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July 14th, 2014

7/14/2014

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I listened to someone tell me that Maryland Assembly passed laws to fight widespread wage theft and I had to remind them that Maryland passes laws but they do not enforce laws.  It's like saying policy makes health care stronger or public education stronger while defunding and deregulating these institutions.  Please stop listening to what neo-liberals and neo-cons say------and look what they do.  Remember, they work under 'tell them what they want to hear and then do what you want' politics of autocracy.

Let's take a look at unemployment in the US to remind ourselves----we must have citizens earning enough money to be able to consume to fuel the economy.  We must have policy that has Federal, state, and local governments using public money to hire small and regional domestic businesses to do work to rebuild a domestic economy.  Global corporations expanding overseas only hire overseas and make their profits overseas. 

THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH UNEMPLOYMENT. 

REMEMBER, UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE US AND MARYLAND IS 36% BECAUSE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS CONTROL OUR ECONOMY AND USE HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT TO KEEP US WORKERS DESPERATE AND TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS.

Below you see the latest scheme by neo-liberal pols working for wealth and profit-----having the public become the Human Resources Department for corporations by having taxpayers fund all job training that should be done by corporations.  THESE WORKERS MUST BE JOB-READY ON DAY ONE.  All of the education funding that helped the working/middle class go to 4 year universities now go to subsidize corporate profit in job training programs.  I listen to neo-liberals telling me the poor need computer skills to do a job as if poor children aren't the top users of computer gaming-----needing lots of computer knowledge.  They simply need access to computers.  There is no skills deficit-----we have US college grads with STEM degrees among the unemployed.  Neo-liberals and neo-cons are simply using this as excuses to spend public money building structures that bring foreign students to the US to train to work overseas.

The problem today with the policy of a New Deal infrastructure funding bill is that neo-liberals are ready to send all that Federal funding to global construction corporations who will be allowed to bring labor from the nations these corporations are headquartered.  There will be little US employment from a infrastructure bill created by neo-liberals.  This is what Trans Pacific Trade Pact TPP is all about!

IF YOUR POL IS NOT SHOUTING THAT REBUILDING A DOMESTIC ECONOMY AND GETTING RID OF GLOBAL CORPORATIONS IN YOUR STATE-------THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.


In Maryland that is why elections have been captured so as to silence an candidate with a platform to do that----


Wednesday, Feb 5, 2014, 11:33 am


Who’s Really To Blame for Unemployment?
BY Michelle Chen  Working In These Times


Though some protesters at an 'Unemployment Olympics' event in Tompkins Square Park, N.Y. blamed joblessness on 'the boss,' a new report suggests that the economic climate is more at fault.

Guided by the mythology of the “American dream”—the idea that, given the opportunity, the deserving will excel and rise above their peers—politicians often attribute unemployment to a mystical “skills gap.” If people can’t find a job, the logic goes, they clearly weren’t fit to be hired. As a consequence, many legislators tout specialized training programs or education reforms as possible solutions to America’s seemingly intractable jobs crisis. But a new study shows that blaming the “skills gap” for unemployment makes about as much sense as blaming a mass famine on “excess hunger.” 

A recent analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows that elevated unemployment is due to a general lack of demand in the job market, fueled by overarching economic decline. In other words, this is not a problem that can merely be addressed by retraining workers or revamping the education system.

In the report, economist Heidi Shierholz outlines this economic imbalance by comparing unemployment at different levels of education. Her results reveal that workers are suffering across the board: 

Workers with a college degree or more still have unemployment rates that are more than one-and-a-half times as high as they were before the recession began. In other words, demand for workers at all levels of education is significantly weaker now than it was before the recession started. There is no evidence of workers at any level of education facing tight labor markets relative to 2007.

Moreover, the report continues, there are no specific job sectors that appear to be especially “tight.” So it’s not that the economy especially favors, for example, radiologists or software engineers; bosses seem to be shutting the door on workers of all sorts:

T]he unemployment rate in 2012 in all occupations is higher than it was before the recession. In every occupational category demand for workers is lower than it was five years ago. The signature of a skills mismatch—workers in some occupations experiencing tight labor markets relative to 2007—is plainly missing.

Indeed, when comparing the job-opening-to-job-seeker ratio across different categories, EPI found that “unemployed workers dramatically outnumber job openings in all sectors. There are between 1.4 and 10.5 times as many unemployed workers as job openings in every industry. ... In no industry does the number of job openings even come close to the number of people looking for work.”

They found similar evidence of stagnation in the number of hours that people are working and in wage rates—both of which also suggest that there has been no significant jump in demand for more labor in specific job areas.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen research debunking the “skill gap” rhetoric. Last year, various analyses of the so-called STEM fields (high-paying professions geared toward science, technology, engineering and math) showed that these much-hyped occupations, which policymakers and the media have tended to revere as potential saviors for U.S. industry, are not exactly lacking qualified U.S. applicants. Rather than hire those skilled workers, however, many managers are opting to fill their openings with "guestworkers," who are essentially brought in on employment visas as a reliable supply of temporary labor linked to specific firms. According to EPI, these guestworkers are also generally paid less attractive wages than their peers in comparable positions. 

In addition, a recent study focused on Wisconsin workers came to similar findings about supply and demand in the workforce. After crunching the 2012 numbers on jobs that require various levels of education, urbanologist Marc Levine concluded in that report, “Even if every unemployed person were perfectly matched to existing jobs, [more than] two-thirds of all jobless workers would still be out of work.” That’s a gap that no amount of extra training will fill.

Schierholz does note that in a dynamic, churning economy, there will always be some “mismatch” between job-seekers and job openings; individuals typically get turned down for positions for which they lack the right skills or experience. But these specific incompatibilities are not enough to explain the dramatic rise in unemployment in the past few years. And the issue before lawmakers now, she says, is how to curb those plummeting jobs numbers.

Rather than focus on grooming workers for specific sectors as a jobs program, EPI therefore recommends another $600 billion stimulus from Washington to help restore state budgets after the deep cuts that severely undermined opportunities and income among public servants during the recession. Another solution for workers would be a New Deal-style launch of infrastructural construction projects, which could immediately create job openings and pump aggregate economic activity. Extending unemployment benefits could also help re-energize the slumped economy, EPI says, by keeping those without a steady income from falling further into poverty.

However, thanks to the current legislature's general reluctance to take measures that smack of expanding welfare or enact proactive policy interventions to create government-supported jobs, Schierholz isn’t optimistic that Congress will actually put these stimulus reforms into action. 

"We actually could do this. The economics is pretty straightforward,” she tells In These Times. Unfortunately, she adds, “Generally, a big fiscal expansion is just not in the cards. So we are instead going to be languishing in this sluggish recovery for a while. It's going to be four or five years before we get back to something that looks like health in the labor market."

So when viewed in historical context, what is commonly deemed the “skills gap” in Washington looks more like a gap in knowledge about how the economy actually works. If legislators' idea is to break out of America's downward spiral, they shouldn't blame workers for not having what it takes to "deserve" to be employed. Instead, policymakers ought to acknowledge the fundamentals of matching people with jobs: it's not just about their usefulness to the economy, but whether the economy is healthy enough to make use of them.


____________________________________________

When labor is marginalized by global corporate power it compromises positions that will in the end kill the unions. The American people will not support unions if the leaders are pushing the policies of global corporations that take the US to the level of developing countries-----as Trans Pacific Trade Pact does.  Each election I see the AFL-CIO and other major unions backing the very neo-liberal candidates breaking down the US Constitution and handing control of the economy to global corporations.  They are backing the worst of economic and development projects all under the guise of 'creating jobs'.  If I have to listen one more time to union leaders say-----'but they promised jobs'. 

WE NEED LABOR UNIONS TO PROTECT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.  STAND FIRM AGAINST BAD PUBLIC POLICY AND RUN REAL LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

The threat of loss of union rights being made by neo-liberals will pale to the American people losing faith in union leadership.  The Democratic Party is a tent of labor and justice.  If labor turns on justice they will lose as well. 

STOP ALLOWING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR POLS DIVIDE AND CONQUER.  WE NEED JOBS BUT NOT ANY JOB.  WE NEED TO BE BUILDING AN ECONOMY THAT WILL CREATE A HEALTHY FUTURE.


Gambling and fossil fuels----fracking and natural gas exporting all to create jobs??????  REALLY?

FRACKING AND NATURAL GAS IS NOT CLEAN FUEL------EXPORTING RAW ENERGY RAISES THE COSTS IN THE US AND DOES NOT SUPPORT BUILDING ENERGY INDEPENDENCE.  IT IS  BAD POLICY.

When labor union leaders become the mouthpiece for all neo-liberal and neo-con policy-----they are worthless to the American people and they will lose support.  In Europe it is labor unions that are successfully protecting the citizens of Europe as best they can.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE NEED STRONG UNIONS BUT WE NEED GOOD UNION LEADERSHIP!

Web Only / Features » February 4, 2014

Angering Environmentalists, AFL-CIO Pushes Fossil-Fuel Investment

Labor’s Richard Trumka has gone on record praising the Keystone pipeline and natural gas export terminals.

BY Cole Stangler Email Print Trumka's comments come at a sensitive time, as trade unions and leading environmental groups have sought to build political partnerships with each other in recent years.

The nation’s leading environmental groups are digging their heels in the sand by rejecting President Obama’s “all-of-the above” domestic energy strategy—which calls for pursuing renewable energy sources like wind and solar, but simultaneously expanding oil and gas production.

But it appears the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, won’t be taking environmentalists’ side in this fight, despite moves toward labor-environmentalist cooperation in recent years. On a recent conference call with reporters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed two initiatives reviled by green groups: the Keystone XL pipeline and new natural gas export terminals. 

“There’s no environmental reason that [the pipeline] can’t be done safely while at the same time creating jobs,” said Trumka.

In response to a question from In These Times, Trumka also spoke in favor of boosting exports of natural gas.

“Increasing the energy supply in the country is an important thing for us to be looking at,” Trumka said. “All facets of it ought to be up on the table and ought to be talked about. If we have the ability to export natural gas without increasing the price or disadvantaging American industry in the process, then we should carefully consider that and adopt policies to allow it to happen and help, because God only knows we do need help with our trade balance.”

The call came amidst a series of three speeches by the AFL-CIO leader pushing for more investment in energy and transportation infrastructure. Trumka did not specifically praise Keystone and natural gas exports during the first speech, at the UN Investor Summit on Climate Risk on January 15, and it is unclear whether he will in the remaining two. But the labor leader’s comments on the conference call were enough to peeve environmentalists.

The anti-KXL camp has long argued that construction of the pipeline will facilitate the extraction of Alberta’s tar sands oil, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet. Many also oppose Keystone XL on the grounds that its route crosses the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest underground sources of fresh water. “We invite President Trumka to come to Nebraska and visit with farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods are directly put at risk with the Keystone XL pipeline,” says Jane Kleeb, executive director of Bold Nebraska, which has organized local opposition against the pipeline. “To say the pipeline will not harm our water is ignoring real-life tragedies witnessed by all of us with the BP explosion, the Enbridge burst pipe into the Kalamazoo River and tar sands flowing down the street in Mayflower, Arkansas.”

Brendan Smith, co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a group that works with labor unions and environmental groups to fight climate change, took issue with Trumka’s argument that Keystone would create jobs.  “There is plenty of work that needs to done in this country, and we can create far more jobs fixing infrastructure and transitioning to wind, solar and other renewable energy sources,” says Smith. “Why build a pipeline that will significantly increase carbon emissions and will hurt our economy when there is a more robust and sustainable jobs agenda on the table?”

Trumka’s measured support for the KXL and natural gas export terminals is likely a nod to the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), whose relations with the parent labor federation have been, at times, fraught with tension. Many of the BCTD-affiliated unions enthusiastically support the pipeline: After the State Department released its final environmental analysis of the KXL, the head of the Laborers International Union of North America called for the president to approve the project while blasting “extremists in the environmental movement.”

Liquefied natural gas exports, meanwhile, are shaping up to be the next site of blue-green conflict. While environmentalists condemn plans to build export terminals nationwide, the BCTD and some of its affiliates have supported them. This appears to be the first time that Trumka has publicly sided with the BCTD on the issue.

Recently, the BCTD has gone head-to-head with environmentalists in Maryland over a controversial plan by energy giant Dominion Resources to convert a liquefied natural gas import terminal at Cove Point in Lusby, Md. into an export terminal. BCTD argues that the project supports thousands of well-paid jobs. Last November, BCTD head Sean McGarvey signed an “open letter” crafted by Dominion that appeared as a full-page ad in both The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post and attacked the “misinformation being thrown about by those who would undo the project.”

Opponents such as the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), an environmental group that works in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, disagree. They say most of the jobs created by Cove Point and other proposed liquefied gas export terminals across the country will be temporary, limited to the construction process. And while the gas industry and the White House tout natural gas as a clean alternative to oil and coal, the environmental impacts are just as severe, argues CCAN Director Mike Tidwell. “When it comes to U.S. natural gas and climate change,” Tidwell says, “the worst possible thing you can do with that gas is frack it, pipe it, liquefy it and send it to Asia to light it on fire. The life cycle, the greenhouse gas emissions of that process makes that gas almost certainly as bad as coal, if not worse, in terms of the impact on the climate. We would be better off if India burned [its] own coal than [took] our gas from Appalachia.”

Like Smith, Tidwell believes that job creation and an environmentally friendly agenda are not mutually exclusive. “Nobody’s saying that there should be no jobs,” Tidwell says. “I think it’s the fossil fuel industry that convinces labor that either you have dirty, fossil fuel jobs or you have no jobs. They’re the ones that create that dichotomy, and I can understand why our friends in the labor movement feel like they gotta hang onto every last job they have because they’re under assault from the Republican Party, they’re under assault from the same corporations that are telling them fossil fuel jobs are good.”

Trumka’s comments come at a sensitive time, as trade unions and leading environmental groups have sought to build political partnerships with each other in recent years. After Obama’s November 2012 re-election, the Sierra Club and the CWA helped found the Democracy Initiative, which successfully pushed for a change in Senate’s filibuster rules. The move is designed to limit GOP obstructionism on modest liberal initiatives. In September 2013, at its most recent convention, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution to build “enduring labor-community partnerships,” which led to speculation that progressive groups like the Sierra Club could earn a spot on the federation’s executive council. 

On February 10, Trumka will face a test of how his call for energy investment affects these ties. He is scheduled to deliver a pro-infrastructure investment pitch at the annual conference of the Blue-Green Alliance, a group composed of environmentally minded unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO-affiliated Communications Workers of America (CWA) and United Steelworkers (USW), as well as environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club.

The Blue-Green Alliance did not respond to requests for comment.

After that, Trumka will peddle his message of labor-energy industry cooperation to the business community. The AFL-CIO president is scheduled to speak on February 27 at Harvard Business School as part of a two-day-long event called “America on the Move: Transportation and Infrastructure for the 21st Century.” Trumka will appear in the closing plenary, “Call to Action,” alongside Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, the keynote speaker, and Tom Donahue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

He may get a warmer reception there. America’s Natural Gas Alliance, an industry group that represents gas exploration and production companies, says it appreciates the labor leader’s call. “We share Mr. Trumka’s support for expanding infrastructure and exporting natural gas,” says Dan Whitten, a spokesperson for the organization. “We know that exporting natural gas can make a substantial difference in reducing our trade imbalance. And to the extent that it adds jobs, we like that too.”

Meanwhile, in an email to In These Times, Dean Hubbard, director of the Sierra Club Labor Program, was careful not to criticize Trumka’s recent remarks.

“We share much more in common with the labor movement than the few things that we disagree on,” Hubbard writes. “We are standing together to create millions of new clean energy jobs, protecting workers and communities affected by the transition from dirty fuels, jointly working toward fair trade, and—as allies in the Democracy Initiative—fighting back against the big corporations trying to sell out workers and the planet. There is no doubt about it: Friends do not always agree on everything.  But we are partners in the progressive movement focused on building on our common ground to secure a safer planet, a stronger economy and a better future for all Americans.”

_____________________________________________
Maryland neo-liberals have as a central tenet the privatization of all that is public----the public private partnership.  This is a direct attack on what is the strongest union left and it is deliberate.  They are deliberately dismantling the public sector to hand control of public policy and oversight to the very global corporations killing democracy.  It is why we have no voice in public policy or in our communities.

If labor unions and justice organizations are supporting neo-liberals as they do in Maryland----that is the problem.  We cannot support the breakdown of our public sector and still say we are labor and justice.  Stop allowing neo-liberals to corrupt institutions that should be working for the citizens of Maryland.  This happens because too much power falls to the few -----it is up to ALL CITIZENS to come out to help labor and justice organizations so they can fulfill their missions.  Do not allow them to be blackmailed by threat to their very existence as happens in Maryland.


IF YOU STAND SILENTLY AS ONE GROUP LOSES ITS RIGHTS AND JUSTICE-----EVERYONE WILL.  AN INJUSTICE TO ONE WILL BECOME INJUSTICE FOR ALL.  THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW!


There is no public savings in these deals----it simply moves wealth to corporations and impoverishes the citizens.  Add the dismantling of oversight and you have rampant private contractor fraud and government corruption.

THIS IS HOW THIRD WORLD SOCIETIES OPERATE!


Friday, Jun 6, 2014, 5:57 pm

Privatizing Government Services Doesn’t Only Hurt Public Workers

BY David Moberg Email Print

A coalition of workers rally against privatization in Washington, D.C.

If you want to understand how privatization of public services typically works, Grand Rapids, Michigan is as good a place as any to start.

The state operates a nursing home for veterans in the town. Until 2011, it directly employed 170 nursing assistants, but also relied on 100 assistants in the same facility provided by a private contractor. The state paid its direct employees $15 to $20 an hour and provided them with health insurance and pensions. Meanwhile, the contractor started pay for its nursing assistants at $8.50 an hour—still billing the state $14.99—and provided no benefits for employees. This led to high worker turnover, reduced quality of care, and heavy employee reliance on food stamps and other public aid. 

Yet despite the evidence from this useful—albeit unplanned—experiment, which showed that any savings the state made through privatization came at the expense of workers and their clients, the new conservative Republican state government decided in 2011 to complete the privatization of the provision of nursing aides to the home. 

The experience with privatization at the Grand Rapids nursing home is in many ways typical among the rapidly growing ranks of public agencies in which the staff of private contractors replace government employees. And according to a new report, “Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class,” privatization policies around the country have greatly contributed to the nation’s growing economic inequality and to a decline in the quality of public services.

The report, released on June 3 by In the Public Interest (ITPI), a resource center on privatization, concludes that in most cases, privatization policies lead directly to cutbacks in government investment in skill development and to reductions in workers’ pay and benefits. In turn, workers have less income to invest in their households, their children and their neighborhoods—leaving individuals and their communities poorly served in the present and ill prepared for the future. 

Regardless of level of government, the story of privatization remains much the same. Elected leaders, often under legislative or political pressure from voters, try to reduce spending or taxes by relying on contractors for services instead. This way, politicians can attempt to avoid responsibility for the pay cuts and worker eliminations that almost inevitably result from privatization.

Government privatizers turn over huge swaths of public service work to private contractors—jobs such as corrections officers, nursing aides, teachers, school support personnel, clerks, waste haulers, food service workers and many others. Nobody knows precisely how much government work is now subcontracted, but New York University professor Paul Light estimates that there are about three times as many federal contract workers as civil service employees, with millions more at the state level.

Privatizers frequently claim that they charge governments low rates because they are especially efficient. In many cases, however, public employees are at least as efficient as private contract ones. Instead, if contractors’ operational cost is lower, the savings stem from the comparatively low salary their employees receive. For example, the median private corrections worker in the United States earns $29,000 a year compared with $38,000 to $39,000 for, respectively, the median state or local officer working in comparable positions. Furthermore, a a Demos study last year estimated that about two million federal contract or other publicly funded workers earned less than $12 an hour, more than the number of low-wage workers at Walmart and McDonald’s combined. Even if advocates of privatization admit that the savings through contracting result from lower pay, not greater efficiency, they typically argue that governments pay above-market wages. Contracting out saves money for taxpayers by eliminating that premium, they say.

But when governments properly account for all of their costs, sub-contractors are often more expensive than public employees. For example, the nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight found that using contractors cost the federal government more than civil service employment in 33 of 35 occupations, resulting in billions of dollars total.

Those costs stem from a variety of sources. Governments must frequently hire an additional layer of supervisors to make sure contractors meet legal and other requirements. In addition, poorly paid contract employees often collect public assistance from supplemental nutrition programs, Medicaid and other aid for the needy, whose costs should be attributed to the contract.

Contracting out public work also rolls back critical progress toward equality on the basis of gender, race and income. Whatever their shortcomings, public employers in recent decades have opened up more opportunities and paid fairer wages to both African Americans and women than the private sector. For several decades, the ITPI report says, direct government employment of public service workers has provided a “ladder of opportunity” for many workers. Public jobs have opened up opportunity, especially where unions have bargained for contracts and influenced public policy. They have played an especially important role for women and African Americans, who still suffer disadvantages in the job market and are most hurt by cuts in public service pay and benefits.

For example, women comprise 57 percent of all government workers. And African Americans are 30 percent more likely than all other Americans to work in the public sector. Compared with black workers in the private sector, black public employees earn 25 percent more.

Cutting public service pay, therefore, compounds the inequities of income in America, replacing the ladder of opportunity upwards with a “downward spiral.”
And though this downward shift may most negatively impact African Americans and women, “it hurts all workers,” says economics professor Daphne Greenwood of the Colorado Center for Policy Studies.

Economists argue over the degree to which broad forces such as technology development or globalization account for rising inequality in the United States, says Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But privatization, he says, is one major cause of increased inequality that “smart policy” could easily reverse.

As some first steps toward that smart policy, In the Public Interest recommends that governments require contractors to show that their cost savings come from innovation and efficiency, not wage and benefit cuts. Contractors should be required to provide a living wage, health insurance and other benefits, ITPI also suggests. Though the McNamara-O’Hara Service Contract Act is designed to guarantee that federal contract workers in service work earn close to the prevailing wage in comparable jobs, both its coverage and enforcement are inadequate. Governments should collect and share detailed information on private contractors and their performance, ITPI says, in addition to preparing social and economic impact analyses in advance of any contract.

Mary Sparrow, a former custodian at the Milwaukee County Courthouse in Wisconsin, might have benefitted from such revisions. She was laid off in 2009 in the depth of the Great Recession after a private contractor, MidAmerican Building Services, won a contract to clean the building. The company told her she could keep the job—but not the pay. They offered her $8 an hour, instead of the $14.29 she had been making, and none of her former benefits. She and her husband have scraped by since, she said at a press conference at the release of the ITPI report, her voice cracking with emotion—buying health insurance with unemployment insurance payments, exhausting life savings for their children’s college to cover myriad expenses, contending with health worsened by stress, and watching former co-workers relying on food banks.

“Only the contractors come out ahead, not the middle class, the front-line workers,” Sparrow told the assembled crowd. “Milwaukee County or any county that privatizes will not see the promised cost savings. Privatizing has a devastating effect on our communities, not only on what we earn but what we spend, even on basics like housing and medication. This has been awful for us, and I hope any city, any state, will think twice before privatizing.”


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All across America immigrant groups were organized to come out for the Senate immigration bill not realizing it was a market-based bill with a goal of preparing for Trans Pacific Trade Pact and the flooding of US economy with global corporations and their nation's labor force.  It has nothing to do with justice for Hispanics here in the US.  In fact it will make conditions worse for immigrants already here in America.  The Path to Citizenship leads nowhere for 90% of immigrants.  It was all a ploy by neo-liberals to use Hispanics here in the US to push for the Trans Pacific Trade Pact policies.  The national leaders pushing this immigration bill knew this but are tied to neo-liberals.  Here in Maryland, O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly knew this as they brought bus-loaded of immigrants to Annapolis to shout for the Senate immigration bill.

Neo-liberals and neo-cons work for wealth and profit which includes exploiting workers---they will never produce policy that promotes labor rights.  If they do it will not be enforced.


All Americans should be fighting this because they goal is to bring all US wages down to third world levels----no only working class----but middle-class.  Remember, in third world countries even doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs are at poverty!


Features » April 1, 2014

The Immigration Movement’s Left Turn Advocates are moving away from the “pathway-to-citizenship” compromise—and are demanding a moratorium on deportations.

BY Michelle Chen  Working In These Times

Deportations are expected to reach the 2 million mark in early April, and activists are campaigning fiercely at the gates of detention centers, border checkpoints and congressional offices to show the White House they will not let the Obama administration’s reach that milestone without a fight.

Who will be the Obama administration’s two-millionth deportee? The question haunts neighborhoods, schools and workplaces from Phoenix to Philadelphia.

And as the Obama administration continues its en masse removal of undocumented immigrants, that unlucky distinction could go to any of the roughly 11 million undocumented people who call the U.S. home—a carwash worker nabbed for a broken taillight; a field laborer who has overstayed her work visa; or a youth donning a cap and gown, deliberately crossing the path of the border patrol in a show of civil disobedience.

Deportations are expected to reach the 2 million mark in early April, and activists are campaigning fiercely at the gates of detention centers, border checkpoints and congressional offices to show the White House they will not let the Obama administration’s reach that milestone without a fight.

Last month in Alabama, immigrant rights advocates organized one such action by forming a human chain outside the Etowah County Detention Center, chanting “not one more”—the rallying cry of a wave of anti-deportation actions that have swept the nation over the past year, gaining political currency as a social media campaign, a slogan at street demonstrations, and more recently, a political salvo in Washington, where more conciliatory policy demands from inside the Beltway have sputtered.  

One protester at the Etowah rally, Gwendolyn Ferreti Manjarrez, declared, “I am tired of living with the fear that my family or any family can be torn apart at the seams for living our everyday life.”

Such pleas reflect exhaustion and exasperation with Washington, which has maintained an immigration-reform gridlock since the Senate reform bill all but died in Congress last year.

Faced with deafening silence in Congress and constant waffling in the White House, a growing number of advocates have joined the chorus calling for a moratorium on deportations. Even prominent centrist Latino organizations like the National Council of La Raza—NCLR lobbied hard for “compromise” legislation last year—have condemned Obama as “deporter in chief.”

Demands for a moratorium on deportations are not unprecedented: Advocates are proposing an extension of the White House's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—a temporary executive reprieve for undocumented young people issued in 2012—to undocumented adults. Supports say their proposal would allow families to stay together in the run-up to future reform. The undocumented community and its allies argue that if Obama could exercise his discretion on enforcement for a sympathetic category of undocumented immigrants—primarily youth pursuing a college education—he could do the same for their undocumented parents and neighbors. 

In January, the Arizona-based group Dream Action Coalition, an advocacy group for the Dream Act legislation on which DACA was modeled, blasted Obama for punishing families for Congress’ failure to pass reform. Presenting the reform movement as a multigenerational struggle, the group stated in an “Open Letter to the Immigrant Rights Movement”: “We can’t wait while we see our families being taken into detention centers for months and even years while our children are being traumatized. …  Let’s together hold President Obama accountable for every deported parent.”

Obama has acknowledged the crisis and in recent weeks signaled he planned to ease deportations, but stopped short of fully halting detentions and removals. The president instead ordered the Department of Justice to review deportation policy “to see how it can conduct enforcement more humanely within the confines of the law.” Following a mid-March ­meeting with pro-immigrant advocates, he reportedly vowed to take executive action by summer if the Republican House members continued to stonewall on reform. Still, amid stiff Republican opposition, Obama promised to soften his approach without indicating whether he would order a full-on DACA-like deferral of deportations. 

Even Senators Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, two leading Democrats who crafted the failed compromise bill, now endorse a deportation freeze as a stopgap measure. Schumer has also threatened to use a parliamentary maneuver known as a “discharge petition” to force a vote on a reform bill on the House floor, similar to the Senate proposal. But due to widespread House GOP opposition, this tactical measure would likely fail under Republican opposition.

But while Congress dithers, grassroots activists say the current enforcement regime doesn’t need to be made more “humane”—it needs to end, full stop.

“We need to make sure that there is affirmative action,” says Erika Andiola, an Arizona-based undocumented activist with the Not One More campaign. Andiola's advocacy is a matter of survival: She has campaigned publicly to defend her mother from deportation, and for the past few years, she has watched her state roll out some of the harshest anti-immigrant policies in the country. Indeed, the fight against deportations has foregrounded the struggles of besieged communities that have seen coworkers and family members swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the past six years.

Grassroots activists are staking out a place at the negotiating table by establishing their own “blue ribbon commission” to draft a progressive set of policy recommendations, informed by their legal experiences fighting congressional lethargy and the federal enforcement dragnet. Andiola notes that she and fellow activists began calling for a deportation freeze months ago, long before many mainstream groups. “We don't want people to negotiate for us,” she adds. “We want to be able to be the ones putting the cards on the table, since we're the ones that have our families in detention and many times our families have been in deportation proceedings.”

Far from Washington, direct actions are escalating. A wave of hunger strikes has begun to spread, both inside and outside of detention centers. In early March, hundreds of immigrants at a Tacoma, Washington detention center began refusing meals and menial jobs assigned to detainees.

Shortly afterward, detainees went on hunger strike at a Conroe, Texas facility, accusing the management company, GEO, of inhumane, overcrowded conditions. Exasperated by the ongoing legal limbo, they also demanded due process of law, including “true and transparent information” on how their cases were being reviewed and processed. (TruthOut later reported that some participants had allegedly been placed in isolation as punishment.) Grassroots pro-immigrant groups, including the National Day Labor Organizing Network and Puente Arizona, have joined faith, labor and community organizations in various cities to coordinate solidarity hunger strikes.

Some have escalated protests by confronting ICE directly at the border. Since last fall, dozens of undocumented activists with the Bring them Home campaign have staged several unauthorized border crossings, voluntarily entering federal custody to protest deportations and dramatize the often hidden violence of family separation.

Activists are also using the web to mobilize people: Not One More has led petitions for the release of individual detainees, while Presente.org's Obama Legacy Project catalogues the administration's record of mass incarcerations and enforcement crackdowns.

Beyond the harrowing deportation numbers, activists want to stop the enforcement programs that have enabled ICE to partner with local police to apprehend immigrants. Secure Communities or SCOMM, the flagship joint enforcement initiative, has been sharply criticized for giving police departments wide  latitude to apprehend immigrants—often just for minor suspected infractions—fingerprint them, and share that information with Homeland Security, which then screens them through a central database to check their immigration status, and eventually funnel them into federal detention. In the impacted communities, ongoing federal crackdowns feed into an overarching climate of discrimination, fraught with racial profiling by police and xenophobic sentiment roiling in racially divided neighborhoods and workplaces.

Although ICE announced back in 2011 that the administration would prioritize the deportation of serious criminals, more than 30,000 immigrants still languish in detention on a given day (thanks in part to a “bed quota” that legally mandates that detention centers fill to a certain capacity).

According to national data, many detainees are being held for misdemeanors and other non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations or marijuana possession. An analysis of ICE data by Syracuse University researchers, shows that of the roughly 350,000 detention orders issued during fiscal year 2012 through early 2013, two-thirds involved no serious criminal convictions.

Reflecting growing frustration with draconian federal enforcement measures and the stagnation of federal reform efforts, some local lawmakers have acted affirmatively on their own to protect immigrants in the absence of legislative progress. In contrast to states that have ramped up their enforcement policies, San Francisco, California and Connecticut have passed legislation to block local police from cooperating with ICE enforcement, except in cases involving an immigrant with a serious prior conviction. 

Growing resistance to the Obama administration’s deportation regime contrasts sharply with last year’s relatively cautious debate  around “comprehensive immigration reform” legislation. The Democrats' agenda centered on incremental legalization, with an emphasis on “desirable” immigrants—high-demand workers in agriculture and STEM fields, as well as childhood arrivals—and harsher border security and enforcement measures. (There was little discussion of the social implications of harsher enforcement tactics.) Some activists rejected the Senate bill outright, opening a sharp rift within the immigrant rights movement between the Beltway organizations that supported a compromise in order to achieve a “pathway to citizenship,” and more radical groups such as Puente Arizona and Families for Freedom, which have centered their advocacy around resistance to the draconian immigration enforcement.

But now it seems that within the reform movement, the divergence on the importance of citizenship has been eclipsed by the convergence on calling for administrative action on deportation. Not One More is planning a nationwide day of action on April 5—roughly coinciding with the date when the two-millionth deportation is set to take place—with demonstrations planned in more than 40 cities

Migrant rights advocate Prerna Lal, who is formerly undocumented herself, says via email that she found the current political terrain for immigration reform “encouraging,” with the wave of direct actions opening space for “the disenfranchised and directly-impacted [to take] bold actions to declare themselves as ‘undocumented and unafraid’ leaders in their own communities.” In the broader push for congressional action, she added, “It is critical to remember that legislation such as Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation or the DREAM Act is often merely a response to placate these actions.”

 Until lawmakers go back to the table to hammer out a reform bill, the best advocates can hope for is a temporary reprieve from the White House. Any kind of deferred action, for adults or youth, is just that—a deferral. But it buys time for undocumented individuals to keep working to shift the political climate, away from the obsession with border security and toward a reform approach that reflects a broader culture shift as immigrant communities become more deeply woven into a transborder, globalized social landscape.

Maybe no one understands this vision for an evolving nation better than the  more than 30,000 people languishing in detention each day. Oscar Quintero, a detainee at Etowah who protested from inside the detention center in solidarity with the rally outside,  recorded a brief statement that was later broadcast online by Detention Watch Network:

This is basically a concentration camp for immigrants. This is what it is, a human warehouse. They treat us like chickens. They are treating us like cattle. The reality is that as Latinos, if we do nothing, if we don’t unite, and we don’t make others listen to us, these abuses will continue, and families will continue to be separated.

For a man separated from his community by concrete walls and a labyrinth of legal barriers, Quintero’s voice managed to carry over the hurdles of politics and resonate with his supporters outside. On the eve of the two-millionth deportation, his words undertook the border crossing that countless others remain as determined as ever to make.



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There is a tremendous silence in Maryland as regards TPP and Maryland is ground zero for implementing it.  They are not waiting for Congress to pass it----the Maryland Assembly and Governor O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore are installing it.

Maryland is one state that has spent the last few decades building the very structures that mirror Trans Pacific Trade Pact and neo-liberals are handing all of our economy over to global corporations and policy that works for them.  So, if Maryland pols signed the letter mentioned in this article-----

WHERE IS THEIR VOICE IN THIS STATE?  DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS EDUCATING THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND AGAINST TPP?  THERE IS SILENCE.

This is how you know who needs to be replaced in private non-profits----in labor unions------in justice organizations----and especially media.  All leaders know what is being pushed in Maryland and we need to have people in labor and justice organizations and non-profits that educate the citizens.


TPP: A Thoroughly Predatory Pact

by Ron Forthofer / July 12th, 2014 Dissident Voice

U.S. transnational corporations are working behind the scenes to change the rules governing them. You may say ‘big deal, this doesn’t affect me’. However if you use the internet, view movies, take pharmaceuticals, want a clean and safe environment, believe in democracy, etc., you likely will be negatively impacted.

Media’s Failure to Inform

Negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), based on the fatally flawed NAFTA model, currently involve twelve nations in the Pacific region and have been underway since 2010. Mainstream media’s coverage about these negotiations has been essentially nonexistent. When mentioned, the media reports that the negotiations are about trade instead of being about easing rules governing transnational corporations.

Why the Lack of Transparency?

This May, Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “From what I hear, Wall Street, pharmaceuticals, telecom, big polluters and outsourcers are all salivating at the chance to rig the deal in the upcoming trade talks. So the question is, Why are the trade talks secret? You’ll love this answer. Boy, the things you learn on Capitol Hill,” Warren said. “I actually have had supporters of the deal say to me ‘They have to be secret, because if the American people knew what was actually in them, they would be opposed.’”


Undue Corporate Influence on U.S. Negotiating Positions

In 2012 Senator Ron Wyden, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, whose office is responsible for conducting oversight over the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and trade negotiations, said: “Yet, the majority of Congress is being kept in the dark as to the substance of the TPP negotiations, while representatives of U.S. corporations—like Halliburton, Chevron, PHRMA, Comcast, and the Motion Picture Association of America—are being consulted and made privy to details of the agreement.”

In a May 2012 letter, thirty law professors from multiple countries involved with the TPP negotiations made the same point about corporate representation. They said:

The only private individuals in the US who have ongoing access to the US proposals on intellectual property matters are on an Industry Trade Advisory Committee (ITAC) which is dominated by brand name pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Hollywood entertainment industry.


There is no representation on this committee for consumers, libraries, students, health advocacy or patient groups, or others users of intellectual property, and minimal representation of other affected businesses, such as generic drug manufacturers or internet service providers. We would never create US law or regulation through such a biased and closed process.

Investor-State Dispute Settlements Threaten Sovereignty

In June 2012 a draft of the TPP’s Investment Chapter was leaked. According to Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch: “Via closed-door negotiations, U.S. officials are rewriting swaths of U.S. law that have nothing to do with trade, and in a move that will infuriate left and right alike, have agreed to submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of foreign tribunals that can order unlimited payments of our tax dollars to foreign corporations that don’t want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms do. U.S. trade officials are secretly limiting Internet freedoms, restricting financial regulation, extending medicine patents and giving corporations a whole host of other powers.”


State legislators are greatly concerned about the threat to states’ ability to maintain their sovereignty and to protect rules protecting their citizens.
For example, Maine State Representative Sharon Treat, one of the drafters of a July 2012 letter from 130 members of state legislatures from all 50 states, said: “The U.S. government should not be negotiating trade deals that undercut responsible state and federal laws enacted to protect public health and the environment, preserve the stability of our financial system, or make sure working conditions are safe and healthy.”

In addition, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) strongly opposes this investor-state dispute resolution process. Its position is:

NCSL will not support Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) or Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with investment chapters that provide greater substantive or procedural rights to foreign companies than U.S. companies enjoy under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, NCSL will not support any BIT or FTA that provides for investor/state dispute resolution. NCSL firmly believes that when a state adopts a non-discriminatory law or regulation intended to serve a public purpose, it shall not constitute a violation of an investment agreement or treaty, even if the change in the legal environment thwarts the foreign investors’ previous expectations.

NCSL believes that BIT and FTA implementing legislation must include provisions that deny any private action in U.S. courts or before international dispute resolution panels to enforce international trade or investment agreements. Implementing legislation must also include provisions
stating that neither the decisions of international dispute resolution panels nor international trade and investment agreements themselves are binding on the states as a matter of U.S. law.

More Financial Deregulation

Given the recent financial crisis, it’s alarming that financial deregulation will likely be pushed in the TPP. A letter from 100 economists to the TPP negotiators expressed concern and stated:

We, the undersigned economists, write to you regarding the capital transfers provisions in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). We are concerned that if recent U.S. treaties are used as the model for the TPPA, the agreement will unduly limit the authority of participating parties to prevent and mitigate financial crises.

They went on to point out the importance of capital controls. “While capital controls and other capital management techniques are no panacea for financial instability, there is an emerging consensus that they are an important part of the macro-economic toolkit. Indeed, all G-20 leaders endorsed the following statement at the 2011 Cannes Summit:

Capital flow management measures may constitute part of a broader approach to protect economies from shocks. In circumstances of high and volatile capital flows, capital flow management measures can complement and be employed alongside, rather than substitute for, appropriate monetary, exchange rate, foreign reserve management and prudential policies.

Fast Tracking of the Agreement

President Obama has sought trade promotion authority (‘fast track’) to get TPP through Congress. Fast track usurps Congress’s constitutional authority over trade issues. Congress would have a very limited time to debate the deal and would not be allowed to make any changes. Fortunately, Congress has not yet abrogated its responsibility over trade issues. It is important to keep pressure on Congress to deny Obama this authority.

Represent Public Interest, not Transnational Corporations

Let your representative and senators know that you want them to oppose both fast track and the TPP. If they fail to do this, they are sending a clear message to voters.




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June 05th, 2014

6/5/2014

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DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS AND CANDIDATES IN PRIMARIES SHOUTING ANY OF WHAT MY WEBSITE WRITES AND MOST EVERYONE KNOWS IS THE TRUTH?  IF NOT, THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.  SEE WHY CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND IS CENSURED IN MARYLAND MEDIA?

Below you see an article that let's you know the Wall Street banks are still as systemically criminal as they were before the crash and Obama----they have not been held accountable and there are no laws changed to protect us no matter how much neo-liberals pretend they there are.  Trans Pacific Trade Pact has as a center-piece that banks will be completely deregulated globally which means here in the US they will continue the fleecing and ignoring of US law without consequence and all neo-liberals are building the structures that allow TPP to take hold-----ESPECIALLY HERE IN MARYLAND!  So, what the people need is a Public Banking system that allows those wanting to escape this criminal financial system and receive a reasonable interest return on savings to go.  Public Banks will also take those low-wage earners that neo-liberals serve up to payday and check cashing systems----and mainstream banks openly killing with illegal fines and fees-----and give them a safe place to cash checks and deposit their money.  Lastly, a state would not want to support a known criminal system like Wall Street by allowing state revenue to bring profits to Wall Street banks with state revenue deposits in these banks.  We certainly wouldn't want the state entering any contracts with banks we know were still systemically criminal and soaking the public of hundreds of millions of dollars in Maryland every year.


ONLY A NEO-LIBERAL AND A NEO-CON WOULD DO THAT.  THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW WHICH CANDIDATES WORK FOR GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AND WHICH FOR PUBLIC INTEREST.


The first thing Maryland's pols did after the crash-----mortgage the state and local government with all kinds of Wall Street financial instruments all knowing an economic crash bigger than 2008 is coming. 

FOR THOSE THINKING THIS IS SOCIALISM------STOP ALLOWING THESE TERMS TO CONFUSE SIMPLY PUBLIC PROTECTIONS AND US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO EQUAL PROTECTION!!!!!  I KNOW MARYLAND REPUBLICANS LIKE CINDY WALSH.

The first thing a legitimate government would have done after the economic crash in 2008 is establish a public banking system in the state to protect citizens from a criminal financial system until we can reform this system.

I think Ezra Klein was the most honest of mainstream media as to the scandal that is Wall Street.  Not surprisingly he left Washington Post recently----probably too much truth in journalism.  News journals and public policy and government watchdogs all call Wall Street systemically criminal and yet Congress, Maryland Assembly, and Baltimore City Hall still has Wall Street front and center of all business transactions.  These banks should have been nationalized, investigated, fraud recovered, and downsized to regional banks.  THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN RULE OF LAW AND EQUAL PROTECTION.  Then, they would have been sold to begin life as new private banking interests.  The banking executives would be in jail and those implicated in these massive fraud banned from the financial industry for life.  THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN RULE OF LAW AND EQUAL PROTECTION.



Wonkbook: The financial system was systemically corrupt
  • By Ezra Klein Washington Post
  • July 20, 2012 at 7:27 am
Very few banks came out of the financial crisis looking good. But JPMorgan and Barclays were in that elite club. Their apparent rectitude raised the possibility -- as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said over and over again -- that what we'd had were a few bad banks, not a hopelessly corrupted financial system. Fast forward a couple of years, and JPMorgan and Barclays are not looking so good anymore. And the particular way in which they're not looking so good points to the fact that we did, indeed, have a hopelessly corrupted financial system.

If you haven't been following the Libor scandal, read Dylan Matthews' great primer. But if you refuse to do even that, here it is in a few sentences: Libor is the rate at which banks lend to each other. It's considered a measure of how safe the financial system is. As such, many banks use it as a benchmark to set the rate on the consumer debt you and I buy -- they start with the Libor rate and then they add on whatever they think our risk is. But there's something odd about Libor: It's a rate the banks report themselves. And, in recent weeks, we've found out Barclays was lying about it.

In recent days, however, we've found out that it wasn't just Barclays lying about it. Everybody was lying about it. Citigroup was lying about it. German banks were lying about it. We know a number of banks -- though we don't know exactly who -- are talking to the feds about a settlement. We know HSBC, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase are being investigated.

On Wednesday, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, was asked about Libor. "The biggest impact is once more undermining the integrity of a system that has already been undermined substantially. There was this huge hole to dig out of in terms of getting trust back and now it's that much deeper."

Remember when Ronald Reagan said "trust, but verify"? Well, we've spent the last few years verifying. And when it comes to the financial system, the lesson is not to have too much trust.

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Now, I am always skeptical of of all new private non-profits because of the neo-liberal practice of using non-profits as 'progressive posers'.  So, I do not know if the Public Banking Institute is the good guy----but the policy is right on.  Vermont has adopted Public Banking and there is a completely guideline to rolling these structures out that I would use here in Maryland.  Remember, if you do not have Rule of Law and you leave the public justice system dismantled----even public banking will become corrupt.  Look at MECU to see public funds used in questionable deals.

We must starve Wall Street not feed it.  When the Maryland Assembly and Baltimore City Hall send public pensions to Wall Street in the guise of 401Ks-----used as fodder by Wall Street even more than pension funds......you know you have pols working for global corporations and not you and I.


  LET'S LISTEN TO A CRIMINAL WALL STREET RATING AGENCY LIKE MOODY'S AND STANDARD AND POOR WHO TELL US TO CUT BACK PUBLIC PENSIONS BECAUSE THEY WERE VICTIMS TO 1/2 OF THEIR VALUE STOLEN IN FRAUD AND PUBLIC MALFEASANCE SAY THESE NEO-LIBERALS.


This is not socialism-----it is public justice and equal protection!



Why Public Banking? Large Private Banks Are Fleecing America.  What are YOU going to do about it?


The Public Banking Institute (PBI) is actively enrolling leading organizations to participate in a national coalition to create a network of public banks. These banks can be capitalized from several sources, including public employee and other labor pensions, with the core deposits coming from tax and other revenues from city/county/state governments. 

Organizations supporting this coalition include large associations and established organizations in the following areas: independent business, labor, new economy, food systems, religious institutions, and others. These organizations will be announced soon.

We will focus campaigns for public banking in 5-7 targeted areas that have a good chance of succeeding with teams already formed on the ground. Once we score some victories, we can expand to other areas. 

We propose the immediate formation and funding of a coalition that will create public banks with specific focus on key states, such as Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and Hawaii, and cities and large counties in other states (California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and others).

Our Vision We envision a network of sustainable state and local publicly owned banks that create affordable credit as an alternative to the current unsustainable, high-risk, centralized private banking system.This network of public banks will provide affordable credit to local communities, which are able to develop their economies and create well-paying jobs and provide the livelihoods needed for working families.

Localization of credit is key to restoring the financial security that our communities and middle class once enjoyed – and to providing communities new tools to address economic, racial, and social inequities.


Do you share this vision?  Then join us!  


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The American people want to get rid of global corporate dominance and rebuild the domestic economy of small and regional businesses to drive Maryland's economy.  Until we receive justice from Wall Street-----that will take a decade or more----we need to provide the safety of public banking.  It meets the requirements of focusing on domestic economy-building in that lending would be centralized to just that----local business ownership and home-ownership------JUST WHAT WALL STREET AND YOUR NEO-LIBERAL IS TRYING TO KILL!

WALL STREET IS HOLDING THE US ECONOMY HOSTAGE TO STAGNATION AND NO FINANCIAL INVESTMENT THAT IS NOT EXPANDING GLOBAL CORPORATE CONTROL AND YOUR POL IS MAKING SURE OF THIS!

Keep in mind public banking can be taken by fraud and corruption as much as private-----look at Spain and Greece to see a public banking system that captured politicians imploded with fraud and corruption.....so, the goals of this group sound good----but if we are not rebuilding public justice and equal protection-----it will be used against us as well.

IF A GROUP IS NOT SHOUTING THAT RULE OF LAW IS SUSPENDED AND NEEDS TO BE REBUILT WHILE OFFERING THESE PUBLIC SOLUTIONS---THEY ARE WORKING AGAINST THE PUBLIC INTEREST.


Vision

We envision a network of sustainable state and local publicly owned banks that create affordable credit as an alternative to the current unsustainable, high-risk, centralized private banking system and that provide affordable credit to local communities, which are able to then develop their economies and create well-paying jobs and provide the livelihoods needed for working families. Localization of credit is key to restoring the financial security that our communities and middle class once enjoyed – and to providing communities new tools to address economic, racial, and social inequities.

Pledge We support public banking as a solution to provide affordable credit to individuals, municipalities, students and businesses and pledge to advocate for and promote public banking whenever possible. 

General Plan We have been building on the research, education and grassroots organizing fom the last 20 months. Our path for the Public Banking Coalition is to take what we have learned and create a model of public banking at every level of public governance. 



Build the coalition- This movement needs political power. Political power will come from organizations, workers, students, businesses, and influential individuals organizing and talking to decision makers from a position of strength.
  • Core staff is currently traveling the country gaining partners and growing support.
  • The Public Banking Coalition needs to establish base agreements and ways and means for reaching and activating membership as well as helping lift voices in local communities.
  • Identify target states, counties and cities in which success is most likely and focus our efforts.
Educate at the national level

  • Create a media campaign to reach and educate people that public banking is an attractive and real possibility; media will be intensified in our target areas.
  • Over 2.6 million people have viewed one video from our first national conference. 
  • Conduct feasibility studies demonstrating how public banking can work in specific localities.
Train at ground Level 

  • Each of our target areas needs educated and activated leadership to make the right contacts in the right places in local communities, business and government, as well as provide opportunities for the electorate to get involved.
  • Publish a legislative guide, training presentations, and handouts to aide local public banking initiatives.
  • Hold local public forums that educate and grow public banking efforts.
Open the next public bank

  • Move a legislative body to say yes!
  • Create banks through initiatives, going directly to the electorate where possible and advisable.
  • Publish research on the legal requirements, structure, and daily operations of existing and proposed public banks and financing systems.
  • Hire banking professionals, with accountability to the people through oversight from elected officials and respected parties who are required to conduct business in a transparent and public process.
Strategy  Build national narrative for public banking through press releases and online campaigns (with active assistance of many groups including The Agenda Project) while focusing on grassroots organizing to establish public banks in key states (Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and Hawaii), counties in California, Illinois and Pennsylvania and in the District of Columbia.

Roadmap Documents  

Roadmap -- Final 060213.doc click to download

Roadmap -- Presentation 060213.doc click to download   Objectives The objectives of the national Public Banking Coalition include:

  1. Position public banking as a compelling and legitimate alternative to the private banking monopoly;
  2. Fund and publish studies that accelerate the creation of public banks;
  3. Frame the media narrative so more people understand the possibility and benefits of public banking; and,
  4. Work through established organizations to organize and educate local and state groups who advocate for and establish a public bank in their respective area.
Projects to be funded: The Public Banking Coalition is soliciting funding for the following projects:



  • Measuring the counter-cyclical impact of the Bank of North Dakota from 2008 - 2010
  • Determining the velocity of money in North Dakota and the connection between the new money created by BND and the state's $40B GDP
  • Projecting the impact (on those who are unbanked or underbanked) of a US Postal Savings Bank in a sampling of states
  • Developing the technical specs for a dual-currency (USD and local currency) payment system on a mobile platform
  • Identifying the conversion rate, and its baseline valuation, for public bank-issued currency
  • Projecting the economic impact on locally generated food and energy with funding from a public bank in targeted states and counties
  • Researching and writing the case study of the extent to which the Sparkassen banks funded the upsurge in local energy production in Germany
Open Letter to Philadelphia City Council Members



PA Project- PBI Letter to PHL Council 04.2513 (1).pdf click to download Use this letter as a template for your county supervisors!

Petition  Sign a petition to all State and County Public Finance Officeholders



__________________________________________

This article gives a good overview of private banking's takeover of all finance in Canada----one of the most progressive nations in the world.  It was done in Canada just as it happened in the US and Europe---global corporate pols took over political parties pretending to be people's candidates when they were not.    Blair in the UK pretended to be Labor Party---Clinton in the US pretended to be progressive democrat----and in Spain and Greece even the Socialist Party was taken by neo-liberal posers.  This was a huge political takeover orchestrated by Wall Street.

As you see below, Canada has the mechanism we need in the US---the public bank---to take back control of economic functions from private banking.  EASY PEASY.

IT IS NOT SOCIALISM ----IT IS EQUAL PROTECTION FOR THE PUBLIC.   




Oh Canada! Time to Bring Back Your Public Banking System

.April 27th, 2012

- See more at: http://www.helladelicious.com


In December 2011, this charge was echoed in a lawsuit filed in Canadian federal court by two Canadians and a Canadian economic think tank. Constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati filed an action on behalf of William Krehm, Ann Emmett, and COMER (the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform) to restore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, including making interest free loans to municipal, provincial and federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education, health, and other social services) and for infrastructure. The plaintiffs state that since 1974, the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy have been dictated by private foreign banks and financial interests led by the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), bypassing the sovereign rule of Canada through its Parliament.

Today this silent coup has been so well obscured that governments and gamers alike are convinced that the only alternatives for addressing the debt crisis are to raise taxes, slash services, or sell off public assets. We have forgotten that there is another option: cut the debt by borrowing from the government’s own bank, which returns its profits to public coffers. Cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the average cost of public projects by about 40%.

Game over: we win.


Ellen Brown is an attorney, president of the Public Banking Institute, and author of 11 books. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com, http://EllenBrown.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. In her latest book, “Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free,” she shows how the power to create money has been usurped from the people and how we can get it back.

- See more at: http://www.helladelicious.com/diy/2012/04/oh-canada-time-to-bring-back-your-public-banking-system/#sthash.D3Cmz7En.dpuf



________________________________________________
       So, how does Wall Street stop the current calls for public banking and get hold of the next public agency it wants to implode?  Post Office banking!  Just look at the neo-liberals flying to this policy.  Remember, the Post Office is not in financial trouble----it is simply having all of its revenue-making operations privatized and there is that hundreds of billions in pension pre-payment. 

THE POST OFFICE IS FINE ON ITS OWN AND DOES NOT NEED BANKING TO HELP IT!

Think about this----neo-liberals and neo-cons started this public private partnership policy with the Federal Housing Agency by creating Fannie and Freddie.  FANNIE AND FREDDIE IMPLODED THE FHA WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION.  Then neo-liberals and neo-cons created Sallie Mae privatizing Federal Student Loans and imploded that with fraud and corruption.  Now, neo-liberals are working to end these two Federal agencies that were working fine before these partnerships and helped low-income people for decades with strong quality service.

TAKE A WELL-WORKING OPERATION AND BLOW IT UP WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION---THE BAINS CAPITAL APPROACH TO KILLING A FEDERAL AGENCY!

Neo-liberals and republicans have worked for decades to dismantle the Post Office.  It was not only the republicans--neo-liberals as well.  With a super-majority of democrats in 2009 why did they not take 10 minutes to end pension pre-funding that is killing the Post Office?  It was on their radar and they didn't because they intend to end this service.  No, what neo-liberals and republicans do is place the Post Office in the business that is filled with fraud and corruption AND IT WILL IMPLODE THE POST OFFICE.  We have a credit union system that was built to do just what neo-liberals aer now calling for the Post Office to do and these credit unions are now operating just like WALL STREET BANKS.  If you notice it is again the low-income used as an excuse to take this great public agency into harms way----Freddie was created to give low-income people more opportunities to own homes.....Sallie Mae was created to give low-income people more opportunity at student loans and in both cases low-income people and taxpayers were fleeced in fraud.

DON'T ALLOW NEO-LIBERALS TO STEAL THIS ISSUE.  WE NEED A PUBLIC BANKING SYSTEM AND IT NEEDS TO STAND ALONE. 


Democrats say struggling post office branches could dabble in banking

By Bernie Becker - 02/05/14 06:00 AM EST  The Hill Blog


 Congressional Democrats are coalescing behind the idea of allowing local post offices to fill gaps in the banking business.


They say the move would be a victory for both the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service and for low-income communities that are often underserved by the major banks.

The idea gained steam after the Postal Service’s inspector general said in a report last week that the USPS could likely add billions of dollars a year to its coffers by offering prepaid cards or loans to the 68 millions adults who currently get little or no services from banks.If the Postal Service partnered with banks to offer more services, those customers would then have an alternative to the often hefty fees charged by payday lenders and other banking alternatives, the inspector general said.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, had released legislation to give the USPS more authority to open new revenue streams like check cashing even before the inspector general’s recommendations.

In recent days, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the populist champion embraced by progressive groups, endorsed the idea in a Huffington Post op-ed.

“There’s a lot of low-income people who no longer have banking access, who need the opportunity to cash a check or do modest kinds of banking,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another backer of the idea, told The Hill. “So I think there is an opportunity there.”

But to the banking industry and congressional Republicans, the idea is far from the win-win that Democrats and the inspector general claim.

GOP lawmakers argue that local post offices shouldn’t be given more leeway to compete with private-sector companies because of a host of inherent advantages it would have — including generally being exempt from a host of taxes. 

“There are unique things that the Postal Service can offer. But being your local loan shark is not one of them,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

“To try to sell T-shirts, coffee and give you a bridge loan — I don’t think is going to solve the problem the post office has,” Chaffetz added.

Advocates for the banking industry dismiss the idea that they’re afraid of the competition and argue that an agency bleeding cash should hardly be allowed to wade into financial services.

“This is the worst idea since the introduction of the Edsel,” said Camden Fine, the chief executive of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

“They can’t even deliver your mail on time. The track record speaks for itself,” Fine added. “If this was about competition, give me all the sloppy competitors I can get.”

The debate is part of a broader argument among lawmakers and stakeholders about how to best put the agency — which has racked up more than $25 billion in losses over the last three years — on more solid financial footing.

Lawmakers and outside groups have for years sought to craft postal reform proposals that would strike a balance between making cuts to an agency that has seen plunging mail volume in recent years, and giving the USPS access to new revenue streams.

Top Republican lawmakers have generally been more willing to let the Postal Service roll back its Saturday delivery. But liberals and postal unions have pushed back on those and other cost-cutting ideas, and sought to give the agency the opportunity to expand its business portfolio.

The last major postal reform bill, which was enacted in 2006, bars the Postal Service from offering new products that aren’t mail-related in most cases.

But the inspector general report issued last week suggests that the USPS — which already sells money orders — could explore new financial services options within its existing authority.

In all, the Postal Service inspector general says that customers underserved by banks spent about $89 billion on interest and fees on alternative services in 2012, or roughly $2,400 per underserved household. The USPS could bring in close to $9 billion — far more than its 2013 losses of $5 billion — if it got just a tenth of the interest and fees now going elsewhere.

The options raised by the inspector general include partnering with banks to offer prepaid cards that consumers could use to pay bills or take out cash, and to offer products that encourage consumers in low-income areas to boost their savings.

Customers with the prepaid postal cards could also have access to smaller loans, instead of having to seek out a payday lender.

The inspector general argued that the Postal Service is well suited for banking, given that it has more than 35,000 locations around the country.

At the same time, roughly 2,300 banks closed in 2012, the inspector general noted — with the vast majority of closures since the fiscal crisis coming in areas below the median household income level.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Oversight Committee, said he sympathized with the concerns voiced by banks and the GOP.

“I understand the skepticism. I share it,” Lynch said. “But I think there might be a way to address the needs of some of those under banked communities.”

Leading postal reform proposals also weigh in on the idea.

A House GOP measure, crafted by Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would require that Congress approve any new non-postal products offered by the USPS.

On the other side of the Capitol, a bipartisan Senate measure, to be considered by the Homeland Security panel this week, would give the USPS wide latitude to explore non-postal offerings.

But the bill from Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) would also allow the agency’s regulator to weigh in on whether the USPS has the authority to offer certain products.

Either way, banking officials said they will continue their efforts to limit the Postal Service’s work on financial services.

Advocates for the industry say there are plenty of banking options for customers in low-income areas, and that there’s no guarantee the sorts of services the Postal Service might offer would be profitable.

Plus, Richard Hunt of the Consumer Bankers Association noted that federal regulators had effectively forced some banks to not offer a sort of advance loan that he said could be similar to what the Postal Service offers. Consumer groups have slammed that advance loan, which would be tied to a customer’s paycheck.

“We’re not monolithic. We have 7,000 competitors, and credit unions,” Hunt told The Hill. “There’s nobody in the Postal Service right now that’s experienced in the banking sector.”



Democrats say struggling post office branches could dabble in banking

________________________________________



Thursday, May 30, 2013

Cameron hands UK Post Office to Goldman Sachs
Britain Plans I.P.O. for Postal Service LONDON –

Britain is preparing to privatize Royal Mail, the country’s postal service, whose origins date to 1516 and the carrying of post for Henry VIII and the Tudor court.
The government said on Wednesday that it had appointed Goldman Sachs and UBS as the lead banks to manage a planned initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange later this year. Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch will also work on the sale. The planned offering could value Royal Mail at about £3 billion ($4.5 billion), according to some analysts.
The government has been considering a sale of Royal Mail for years, but plans became more concrete over the last year when the company’s finances started to improve. Pressure is also growing on the government to find additional savings to reduce the budget deficit. Like other postal services, Royal Mail was hurt as more people swapped handwritten letters for e-mail. But earnings have improved recently, and the company reported that profit more than doubled for the year ended March 31 as more people shopped online and received their purchases by post.
The sale of the service, which was opened to the public by Charles I in 1635, would be the biggest privatization in Britain since the railroads in the 1990s. Royal Mail is one of Britain’s largest employers, and the government plans to set aside about 10 percent of Royal Mail’s shares to be held by its workers.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/britain-plans-i-p-o-for-postal-service/

Comment by Road Hog -

I blogged about this a few years ago.

This is where neo-liberals in Congress are going with this Post Office as bank policy.  Believe me, republicans have been trying to do this for decades so they are not against it----it is a Wall Street policy.  The UK Postal System---one of the oldest in the WEST has been completely captured into a global corporate structure.


Post Office announces plans to launch current account Customers want 'simplicity, transparency and good value for money', says Post Office director of financial services
  • Hilary Osborne
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 10 April 2013

The Post Office is set to launch a current account market this spring. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA Post Office has announced plans to re-enter the current account market with a new banking deal for consumers over the next few weeks. Details of the account are scant, but it is thought that the combination of a well-known brand and a large branch network could make it a serious challenger to the big four banks, particularly when new rules making it easier to switch accounts come into force later this year.

Nick Kennett, director of financial services at Post Office, said that research into the current account market had suggested customers primarily want "simplicity, transparency and good value for money".

He added: "With over 11,500 branches, which is more than all the UK banks combined, we can provide this through the most convenient and accessible retail network in the UK."

Post Office already offers a range of financial services including savings, credit cards and travel money, and recently introduced in-branch mortgage advice for consumers. Kennett said that the launch of a current account was part of the "significant transformation" of the brand.

The account will initially be launched in a small number of branches, before a wider-roll out next year.

Kevin Mountford, head of banking at comparison website MoneySupermarket, said the launch was "big news" for consumers. "The fact that the Post Office is a popular trusted brand, already has a large savings account portfolio, and has over 11,500 branches throughout the country means it can be a serious challenger in the current account market," he said.

Michael Ossei, personal finance expert at uSwitch.com, said the banks should see Post Office as "a serious threat", with those in rural areas especially likely to be attracted by its branch network.

However, Andrew Hagger, director of Moneycomms.co.uk, cautioned that more detail is needed, pointing out that the excitement surrounding Marks & Spencer's entrance to the market last year quickly subsided when it emerged the accounts had fees of up to £20 a month.

This is not the first foray into current account banking by Post Office, which was the home of the state-owned Girobank for two decades until its sale to Alliance & Leicester building society in 1990. At that point, it was the sixth-largest provider of current accounts in the UK. It comes at a time when competition in the market is heating up, with Tesco and Virgin Money known to be working on their own launches, and existing providers enhancing their deals to attract consumers.



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May 29th, 2014

5/29/2014

0 Comments

 
PRIVATIZING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC IS THE NEXT PHASE OF THE 21ST CENTURY OR NEW ECONOMY------NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS WORKING TO GIVE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS COMPLETE CONTROL OF ALL ASPECTS OF GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMY.  WHAT COULD GO WRONG WITH THAT?  MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION AND LOSSES TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE OF TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD AND FLEECING OF GOVERNMENT COFFERS.

Today I want to look at the privatization of the Port of Baltimore and two pay-to-play that will be an environmental nightmare for the citizens of Maryland but moves forward because it earns billions of dollars and advances political careers for corporate pols.  Let's look at why the Port of Baltimore has been given an 'F' in environmental stewardship ------BECAUSE, AS WE KNOW, NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS COULD CARE LESS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. 

REMEMBER, TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT (TPP) IS ALL ABOUT ALLOWING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS WORKING IN THE US TO IGNORE ALL ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS IN THE PURSUIT OF PROFIT.  Do you hear your environmental or justice organizations shouting this?

All states have a Port Authority that is controlled by State and Federal governments.  So, when a decision to privatize these ports comes with public private partnerships----IT IS CORPORATE DEMOCRATS MAKING THIS DECISION.  Republican Erhlich and Democrat O'Malley pushed to hand the Port of Baltimore to a private investment firm HighStar-----yes, the same investment firm behind Water, Waste, and Sewage privatization-----behind bringing VEOLA and transportation privatization.  All of this is tied with HighStar shareholder Johns Hopkins earning billions in these privatization deals.  See why O'Malley and neo-liberals are working hard to privatize all that is public?  So, neo-liberals decided that instead of a few billion coming to the State Treasury from state business at the port------it should LEASE the port for a few hundred million and then give the billions of dollars earned from the port to HighStar.  NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS MAKING THE PUBLIC RENTERS IN ALL WAYS!!!!

This is not only a loss for the state financially------it is an environmental disaster for the bay.  Expanding the port to bring global cargo ships brings invasive species that choke native species and fill the bay with species that are generally of no value ----killing the bay.  This does not even take into consideration the level of chemical and waste pollution coming from these ships.  THE PUBLIC LOSES BILLIONS IN STATE AND LOCAL REVENUE AND ITS BAY IS KILLED.....THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU!  Meanwhile, there is no appreciable job creation as the port goes robotic and trains simply pass right through the city ------only the cost of infrastructure development for HighStar's port operations all paid for by taxpayers.  We have communities fighting what will be cargo train terminals that will kill their communities shouting THERE IS NO BENEFIT TO THE COMMUNITY OF CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE-----AND THEY ARE RIGHT.

REMEMBER, SUSTAINABILITY IS ABOUT GROWING DOMESTIC AND LOCAL ECONOMIES ------FOR A HEALTHY FUTURE.  THIS IS THE OPPOSITE.


Sparrows Mill Steel plant has been slated for closure for decades but recently a pay-to-play sent millions of Federal, State, and local taxes for a deal supposedly to restart this steel mill------and yet, the deal included nothing that required the mill owners to upgrade mill equipment that was a must to make the mill competitive and able to survive.  It handed this mill to corporate players who then took charge of dismantling and deciding who would own this huge and valuable property on the bay.  So, as would be expected, the new mill owners closed this mill two years after receiving all that tax money to open and went into bankruptcy to shed all the costs of labor contracts, pensions, and bills owned to venders and the city.  What the state and Baltimore County could have done is take this property into the hands of the state and dismantle this mill in a way that protected labor contracts and vendors and handed all the profits from salvage to public coffers-----instead, all the profits from salvage went to a Chicago corporation known to be connected to Obama's campaign.  THIS WAS A PAY-TO-PLAY.  Besides having the state and county lose control of valuable waterfront property-----the deals never included that the costs of environmental cleanup from decades of industry and a sewage problem that makes this area an environmental nightmare.  WE HAVE SOME MILLIONS GIVEN TO STUDY THE PROBLEM.  This mill was constructed in a way that Baltimore's waste water drains right into this mill and openly floods the Port of Baltimore. 

THE STATE COULD HAVE USED THE PROCEEDS FROM THE STATE OWNERSHIP OF THIS MILL TO CLEAN UP AND FIX WASTE WATER AND CHEMICAL CONTAMINATION----BUT DID NOT.


Now, guess who will be made to pay for all of this as part of a taxpayer subsidized waste water infrastructure upgrade and development of this former steel mill------TAXPAYERS. 


MORE CORPORATE SUBSIDY AND THE EXECUTIVES BROUGHT IN TO HANDLE THIS MASS MOVEMENT OF ASSETS OUT OF BALTIMORE COUNTY/ THE PORT-----MADE MILLIONS FOR THEIR TROUBLE.  The Steel workers lost pensions and health care as the mill was allowed to go into bankruptcy instead of being taken by the state for assets.

ALL OF THIS LAND NOW IN THE HANDS OF INVESTMENT FIRMS WILL NO DOUBT BE DESIGNATED 'TAX FREE'.


One more quick mention of the next environmental catastrophe for Port of Baltimore-----Harbor Point and the development of a toxic waste landfill right on the water's edge.  Even as the citizens are assured that none of the toxic waste will blow in the air and into people's lives and none of it will seep into the bay-----EVERYONE KNOWS TOXIC WASTE WILL INDEED DO BOTH.  This development is on land that could have simply been left natural as a public green space-----but NO-----we must maximize profits say neo-cons and neo-liberals.  All of this brings hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate tax breaks and the public building SEA WALLS around these Harbor East properties built right on waters edge because everyone knows global warming will have sea level rise 12-20 inches in just 20 years.  THE PUBLIC WILL PAY FOR SEA WALLS TO PROTECT DEVELOPMENT THAT SHOULD NOT EVEN BE THERE.

THIS IS WHEN YOU KNOW YOU HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS MAKING ALL THESE DECISIONS.  THEY COULD CARE LESS ABOUT PUBLIC INTEREST OR JUSTICE.
 

THIS IS WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT LOOKS LIKE.

Maryland was once again ranked with an 'F' in environmental stewardship as the Port of Baltimore is filled with trash, sewage, chemicals, and invasive species.....all while O'Malley and the neo-liberals in Maryland Assembly claim to be environmental and a Blue State.  Neo-liberals dismantle all oversight and accountability in government and that includes environment----so as they pass laws that make them look progressive, they then simply ignore these laws.  When O'Malley runs for President he will use all kinds of Maryland media making him sound environmental.

Keep in mind that it was the Maryland Assembly and Governor O'Malley that signed off on this so the idea that the Maryland Department of Environment comes in after all the deals are made to say these things are wrong is ridiculous.  Hilgo is the Chicago-based firm connected to Obama's campaign.

Sparrows Point owners warned on environmental allegationsAsbestos, sludge issues cited by state

March 13, 2014|By Alison Knezevich,

The Baltimore SunState environmental officials and the owners of the Sparrows Point peninsula are moving toward a settlement to correct alleged regulatory violations at the former steelmaking site.

Regulators say an array of problems have occurred over the past year on the 2,300-acre peninsula, including illegal open dumping of industrial sludge, improper handling of hazardous materials and the running of an unlicensed scrap tire operation.


"We are drafting a settlement in the form of a consent order which will provide terms and a schedule for corrective actions — and which will include a financial penalty," Maryland Department of the Environment spokesman Jay Apperson said in a statement. Apperson said the penalty amount has not been determined.

The steel mill at Sparrows Point, which employed tens of thousands in its heyday, closed in 2012. Officials are now eyeing the property, which has a decades-old history of environmental problems, for future economic development.

Baltimore County formed a partnership to explore ways to bring jobs to the peninsula. Last year, County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said county officials want to capitalize on the expansion of the port of Baltimore, with hopes of bringing a new marine terminal to the peninsula's Coke Point area. County leaders have said environmental contamination should not deter redevelopment of the land, contending much of the peninsula can be cleaned up in the near future.

In a December letter to owners Sparrows Point LLC and Hilco Industrial and to site contractor MCM Industrial Services LLC, Maryland Secretary of the Environment Robert Summers wrote that over the past year, inspections had revealed "a pattern of significant and ongoing violations of Maryland environmental laws" by the companies.

"Most troubling, however, is that many of these violations have been brought repeatedly to your attention and have been largely unaddressed," he wrote.

Since the letter was sent, representatives of the companies have met with state officials, Apperson said.

Randall Jostes, CEO of ELT, of which Sparrows Point LLC is an affiliate, said the company is working closely with the state agency to address the allegations.

The peninsula is a huge site "that has 100 years of history of steelmaking activity," he said.

"We're in the process of bringing down the legacy to reach the vibrant, redevelopment future," he said. "The process itself uncovers a lot of historical site issues and we are working with MDE on each and every issue discovered."

A spokesman for Hilco declined to comment. A spokeswoman for MCM said officials familiar with the matter were traveling and not available to comment.

Russell Donnelly, an Edgemere resident and environmental activist, said the community has dealt for years with polluted water in the area but has seen improvements in recent years. He said he doesn't want to see that progress reversed.

"I applaud MDE for at least keeping an eye out," Donnelly said. "I'm glad to see they're on the job."

The letter from Summers says the firms could have to pay substantial penalties.

Asbestos violations — which dealt with alleged failure to comply with regulations on packaging and processing asbestos-containing waste material — were initially corrected within 10 days, but then officials found other alleged violations, Apperson said.

The site has sparked environmental concerns for decades. In 1997, a consent decree was issued as part of a settlement between then-owner Bethlehem Steel and state and federal environmental regulators. The decree ordered Bethlehem Steel and any subsequent owner to investigate the existence of contamination and determine how best to remediate it.

Thus far, the current owners have not fully investigated the extent of contamination, said Jon Mueller, vice president for litigation at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Mueller contends the new owners have tried to buy time and spread blame around about environmental problems on the peninsula.

"I think the government agencies are rightly concerned that the new owners are kind of playing the shell game," Mueller said, adding he was pleased that the state appears to be taking action.

The foundation, as well as Blue Water Baltimore and local citizens, sued the then-owner RG Steel in 2010, seeking an investigation and complete cleanup of the site. The lawsuit was dismissed in February through an agreement by all parties after they reached a plan to investigate off-site contamination, Mueller said.


The quick succession of owners has made it difficult to hold someone accountable and has "allowed this contamination to continue for years," Mueller said.

"There've been multiple owners since then, and the full investigation of the property hasn't even occurred, let alone full corrective measures," he said. "With all these different owners, it's made it really hard to pin somebody down to get this work done so these problems have lingered for a decade."

John Long, of the Dundalk-based environmental group, Clean Bread and Cheese Creek, said it's hard for residents to know what's happening on the peninsula.

"Nobody's communicated any type of oversight that's taken place on the dismantling process,"
Long said. "I think everyone would like to see the site become something that's useful and beneficial to the community, that's healthy."

___________________________________________

Below you see what was the biggest Baltimore City racketeering deal done completely out in the open.  If you look at the photos of development plans you see this massive complex built right on the water's edge-----PURE VANITY DEVELOPMENT.....and besides all of the corporate tax breaks they are going to get LEED certification for this building......more tax breaks from a LEED program rife with fraud and corruption.  LEED is about green construction given to this environmental boondoggle.

The racketeering charges come from the fact that Exelon----just handed BGE----was required by this merger to keep its headquarters in Baltimore so, there was no need to give Exelon $100 million tax break to 'keep this business in the city'----IT WAS ALREADY IN THE CITY.  So, this deal involves fraud and public malfeasance galore.  What is worse is the building on a toxic waste dump and the need to build sea walls all distorting all environmental issues in the area. 


THIS WAS OBSCENE DEVELOPMENT AND IT IS DRIVEN BY BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS------NEO-CONS WHO COULD NOT CARE LESS ABOUT ENVIRONMENT AND NEO-LIBERAL POLS.


Yet, when election time comes------labor unions and city justice organizations-----church leaders all tell there members to vote for the same neo-liberal pols doing all this damage. 

AS WE CLEAN UP THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BY GETTING RID OF NEO-LIBERALS DO THE SAME WITH YOUR LABOR AND JUSTICE LEADERS.  None of this development means good jobs or help for the underserved communities and citizens.
  It is pure profiteering.

How do you mitigate these injustices?  You take away all the tax breaks as illegal and public malfeasance and you slap this corporation with the costs of the environmental damage and cleanup.


Why Exelon chose Harbor Point over downtown – more like suburbia

Baltimore Brew Stirring up News and Views in Baltimore Maryland

Thursday, May, 29th, 2014 29
Fern Shen


Reporters were given a bundle of new details yesterday about the planned $120 million Exelon Corp. building – including the developer’s hope it will be 22 stories high and get a crunchy-green “platinum” LEED certification – but something subtler was being delivered as well.

It was a tutorial on the development realpolitik of Baltimore from the chief emissary of the man who’s mastered the process, bakery magnate John S. Paterakis Sr.

“We are all connected. This project is downtown,” said Michael S. Beatty, president of Paterakis’ Harbor East Development Group.

As he spoke, Beatty gestured to the place where he was standing: the 24th floor of Legg Mason’s headquarters in Harbor East, adjacent to Paterakis’ Harbor Point, the site of the proposed Exelon tower that is about a mile – a very long mile – from the city’s “central business district.”

“Where’s My Office Park?”


In light of the civic fuss that arose because Exelon passed over four sites in the traditional – and ailing – downtown core, Beatty was offering a mollifying message, that Harbor Point is “growing the downtown of Baltimore” and “will help all of Baltimore.”

Calvin Butler, of Exelon, and Michael Beatty, of Harbor East Development Group, speak to reporters about Exelon’s new building. (Photo by Fern Shen).

But his presentation was also a treatise on why Beatty and Paterakis think downtown has been foundering over the last decade, while Harbor East has been booming.

“We’re going to go after those tenants that are leaving downtown Baltimore because they’re looking for this suburban dream of ‘Where’s my office park? Where’s my big floor-plated office building?’” Beatty said, as the panorama of Baltimore’s waterfront sparkled on the other side of floor-to-ceiling windows.

“The reality was, downtown Baltimore didn’t have the large floor-plated building,” he declared. No one piped up to note that there are three or four vacant sites in the “old” downtown where such a building could be constructed.

Branding Safety in the City

A feeling of safety, Beatty said, was another suburban feature they have marketed as part of their “brand.”

“Tenants were looking out to the suburbs and saying it was safer out in the suburbs, and the reality was there was an impression downtown Baltimore wasn’t a safe environment,” Beatty said, as a representative for their latest trophy, the energy giant Exelon, stood by smiling.

Nodding in agreement, Calvin G. Butler Jr., senior vice president for corporate affairs for Exelon, nevertheless insisted that the company’s site selection did represent its commitment to downtown Baltimore.

Artist’s rendering of how the Exelon building at Harbor Point might look. (Credit: Harbor East Development)

But the two downtown finalists – the Baltimore City Community College site on Lombard St. and the former McCormick spice plant site on Light St. – didn’t cut it with the company.

“We wanted to create a presence and make a statement,” Butler said of the Harbor Point site. Exelon is committed to paying $125 million for a 15- to 20-year lease on the building, he said.

Moving to the new building will be the 2,000 employees from Constellation’s current buildings on Pratt Street and Market Place (on the eastern edge of downtown), as well as employees from Exelon’s energy marketing operation in Kennett Square, Pa., and its corporate headquarters in Chicago, Butler said.

Cubicle Workers and a Lacrosse Field

An artist’s rendering of the Exelon building released yesterday shows a glassy tower very similar to the Legg Mason building. Construction is planned to commence upon completion of Exelon’s $7.9 billion acquisition of Constellation, likely to take place at the end of March.

“We are looking at occupancy by the end of 2014,” Butler said.

Also on display behind Beatty and Butler were sketches of the 70,000 square-foot trading floor and schematics of the entire $250-million Harbor Point development.

Harbor Point layout with new streets and waterfront park. (Harbor East Development Group)

The mixed-use project (which already includes Thames Street Wharf and the Morgan Stanley building) is rising from a 27-acre brownfield site where the former Allied Chemical chromium plant once stood.

When fully built out, the developers said, Harbor Point will include a million square feet of office space, 150,000 square feet of retail, 600 residential units, 250 hotel rooms and 3,000 parking spaces.

Double Tax Breaks

The Exelon relocation stirred up another hot-button issue in town along with the fate of the central business district – tax breaks.


A key factor in developing Harbor Point will be the $155-million tax increment financing (TIF) subsidy approved by the City Council in December 2010. Moreover, the site is located in a state enterprise zone, entitling the developer to an 80% cut in property taxes for five years.

Beatty answered some of the criticism by suggesting the subsidy was a good use of public funds in part because some of it was going to be used for open public spaces.

What’s that back behind the Marriott? Oh yes, the Inner Harbor and central business district. (Photo by Fern Shen)

The TIF financing, according to material the company released yesterday, would cover 2/3 of a mile of new roads and one mile of new sidewalks. The TIF also would also help finance 11 acres of open space, including a park and half-mile waterfront promenade, a central plaza, and a lacrosse field associated with a new U.S. Lacrosse complex on the site.

Finally, the TIF would help pay for a new bridge that would connect Central Avenue to Harbor Point. The bridge would run past the west side of a current Living Classrooms building, said Marco E. Greenberg, Harbor East’s vice president for development, standing on an open terrace and pointing the spot out to reporters.

Embry and Others Question Tax Breaks


Harbor Point’s designation as a state enterprise zone would reduce the amount of property taxes going to the city of Baltimore to virtually nothing.

That’s because the state’s partial reimbursement to the city for the enterprise zone break would go to pay off interest on the TIF bonds, not to the city’s coffers.

The prospect of this double tax break at Harbor Point was the subject of some pointed words today at a meeting by a task force on tax breaks appointed by City Councilman Carl Stokes.

Detailed layout of the former site of an Allied chemical plant. (Developer drawing)


Robert C. Embry, a former city housing commissioner and president of the Abell Foundation, expressed surprise that Harbor Point was part of a state enterprise zone.


Wondering how “one of the most affluent areas of the city” got this designation, he speculated that it qualified as a disadvantaged area because it is located near one-time public-housing projects, long since razed, along Lombard Street.

Embry asked “whether the city can get out of the enterprise zone” or when the designation expires. (The zones are enacted for a ten-year period.) Whenever that happens, Embry recommended that the city review the zone’s boundaries and economic justification.

How the Harbor Point site looks now, from Legg Mason’s 24th-floor terrace.
The site is capped over to contain hazardous wastes from the old chemical plant. (Photo by Fern Shen)

City Councilman James B. Kraft, whose 1st District encompasses Harbor Point, also expressed dismay about the tax breaks. He complained that Exelon “does not need to be subsidized by the city of Baltimore.”

Noting that the energy giant reported profits of $600 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, Kraft said the company “ought to be saying, ‘We don’t need it,’” and should voluntarily agree not to apply for the enterprise tax incentives.

Transit-Friendly or Car-Oriented?

Another question raised about the Harbor Point project is whether it will essentially be a car-oriented development, much like Harbor East.

“Definitely not,” Beatty told reporters yesterday.

He noted that many of the occupants of Harbor East’s residential units don’t commute. He cited city bus service and the Charm City Circulator, and pointed to a stop on the proposed $2.2 billion East-West Red Line light rail as possible mass transit options.

“Here’s the Red Line,” he said, “that’s probably seven years away.” (That’s a prediction that even state transportation officials aren’t comfortable making.)

As for cars, he noted that Central Ave. is due for a $24-million makeover designed to relieve congestion that already plagues the area.

Asked how many parking spaces the two developments will have, Beatty added up Harbor East’s current 4,000 spaces to Harbor Point’s proposed 3,000 and agreed that the development will feature 7,000 spaces.

That makes for a very big office park.


____________________________________________
Keep in mind that it is the same investment firm------HighStar that has been handed the private contract for most of these East Coast ports and is behind all of the global corporate cargo ships killing the environment.  In our case this is Johns Hopkins.  Everyone knew these invasive species would follow this port expansion and everyone knew it would cost the public taxpayers billions of dollars fighting to eradicate these species.  Note, HighStar does not pay to eradicate these invasive species-----the taxpayers do.  So, first you end these public private partnerships and you tax these corporations to pay for the cleanup.  Neo-liberals instead have eliminated all taxes paid by these investment firms and actually give copious amounts of corporate subsidy making profits soar.

NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS KNOW THESE DECISIONS WILL COST TAXPAYERS BILLIONS AND KNOW THE PUBLIC WILL LOSE CONTROL OF ALL PUBLIC POLICY AT THE PORTS.





Friday, May 17, 2013

More invasive species detected at US ports in the Mid Atlantic

               Insect as well as plant and animal species from around the world can hitch a ride in a manner of speaking, on cargo shipments, moving from their native lands to exotic foreign destinations, and sometimes stay and establish a new home. Ports of entry like Baltimore and Norfolk are doorways to establishment of species that may impact livelihoods by altering the characteristic services of ecological systems.
               The front-line of defense is the U. S. CBP, "one of the Department of Homeland Security’s largest and most complex components, with a priority mission of keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S. It also has a responsibility for securing the border and facilitating lawful international trade and travel while enforcing hundreds of U.S. laws and regulations, including immigration and drug laws. Amopng other tasks," CBP performs two crucial roles in facilitating trade to and from the U.S. and around the globe: securing it from acts of terrorism and assuring that goods arriving in the U.S. are legitimate and that appropriate duties and fees are paid."[1]
Working with USDA ARS Systematic Entomology Laboratory and USDA APHIS Plant Inspection Stations, and APHIS Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ). the organizations work to protect American jobs, businesses and the ecosystems that support them. Recent interceptions of non-native and potentially harmful insect species provide  highlights of the impossible nature of their underfunded mission. USDA APHIS PPQ reported at the Maryland Invasive Species Council's May 2013 meeting the following interceptions.
Macroglossum stellatarum
tpittaway.tripod.com
               At the port in Norfolk, Virginia CBP intercepted for the first time, Macroglossum stellatarum  Linnaeus (1758), the hummingbird hawk-moth. The moth is found though out most of Europe, Asia and Northern Africa. While the species is unable to survive cold winters, the adults are strong enough fliers that they seasonally migrate from the Mediterranean region North to Sweden & Iceland. The Encyclopedia of Life notes that "The hummingbird hawk-moth is named for its long proboscis (straw like mouth) and its hovering behavior, which, accompanied by an audible humming noise, give it remarkable resemblance to a hummingbird as it visits flowers to feed on nectar."[2] Humans see various shades of dull brown or grey in the forewings of the moth. On the other hand, they reveal characteristic fluorescent yellow, violet, purple and green patterns under ultraviolet light . Thus to birds and other insects the moth is most likely brightly patterned.[3]
Coreus marginatus
www.britishbugs.org.uk                The Port of Norfolk also saw for the first time the arrival and discovery of Coreus marginatus Linnaeus (1758). The uninvited accidental visitor was found in a shipment of tile from Italy. This species if found throughout most of Europe where it feeds on plants in the genus Rumex. In addition inspectors also discovered at the Norfolk facility an adult moth hiding out amongst military cargo. The moth was identified as Autophila ligaminosa Eversmann (1851). This is the first time this species found in the sub-alpine region from the Balkans west to Afghanistan has been identified entering the US.   Autophila ligaminosa 
www.ppis.moag.gov.il -

               In the historic rivalry between Virginia and Maryland, the Port of Baltimore was not without its own early detection of non native visitors taking advantage of the enormous flow of global trade. And to make matters even worse one of the interception was yet another stink bug. Baltimore CBP found a moderate sized stinkbug in a shipment of tile that was later identified to be Sciocoris sideritidis Wollaston (1858). This is the first time this species has been identified entering the US. Just wait until an undetected mating pair of this new species to the shores of the United States sets up shop and works with the two existing invasive stink bugs already sucking their way through vegetables, fruits, and soya beans. Reducing USDA funding through political mismanagement and grand standing in Congress is a sure way to encourage this opportunity. 
Sciocoris sideritidis
www.naturedugard.org 

             And last but not least, remembering that airports are ports too, a baggage interception in Baltimore was confirmed to be Tetraleurodes andropogoni Dozier (1934), a type of white fly. This is the first time this species have been intercepted entering the US.  According to CPB "the insects were discovered on fresh leaves being carried by a passenger originating from Nigeria and arriving from the United Kingdom."[4]  


___________________________________________

Below you see an article that has the State of Maryland and O'Malley selling this idea of privatization as a boon for the citizens of Maryland.  More jobs, more businesses connected to the port.  In Red you see what actually happens.  Just as our BWI airport was privatized to great loss -----now the Port of Baltimore is seeing ever greater losses to the citizens of Maryland.  Lease revenue of a few hundred million replaces the few billion the state and local government collected in revenue from the port businesses.  Labor is immediately under attack for wage concessions to maximize profits.....as always.  Federal and state money is dredging in soil known to be filled with toxic waste from chemical plants.  Don't worry they say.  The costs of Homeland Security now worried about dirty bombs coming from world ports-----the costs of invasive species eradication-----

ALL COSTS BORN BY THE TAXPAYERS.  THE NET LOSSES TO MARYLAND AND FEDERAL TAXPAYERS WILL BE BILLIONS AS THE INVESTMENT FIRM HIGHSTAR POCKETS BILLIONS IN PROFIT.


THIS IS PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AND EVERYONE INVOLVES KNOWS IT!


As we see in red......the first thing that happened was a request to lower public lease amounts 'to make the port more competitive'.  So starts the chipping away of the little the state makes in leasing.


'An item before the Oct. 31 state Board of Public Works would give the Port permission to lower rates for “the lease and use of marine terminals or facilities owned by the MPA.”  '
*********************************************************

As we see in red------more and more Federal money coming to open this global port.....remember, the port was earning the state and local economy billions before this all started.  Look below and see rather than create jobs the investment firm is outsourcing jobs, automating much work and as expected----jobs are not created but destroyed.

'Last week, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski announced $21 million in federal Department of Homeland Security funds to support shipbuilding and repair jobs at the U.S. Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay'.

116 Port of Baltimore workers to lose jobs

Wed, 05/12/2010 - 6:16am The Associated Press

Amports Inc. will lay off 116 workers at two auto terminals at the Port of Baltimore this summer.




Longshoreman Strike Shuts Down Port of Baltimore
Port of Baltimore Shutdown: Longshoremen in solidarity with nationwide labor struggle -   October 17, 2013

*****************************************************
Here is an assessment of the Port of Baltimore before all these privatization deals took hold.  The port was healthy-----workers earning good wages, lots of smaller and regional businesses creating a broad economic base.....and now----one great big global corporation starting to strangle-hold the port economy.

NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS----WORKING TO STRANGLE THE LIFE OUT OF THE US ECONOMY!

Because of all this, the Maryland Port Administration says that the Port is a major source of personal and business revenue in the state, shown by these statistics:

  • The Port was responsible for $3.6 billion in personal wage and salary income in 2006.
  • The Port generated $1.9 billion in business revenues in 2006.
  • Local purchases by businesses directly dependent on port activity amounted to $1.3 billion.
  • Activities of the Port generated state, county and municipal taxes of $388 million.
  • The U.S. Customs Service collected $507 million in duties in 2005.

Published: June 2007      
Baltimore switch Ports America Inc, the port operating arm of AIG Global Investment Group, has entered into an agreement with Universal Maritime Services Corporation (UMS) to take over operations at the Dundalk Marine Terminal at the Port of Baltimore.



This is the standard hype given by neo-liberals as they know they are selling the citizens of Maryland to global corporations and profits.


STOP ALLOWING NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS TO PRIVATIZE ALL THAT IS PUBLIC!!

Ports America Chesapeake Successfully Closes 50-Year Lease and Concession Agreement To Operate and Upgrade The Seagirt Marine Terminal In The Port of Baltimore
BALTIMORE, Jan. 12 /PRNewswire/ --

Ports America Group ("Ports America") today announced that its subsidiary Ports America Chesapeake ("PAC") has successfully closed on a 50-year lease and concession agreement to operate the Seagirt Marine Terminal ("Seagirt") in the Port of Baltimore.  The concession was approved by the Maryland Board of Public Works on December 16, 2009.

The agreement provides more than $1.3 billion in value to the State of Maryland, creates 5,700 jobs, and delivers more than $15 million annually in new tax revenues.  Importantly, PAC will provide 100% of the funding to implement the Maryland Port Administration's ("MPA") long-standing vision and commitment to make Baltimore one of only two eastern ports capable of handling the large "Super Post Panamax" container ships that will begin calling the East Coast upon the completion of the Panama Canal widening project in 2014.  

"I share Governor Martin O'Malley's passion for the Port of Baltimore, and creating high quality jobs so critical to the Port's future and Maryland's competitiveness on the Atlantic seaboard," said Christopher Lee, Founder and Managing Partner of Highstar Capital.

"Baltimore is one of the best, most efficient ports in the country" Lee said. "I'm very proud to be a partner with the State of Maryland and look forward to our long association in making sure Baltimore maintains its great maritime heritage."

Commenting on the Baltimore Concession, Ports America Chesapeake CEO Mark Montgomery said: "We're proud and excited to work with the Maryland Port Administration, the International Longshoremen's Association, and all our ocean carrier customers, including Mediterranean Shipping Company and Evergreen, to help make this historic American port the most competitive facility on the East Coast."

Ports America is the largest independent American terminal operator and stevedore, with operations in 44 ports and 84 terminals. Ports America and its predecessor companies have served in the Port of Baltimore for over 88 years and have operated Seagirt since it was opened in 1990.

Ports America is owned by Highstar Capital, a leading independent operationally focused and value-added infrastructure investor that has directly invested over $5.2 billion of capital in infrastructure investments to date, primarily in the United States.  Ports America Chesapeake is the newly formed affiliate of Ports America that will be the day-to-day operator of Seagirt.

Goldman Sachs and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP served as financial advisor and legal advisor, respectively, to Ports America Chesapeake.  

About Ports America

Ports America, headquartered in Iselin, N.J., is the largest independent port terminal operator in North America, providing terminal management and a full suite of stevedoring and related services.  Ports America, including its predecessor companies, has almost 90 years experience operating American seaports. Its current business includes 44 ports and 84 terminals in North America, handling containers, roll on/roll off cargo, general cargo and cruise ship passengers and luggage.

For more information please visit Ports America's website at www.portsamerica.com

About Highstar Capital

Highstar Capital is an independent, owner-operated infrastructure investment fund manager with an operationally focused, value-added investment strategy.  Since it closed its first fund in 2000, Highstar has directly invested $5.2 billion for its limited partners and co-investors across its core infrastructure sectors of energy, environmental services and transportation.

For more information please visit Highstar Capital's website at www.highstarcapital.com

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April 25th, 2014

4/25/2014

0 Comments

 
I OCCASIONALLY MISS A DAY OF BLOGGING WHEN ATTENDING SYMPOSIUMS OR RALLIES....PLEASE COME BACK.  I BLOG ON WEEKDAYS.....

CORPORATE POLS ARE DISMANTLING EVERY AVENUE FOR COMMUNICATIONS FOR WHAT WILL BE 90% OF AMERICANS.  IF YOU DO NOT SHOUT OUT TO SAVE NET NEUTRALITY AND THE POST OFFICE-----ALL COMMUNICATIONS WILL BE CONTROLLED BY CORPORATIONS AND LIMITED TO A FEW PEOPLE.



I attended a rally yesterday of Postal workers fighting to keep the US Post Office public.  The USPS is the only method of communication left that is public and that will always work in the public interest in providing quality service and make communications accessible to all.  Allowing neo-liberals and neo-cons to privatize USPS will open the door to millions of people having no means of communication.

CORPORATE POLITICIANS IN BOTH PARTIES ARE DISMANTLING THE POST OFFICE PIECE BY PIECE IN HANDING ALL REVENUE-GENERATING OPERATIONS TO PRIVATE CORPORATIONS.  THEY HAVE CREATED POLICY THAT DELIBERATELY TAKES REVENUE THAT WOULD MAKE THE USPS A PROFITABLE AGENCY
-----PRE-FUNDING OF PENSIONS DECADES IN ADVANCE----JUST TO STARVE THE POST OFFICE BUDGET.  REMEMBER, THE USPS TAKES NO TAXPAYER MONEY.  IT IS SELF-FUNDING.

Let's look at the goal of neo-liberal/neo-con policy as regards communications.  Think what is needed to take a nation of 300 million people from a first world society to a third world society ------kill education, control communication, and create a surveillance society.  This has been the recipe of totalitarianism for centuries.

How are your cell phone plans going?  Lot's of free phones and each member of the family using them.  Not missing the $15 phone bill with unlimited local calls when we had our public utility.  Wall Street intends to end the compartmentalization of services and go with an everything or nothing plan.   Just as we are forced to pay for 100 cable channels in order to watch a half dozen......they are going to require people to buy unlimited/shared plans that will price many people out of the market. A few hundred a month for phone and internet will keep many families away. There goes the phone for everyone in the family.  What is happening at the same time is a culture of robo-calls hitting our phones.  Collection agencies and marketing firms
are now filling the time we have bought with daily calls sometimes two and three firms each day.  So, the public is now paying to receive more calls it does not want and having smaller amounts of time to use in communicating.  CALL TO STOP THESE HARASSING MESSAGES YOU SAY!  The phone services have allowed these businesses the ability to over-ride MUTING......to over-ride CALL ENDING.....AND phones are being built so people cannot block calls from numbers they do not want.  Imagine if you pay $30 for hundred minutes of time and half of this is taken in robo-calls.      THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW TO LOW-INCOME PEOPLE AND IT IS GETTING WORSE.  WHY BUY TIME FOR A PHONE THAT WILL BE LOST TO CORPORATE ROBO-CALLS.  There goes that means of communication.  This is 'de-phoning' the working class but you can bet the middle-class is not far behind in seeing phone bills eating too much of disposable income.  People are being left to count the minutes they can get to talk so forget making calls that require long wait times----you know, customer service.

DE-PHONING.....DE-BANKING.....what is next?

It was announced that the Obama Administration is moving forward with ending net neutrality after making this issue central in his election in 2008.  PROTECTING PEOPLE ACCESS TO WHAT HAS BECOME AS ESSENTIAL AS ELECTRICITY AND FUEL IN LIVING LIFE IN AMERICA.  There's profit to be made say neo-liberals!  So, rather than appoint an FCC head that moved forward with declaring the internet a UTILITY so rates would be controlled as electricity and water is now....everyone paying the same for the same products...Neo-liberals are going to create a tiered system of accessing the internet with corporations taking all of the high speed capability and you and I being able to afford what will be ever slower and limited access to much information on the internet.  Remember, email is considered data and as the charges for data climb as it will with the end of net neutrality......you will be counting the words you send.   Video streaming will become too expensive to afford and as you know, most of the websites we open are now full of video/graphics that will make costs soar.  MOST PEOPLE WILL NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO MUCH ON THE INTERNET AND EMAIL WILL BECOME RATIONED. 

THIS IS THE TOTALITY OF OUR COMMUNICATIONS FOLKS.  PHONES AND EMAIL BECOME TOO EXPENSIVE WHAT DO YOU HAVE?  You write a letter.  But wait.......there is no mail service because the USPS was privatized and mail delivery is not a profitable business.  Prices for stamps are high now because of the privatization and loss of revenue ----think what the price will become when  global corporations control the stamp!

What the Post Office privatizers are now doing is eliminating the Post Office as a place and door-to-door delivery and centralizing where you will go every day to pick up mail.  STAPLES has just been awarded the ability to receive letters you want to send, ending the protections of mail traveling in public hands.  FED-X and UPS do a great job you say!

FED-X AND UPS DO NOT WANT THE MAIL BUSINESS BECAUSE IT IS NOT PROFITABLE......LETTER HANDLING WILL END.



WE THE PEOPLE WILL BE LEFT TO SEND SMOKE SIGNALS IF YOU ALLOW CORPORATIONS TO END OUR LAST PUBLIC METHOD OF COMMUNICATIONS.



AT&T Puts an End to Unlimited Data Plans


By Liane CassavoyJune 2, 2010


AT&T has rolled out new mobile data plans for users of its smartphones and tablets. Starting next Monday -- the same day that Apple is widely expected to unveil a new iPhone -- AT&T will no longer offer its $30-per-month unlimited data plan to new users. Instead, customers will have to pick between plans that allow them a certain amount of data access each month.

In a statement announcing the new plans, AT&T says the new options will "make it more affordable for more people to enjoy the benefits of the mobile Internet." The new data plans include three options:

- DataPlus: This $15-per-month plan allows users to access 200MB of data per month. If customers go over the 200MB limit, they will receive another 200MB for an additional $15 per month. AT&T says that 65 percent of its smartphone customers currently use less than 200MB of data per month on average, so this plan should save them money.

- DataPro: This $25-per-month plan allows users to access 2GB of data per month. If you go over that limit, each additional GB of data will cost $10. AT&T says that 98 percent of its smartphone customers user less than 2GB of data a month.

- Tethering: If you choose to use your smartphone as tethered modem, you'll have to spring for the tethering plan in addition to the DataPro plan. Tethering costs an extra $20 per month. AT&T says that tethering for iPhones will be available this summer, when Apple releases the iPhone OS 4 update.

Current AT&T smartphone customers will be able to keep their unlimited data plans, for now, at least. But users of the iPad 3G may see a change in their plan: iPad users who currently subscribe to the $29.99-per-month unlimited plan will be switched to the DataPro plan.

__________________________________________

For those not wanting or needing all the bells and whistles you are being forced out of buying what you need because of predatory marketing and credit collection.  If a family cannot afford internet connection they will not be able to switch to unlimited/shared option plans....they will be de-phoned. 

BETTER THE MASSES NOT COMMUNICATE IN AN AUTOCRATIC SOCIETY!

If 70% of Americans are at the poverty line and the percentage will rise if Trans Pacific Trade Pact TPP is ended....most Americans will not be able to afford ordinary communications.


Even the middle-class needs to be concerned as ending net neutrality will mean prices for what are now ordinary downloads....like movie streaming.....will skyrocket.  These shared plans will rise from $99 to well over a few hundred dollars a month if you are to retain the quality you have now.
  With health care costs rising, just when does that disposable income disappear?  Communications will go before food, health, and shelter!

APSeptember 17, 2012, 3:12 PM

Robocall complaints up despite do-not-call list

(Skip Peterson/AP, file)

(AP) WASHINGTON - So much for silence from telemarketers at the cherished dinner hour, or any other hour of the day.

Complaints to the government are up sharply about unwanted phone solicitations, raising questions about how well the federal "do-not-call" registry is working. The biggest category of complaint: those annoying prerecorded pitches called robocalls that hawk everything from lower credit card interest rates to new windows for your home.

Robert Madison, 43, of Shawnee, Kan., says he gets automated calls almost daily from "Ann, with credit services," offering to lower his interest rates.


"I am completely fed up," Madison said in an interview. "I've repeatedly asked them to take me off their call list." When he challenges their right to call, the solicitors become combative, he said. "There's just nothing that they won't do."

Madison, who works for a software company, says his phone number has been on the do-not-call list for years. Since he hasn't made any progress getting "Ann" to stop calling, Madison has started to file complaints about her to the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees the list.

Amid fanfare from consumer advocates, the federal do-not-call list was put in place nearly a decade ago as a tool to limit telemarketing sales calls to people who didn't want to be bothered. The registry has more than 209 million phone numbers on it. That's a significant chunk of the country, considering that there are about 84 million residential customers with traditional landline phones and plenty more people with cellphone numbers, which can also be placed on the list.

Telemarketers are supposed to check the list at least every 31 days for numbers they can't call. But some are calling anyway, and complaints about phone pitches are climbing even as the number of telemarketers checking the registry has dropped dramatically.

Government figures show monthly robocall complaints have climbed from about 65,000 in October 2010 to more than 212,000 this April. More general complaints from people asking a telemarketer to stop calling them also rose during that period, from about 71,000 to 182,000.

At the same time, fewer telemarketers are checking the FTC list to see which numbers are off limits. In 2007, more than 65,000 telemarketers checked the list. Last year, only about 34,000 did so.


Despite those numbers, the FTC says the registry is doing an effective job fighting unwanted sales calls.

"It's absolutely working," Lois Greisman, associate director of the agency's marketing practices division, said in an interview with The Associated Press. But, she said, "the proliferation of robocalls creates a challenge for us."

Greisman said prerecorded messages weren't used as a major marketing tool in 2003, when the registry began. "In part because of technology and in part because of greater competitiveness in the marketplace, they have become the marketing vehicle of choice for fraudsters," she said.

For people trying to scam people out of their money, it's an attractive option. Robocalls are hard to trace and cheap to make.

With an autodialer, millions of calls can be blasted out in a matter of hours, bombarding people in a struggling economy with promises of debt assistance and cheap loans. Even if a consumer does not have a phone number on the do-not-call list, robocalls are illegal. A 2009 rule specifically banned this type of phone sales pitch unless a consumer has given written permission to a company to call.

Political robocalls and automated calls from charities, or informational robocalls, such as an airline calling about a flight delay, are exempt from the ban. But those exemptions are being abused, too, with consumers complaining of getting calls that begin as a legitimate call, say from a charity or survey, but then eventually switch to an illegal telemarketing sales pitch.

Robocalls can be highly annoying to consumers because they're hard to stop. Fraudsters use caller-ID spoofing so that when a person tries to call back the robocaller, they get a disconnected number or something other than the source of the original call.

The best thing people can do when they get an illegal robocall is to hang up.
Do not press "1'' to speak to a live operator to get off the call list. If you do, the FTC says, it will probably just lead to more robocalls. The caller will know you're there and willing to answer, and may continue to call.

The FTC says people can also contact their phone providers to ask them to block the number. But be sure to ask whether they charge for that. Telemarketers change caller-ID information often, so it might not be worth paying a fee to block a number that will soon change.

The industry says most legitimate telemarketers don't utilize robocalls to generate sales.

"They give a bad name to telemarketers and hurt everybody," says Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president of government affairs at Direct Marketing Association, a trade group.

Cerasale says the do-not-call list has resulted in telemarketers making far fewer cold calls to random people. Instead, he says, marketers have shifted to other methods of reaching people, such as mail, email or targeted advertisements on websites. That, he said, could be one of the reasons that the number of telemarketers checking the registry has dropped so sharply.

In light of the increased complaints, the FTC is stepping up efforts to combat robocalls. It recently released two consumer videos to explain what robocalls are and what to do about them. It also announced an October summit to examine the problem and explore the possibility of emerging technology that might help trace robocalls and prevent scammers from spoofing their caller ID.

Enforcement is another tool. The FTC has brought cases against about a dozen companies since 2009, including Talbots, DirecTV and Dish Network. The cases have yielded $5.6 million in penalties.

The agency said this month that it was mailing refund checks to more than 4,000 consumers nationwide who were caught up in a scam where the telemarketer used robocalls from names like "Heather from card services" to pitch worthless credit card rate reduction programs for an up-front fee. Checks to consumers range from $31 to $1,300 depending on how much was lost.

_______________________________________

When ATT ends unlimited data-----the most widely used option----you know the market is on the way to creating conditions you don't want or need to one that is most profitable.  That is what this shared packaging will be......paying for the 100 cable stations for a few wanted channels.

As the prices for SMART PHONE and technology rise, the tech industries are filling our schools with processes that require more and more operational exposure.  Society is being built around the need to access more of this and the ability to afford it is growing for most people.  THIS IS WHAT BEING WINNERS AND LOSERS IS ABOUT.

REMEMBER, HAVING PUBLIC UTILITIES IS WHAT MADE ALL CITIZENS EQUALLY ABLE TO BUILD THEIR FUTURES AND RISE IN ANY DIRECTION.  THIS MASS-PRIVATIZATION OF ALL THAT IS PUBLIC WILL IMPOVERISH AND DISENFRANCHISE MOST IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.

Ending net neutrality will give large corporations the ability to access ever faster and larger data packages while the employee has no access and computers at work protected against private use. 

ERGO------MOST AMERICANS WILL NOT KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON AS IS TRUE IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES!


Opinion: It’s a trap! Beware carriers’ new unlimited talk and text plans


By Brad Chacos  —   July 20, 2012 6 44 23 12 2 The most effective chains are the ones you don’t realize bind you.

After AT&T unveiled its own version of a shared data plan on Wednesday, dozens upon dozens of posts hit the Web heralding the news and weighing Mobile Share against both traditional data plans and Verizon’s Share Everything. (Even yours truly got in on the frenzy.)

Most posts considered the deal’s advantages for the consumer. But how do shared data plans benefit the carriers? Ah, that’s where things get a bit more devious.

Pooled data is the bait on the trap AT&T and Verizon have structured shared data to give themselves several advantages. The plans meet customer demands for a family data pool. Low subscription prices for tablets should drive more consumers to connect their slates to cellular networks. And both Mobile Share and Share Everything include unlimited talk and text minutes.

Wait! That last one’s a consumer benefit, not a carrier benefit. Isn’t it?

Not quite.

Analysts who have studied the plans agree: If you aren’t already on an unlimited talk and texting plan, shared data plans will actually cost you more money — often, a lot more money. Being for-profit businesses, carriers of course love pulling down more dough, but even more than that, they like the idea of getting you used to paying for unlimited talk and text.

That’s because talk and text deliver insane profit margins. It is a cash cow for carriers, and the cow’s milk is running dry.

Data killed the voice plan star Don’t take my word for it, though. Back in June, the Wall Street Journal reported that cellular subscribers have spent less time talking on the phone ever since the iPhone launched in 2007. That follows several years of an upward usage trend prior to the arrival of smartphones.

You never hear anybody complaining about their rollover minutes any more, do you? Now you know why.

Carriers have been keen to the mass migration for a while now, which helps explain why Skype had to fight a terrible struggle to even land on the original iPhone. (AT&T only caved in after both consumers and the FCC complained heavily.) That griping isn’t a thing of the past, either; this past May, Nokia tried to blame its Lumia struggles on Skype’s Windows Phone app.

In a 2011 New York Times report, Verizon vice president Brian Higgins conceded that as Internet speeds and availability increase, “Eventually, everything migrates to a data channel. We’re moving away from silos of communication to one where everything is combined together.”

That worries carriers, who see much more profit from voice subscriptions than data subscriptions.

After Apple announced that FaceTime would begin working over cellular networks in iOS 6, GigaOm and 9to5Mac examined the situation and found that chatting over FaceTime uses 3MB of data per minute. On a 2GB plan, that’s good for 666 minutes; a 3GB bumps that to an even 1,000. Comparable minutes on a voice plan cost significantly more than those on data plans — sometimes more than twice as much, the publications found.

Surprise! It’s rumored that AT&T might charge iPhone users an additional fee if they want to use FaceTime over Cellular. (Sprint definitely won’t, though.)

Data also killed the SMS star Carrier profits are even more gargantuan when it comes to text messages. In the wake of Apple’s iMessage service, CNET’s Steve Shankland did the math and found that on per-text SMS plans, which normally charge 20 cents per text, carriers receive the equivalent of $1,250 for every MB — not GB — of data — a 8,333 percent markup over the $30/2GB data plan Verizon had available at the time.

Shankland said the $20/month unlimited texting plan was “a better deal if you send and receive more than 100 messages a month.” No matter which way you cut it, though, carriers make a ton of money on texting.

That’s why iMessage and services like Kik (which send texts via data networks) have the carriers worked up. Data-based texting services were estimated to cost carriers $13.9 billion (with a “B”) in lost revenue in 2011.

“You lie awake at night worrying about what is that will disrupt your business model,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in May. “Apple iMessage is a classic example. If you’re using iMessage, you’re not using one of our messaging services, right? That’s disruptive to our messaging revenue stream.”

People who talk and text less often drop down to lower-priced limited service plans. But carriers won’t have to lose revenue or leave their messaging services lying dormant if they can convince you to pay for unlimited talk and text as part of a shared data plan.

Coincidentally, shared data plans began appearing shortly after Stephenson made his comments.

Can you escape the trap? If you don’t chat on the phone very often and don’t want to pay a premium for a service you don’t use — things are looking grim.

After introducing its Share Everything plans, Verizon did away with all the rest of its individual offerings. Unlimited talk and text is now the only way to fly on the nation’s largest 4G LTE network. Existing subscribers can keep their current plans, but be prepared to say sayonara to your low-cost limited voice minutes when you upgrade to a new handset.

AT&T’s a better option for tentative talkers and texters. It is still offering its traditional individual and family plans alongside Mobile Share — at least for now. Don’t expect that to last forever, though. As AT&T Mobility honcho Ralph de la Vega said in the aforementioned June WSJ article:

“The industry’s definitely moving towards unlimited… . Especially as more people adopt smartphones that have voice capabilities over the Internet, segmented voice plans will become less relevant.”

In other words, the talk and text cash cow isn’t dead. If shared data plans give us a glimpse of the future, we’ll be paying for its life support for a long, long time.
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We want to be clear-----Obama is not forced to do this.  He understands that the only way to have net neutrality was to declare it an utility.  His FCC refused to do that and sent the the Supreme Court policy they knew would be refused and now use this as an excuse to move forward with ending net neutrality.

When we have politicians who campaign on issue stances and then ignore them----we have not had free and fair elections.  One cannot vote for a politician if you have to guess if they will or won't do what they say.  That is politics in Iran or Nigeria.....


THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST INCREDIBLE POLICIES AS REGARDS MOVING TO A THIRD WORLD SOCIETY AND YOU DO NOT HEAR IT DISCUSSED AT ALL ON MEDIA.....DO YOU HEAR YOUR PUBLIC MEDIA DISCUSSING THESE POLICIES?  THEN, SHAKE THEM OUT!  THEY SHOULD NOT BE RECEIVING TAXPAYER MONEY IF THEIR GOAL IS TO KEEP YOU UNINFORMED!



April 24, 2014
Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination
Posted by Tim Wu  The New Yorker

In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint F.C.C. commissioners that support open Internet principles like net neutrality?”

“The answer is yes,” Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of net neutrality.”
Explaining, he said, “What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites…. And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet—which is that there is this incredible equality there.”

If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler, has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”

Late last night Wheeler released a statement accusing the Wall Street Journal of being “flat-out wrong.” Yet the Washington Post has confirmed, based on inside sources, that the new rule gives broadband providers “the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers … in a commercially reasonable matter.” That’s telecom-speak for payola payments, and a clear violation of Obama’s promise.

This is what one might call a net-discrimination rule, and, if enacted, it will profoundly change the Internet as a platform for free speech and small-scale innovation. It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.

Some history may help explain the situation. The new rule gives broadband providers what they’ve wanted for about a decade now: the right to speed up some traffic and degrade others. (With broadband, there is no such thing as accelerating some traffic without degrading other traffic.) We take it for granted that bloggers, start-ups, or nonprofits on an open Internet reach their audiences roughly the same way as everyone else. Now they won’t. They’ll be behind in the queue, watching as companies that can pay tolls to the cable companies speed ahead. The motivation is not complicated. The broadband carriers want to make more money for doing what they already do. Never mind that American carriers already charge some of the world’s highest prices, around sixty dollars or more per month for broadband, a service that costs less than five dollars to provide. To put it mildly, the cable and telephone companies don’t need more money.

In 2007, Obama understood all of this. Without net neutrality, the result would be “much better quality from the Fox News site and you’d be getting rotten service from the mom and pop sites.” That year, he swore to me personally that he was committed to defending net neutrality. Unfortunately, his F.C.C. chairman is in the process of violating a core promise to innovators, to the technology sector, and, really, to all of us who use the Internet.

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Since the goal of privatization is busting public sector unions and send more taxpayer money to corporate profit....what is this mantra from neo-liberals shouting they are working to build the middle-class?

IT IS A COMPLETE LIE!  NEO-LIBERALS ARE THE ONES WHO KILLED THE MIDDLE-CLASS WITH CLINTON AND HIS EMPIRE-BUILDING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS SCHEMES.

Right now sending a letter is getting more and more problematic because the Post Office is being defunded and losing control of avenues of delivery.  Closing sorting facilities because hundreds of billions of dollars in pre-paid pensions is taken from annual revenues is a deliberate move to make the USPS unable to provide competitive service.  Where is all those billions in pension pre-payments going?  Well, as you know, the US Treasury is broke......these pensions are being spent as with our payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare to build and maintain the NSA spying and Homeland Security.

WE NEED THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO BE OUTRAGED!!!!!!  STOP ALLOWING THESE POSTAL EMPLOYEES TO FIGHT FOR WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IN A DEMOCRACY-----COMMUNICATIONS!



AlterNet / By Jodie Gummow

  Post Office Privatization Deal in the Works: Activists Take to the Streets The Postal Service plans to replace well-paid postal workers with low-wage Staples employees.

American Postal Workers Union protest in New York.
Photo Credit: Jodie Gummow

April 24, 2014  |     “U.S. mail is not for sale!” This was the hard-hitting message of hundreds of local activists who joined forces across the country in a national day of action protesting a privatization deal between the U.S. Postal Services and Staples.  

The USPS pilot program establishing unsecured postal counters in more than 80 Staples stores in four geographic areas began late last year.  


In response, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) members and associates rallied outside Staples stores around the country demanding an end to the deal which they say is aimed at replacing good, living-wage postal jobs with low-wage, high-turnover jobs filled with untrained Staples employees.  They say it may eventually lead to layoffs and the closing of post offices.

In New York, members of the New York Metro Area Postal Workers Union (APWU) joined forces outside the 5 th Avenue Staples store to deliver a clear message to the American people:

“What we’re trying to do is send a message to the U.S. Postal Service and Staples that the U.S. mail is not for sale,” Jonathan Smith, president of the New York APWU who led the New York charge explained to AlterNet. “We will not allow them to hire employees with no minimum wage, with no benefits and who are not trained to do the job properly.  With all the concern about privacy and identity theft, that’s just not the right way to handle the U.S. mail.  The mail needs to be handled by experienced postal employees who swear an oath and who are accountable to the American people. This is a disservice to the American people and the constitution,” he said.

While Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has denied the USPS-Staples scheme is privatization, the APWU recently obtained a copy of the heavily redacted  USPS agreement, which reveals the true goal of the program is to replace jobs held by USPS employees with low-wage jobs in the private sector, as well as expand the program to 1,500 Staples stores nationwide.

Smith explained to AlterNet how this directly comprises the quality, security and reliability that consumers expect and deserve in the handling of their mail as the struggling U.S postal service looks for ways to cut costs and boost revenue.

“Donahoe is trying to turn the postal service into a for-profit organization. We are here to tell the American people that we will not allow the Postal Service to take our work away and give it to people that are not trained. We are the 99 percent and if we don't fight for our rights, they will take it away.”

Likewise, Bobby Blum, Vice President of the  National Postal Mail Handlers Union spoke of the importance of unions to join together in postal alliance to fight against global corporations and privatization. 

 “We’re here today to stop the transfer of middle-class jobs to low-wage jobs and to stop the transfer of union jobs to non-union jobs,” he said. “We stand shoulder to shoulder to stop the privatization of the people’s postal service.   The CEO of Staples averages a $15 million a year salary, while the average Staples employee makes less than $9 an hour…We must stand together to fight. We can’t let postal employment go to the corporate elite and the cronies in congress dismantle the people’s service.  An injury to one is an injury to all – we stand with you today and say, ‘Stop staples! Stop staples now!” he said.

Fuelling further outage is the recent Staples announcement that it will close 225 stores by 2015, which has many furious employees wondering how such an important public asset could be turned over to a struggling private company, as Times Square postal worker Diane Erlanger explained to AlterNet at the protest.





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March 25th, 2014

3/25/2014

0 Comments

 
Baltimore has a systematic privatization plan for public schools that have teachers, administrators, school principals and even schools buildings under attack.  THESE NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS WANT ALL THAT IS PUBLIC!  It is the long-serving City Hall and Maryland Assembly that are pushing these policies that will tie to the Trans Pacific Trade Pact giving all public policy-making to corporations.  You can see that clearly with Race to the Top and education privatization.

YOUR INCUMBENT IS NOT WARM AND FUZZY FOLKS!

Regarding Mary Pat Clarke coming to the aid of Baltimore principals:


Did you know that Mary Pat Clarke heads the education committee in a city that is privatizing public education and getting rid of seasoned teachers and educators just to replace them with Teach for America and VISTA employees and principals trained in making schools a business?  Now you see why these principals are being targeted with an impossible task of getting students to come to school when Baltimore public policy works to make this almost impossible.  

THAT'S MARY PAT CLARKE FOR YOU.....PRETENDING TO WORK FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE WHEN SHE IS WORKING TO INSTALL THE WORST OF GLOBAL CORPORATE POLICY!  MARY PAT ONCE LOOKED AT ME WHEN IN CITY HALL A JUSTICE ACTIVIST YELLED ABOUT THE MOST RECENT INJUSTICE AND SAID ------'SHUT UP AND TELL HER, SHE'LL WRITE ABOUT IT'.  

You won't hear Mary Pat Clarke use her position of head of labor and education to shout out what I do!  That's because she is not a democrat.  Feeling people's pain while being silent as totalitarian policy is put into place just isn't the same.  So, if you do not like labor and education policies in Baltimore-------Mary Pat Clarke is the face of it.  But it is Rawlings-Blake that gives O'Malley the power to appoint the privatization Baltimore School Board and Superintendent not Clarke you say.........

HER JOB AS THE ELECTED OFFICIAL HEADING LABOR AND EDUCATION IS TO SHOUT OUT AGAINST ALL OF THESE POLICIES FOR WHICH I WRITE.  MARY PAT IS NOT WARM AND FUZZY......SHE IS A CORPORATE POL.

The first thing Alonzo did when Wall Street sent him to Baltimore was to shake out many of Baltimore's teachers and administrators who labored for decades in school environments underfunded and resourced.  There was fraud and corruption in education administration just as it is systemic throughout Baltimore government so much of the funding for Baltimore schools was lost to fraud and corruption from the state to local people in power.  THIS IS NOT A REFLECTION ON TEACHERS AND MANY FRONT-LINE ADMINISTRATORS YET THEY ARE THE ONES BEING AXED.  Baltimore City has one of the worst environments for its schools in the nation and the WYPR report on student attendance problems is reflected in bad public policy these school principals have no ability to control  MARY PAT CLARKE IS THE VOICE FOR THIS. So, simply standing up against retaliation on principals not able to keep students in schools, we should hear City Hall shouting that Baltimore Development Corporation which runs City Hall has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to buying and running COLLEGE TOWN VEOLA bus systems with the only bus system with enough buses that they can actually run on time while sending these elementary and middle-school children to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods often having to change city buses to get there each morning.  This policy is meant to push families to relocate near the schools these children are being forced to attend because schools in their communities have closed and because schools that are funded and doing a good job are on the other side of town.  KIPP is a private chain charter that is allowed to operate outside of all public school parameters in order to look successful and the Maryland Assembly has even targeted this private charter chain with exclusive student college grants to make going to a private charter chain attractive.  THESE ARE THE POLICIES THAT MAKE IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY CHILD TO WANT TO COME TO SCHOOL.  Can you imagine having to catch a city bus to and from and get to school built as a business abandoning all quality education principals?  WELCOME TO BALTIMORE CITY SCHOOLS.  IT IS A MESS.

Since the Baltimore Development Corporation has as an objective of having maybe 8 healthy Baltimore districts and allowing all surrounding districts to deteriorate, this is what drives what schools stay open and where children are tracked.  Remember, the City of Baltimore has hundreds of millions of dollars from the subprime mortgage fraud much of which needs to come to Baltimore and what better way to provide justice for communities targeted by fraud to have their schools rebuilt.  Also, the Algebra Project won a $700 million dollar award from the State of Maryland for black schools in Baltimore but O'Malley/Brown has refused to pay.  

WHAT ANTHONY BROWN NOT SHOUTING TO GET ALL THIS MONEY TO BALTIMORE CITY TO REBUILD SCHOOLS?  RATHER, ALL THESE NEO-LIBERALS ARE SHOUTING FOR MORE WALL STREET LEVERAGE FOR SCHOOL BUILDING BUT JUST ENOUGH FOR THOSE 8 DISTRICTS. Remember, this is money simply recovered from fraud.....it does not have to come from our government coffers.  

No matter the development plans, all communities are required to offer its residence the opportunity and access to good public schools.  Gentrification does not have to have such a high level of injustice just because people at the top want to steal all the public's money by fraud and corruption.  Working class and poor communities are being hit hardest with these horrible education policies but the middle-class need to know these are people with no conscience and they will take all public schools just to maximize profit!


March 23, 2014    
“TFA Truth Tour” to Expose Dark Side of Corporate Education Reform

TFATT-logo    

By Robert Ascherman and Karen Li

Starting tomorrow, USAS is launching the next stage in our campaign to fight back against corporate robber barons of education reform on our campuses: the Teach for America Truth Tour. The tour will visit 15 campuses to expose the truth about TFA: not only does it fail to prepare teachers for the classroom, but it is systematically pushing to replace our system of community public education and replace it with an alternative largely controlled by profit-seeking corporations.

Imagine your favorite professor. Now imagine that this professor will be replaced by someone who has only been trained for 5 weeks and will only be at your university for two years. They don’t know anything about you, they don’t know anything about the community at your university, and they don’t know anything about your life and how it relates to your capacity to learn. Now imagine that this isn’t happening just to your favorite professor, but to every professor at your university. As you can tell, this is a situation that would devastate and destabilize your university.

That’s what’s happening in K-12 public education. For example, in Chicago the Board of Education slashed the budget for schools and fired teachers, yet increased its financing of TFA from $600,000 to $1.6 million and brought in over 300 TFA corps members. In Newark, the superintendent, an TFA alumnus, is likely to fire 700 teachers and replace most of them with TFA corps members. But as one study noted, TFA “is best understood as a weak Band-Aid that sometimes provides some benefits but that is recurrently and systematically ripped away and replaced.”

In order to operate, TFA depends on its partnerships with universities to get corps members certified to teach in each state. While teaching, corps members must attend classes at a university, which in some programs can lead to a master’s degree. In effect, TFA uses our universities’ names to make up for its own weak training programs and convince state boards of education that its members are “highly qualified” to teach.

But students are refusing to allow this to happen any longer. We are joining together with parents, teachers, and TFA alumni to expose the truth about TFA.

The TFA Truth Tour is just part of a larger campaign by USAS, our allies at Students United for Public Education, and the many TFA alumni who are beginning to organize and speak out against the organization, and is only the beginning of a growing groundswell of opposition to TFA’s destructive effect on our public schools.

TFA Truth Tour Itinerary

3/24/2014 George Mason University
3/24/2014 American University
3/25/2014 University of Pennsylvania
3/25/2014 Temple University
3/26/2014 New York University
3/26/2014 Hunter College
3/26/2014 Seton Hall University
3/27/2014 Boston University
3/28/2014 Harvard University
3/31/2014 University of Minnesota
3/31/2014 Macalester College
3/31/2014 Hamline University
4/2/2014 University of Wisconsin
4/3/2014 University of Illinois at Chicago
4/3/2014 University of Chicago

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Below you see the sad state of affairs in Baltimore's public transportation system.  It all centers on privatization of public bus service to private contractors who then place employees working under the worst of conditions.  Wages, work schedules, and route schedules that are not realistic all contribute to employee misconduct and bring danger to all citizens.  We watched as a

VEOLA CIRCULATOR DRIVER CHOSE TO DRAG AN WOMAN IN DISTRESS OFF A BUS A LEAVE HER.  HE WAS A PRIVATE CONTRACTOR NOT MEETING THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS JOB BECAUSE THE PAY IS SO LOW.

I was riding on a COLLEGE TOWN VEOLA BUS that had the driver under pressure to stay on schedule that clearing could not be met because of traffic and road closures speed up and drive dangerously because a dispatcher phoned to tell him to get on schedule.  THE PROBLEM IS WITH BAD ROUTE SCHEDULES FROM INCOMPETENT OR NO INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERS.  Now, all drivers are not innocent but this is what drives poor quality and labor abuse on the job.  At the same time, our children are being made to use these kinds of services every day.  CHRONIC ABSENTEEISM ------WE KNOW THE REAL PROBLEMS!



IT ALL HAS TO DO WITH PRIVATIZING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC.


The answer to cost is to have schools in each community that offer quality education opportunities for all and fund it with the billions of dollar stolen each year in fraud and corruption.




'Approximately 300 drivers are contracted to transport students in Baltimore County and Baltimore City, but the companies holding these contracts are not required to tell the districts when their drivers receive citations, WMAR reported'.

Baltimore Area Bus Drivers Cited for Over 800 Dangerous Traffic Violations


Oct. 25, 2012
By KEVIN DOLAK WMAR

Baltimore School Bus Caught Running Red Light
Next Video School Buses Over the Limit




School bus drivers in the Baltimore area have been caught on camera committing dangerous traffic violations, including speeding and running red lights, which have potentially put the lives of thousands of school children at risk and led to hundreds of citations.

Traffic citations obtained by ABC affiliate WMAR that were issued to Baltimore City and County bus drivers in the past two years show drivers breaking the law, often with children on-board. Speed and red light cameras have caught drivers in the area barreling up to 40 miles per hour over the speed limit and blowing through lights across the city and county.

"They're a driver like everybody else. If they're speeding or going through a red light, cameras are going to take them as well," said Kristy Knuppel, a concerned parent.

Of at least 99 camera citations that were issued to public school bus drivers in Baltimore County, 19 citations were issued for red light violations, 80 were for speeding, with 37 of the tickets issued specifically to drivers operating within a school zone, which is by law a half-mile radius of a schools.

Many citations for drivers who had repeated violations have been found. In an investigation launched by WMAR in Baltimore, at least 17 repeat offenders were found in the Baltimore County records, including a single bus that was cited five times in three months.

Baltimore City school records show at least 74 camera citations were issued in the same time frame. Eighteen of those tickets were issued for red light camera violations while 56 buses were cited for speeding.

The $40 tickets are issued only to vehicles recorded driving at least 12 mph over the speed limit, according to the Baltimore Sun, which reported that privately owned buses have received at least 800 automated speed citations in Baltimore City. The Sun reported that one bus was clocked at 74 mph.

Approximately 300 drivers are contracted to transport students in Baltimore County and Baltimore City, but the companies holding these contracts are not required to tell the districts when their drivers receive citations, WMAR reported.

Charles Herndon, a spokesman for Baltimore County Public Schools told ABCNews.com that the county has a progressive course of discipline for drivers that receive citations, which begins with a letters of reprimand and with repeated offenses can lead to dismissal. He said that in the county the drivers cover over 1,400 miles and 900 routes.

"When you take the mileage into consideration, it's a small number. But even one [citation] is too many," he said.

Herndon said that the county is now nearing the end of a five-year contract with its vendors, which he describes as "longstanding, reputable companies." Since the speed and red light cameras were installed in the county in the past few years, this was not a factor in the original contracts. As new contracts are negotiated with the three vendors Baltimore county uses, Herndon says they will find a way or "verifying who and how many" drivers received citations.

Herndon also noted that in instances where drivers received multiple citations, at the time of their offenses they were unaware the cameras were filming them. He said that though it's no excuse for speeding or running lights, it will influence future behavior.

"It's something that would help to moderate behave of drivers that are violation," he said. "And we'd hope drivers would not get into that position."

_________________________________________________


THE PROBLEMS ARE NOT ONLY WITH THE SAFETY OF OUR CITIZENS AND CHILDREN, BALTIMORE CITY HAS SUCH A HOSTILE LABOR ENVIRONMENT AS TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR EMPLOYEES TO DO THEIR JOBS SAFELY AND WITH REASONABLE WORK CONDITIONS.  SEE WHY PARENTS MAY NOT WANT THEIR CHILDREN ON THESE BUSES?

This is what creates a bad public policy cycle that comes back to schools and achievement.




'The Maryland School Bus Contractors Association strongly supports the locally-owned school bus owner/operator and values greatly their contribution and commitment to their respective local communities. These hardworking men and women not only frequently service the school bus routes they rode as children, they are often second and third generation contractors, continuing the legacy of their parents and grandparents. They employ fellow local residents, support local charitable causes and pay local taxes. It is MSBCA's belief that local school systems should seek to protect these small business owners as best they can'.


School bus drivers threaten to strike over deal with city


Joce Sterman 4:38 PM, Mar 8, 2013 12:42 PM, Mar 11, 2013 WMAR


Baltimore school bus drivers threaten strike

WMAR BALTIMORE - A group of nine local school bus contractors is threatening to strike in Baltimore city over a contract given to an out-of-state company.  ABC2 News Investigators broke the story Friday afternoon on Twitter, letting you know thousands of kids could be without a ride to school, all over an agreement they say will put hundreds of local drivers out of work.

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Roots and Branches is a chain charter school that does well in Mt Washington.  It gets lots of private donations, school choice lotteries have fixed the demographics that attend this school, and it gets public education funding because it is classified as a public school.  It does just what this article states----creams off the most engaged parents making the existing public school to struggle with less funding for the most challenging students.  Flash forward a decade of doing this and you have the model where these private 'public' charters are privatized and profit-driven and are no longer receiving all that private donation.  

IT'S GOAL IS TO WIN APPROVAL IN THE SHORT TERM SO AS TO END PUBLIC EDUCATION AND PRIVATIZE TO NATIONAL CHARTER CHAINS IN THE FUTURE.  THESE ARE VERY BAD POLICIES FOR 90% OF AMERICAN CITIZENS.

It is not choice when communities are left with only these charters.
Why do you think church leaders are not shouting against casino neo-liberalism taking all public money through fraud so that public schools can be supported with funding and resources?  


THE IDEA THAT THERE IS SCHOOL CHOICE IN BALTIMORE IS RIDICULOUS.  HAVING A NATIONAL CHARTER CHAIN MOVE INTO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD AS PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE BEING CLOSED IS CHOICE?


A Hampden parent on Roots & Branches charter school: ‘not in my backyard’

Brew Editors May 5, 2011 at 1:09 pm


Hampden has sweet potato fries, banh mi, organic haircuts “and the deftest waxing north (or south) of the equator,” but it won’t have the Roots & Branches charter school, which — after recently floating the idea of moving into Hampden’s Florence Crittenden Center — is now moving into another neighborhood.

So writes Hampden parent Edit Barry, in this strongly-worded blog post that argues that a charter would “cream off the most engaged parents” and hurt the local public school, Hampden Elementary/Middle School.

It’s “a disappointing” reaction, responds Jen Shaud, founder and executive director of Roots & Branches, which will announce its new location on Wednesday.

“I believe in choice,” said Shaud, who hadn’t seen Barry’s piece. “When charter schools and parochial schools and community schools work together then all schools, all of Baltimore, all Baltimore students, benefit.”

Whichever side of the charter debate you take, you’ll find Barry’s Hampden-flavored version of the “anti” position interesting.


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Everyone understands that creating a system where only 10% of students of color have a strong education is not good.  People involved in these schools are making money on this charter chain that seeks to dismantle equal opportunity and access for most children of color.  It is very, very, very bad.

Why should middle-class America care what is happening to schools in underserved communities?  As with the article about Hampden above------IT WILL COME TO ALL COMMUNITIES.


The problems for the citizens of Baltimore regarding education and funding is that a crony system of politicians are allowing massive fraud and corruption to take money away from public schools-----

STOP VOTING FOR THESE CRONY POLITICIANS.


 KIPP - Knowledge is Power Program (student attrition)
STUDY FINDS HIGH DROPOUT RATES FOR BLACK MALES IN KIPP SCHOOLS
; March 31, 2011; Education Week

    KIPP charter middle schools enroll a significantly higher proportion of African-American students than the local school districts they draw from, but 40 percent of the black males they enroll leave between grades 6 and 8, says a new nationwide study by researchers at Western Michigan University.


    “The dropout rate for African-American males is really shocking,” said Gary J. Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement, and research at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, and the lead researcher for the study. “KIPP is doing a great job of educating students who persist, but not all who come.”…

This is what we call  policy deliberately designed to create winners and losers and it happens because schools in Baltimore are so underfunded that parents are made to go to extremes to get a child into any school that provides funding.  

THAT IS NOT PUBLIC EDUCATION.  KIPP IS DESIGNED TO SELL THE IDEA OF CHARTERS AS WORKING WHEN ALL THEY DO IS SKEW ALL EDUCATION DATA AND UNDERMINE A PUBLIC SYSTEM THAT WORKS JUST FINE WHEN FUNDED.

People who say----we don't want our tax money going to underserved schools need to think this way....your tax money is being stolen through massive corporate fraud.  Do you really think it better to allow a few people all the money rather than allowing all people equal opportunity quality to education?  KIPP has a goal of becoming a national private charter chain that will not be providing good education as profits trump public service.

STOP SUPPORTING THE DISMANTLING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION AND FIGHT FOR WELL-FUNDED PUBLIC SCHOOLS!





NATIONAL REPORT SAYS CHARTER SCHOOL HAS HIGH STUDENT ATTRITION;

March 31, 2011; Baltimore Sun (MD)

    A charter network that has two schools in Baltimore has a high level of student attrition and of private and public funding that have positioned it to be successful, according to a national report published Thursday.

    The report on Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which opened its first school in Baltimore about a decade ago and recently reached a long-term deal to remain in the city for another 10 years, suggests that the national charter school network's high performance is a result of having advantages over its public school counterparts.

    The study, which was published by Western Michigan University and jointly released with Columbia University, "What Makes KIPP Work: A study of student characteristics, attrition and school finance," based its conclusions on publicly available KIPP data measured against districtwide data…

    Nationally, the report found, on average about 15 percent of students leave KIPP every year, compared with 3 percent in public schools. Moreover, between grades six and eight, about 30 percent of students drop off KIPP's rolls.

    The majority of students who leave are African-American males, the report found, and the schools primarily serve African-American students.

    The lead researcher, Gary Miron, called KIPP's attrition a "tremendous drop-off," concluding that he believes "their outcomes would change" without the attrition.

    The study also concluded that KIPP's high performance, when compared to public schools, could be a result of serving significantly fewer special-education students and English language learners — two populations that are often less competitive academically and more expensive to educate…

    The report's researchers found that in addition to receiving more public funding per pupil than its public school counterparts, KIPP also received $5,760 per pupil from private funding…

    "Kids who persist at KIPP do well," Miron said. "But the question is, is KIPP lifting the public schools, or are they lifting the kids who have the support to persist?"

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This policy of catholic schools closing and reopening as 'public' charters is indeed another step towards privatization of public schools.  So, we can see why so many public schools are having to close as large numbers of private schools are now receiving public money to run religious schools.  We do not care if religious schools exist------

BUT THERE IS SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE THAT FORBIDS THIS.  WE WANT PUBLIC MONEY FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS.


  When I see catholic justice people out in the streets shouting for justice for the poor I ask does the Catholic Church really think  ending the public structures of democracy really help the poor?  Remember, we fought revolutions to end the Medieval church's capture of public knowledge----we do not want to go back there do we?  No one believes charters paying money to churches for space is nothing but privatized church schools.

Remember, when Obama and Congressional neo-liberals pushed Race to the Top with all the charters as public schools.....this is exactly what they were moving towards....good-bye public schools and public education!


CHURCH LEADERS NEED TO SHOUT OUT FOR STRONG DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION AND NOT DRIVE THE PRIVATIZATION!


Catholic schools see new life as public charter schools


Education Top News — 01 February 2012
By Tim Ebner
Capital News Service



BALTIMORE – At first glance, visitors to Tunbridge Public Charter School in Baltimore might confuse it with a Catholic school.

The outside of the building is adorned with stained glass windows, stone archways and a cornerstone inlaid with a cross.

But on the inside, the school looks like many other public schools.

“All of the religious materials and figures have been removed from the classroom,” said Lydia Lemon, the school’s principal. “When we brought students into the school, we made sure to explain that this was a public school even though it’s next to a Catholic Church,” she said.

Tunbridge is located on the parish grounds of St. Mary’s of the Assumption Catholic Church, one of a number of public schools that have taken over space that once housed a Catholic school in Baltimore.

As the Archdiocese of Baltimore confronts tough decisions on school consolidations and closures — tied to declines in student enrollment — 20 charter schools, early childhood development programs, nonprofits and private schools have moved into the once-sacred buildings.

The transformations represent a sizable share of the 70 Catholic schools currently in operation in the Baltimore archdiocese.

Almost half of the sites – nine schools – are being used as public charter schools or for head start programs for early childhood development. Charters are the single largest occupant of former Catholic schools, making up a quarter of all leases and sales.

Charter schools, like Tunbridge, offer parents and students greater school choice and free tuition, a benefit for families facing tough economic decisions, said J. Keith Scroggins, chief operating officer of Baltimore City Public Schools.

Tunbridge expects a competitive pool of 300 applicants for approximately 40 spots in next year’s class.  To make room, the school is expanding by renovating the former church convent.

“By bringing charters in and by creating transformed city schools, we are trying to put identical educational opportunities in every segment of Baltimore,” Scroggins said.

But church leaders worry that charters compete directly with Catholic schools for student enrollment, especially for non-religious families attending the schools as an alternative to public education.

Last year, student enrollment dropped by 4.3 percent in the archdiocese, which followed a 9 percent drop the year before, said archdiocese spokesman Sean Caine.

“Schools stay open because parents want their children to receive an excellent education. We see families overcome difficulties to send their children to our schools because they believe it’s important,” Cardinal-designate Edwin O’Brien said.

During a visit to St. Michael’s the Archangel School Tuesday, located just outside the city in Overlea, O’Brien stressed the importance of Catholic education in forming student character.

In Baltimore, Catholic schools play a historic role. The city was the first archdiocese in the United States, and a number of schools have been rooted in Baltimore neighborhoods for more than 100 years.

But at St. Michael’s, where student enrollment is down and nuns no longer serve as teachers, the school will consolidate from two buildings to one for the first time in its history.

“It’s an issue of economic climate, but people are also having fewer children, and there are more schools to compete with,” said the school principal Patricia Kelly.

Because remaining Catholic schools face competition from charters, the archdiocese has delayed allowing charter schools to move into some of their buildings.

In March 2011, church leaders delayed an application request by a local charter school, Baltimore International Academy, to move to St. Anthony’s of Padua because of concerns that the charter would affect enrollment at other nearby Catholic schools.

“We look at the population that the school will be serving, the proximity to other schools and considerations that may interfere with our schools’ viability,” said Barbara McGraw Edmondson, superintendent of the archdiocese’s Catholic schools.

Edmondson said she did not know when the archdiocese would make a final decision on St. Anthony’s.

“We think about both the long-term and temporary needs. We consider all the factors and decide on how to use the property when it’s the right time,” she said.

The archdiocese does not track the total revenue made by facility sales and leases within the archdiocese because a majority of funds go directly to local parishes.

Charters are not the only organizations moving into buildings that once housed Catholic schools.

When Mount Washington Elementary School in Baltimore, which is not a charter school, made an offer for space at Shrine of the Sacred Heart, the community made a hard sell for the archdiocese to accept the public school’s application even though the school was not the highest paying bidder, Caine said.

The archdiocese accepted the offer.

In other instances, the archdiocese has leased or sold buildings to programs funded by the federal government’s Head Start program and to private schools and nonprofits.

While charters may be seen as a threat, Lemon said she does not think that’s the case at Tunbridge. Charter school leaders worked with parishioners to host meetings while the school was being renovated in 2009 and they still continue to interact with the parish.

“We’ve had a very positive experience with the parish,” Lemon said. “I think we work together and both serve the community.”

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March 20th, 2014

3/20/2014

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IF YOU ARE NOT READING INTO THESE POLICIES THE VISION OF SANITARIUMS FROM THE DAYS OF CHARLES DICKENS------YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND HEALTH CARE REFORM WRITTEN BY HEDGE FUNDS...THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.

THIS IS A LONG BLOG.....PLEASE GLANCE THROUGH ALL ARTICLES!

Regarding corporate commentators Fraser Smith and Basu on private non-profits and health care reform in Maryland:

FRASER SMITH AND BASU HIT IT ON THE HEAD.....JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY CREATED THE PRIVATE NON-PROFIT MARYLAND HEALTHCARE FOR ALL TO CAPTURE THE POLICY ISSUE OF UNIVERSAL CARE AND MADE SURE IT WENT WITH AFFORDABLE CARE ACT-----PRIVATIZATION FOR PROFIT AT THE EXPENSE OF ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE-------AND SO THE POLICY WOULD NOT GO TOWARDS EXPANDED AND IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL, THE REAL UNIVERSAL CARE POLICY.

So, a corporation created its own private non-profit to push it own policy agenda using taxpayer money and private donations to make sure policy went towards maximizing profit for Johns Hopkins. That is indeed what this proliferation of corporate private non-profits is about.

SO, WHAT ABOUT THIS LADY FRASER MADE TO SOUND THANKFUL TO HAVE THIRD WORLD HEALTH CARE WITH TODAY'S MEDICAID AFTER LOSING A FIRST WORLD QUALITY HEALTH PLAN?

We hear time and again that this Affordable Care Health Reform is a Republican idea pulled together first by Reagan and implemented by Romney in Massachusetts. It is indeed a Republican plan. Affordable Care does not mean affordable for people, it means affordable for corporations and profit-maximizing.....Third Way corporate neo-liberals in Mass passed this plan just as they are now in Maryland. What we are seeing is the requirement to have health insurance partnered with health access that is window-dressing. When Massachusetts says it has almost universal coverage it isn't telling you that the coverage that many people have is just the preventative public health level we are seeing hitting Maryland. Who are those falling into this Medicaid level care? The article below written in 2010 looks at immigrant and low-income care but makes clear that the window is opening as to who will receive this level of care.


Massachusetts health care plan “dangerously restricts access” to primary care

Published August 9th, 2010 iHealthBulletin News!

The first health care plan from a for-profit insurance company approved to offer government-subsidized coverage under Massachusetts’ health care reform has dangerously restricted access to primary care, according to data reported on August 5, 2010 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers say the findings raise troubling concerns about the Obama administration’s new health law, which is modeled after the Massachusetts plan.

Three Harvard-affiliated physicians report that out of a list of 326 doctors identified as members of the provider network of CeltiCare, a for-profit insurer contracted by the state of Massachusetts to take over coverage of about 30,000 legal immigrants (and, more recently, low-income citizens), only 217 were non-duplicate adult primary care providers. Of these 217 doctors, 25 percent could not be reached by telephone.

Of those primary care doctors who were reachable by telephone, only 37 percent, or 60 providers, said they were accepting new CeltiCare patients. In those cases, the average wait time for an appointment was 33 days, even though the patient was described as having a chronic illness like diabetes or hypertension.


Moreover, although many of the patients who had been forced into the CeltiCare plan don’t speak English, only 38 of the doctors who were accepting new patients had any form of translation services.

The plan’s failure to provide adequate access to doctors for its members raises grave concerns not only about Massachusetts’ reform, but also about the recently enacted national reform, the researchers say. The national plan closely mirrors Massachusetts’ reform, but relies far more heavily on for-profit insurers.

The report points out that even when patients have insurance, profit-driven plans may discourage them from getting the care they need by “rationing by inconvenience.”

The data appears in a letter titled “Immigrants’ experience with publicly funded private health insurance” in the August 5, 2010 print edition of the journal. It was written by two resident physicians at the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance and a Harvard Medical School faculty adviser, and is based on the work of a group of interns, residents and medical students from several Boston-area hospitals and medical schools.

These doctors-in-training carried out the research after they became worried when some of their sickest patients – patients with cancer, diabetes and other severe health problems – were forced from their existing insurance plan into the CeltiCare plan. They then were told that they could no longer be treated at many of their previous health clinics, forcing them to find new doctors.

The researchers identified doctors available to the CeltiCare patients using the plan’s “Find a Provider” website. They called each of the doctors’ offices within a 5-mile radius of their hospital, identifying themselves as relatives of a chronically ill, older adult who needed an appointment soon. If an appointment was offered, the researcher asked about the availability of translators.

“Trying to get an appointment was even more daunting than these numbers suggest,” said Dr. Cassie Frank, a co-author of the article. “Many clinics forced me to call several times to get an appointment. One said they only open up appointments on Monday morning, and that to have a chance of getting any appointment slot I’d have to show up an hour before the clinic opened to be first in line.”


Dr. Malgorzata Dawiskiba, another co-author, said: “The state suddenly shifted thousands of sick patients to a cut-rate plan. But instead of getting a bargain, the patients were left stranded – insured, but unable to find a doctor who could care for them. These were people whom we knew. We and our supervisors had been their doctors, sometimes for many years, and overnight they were told ‘you can’t come here anymore.’”

Dr. Ruth Hertzman-Miller, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and study co-author, commented: “The problems faced by CeltiCare’s patients may soon become much more widespread. Our legislative leaders want to require every insurer in Massachusetts to offer a plan with a restricted list of doctors and a lower price tag. But that kind of restricted coverage may be little more than a worthless piece of paper” (Courtesy of Eurekalert).


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What we are seeing in Maryland already is an inability of low-income people or inadequately insured people to get the normal treatment for common diseases. When you have to co-pay a $100,000 treatment, how does that affect your future access? YOU WON'T HAVE ANY. Baby boomers are told they will not be affected, but at age 55 I know that when I start having major health issues in a decade or so, all of this reform will not protect my Medicare coverage.

OTHER COUNTRIES DO UNIVERSAL CARE WITH SATISFACTORY SERVICE......DO YOU HEAR THE ENGLISH, CANADIAN, OR FRENCH SHOUTING OUT AGAINST THEIR HEALTH SYSTEMS? DO YOU HEAR OF THE POOR CLIMBING INTO THE BACKS OF VANS FOR HEALTH CARE WHILE THE RICH HAVE HEALTH BOUTIQUES IN THESE COUNTRIES?

VOTE YOUR NEO-LIBERAL INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!


Making all of health care about profit moves drugs to market-based operations.  So, if a drug is not used much it will be made expensive or will not be manufactured.  We already are seeing shortfalls in availability of common drugs because of market-based health policy.  IT WILL GET WORSE IF LEFT TO CONTINUE.

No Health Insurance Dims Cancer Fate Cancer Outcomes Worse for People With No Health Insurance or Inadequate Health Insurance

By Miranda Hitti
WebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Dec. 20, 2007 -- Cancer patients without adequate health insurance tend to face grimmer odds than those with good health insurance, says the American Cancer Society.

The American Cancer Society today released a new report on health insurance and cancer.

The report shows that people with no health insurance or inadequate health insurance face four main challenges when it comes to cancer:

They're less likely to get screened for cancer.
They're less likely to get counseled about cancer prevention.
They're more likely to get diagnosed late, when their cancer is harder to treat.
They're more likely to die from cancer than people with adequate health insurance.


Take breast cancer, for instance. The report shows that women with private health insurance are more likely to get mammograms, get diagnosed earlier, and have better survival rates than uninsured women.

The same is true for colorectal cancer. The report shows that among adults aged 50-65, about half of those with private health insurance had gotten screened for colorectal cancer in the past decade, compared with almost 40% of those with Medicaid insurance and about 19% of uninsured people.

Noting that some new cancer treatments cost more than $100,000 per year, the American Cancer Society's report asks, "To what extent will availability and type of insurance coverage, as well as individual financial resources, determine who has access to the most effective therapies?"

Health insurance isn't the only gap in cancer care. Racial and ethnic disparities also affect cancer outcomes.

The American Cancer Society based its report on information from the CDC and from the National Cancer Data Base.

The findings appear in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

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CHECK OUT THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THESE HEALTH HOMES THEY PLAN FOR MEDICAID/MEDICARE PEOPLE. THEY ARE SIMPLY COMPOUNDS OF CARE WE ALREADY KNOW WILL BE RUN BY HUGE HEDGE FUND-SIZED CORPORATIONS THAT HAVE NO INTENTION BUILDING A CARING/QUALITY ENVIRONMENT.

What is the difference between the retirement communities and state nursing homes we have today and what ACA is calling community-centered health homes? First, retirement communities and state nursing homes were run by private non-profits like religious communities and the government having the public's interest at heart. What ACA if creating is a national system of corporate businesses often owned by hedge funds and run with only thoughts of profit and raiding entitlement Trusts with fraud. We already had the kinds of facilities ACA is creating only they were not structured for profit.

THINK HOW A HEDGE FUND WILL OPERATE A COMMUNITY HEALTH HOME.

Community homes for seniors and the poor with chronic health conditions.....sound a little like the sanitariums of hundreds of years ago? YOU BETCHA!!!!! Think who will age or fall into poverty in this downward spiral of neo-liberalism------ALMOST EVERYONE. HOW MEDIEVAL OF NEO-LIBERALS!!!




MEDICAL HOMES-----for the poor that means isolated health care focusing on containing communicable diseases and mental health issues. It is third world speak for containing disease vectors as cheaply as possible. As I mention above, the old practice of SANITARIUMS is the model. It will become a Dickens' nightmare as public health is dismantled and no public oversight allows a level of neglect we do not want to allow.

You notice that ACA sends billions of dollars to fund the building of these structures and this is happening as more and more people lose private health insurance or public health plans are getting ready to be thrown into these state health systems relegating most people to the status of Medicaid.

SEE WHY NEO-LIBERALS ARE PUSHING EXPANDED MEDICAID RATHER THAN FIGHTING TO RECOVER TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS LOST FROM ENTITLEMENT TRUSTS FROM CORPORATE FRAUD.

We simply need to rebuild white collar criminal agencies and stop the massive fleecing of Medicare and Medicaid, recover funds lost to fraud, and we will be flush with money to fund a first world quality of health care for all.



HMMMMMMM.....MEDICAL ENTERPRISE ZONES SEEM TO BE THE FEDERAL MONEY BUILDING THIS SYSTEM

Community-Centered Health Homes

Community-Centered Health Homes Bridging the gap between health services and community prevention ...practices, including the patient-centered medical home,

aswww.ravenswoodfhc.org/images/pdf/community-centered...

Transforming Community Health Centers into Patient-Centered Medical Homes: The Role of Payment Reform

September 28, 2011

Authors: Leighton Ku, Ph.D., M.P.H., Peter Shin, Ph.D., M.P.H., Emily Jones, M.P.P., Brian Bruen, M.S.
Contact: Leighton Ku, Ph.D., M.P.H., Director, Center for Health Policy Research in the Department of Health Policy, George Washington University leighton.ku@gwumc.edu
Editor: Deborah Lorber

"FQHCs have long sought to provide quality team-based, comprehensive primary care and typically viewed themselves as serving as medical homes, even before there were formal definitions for medical homes."

Overview This report examines how changes in the way federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) are financed could support the transformation of these critical safety-net providers into high performing patient-centered medical homes. Through surveys and interviews, the authors explore the current landscape of health center involvement in medical home initiatives, adoption of medical home standards, and receipt of payment incentives. Based on their findings, the authors make preliminary recommendations to encourage health centers to serve as patient- and community-centered medical homes. These include: establishing recommended standards for patient- and community-centered medical homes that apply to FQHCs; structuring payment incentives to promote medical homes; including FQHCs in state Medicaid medical or health home projects; adapting payment approaches, including adding monthly case management fees; and encouraging the Health Resources and Services Administration to use quality-of-care measures in making funding decisions.

Executive Summary

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Affordable Care Act) significantly altered the landscape of American health care policy. In addition to expanding coverage to millions of uninsured and increasing funding to expand community health centers, the Affordable Care Act initiates efforts to change how health care is paid for and delivered in the United States. For example, the law encourages state Medicaid programs to develop medical homes, also known as "health homes," for Medicaid patients with chronic diseases. More broadly, the law calls on federal and state governments to consider other methods to transform health care delivery, including strategies such as creating accountable care organizations and bundling episodes of care. The large increases in the number of people with health insurance, including Medicaid patients, after the implementation of health reform will require the nation and the states to consider strategies to strengthen primary care services as part of a high performance health system.

This report examines how changes in the way federally qualified health centers are financed could support the transformation of these critical safety-net providers into high performing patient-centered medical homes. Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), also known as community health centers or clinics, are nonprofit facilities that provide comprehensive primary medical care—and often dental, vision, and behavioral health services—to low-income patients in medically underserved areas, regardless of a person's ability to pay.

In late 2009, we conducted a survey of state primary care associations, which represent community health centers in their states. We followed up this survey with interviews of selected health center, state agency, and managed care staff about medical home and quality initiatives in their states. In the majority of states, health centers receive payments to serve as primary care providers or medical homes, generally under Medicaid, and more recently have begun to serve as patient-centered medical homes. There was great diversity in the nature of medical home programs, medical home criteria, and stages of development. In some cases, private physicians are eligible for medical home payments, but health centers are not.

FQHCs have long sought to provide quality team-based, comprehensive primary care and typically viewed themselves as serving as medical homes, even before there were formal definitions for medical homes. Nonetheless, many FQHCs have demonstrated interest in attaining formal recognition as a medical home.

Preliminary data from a George Washington University survey of FQHCs, conducted from 2010 to 2011, indicate that about 6 percent of centers have attained National Committee for Quality Assurance–Patient Centered Medical Home (NCQA–PCMH) recognition, another 12 percent have a pending application, and 40 percent expect to seek recognition in the next 18 months. Some (12%) have received or applied for recognition from a state medical home program and 11 percent are considering another national recognition program. One reason some centers do not consider applying is there is no financial reward for attaining recognition, as some states do not have medical home incentive programs for FQHCs.

We present several financing recommendations to increase the incentives for FQHCs to transform themselves into high-performing medical homes:

Establish recommended standards for patient- and community-centered medical homes that apply to FQHCs. A variety of national and state recognition programs exist for medical or health homes, but they generally focus only on patient-centered medical care. Health centers also seek to provide community-centered services, such as offering access to patients regardless of ability to pay; providing nonmedical services like behavioral, dental, or enabling services (like case management, health education, and translation); and conducting community needs assessments and other prevention-oriented projects. It may be relevant to establish standards that emphasize these broader community-oriented service components.
States should include FQHCs in Medicaid health home projects. Under the Affordable Care Act, state Medicaid programs may establish health home projects for those with chronic health conditions. In the past, some state medical home programs excluded FQHCs because they are paid differently than physician practices. Since FQHCs provide primary care to a substantial and growing number of Medicaid patients, they should be included in all state Medicaid health home projects.
Clarify that states may pay FQHCs more than the levels prescribed by the prospective payment system. Although federal Medicaid policy that governs health center payments does not prevent states from paying FQHCs more than the prospective payment system (PPS) level, which is based on historical Medicaid costs and then updated, some states appear to interpret the statute as constituting a cap on FQHC payment levels.
If states adopt medical or health home incentives, providing monthly case management fees per Medicaid patient is a reasonable approach. States considering this option could add a monthly medical home case management fee, in addition to regular FQHC reimbursements, as an appropriate way to create a payment incentive for medical home status. This is already used in many states and is the method planned for the Medicare FQHC Advanced Primary Care Practice demonstration project.
Clarify how states may increase FQHC payment levels under Medicaid. Under current federal rules, states may change PPS payments to individual health centers when the centers demonstrate a change in the scope of Medicaid services. However, there is no specific provision for changing the PPS
payments when a health center increases the quality or intensity of services it provides.
Maintain the all-inclusive per-visit payment rates in Medicaid. Under federal law, Medicaid payments to FQHCs are paid on a flat, all-inclusive, per-visit (or per encounter) basis. To change the system would require substantially changing all FQHC payment rates, which would take years to develop. Given current state budget problems, in which state Medicaid programs have often trimmed provider payment rates, opening all FQHC payment rates to recalculation could place them at substantial risk of unanticipated reductions.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) should ensure that Medicare policies are consistent with medical home goals. CMS has announced two Medicare advanced primary care medical home demonstration projects, one for FQHCs and one that permits multipayer projects in several states. CMS should continue to develop these projects. CMS is also actively developing policies in related areas, such as those related to Medicare accountable care organizations, and should ensure that the objectives of those policies are ultimately supportive of medical home policies as well.
The Health Resources and Services Administration has long encouraged quality of care for FQHCs and supports Section 330 grantees as NCQA–PCMHs, but could consider additional efforts. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) seeks to build on the already strong quality of care delivered by health centers by focusing on quality improvements and ways that payment reforms could affect health centers. HRSA provides grants to subsidize the cost of NCQA–PCHM applications for FQHCs that receive federal Section 330 grants. In allocating funds to grantees, HRSA has not traditionally used quality of care in funding decisions. HRSA is improving information collected about the quality of care at Section 330 grantees under its Uniform Data System. In the future, HRSA could develop incentives to improve the quality of care at health centers or performance as medical homes. It could develop further efforts to help integrate health center coordination in medical home, health home, and advanced primary care projects, working with Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program—and eventually the health insurance exchanges.

As the concept of a medical home and other paradigms to strengthen the health care infrastructure are implemented, FQHCs will serve as laboratories for innovation to test new care models. Adequate and appropriately structured financial incentives are critical to the success of any model of health care delivery, and the medical home is no exception. In addition to changes to the reimbursement system that would better align incentives, other supports for providers such as training and technical assistance are necessary to bolster and support the infrastructure.
________________________________________________


This is what happens when health care becomes about maximizing profits. Staff are not always to blame. People are being sent to do jobs for which they are not prepared. Standardization of care misses lots of individual symptoms and history. Having hedge funds operating medical care can only be a spiraling disaster for health care. SHOUT FOR EXPANDED AND IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL.

This article is a good look at what has happened as health care moves from hospital to nursing facilities, but it doesn't address the gorilla in the room------home health care skilled and non-skilled. If you know nursing homes and community care facilities are rife with bad care you know this booming national health chains of home health care businesses are really, really bad. THEY ARE. This is what all of these private for-profit career job training schools are releasing on the public and it is not pretty. The students graduating are not at fault most times....they are being steered into programs that do not prepare them for the jobs they will do and these health businesses for which they are hired are not monitored or operating legally in many cases.

THIS IS WHAT ACA DOES IN TANDEM WITH PRIVATIZATION OF EDUCATION....IT DEVELOPS A SYSTEM WHERE EDUCATION FEEDS BUSINESSES AND IT IS ALL PROFIT-DRIVEN.

So, Americans are being told they will be serviced at home at the same time academics are seeing the lowest quality of training for students entering these fields. I want to qualify that home health care businesses have been around for decades and many offer strong, quality care and staffing. What we are seeing from ACA is a flooding of the market with national chains simply there to make a buck anyway they can. This article below has a Hopkins professional reporting these shortfalls as Baltimore is ground zero in the worst health care in these kinds of facilities and Hopkins is public health in Baltimore. It's like interviewing the fox about how best to stop foxes from raiding the hen house.

DO YOU SEE HEDGE FUNDS AND GLOBAL CORPORATIONS RISING TO THE CALL TO IMPROVE QUALITY OF CARE?


'About 40 percent of people over age 65 will spend time in a nursing home at some point, Mollot said. Hopefully, he said, the inspector general’s report will help the public see that care needs to improve'.

He said,

“They are dangerous, dangerous places”.



Keep in mind with this article below that in Maryland, where Medicare is being dismantled by privatization with no Federal oversight, has the goal to end all Federal oversight of Medicare. 1/2 of Medicare spending is lost to fraud and you see Federal spending by Medicare is sent to building these skilled nursing businesses. When the Federal Medicare program is privatized to these state systems, there will be no public oversight as described in this article.

One Third of Skilled Nursing Patients Harmed in Treatment

March 16th, 2014

Special Report from ProPublica

by Marshall Allen, ProPublica

One-in-three patients in skilled nursing facilities suffered a medication error, infection or some other type of harm related to their treatment, according to a government report released recently that underscores the widespread nature of the country’s patient harm problem.

Follow up:

Doctors who reviewed the patients’ records determined that 59 percent of the errors and injuries were preventable. More than half of those harmed had to be readmitted to the hospital at an estimated cost of $208 million for the month studied — about 2 percent of Medicare’s total inpatient spending.

Patient safety experts told ProPublica they were alarmed because the frequency of people harmed under skilled nursing care exceeds that of hospitals, where medical errors receive the most attention.

Dr. Marty Makary, a physician at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore who researches health care quality, said -

“(The report) tells us what many of us have suspected ­­– there are vast areas of health care where the field of patient safety has not matured”.

The study by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) focused on skilled nursing care – treatment in nursing homes for up to 35 days after a patient was discharged from an acute care hospital. Doctors working with the inspector general’s office reviewed medical records of 653 randomly selected Medicare patients from more than 600 facilities.

The doctors found that 22 percent of patients suffered events that caused lasting harm, and another 11 percent were temporarily harmed. In 1.5 percent of cases the patient died because of poor care, the report said. Though many who died had multiple illnesses, they had been expected to survive.

The injuries and deaths were caused by substandard treatment, inadequate monitoring, delays or the failure to provide needed care, the study found. The deaths involved problems such as preventable blood clots, fluid imbalances, excessive bleeding from blood-thinning medications and kidney failure.

One patient suffered an undiagnosed lung collapse because caregivers failed to recognize symptoms. The patient later had a reaction to medication and a blood clot and had to be transferred to a hospital.

Projected nationally, the study estimated that 21,777 patients were harmed and 1,538 died due to substandard skilled nursing care during August 2011, the month for which records were sampled.

Medicare patients “deserve better,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. Nelson said he would push for better inspections of the facilities. He said,


“This report paints a troubling picture of the care that’s being provided in some of our nation’s nursing homes”.

The report said it is possible to reduce the number of patients being harmed. It calls on the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to promote patient safety efforts in nursing homes as they have done in hospitals.

The authors also suggest that CMS instruct the state agencies that inspect nursing homes to review what they are doing to identify and reduce adverse events.

In its response to the report, CMS agreed with the findings and noted that the Affordable Care Act requires nursing homes to develop Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement programs. The agency’s quality improvement work includes a website for nursing homes that was launched in 2013.

A “skilled nursing” facility provides specialized care and rehabilitation services to patients following a hospital stay of three days or more. There are more than 15,000 skilled nursing facilities nationwide, and about 90 percent of them are also certified as nursing homes, which provide longer-term care.

As hospitals have moved to shorten patient stays, skilled nursing care has grown dramatically. Medicare spending on skilled nursing facilities more than doubled to $26 billion between 2000 and 2010. About one-in-five Medicare patients who were hospitalized in 2011 spent time in a skilled nursing facility.

John Sheridan, a member of the American College of Health Care Administrators, which represents nursing home executives, called the report valuable but noted that it sampled only a small number of patients. He questioned whether the findings apply broadly to skilled nursing facilities.

Sheridan also strongly disagreed with the report’s observation that there’s less known about patient safety in skilled nursing facilities compared to hospitals. He said Medicare has robust inspections of nursing homes it certifies – they take place annually or when there are complaints and are usually conducted by state contractors. Medicare also keeps detailed data on the violations, he said. (ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect makes it easy to search and view Medicare inspection reports.)

Sheridan agreed that skilled nursing facilities could improve, but said the caregivers face a daunting task and work diligently despite low reimbursements Medicare pays to the facilities.

Sheridan said of the providers that -

“They don’t go to work every day to cause an adverse event. They do it to care for the residents there. They do it with sacrifice and love.”

Dr. Jonathan Evans, president of the American Medical Directors Association, a group focused on nursing home care, said while he doesn’t dispute the estimates in the inspector general’s report, they are typical of problems that exist throughout the health care sector.

Evans said that patients receiving skilled nursing care are leaving hospitals sooner and that many are not medically stable and have more intensive needs. Nursing homes, originally designed for long-term patients who did not need intensive care, and have been slow to adapt, Evans added.

He said,

“You have a system of long-term care that’s trying to retrofit to be a system for post-acute care. The resources to care for them and commitment from those sending them from one facility to another haven’t kept pace.”


Evans called the study significant and said he hopes it raises awareness and sparks improvements.

Makary, the Johns Hopkins’ doctor, said the patient safety movement has been more focused on problems at hospitals than in nursing homes.

A 2010 report by the HHS inspector general estimated that 180,000 patients a year die from bad hospital care, and other estimates have been higher. The patient safety research community has focused on reducing bloodstream infections and surgical errors at hospitals but has done less to address issues specific to nursing homes, Makary said.

Developing metrics to track improvement would be more effective than annual inspections, which don’t do a good job of capturing a facility’s everyday performance, Makary said.

Patient advocates said the study verifies what they’ve heard from skilled nursing patients and their families. Richard Mollot, executive director of New York’s Long Term Care Community Coalition, said he was “flabbergasted” by medication errors, bedsores and falls that were identified in the report.

They are prominent problems that nursing homes should be “well versed” to address, he said.

Mollot said the report should have more forcefully called for better enforcement of the existing standards in nursing homes.

States inspect nursing homes on behalf of Medicare every year and when there are complaints, he said, but some inspectors are tougher than others. Medicare’s current standards of care are good, he said, and “if they were enforced we wouldn’t have these widespread problems.”

About 40 percent of people over age 65 will spend time in a nursing home at some point, Mollot said. Hopefully, he said, the inspector general’s report will help the public see that care needs to improve.

He said,

“They are dangerous, dangerous places”.

_____________________________________________

This article show too where things will go in the US if neo-liberals remain in charge. Spain has been taken by the worst of TROIKA politicians and the public sector is being gutted and a strong public health care system and quality wages and staffing dismantled. Remember, Trans Pacific Trade Pact (TPP) and its Atlantic Trade deal pushes the dismantling of public health all over the world so US private health systems will maximize profits. Here is a former first world country moving to third world in one fell swoop. This is the goal of TPP---to take formerly first world nations to the level of developing countries under the guise of needing to be competitive globally.

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU----ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS!


Outrage as nurses are appointed at less than €4 per hour

by TPN/ Lusa, in News · 05-07-2012

Portugal’s national nurses register publicly announced on Monday that it considered it “scandalous” for nursing professionals to be placed on contracts earning less than four euros per hour and appealed for those who could “not to accept” the proposals.
Outrage as nurses are appointed at less than €4 per hour


This is a scandal for Portugal, for a first world country, that is offering highly qualified professionals at a price per hour that is incompatible with their profession and their dignity," said Germano Couto from the national nurses register Ordem dos Enfermeiros, adding that he had received "a series of denunciations" from "tens of nurses who have contracts at €3.96 per hour."


Mr. Couto spoke in reaction to news published in Diário de Noticias that nurses hired by temping agencies for the health centres of Lisbon and the Tagus Valley region who started work on Monday will receive less than four euros per hour.

He guaranteed that the news piece "is real" and "there are facts and evidence", although he added that he hoped it "isn’t more than a series of intentions" and so "may be reverted by the Lisbon and Tagus Valley regional health authority and the Ministry of Health."

Mr. Couto added that the government may be "paying more to these companies" for them to "obtain their profit" but highlighted that it is necessary to check whether these companies are fulfilling the contract conditions, as the €3.96 per hour the nurses will earn equates to €300 in their pockets at the end of the month, which doesn’t even qualify as minimum wage.

Currently, the average wage deemed acceptable for nurses in Portugal is around €1,020 per month, which is around seven euros per hour and that value "should be the yardstick the government should use."

Following the news of the reduced wages for new nursing contracts in the Lisbon area, the national nurses register has "appealed to nurses not to accept these contracts if they are able," adding that they do however understand if some go ahead "so as not to lose their status."

Mr. Couto considers that many health professionals prefer to move abroad rather than end up unemployed or lose their status, criticising that Portugal is "training nurses for export" at a time when there is need in the country.

In response to the news, the Lisbon and the Tagus Valley health authority (ARSLVT) announced that the nursing contracts were put to tender at prices per hour varying between €4.77 and €5.19 and declined any responsibility of wages being paid below four euros per hour.

The price per hour "results from the public tender whereby the companies involved presented their proposals," ARSLVT said in a statement.

The health authority said it had launched a public tender for the acquisition of nurses with a base value of €8.50 per hour, which corresponds to the average price on the market for this type of service.

"The values presented by firms that responded to the public tender were substantially lower than the base value, and all those 50 percent below it were excluded from the public tender because of the legal reason that they were abnormally low values," said the statement.


ARSLVT added that "the majority of firms presented values much reduced compared to that proposed by ARSLVT, with a price being fixed between €4.77 and €5.19" in the end.

"Negotiation of salaries and conditions is the exclusive responsibility of the firms that responded to the public tender and their staff," the regional health authority concluded.
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March 14th, 2014

3/14/2014

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We want to thank Unite Here 7 for all of the hard work this union does for the workers it supports.  The leadership braved the civil disobedience of risking arrest to shout out as hard as they could about the abuse of workers in Maryland!

NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND REALLY HATE WORKERS!



This rally in Annapolis was a powerful event.  The number of people coming to these rallies are growing and the general public is waking up and joining.  We thank workers who risks their jobs and retribution from employers to stand with unions as we rebuild Maryland's labor laws and protections.

Low-wage is not only a problem for those not finishing school or going for higher education.  It is happening to all workers no matter the degrees.  Remember, neo-liberals intend to create in the US what corporations had in third world countries and professionals earn little more than those impoverished at the bottom pay scale.  Doctor, lawyer, and Indian Chief earn next to nothing in third world countries.  It is the middle-class that has the power of voice and money to fight this and must stand with all citizens.  Remember,

AN INJUSTICE FOR ONE WILL BECOME AN INJUSTICE FOR ALL!


I want to shout out as well that labor and justice need to take the status of public private partnership to court as an illegal entity.  In this one case of the BWI workers and AirMall....you have a publicly owned airport run by Maryland Transportation Authority allowing private corporate national chains to act illegally.  They are allowing as well for those employees not to be paid what should be a public employee wage and benefit. You see, if the government owns the property then the rules of the state need to apply.  The idea that the state and localities are going to get away from protecting employees with these private partnerships and indeed, actually work to exploit these employees because it brings more money into government coffers all while protecting AirMall from corporate taxes is illegal. 

MARYLAND CITIZENS MUST NOT ALLOW A GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE THAT SEEKS NOT ONLY TO IMPOVERISH AND EXPLOIT CITIZENS FOR ITS OWN REVENUES WHILE PROTECTING CORPORATIONS FROM PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE......BUT, AT THE SAME TIME THESE PARTNERSHIP STRUCTURES TAKE AWAY PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY-----WHICH IS THE POINT OF PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS.


If taken to court I feel certain that this status will/should be found illegal.  It will have to be taken outside of Maryland because Maryland courts have been stacked with corporate judges by O'Malley.

Rally and March in Annapolis

Public · By Unite Here Local 7


    • Thursday, March 13, 2014
    • 12:00pm
  • Asbury United Methodist Church 87 West Street, Annapolis Maryland
  • Join us as we stand in solidariy with workers at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport.

    Busses will leave from Unite Here Local 7 offices at 1800 North Charles Street at 10 a.m. Rally will begin at Asbury United Methodist church located at 87 West Street, Annapolis, Maryland followed by a march to Lawyer's Mall.

    Why are we marching?

    Non-tipped concessions workers a BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport earn a median wage of $8.50 per hour. Only 17% of surveyed workers reported that they received health insurance through their jobs. Only 10% of surveyed workers reported that they received paid sick day. The lowest paid employees of the Maryland Aviation Authority receive $13.45 per hour. They are guaranteed health insurance, paid sick days, and a pension.

    The Thurgood Marshall Equal Pay Act creates a waqe equity supplement whereby the state of Mayland will temporarily make up the difference between the wages of concessions workers and those of the lowest-paid employees of the Maryland Aviation Authority.

    Join us as we march towards equality at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Many, many thanks to all of the 300+ of you who came out to our march today! We had a wonderful and inspiring day. More photos to come. — at Maryland State House.

_________________________________________
First, we need to acknowledge that the Maryland and local government structural budget deficits are created by massive corporate fraud and corruption and corporate welfare in the form of corporate tax breaks......it has nothing to do with public services, public employees, and public programs.

That said, we want to remind these public union leaders that 1/2 of pension value was lost to pension fraud in the 2007 economic collapse.  Throwing pensions from the then safety of the bond market into an imploding stock market in 2007 to collapsing buoy big banks is public malfeasance and corporate fraud.  It was intentional and it was duplicitous.

UNION LAWYERS NEED TO GET THAT 1/2 VALUE LOST TO FRAUD BACK ALONG WITH ALL THE GAINS THOSE FUNDS WOULD HAVE HAD IN THIS PAST BULL MARKET.

O'Malley has underfunded and defunded pensions from his tenure as Mayor of Baltimore.  It is no secret that he does not intend on public sector workers getting much if any of those promised and contracted benefits, whether pensions or health care.  Public sector unions had better know their health plans will be thrown into these private state health systems and will be worth whatever tier an employee can pay....for city and state employees who do not make much.....that will be Medicaid or Bronze at best....both mostly preventative care.


This game that Maryland media and government officials play with union leaders has two goals:  First, by threatening unions with loss of union rights or future wage increases the intent is to make the unions concede to bade deals.  DEMOCRATIC POLS WOULD NOT DO THAT!  Second, by announcing that union leaders knew of this deal that hurt its membership it undermines confidence in unions and their leadership.  This is deliberate.  Finally, when union leaders feel they must support the same politicians who place them in these positions-----they endanger the future of unions in Maryland.  So, to take the pressure off of unions and leadership to allow them to do the right thing for their membership

THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND MUST RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES SO LABOR WILL HAVE FRIENDLY POLITICIANS AND GOVERNMENT APPOINTEES IN OFFICE.  WAKE UP-----WHAT IS HAPPENING TO THESE LABOR GROUPS WILL COME TO YOU UPPER- MIDDLE-CLASS MARYLANDERS!

Union leaders have to stop this race to the bottom and run their own candidates in primaries.  Labor cannot support neo-liberals who are killing them!

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU AND ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS!



Unions, pension board unhappy O’Malley cut $100M in promised payment to retirement fund


January 17, 2014 at 6:58 am

By Len Lazarick

Len@MarylandReporter.com

IMarch 15, 2011, Alvin Thornton (in suit) and union leaders head march to State House.

The largest unions representing state workers and public school teachers are upset at Gov. Martin O’Malley’s decision to permanently cut $100 million from extra payments into the state pension system. The money came from additional employee salary deductions required by a 2011 pension reform, and was intended to help cure underfunding in the pension system.

The Board of Trustees of the State Retirement and Pension System, headed by State Treasurer Nancy Kopp, is also opposed to reducing the promised $300 million payment down to $200 million. This delays the goal of funding of the state pensions system at 80% by a full year, from 2024 to 2025. The pension system was 100% funded 12 years ago, but 80% is the accepted standard for public systems.

MarylandReporter.com raised the issue at the governor’s news conference on his proposed budget Wednesday. O’Malley had not mentioned cutting the pension payment in his presentation, even though it is listed as the largest spending reduction he is proposing to balance next year’s budget.

After his explanation of the change, O’Malley was specifically asked if the public employee unions had signed off on the reduction.
The video of the Jan. 15 news conference shows O’Malley turning to Chief of Staff John Griffin and Budget Secretary Eloise Foster, and both nod their heads indicating the unions had agreed. (The video is in the video library under Jan. 15, 2014 and the exchange takes place around minute 41.)

Unions unaware of the change

Looking west from the State House steps, thousands fill Lawyer’s Mall, Bladen Street and Rowe Boulevard for the “Keep the Promise” rally against pension changes in 2011.

On Thursday, representatives of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Maryland State Education Association told a reporter that they were not aware of the $100 million cut in this year’s pension payment. The union representatives also seemed totally unaware that O’Malley wanted to make the cut permanent by changing the law in the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act of 2014 (page 11) that he introduced Wednesday to implement the budget.

“AFSCME members don’t agree with the state’s decision to underfund pension contributions,” said Patrick Moran, president of  AFSCME Maryland. “We’re hopeful the state will balance its budget and make its pensions contributions — just like state employees do every year.”

But the permanent cut is exactly what Foster recommended in a report sent Wednesday to the budget committees and the Joint Committee on Pensions.

Foster’s report also includes the position of the pension board; it “strongly recommends” that the state continue to make the $300 million payment.

The board said the savings achieved by restructuring benefits should be plowed back into the pension system, which is currently only about 65% funded.

“It should be noted that of the total $300 million reinvestment, approximately two-thirds is a result of the fact that the reforms increased employee contributions,” the board said.

The 2011 pension reform legislation, which O’Malley pointed out caused “the largest public employee protest” of his administration, raised employee contributions from 5% to 7% of salary.

Cut made to balance budget, reduce structural deficit

At Wednesday’s budget rollout, from right, Gov. Martin O’Malley, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, Budget Secretary Eloise Foster, Chief of Staff John Griffin.

O’Malley said the proposed cut in pension payment was “due to more favorable actuarial forecasts.” But Foster’s report makes clear the motivation was to balance the budget this year and “improve budget sustainability by reducing the structural deficit.”

The cut in the pension payment will save the state $1.2 billion over the next five years. The state has not making its full annual required contribution established by the outside actuaries for more than a decade. Only last year did it approve a change to the funding method to address the shortfall.

The $300 million cap on reinvestment of pension savings was controversial in 2011 at the time the pension changes were passed. The teachers union wanted even more money put back into the system.

________________________________________

As I listened this morning to corporate WYPR regarding the fact that Maryland has one of the highest immigrant arrest by ICE and that 43% of the arrests involved people with no criminal background I waited for just one word of acknowledgement that immigrants in Maryland are being fleeced of their wages and abused in the workplace.  NOT ONE WORD. 

MARYLAND MEDIA WANTS TO SHOW CONCERN FOR IMMIGRANTS WITH THE IDEA OF 'TRUSTING' POLICE WHILE THEY ARE BEING EXPLOITED AND ABUSED IN THE WORKPLACE.

The reason Maryland media does this is that they want more immigrants to come to Maryland to be fleeced and abused to enrich the corporations committing these crimes.  Nothing hurts a corporate policy of luring immigrants to work to abuse them then reports of arrests and harassment by ICE.

THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND ARE DEMANDING THAT NEO-LIBERALS IN THIS STATE STOP IGNORING THE FACT THAT LOW-WAGE WORKERS, BOTH IMMIGRANT AND DOMESTIC ARE OPENLY FLEECED OF THEIR WAGES JUST AS IF THEY WORKED IN A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY!

At the same time, Immigrant Justice groups must stop supporting the very politicians allowing this abuse.  Neo-liberals passing the Dream Act or Immigration Reform are doing it for Trans Pacific Trade Deal agreements, not to protect and help immigrants here now.  TPP allows ever growing numbers of high-skilled immigrants and their families will have the money to go to universities in Maryland......most domestic immigrants will not as all they earn is stolen.  Dream Act is directed at future high-skilled immigrants. Most immigrants already in America will, like low-wage Americans, be funneled through vocational tracking and job training community colleges.  This is not an American Dream, believe me.

The Senate's Immigration Bill is tied to TPP too.  It is market-based and designed not only to flood the high-skilled market with immigrant workers.....but it allows growing numbers of third world immigrants to be brought to the US and exploited just as they would be in that third world country.  Immigrants already in the US will be pushed into an even more abusive work environment if that is even imaginable. 


NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AT THE EXPENSE OF LABOR AND JUSTICE.....STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES.  RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARY ELECTIONS TO SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERALS OUT OF THE PARTY!

Immigrants in America now have to know that the democratic party IS the party of the people.  It has simply been hijacked by corporate politicians that need to go.

Immigrants' Rights

The PJC’s Immigrants’ Rights Project seeks to protect and expand the rights of low-wage and poverty-stricken immigrants in Maryland. We are concerned with wage theft, consumer law issues, housing abuses and want to ensure that immigrants have access to state courts, programs and agencies.


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

Wage Theft Shatters American Dream for Many Low-Income Immigrants Wage theft in the United States has reached near epidemic levels among low-wage workers.

Korean immigrant workers, represented by AALDEF, held a protest with supporters against abusive employment practices at a New Jersey restaurant in April, 2010."



  • December 27, 2011

Eight years ago, “Mrs. Kim” came to the United States from China “to pursue her American Dream,” but thanks to unscrupulous business practices familiar to many Asian immigrants working in low-wage industries, things went horribly wrong.

Kim, who did not want to use her real name because she is still involved in litigation, began life in the U.S. preparing dumplings and side dishes at a Korean restaurant in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The job went well for a few years. It was hard, but Kim was getting paid for her efforts.

“When I first started working, [the owner] agreed to pay me $600 per week,” she said. “Specific hours were not indicated, but she did indicate I would have to work over 12 hours per day.”

Though she worked as many as 17 hours a day, when the restaurant’s business started to decline, the owner began paying employees late or not paying them at all.

Kim is suing her former boss for more than $40,000 in minimum and overtime wages that have been withheld and additional liquidated damages.

“Wage and labor laws are designed to cover every worker. Immigration doesn’t come into it. But that’s not what we’ve seen in Asian-American communities,” said Shirley Lin, an attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), who has taken Kim’s case. “We’ve seen employers push them to the extreme with long hours and abusive practices.”

Easy Targets

Lin said that employers in these kinds of situations often threaten to report the employee to immigration authorities if they challenge the abuse.

She said Asian immigrant workers in low-wage industries, like their Latino, African-American and Caucasian counterparts, are susceptible to wage theft for a variety of reasons, including language barriers, fear of deportation and a lack of education about their rights.

Wage theft in the United States has reached near epidemic levels among low-wage workers, according to a landmark 2008 national survey of nearly 4,000 low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

Seventy percent of the workers surveyed were foreign-born.

The survey, which was conducted by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, found over two-thirds of low-wage workers experienced “at least one pay-related violation” in the work week reported.

Furthermore, 26 percent of workers were paid less than the legal minimum wage; 76 percent of employees who worked overtime were not paid the legally required overtime rate; 70 percent of workers who performed work outside of their regular shifts did not receive any pay for this work; and 30 percent of tipped workers were not paid the tipped minimum wage.

Lacking an income, Kim said she was forced to borrow money from friends and not pay bills just to survive.

“They’re making employees suffer,” Kim said. “If you can’t run a business and pay your employees, you shouldn’t run a business. You shouldn’t take advantage of workers like this.”

She is now working at another restaurant and said she’s extremely stressed and tired from her experience with her former employer.

“I can’t sleep at night. It’s affecting my future employment because I’m not as strong. I’ve cried many tears over this employer.”

Paying the Boss

There is an added dimension to Kim’s struggles.

Her stress grew when her previous boss began pressuring employees to lend their money to support the business, another manifestation of wage theft, said Lin. Kim submitted, giving up around $55,000.

She said her boss would appear to pay her back by giving her postdated checks, but she was often told not to deposit them and when she did, the checks bounced.

“At the time I lent her money, I trusted her,” Kim said. “I thought she would share her success with her employees, but that’s not how it turned out. I helped her open a second restaurant. The owner became very greedy, borrowed money from employees and delayed paying our wages.”

Conning workers into giving loans is not the most common type of theft, which usually comes in the form of failure to pay, not paying required overtime wages, not paying for work required before and after a shift, or paying less than the minimum wage.

Kim, who has a husband and son back in China who she has not seen for eight years, said she sometimes regrets coming to the U.S. because of the stress caused by failing victim to, and fighting, wage theft.

"My husband has threatened to divorce me because of this,” she said. “My family wants me close to them, but because this is so important to me, I don’t want to give up.”

Kim’s is not an isolated case.

According to the survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development, Asians immigrants were the most susceptible to overtime abuse and off-the-clock violations compared to other racial groups studied.

Cracking Down

The problem has spurred a number of groups to try to help, including Adhikaar, which assists Nepalese, and the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, which aims to protect Chinese immigrants from exploitation.

Lin said workers like Kim are in a “vacuum of oversight and enforcement of our labor laws.”

“Without any government oversight, it falls upon the workers to hold the line against these kinds of unscrupulous employers.”

According to Nancy J. Leppink, deputy administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the division has increased its number of investigators. They help to enforce minimum wage, overtime pay, record-keeping, child labor and other labor laws.

This reverses a trend cited by the Government Accountability Office, which found that enforcement actions by the WHD decreased from 51,643 in 1998 to 29,584 in 2007, despite an increase in the number of worksites and employees. The number of investigators in the WHD decreased by 20 percent during this period, falling to just 732 nationwide in 2007.

“Since  2009, the WHD has hired more than 300 investigators, bringing the agency’s total to more than 1,000 investigators,” Leppink wrote in an email. “In 2011, WHD collected a record number of back wages, which totaled $224.8 million, and helped over 275,000 workers. These additional resources, coupled with WHD’s changes to how it prioritizes its work to be more strategic, have clearly revived WHD’s enforcement program on behalf of the workers in this country.”

She added that more than 600 of WHD’s investigators speak a language other than English, including Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese.

“Some of our WHD staff are fluent in many languages,” Leppink wrote. “We also have available a language interpretive service which can assist with translation in more than 170 languages.”

Room for Improvement

While Lin called these developments “laudable,” she’d said she would like to see the specifics of how these resources are allocated.

“Navigating a wage claim is extremely complex, and in some cases takes more than a year,” she said. “Telephonic access is a good step, but the critical stage of the investigation is [done] onsite and typically includes interviewing an employer who might be monolingual and employees who speak many different languages. The DOL should take proactive steps to figure out what communities are in more need of language access among its staff investigators.”

There still may be hope for wage theft victims like Kim. Some of these cases do have happy endings.

Earlier this month, three Korean chefs were able to recover nearly $40,000 in unpaid wages from a sushi restaurant after one, who had worked with AALDEF before, organized them to take action.


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March 12th, 2014

3/12/2014

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Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland stands for strong public, private libraries, and research institutions  


NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AND CONTROL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!  HEATHER MIZEUR SAYS SHE IS PROGRESSIVE?  HAVE YOU HEARD HER SHOUT AGAINST ALL OF THIS? SHE SUPPORTS PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND WALL STREET CREDIT BOND LEVERAGE FOR THESE KINDS OF THINGS!



MOVING ALL FEDERAL AND STATE FUNDING OF EDUCATION TO PRIVATE CORPORATE NON-PROFITS AND EDUCATION BUSINESSES IS DELIBERATELY MEANT TO PRIVATIZE AND CLOSE PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS DEDICATED TO PUBLIC INTEREST.  THIS SHOULD HAVE EVERYONE ON THE STREETS.



  To:  Citizens for Maryland Libraries

I would like to share my views of policy that will concern the vision and mission of Maryland libraries.  As an academic currently working as a research professional I live in libraries and archives so I am one of the most frequent users of the institutions for which you advocate.  I would be a real friend to public and private libraries and research institutions. 

First, let me clarify a policy stance that drives my policies on education and by extension how libraries fit into education at all levels.  We have watched these few years of Governor O’Malley’s term the embracing of a Federal policy advanced by the Obama Administration under the direction of his Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Race to the Top and this policy guides any questions regarding libraries and Common Core materials.  As a progressive labor and justice candidate I see Race to the Top as an assault on public education K-12 and with it Common Core.  I will work hard to restore rigor and accountability in all public schools as I too agree that we have failed to assure these standards in public schools these few decades.  I think Race to the Top and Common Core are not the best approach for doing this.  Indeed, I feel these policies work against the very goal stated by politicians pushing this agenda.  The method of implementation of Race to the Top shows what I feel is a desperate attempt to move education policy that Federal officials know the public does not want and they are doing as quickly as possible with such a lack of transparency as to have no avenue for public comment and input in what is the cornerstone to our democratic society-------democratic education and equal opportunity and access to all education.  Common Core sold as a standardization of curricula is not progressive but regressive.  It is not even about making sure there is consistency across America in subject content and rigor.  As anyone who has a background in science and education as I do knows……STEM courses are already standardized.  Facts are facts and courses from science, technology, engineering, and math are fact based.  Now, some people may say that areas like evolution and environment have prejudice in political beliefs, but if students are required to know science standards for existing national tests, those requirements will continue to drive course content.  My concern with Common Core is more with the humanities and liberal arts where standardization greatly jeopardizes democratic freedom of thought and speech as each region of this nation has its own experiences with socio-economic evaluation, civics, history, music, literature, etc.  We do not want to standardize that which makes a nation a plurality.  As a progressive I do not like conservative states writing out the labor and civil rights era every opportunity they get, but I also would not like having the Bush Administration writing the Common Core history lesson on their administration’s foreign policies on War and torture.  Standardization never works well at a time when government is controlled by what we all know to be corporate culture that does not have the public interest in mind in writing policy.  So, just as a general statement on education policy I will open with my intent to fight Race to the Top implementation in Maryland.  My appointments would be strong public education advocates and my bully-pulpit as governor would address the Maryland Assembly as regards the movement of policy that has so little research showing its legitimacy in creating the achievements it states and the unwise decision to move forward so quickly with policy that has not had public comment, development of core materials to be used, and the discussions as to where these policies lead the state in the long-term.  I believe the majority of citizens in Maryland, both democrat and republican are not comfortable with these policies and particularly their being implemented without discussion and thought.     Please see my website Citizens Oversight Maryland.com for very clearly written policy stances on this education policy.  Keep in mind I am an activist and this site is written to be populist.  Accountability and public oversight is the passion of my campaign.  

Now, on to  three specific questions directed at libraries: 

1.        One of the greatest achievements of our last economic revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was philanthropy that gave us the public institutions of learning and the public library system we have today.  The idea that all people living in America were to be educated in a way that prepares them to be leaders and to be citizens is central to our Founding Father’s writing of the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.  Public places were key to the American people being both.  The legal case of Brown vs Board of Education was successful in that the dictate of equal opportunity and access to public education was already a given; it was simply the acknowledgement, as if this needed to be acknowledged, that all men are created equal includes people of color.  So, simply having this philosophy of education identifies me as someone who by extension values the library system in providing that access and opportunity to all.  If we look at the future as regards digitization of all information and the ability of citizens here in America to afford the tools needed to access this digital information we know that libraries will be even more necessary to open access to many people.  Right now, for many it is libraries that offer the only access to the internet and as public schools become more wired and computers become integrated in lessons, access to computers outside the classroom is critical.  Funding for this transition in classrooms is a good thing and we need to see that libraries and community centers are viewed as equally needing of funding to meet these changes.   We are seeing a movement in Maryland of using private education non-profits to serve in providing after-school programs and even in-school programs.  Libraries on the other hand are being left to feel that budgets could be slashed or branches closed at any time.  The movement of these educational outlets from the public to these private non-profits shows a desire to privatize our public sources and services.  I write extensively on the negative impact of public-private partnerships and where I do see good coming from some of these partnerships the goal is clearly to make these relationships the rule and not the exception.  This will not end well for libraries whether public or private.  As a researcher I know that access to research is becoming limited as even universities are making research protected from public view through patents and by extension librarians are now having to tell consumers of the library sources that once accessible data is now proprietary.  This also limits what librarians can say in the course of their duties while on the clock and as we all know, Federal rules regarding surveillance of public records has librarians forced to operate in ways they may find disagreeable.  We see this as an assault on free speech and freedom of information.  All of this falls into policy that attempts to privatize our public spaces.    In order for an education policy to be dynamic and promote success for all Marylanders, we cannot restrict our public spaces and the flow of public information with these categorization of quasi-governmental or public private.  It is repressive and it hurts everyone.  We want to build community educational programs, we want to make libraries center of these communities and a vital part of each school’s structure.  This requires strong funding to public schools and I will say that the current policy of allowing corporations to donate rather than pay taxes skews all attempts at making educational opportunities equal.  Tiered-per-pupil funding in Baltimore for example with the desire to run individual schools as businesses has some schools pressed to buy toilet paper for the children’s bathrooms so whether that school has a good library falls to the whim of private donation.  This is not democratic and public education.  It does not meet the US Constitutional requirement of democratic and equal opportunity.  Libraries that are tied to private donation rather than by public funding are then under the restrictions that come with that donation and, indeed, that is the point of this policy.  Libraries whether private or public will not serve their consumers if policy is dictated by private donation only.  I know, Carnegie was one big private donation but he had the foresight of placing them in the hands of public operation.   We must continue the public funding of library resources of all kinds and with it public access and programming developed with the public in mind.  In Baltimore, small libraries have been defunded and public access ended because of cuts to library budgets and branches are in fear each budget season that the axe may fall.  Politicians thinking all information is online will be the ones who view physical buildings for libraries as extraneous.   In conclusion, I value private non-profits operating as a source for after-school programs.  I feel that libraries are already in the position of providing these programs as well.  A well-resourced library already in a community is necessary for any well-developed education mission.  In this age of technology we would want our libraries to have the same resources as our classrooms so the connection to after-school consumers is there.  

2.        Since I am not a supporter of all of the testing and evaluation policy I do not see a need to expand preparation for testing to libraries more than what exists right now.  Education that is broad and experiential needs to have more opportunity in group projects and exposure to any number of learning skill development tools.  Classroom teachers are not able to do the level of educational skills development needed for achievement and this is where libraries can be an excellent source for parents and students in their after-school choices.  We desperately need all hands on deck with skills development and I do not feel that private non-profits are the only avenue for this.  Our Pratt Central Library has wonderful programs for children and with a bigger budget would have the space to expand as a meeting place for after-school programs.  Having library staff coming to public community centers to help build and implement these programs, funding of mobile library buses all are extremely valuable in attaining educational goals in Maryland.  The upside down education policy of having students going online after school to prepare for classroom lessons is an excellent opportunity for libraries so having the software and materials used in the classrooms at the library is a must.  Parents have never needed more resources than now in learning how to help their children meet these new classroom requirements.   I cannot begin to share the importance for every student in having a library to which to retreat for all kinds of reasons.  Libraries are not only about classroom K-college.  They have as a mission to be the sight of Lifelong Learning.  To be able to meet this mission libraries must be well-resourced.  It is expensive to outfit a library for those with disabilities or to make sure the library collections cater to all kinds of tastes and cultural backgrounds.  All attempts to cut budgets makes the libraries less able to do this and in turn make them attractive to fewer people.  If your goal was to be rid of libraries, that would be the mechanism.  Look to the US Post Office to see this strategy for dismantling a national public treasure!  

3.       I will say as Governor of Maryland my responsibilities to move forward policies regarding Race to the Top will remain until a time comes that this policy can be changed.  It is my intent to push for this.  That said, as State Executive it will be my responsibility to move forward policy dictated by past legislation and indeed, MCC-RS and Common Core are those policies.  That said, I will be sure to see that libraries have what is needed to make them central in implementing this policy and support public school teachers in their classrooms and with promoting the success of students in achievement on these tests.  The amount of education funding going into implementing these Race to the Top policies is outrageous for people knowing all our public schools need are resources and rigor.  So, it would be my job to look carefully at all of the private consultants, all of the private educational businesses tied with this Race to the Top and assess how we might better implement these policies by using the resources such as libraries already in our community.  Since Race to the Top is mostly about growing an education business industry, corporate politicians working for these corporations are no doubt bringing the state into lots of business deals that may not be needed or effective.  I would look at these contracts to see how we can bring libraries and public community centers into the loop in assuring student readiness for these tests.  As a former classroom teacher I know these teachers are overwhelmed and really have little ability to accomplish all that is being placed upon them so quickly.  I would make it my goal to give relief to these classroom teachers in whatever way I can and that would extend to bringing in existing educational sources like libraries and librarians.     


WALSH FOR GOVERNOR IS A GREAT BIG FAN OF LIBRARIES AND ALL RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS AND IN PROTECTING US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF FREE SPEECH, CIVIL LIBERTIES, AND CIVIL RIGHTS THAT GO WITH EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS! 


Update: Vermont Library Lays Off Whole Staff; Librarians Protest

By Meredith Schwartz on January 8, 2013 This article has been updated to include video footage of the “Hug” of the Athenaeum on January 12.

On December 3rd, 2012, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum Board of Trustees announced it would lay off its entire library, docent, and information technology staff, then “ask them to consider applying for the newly formed Athenaeum positions,” Bill Marshall, chair of the Athenaeum Board of Trustees, said in a letter.

The first goal of the radical restructuring is to reduce costs: the library is eating into its endowment. It could be depleted in as little as seven years if spending continues at the current rate, which the Athenaeum’s Executive Director, Matthew Powers, said was between 10 and 20 percent per year, rather than the recommended 4.5 percent. The plan will cut personnel spending by eight percent, or about $40,000. Powers told LJ that personnel is the “single highest line” in the library-cum-museum’s budget. “Last year personnel costs were roughly $340,000 out of a total budget roughly of $500,000, and that doesn’t take into account the deficit,” he explained.

Although it is the staff restructuring that is raising the most controversy, Powers told LJ it’s far from the only cut. “Within the overall budget we reduced about $150,000; so we didn’t just look at the personnel budget,” said Powers. Other cutbacks affected general expenses and facilities. “No stone was unturned,” Power continued.

The other stated goal of the restructuring is to gear the Athenaeum up to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing world of librarianship, including a new focus on digitization, research and technical assistance, super-broadband Internet access, and off-site services, as well as more emphasis on programs and collaboration with other institutions. However, it is not entirely clear how the restructuring would place more emphasis on technology use and support, since it replaces a dedicated employee with an IT contractor.

According to Laurel Stanley, a retired academic library director, public library trustee, Athenaeum member and donor, and member of the Vermont Library Association Board, a new focus on these goals isn’t necessary. “They’re saying that the Athenaeum is behind in new services and technology and that’s just not true,” said Stanley. “The Athenaeum is definitely a leader in the Northeast Kingdom [section of Vermont], and measures well compared to other libraries in the state.”

According to a second letter from the Board, the Athenaeum is moving from a team of eight people working in the library—most part-time—to a team of four people, two of whom are full time. (Plus a new curatorial position which requires museum, not library, expertise, and a full time development position.) The letter compared the decision to the also-controversial restructuring at Harvard University, and also includes a Q&A section describing some background:

Q: Is there a future for public libraries?

A: Yes! Absolutely yes! There is an important role for public libraries, but it’s going to be different. Preparing for this new role for our library is the fundamental reason we are restructuring. Moreover, this change is occurring with great speed and we have some catching up to do. This is the reason we felt we needed to take a bold step forward, instead of small, incremental changes.

The Athenaeum’s new library positions include a full time librarian and assistant librarian, a part time assistant librarian, and a part time youth services librarian. Although the Board’s letter stated that the people hired into the four new positions will be qualified librarians, according to the job posting, an MLS is not required for any of the positions. While Vermont considers someone with a department of library certification to be a qualified librarian, Stanley told LJ, “it is highly unusual that a library the size of the Athenaeum would not have at least one MLS. You can’t tell me you’re going to do catching up and then say you don’t need an MLS.”

While the Athenaeum says the restructuring does not result in any significant cut in staffing, Stanley disagrees, saying the 130 hours of library staffing that the new positions provide will be insufficient to both staff the Athenaeum’s two service desks and children’s room for the library’s current 42-43 open hours per week, and provide the additional outreach services and programming called for by the plan. Likewise, expanding non-library positions such as a curator, a development director, a book keeper, and a custodian, while reducing library staff hours, is not focusing on library services, claims Stanley.

Stanley agrees that the budget must be balanced, but feels that “they’ve put far too much money into this art gallery, and library services has been far down” on the list of priorities.

Rural Librarians Unite (RuLU), a newly formed volunteer group, is organizing opposition to the cuts in the form of a “hug” for the library. On Saturday, January 12 at noon, the group will join with the Vermont Library Association and citizens of St. Johnsbury to hold hands around the library.

The demonstration is similar to that organized by 2012 LJ Mover & Shaker Christian Zabriskie in 2011. Zabriskie, founder of Urban Librarians Unite, coordinated a “hug” of the New York Public Library’s main branch, and Lydia Willoughby, spokersperson for RuLU, says that’s not a coincidence. “We contacted ULU before starting anything up here, and got their blessing. The ‘hug’ event was definitely influenced by their work at NYPL.”

The Vermont Library Association (VLA) said in a statement, “While the Vermont Library Association understands the Board’s responsibility for setting direction for their library during a time of financial stress, now, more than ever, Vermonters need libraries–and librarians. The Vermont Library Association feels that the board’s actions demonstrate a devaluation of libraries and the library professionals capable of leading them through a time of intense change in information resources and society.  Librarians are not replaced by the Internet–their skills and training enrich the Internet and facilitate access for all Vermonters.”

Both RuLU and VLA also called on supporters to contact the Athenaeum directly, as well as their elected representatives.

Willoughby told LJ, “While the timing of Rural Librarians Unite was definitely in response to the Athenaeum situation, the story was never about just the Athenaeum library staff…RuLU will serve as an activist force that libraries and librarians can go to whenever they want to get a campaign off the ground for any reason.”

RuLU’s future plans include building library and literacy services for correctional facilities and reentry programs in Vermont, an alternative email listserv for rural librarians to make action plans and share resources, support for safe physical spaces for vulnerable learners and library users, meet ups at independent bookstores, unconferences, collaboration with Every Library on State-wide advocacy, and reaching out to ARSL and other peer organizations. While RuLU is focused on Vermont right now, Willoughby doesn’t rule out expanding nationally/or and working with nearby Canadian libraries.


__


The “Hug” drew a crowd of about 200 people, according to RuLU. Video of the event can be seen below:



HUG the Athenaeum - The People Make the Library

- Jan 12, 2013 RuralLibrariansUnite·1 video
2 864 views 16     0 Published on Jan 13, 2013

In December 2012, the board of trustees at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum laid off 11 library staff and invited them to reapply for 3.25 positions. Rural Librarians Unite organized a rally in response. Here is some footage! We love libraries!

Find out more on our website: rurallibrariansunite.org
facebook: facebook.com/rurallibrariansunite
twitter: @rurallibrarians


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This article shows the same happening in Maryland.  While I do fault union leadership for not shouting and using labor lawyers to fight worker wealth lost to fraud and corruption,these unions need the citizens of the state to come out in support of labor and public services.  When neo-liberals partner with republicans to privatize all that is public.......labor and justice must have public support.

PLEASE MOBILIZE AND SHOUT, PROTEST, PETITION AND RUN FOR OFFICE AT ALL LEVELS!  WE NEED TO TAKE BACK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.

Remember, budget shortfalls come from failure to recover tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud at the national level and tens of billions at the state and local levels.  IT IS ALL ABOUT REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND ACCOUNTABILITY!




SCOD Public Blog
Sustainable Cooperative for Organic Development

Maryland Budget Cuts = Drastic Library Layoffs Maryland State Budget Cuts Public Services




County library workers in unions, pay more than $500 a year in dues. What have all those dues done for them? That is the sum total effect that paying all those union dues has done for thousands of workers in 21st Century Maryland. Luxurious Legislators have waited until the State deficit is almost $800 million, before they decided to radically chop down the life-long careers of countless loyal State workers and their families.

Montgomery County Executive Dictator Isiah Leggett is calling for a reduction in government spending for the first time in more than 40 years. Regardless of political party, there is nothing “democratic” about his legacy. He spent all the County’s money on bullet-proofing his personal security, and a gold-leaf bathroom in his office. Now in his $4.3 billion budget Monday, he calls for cuts across the state, including libraries and other services. The plan also gives schools $137 million LESS than required by the state. Leggett is calling for an energy tax that would cost about $3 per month for the average household. He has called for a $62 million ambulance fee that was rejected by the county council in the past.

All of these drastic cuts are his attempts to address his own political follies that have aggregated into one of the largest budget deficits in the region. Leggett is proposing no pay increase for county employees. He would eliminate hundreds of currently filled jobs and impose 10 days of furloughs for non-public-safety employees. The overall job reduction amounts to well over 750 work years.

This massive reduction in much needed public service, is almost as bad as the General Assembly cuts to Baltimore’s highway aid from the state. The evidence is clear that the public demands more access to these services, yet the wrong decisions are made. There are many ways to cut budgets over a period of years, without forcing a mass exodus.

The future of civilization in Maryland does not look good. Already homeless and people without internet access clamor at the doors of the libraries. What will all those thousands of people do? Get a job with all these cuts? Yeah, right.


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Libraries are now one of the last places for the public to meet in a public space especially in Maryland.  The intent is to take that away as well.  With loss of net neutrality and consolidation of the communications industry, prices will soar and content standardized across the nation in the hands of global corporations.  THE INTENT IS TO CONTROL INFORMATION AND ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION.  Libraries are and will become the only outlet for people to computers and content online. 

Meanwhile, librarians are being threatened by Federal Security agencies against making public illegal searches, illegal blocking of information, and privacy issues libraries have always protected.  Free speech and free flow of information is threatened by neo-liberals.



Librarians Protest Against Budget Cuts At City Hall October 31, 2011 1:32 PM Library Generic (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

CHICAGO (CBS) – It was reading time and protest time for more than 100 city librarians and supporters Monday morning at a rally outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office at City Hall.

WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports that one librarian read to children at City Hall about a “big green monster,” but what librarians found even scarier were the mayor’s planned cuts to the library system.

LISTEN: WBBM Newsradio’s Bernie Tafoya reports




“At a time we’re taking more and more things away from our kids, we need to give them something to expand their imaginations,” said Beverly Cook, who has been with the library system for more than 25 years.

The mayor plans to trim $11 million from the budget for public libraries next year by eliminating 268 vacant positions and laying off 284 workers – including two dozen various librarians, 112 clerks and all 146 pages charged with shelving books.

Library student Megan Russell said, “The effect will be horrendous for both children and people that cannot afford Internet and cannot afford books.”

Library supporters arrived at City Hall with more than 4,000 petition signatures backing up their opposition of the library cuts.

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You may not understand the outrage over issues with Trans Pacific Trade Pact (TPP) like intellectual property protections and IT protections but the article below shows the problem.  Since universities are being made into corporations and patenting their research, what was free and open sharing of all academic research internationally will now be threatened.  Proprietary means that the decades of building an international system of sharing academic information to cut the costs of taxpayer funding of costly research will be closed to the public.  Librarians used to be the experts on finding all of this information to share with the public and now those resources are mostly accessible to only university personnel.



Bill Clinton placed privatization of universities on the fast track once he and Reagan tag-teamed global corporate rule.  Obama has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to build these university research centers that are now simply corporations while sending relatively small funding connected to Race to the Top to fund K-12.  Most of that too attached to building private education structures.  Meanwhile, researchers like myself cannot access what Federal, state, and local taxes fund in research because patented research is proprietary.

Why have library staff when most of what libraries did is now being lost.....the public does not need to know!  'Innovation startup' is just a political phrase for spending all taxpayer money on the R and D costs for new product development.  All these startups that are successful are simply folded into global corporations and the university department heads are paid as if they are manufacturing executives. 

NEO-LIBERALS WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT AND CONTROL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!  HEATHER MIZEUR SAYS SHE IS PROGRESSIVE?  HAVE YOU HEARD HER SHOUT AGAINST ALL OF THIS? SHE SUPPORTS PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AND WALL STREET CREDIT BOND LEVERAGE FOR THESE KINDS OF THINGS!


Academic Patenting: How universities and public research organizations are using their intellectual property to boost research and spur innovative start-ups

Mario Cervantes, Economist, Science and Technology Policy Division, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD1

Introduction Universities and other public research organizations are increasingly protecting their inventions – from genetic inventions to software – helping raise additional funding for research and spurring new start ups. The rise in university patenting has occurred against a broader policy framework aimed at fostering a greater interaction between public research and industry in order to increase the social and private returns from public support to R&D. The general strengthening of intellectual property protection world-wide as well as the passage of legislation aimed at improving technology transfer are additional factors that have facilitated the expansion of patenting in academia in OECD countries.

Indeed, in 1980, the United States passed what is widely considered landmark legislation, the Bayh-Dole Act, which granted recipients of federal R&D funds the right to patent inventions and license them to firms. The main motivation for this legislation was to facilitate the exploitation of government-funded research results by transferring ownership from the government to universities and other contractors who could then license the IP to firms. Although patenting in US universities did occur prior to the passage of Bayh-Dole Act, it was far from systematic.

At the end of the 1990s, emulating the US policy change, many other OECD countries reformed research funding regulations and/or employment laws to allow research institutions to file, own and license the IP generated with government research funds. In Austria, Denmark, Germany and Japan, the main effect of these changes has been the abolishment of the so-called “professor’s privilege” that granted academics the right to own patents. The right to ownership has now been transferred to the universities while academic inventors are given a share of royalty revenue in exchange. There has also been debate in Sweden on whether to follow a similar path and transfer ownership to institutions. For now at least, the status quo remains and policy efforts are focusing on developing the ability of universities to provide professors with support for patenting. 

In Canada, where rules on IP ownership by universities vary across Provinces, efforts have nevertheless been made to harmonize policies at least with respect to R&D funded by federal government Crown Contracts. In Ireland and France, where institutions normally but not always retain title, the government has chosen an alternate path: issuing guidelines for IP management at institutions in order to foster more consistent practices. Such reforms are not only confined to the OECD countries. China has recently made legislative reforms to allow universities to protect and claim IP, but implementation of such reforms remains a challenge. One lesson from all this is that despite the importance of patent legislation in fostering technology transfer, different national systems may require different solutions.

Institutional ownership of IP is not sufficient Encouraging universities to commercialize research results by granting them title to IP can be useful but it is not sufficient to get researchers to become inventors. The key is that institutions and individual researchers have incentives to disclose, protect and exploit their inventions. Incentives can be “sticks” such as legal or administrative requirements for researchers to disclose inventions. Such regulations are often lacking in many countries, even in those where institutions can claim patents. Government rules that prevent universities from keeping royalty income from licenses are another disincentive to institutions. Incentives can also be “carrots” such as royalty sharing agreements or equity participation in academic start-ups. Recognition of patent activity in the evaluation and recruitment of faculty can also provide incentives for young researchers. Tsinghua University in China offers its young researchers prizes for inventions that are commercialized. 

Given the diversity of research institutions and traditions, it is important that incentives are set at the institution level, but national guidelines can help bring about coherence and the sharing of good practices. As important as incentives is the need for research institutions to clarify IP rules and disseminate them among faculty, staff as well as graduate students- who are increasingly involved in public research activities.

Building critical mass in IP management To bridge the gap between invention and commercialization, universities have established "technology transfer offices" (TTOs), on campus or off-campus intermediaries that carry out a wide range of functions, from licensing patents to companies to managing research contracts. Results from an OECD report on patenting and licensing at public research organizations2 show that there is a large diversity in the structure and organization of TTOs within and across countries (e.g. on or off -campus offices, arm’s length intermediaries, industry sector-based TTOs, and regional TTOs) but the majority appear to be dedicated on-site institutions and integrated into the university or research institution. Many of the TTOs are in their infancy; most are less than 10 years old and have less than five full-time staff. Still, the number of new TTOs is growing, to the order of 1 per year per institution.

In terms of performance, the report also found enormous variations in terms of the size of patent portfolios as well as revenues obtained from licensing. In 2000 the United States had a huge lead over other OECD countries in academic patenting: universities and federal labs received over 8 000 patents (5% of total patenting, rising to 15% in biotechnology). Academic patenting in other countries, as measured by the number of patents granted to public research institutions, ranged from the low hundreds in Japan, the Netherlands and Switzerland, to close to 1 000 at German public labs and Korean research institutions in 2000-2001. While leading universities and public research organizations in countries such as the United States, Germany and Switzerland may earn millions of dollars or euros in licensing revenue, the gains are highly skewed – a few blockbuster inventions account for most revenue. Furthermore, income from licensing academic inventions remains quite small in comparison to overall research budgets. Academic patenting is thus more about boosting research and transferring technology to industry than about making a profit. In fact, evidence from the US show that the break even point for TTOs is between 5 to 7 years.

A main barrier to the development of TTOs is access to experienced technology transfer professionals. Not only are the skills sets of such professionals in short supply but sometimes government employment rules and pay-scales prevent public institutions from being able to provide competitive salaries to such professionals. Governments are nevertheless trying to help universities build IP management capacity. Denmark and Germany have both invested several millions of euro to spur the development of technology transfer offices clustered around certain regions or sectors such as biotechnology. The UK government has increased expenditures on the training of intellectual property management at universities. Even in the United States and Japan, universities pay reduced patent application fees. National patent offices are also involved in reaching out to universities to provide training in intellectual property.

Start-ups versus licensing to other firms One of the questions facing technology transfer managers and inventors is whether to license a technology or to create a start-up firm to commercialize it. Governments and university managers, especially in some European countries, have tended to favour start-ups as opposed to licensing strategies. Part of this stems from the rise in government funded venture funds that aim to promote new firm creation. The key question, however, is: which is the best channel for transferring the technology to the marketplace? The answer in fact depends on the technology in question, the market for such a technology, the skills set of the staff and researchers involved the invention, access to venture capital, and finally the mission of the institution. Certain “platform” technologies with a wide range of applications may be commercialized via a start-up company for example while others may be licensed to larger firms with the business capacity to develop the invention further and integrate it into its R&D and business strategy.

Balancing IP protection with the need to maintain public access Despite the relatively small amount of (formal) academic patenting activity that takes place, the increased focus on patenting academic inventions and licensing them to companies has raised a number of concerns common to countries throughout the OECD area and beyond. These concerns range from the impact of patenting on the traditional missions of universities, the effect on the direction of research, on the actual costs and benefits of patenting and licensing, to the effects on the diffusion of and access to publicly funded research results.

What has been the impact of IP and technology transfer activities on the direction of research? Quantitative studies tend to show that patenting has led universities to conduct more applied research. By making university research more responsive to the economy, is there a danger that basic research will suffer? On the one hand, several studies in the United States have found that universities and individual researchers that have seen the largest increases in patenting are also those which experienced the greatest gains in academic publications. On the other hand, the rate at which academic patents are cited in other patents fell (relative to the average) between the early 1980s and late 1990s in the United States and is now lower than the citation rate of patents granted to business. This could suggest a possible drop in the quality of public research – or at least of its patented component. Alternatively, it may reflect the inexperience of newly founded technology transfer offices.

Exclusive versus non-exclusive licensing Should universities and other public research organizations grant exclusive licenses to firms for inventions that have benefited from public funds? Licensees often require exclusive licenses as they offer more protection for the necessary development to be conducted before a university-provided invention can become a marketed product. The issue is particularly crucial for start-ups which have few assets other than their IP. On the other hand, by definition, exclusive licenses limit the diffusion of technologies. The OECD report has found that the mix of exclusive and non-exclusive licenses granted by public research organizations is fairly balanced, and that exclusivity is often granted with restrictions on the licensee side. Research institutions often include clauses in license agreements to protect public interests and access to the IP for future research and discovery. Licensing agreements in many institutions include a commitment to exploit the invention on the part of the licensee, particularly if the license is exclusive, and to agree on milestones in order to assure that commercialization will take place. Such safeguards can be used to ensure that technology is transferred and that licensed patents are not used simply to block competitors.

As academic inventions arise in areas closer to basic research, scientists and policy makers are also concerned that patenting certain inventions could block downstream research. One example is that of research tools, in which granting a patent could inhibit diffusion by increasing the costs and difficulty of using such tools in applied research. In response, the National Institutes of Health in the United States (NIH) have espoused a policy that discourages unnecessary patenting and encourages non-exclusive licensing (see link). Such guidelines are now being emulated by funding agencies and research institutions in other countries.

Research exemption Another area of debate concerns the use of the so-called “exemption for research use” that has been in use in universities in both the United States and in EU countries, either formally or informally. Traditionally, universities have been exempted from paying fees for patented inventions they use in their own research. The rationale is that universities fulfill a public mission. As more public research is carried out with business and generates monetary rewards, the divide between public mission and commercial aims becomes less stark. The extent and status of this exemption differs across countries and is often ill-defined. This research exemption – or rather its interpretation – has recently been the subject of policy debate and litigation: recent court decisions in the United States have restricted its meaning.

Conclusions Making universities and other public research organizations more active in protecting and exploiting their IP means not only actively promoting faculty and student research, but also determining how best to pursue any relationship with business clients while protecting the public interest. Many of the concerns or issues related to balancing IP protection with public access will take time to resolve. The growing reliance of public research institutions on various sources of funding, including from industry and contract research, as well as demands by society for greater economic and social returns on investment in public R&D, have made academic patenting a reality that is more likely to increase than decrease. At the same time, it should be recalled that intellectual property is but one of several channels for transferring knowledge and technology from publicly funded research which include publication, the movement of graduates, conferences as well as informal channels. While research institutions and firms are working to find solutions to problems as they arise, governments and research funding agencies have a role to play in providing guidelines on academic patenting and licensing and in fostering debate.





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Keep in mind that Maryland and especially Baltimore are ranked at the bottom for fraud, corruption, and the lack of transparency.......billions of dollars are lost in Baltimore alone to the richest.  This is the structural deficit for all government budgets and it is being used to privatize and close all that is public.

Neo-liberals are doing to the US what Gorbachev did to USSR during Perestroika......privatizing all public wealth to create Oligarchs.  The US has a Constitution and Equal Protection under law that protects Americans from these actions. 

WE SIMPLY NEED PEOPLE IN OFFICE THAT ARE NOT COMPLICIT



Maryland Historical Society cuts operating hours, staff

Budget gap of $670,000 to blamemuseum, library open on Thursdays, Saturdays onlyDecember 03, 2009|By Liz F. Kay | liz.kay@baltsun.com

A $670,000 budget shortfall caused by the dismal economic climate has prompted the Maryland Historical Society to cut hours at its Baltimore museum and library and to eliminate several staff positions, according to the president of its trustee board.


In addition, Wednesday was director Robert Rogers' last day with the society, board president Alex G. Fisher said. Rogers' departure is unrelated to the 165-year-old organization's budget problems, according to Fisher. The board will name an interim director until it can conduct a search for a new leader.

The society was able to close nearly half of its budget gap by cutting the equivalent of seven full-time positions. To make up the rest, it also limited operating hours at the museum and library to noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, and the 28 trustees agreed to double their gifts to the society's annual fund.

Many charitable organizations have been struggling to remain solvent during the economic downturn.

"It's no secret that all nonprofits are suffering as a result of the economy," Fisher said.

Although financial markets have recovered somewhat, they are still lower than they were several years ago, which affects the income drawn from the historical society's endowment, as well as the confidence of supporters who make contributions, Fisher said. State funding for the society has also decreased by $450,000 in the past three years, according to Fisher.

He described the decrease in hours as "regrettable." However, "if you're going to be fiscally responsible, you just have to do that," Fisher said. The library and museum were formerly open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, though the library would close during lunch.

Scholars and historians worry that the decision to reduce hours will make it difficult for researchers to conduct their work.


"If you're an out-of-town researcher, you can't even go back-to-back days," said Jessica Elfenbein, an associate provost and professor of history at the University of Baltimore. "It's going to be very hard for any researcher to do justice to Baltimore if you can't get to the collections it supports."

Said Robert Brugger, senior editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press: "That means that people who would like to be doing research are not going to do it, or need to find more money than would otherwise be needed to get work done."


Fisher acknowledged that was a legitimate concern. The society is hoping to restore some operating hours at its Mount Vernon facilities by relying on volunteers.

"But it will take time to get that accomplished," Fisher said.

The society is also revamping its Web site.

"Once that's done, access to library material will expand dramatically to anyone off-site," courtesy of the Web, Fisher said.

Education programs in Maryland schools will also be curtailed through the remainder of the school year, according to Fisher. As student tours of the museum have dwindled in recent years, outreach in schools has filled that void, he said, and the society would send staff to train teachers to use replicas of museum holdings for Maryland history lessons. But next summer, the society will transition to offering more Web-based resources.

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March 11th, 2014

3/11/2014

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New Push for Single Payer Healthcare for All

The cause of universal healthcare is alive and well. Not only is the state of Vermont moving toward a single-payer system, but Vermont's U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill and is holding a hearing this week on the benefits other countries enjoy from a single-payer system that would benefit everyone except the profiteering middlemen who've rigged the current system.

ALL OF MARYLAND'S CANDIDATES FOR GOVERNOR WILL CONTINUE THIS AFFORDABLE CARE ACT PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH-----CINDY WALSH SUPPORTS EXPANDED AND IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL!


As citizens of Maryland listen to the failures of implementing its private health insurance system WE THE PEOPLE have decided to move forward with Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.  Neo-liberals think they can simply run as progressives in elections and then implement republican policies that end all public programs and services but citizens have figured out this game.

Privatizing public health with Affordable Care Act is more than losing access to basic health procedures and care.  It is about losing our public health agencies structured to oversee the data collected on the health of the nation, the agencies that hold the health industry accountable for quality and malpractice, and the agencies tasked with public justice in regards to health outcomes.  In other words, it creates the same conditions of deregulation that gave us Wall Street banks and their unaccountability.  In addition to preying on people for profits, the public will not know that the data provided in approving medical products and techniques are true and if what is being given as treatment is dangerous.  The public now faces a litany of drugs hitting the market that have not gone through clinical trial and the practice of using the general public as the source of knowledge of medical efficacy for products is becoming more common.  If you have universities as corporations that patent research you have lost pure academic study that provides facts in public interest.
  If you lose your public health agencies that provide data collection that is honest, you lose your ability to hold health industries accountable.


THIS IS HUGE FOLKS!  DISMANTLING PUBLIC HEALTH WILL HAVE ALL CITIZENS DISTRUSTING HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AS WE DISTRUST OUR BANKS!


Below you see where this is going.  Payers are health insurance agencies and providers are the doctors and hospitals.  This article shows the intent to end public health data collection and analysis in overseeing the health care industry from research, to hospital care, to outcomes.

Remember, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have decades of public health data stored in its database that show all of the information needed to assess the cost benefit of procedures, the outcomes from procedures, the average prices paid for every procedure.  WE ALREADY HAVE ALL OF THE DATA NEEDED TO DEVELOP A MEANINGFUL APPROACH FOR COST EFFECTIVE HEALTH CARE.  What neo-liberals are doing is handing all of the development of cost models to the very people creating the inflated costs by health fraud and profiteering.  This article says------we do not need public funding of data exchanges because with public funding comes public oversight and transparency.  Can you imagine corporations paying for the data collection for medical procedures and products they develop?



The Affordable Care Act is about ending public health and deregulating the health industry just as Clinton did the banking industry.  It ends all public ability to oversee, to hold accountable, and to collect data that can be reliably used to protect public interest.  Maximizing profits means corporations will write the policies that end public health.




Payers, Providers Question Value of Public Health Data Exchanges

Tuesday, January 28, 2014 TOPIC ALERT:
  • Health Data Exchange
Click on topic to receive periodic emails. The majority of payers and providers believe that the business model of publicly funded health information exchanges is flawed, according to a Black Book survey, Health Data Management reports.

Survey Details, Findings For the survey, Black Book polled 1,550 providers and 794 payers.

According to the survey, 95% of payers, 83% of hospitals and 70% of physicians said HIEs funded by federal grants have flawed business models and do not assist with meaningful connectivity (Goedert, Health Data Management, 1/27).

In addition, 94% of surveyed payers said they did not see "value proposition" in public HIEs (Sullivan, Government Health IT, 1/27).

Less than 33% of surveyed providers said they participate in public HIEs, while 86% said they have rejected paying the annual fees for public HIEs (Health Data Management, 1/27).

More than 80% of the 220 operating public HIEs in the U.S. are stalling as federal grants supporting many of those HIEs ends, according to Government Health IT (Government Health IT, 1/27).

Seventy-two percent of survey respondents predict that there may be only 10 public HIEs left after federal grant money for them expires in 2017.

More than 80% of respondents concluded that a national operational public HIE is more than a decade away (Walsh, Clinical Innovation & Technology, 1/28).

Meanwhile, the report also found that many payers have been investing more heavily in private HIEs, rather than public exchanges.

Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, said, "Payers are looking for [return on investment] that the majority of public HIEs aren't even close to delivering, [s]o it was inevitable the private HIE market got so hot" (Government Health IT, 1/27).

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Here in Baltimore, all of public health has and is being privatized to private corporate non-profits that write health policy, that implement all that policy in communities, and that are the source of all data that comes to the public.  All is done under the restrictions of the public to transparency protections given private non-profits.  We have little access as the public to any of the policy-writing, any of the use of Federal and State funding on behalf of health services, any sense of oversight of the data being presented to the public on the state of public health.

We know that Medicare and Medicaid fraud is rampant and as much as 1/2 of spending on entitlements are lost to fraud.  This in turn affects the health programs implemented and it affects the result data we receive. 

RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU UNDERSTAND THAT CORPORATIONS PROVIDING A SERVICE WILL HAVE THE INCENTIVE TO SKEW DATA TOWARDS THEIR BENEFIT AND NOT THE PUBLIC INTEREST?  THAT IS WHY THE US HAS A PUBLIC SECTOR-----TO SERVE THE PUBLIC INTEREST.

Neo-liberals work in the corporate interest and push these policies of privatization so that corporations have all the control.




What Is the Public Health System?

The public health system once was thought of as comprising only official government public health agencies, but now is understood to include both other public-sector agencies (such as schools, Medicaid and environmental protection agencies, and land-use agencies) and private-sector organizations whose actions have significant consequences for the health of the public. The public health system includes the following four main components:

  • Mission – The mission of the public health system includes its goals at any point in time and how, at the conceptual level, these goals are operationalized. At the beginning of the 21st century, the mission of public health is to ensure conditions in which people can be healthy.2
  • Structure – The structural capacity of the public health system is the cumulative resources and relationships necessary to carry out the important processes of public health. Structural capacity includes the following elements: information resources, organizational resources, physical resources, human resources, and fiscal resources. 2
  • Process – The practice of public health can be thought of in terms of the key processes through which practitioners seek to identify, address, and prioritize community or population-wide health problems and resources and the outputs of these more fundamental processes, public health’s interventions, policies, regulations, programs, and services.The processes of public health are those that identify and address health problems as well as the programs and services consistent with mandates and community priorities. 2
  • Outcome – The immediate and long-term changes experienced by individuals, families, communities, providers, and populations are the system’s outcomes, the cumulative result of the interaction of the public health system’s structural capacity and processes, given the macro context and the system’s mission and purpose. Outcomes can be used to provide information about the system’s overall performance, including its efficiency, effectiveness, and ability to achieve equity between populations.
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    If you look at the leaked documents for the Trans Pacific Trade Pact you will see it involves ending public subsidy of health and indeed, Obama Administration is actively lobbying nations around the world to end generous public health subsidy as part of these trade deals.  NEO-LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO FORCE NATIONS AROUND THE WORLD TO END PUBLIC HEALTH AND THEY ARE DOING THAT IN THE US WITH THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.

    Building state health systems is a republican policy to end Federal public health programs.  They have tried for decades to do this and it is Obama and neo-liberals passing the laws to do it.  They want as much as republicans to downsize the public sector and health care is the largest sector left to privatize.  Private health systems are designed to give the health industry control of writing all of the policies in this reform and they are writing them to the industry's benefit and to the public detriment.





  • FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    July 24, 2013
    4:27 PM

    CONTACT: US PIRG

    Phone: (202) 546-9707

    Congress Mulls Dismantling America’s Public Health and Consumer Protections WASHINGTON - July 24 - “The Regulatory Accountability Act (H.R. XX) and the Regulatory Flexibility and Improvement Act (H.R. 2542)  would threaten the health and safety of the American people, by disarming standards like the ones that keep children safe from faulty cribs and toxic toys. These bills would block enforcement of critical laws by creating new bureaucratic hurdles and impossibly short timelines for approval of public health rules.

    “The Regulatory Accountability Act would add layers of new bureaucratic processes before even simple public health rules could be enforced, and empower special interests to use the courts to delay protections that have been years in the making.   For example, in 2011 after a 10 year fight, Congress authorized and the Consumer Product Safety Commission developed new safe crib standards.  Parents finally received protection against collapsing cribs that injured and killed far too many infants. The RAA Act would make it easier for special interests to contest the new crib standards in court, delaying these critical protections.

    “The Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act, by adding new layers of red tape and bureaucracy,will potentially jeopardize straightforward proposals. This could hurt the ability to create important new tools such as the www.SaferProducts.gov website, which provides parents with information on dangerous and toxic toys and children’s products.

    “As a nation, we have made significant progress toward ensuring a safe and healthy marketplace for consumers.  Congress should continue in that proud tradition and oppose these bills, to protect the health and safety of the American people.”


    ________________________________
    Below you see a democratic state struggling with simple public health issues that ACA force into the reform category.  It is not only republican states that will use this move to state control of health policy-----neo-liberal states are dismantling services under the guise of lack of state budget for public health.

    Below you see policy that looks a lot like the policies working to implode the US Post Office.  Regulations that hit public health hardest will force the public sector out of business and private sector simply absorbs the cost until it takes control of once public sector services.  Look at what conservative states are doing to Planned Parenthood to end abortions.  The use of targeted regulations makes the cost to public health too expensive just to put them out of business.

    If you talk with doctors in the public health field they will tell you that decades of massive entitlement fraud pushed the need to commit fraud to stay in business onto public health agencies. 

    WE WATCHED AS THESE SAME PRACTICES BLEW UP OUR PUBLIC HOUSING AGENCY AND OUR PUBLIC EDUCATION AGENCY.  THEY ARE NOW COMING FOR PUBLIC HEALTH.

  • REMEMBER, THE US HAS THE HIGHEST COST IN HEALTH CARE BECAUSE OF MASSIVE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION IN THE INDUSTRY-----NOT BECAUSE PATIENT COSTS ARE HIGH.  GOVERNMENT COFFERS ARE EMPTY BECAUSE CORPORATIONS ARE PAYING NO TAXES.  THESE ARE THE PROBLEMS.  NEO-LIBERALS ARE MAKING THE PUBLIC PAY THE SHORTFALLS.



  • New CDC Regulations Threaten to Dismantle Vaccines for Children Program

    The policy changes would affect how providers store and replenish vaccines and have a severe impact on rural clinicians. Jeff McDonaldSignificant federal policy changes could force many providers to opt out of Oregon’s well-established immunization program, potentially leaving kids around the state unvaccinated and with a higher risk of disease, state health care leaders and providers say.

    New policies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), set to take effect as early as Feb. 1, could dismantle the state’s successful Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, which includes about 600 clinics and serves about 52 percent of the state’s children in the state.

    Among the new requirements is the separation of public and private inventory with public stock including VFC and state purchased vaccines. Public stock includes VFC and state-funded Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) doses, while the state’s Billable Project provides immunizations to children with private insurance.

    “The purpose of this requirement is to assure VFC vaccine is not administered to non-VFC eligible children,” wrote Melinda Wharton, CDC’s deputy director, in a Sept. 5 memo. “This has been identified through various program integrity reviews as a critical risk. For this reason, we must require that VFC vaccine be stored separately in providers’ offices.”

    CDC has introduced the policy changes in response to an audit of the federal VFC program by the Office of Inspector General, which found unacceptable accounting and vaccine storage and handling practices in several states around the country.

    Oregon was not among those states cited in the audit and has already found a way to work around a portion of the CDC’s policy changes for the Advance Credit Model, which took effect Oct. 1.

    Last week, the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) announced it would pay up to $7.5 million in advance for the cost of vaccines for both CHIP and Billable programs. Those costs have been in arrears quarterly by the state under the old model after the CDC had provided the vaccines in advance.

    But other parts of the new regulations could prove more onerous and lead to private clinics dropping out of the VFC program, said Mimi Luther, VFC manager with the Oregon Health Authority’s Public Health Division.

    “The risk is that we will have kids who don’t have access to vaccines,” she said.

    Oregon’s VFC program, which started as part of a federal program in 1995, relies upon a system of provider accountability for waste and a vaccine tracking method that is one of the most established in the country, Luther said.

    The new policies, which have been in flux since they were announced in August, would change how providers store and replenish vaccines and ultimately lead to lower vaccination rates and greater vulnerability in an outbreak, Luther said.

    Under the current regulations, when providers run out of doses marked for VFC kids, they can borrow from their supply of Billable doses and replenish the supply through reordering. Roughly 43 percent of providers borrow vaccines that are intended for different eligibility groups or from other providers, she said.

    That practice would no longer be allowed under the new regulations.

    One exception to this rule would occur in times of outbreak, but would require providers to get written permission from the state’s Public Health Officer, who would need written permission from the CDC, Luther said.

    “That is just absurd,” she said. “Can you imagine being a pediatrician during an outbreak and saying, ‘sorry, I can’t immunize your kid today? It is crazy.”

    Storage guidelines also would change, potentially costing up to thousands of dollars for larger clinics.

    Another new requirement is that providers organize and stock their vaccines in separate refrigeration bins for different eligibility classes, including VFC, CHIP, Billables, and Section 317 clients, according to OHA. Many providers would need to purchase new refrigerators and increase their staffing and electricity costs to meet those requirements.

    Additionally, the new regulations would dismantle the state’s successful buying program, which requires providers to pay for any doses that are wasted or expired.

    “Oregon always has required providers to pay for waste because we think it’s a good stewardship of public dollars,” Luther said.

    The system has proven successful with only a 2 percent rate of waste, she said.

    But under new CDC regulations, providers would be required to buy replacement doses on the private market.

    The costs would increase dramatically in most cases.

    Using the state’s bulk buying power, the cost of a single dose of measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine would cost $19.75 through the state and $56.14 through the private market.

    “The state has huge purchasing power and contracts in place,” she said. “What I pay for a vaccine is much less than anybody would pay for on the private market.”

    Exemplifying this point, Luther priced Hepatitis A vaccine at $15.25 for a single dose from the state and $30.40 on the private market. Polio vaccine would cost $12.42 and $27.44, respectively.

    That is ordering a single dose. Most private insurers sell vaccines in packs of 10, so while an HPV vaccine would cost $107.16 from the state, a provider would end up paying about $1,350 from private insurers for a 10-pack, according to Luther.

    “I am hopeful that Oregon is going to find a way to not require the separate inventories,” Luther said. “I am sure in my heart that if we fail at that we are going to lose many providers.”

    The new policy guidelines could have the most impact on rural clinicians, who would need to follow a new set of storage and handling guidelines that would increase costs and potentially leave some clinics short of vaccines at critical times.

    “They’re trying to fix something that isn’t broken in our state,” said Michael Sheets, a family nurse practitioner and owner of The Merrill Clinic and The Bonanza Clinic in rural Southern Oregon. “Potentially what could happen is that some of the centers may opt not to do immunizations instead of meeting these requirements.”

    The value of the VFC program in rural areas cannot be overstated, said Sheets, who drives 23 miles between his two private clinics and spends a half-day at each.

    The private clinics fill in a 96-mile stretch between the Public Health Department in Klamath Falls and the next closest public facility in Lakeview.

    “Basically, we’re not making any money on this,” Sheets said. “Providers are trying to help the kids because otherwise the working poor couldn’t afford to get their shots.”

    At his two clinics, Sheets administers a variety of shots for kids in the VFC and CHIP programs, including influenza, chicken pox, diphtheria and polio.

    Since the program began in the mid-1990s, ear, sinus and respiratory infections have dropped dramatically because of the shots, he said.

    “The kids that have these shots, don’t end up having those problems,” he said. “The value cannot be overstated in terms of reduced illness. It is a marriage of the public and private sector that works. We should have more of that, not less.”

    Vaccines are currently stored and marked according to eligibility classes in a single refrigerator unit close to exam rooms, Sheets said. Under the proposed CDC rules, providers could end up needing additional storage space and temperature monitoring equipment to meet the CDC regulations, he said.

    Additional refrigeration unit in each of his clinics would cost $400 to $500. The units would need to be moved further away from the patients due to lack of space, he said.

    Clinicians could opt out of the system altogether, forcing rural families to travel further distances to get to the closest clinic, Sheets said. Or patients could potentially be turned away, he said.

    “The new regulations are not in the best interests of anyone,” he said. “Somebody who is sitting in Atlanta or D.C. has written the regulations and doesn’t know how clinics work.”


    The next steps for Oregon’s medical community include asking CDC for an exemption to the new requirements or a delay in their implementation until December, 2014, OHA’s Luther said.

    The state would like the opportunity to problem solve the new regulations with the CDC, she said.

    Otherwise, the changes would shift the burden onto already cash-strapped county health departments, said Karen Vian, immunization program manager for Douglas County Public Health.

    Vian is one of many members of the health community who have shared their story with the state, and her experiences could help shape national policy, Luther said.

    “These policy changes don’t work for the private sector and they don’t work for the public sector,” Vian said. “Public health departments are going to be unable to meet these policy changes.”



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The Affordable Care Act seeks savings for Medicare and Medicaid by requiring the use of generic drugs.  Yet, as we see below, the US is pushing policies that make it harder to create generics and limit generic sales.  So, how do you think that will ultimately effect seniors and the poor in the US?

That's right.  People already have cases where the generic form of a drug is not as effective so if TPP passes this will grow in frequency.



  • The TPP’s Threats to Public Health

  • The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is an international trade and investment pact currently under negotiation between the United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. It is also specifically intended as a “docking agreement”that other countries would join over time, with Japan, Korea, China and others already expressing some interest. U.S. negotiators are pushing to complete the TPP as soon as possible.NEGOTIATIONS ARE HEADED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION ON PUBLIC HEALTH  A roll back from the Bush administration.Leaked U.S. proposals for several chapters in the Trans-Pacific Partnership reveal that U.S. trade negotiators have reversed hard-won reforms designed to enhance access to affordable medicines that were made during the George W. Bush administration. In addition to pushing for increased monopoly rights for drug companies, the U.S. is also demanding new rights for pharmaceutical firms to challenge pricing and other drug formulary policies used by many countries to keep down health care costs.PACT WOULD REDUCE ACCESS TO GENERIC MEDICATION BY EXTENDING DRUG PATENTS
    Access to generic medicine is critical to saving lives. The first generation of HIV drugs has come down in price from roughly $10,000 per patient per year to just $120 thanks to increased access to generic medications. This reduction in price has helped to dramatically scale up the number of people throughout the world who are now receiving treatment. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, UNITAID and UNICEF all rely heavily on access to quality generic medications. For millions of people throughout the globe, delaying access to generic medications means delaying access to treatment. The U.S. proposal would grant new monopoly patent rights, reducing access to generic medicine. If finalized and implemented, the leaked U.S. intellectual property proposal would roll back access to generic medicine for people in developing countries and throughout the world. Specifically, the U.S. proposal would broaden the scope of patentability by making it easier for pharmaceutical companies to patent new uses and minor variations of old medicines; slow the production of new generics when patents expire by expanding “data exclusivity” over clinical trials forcing either the timely and costly replication of such trials or an additional three-year delay (beyond the current five) before such “exclusivity” ends;constrict safeguards against patent abuse by makingit harder for public health advocates to challenge unjustified new patents; require new forms of drug patent policing;and mandate that countries allow patents on plants, animals Trade Policy & Access to Medicine!

  • _____________________________________


    What neo-liberals intend to do as they privatize public health goes beyond actual access to health care.  The public sector is the last labor unions holding on to middle-class income and as we already see with handing health policy-writing to states developing private health systems as in Maryland------it is staff and labor costs cut under the guise of making health care cost effective.  Women are the ones being hit by this attack on the public sector with public private partnerships and the ending of public health.

    DO YOU HEAR NEO-LIBERALS SHOUTING THEY ARE THE PROTECTORS OF WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS?  DO YOU SEE THE STATE OF MARYLAND ADOPTING ALL THAT IS PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC SERVICES, PROGRAMS, AND ASSETS?

    MARYLAND ADOPTED A STATE PRIVATE HEALTH SYSTEM BECAUSE IT IS RUN BY NEO-LIBERAL POLITICIANS WORKING FOR JOHNS HOPKINS AND THE HEALTH INDUSTRY!


  • Roosevelt House Faculty Forum
    Triple Jeopardy: Dismantling of the Public Sector and the War on Women

    Mimi Abramovitz Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, and a Roosevelt House Faculty Associate; Faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center and the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies. Posted on January 13, 2014

    The current effort to dismantle the public sector is the latest round in the rancorous debate about the role of so-called “big government” that has shaped public policy since the mid-1970s. There has been much buzz in recent news surrounding the widening inequality gap, the long-term effectiveness of President Johnson’s Great Society programs in combating poverty, and President Obama’s call to increase the federal minimum wage.  While these issues are extremely important, it has been surprising to see the lack of a gender lens in these dialogues, a perspective that is absolutely critical in evaluating potential policy changes.

    Since the onset of the economic crisis in the mid-1970s, U.S. leaders have pursued a neoliberal agenda designed to downsize the government, and redistribute income upwards. Its familiar tactics include tax cuts, retrenchment, privatization, and deregulation, among others.  To win public support for these unpopular ideas, neoliberal advocates have resorted to what Naomi Klein called the “shock doctrine”: the creation and manipulation of a crisis to impose policies that the public would not otherwise stand for. Discounting evidence and evoking the shock doctrine, government foes targeted programs for the poor but also popular entitlement programs—once regarded as the “third rail” of politics. Unlikely to pass Congress intact their proposals which fall heavily on women –will set the agenda for months to come.

    The current effort to dismantle the public sector is the latest round in the rancorous debate about the role of so-called “big government” that has shaped public policy since the mid-1970s. Initially targeted at program users, the attack subsequently took aim at public sector employees and union members. Since most scholars and activists focus on one group or another, they miss the strategy’s wider impact. Lacking the gender lens needed to bring women into view, they also miss that women comprise the majority in each group. Until the 2012 presidential campaign turned the women’s vote into a hot political issue, few officials paid much attention to women’s issues or did much to end the decades-long “war on women”

    Given that women make up the majority of government service users, employees and union members, the cuts constitute a “war on women.”
    Many of the programs now on the chopping block address the basic needs of women and their families over the life span. Current House budgets proposed to to cut child care, Head Start, job training, Pell Grants, housing, and more by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years.

    Less spending by Washington translates into reduced federal aid to states and cities. To balance their budgets, states spent $75 billion less in 2012 than in 2011, and 31 states projected a $55 billion shortfall in state budgets for the 2012 fiscal year.  In total, states governments have had to close more than $540 billion in shortfalls over the past four years due to cutbacks on the federal level.  In addition, the right has taken aim on women’s reproductive health services, demanding ever more drastic cutbacks.  In 2012, The Guttmacher Institute reported that legislators in 46 states introduced 944 provisions to limit women’s reproductive health and rights including massive cuts to Planned Parenthood.

    Fewer services also mean more unpaid care work. Employed or not, women are the majority of the nation’s sixty-seven million informal caregivers; they pick up the slack when services disappear. From 1935 to 1970, the services provided by an expanding public sector helped women balance work and family life. Since the mid-1970s, neoliberal budget cuts shifted the costs and responsibility of care work back to women in the home. So does the growing practice of moving the elderly and the disabled from publicly-funded residential centers to home-based care, and discharging hospital patients still in need of medical monitoring and nursing services.

    The anti-government strategy also decreased women’s access to the public sector jobs. After World War II, as social movements pressed for an expanded welfare state, these jobs became an important source of upward mobility for white women and people of color excluded from gainful private sector employment. In January 2012, women comprised 57 percent of all government workers.  According to the latest available data, women comprise 43 percent of federal, 51.7 percent of state and 61.4 percent of local government employees. Women filled these jobs because society assigned care work to women, their families needed two earners to make ends meet, and social welfare programs benefited from cheap female labor. The public sector also became the single most important employer for blacks, who are 30% more likely than other workers to hold public sector jobs. More than 14% of all public sector workers are black. In most other sectors, they comprise only 10% of the workforce.

    The Great Recession and the slow recovery have decimated public sector employment. During the early stages of the recession, men suffered more than 70% of total job loss because “male” jobs (construction, manufacturing, etc.) are particularly sensitive to cyclical downturns. The current “recovery,” by contrast, has been tougher on women, who comprised over half of the public workforce. From June 2009 to May 2012 as the public sector lost 2.6% of its jobs women suffered 61% of the job losses (348,000 out of 573,000). They gained only 22.5% of 2.5 million net jobs added to the overall economy. In 2012, the poverty rate among women climbed to an astounding 14.5%.

    Total union membership plummeted from a peak of 35% of the civilian labor force in 1954 to just 11.3% in 2012 — the lowest percentage of union workers since the Great Depression. Private-sector unionization dropped to 6.6 %. Despite the loss of thousands of government jobs, public unions withstood the onslaught, maintaining an average membership rate of more than 35%. It helped that the majority of public sector work cannot be outsourced or automated.

    Seeking to weaken the remaining unions, foes of labor and government turned against the public sector –labor’s last stronghold. Some governors demonized government workers as the new privileged elite to convince the public that collective bargaining rather than tax cuts is the enemy of balanced budgets. When governors strip teachers and nurses of their collective bargaining rights but spare police and firefighters, they hit women especially hard: 61% of unionized women but only 38% of unionized men work in the public sector. The loss of union protection sets women back economically. Unionized women of all races in both public and private jobs earn nearly one-third more per week than non-union women, although white women earn more than women of color. Trade union women face a smaller gender wage gap and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and pension plans than their non-union sisters.

    Public sector unions historically pressed for high-quality services, dependable benefits, and fair procedures for themselves and for others. In the 1920s, the teacher’s union stood up for greater school funding and smaller class sizes. In the 1960s, unionized social workers fought for fair hearings and due process for welfare recipients. In the 1980s and 1990s, home care workers sought more sustained care for their clients. The loss of union power will cost public sector program users, workers, and union members a strong advocate. Unions remain one of the few institutions with the capacity to represent the middle and working classes and check corporate power inside and outside government.

    The attack on the public sector puts women in triple jeopardy.
    As the majority of public sector program users, workers, and union members, they face fewer services, fewer jobs, and less union protection. In state after state, thousands of government workers and community supporters have raised up against these cuts, unwilling to take the assault on their well being, dignity, and rights lying down. As the National Economic & Social Rights Initiative reminds us, the current agenda amounts to “attacks on public responsibility, the notion of the public good, and the ability of government to secure economic and social rights for all.”  These cuts pose as fundamental threats to the stability and health of both our country’s economy and our democracy.  We must stand together to demand stronger social policies that support women and their families.

    This OpEd was adapted from the longer article, “Feminization of Austerity,” New Labor Forum, Winter  21(1) 2012: 32-41.






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February 16th, 2014

2/16/2014

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STOP THIS MADNESS AND RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST ALL NEO-LIBERALS IN PRIMARIES!


I want to continue with the need to shake the bugs from not only the democratic party.....neo-liberals, but the neo-liberal people heading our labor and justice organizations as well. 

THERE IS NO REASON FOR ANYBODY TO BE SUPPORTING OBAMA AND CONGRESSIONAL NEO-LIBERALS....EVERYONE SEES THESE POLICIES PASSED ARE REPUBLICAN AND WORK FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT.

I have said that in Maryland labor and justice have a hard time since the political system is so crony and corporate that these groups sometimes feel they have to get along.  For example, Morgan State and other Historically Black Colleges in Maryland are being deeply defunded and threatened with closure so what should be a campus of dissent against the dismantling of the US Constitutions and the Bill of Rights is instead deliberately quiet and too supportive as with the Arne Duncan and public school privatization.  Labor unions have the same problem and make the same concessions because neo-liberals control Maryland Assemby and governor's office. 


IF LABOR AND JUSTICE DO NOT MOVE NOW TO STOP THE PROGRESSION OF GLOBAL CORPORATE RULE....THERE WILL BE NO UNIONS AND WE WILL BE A THIRD WORLD COLONIAL SOCIETY WITH NO JUSTICE.  THIS IS NOT HYPERBOLE.  STOP CONCEDING!!!!!!


Below you see a blending of labor and justice that works.  The nurses unions know that the Affordable Care Act is bad for both labor and justice and have been protesting for the entire time the ACA was under development in Congress.  We thank them for continually shouting for Expanded and Improved Medicare for All and universal care.  NAACP and NAN support ACA to the end even though it is people of color hit hardest with lost access.

New York State Nurses Association's status.


Today we joined thousands of our allies at the Black, Latino, and Asian Legislative Caucus to fight for an end to the Healthcare Inequality that is hurting too many of our patients.

We'll be back on March 26 to fight for Safe Staffing and Healthcare for All. Like & Share if you'll join us! (22 photos)


This is what I am saying about changing leadership, not only getting rid of neo-liberals in the democratic party, but the labor and justice leaders aligned with these global corporate pols! UAW and AFL-CIO and others seem content to organize international union membership and allow all of the TPP and global markets to expand. WE WILL NOT HAVE A DEMOCRACY IF WE DO NOT RETURN TO A STRONG DOMESTIC ECONOMY!

I spoke of Baltimore's teacher's union and Maryland teachers feeling that their unions are not speaking for them.  Indeed, Baltimore's unions came out with a contract giving the members only the opportunity of three days to look at it and then vote.....no input.  The Boeing aerospace unions in Washington State are booting their leaders and demanding a redo on that Boeing contract because it was so bad for the members.  The Auto Workers union is saying the same for the vote at a Tennessee VW plant.  These union members are shaking the bugs from the rug as they understand there is too much cronyism happening with union leaders and neo-liberals who are not working for labor and justice.

https://www.facebook.com/alewitz/media_set?set=a.2987080833548.2157477.1157866386&UNIONS DON’T ORGANIZE WORKERS – WORKERS ORGANIZE UNIONS!

The defeat of the United Auto Workers union in TN cannot be laid solely at the actions of the employers - the business union policies of the UAW bureaucracy are also to blame.

Decades of immigrant bashing, sweetheart deals and reliance on Democratic Party politicians have been a betrayal of the membership and the working class as a whole. It is not surprising that workers are confused about why we need unions.

Image: BUREAUCRACY
From THE WORKER IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
by Mike Alewitz

One of five 7’ x 10’ banners commissioned for the founding convention of the ICEM/ 1995. The banners hung briefly in the AFL-CIO Building in Washington, DC, until they were ordered removed by then Vice-President Richard Trumka.

********************************************************
Below you see the difference some unions are making.....health care and teacher's unions are fighting for their members whereas trades and services are seeming to be on board with neo-liberals and global markets.  Keep in mind that when we had a domestic economy and not a global one.....auto workers were able to buy the cars they built as did the rest of the middle-class so auto manufacturers did not have to sell overseas.  Now, auto workers are often forced to lease cars if that as Ford and GM spend all their money expanding overseas. GM's financial arm is what blew the company up with subprime mortgage debt and it was spun off as a bank owing tons of money to taxpayers while the union workers had all their wages and benefits slashed. 

WE DO NOT WANT UNIONS ACCOMMODATING THE GLOBAL MARKET WHEN THEIR MEMBERS ARE BEING IMPOVERISHED BY THAT GLOBAL MARKET.



From a union member:

Had a chat about the UAW disaster with Jane McAlevey, who points out that the UAW made its primary relationship with the boss, not the workers. They agreed to no housecalls, no conversations with workers. Also, not a word about politics, situating the fight in any larger struggle.

But (and these are my conclusions, but I doubt Jane would disagree) this is entirely the norm for mainstream union strategies. It's precisely the formula for defeat, but it never gets rethought.

The contrasts with the Chicago Teachers Union are stark. But the UAW and the rest of the gang won't touch that shit. Better to write big checks to Dems instead.

____________________________________________

Below you see how teachers stand with parents and students and shout loudly for everyone as well as their own rights.  In return, the communities support these teachers......well, not in Maryland right now!

As this article shows, strikes are critical for unions to have power in contract negotiation.  What we see in Maryland are neo-liberals dismantling union rights by forcing unions to sign PEACE AGREEMENTS....signing the right to strike away.  The Maryland AFL-CIO did that with building casinos in Maryland and Unite Here did it with hotel workers unions.  In addition, they allow the contract negotiations be done in arbitration instead of between employee and employer.  These arbitration committees are always packed with corporate-leaning members taking away labor's ability for a fair deal. 
It is not in the member's interest to have these deals!


THIS IS HOW MARYLAND NEO-LIBERALS TREAT UNIONS WHEN THEY AREN'T PRIVATIZING THEM OUT OF EXISTENCE AND SOME UNIONS ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN AND SUPPORT THESE SAME POLS FOR ELECTION.

Ideally, the citizens of Maryland would run and vote forlabor and justice and get rid of these neo-liberals holding labor captive.  That is what we are shouting as ALL MARYLAND LABOR ARE UNDER ATTACK, public and private sector.

So, when the Maryland AFL-CIO stands with O'Malley and his protege Anthony Brown after time and again being made to concede....when Maryland AFSCME watches as everything public is handed to private contractors and all public pensions used as fodder for Wall Street......

and still stand behind those same neo-liberals doing this......

WE NEED A CHANGE IN LEADERSHIP OR THE UNION MEMBERSHIP WILL NOT TOLERATE THE LOSSES.


Strikes are still a really valuable way of exercising worker power!
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/faculty-on-strike/
Solidarity with teachers of working-class students everywhere!Faculty on Strike |


Jacobinwww.jacobinmag.comUIC United Faculty Local 6456 / Facebook On February 18, the tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who make up the University of Illinois-Chicago faculty union UICUF Local 6456 will walk out of the...

___________________________________________

We all know the arbitration process is biased because just as with the Ratings Agencies Moodys and S & P which committed fraud to give AAA ratings because they made more money in doing such.....so do these arbitration companies.  WHEN UNIONS AGREE TO PEACE AGREEMENTS AND ARBITRATION, THEY TAKE MOST BARGAINING POWER AWAY.

The Baltimore Teacher's Union actually agreed to a $1 increase for teachers.  That is pitiful. 

We understand that union leaders are under pressure with the democratic voters re-electing neo-liberals working to kill labor and justice for profits.....

BUT DO NOT TURN AROUND AND GIVE THESE SAME POLS HEADLINES AS LABOR-FRIENDLY FOR GOODNESS SAKE!



Corporations Only Want Arbitration Fairness for Themselves, Not Workers
April 30th, 2009 | Paula Brantner

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

Moreover, the EFCA arbitration provisions apply to two entities that commonly utilize arbitration to resolve disputes (unions and employers) and have expertise in navigating the system.  The “repeat user bias” in employment arbitration has been well-documented, as arbitrators tend to favor the parties who are most likely to use their services again (which is rarely if ever the employee), and can be blacklisted if they are perceived as being too worker-friendly.  (See Alexander Colvin, Empirical Research on Employment Arbitration: Clarity Amidst the Sound and Fury?, Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2007)).

So if employers truly think that arbitration is a better system than resolving disputes in court, then why are they fighting the EFCA provision?  You don’t have to be a cynic to realize that they’re inclined to fight any effort to level the playing field for workers, which the Employee Free Choice Act would do.  Just as they’re spreading the myth that EFCA would eliminate the secret ballot, it just comes naturally for them to confuse the public about the other EFCA provisions that would empower workers.

But if corporate America doesn’t want “a bureaucrat from Washington” to tell people how to run their businesses, then we have to wonder why they want arbitrators who are not even required to know the law or follow it passing judgment on their employment practices.  Essentially, companies are talking out of both sides of their mouth:  they want to impose an unfair arbitration process on their employees, but cannot bear to have even a fair arbitration process applied to them.


  1. Unite Here, Horseshoe Casino nearing labor peace agreement

  2.  ...www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/05/24/unite-here... 
    In this week’s BBJ, I wrote about how the expansion of casino gaming in Maryland offers labor unions a huge opportunity to expand their membership and ...

WOW ----UNIONS HIT THE JACKPOT-----AND ALL THESE DEALS COME WITH PEACE AGREEMENTS.  This headline will be used by O'Malley in his run for President as being union-friendly when in fact he is dismantling all union rights.  I hear that unions back him because of threats to collective bargaining.  So, what are deals that will ultimately put unions out of business by weakening them comes across as a big win.  I like Unite Here people, they work hard so I do not mean this to be totally on these union leaders shoulders......

WE THE PEOPLE ARE ELECTING NEO-LIBERALS WHO ARE FORCING LABOR INTO THESE DEALS.  LABOR UNIONS SHOULD NOT GIVE POSITIVE SUPPORT OR HEADLINES FOR WHAT IS BAD FOR UNIONS!


Wednesday, Jan 8, 2014, 6:44 pm
Maryland Unions Hit Jobs Jackpot with New Casinos
BY Bruce Vail



“We have a labor peace agreement with MGM, so I expect we will be moving pretty quickly to organize wall-to-wall,” Boardman tells Working In These Times. About 2,000 of the permanent casino workers are likely to be represented by Local 25, he says, with the remainder spread out among Teamsters Local 639, International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 99 and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 22. Similarly, the 2,000 temporary construction jobs are expected to be filled by union members linked to the Washington, D.C. Building Trades Council (AFL-CIO), a regional alliance of 15 union locals of electricians, ironworkers, painters, plumbers and others.

__________________________________________

Anthony Brown is the same as O'Malley and both are raging neo-liberals and sold on Wall Street.  All unions in Maryland lose because of these pols.  O'Malley deliberately underfunded public pensions (FIRE, POLICE, TEACHERS) as Mayor and Governor and has allowed the pension fraud to stand even as sending them to 401Ks where they will be preyed upon by Wall Street even more.  Brown will do the same.  It was O'Malley/Brown forcing the peace agreements......that are pushing Race to the Top that kills teacher's unions.....that privatize all public services with outsourcing that often goes out of state or to any non-union contractor. 

BROWN/ULMAN WILL KILL LABOR AS TPP-TYPE POLICIES EXPAND.  YET, THERE ARE THE UNION BACKING.  NOT ONE UNION/LABOR CANDIDATE IN THESE DEMOCRATIC RACES.  SO, UNIONS WORK TO ELECT NEO-LIBERALS WHO THEN KILL UNION MEMBERS WITH BAD POLICY.

STOP THIS MADNESS AND RUN LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST ALL NEO-LIBERALS IN PRIMARIES!




Anthony Brown and Ken Ulman Endorsed by Maryland-DC Council of AFL-CIO Saturday, October 26, 2013


Union Watch » Firefighters union backs Anthony Brown in


Anthony Brown picks up backing of plumbers and pipefitters in ...


Teachers back Brown for governorLargest union endorses lieutenant governor

Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, right, a gubernatorial candidate,… (Barbara Haddock Taylor,…)October 19, 2013|By Michael Dresser, The Baltimore SunThe state's largest teachers union threw its support behind the gubernatorial candidacy of Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown on Saturday, passing over three other candidates who sought its endorsement.

Delegates to the Maryland State Education
Association
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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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