website:

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

According to its website, U.S. PIRG is “a consumer group that stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security, or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.”

General Electric, a company that boasted $14.2 billion profit in 2010 adeptly avoided taxation altogether despite earning over $5 billion from U.S. sales. The company moved its address outside the U.S. and continues to avoid the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

Instead of prosecuting GE, Goldman Sachs and others for tax evasion, the U.S. government  has consistently raised taxes on the middle class in order to close budget deficits and fund social programs.

This issue has become a cause celebre of Occupy Wall Street and sympathetic tax reform advocates in Washington. However, few voices have emerged calling for comprehensive corporate tax reform. The main issue is because Washington policies are largely dominated by corporations and wealthy donors able to shape policy by financing costly elections.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Va.), one of the few advocates for corporate tax reform, commented on the issue in a statement last year saying, “We have a deficit problem. It has to be addressed, but it cannot be addressed on the backs of the sick, the elderly, the poor, young people, the most vulnerable in this country. The wealthiest people and the largest corporations in this country have got to contribute. We’ve got to talk about shared sacrifice.”




0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Author

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

    Archives

    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012

    Categories

    All
    2014 Economic Crash
    21st Century Economy
    Affordable Care Act
    Affordable Care Act
    Alec
    Americorp/VISTA
    Anthony Brown
    Anthony Brown
    Anti Incumbant
    Anti-incumbant
    Anti Incumbent
    Anti Incumbent
    Attacking The Post Office Union
    Baltimore And Cronyism
    Baltimore Board Of Estimates
    Baltimore Board Of Estimates
    Baltimore Development Corp
    Baltimore Development Corp
    Baltimore Recall/Retroactive Term Limits
    Bank Fraud
    Bank Fraud
    Bank Of America
    Bank Settlement
    Bank-settlement
    B Corporations
    Bgeexelon Mergerf59060c411
    Brookings Institution
    Business Tax Credits
    California Charter Expansion
    Cardin
    Career Colleges
    Career Colleges Replacing Union Apprenticeships
    Charters
    Charter School
    Collection Agencies
    Common Core
    Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
    Consumer-financial-protection-bureau
    Corporate Media
    Corporate-media
    Corporate Oversight
    Corporate-oversight
    Corporate Politicians
    Corporate-politicians
    Corporate Rule
    Corporate-rule
    Corporate Taxes
    Corporate-taxes
    Corporate Tax Reform
    Corporatizing Us Universities
    Cost-benefit-analysis
    Credit Crisis
    Credit-crisis
    Cummings
    Department Of Education
    Department Of Justice
    Department-of-justice
    Derivatives Reform
    Development
    Dismantling Public Justice
    Dodd Frank
    Doddfrankbba4ff090a
    Doug Gansler
    Doug-gansler
    Ebdi
    Education Funding
    Education Reform
    Edwards
    Election Reform
    Election-reform
    Elections
    Emigration
    Energy-sector-consolidation-in-maryland
    Enterprise Zones
    Equal Access
    Estate Taxes
    European Crisis
    Expanded And Improved Medicare For All
    Expanded-and-improved-medicare-for-all
    Failure To Prosecute
    Failure-to-prosecute
    Fair
    Fair And Balanced Elections
    Fair-and-balanced-elections
    Farm Bill
    Federal Election Commissionelection Violationsmaryland
    Federal Election Commissionelection Violationsmarylandd20a348918
    Federal-emergency-management-agency-fema
    Federal Reserve
    Financial Reform Bill
    Food Safety Not In Tpp
    For Profit Education
    Forprofit-education
    Fracking
    Fraud
    Freedom Of Press And Speech
    Frosh
    Gambling In Marylandbaltimore8dbce1f7d2
    Granting Agencies
    Greening Fraud
    Gun Control Policy
    Healthcare For All
    Healthcare-for-all
    Health Enterprise Zones
    High Speed Rail
    Hoyer
    Imf
    Immigration
    Incarceration Bubble
    Incumbent
    Incumbents
    Innovation Centers
    Insurance Industry Leverage And Fraud
    International Criminal Court
    International Trade Deals
    International-trade-deals
    Jack Young
    Jack-young
    Johns Hopkins
    Johns-hopkins
    Johns Hopkins Medical Systems
    Johns-hopkins-medical-systems
    Kaliope Parthemos
    Labor And Justice Law Under Attack
    Labor And Wages
    Lehmann Brothers
    Living Wageunionspolitical Action0e39f5c885
    Maggie McIntosh
    Maggie-mcintosh
    Martin O'Malley
    Martin O'Malley
    Martin-omalley
    Martin-omalley8ecd6b6eb0
    Maryland Health Co Ops
    Maryland-health-co-ops
    Maryland-health-co-ops1f77692967
    Maryland Health Coopsccd73554da
    Maryland Judiciary
    Marylandnonprofits
    Maryland Non Profits
    Maryland Nonprofits2509c2ca2c
    Maryland Public Service Commission
    Maryland State Bar Association
    Md Credit Bondleverage Debt441d7f3605
    Media
    Media Bias
    Media-bias
    Medicaremedicaid
    Medicaremedicaid8416fd8754
    Mental Health Issues
    Mental-health-issues
    Mers Fraud
    Mikulski
    Military Privatization
    Minority Unemploymentunion And Labor Wagebaltimore Board Of Estimates4acb15e7fa
    Municipal Debt Fraud
    Ndaa-indefinite-detention
    Ndaaindefinite Detentiond65cc4283d
    Net Neutrality
    New Economy
    New-economy
    Ngo
    Non Profit To Profit
    Nonprofit To Profitb2d6cb4b41
    Nsa
    O'Malley
    Odette Ramos
    Omalley
    O'Malley
    Open Meetings
    Osha
    Patronage
    Pension-benefit-guaranty-corp
    Pension Funds
    Pension-funds
    Police Abuse
    Private-and-public-pension-fraud
    Private Health Systemsentitlementsprofits Over People
    Private Health Systemsentitlementsprofits Over People6541f468ae
    Private Non Profits
    Private-non-profits
    Private Nonprofits50b33fd8c2
    Privatizing Education
    Privatizing Government Assets
    Privatizing-the-veterans-admin-va
    Privitizing Public Education
    Progressive Policy
    Progressive Taxes Replace Regressive Policy
    Protections Of The People
    Protections-of-the-people
    Public Education
    Public Funding Of Private Universities
    Public Housing Privatization
    Public-libraries-privatized-or-closed
    Public Private Partnerships
    Public-private-partnerships
    Public Transportation Privatization
    Public Utilities
    Rapid Bus Network
    Rawlings Blake
    Rawlings-blake
    Rawlingsblake1640055471
    Real Progressives
    Reit-real-estate-investment-trusts
    Reitreal Estate Investment Trustsa1a18ad402
    Repatriation Taxes
    Rule Of Law
    Rule-of-law
    Ruppersberger
    SAIC AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
    Sarbanes
    S Corp Taxes
    Selling Public Datapersonal Privacy
    Smart Meters
    Snowden
    Social Security
    Sovereign Debt Fraudsubprime Mortgage Fraudmortgage Fraud Settlement
    Sovereign Debt Fraudsubprime Mortgage Fraudmortgage Fraud Settlement0d62c56e69
    Statistics As Spin
    Statistics-as-spin
    Student-corps
    Subprime Mortgage Fraud
    Subprime-mortgage-fraud
    Surveillance And Security
    Sustainability
    Teachers
    Teachers Unions2bc448afc8
    Teach For America
    Teach For America
    Technology Parks
    Third Way Democrats/new Economy/public Union Employees/public Private Patnerships/government Fraud And Corruption
    Third Way Democratsnew Economypublic Union Employeespublic Private Patnershipsgovernment Fraud And Corruption
    Third-way-democratsnew-economypublic-union-employeespublic-private-patnershipsgovernment-fraud-and-corruptionc10a007aee
    Third Way/neo Liberals
    Third-wayneo-liberals
    Third-wayneo-liberals5e1e6d4716
    Third Wayneoliberals7286dda6aa
    Tifcorporate Tax Breaks2d87bba974
    Tpp
    Transportation Inequity In Maryland
    Union Busting
    Unionbusting0858fddb8b
    Unions
    Unionsthird Waypost Officealec3c887e7815
    Universities
    Unreliable Polling
    Unreliable-polling
    Van Hollen
    Van-hollen
    VEOLA Environment -privatization Of Public Water
    Veterans
    War Against Women And Children
    War-against-women-and-children
    Youth Works

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.