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August 16th, 2014

8/16/2014

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

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

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

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


Baltimore City Will Hire 2 New Prosecutors To Reduce Violence

July 11, 2013 7:01 PM

Mike Hellgren WJZ general assignment reporter

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

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

Mike Hellgren has more on the new partnership.

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




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

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


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

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


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

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

Mark Reutter December 5, 2012 at 7:11 am


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

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

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

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

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

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

A Crash Nobody Heard

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

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

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

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

The Inspector General faulted Baltimore’s homeless program.

“Baltimore Was Delinquent”

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

At the Bottom of Cities Audited


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

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

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

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

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

Coming Back for More

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

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

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

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

Farming Out Responsibility

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

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

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

_____________________________________________



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

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

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


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

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

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


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



PETER FROSH FOR MARYLAND ATTORNEY GENERAL



Issues Protecting Kids Online


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


_____________________________________________

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

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


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


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

UNCONSTITUTIONAL CONDUCT!  PROVE IT!


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

ProPublica obtained the memo through a public records request.

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

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

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

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

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

But many states take a different tack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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







0 Comments

August 05th, 2014

8/5/2014

0 Comments

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


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


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

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

FCC to expand wireless spectrum





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



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

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

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


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


shaping the future



Ensuring Viewers' Are Not Denied New and Better TV Services


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Congress to Sell Public Airwaves to Pay Benefits



Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

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

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

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


_________________________________________________

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

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

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


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


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


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


August 05, 2009

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


by STEVE MACEK And SCOTT SANDERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

And no commercial advertisements whatsoever.

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

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


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

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

Scott Sanders is a longtime Chicago media and democracy advocate.


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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



0 Comments

July 13th, 2014

7/13/2014

0 Comments

 
JUST AN FYI AS THE MARYLAND BOARD OF ELECTIONS CERTIFIED THIS GOVERNOR'S RACE ON JULY 10, 2014.  THIS MEANS ITS TIME FOR CINDY WALSH FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND TO GO TO COURT.  THIS EFFORT IS NOT ONLY TO CHANGE THE SYSTEM SO IT WORKS AS RULE OF LAW REQUIRES---IT IS ABOUT THE CITIZENS OF MARYLAND KNOWING HOW THINGS SHOULD WORK AND ASK YOURSELF----WHY IS MY INCUMBENT NOT SHOUTING THIS? 

IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS.




Neo-liberals in Maryland have such control of the state and local Democratic committees that they openly violate election laws to make sure that any candidate with a platform against neo-liberal policies is excluded from election events and media coverage----a blackout of labor and justice candidates. For others across the US -----this may be happening in your neck of the woods.

THIS IS ILLEGAL AND WE MUST TAKE THIS TO COURT. EVEN IF THE COURT IS CORRUPT WE MUST DOCUMENT THIS BREAKDOWN OF RULE OF LAW AND EDUCATE THE PUBLIC ABOUT HOW THINGS SHOULD WORK!

Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland has filed a complaint in the Circuit Court of Maryland/Baltimore claiming systemic election violations changed the results of the election for Governor of Maryland in the Democratic Primary and need to be invalidated. If not for these election violations Cindy Walsh would have won the election without a doubt! The next step is for the court to issue summons' to these defendants in an expedited process as required by Maryland law in challenges to elections for Governor. Failure to do so will deny me my US Constitutional rights to due process and rights to participate freely in elections. Remember, I should be campaigning for the general election right now as the Republican candidate is doing.

I am self-representing as Maryland has no public justice protecting citizens against government malfeasance. I feel confident the complaint is written correctly and I know the claims are valid and easily proven. Lawyers may LOL at my lack of legalese-----be kind!!!!




CIVIL CLAIM IN THE CIRCUIT COURT  OF MARYLAND IN BALTIMORE



Cindy Walsh vs
Bobbie S. Mack , Chairman Maryland Board of Elections; Doug Gansler, Maryland State Attorney General; and Democratic Primary candidates for Governor of Maryland,  Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur.


Parties to this complaint


1.  Cindy Walsh
2522 N Calvert Street     Civil Action#____________
Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Plaintiff

 
 VS.


 
2.  Bobbie Mack, Chairman Maryland Board of Elections
151 West Street, Suite 200
Annapolis, MD 21401

Defendant


3.  Doug Gansler, Maryland Attorney General and candidate
200 St. Paul Place
Baltimore, MD 21202


Defendant

 

4.  Anthony Brown- candidate
100 State Circle 
Annapolis, Maryland 21401

Defendant

 

5.  Heather Mizeur- candidate
House Office Building, Room 429
6 Bladen St., Annapolis, MD 21401


Defendant

 

Jurisdiction

6.  Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland is filing in Maryland Circuit Court of Baltimore because plaintiff is a resident of Baltimore and the election irregularities identified in the Federal Court case include businesses located and operating in Baltimore.  The plaintiff claims Maryland agencies tasked with oversight and enforcement, the Maryland Board of Elections and Maryland Attorney General’s Office, failed to oversee Maryland elections and enforce Maryland and Federal election laws. 

TITLE 6 Subtitle 1 Section 6-102 (a); Section 6-103 (a) (b) (1); TITLE 6 Subtitle 2 Section 6-201 (a) 


Statement of Facts and Claims

 7.  The US Constitution and Maryland Constitution guarantees the rights of citizens to free and fair elections.  This includes the rights of citizens to run for elected office and the rights of citizens to go to the polls educated on the issues and candidates in an election race so they may cast an intelligent vote.  The FCC and IRS regulate businesses under their venue and have laws that protect elections and how businesses may participate in elections.  These laws state that if a business decides to participate in elections it must do no damage to one candidate or oppose a candidate and it must educate voters on the issues and candidates in an election race excluding no candidate because of platform.  These laws protect Federal, State, and local elections.  This case does not address a third party candidate; it addresses a candidate in a Democratic Primary and has the protection of major party status.  Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland was systematically excluded from election coverage by Maryland media and election events by major 501c3 organizations and this exclusion was complete in the City of Baltimore.  The plaintiff will prove these widespread election irregularities without a doubt changed the results of the Democratic Primary election for Governor of Maryland and denied the citizens of Maryland the information on a campaign platform that in all probability included issues valuable to their decision to vote and for whom to vote.  This case claims that Bobbie Mack of the Maryland Board of Elections and Doug Gansler of the Maryland Attorney General’s Office willfully and deliberately failed in their duties of oversight and enforcement of Maryland and Federal Election Law and refused to respond to plaintiff’s requests for relief from said election irregularities.  Rather, they allowed them to continue creating the conditions now necessitating the invalidation of the election results in the Democratic Primary for Governor of Maryland.  This case claims as well that Democratic Primary candidates Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur and their campaign committees knowingly violated election law and ignored and participated in election venues that violated election law.


MARYLAND STATUTES AND CODES


8.  Cindy Walsh claims election irregularities; requests to invalidate an election result can be taken to Maryland Circuit Court.


Title 12 Subtitle 2.    Judicial Review of Elections Section 2-102 (a) (b) (1) (2) (3); Subtitle 2. 12-202 (a) (1) (2) (b) (2); 12-203 (a) (1) (2) (3) (b); 12-204 (a) 1) (2) (b) (1) (2) (c) (1) (2) (d) 


9.
  Cindy Walsh claims Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler has the power to investigate election violations through the State Prosecutor’s Office and as an elected politician has taken an oath of office requiring the upholding of Federal and State Constitutional law including election law.  Doug Gansler failed to respond to requests from plaintiff to investigate claims of election irregularities and participated in election irregularities so great as to change the result of the Democratic Primary for Governor of Maryland.

 Chapter 612, Acts of 1976; Code Criminal Procedure Article, secs. 14-101 through 14-114; Sec. 6 (originally Article I, sec. 6, renumbered by Chapter 681, Acts of 1977, ratified Nov. 7, 1978).

 
10.
  Cindy Walsh claims the Maryland Board of Elections Chairman Bobbie Mack is tasked with ensuring that elections are free and fair and to respond to candidate’s complaints identifying election irregularities and as an appointed state official has taken an oath of office requiring the upholding of Federal and State Constitutional law including election law.  Bobbie Mack failed to respond to complaints of election irregularities and this candidate's request for relief from those irregularities.
These irregularities were so great as to change the result of the Democratic Primary for Governor of Maryland.

Title 2 Subtitle 1 Section 2-102 - (a) (b) (1) (2) (3)

 

11.  Cindy Walsh claims Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur willfully, knowingly, and with malice violated FCC and IRS election laws and as elected politicians having taken an oath of office requiring the upholding of Federal and State Constitutional law including election law, have violated that oath of office.



ARTICLE I SEC. 6; SEC. 9.



  Demand for relief

Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland asks the court for the following:

12.  Invalidate the 2O14 Democratic Primary due to election irregularities so widespread as to without a doubt changed the result of the Democratic Primary for Governor of Maryland.

13.  Find the Maryland Board of Elections and Maryland Attorney General’s Office guilty of failing to perform the duties of their office and of obstruction of justice placing these agencies under court supervision for a probationary period of several election cycles until the citizens of Maryland are assured free and fair elections.

14.  Find the Democratic Primary candidates for Governor of Maryland, Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur guilty of failing to honor their oath of office by upholding all Federal and State Constitutional laws especially election law and actively violating these election laws.

15.  Provide the Democratic Primary candidate Cindy Walsh an election venue after being denied one in this Democratic Primary for Governor of Maryland.  Disqualifying Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, and Heather Mizeur for knowingly committing election irregularities and knowingly participating in election venues violating election law would place Cindy Walsh the next highest in votes and therefore the winner of this Democratic Primary.  If the court deems the entire primary invalid then allow Cindy Walsh a spot in the 2014 general election for Governor of Maryland running as a Green Party candidate.  This would require the court for one time to suspend general election filing date requirement date of February 2014 and suspending the law that precludes a candidate losing a primary from running in a general election.  If this is the solution, then the court would need to protect Cindy Walsh from the same kind of media and 501c3 organization censure through the general election this time because of being a third party candidate.

16.  Refund the costs of running this election including candidate filing fees for the candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor and costs of electioneering, refund court costs, with financial damages to the plaintiff for an amount of $500,000.  The plaintiff asks the court to assure the Maryland Assembly pay this award or be sent to jail for contempt of court.   Cindy Walsh is self-representing and is her own lawyer.  Defendants and their lawyers can use the following contact information: Cindy Walsh   2522 N. Calvert St. Baltimore, Maryland 21218; 443-825-7031; Cwals99@yahoo.com  



Signature/date of plaintiff and plaintiff’s lawyer 

______________________________                                                                                          _____________________________


MARYLAND ELECTION LAW:

Title 12 Subtitle 2.    Judicial Review of Elections

12-202.  Judicial challenges

a)  In general--- If no other timely and adequate remedy is provided by this article, a registered voter may seek judicial relief from any act or omission relating to an election, whether or not the election has been held, on the grounds that the act or omission:

1)  is inconsistent with this article or other law applicable to the elections process; and
2)  may change or has changed the outcome of the election.

b)  Place and time of filing.---- A registered voter may seek judicial relief under this section in the appropriate circuit court within the earlier of:

1)  10 days after the act or omission or the date the act or omission became known to the petitioner; or

2)  7 days after the election results are certified, unless the election was a gubernatorial primary or special primary election, in which case 3 days after the election results are certified.  (An Code 1957, art. 33, 12-202; 2002, ch.291, 2, 4)


12-203. Procedure

a) In general.----   A proceeding under this subtitle shall be conducted in accordance with the Maryland Rules, except that:

1)  the proceeding shall be heard and decided without a jury and as expeditiously as the circumstances require;

2) on the request of a party or sua sponte, the chief administrative judge of the circuit court may assign the case to a three-judge panel of circuit court judges; and

3)  an appeal shall be taken directly to the Court of Appeals within 5 days of the date of the decision of the circuit court.

b)  Expedited appeal.  ----  The Court of Appeals shall give priority to hear and decide an appeal brought under subsection (a) (3) of this section as expeditiously as the circumstances require. (An Code 1957, art.33, 12-303; 2002, ch 291, 2, 4)





12-204.  Judgement.

a)  In general.  ------- The court may provide a remedy as provided in subsection (b) or (c) if this section if the court determines that the alleged act or omission materially affected the rights of interested parties or the purity of the elections process and:

1) may have changed the outcome of an election already held; or

2) may change the outcome of a pending election.

b)  Act or omission that changed election outcome.  ----If the court makes an affirmative determination that an act or omission was committed that changed the outcome of an election already held, the court shall:
1)  declare void the election for the office or question involved and order that the election be held again at a date set by the court; or

2)  order any other relief that will provide an adequate remedy.

c)  Act or omission that may change outcome of pending election.  -----  If the court makes an affirmative determination that an act or omission has been committed that may change the outcome of a pending election, the court may:

1)  order any relief it considers appropriate under the circumstances; and

2)  if the court determines that it is the only relief that will provide a remedy,, direct that the elections for the office or question involved be postponed and rescheduled on a date set by the court.

d)  Clear and convincing evidence.  -----  A determination of the court under subsection (a) of this section shall be based on clear and convincing evidence.  (An Code 1957, art. 33, 12-204; 2002, ch. 291, 2, 4)


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

Maryland Attorney General’s Office

Chapter 612, Acts of 1976; Code Criminal Procedure Article, secs. 14-101 through 14-114; Sec. 6 (originally Article I, sec. 6, renumbered by Chapter 681, Acts of 1977, ratified Nov. 7, 1978).
The Office of State Prosecutor was established by Constitutional amendment and legislation in 1976 (Chapter 612, Acts of 1976, ratified Nov. 1976). The State Prosecutor’s Office began operation January, 1977.

The State Prosecutor may investigate on his own initiative, or at the request of the Governor, the Attorney General, the General Assembly, the State Ethics Commission, or a State’s Attorney, certain criminal offenses. These include: 1) State election law violations; 2) State public ethics law violations; 3) State bribery law violations involving public officials or employees; 4) misconduct in office by public officials or employees; and 5) extortion, perjury, or obstruction of justice related to any of the above.

 MARYLAND STATUTES AND CODES


Maryland Board of Elections
Title 2 Subtitle 1 Section 2-102 - Powers and duties. Listen § 2-102. Powers and duties.

(a) In general-The State Board shall manage and supervise elections in the State and ensure compliance with the requirements of this article and any applicable federal law by all persons involved in the elections process.

(b) Specific powers and duties.- In exercising its authority under this article and in order to ensure compliance with this article and with any requirements of federal law, the State Board shall:

(1) Supervise the conduct of elections in the State;

(2) Direct, support, monitor, and evaluate the activities of each local board;

(3) Have a staff sufficient to perform its functions;

[An. Code 1957, art. 33, § 2-102; 2002, ch. 291, §§ 2, 4; 2003, ch. 379, § 2; 2004, ch. 25; 2006, ch. 61, § 1.]


 

18 U.S. Code § 1001  (a) (2) (3) False statements of fact

 

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years

 

·         Defamation per se

 

 

Damages Awarded for Defamation in Maryland Among the damages for defamation in Maryland include:

  • actual damages
  • punitive damages
  • other damages awarded by the court
 

Punitive Damages in Maryland: Reconciling Federal Law, State Law, and the Pattern Jury Instructions

·        


·         Stephen J. Shapiro

·        
University of Baltimore - School of Law

Fall 2007

University of Baltimore Law Forum, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 27-53, Fall 2007

·        
Abstract:     

·         Starting in the early 1990's, both the United States Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals of Maryland addressed the issue of jury discretion in awarding punitive damages. The two courts addressed the perceived problem in two different ways. The United States Supreme Court focused their attention mainly on the excessive amount of such awards. It held that the Due Process Clause regulates both the procedures used in awarding punitive damages and the amounts of such awards. The Court required that juries be given sufficient instructions to enable them to make awards based on the purpose of punitive damages, and required state trial judges and appellate courts to reduce the amount of such awards if they were “grossly excessive.” The Court provided state judges with guideposts for determining the appropriate amount of punitive damage awards and required that the amounts be proportionate to the amount of compensatory damages.

The Court of Appeals of Maryland focused its attention instead on the proof required for a jury to make a punitive damages award in the first place. It held that punitive damage awards could only be made if the defendant's conduct rose to the level of actual malice (evil motive or intent to do harm, or knowing that its actions would be harmful) and not just implied malice (gross negligence, recklessness, or should have known of the harm). In addition, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that juries should be instructed that they must find that actual malice had been proved by “clear and convincing evidence,” and not just a preponderance of the evidence.

This article will suggest several changes to Maryland law and the Maryland Civil Pattern Jury Instructions, so that the instructions more accurately reflect Maryland law, and that Maryland law complies with the Due Process Clause. The proposed changes include:
• providing a clearer standard in the instructions for when punitive damages should be awarded;
• clarifying that the “clear and convincing” standard applies only to the finding of “actual malice” and not to the broader question of whether and in what amount to award punitive damages;
• changing the law, the procedure and the jury instructions relating to whether and when a jury may consider evidence of the defendant's financial condition in calculating the amount of a punitive damage award; and
• providing more guidance to juries as to the appropriate amount of punitive damage awards.


·         Number of Pages in PDF File: 28

·         Keywords: punitive damages, jury discretion, Supreme Court, Court of Appeals of Maryland, Maryland Civil Pattern Jury Instructions, compensatory damages, Due Process Clause

·         JEL Classification: K13, K49

·         Accepted Paper Series



·         Download This Paper

·         Date posted: June 24, 2009  

·         Suggested Citation

·         Shapiro, Stephen J., Punitive Damages in Maryland: Reconciling Federal Law, State Law, and the Pattern Jury Instructions (Fall 2007). University of Baltimore Law Forum, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 27-53, Fall 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1425083

Punitive damages in Rockville, Maryland usually cannot exceed 10 times the amount of actual damages suffered by the plaintiff. However, this is just a guideline, and not a strict rule. Courts in Maryland have found larger punitive damage awards to be perfectly valid, and smaller ones to be invalid. This will be highly dependent on the facts of each case.

___________________________________________


THIS IS A DRAFT OF THE COMPLAINT GOING TO FEDERAL COURT


CIVIL CLAIM IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MARYLAND

 

Cindy Walsh

2522 N Calvert Street                                   Civil Action #  __________________
Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Plaintiff

 

                   VS.

 

1.      University of Maryland---College Park

  Wallace D. Loh
 President
1101 Main Administration Building
 College Park, MD 20742-6105

 
Defendant

 
2.      University of Maryland Carey Law School     

Phoebe A. Haddon
Dean
500 W. Baltimore Street   Suite 260
Baltimore, MD 21201-1786


Defendant


3.      University of Baltimore

Robert L. Bogomolny
President
1420 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201

 
Defendant


4.      Morgan State University

David Wilson
President
1700 East Cold Spring Lane
Baltimore MD 21251

 
Defendant

 
5.      Coppin State University

Mortimer Neufville
President
2500 West North Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21216-3698

 
Defendant



6.      Maryland Public Television

Larry D. Unger
President and Chief Executive Officer
11767 Owings Mills Boulevard
Owings Mills, Maryland 21117

 
Defendant

 

7.      WYPR Public Media 

Anthony Brandon
President & General Manager
2216 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218

 
Defendant

 

8.      WEAA Public Media 88.9 FM

Morgan State University--David Wilson-President
1700 E. Coldspring Lane
Baltimore, MD 21251

 
Defendant


9.      Baltimore Education Coalition

Yasmene Mumby/ Jimmy Stuart Co-Chairs
Cathedral of the Incarnation
4 East University Parkway
Baltimore, Maryland 21218

Defendant

 
10.  BUILD

Baltimore- Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development

Co-Chairs
Rev. Andrew Foster Connors, Pastor of Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church
Rev. Glenna Huber, Pastor of Church of the Holy Nativity

2439 Maryland Ave
Baltimore, MD 21218


Defendant



 11.     Church of the Great Commission

Rev. Joshua Kevin White is Host Pastor.
Collective Empowerment Group, Inc.
President, Rev. Anthony G. Maclin  Board of Directors
5055 Allentown Road
Camp Springs, MD.  20746


 
Defendant
 


12.  Maryland Democratic Party

Yvette Lewis, Chair
33 West Street, Suite 200
Annapolis, Maryland 21401

 
Defendant



13.    The Gazette's Corporate Office

Douglas Tallman,  Editor
Vanessa Harrington,  Editor
9030 Comprint Court
Gaithersburg, MD 20877


Defendant



14.  Maryland Reporter.com

Len Lazarick
6392 Shadowshape Place
Columbia, MD 21045

Defendant



15.  WBFF TV

Steve Moretz Operations Manager
2000 W. 41st Street
Baltimore, MD 21211


Defendant



16.  Pennsylvania Avenue AME Zion Church

Reverend Lester A. McCorn, Senior Pastor
Lady Charlene M. McCorn, First Lady
1128 Pennsylvania Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21201


Defendant



17.   Maryland Municipal League  


Scott A. Hancock,  Executive Director

1212 West Street  
Annapolis, Maryland 21401


Defendant



18.   WBAL TV Channel 11

Dan Joerres  -- President & General Manager
3800 Hooper Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21211

Defendant

 

19.  WJZ TV Channel 13

Gail Bending -- News Director
3725 Malden Ave
Baltimore, MD 21211-1322

Defendant

 

20.  WMAR TV Channel 3

Kelly Groft --- News Director
6400 York Rd
Baltimore, MD 21212-2117

Defendant

 

21.  Baltimore Sun

Trif Alatzas -- Senior vice president, executive editor
501 N. Calvert Street
Baltimore, MD 21278

Defendant



22.  WOLB  AM Radio- Radio One Baltimore

Howard Mazer -  General Manager
1705 Whitehead Road
Baltimore, MD 21207


Defendant






________________________________________

THIS IS A DRAFT OF THE FEDERAL COURT LAWSUIT TO BE FILED BY CINDY WALSH

 

 

Background to Federal Court lawsuit regarding election irregularities in the Democratic Primary for the Governor of Maryland

Censure in media and 501c3 events of my candidacy and platform damaged my campaign and denied the voters the right to freedom and intelligent casting of a vote.  This was a huge factor in election results and directly changed the course of this primary election.  Anthony Brown with 12% of registered democratic voters left 72% of those voters deciding not to participate.  Cindy Walsh with 1% of registered democratic voters could have easily won the 15% more of voters needed to win this election if not for the systemic election violations that left my campaign out of primary election events and media. 





Legal basis of complaint:

Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland is filing suit in Federal Court because of violations to Federal Election laws carried in FCC and IRS organization requirements.


Below you see the FCC requirements for media coverage of elections.  It clearly states that media cannot ‘willfully’ disallow reasonable access to time given to other candidates in a race.  There is no expectation of equal time, but there is an expectation of reasonable access to those media vehicles and an expectation of accurate depictions of an election race to include a full list of candidates in a race :

Federal election laws are not only for Federal Elections ----they cover any candidate for public office.


Four Exemptions
In 1959, Congress amended the Communications Act after the FCC ruled that Chicago broadcasters had to give "equal time" to mayoral candidate Lar Daly; the incumbent mayor was then Richard Daley. In response, Congress created four exemptions to the equal time rule:

(1) regularly scheduled newscasts
(2) news interviews shows
(3) documentaries (unless the documentary is about a candidate)
(4) on-the-spot news events


Federal Communications Commission Rules (Title 47 Code of Federal Regulations)
Statutes and Rules on Candidate Appearances & Advertising

Relevant Sections of the Communications Act of 1934
Section 315 [47 U.S.C. §315] Facilities for candidates for public office.


(a)    If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station: Provided, That such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast under the provision of this section.  No obligation is hereby imposed under this subsection upon any licensee to allow the use of its station by any such candidate.  Appearance by a legally qualified candidate on any –

(1)    bona fide newscast,

(2)    bona fide news interview,

(3)    bona fide news documentary (if the appearance of the candidate is incidental to the presentation of the subject or subjects covered by the news documentary), or

(4)    on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events (including but not limited to political conventions and activities incidental thereto), shall not be deemed to be use of a broadcasting station within the meaning of this subsection.



FCC Section 315 [47 U.S.C. §315] (1) (2) (3)  (4)  Nothing in the foregoing sentence shall be construed as relieving broadcasters, in connection with the presentation of newscasts, news interviews, news documentaries, and on-the-spot coverage of news events, from the obligation imposed upon them under this Act to operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.
 

Below we see the FCC statute for 501c3 media entities participating in elections.  Again, it is clear that these media outlets will not oppose-----which complete exclusion as opposition-----any one candidate.  This was systemic in all 501c3 media in Maryland.


Section 399 [47 U.S.C. §399] Support of political candidates prohibited.

No noncommercial educational broadcasting station may support or oppose any candidate for public office.

Section 73.1940 [47 CFR §73.1940] Legally qualified candidates for public office.

(a) A legally qualified candidate for public office is any person who:

(1) has publicly announced his or her intention to run for nomination or office;

(2) is qualified under the applicable local, State or Federal law to hold the office for which he or she is a candidate; and

(3) has met the qualifications set forth in either paragraph (b), (c), (d), or (e) of this section.

(b) A person seeking election to any public office including that of President or Vice President of the United States, or nomination for any public office except that of President or Vice President, by means of a primary, general or special election, shall be considered a legally qualified candidate if, in addition to meeting the criteria set forth in paragraph (a) of this section, that person:

(1) has qualified for a place on the ballot; or

(2) has publicly committed himself or herself to seeking election by the write-in method and is eligible under applicable law to be voted for by sticker, by writing in his or her name on the ballot or by other method, and makes a substantial showing that he or she is a bona fide candidate for nomination or office.


(e) A person seeking nomination for the office of President or Vice President of the United States shall, for the purposes of the Communications Act and the rules thereunder, be considered a legally qualified candidate only in those States or territories (or the District of Columbia) in which, in addition to meeting the requirements set forth in paragraph (a) of this section:

(1) He or she, or proposed delegates on his or her behalf, have qualified for the primary or Presidential preference ballot in that State, territory or the District of Columbia; or

(2) He or she has made a substantial showing of a bona fide candidacy for such nomination in that State, territory or the District of Columbia; except, that any such person meeting the requirements set forth in paragraphs (a)(1) and (2) of this section in at least 10 States (or 9 and the District of Columbia) shall be considered a legally qualified candidate for nomination in all States, territories and the District of Columbia for purposes of this Act.

(f) The term "substantial showing" of a bona fide candidacy as used in paragraphs (b), (d) and (e) of this section means evidence that the person claiming to be a candidate has engaged to a substantial degree in activities commonly associated with political campaigning. Such activities normally would include making campaign speeches, distributing campaign literature, issuing press releases, maintaining a campaign committee, and establishing campaign headquarters (even though the headquarters in some instances might be the residence of the candidate or his or her campaign manager). Not all of the listed activities are necessarily required in each case to demonstrate a substantial showing, and there may be activities not listed herein which would contribute to such a showing.

[43 FR 32795, July 28, 1978, as amended at 43 FR 45856, Oct. 4, 1978; 43 FR 55769, Nov. 29, 1978; 45 FR 26066, Apr. 17, 1980; 45 FR 28141, Apr. 28, 1980; 57 FR 208, Jan. 3, 1992; 57 FR 27708, June 22, 1992]


Section 73.1941 [47 CFR §73.1941] Equal Opportunities.

(a) General requirements. Except as other-wise indicated in § 73.1944, no station licensee is required to permit the use of its facilities by any legally qualified candidate for public office, but if any licensee shall permit any such candidate to use its facilities, it shall afford equal opportunities to all other candidates for that office to use such facilities. Such licensee shall have no power of censorship over the material broadcast by any such candidate. Appearance by a legally qualified candidate on any:

(1) Bona fide newscast;

(2) Bona fide news interview;

(3) Bona fide news documentary (if the appearance of the candidate is incidental to the presentation of the subject or subjects covered by the news documentary); or

(4) On-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events (including, but not limited to political conventions and activities incidental thereto) shall not be deemed to be use of broadcasting station. (section 315(a) of the Communications Act.)

(b) Uses. As used in this section and § 73.1942, the term "use" means a candidate appearance (including by voice or picture) that is not exempt under paragraphs 73.1941 (a)(1) through (a)(4) of this section.

(c) Timing of request. A request for equal opportunities must be submitted to the licensee within 1 week of the day on which the first prior use giving rise to the right of equal opportunities occurred: Provided, however, That where the person was not a candidate at the time of such first prior use, he or she shall submit his or her request within 1 week of the first subsequent use after he or she has become a legally qualified candidate for the office in question.

(d) Burden of proof. A candidate requesting equal opportunities of the licensee or complaining of noncompliance to the Commission shall have the burden of proving that he or she and his or her opponent are legally qualified candidates for the same public office.

(e) Discrimination between candidates. In making time available to candidates for public office, no licensee shall make any discrimination between candidates in practices, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with the service rendered pursuant to this part, or make or give any preference to any candidate for public office or subject any such candidate to any prejudice or disadvantage; nor shall any licensee make any contract or other agreement which shall have the effect of permitting any legally qualified candidate for any public office to broadcast to the exclusion of other legally qualified candidates for the same public office.


 

FCC Section 315 [47 U.S.C. §315] (1) (2) (3)  (4)  Nothing in the foregoing sentence shall be construed as relieving broadcasters, in connection with the presentation of newscasts, news interviews, news documentaries, and on-the-spot coverage of news events, from the obligation imposed upon them under this Act to operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.





18 U.S. Code § 1001  (a) (2) (3) False statements of fact

 (a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;

shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years

 

·         Defamation per se


[57 FR 208, Jan. 3, 1992; 59 FR 14568, March 29, 1994]

 

Damages Awarded for Defamation in Maryland Among the damages for defamation in Maryland include:

  • actual damages
  • punitive damages
  • other damages awarded by the court
 

Punitive Damages in Maryland: Reconciling Federal Law, State Law, and the Pattern Jury Instructions

·        


·         Stephen J. Shapiro

·        
University of Baltimore - School of Law

Fall 2007

University of Baltimore Law Forum, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 27-53, Fall 2007

·        
Abstract:     

·         Starting in the early 1990's, both the United States Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals of Maryland addressed the issue of jury discretion in awarding punitive damages. The two courts addressed the perceived problem in two different ways. The United States Supreme Court focused their attention mainly on the excessive amount of such awards. It held that the Due Process Clause regulates both the procedures used in awarding punitive damages and the amounts of such awards. The Court required that juries be given sufficient instructions to enable them to make awards based on the purpose of punitive damages, and required state trial judges and appellate courts to reduce the amount of such awards if they were “grossly excessive.” The Court provided state judges with guideposts for determining the appropriate amount of punitive damage awards and required that the amounts be proportionate to the amount of compensatory damages.

The Court of Appeals of Maryland focused its attention instead on the proof required for a jury to make a punitive damages award in the first place. It held that punitive damage awards could only be made if the defendant's conduct rose to the level of actual malice (evil motive or intent to do harm, or knowing that its actions would be harmful) and not just implied malice (gross negligence, recklessness, or should have known of the harm). In addition, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that juries should be instructed that they must find that actual malice had been proved by “clear and convincing evidence,” and not just a preponderance of the evidence.

This article will suggest several changes to Maryland law and the Maryland Civil Pattern Jury Instructions, so that the instructions more accurately reflect Maryland law, and that Maryland law complies with the Due Process Clause. The proposed changes include:
• providing a clearer standard in the instructions for when punitive damages should be awarded;
• clarifying that the “clear and convincing” standard applies only to the finding of “actual malice” and not to the broader question of whether and in what amount to award punitive damages;
• changing the law, the procedure and the jury instructions relating to whether and when a jury may consider evidence of the defendant's financial condition in calculating the amount of a punitive damage award; and
• providing more guidance to juries as to the appropriate amount of punitive damage awards.

·         Number of Pages in PDF File: 28

·         Keywords: punitive damages, jury discretion, Supreme Court, Court of Appeals of Maryland, Maryland Civil Pattern Jury Instructions, compensatory damages, Due Process Clause

·         JEL Classification: K13, K49

·         Accepted Paper Series



·         Download This Paper

·         Date posted: June 24, 2009  

·         Suggested Citation

·         Shapiro, Stephen J., Punitive Damages in Maryland: Reconciling Federal Law, State Law, and the Pattern Jury Instructions (Fall 2007). University of Baltimore Law Forum, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 27-53, Fall 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1425083

Punitive damages in Rockville, Maryland usually cannot exceed 10 times the amount of actual damages suffered by the plaintiff. However, this is just a guideline, and not a strict rule. Courts in Maryland have found larger punitive damage awards to be perfectly valid, and smaller ones to be invalid. This will be highly dependent on the facts of each case.
0 Comments

July 03rd, 2014

7/3/2014

0 Comments

 
THESE ARE NEO-CON AND NEO-LIBERAL POLICIES SO TO ESCAPE BAD POLICY---DO NOT SIMPLY VOTE THE OTHER PARTY-----CLEAN UP THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

Maryland's Governor Martin O'Malley announced that shortfalls in the 2014 state budget due to a complete stagnation of Maryland's economy and high unemployment  created by control of Maryland's economy by global corporations will focus on programs and services valuable to the citizens of Maryland but not affect the massive giveaway of revenue in the guise of corporate subsidy, tax breaks, or any effort to reign in billions of dollars in corporate fraud. 

O'Malley as a neo-liberal calls this FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY


So, $10 million will be taken from higher education and that includes grants, financial aid, and scholarships to Maryland citizens and employment to 4 public universities essential to middle-class/working class/poor families.

Below you see how a neo-liberals systematically eliminate all public sector employment by saying it is not firing anyone but eliminating positions not filled.  Maryland has had its entire oversight and accountability sectors eliminated in this way.  What I want to focus on today is higher education and the outsourcing of public university jobs to such an extent that the state spends money to support an education system that does not even operate in the US or benefit the citizens of Maryland.  O'Malley spent his 8 years developing the structures for overseas education and made marketing and recruiting foreign students a priority.  This is where our higher education money is spent and media states that never has there been fewer citizens of Maryland unable to attend Maryland universities.  It is not only high tuition----it is the elimination of financial aid, grants, and scholarships.  It hurts the economy in that people are not hired to these state positions to earn the money needed for consumption of goods and this creates a stagnant economy.  O'Malley does this because he works for global corporations that want all state and local revenue spent expanding their businesses overseas,  promoting exports, and bringing foreign students to Maryland to graduate and be sent back overseas to work for US global corporations in other nations.  This entire process leaves out the families in Maryland and their children's ability to attend the best public universities in the state.  Don't worry.....O'Malley and neo-liberals spent hundreds of millions building a separate system of higher education for the citizens of Maryland that cheapen and track all into vocational training programs.  This also increases the number of foreign graduates that are not citizens ready to take high level jobs thanks to Obama's executive order to allow the high-skilled green card worker quotas to rise.  So, Maryland citizens are not able to access the higher education venues that lead to the best jobs.  When people who are not citizens are given these jobs they have no workplace rights and are not free to report abuse or illegal activity within the corporations for which they work.  In these times of systemic corporate fraud and corruption----this is critical.

So, an election year budget that protected labor positions is followed by budget cuts eliminating jobs right after the primary for Governor of Maryland.  Union leaders knew this would happen-----it happens all the time.  Neo-cons would be worse.
  Neo-liberals only pretend to be progressive labor and justice!

Remember, I have for years been explaining that the state was giving a rosy economic picture that was not real and I stated why the economy was indeed stagnant and unemployment high.  Below you see Franchot being the spoiler but the Comptroller's Office is ground zero for corporate tax fraud and the wrongful designation of corporations as non-profits and therefor losses in the hundreds of millions in state tax revenue each year which would happen with a republican in office as well.


State approves O'Malley's $84 million in budget cuts Poor economy prompts spending reductions


By Erin Cox, The Baltimore Sun 1:19 p.m. EDT, July 2, 2014



The lackluster economy prompted Gov. Martin O'Malley to propose erasing $84 million in planned spending for next year.

Just a day after the new state budget took effect, O'Malley persuaded the Board of Public Works unanimously to approve a modest set of cuts to Maryland's $16.1 billion general fund.

About $10 million in cuts come from the state's higher-education institutions, although O'Malley aides said it would not affect tuition rates.

The cuts would not cause any layoffs but would trim 61 vacant jobs from the state's workforce of about 80,000 people, aides said. More than half of those jobs will come from higher education, including 36 vacant posts in the University of Maryland system.

Even though the official estimate of how far revenue lags behind state spending will not be ready until September, the administration chose to begin budget cuts now — before agencies started spending this year's cash. Together, the cuts represent less than half a percent of the state's general fund.

O'Malley said that the cuts "build upon a tradition, a culture of fiscal responsibility." He pointed out the belt-tightening was much smaller than cuts the state took during the recession.

Comptroller Peter A. Franchot voted for the cuts, but said that state leaders need to drop the "political spin" about the state's improving economy and "stop pretending that we made it through the thicket."

"Our citizens don't want to hear the spin anymore, and they're not falling for it," Franchot said.

A federal economic report released last week showed that the U.S. economy contracted more during the first quarter of 2014 than in any quarter during the previous five years. That followed another U.S. Department of Commerce report showing that Maryland's economy had stagnated in 2013.

The sluggish growth means state revenues have fallen lower than officials estimated earlier this year.

O'Malley defended the state's financial health by citing its AAA bond rating and comparing Maryland's relatively small budget shortfall to larger looming problems in other states on the Eastern seaboard, some of which have shortfalls in the hundreds of millions.

"We are coming through this recession faster than a lot of other states," O'Malley said. He added, "there's a lot that is going right, and of course, still, a lot of work to do. In that spirit, I agree with the comptroller that we should have an honest conversation."

In January, O'Malley proposed a $39 billion state budget that increased spending by 4.9 percent and took effect Tuesday, the final state spending plan of his eight years in office.

T. Eloise Foster, O'Malley's budget secretary, said Wednesday's cuts are designed to resolve the shortfall for the entire year. "My plan is not having to do this again," she said.

While O'Malley's staff declined to offer a list of all the $84 million in specific cuts, they said they include $56 million to various government agencies, with some asked to eliminate vacant jobs, forgo software upgrades or pare back other expenses.

In addition to the $10 million cut from higher education, another $10 million will be shaved from the state budget by spending federal cash already in state coffers. And budget experts said they expect $7 million of anticipated expenses to not materialize.

The cuts would not affect the struggling Maryland Health Benefit Exchange insurance website or a series of new economic development programs to expand cybersecurity and biotechnology sectors in Maryland.

All cuts must be approved by at least two members on the state's three-person Board of Public Works, on which O'Malley, Franchot and State Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp sit.

The cuts pale in comparison to the big spending reductions the board approved during the recession. In 2010, O'Malley went to the board three times for a total of $614 million in spending cuts from the general fund. In 2009, he asked for a total of $429 million in cuts over three requests. And in 2008, O'Malley requested a single $213 million spending cut.

_________________________________________________

Below you see where all the money for higher education has gone during the neo-liberal O'Malley's terms in office-----building this network of global PhDs and it has nothing to do with the citizens of Maryland!  This is what the US Senate based their immigration reform bill ------the bringing of foreign students and grads to America and then allowing them to take these US corporate positions often the best positions.  We are not anti-immigrant nor do we want to exclude foreign students from our universities-----quite the opposite, this should be robust.  We are against the simultaneous defunding of higher education for the bulk of Maryland citizens and it is deliberate.

WE CAN FUND HIGHER EDUCATION FOR ALL THAT WANT TO ATTEND OUR MARYLAND UNIVERSITIES BY ENDING CORPORATE SUBSIDIES AND TAX BREAKS AND FOR GOODNESS SAKE MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD.

All this is happening because of global corporate control of the Maryland economy.  We do not need these global connections for a healthy economy------it does just the opposite----it stagnates the economy.

The Global Ph.D.
July 3, 2014 By Holly Else
for Times Higher Education



Internationalizing the doctoral training process could help to overcome negative perceptions about the employability of Ph.D. students outside academia, said participants at a recent conference.

Universities in several countries are beginning to think of new ways to cater for the rising number of overseas doctoral students, speakers at the European University Association’s annual meeting on doctoral education told delegates in Liverpool.

International doctoral students offer a “cost-effective” way for institutions to build international links. But problems surrounding complex visa rules, falling domestic student numbers and the cost of running international joint doctoral programs remain.


The number of domestic doctoral candidates at Australia’s University of Queensland started dwindling in 2008, according to the head of its graduate school, Alastair McEwan. To compensate, the university has enrolled international students, who now make up about 40 percent of the doctoral student body.

The shift is “most dramatic” in engineering, architecture and IT, where departments are “heavily reliant” on overseas students, he said. He added that the university is investing in this area because Ph.D. students “are absolutely critical” to research output and are “a very cost-effective way to promote international linkages.”

McEwan said that the benefits international doctoral candidates bring to the institution “cannot be overestimated”. Their presence offers students a “breadth of knowledge about other cultures.”

“That is an important transferable skill that should be part of a student’s employability development. Internationalization of the Ph.D., or international interactions, could help us overcome some of the negative perceptions about the employability of Ph.D. students outside academia,” he added.

But he said that having overseas students enrolled on doctoral programs was a one-dimensional method of internationalization. “The next stage is to start thinking about other ways,” he said, adding that the answer did not lie in Ph.D.s that are run jointly with overseas institutions.

“These come with a high overhead as they are very hard to manage.... I’m not convinced that this is the most efficient or effective way to manage things in the long run,” he added.


American institutions are also seeing a rise in the number of overseas doctoral candidates in science, technology and engineering subjects. The vice provost and dean of Cornell University, Barbara Knuth, said: “We should be concerned in the U.S. in terms of [what] our doctoral pool will be for economic development purposes.”

She said that the nation’s immigration policies are “complex and quite limiting.”

“Doctoral students are eager to come to the U.S. to study, but we are not very good at encouraging them to stay after their degrees,” she added.

Cornell is now working to internationalize the doctoral experience for all students. Internationalizing the Ph.D. process would help to expand a graduate’s professional networks and employability, she said.

At the institutional level, it will broaden intellectual discoveries, help academics to address complex global problems and increase the visibility and exposure of the institution globally, she said.

Jean Chambaz, president of the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in France, said that universities needed to move beyond memoranda of understanding when it comes to working together internationally.

“We need focused, balanced programs on questions of common interest that include multilateral doctoral candidates and staff circulation,” he told delegates.


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Below you see why more and more staff are being cut from our public universities-----all the jobs are being outsourced to global corporations that are doing the work overseas that people right here in Maryland should be doing and these citizens of Maryland would do a better job.  It is done simply to reduce labor costs as pay is lower overseas and we wouldn't want all of those pesky public sector benefits providing the citizens of Maryland a first world quality of life say neo-liberals.


Is a global corporation needed to process college applications charging fees for doing so -----money which could hire a local person with a public university to do this job?  We all know massive corporate fraud is infused in all these business arrangements so universities are losing far more money by outsourcing these jobs than saving.  So, fighting fraud in court is worth eliminating staff at a university who could be held accountable to do the work right?

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU---WORKING FOR
WEALTH AND PROFIT SENDING ALL PUBLIC ASSETS TO CORPORATIONS WHILE IMPOVERISHING THE CITIZENS OF AMERICA.


IT IS ABSOLUTELY ABSURD THAT AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION IS INVOLVED IN ALL THIS INTRIGUE------JUST EDUCATE THE US CITIZENS!


Troubles at Embark

July 3, 2014 By Ry Rivard  Inside Higher Education

Embark, whose software helps colleges to process online applications, has owed graduate and professional schools millions of dollars and misled university officials about why it wasn’t quickly paying up, a former executive of the company is alleging amid an ongoing legal dispute.

In June 2013, Embark owed its clients $4.7 million from student application fees it collected, according to a filing in New York state court by lawyers for Raza Khan, a former chief technology officer and board member at Embark.

Even though payments were supposed to be made in a matter of months, $1.2 million of that had been owed to colleges for more than a year, according to a spreadsheet filed last month that is said to reflect the company’s bookkeeping as of late June 2013.

Khan, who left the company around the same time, alleges company officials improperly spent money owed to colleges in order to deal with Embark’s “cash flow problems.” The money was supposed to go to colleges directly and quickly, but, according to Khan, Embark officials intentionally delayed paying back colleges and “concocted” false stories to cover up the true reason for the delays.

Embark processes admissions applications for colleges across the world, including elite graduate programs. Colleges pay Embark for its services, but Embark is obligated to pay the institutions all or most of the application fees it collects. Khan’s allegations center on Embark’s failure to give colleges their share of those student application fees.

Embark got a judge to partially seal the documents, but they were available on the court’s website for several days last month.  The company’s lawyer declined repeated requests for comment on the merits of Khan’s claims.

Khan is engaged in a bitter legal fight with his former business partner and high school classmate, Vishal Garg.

In June 2013, Embark owed its clients $4.7 million, including student fees collected as far back as 2009, according to Khan’s filing.

The largest single unpaid amount is over $1 million, which Embark is said to owe to Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Sid Dinsay, a spokesman for the medical school in New York City, declined to comment.

When colleges asked for their money, the company sometimes “concocted” reasons that its payments were delayed, according to Khan’s filing.

In a September 2011 email also contained in Khan’s filing, Blake Avalone, then director of client relations, told another Embark official to use a “canned response” to hold off a college that was asking for money dating to the beginning of that year. The response Avalone approved blamed a “credit card processor” for the delay. Khan said in his filing that this was among the “false explanations” Embark gave colleges for payment delays.

Another Embark employee in the same email thread suggests that the email “be sent from ‘Accounting’ if that helps.” In an email chat included in the court filing, the same employee also said, “if we're going to lie, the vaguer the better no.”

Avalone, now Embark’s managing director, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. Emails and voicemails were not returned by anyone at Embark over the past two weeks.

Several universities, including the University of Michigan and at least one graduate program at Harvard University, have threatened legal action against Embark. Officials at both those institutions said they were paid by Embark after they made those threats.

At least one other university has recently complained to Embark. The University of California at Davis hired a lawyer to help it collect money it says Embark has owed since spring 2012, according to a letter released by the university.  In mid-May of this year, the university’s lawyer demanded that Embark pay $38,589 by June 15. That didn’t happen.

“No money was received – only a promise from the [Embark] president to follow up,” a UC Davis spokeswoman said in an email last month.

Other universities are being paid back, if only gradually.

A spokesman for Thunderbird School of Global Management said last month Embark still owes it $71,000. The school ended its relationship with Embark last fall for other reasons, the spokesman said. Khan’s filings suggest the school was owed $215,000 at one point. Thunderbird could not confirm that figure.

As of last summer, Rutgers University’s business school was owed $261,000 for fees dating as far back as April 2011, according to Khan’s filing. Much of that has been paid, the university said last month.


“Since the beginning of 2014, Embark has paid $229,260 to the Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick,” a Rutgers spokesman said in an email. “The school continues to work with Embark to collect the remaining balance.”

It’s not clear exactly how precise the spreadsheet is in Khan’s filing: It says Georgia State University is owed $81,000 for fees it collecting in 2010 and 2011, though a Georgia State official said that Embark paid it $80,000 several years ago for work done in 2009 and no longer owes the university money. UC Davis, on the other hand, is asking for more money than the spreadsheet shows it is owed.

Khan first made allegations about Embark’s repayments to colleges in July 2013, when he sued his business partner Garg. But Khan provided more details about Embark’s business last month in a separate case in which Embark is suing him.

Garg and Khan founded MyRichUncle, an upstart student loan company that made its name lending directly to students before its parent company, MRU Holdings, went bankrupt in 2009. MyRichUncle was well-known in higher ed circles in the mid-2000s for its aggressive marketing that accused college financial aid officers of engaging in “kickbacks.”

Before the bankruptcy, MRU quietly bought Embark from the Princeton Review in 2007, vowing to invigorate a company that had seen its value and reach tumble during the six years Princeton Review owned it.

Khan’s filing suggests he and Garg were unable to do so. Now, Garg’s wife, Sarita James, is president of Embark. James did not respond to multiple emails over the past two weeks seeking comment.

Khan claims Garg and others at Embark “circulated false financials” to the company’s clients and delayed payments to them because of cash flow problems.

Sometimes, even after threatening legal action, a client would stick with Embark.

In February 2013, a graduate program within Harvard Law School asked Embark for $120,000 owed to it since November and December 2012.

“Despite the promise of wire transfers by Embark (supposedly made on Feb. 1 initially and then again on Feb. 20), and despite our request for actual confirmation of the transfers, we have not received anything, not even evidence that any of the wire transfers were actually made,” Harvard assistant dean Jeanne Tai wrote in a February 2013 email, which appeared in the court filing. Harvard is not a party to the litigation.

Reached last month by phone, Tai said everything had since been squared away.

“They have since made good on everything they owed and since that period of time, we haven’t had any trouble getting what they owed us,” she said.

The Harvard graduate program remains a client.

Khan’s filing said even though Embark knew that it owed money to colleges, Garg, the former head of the company, “did not intend to cause Embark to pay such amounts owed unless and until the schools complained.”

Officials at several other institutions said to be owed money declined to comment in detail or did not return calls seeking comment about their relationship with Embark.

After the MRU bankruptcy filing, Khan and Garg quickly started another company, Education Investment and Finance Corporation, or EIFC, which manages and services private student loans and mortgage-backed securities.
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Bill and Hillary Clinton are the face of these global corporations and neo-liberalism.  They plan to win the White House in 2016 and are getting Hillary into all venues they had a hand in destroying.  High tuition and devastating student loan debt happened because the Clintons started the corporatization of US universities with the goal of creating US global corporate universities.  Bill and Hillary are the face of the 2008 economic crash that has left millions of US college grads without employment----they created these Wall Street banks by deregulating the financial industry and breaking Glass Steagall so these banks could grow to the global corporations knowing they would control the US government and economy.

PLEASE DO NOT ALLOW HILLARY AND NEO-LIBERALS TO TAKE CONTROL OF DEMOCRATIC PARTY CAMPAIGNING----RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES AGAINST ALL NEO-LIBERALS IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES.  You can see why, here in Maryland it was critical for Anthony Brown to win-----heaven forbid the candidate wanting to dismantle all of this corporate structure win!


The Clinton's funded Anthony Brown's campaign because he will embrace this global corporate structure as O'Malley did and the marginalization of the citizens of America.
  The Clinton Foundation is a global corporate development institution so all that money she is making will be tax-free.

Scrutiny for Hillary Clinton Speaking Fees at Colleges

July 3, 2014

Inside Higher Ed

At least eight universities have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton to speak on their campuses, The Washington Post reported. Students at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she is due to be paid $225,000 to speak in the fall, have protested, and that is drawing attention to the likely presidential candidate's high fees, not all of which have been previously disclosed. Some of the payments ($200,000 is believed to be standard) have gone not to Clinton personally, but the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

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Here in Maryland, Baltimore is ground zero for the dismantling of public education from K-college.  Johns Hopkins is the driver of this policy.  They have a corporation that works to recruit overseas education labor and bring them to America to work in K-12 and in universities and colleges.  Why bring immigrant labor to teach in US schools when we have huge unemployment and plenty of teachers?  Well, Race to the Top and all of the teacher accountability that has nothing to do with quality education but everything to do with chasing current teachers out of a hostile system----- will need people to replace the US teachers that leave out of frustration and the fact that no one will want to be exposed to these kinds of working conditions.  There comes the need for foreign workers taking jobs in public schools.

Remember, the goal with K-12 is to have online classes that only need a person like an education tech in the classroom to facilitate an online presentation of material.  That education tech does not need to be a real teacher-----they only need to know how to start the online lessons and administer the tests.  So, neo-liberals have as a goal of completely dismantling our entire public education system and quality democratic education.  Think the absolutely botched rollout of Race to the Top is an accident?  This policy has been in the making since the beginning of the Bush Administration----it is a republican policy written by US corporations a decade ago----it is no accident that teachers are being subjected to the worst of conditions in this education reform rollout----neo-liberals hate labor and unions and want to get rid of public sector unions through privatization with national charter chains and global corporations specializing in education temps.


I cannot tell you how revolting it is that America is behind all of this labor abuse and it is neo-liberals controlling the people's Democratic Party leading this.

Neo-cons write the policy and neo-liberals run as Democrats to implement these policies that kill the labor that votes for them.

Monday, May 26, 2014, 1:00 pm

Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source

BY George Joseph Working In These Times


Recruiting companies in the U.S. are attracting some of Philippines' best teachers with one-year guest worker visas to teach in American public schools, saddling the teachers with hidden fees and furthering the Philippines' growing teacher shortage. (SuSanA Secretariat/ Flickr / Creative Commons)  

Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse. 

According to court documents, Lourdes Navarro, chief recruiter and head of Universal Placement, made applicants pay a whopping $12,550 in interview and “processing fees” before they’d even left the Philippines. But the exploitation didn’t stop there. After the teachers landed in LAX, they were required to sign contracts paying back 10 percent of their first and second years’’ salaries; those who refused were threatened with instant deportation.

“We were herded into a path, a slowly constricting path,” said Ingrid Cruz, one of the teachers, during the trial, “where the moment you feel the suspicion that something is not right, you're already way past the point of no return." Eventually, a Los Angeles jury awarded the teachers $4.5 million.

Similar horror stories have abounded across the country for years. Starting in 2001, the private contractor Omni Consortium promised 273 Filipino teachers jobs within the Houston, Texas school district—in reality, there were only 100 spots open. Once they arrived, the teachers were crammed into groups of 10 to 15 in unfinished housing properties. Omni Consortium kept all their documents, did not allow them their own transportation, and threatened them with deportation if they complained about their unemployment status or looked for another job. 

And it’s not always recruiting agencies that are at fault. According to an American Federation Teachers report, in 2009, Florida Atlantic University imported 16 Indian math and science teachers for the St. Lucie County School District. Labeling the immigrant teachers as “interns,” the district only spent $18,000 for each of their yearly salaries—well below a regular teacher’s rate. But because the district paid the wages to Florida Atlantic University, rather than the teachers themselves, the university pocketed most of the money, giving the teachers a mere $5,000 each.

Researchers estimate that anywhere from 14,000 to 20,000 teachers, imported on temporary guest worker visas, teach in American public schools nationwide. Such hiring practices are often framed as cultural exchange programs, but as Timothy Noah of the New Republic points out—in this case about Maryland’s Prince George County—“When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor—and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.”

A manufactured problem School districts frequently justify hiring lower-paid immigrants by pointing to teacher shortages in chronically underfunded rural and urban school districts. And it’s true: In poorer areas, classrooms are often overcrowded and understaffed. But this dearth of instructors did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is an inevitable result of the austerity measures pushed through on a federal, state, and local level after the panic of the 2007 financial crisis.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, between 2008 and 2011, school districts nationwide slashed 278,000 jobs. This bleeding has not stopped: According to the Center on Education Policy, almost 84 percent of school districts in the 2011-2012 school year expected budget shortfalls, and 60 percent planned to cut staff to make up deficits.

Thus, we see a familiar pattern of neoliberal “restructuring” in American school systems: Cut public institutions to the bone, leave them to fail without adequate resources, then claim the mantle of “reform” while rebuilding the institutions with an eye towards privatization.   

In many cities, newly laid-off instructors are left to languish while their former employers employ underpaid replacements to fill the gaps. For example, the Baltimore City Public Schools district has imported more than 600 Filipino teachers; meanwhile, 100 certified local teachers make up the “surplus” workforce, serving as substitutes and co-teachers when they can. 

The manufactured labor scarcity narrative, used to justify the importation of guest worker teachers, provides districts with the opportunity to employ less costly, at-will employees, whose precarious legal status is often exploited. Such moves to pump up the workforce with workers—not here long enough to invest themselves in organizing or bargaining struggles—also serve to weaken shop-site solidarity and unions’ ability to mobilize on a larger scale.

The recruiting contactors’ advertisements to districts are particularly instructive in this regard, noting their recruits’ inability to qualify for benefits and pension contributions. In an extensive study, education professors Sue Books and Rian de Villiers found that recruiting firms tend to appeal to districts on the basis of cost-saving, rather than classroom quality. As one Georgia contractor, Global Teachers Research and Resources, advertises, “school systems pay an administrative fee [to GTRR] that is generally less than the cost of [teacher] benefits. Collaborating with GTRR means quality teachers with savings to the school systems.” Even more egregiously, a Houston based recruiting firm called Professional and Intellectual Resources exclaims that their “bargain-priced” Filipino teachers can “make the most out of the most minimal resources. 

Memorizing isn’t learning This criterion for hiring makes sense in the context of what philosopher Paulo Freire calls “the banking concept of education.” In his 1968 classic, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire critiques the pedagogical tradition of rote memorization, in which the teacher-as-narrator “leads the students to memorize … the narrated content.” Freire argues, “It turns [students] into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is.”

However, Freire’s “narrative” is no longer even in the hands of teachers, who might at least have some understanding of content relevant to students. Instead with the rise of test-based approach to education, forced through with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, and numerous ramped-up state tests, nameless corporate and federal employees now tie teachers and students’ success to the production of higher test scores. Thus, today’s cutting-edge education reform movement has brought this “banking concept of education” back into vogue, demanding “objective measures” and “accountability” through constant standardized testing. 

The idea that new teachers should be imported from halfway around the world for yearlong stints, knowing no background about the communities they are entering and the content relevant to them, is only justified if the teacher is reduced to an instrument of standardized information transmission. And if teachers are just such instruments, why not search the global market for the cheapest, most malleable ones possible?

As Books and de Villiers point out, many recruiters’ advertisements reflect this logic: “Only two [recruiters’] websites apprise teachers of the socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in many U.S. schools. Only five include useful educational links, and only three provide information about school-based mentoring.” So for corporate recruiters and their district clients, finding the right match for a school is not about teacher quality or experience, but rather cost and expendability.

The phenomenon of teacher trafficking, then, doesn’t rest entirely on recruiters’ mercenary tendencies or districts’ drive to cheapen their labor. It also rests on the larger neoliberal conception of workers. In this case, teachers become moveable parts, switched out in accordance with the iron laws of supply and demand in order to more efficiently output successful test scores, whose value comes to represent students themselves. 

Colonialism in the classroom The American importation of Filipino teachers, as well as educators from other countries, has consequences beyond the United States, too. According to Books and de Villiers, several recruiting agencies only seek out teachers in the Philippines because its high poverty rates and supply of quality teachers make it, as one journalist from the Baltimore Sun put it, “fertile ground for recruits.” Meanwhile, the nation has an estimated shortage of 16,000 educators and the highest student-teacher ratio in Asia at 45:1.

As one Filipino union leader told the American Federation of Teachers, “To accommodate the students, most public schools schedule two, three and sometimes even four shifts within the entire day, with 70 to 80 students packed in a room. Usually, the first class starts as early as 6:00 a.m. to accommodate the other sessions.” And as American corporate forces have exploited the Philippines for its best teachers, pushed across the world by the beck and call of the market, agents of the nonprofit world have taken it upon themselves to send American substitutes in their place.

Launched last year, Teach for the Philippines presents itself as “the solution” to this lack of quality teachers in the country—a claim similar to those of its U.S. parent organization, Teach for America, a behemoth nonprofit that each year recruits thousands of idealistic college graduates to become (and often replace) teachers in low-income communities after a five-week training camp.

The Teach for Philippines promo video begins with black and white shots of multitudes of young Filipino schoolchildren packed into crowded classrooms, bored and on the verge of tears. A cover version of a Killers song proclaims, “When there's nowhere else to run … If you can hold on, hold on” as the video shifts to the students’ inevitable fates: scenes of tattooed gang kids smoking, an isolated girl and even a desperate man behind bars. In the midst of this grotesquely Orientalizing imagery, text declares, “Our Country Needs Guidance,” “Our Country Needs Inspiration,” and finally “Our Country Needs Teachers.”           

Teach for the Philippines recruits young Filipinos both domestically and internationally, with special outreach to Filipino Americans. Though still in its start-up phase, with only 53 teachers in 10 schools, the program presents a disturbing vision for the future of teaching in the context of a global workforce. While the Filipino teachers imported to America are not necessarily ideal fits, given their inability to remain as long-term contributors to a school community, at least they are for the most part trained, experienced instructors. Within the Teach for the Philippines paradigm, however, Filipino students, robbed of their best instructors, are forced to study under recruits, who may lack a strong understanding of the communities they are joining and have often have never even had any actual classroom experience.

But Teach For the Philippines is just one growing arm of Teach for America’s global empire, now spanning the world sites in 33 countries and enjoying millions in support from neoliberal power players like Visa and even the World Bank. So while austerity-mode Western nations may seek to cut costs by employing no-benefits guest workers, countries such as the Philippines will be forced by the unbending logic of the market to plead for international charity—summer camp volunteers looking to “give” two years of their lives to really make a difference.           

In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire argues, “It is to the reality that mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people, that we must go to find the program content of education.” But for such a reality to be approached, teachers and communities must have the opportunity to grow together, to listen to each other, and to understand the reality that they seek to transform. By pushing teachers into a globalized pool of low-wage temp workers, teacher trafficking precludes this possibility.








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April 29th, 2014

4/29/2014

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The SEC allowed US banks to leave GAAP accounting principles for an International Accounting Principles that place the protections on shareholder wealth and not the public.  As you see below, so many accounting frauds are happening now.  Accounting is a dry subject but it is behind all of the loss of control in fraud and corruption.  Please take time to glance through these postings, especially the last one!

DO YOU HEAR YOUR POL SHOUTING THAT OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DISMANTLING ACCOUNTING REGULATIONS JUST AS CLINTON DEMANTLED BANK REGULATIONS MAKING IT HARDER FOR THE PUBLIC TO CONVICT IN ACCOUNTING FRAUD?


I want to take a few days to look at the state of US banks several years after the massive frauds were discovered and brought down the US economy.  Bank of America and Citibank were to too largest pushers and processors of subprime mortgage loans and Citibank's CEO Robert Rubin was of course Bill Clinton's finance chief when all of the bank deregulation and breaking of Glass Steagall occurred.  It is reasonable to assume the overall plan to blow up the US real estate market was in full swing as Clinton was creating the structures for what is now global Wall Street.  The reason Citi and BOA are of importance is that they are the ZOMBIE banks....the ones that Rule of Law would have required be nationalized and taken into bankruptcy so that all assets could be sent back to creditors and victims of mortgage fraud. 

THIS IS WHAT RULE OF LAW REQUIRED BECAUSE OF THE UNQUESTIONABLE PROOF OF MASSIVE AND SYSTEMIC FRAUD.

That of course did not happen and we have yet to get justice with these two banks.  Mind you, Wells Fargo and the other big banks are equally guilty but CITI and BOA need to go.  Most economists agree that nationalizing these banks to recover fraud would not have had much more of an effect on the economy than the current stagnant and crippled economy we have today.  The second piece to this of which I've spoken earlier is that the movement of US private and public pensions from the then safety of the bond market to the stock market in 2007-2008 was done to buoy these collapsing banks.  Many of US pension money is still attached to the worst of criminal banks.  Rather than bring these banks into bankruptcy and transfer lost pension wealth to worker's, the pensioners are being told the gains of the BULL market these few years has made up the losses----only, it hasn't.

Below you see that yet another illegal game was played at the time of the crash simply to make these banks appear viable.  The idea was pretend they are OK and they can go overseas to amass new profits.  The idea was to allow the FED policy of QE take trillions of dollars of those bad loans off bank accounts to make them look healthier----the FED with $4 trillion in debt has been heard to say they will pass all that debt from fraudulent loans over to the US Treasury-----AKA, THE TAXPAYER.  The FED has reached its limit of debt that can be sustained, the massive transfer of bundled foreclosures has mostly finished (round two of the massive subprime mortgage fraud) so talk moves to reversing the policies that allowed these banks to hide debt and look healthy.


GOODBYE PENSION GAINS FROM THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS----IT WAS ALL FRAUD AND MISREPRESENTATION YET AGAIN.  JUST AS THE WALL STREET RATING AGENCIES GOT OFF SCOTT FREE FOR FRAUDULENTLY GIVING 'AAA' RATINGS TO THESE SUBPRIME LOANS---NOW BANK OF AMERICA AND CITIBANK WILL BE ALLOWED TO REVERSE THE ACCOUNTING TRICKS THAT FALSIFIED THEIR VALUE FOR YEARS AFTER THE CRASH-----ALL INVOLVING FRAUD AND CORRUPTION.


'And how did it err? It says that it properly raised its reported capital levels to offset the reported loss caused by unrealized changes in the valuation of the securities it had issued. But it also raised the capital levels to offset losses that had been realized, something it should not have done. The realized changes came when securities issued by the bank were paid at maturity or repurchased at an earlier date.

That mistake improperly increased its reported capital.

Bank of America did not explain how that the error came to happen or how it was repeated year after year. Nor did it explain why the error was discovered when the first-quarter financial statements for this year were being prepared'.


What all the US big banks did-----BOA and CITI especially ----was to leave the GAAP accounting principles method of recording debt and used an accounting model that allowed it to hide all the subprime mortgage loan and other debt making it look healthier than it was.  You then watch TV commercies toting BOA and CITI as strong and profitable banks as they expanded overseas when in fact they had enormous debt.  Again, these banks were allowed to provide false information to investors to attain business just as happened with the subprime loans.

ALL OF THIS IS FRAUD AND ALL OF THIS PLACES THE PEOPLE'S WEALTH AND INVESTMENTS IN CONSTANT RISK.




Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (United States)

From Wikipedia

Accounting standards have historically been set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) subject to Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.[4] The AICPA first created the Committee on Accounting Procedure in 1939, and replaced that with the Accounting Principles Board in 1959. In 1973, the Accounting Principles Board was replaced by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) under the supervision of the Financial Accounting Foundation with the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council serving to advise and provide input on the accounting standards.[5] Other organizations involved in determining United States accounting standards include the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), formed in 1984, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).

Circa 2008, the FASB issued the FASB Accounting Standards Codification, which reorganized the thousands of US GAAP pronouncements into roughly 90 accounting topics[6]

In 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a preliminary "roadmap" that may lead the United States to abandon Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the future (to be determined in 2011), and to join more than 100 countries around the world instead in using the London-based International Financial Reporting Standards.[7] As of 2010, the convergence project was underway with the FASB meeting routinely with the IASB.[8] The SEC expressed their aim to fully adopt International Financial Reporting Standards in the U.S. by 2014.[9] With the convergence of the U.S. GAAP and the international IFRS accounting systems, as the highest authority over International Financial Reporting Standards, the International Accounting Standards Board is becoming more important in the United States.

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Just to show how widespread these accounting frauds were----look below at the systemic nature of these frauds.  Remember, Enron and its collapse resulted by massive frauds by its accounting firm and back then----Rule of Law held Enron and the accounting firm accountable.  That hasn't happened since.

DEREGULATION HAS MADE A WILD WEST OF ALL CORPORATE BEHAVIOR AND THIS HAS OUR ECONOMY AT THIRD WORLD LEVELS OF CORRUPTION.


So, Wall Street banks were allowed to hide massive amounts of debt with accounting tricks and when the FED did the 'STRESS TESTS'  that famously allowed banks to exit government control due to BAILOUT in 2009-2010....it was all a lie.


16 Financial Shenanigans That Got Companies Into Tons Of Trouble

Eric Platt and Lucas Kawa Nov. 20, 2012,

Accounting improprieties, disclosure failures, and outright misrepresentations have gotten companies into trouble since the beginning of business. These are the accusations that Hewlett-Packard has made against software company Autonomy.

As the HP story continues to unfold, we are reminded of some past instances when confusing financial and accounting principles got some big companies on the front page for all of the wrong reasons.

In the recent past, companies have been busted for employing questionable accounting tricks, financial engineering, complicated risk metrics, and outright fraud in an effort to hide losses are inflate profits.


Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)
Definition: An SPV is a legal entity typically used to serve as a counterparty with the main corporation. In finance it often used for securitization, but it has also been used to hide risky corporate behavior/transactions and conceal corporate relationships.

Case: The most notorious case of special purpose entities being used to distort a company's obligations is Enron, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Enron used SPVs to lower the appearance of its debt load and overstate earnings and equity. 

Mark to Market (MTM) AP


Definition: MTM is an accounting measure that values accounts to the current environment. Firms use mark-to-market accounting when the value of an asset or liability moves over time.


Case: Bear Stearns, the now defunct investment bank purchased by JP Morgan, reported in June and July of 2007 that its two main hedge funds (the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund) had to mark down nearly all their value, sparking concerns of contagion in the financial crisis. Banks across Wall Street suffered huge paper losses thanks to MTM.


Repo 105
AP Images/ Kristy Wigglesworth

Definition: Repo 105 is an accounting trick that defines a short-term loan as a sale. A company can then use that cash to lower liabilities before paying back the loan with interest. Generally in the repo market, companies will not exchange collateral because the time period is very short.

Case: Lehman Brothers masked extensive liabilities right before quarter-end by using this Repo 105 tactic. The company ultimately filed for bankruptcy and was sold off to different institutions (with most U.S. operations going to Barclays). 

Expense Recognition
ABetterBagofGroceries.com

Definition: Under generally accepted accounting principals, expenses should be recognized when incurred — not necessarily when the payment is made. This is known as the expense recognition principle.

Case: Diamond Foods allegedly shifted payments to walnut growers to later periods to offset costs during its fiscal 2011 year, inflating earnings as it entered negotiations with Proctor & Gamble. The stock transaction depended heavily on Diamond's share price.

Revenue Recognition
haccamopooly/flickr

Definition:  Under  generally accepted accounting principals, revenue should be recognized when the company delivers or performs the task it will be paid for — not necessarily when the payment is received. This is known as the revenue recognition principle. However, exceptions do apply.

Case: Xerox settled with the SEC in 2002 for accelerating revenue recognition of equipment sales by more than $3 billion, which increased pre-tax earnings by $1.5 billion. The company, which was supposed to record revenues both upfront and over a period of time (for servicing equipment over its usable life), moved those service revenues to the time of purchase.

Misrepresented Cash Flows
Definition: The statement of cash flows is the third major financial statement, which tallies cash generated and spent by a company during a fiscal period. This portion of the financial statement of an earnings release is one of the best ways to gauge a company's solvency and actual performance.


Case: WorldCom used its cash flows statement to hide expenses by marking operating costs, which should have been booked as expenses, as capital investments. Under that plan, WorldCom inflated cash flow by $3.8 billion and posted quarters of positive performance when it really lost money.

Channel Stuffing
Krispy Kreme

Definition: Channel stuffing is a practice where a distributor ships retailers excess goods that were not ordered to increase the accounts receivable portion of their balance sheet. Generally, the retailers then ship back the goods and the company must mark them as returns.

Case: Krispy Kreme allegedly sent franchises double their usual shipments at the end of financial quarters so the company could meet Wall Street forecasts. In 2005 the company said it would restate past financial statements.

Hiding Losses in Acquisitions
HK-DMZ on flickr

Definition: Companies can pay high prices for financial advice during a merger, and some have used that guise as a method to cover prior losses. 

Case: Japanese technology giant Olympus announced it had been hiding losses on securities investments for years by using the cover of acquisitions. When new CEO Michael Woodford called attention to strange payments made in 2008, he was subsequently fired.

Round Trip Trading alan5o5 via Flickr

Definition: This is practice where a firm trades an asset and then buys it back many times to inflate its transaction volume. However, the market-manipulation has no impact on profit (although it will bolster top line results).

Case: Dynegy was forced to pay the SEC $3 million after it was found conducting round trip trades with special purpose entities. According to the SEC, Dynegy's "overstatement of its energy-trading activity resulting from 'round-trip' or 'wash' trades — simultaneous, pre-arranged buy-sell trades of energy with the same counter-party, at the same price and volume, and over the same term, resulting in neither profit nor loss to either transacting party."

Smoothing Earnings
Definition: This is a practice where a firm smooths net income by using GAAP techniques to level off fluctuations between periods.


Case: Freddie Mac understated earnings by more than $5 billion over three years to keep earnings consistent and investors happy. According to The New York Times, Freddie Mac lost $111 million during a period it announced net income of nearly $1 billion. Freddie Mac only reported half of what it reported it earned during the third quarter of the year, stating that it earned about $1 billion rather than $2 billion.


Churning
Definition: A practice by brokerage houses where they excessively trade securities to generate commission — even when the trades do not benefit the account holder. Similarly, the practice has been conducted by insurance companies by moving clients from one policy to another.

Case: MetLife, just one of a number of insurance companies found guilty of the practice, settled with state regulators and set aside billions for claims that it moved clients from one policy to another, to generate high premiums.

Bartering
Boonsri Dickinson, Business Insider

Definition: A transaction where two companies (or people) agree to trade goods or services with each other without the use of currency. 

Case: AOL was investigated by the SEC and Justice Department for inflating revenue by using barter trades for online advertising and recognizing the trade as a sale in the period leading up to the merger with Time Warner.

Tax Evasion Philly News

Definition: Pretty simple: an illegal practice where a person or company does not pay the correct tax liabilities owed to the government.

Case: Crazy Eddie, a discount electronics retailer, evaded taxes for years before going public by "skimming and under-reporting income." This was just one of the practices the company used to bolster results. 

Back Dating Employee Stock Options Lara604 / Flickr

Definition: The process where a company offers options to an employee at a date before the actual date the option was made. Companies have done this so they can set better exercise prices to the employee (generally pushing the option into the money).

Case: Apple came under scrutiny for back dating options to employees and forced then-CEO Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to pay $14 million, plus attorney fees. 

Goodwill Impairments
Howard Lake

Definition: Although not illegal, companies have come under pressure from investors for overstating goodwill — which bolsters the balance sheet. Goodwill represents a company's intangible assets (its brand, customer relations, etc.) and often arises during a merger or acquisition.

Case: Green Mountain came under fire for its accounting of goodwill during its acquisition of Van Houtte and how its jump in assets was mainly attributable to that line item on the balance sheet. 

Value at Risk (VAR)
Chris McGrath/Getty Images

A sign on the outside of a Chase bank branch in New York City.

Definition: A tool used by financial institutions that estimates probable losses based on historic trends, prices and volatility. Firms generally report VAR data at quarter-end, with confidence intervals, and for periods stretching from one day to two weeks.

Case: JP Morgan is under intense scrutiny after reporting a $2 billion loss after publishing a VAR of just $76 million a quarter earlier for its entire credit portfolio. At that pace, the entire JP Morgan unit could have lost as much as $76 million in value in any given day (to a 95 percent confidence interval).

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Remember, these pensions were deliberately thrown into the stock market as it crashed just to buoy these big banks.  This is fraud and public malfeasance on the part of public pensions.  What will double-down on these losses if the fact that all the gains from the stock market these few years are masked by hidden debt----no real gains.

Pension fund managers were part of sending these pensions into a crashing market and as of yet very little justice has come from all these massive pension losses.  Below you see movement by pension funds to recover losses but as of yet-----the same small settlements bring nearly nothing back.  When Bank of America is forced to stop using the accounting methods hiding its debt-----stock values will fall once again.
  This article highlights the ongoing fraud as these foreclosure proceedings were handled as badly.

KEEP IN MIND THIS IS NOW HAPPENING IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND A DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY IN THE SENATE AS ARE ALL POLITICIANS ARE SILENT.  CAN YOU IMAGINE IF ALL OF CONGRESS SHOUTED LOUDLY TO GIVE CITIZENS JUSTICE ----- THAT IT WOULD HAPPEN.

This is how we know we have corporate pols running as democrats-----NEO-LIBERALS.

Biggest US Pension Funds Get Into Fraudclosure Fray, Demand Banks "Immediately Examine Foreclosure Practices"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/09/2011 20:13 -0400


  More bad news for the BofA/Wells syndicate. After on Friday two of the biggest mortgage lenders in the world were hit with bad news out of the Massachusetts supreme court, today it is seven of the nation's major pension funds, between them representing nearly half a trillion in capital, which are demanding that "the boards of directors of Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo immediately undertake independent examinations of the banks’ mortgage and foreclosure practices." The coalition of pension funds called for the banks’ Audit Committees to launch independent examinations of their loan modification, foreclosure, and securitization policies and procedures. “This will help to prevent future compliance failures and restore the confidence of shareholders, regulators, legislators and mortgage markets participants,” the coalition advised in its letter. The coalition members’ insistence on immediate action reflects the urgency of their concerns over mishandled mortgages. But Jim Cramer on Friday said there was no urgency, and no reason to be concerned, and that this is nothing but a buying opportunity for the lemmings which jut got one step closer to the cliff.
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Let's be clear----there were trillions of dollars in subprime mortgage fraud.  The number of homes in America involved was massive.  The reason this fraud was allowed to continue and goes without justice is the goal of this entire scheme was to remove the American people from homeownership----

THE EQUITY WE THE PEOPLE GAINED OVER DECADES OF SAVING AND INVESTMENT.

    I want people who are still losing their homes to foreclosure....and Maryland is ground zero for this.....that damages to the US economy from this massive fraud need to extend to families facing long term unemployment and are now losing their homes.


Remember, all US big banks are still responsible for massive fraud but BOA and CITIBANK were the ringleaders.

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail The bank has defrauded everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed. So why does the government keep bailing it out?


By Matt Taibbi March 14, 2012 10:55 AM ET

Rolling Stone

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they'll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world's worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt's funeral. They're out of control, yet they'll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

It's been four years since the government, in the name of preventing a depression, saved this megabank from ruin by pumping $45 billion of taxpayer money into its arm. Since then, the Obama administration has looked the other way as the bank committed an astonishing variety of crimes – some elaborate and brilliant in their conception, some so crude that they'd be beneath your average street thug. Bank of America has systematically ripped off almost everyone with whom it has a significant business relationship, cheating investors, insurers, depositors, homeowners, shareholders, pensioners and taxpayers. It brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, "robo-signed" evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn't ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

But despite being the very definition of an unaccountable corporate villain, Bank of America is now bigger and more dangerous than ever. It controls more than 12 percent of America's bank deposits (skirting a federal law designed to prohibit any firm from controlling more than 10 percent), as well as 17 percent of all American home mortgages. By looking the other way and rewarding the bank's bad behavior with a massive government bailout, we actually allowed a huge financial company to not just grow so big that its collapse would imperil the whole economy, but to get away with any and all crimes it might commit. Too Big to Fail is one thing; it's also far too corrupt to survive.

All the government bailouts succeeded in doing was to make the bank even more prone to catastrophic failure – and now that catastrophe might finally be at hand. Bank of America's share price has plunged into the single digits, and the bank faces battles in courtrooms all over America to avoid paying back the hundreds of billions it stole from everyone in sight. Its credit rating, already downgraded to a few rungs above junk status, could plummet with the next bad analyst report, causing a frenzied rush to the exits by creditors, investors and stockholders – an institutional run on the bank.

They're in deep trouble, but they won't die, because our current president, like the last one, apparently believes it's better to project a false image of financial soundness than to allow one of our oligarchic banks to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Last year, the Federal Reserve allowed Bank of America to move a huge portfolio of dangerous bets into a side of the company that happens to be FDIC-insured, putting all of us on the hook for as much as $55 trillion in irresponsible gambles. Then, in February, the Justice Department's so-called foreclosure settlement, which will supposedly provide $26 billion in relief for ripped-off homeowners, actually rewarded the bank with a legal waiver that will allow it to escape untold billions in lawsuits. And this month the Fed will release the results of its annual stress test, in which the bank will once again be permitted to perpetuate its fiction of solvency by grossly overrating the mountains of toxic loans on its books. At this point, the rescue effort is so sweeping and elaborate that it goes far beyond simply gouging the tax dollars of millions of struggling families, many of whom have already been ripped off by the bank – it's making the government, and by extension all of us, full-blown accomplices to the fraud.



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Here you see while Bank of America was known to be in debt of a trillion or more in US fraud....it took its bailout money and expanded overseas where it invests in more high-risk and leverage as much as before the crash.  As this article shows, the Chinese are creating the environment that will hasten a collapse in our US economy this year.


Bank of America advises China default contracts to hedge debt storm Chinese bond yields have already risen to the highest in a decade yet markets remain “complacent” about the implications Bank of America's Bin Yao says markets have underestimated the risk of a monetary squeeze

 Photo: EPA By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

2:15PM GMT 13 Dec 2013



Bank of America has advised clients to take out default insurance against Chinese debt, warning that monetary tightening by China’s central bank risks setting off a bout of serious credit stress in 2014.

Bin Yao, the bank’s credit strategist in Asia, said Chinese bond yields have already risen to the highest in a decade as the authorities seek to rein in rampant growth of the M2 money supply and excess credit, yet markets remain “complacent” about the implications.

He recommends buying credit default swaps (CDS) on five-year Chinese debt as the easiest way to “hedge the China tail risk”. These contracts spiked to 266 after the Lehman crisis and again to 206 during the ‘hard-landing scare’ of late 2011. They have since settled down to stable levels, trading this week near 66.

Bin Yao said the markets have underestimated the risk of a monetary squeeze. The central bank has already raised interest rates by three quarters of a point over the last year. Rising yields are pushing the shadow banking system closer to the brink. “We find trust loans especially troubling,” he said.

Short-term debt issuance by trust companies has jumped to $320bn from almost zero two years ago. A new study by the China Academy of Financial Research warned that the trusts face a redemption shock after promising returns of 10pc to 15pc that may be impossible to deliver.



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The American accounting system GAAP is just too burdensome with all of the defined rules that allowed accounting fraud to be easily investigated and prosecuted.  That is why we need to go with this International Accounting Standard.  In order to successfully break from any ability of the public to prosecute fraud as happened with Enron and Aurthur Anderson Accounting, the ability of Americans to file lawsuits for accounting irregularities must be curtailed.


So, they are doing to the accounting sector what was done with the financial deregulation by adopting this International system with much weaker and broadly defined rules.

MIND YOU----THIS IS OBAMA AND A MAJORITY CONTROLLED CONGRESS ALLOWING THIS.  THE SECURITY AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION IS ACTING WITHOUT ANY THOUGHT OF PUBLIC INTEREST.  THAT IS A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU!

DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING AGAINST THIS????


The Dark Side of Global Accounting Standards

Expect loose standard-setting in the oil and gas industries and a ton of litigation if convergence hurtles down its current track, critics say.

  • David M. Katz    CFO
  If the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday votes as expected and allows non-U.S. issuers here to report their financials in line with International Financial Reporting Standards without reconciling them with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the United States will have crossed a point of no return in the movement toward a single set of global accounting standards, some experts feel.

But that doesn’t mean that many key players won’t cross that line without a fair amount of kicking and screaming.

Speaking at a roundtable discussion on global accounting standards at New York University’s Stern School of Business on Monday, Charles Niemeier, a member and former acting chair of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, said that he was “a bit troubled by the speed” of the SEC’s march toward the convergence of U.S. and international accounting standards.
“If we eliminate reconciliation, what have we done? I have some fear that we’re crossing the Rubicon — that we’ve lost leverage in order to get closer [to global uniformity].”

Leverage by U.S. regulators and standard-setters to push for rigor in converged standards could be lost, as well as the clout to hold individual companies to international rules, Niemeier told CFO.com. At the roundtable, the audit firm overseer disputed a basic premise of the proponents of convergence: that if the international standards are adopted in the United States, it would produce a clearer system based on solid principles rather than rule-based minutiae. “Some say Europe is principles-based. I beg to differ. It’s younger,” he said, suggesting that much of the detail in GAAP is justified by long-standing experience. Some speakers said that IFRS lacks the detail provided under GAAP to provide adequate financial reporting in a number of specific industries in the United States, particularly oil and gas and insurance.

By contrast, critics of U.S. GAAP’s complexity, including the SEC’s own advisory committee, consider industry specific guidance to be one of the U.S. accounting system’s major flaws.

At the same time, many roundtable participants worried that the U.S. legal system — also blamed for the complexity of U.S. GAAP — might trip up global accounting standards too. Under the U.S. legal system, they said, auditors feel they must adhere closely to preset rules in order to avoid being sued. In order for IFRS to take hold in the United States, there needs to be “a change in the way we look at litigation in America, where it’s a mark of honor to sue someone,” said Stern accounting professor Seymour Jones at the roundtable.


Even a decision by the SEC to recognize the International Accounting Standards Board (which sets IFRS) as a bona fide standards setter could get tested in a U.S. court, according to Stanley Siegel, an NYU law professor. “Nothing is going to stop an American litigant who has bought shares in an American company or a Brazilian company” issuing stock in the United States from questioning the validity of the SEC’s choice of IASB under Section 108 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, he said. (Sarbox 108 enables the SEC to designate a standard setting body’s accounting principles as “generally accepted.”).

Indeed, many seem to feel that the SEC is moving ahead too swiftly and without adequate planning for what truly looms as a major step in the direction of converged international accounting standards. Even Financial Accounting Standards Board chairman Robert Herz, perhaps convergence’s prime U.S. spear carrier feels that “a national plan” for convergence needs to be in place before target dates are set. “Before you get to a timetable,” the key players need to determine “what are the tasks to be done.” High on the plan’s priority list should be educational and regulatory requirements. Underscoring the point about education, Nieimeier said in an interview that few people at PCAOB understand IFRS.

Nevertheless, convergence seems to be proceeding apace. While the SEC has been promoting the idea of installing a single set of international standards for about 20 years, the notion has gone into high gear in the last year, according to John White, the director of corporation finance at the SEC.

The reconciliation proposal, which White and SEC Chief Accountant Conrad Hewitt will present to the commission on Thursday, would create the unprecedented existence of “two co-existing financial reporting systems in the U.S.,” White said at a Financial Executives International conference in New York earlier this week. In developing the proposal, he said, the commission had three questions to answer:

• Is there a satisfactory convergence process in place?

• Are International Financial Reporting Standards being consistently and faithfully applied?

• Is IASB up to the job of setting global financial accounting strictures?

The commission is apparently satisfied enough with the answers to go ahead with at least the first step. The percentage of public issuers in the United States that will be affected is modest, however. Just 1,100 companies out of the 11,000 entities that report their financials to the SEC are foreign issuers, and only 200 of them use GAAP. Of the remaining 900 foreign companies required to file a GAAP reconcilation report, up to 180 may qualify to take advantage of the proposal if they file their financial reports using the IASB’s version of IFRS.


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December 22nd, 2013

12/22/2013

0 Comments

 
My weekend activism blog includes donating to REAL PROGRESSIVE MEDIA!!!!!!  MAKE YEAR END DONATIONS THAT SUPPORTS THESE MEDIA OUTLETS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR!

There are many small REAL PROGRESSIVE outlets all across America worthy of financial support.  Please find one in your neck of the woods to support.  Also, make sure that public funding goes to public interest media and not corporate media as NPR and APM are Wall Street neo-liberalism all the time!


LOOK GLOBALLY:


DEMOCRACY NOW!!!!!


Independent, daily global news hour hosted by Amy Goodman & Juan González. Livestream 8-9am ET at democracynow.org. Airs on 1,200 TV/radio stations.MissionDemocracy Now! is a weekday, independent global news hour anchored by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Tune into the live broadcast Monday through Friday 8-9am ET at www.democracynow.org .

Description
Independent, weekday global news hour anchored by Amy Goodman and Juan González. Live 8-9am ET at democracynow.org. Airs on 1,200+ TV/radio/internet stations in the United States and around the world.

DONATE to Democracy Now! today at http://www.democracynow.org/donate

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LOOK NATIONALLY


Clearing the FOG:
Speaking truth to expose the forces of greed on Mondays at 11 am EST

Watch us live at UStream.tv/itsoureconomy. Visit ClearingtheFOGRadio.orgDescriptionListen live at WeActRadio.com or listen to archived shows at http://www.mixcloud.com/ClearingtheFOG/ .


Visit our website at ClearingtheFOGRadio.org and you can subscribe to our podcasts on iTunes.
Watch for our articles on TruthOut.org every Wednesday.

In Baltimore, people cannot get jobs because they have criminal records. O'Malley sent 100,000 Baltimore citizens to jail under zero tolerance......people have felony records for minor offenses. Public policy keeps unemployment high.....THESE ARE ALL PRISON PIPELINE CONDITIONS. Injustice for one will become an injustice for all!Cradle to Prison Pipeline - Baltimore City Jailwww.youtube.comCradle to Prison Pipeline - exposed by Shortys Underground News Network

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Support Acronym TV -

Bringing you unspun news and coverage of the movement that corporate media doesn't want you to know about! What do you stand for?
Independently Produced, Individually Supported- Acronym TVwww.youtube.comDonate: http://www.patreon.com/AcronymTV Thank you to supporters of Acronym TV. Here is the deal: It is the end of the year.
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LOOK LOCALLY
:


Cradle to Prison Pipeline - Baltimore City Jailwww.youtube.comCradle to Prison Pipeline - exposed by

Shortys Underground News Network

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Bill Hughes Photography and photojournalism

  • http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=liamh2
  • http://vimeo.com/billyclubvideos/videos/... 
  • http://home.comcast.net/~liamhughes/ 
  • http://www.artistrising.com/galleries/Bi...


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Whereas the Baltimore Brew is more mainstream than I would like, they do create and allow hard investigative journalism be presented on their site.....they hold power accountable in Baltimore although they do not expose neo-liberal policy stances!


Baltimore Brew
What is it?
Baltimore Brew is a daily online journal featuring independent reporting and informed commentary about greater Baltimore. Think of us as your post-apocalyptic* source of information and insight on the city.

Who publishes Baltimore Brew?
Fern Shen is the founder, editor and publisher. Contact her at baltimore.brew@gmail.com .  Learn more about the Brew Bloggers.

What is Baltimore Brew about?
It’s about Baltimore’s neighborhoods, housing, politics, environment, real estate, downtown development, schools, transportation, crime, justice, media and whatever else seems worth covering. Books, the arts, culture, food/drink, history, interesting things to do or places to go, all may eventually be found at the Brew.


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WHO IS GETTING ALL THE FEDERAL AND CORPORATE FUNDING?

CORPORATE NATIONAL PUBLIC AND AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA-----WALL STREET ALL THE TIME.  WYPR HOSTS THESE CORPORATE MEDIA OUTLETS IN MARYLAND!



Demand that public media funding go to media that promotes public interest programming and not global corporate policy news!!!  Do you know that public media funding must go to outlets that have a majority of its funding through individual donors which WYPR does not?


0 Comments

December 11th, 2013

12/11/2013

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I really want to encourage people to consider what your news organization or pundit is saying and who is giving REAL news.  The US is captured by corporate interest and that includes media and sadly, the once great National Public Media is now trash.....Wall Street all the time!

Our NPR programming  just finished a story of financial justice with the auto industry paying off its bailout and now free to act as a economic engine for US workers.  As you see below, the story is neither.  Should US workers be glad that the auto industry did not go out of business?  Did it really need to or was that just a way to break the auto industry unions?  THAT'S WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT!  Remember, auto sales were so bad because of the massive financial fraud that brought down the economy and when we were told Wall Street would not 'loan' money to the auto industry to help weather the crisis, we ask ----WHY DID THEY NEED A LOAN WHEN IT WAS THE FINANCIAL FRAUD THAT BROUGHT THEM DOWN?  It is the same as the gas prices that drained the profits of airlines for a decade as speculators took prices sky-high everyone knowing it was illegal market manipulation.  Was it just a way to move the airline industry into bankruptcy to shed all of union wages and benefits, because as we know, now that all the airlines have gone through bankruptcy we haven't seen gas prices like that and airlines are making billions in profit. 

THIS IS ALL MANIPULATION TO TAKE ALL OF NEW DEAL AND WAR ON POVERTY WEALTH AWAY FROM THE MIDDLE/LOWER CLASS AND BREAK THE UNIONS. 


I wanted to look at this one piece of news item......the announcement that General Motors has paid its bailout with the Treasury selling all of the stock handed the government at the time of bankruptcy.  Only......none of it is true!

First, let's look at one economist's view of how widespread fraud and corruption is to know I am not making this up!


Corruption of America starts at home, not abroad JPMorgan Chase has been hiring China's "princelings" in exchange for business deals with their parents -- a serious offense that's all to similar to practices here in America
By Robert B. Reich 6:00 a.m. EST, December 11, 2013  Baltimore Sun



The Justice Department has just obtained documents showing that JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street's biggest bank, has been hiring the children of China's ruling elite in order to secure "existing and potential business opportunities" from Chinese government-run companies.

"You all know I have always been a big believer of the Sons and Daughters program," says one JPMorgan executive in an e-mail, because "it almost has a linear relationship" to winning assignments to advise Chinese companies. The documents even include spreadsheets that list the bank's "track record" for converting hires into business deals.


It's a serious offense. But let's get real. How different is bribing China's "princelings," as they're called there, from Wall Street's ongoing program of hiring departing U.S. Treasury officials, presumably in order to grease the wheels of official Washington? Timothy Geithner, President Obama's first Treasury secretary, is now president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus; his budget director Peter Orszag is now a top executive at Citigroup.

Or, for that matter, how different is what JPMorgan did in China from Wall Street's habit of hiring the children of powerful American politicians? (I don't mean to suggest Chelsea Clinton got her hedge-fund job at Avenue Capital Group, where she worked from 2006 to 2009, on the basis of anything other than her financial talents.)

And how much worse is JPMorgan's putative offense in China than the torrent of money JPMorgan and every other major Wall Street bank is pouring into the campaign coffers of American politicians -- making the Street one of the major backers of Democrats as well as Republicans?

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, under which JPMorgan could be indicted for the favors it has bestowed in China, is quite strict. It prohibits American companies from paying money or offering anything of value to foreign officials for the purpose of "securing any improper advantage." Hiring one of their children can certainly qualify as a gift, even without any direct benefit to the official.

JPMorgan couldn't even defend itself by arguing it didn't make any particular deal or get any specific advantage as a result of the hires. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the gift doesn't have to be linked to any particular benefit to the American firm as long as it's intended to generate an advantage its competitors don't enjoy.

Compared to this, corruption of American officials is a breeze. Consider, for example, Countrywide Financial's generous "Friends of Angelo" lending program -- named after its chief executive, Angelo Mozilo -- that gave discounted mortgages to influential members of Congress and their staffs before the housing bubble burst. No criminal or civil charges have ever been filed related to these loans.

Even before the Supreme Court's shameful 2010 "Citizens United" decision -- equating corporations with human beings under the First Amendment, and thereby shielding much corporate political spending -- Republican appointees to the court had done everything they could to blunt anti-bribery laws in the United States. In 1999, in "United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers," Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, interpreted an anti-bribery law so loosely as to allow corporations to give gifts to public officials unless the gifts are linked to specific policies.

We don't even require that American corporations disclose to their own shareholders the largesse they bestow on our politicians. Last year around this time, when the Securities and Exchange Commission released its 2013 to-do list, it signaled that it might formally propose a rule to require corporations to disclose their political spending. The idea had attracted more than 600,000 mostly favorable comments from the public, a record response for the agency.

But the idea mysteriously slipped off the 2014 agenda released last week, without explanation. Could it have anything to do with the fact that, soon after becoming SEC chair in April, Mary Jo White was pressed by Republican lawmakers to abandon the idea, which was fiercely opposed by business groups?

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is important, and JPMorgan should be nailed for bribing Chinese officials. But, if you'll pardon me for asking, why isn't there a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act?

Never before has so much U.S. corporate and Wall Street money poured into our nation's capital, as well as into our state capitals. Never before have so many Washington officials taken jobs in corporations, lobbying firms, trade associations, and on the Street immediately after leaving office. Our democracy is drowning in big money.

Corruption is corruption, and bribery is bribery, in whatever country or language it's transacted in.

Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. His new film, "Inequality for All," was released in September. He blogs at http://www.robertreich.org.

_________________________________________

Regarding the GMC payment of bailout told as a good thing:

Let's see.......GM Financial, now ALLY has yet to pay off its bailout as its financial business was steeped in subprime loan fraud. Obama came in and bumped auto workers to $14 an hour.....poverty wages in order to pay for the downturn in auto sales caused by the massive corporate fraud bringing the economic collapse. So, Wall Street is super rich having stolen tens of trillions of dollars and the auto workers paid for the losses with their wages and benefits-----HOW IS THAT GOOD?

This was the most convoluted of conspiracies to defraud the American public in bailing out the worst of businesses while making it a bank that later GM comes back to buy. It boggles the mind!

As far as I can see GMAC/Ally has not paid its bailout and it looks like the crimes of this financial arm were paid for by workers.


6/01/2012 @ 5:17PM

GM Unloads $26 Billion in White-Collar Pensions; Could Union Workers Be Next?


General Motors said Friday it will offer 42,000 white-collar retirees in the U.S. a lump-sum payment in lieu of their monthly pension check and will transfer pension responsibility for 76,000 others to a group annuity plan managed by Prudential Insurance.

It’s the latest, and boldest, step to ease GM’s massive pension burden. Chief Financial Officer Daniel Amman said the changes would erase $26 billion from GM’s $134 billion worldwide pension obligation and “set the groundwork” for further actions. “It really comes down to risk reduction,” he said. “We want to remove this as an issue for us.”

GM no doubt would like to do something similar with its $71 billion pension plan for hourly factory workers and retirees, whose assets are $10 billion short of its obligations. During contract talks last fall, GM and United Auto Workers bargainers spent many hours discussing the pension plan, but no substantial changes were made. Amman told reporters Friday: “We’ve agreed to keep an open channel on that topic.” A UAW spokeswoman was not available for comment.

Pension accounting is a volatile business, and depends on market returns, discount rates and worker mortality rates. Despite steady cash and stock contributions over the years, as well as a shift toward a more stable asset mix, GM’s global pension plans are still $25 billion short of the company’s expected obligation to current and future retirees.

The transfer of about 25% of its total U.S. pension obligation to Prudential will cost GM $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion: $1 billion to “top off” the salaried plan’s assets before they are turned over, and $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion to cover a one-time premium payment to Prudential. (The actual amount depends on how many retirees opt to continue getting their monthly benefits from Prudential.) But it’s worth it: After GM pays off Prudential, it will have no further cash obligations tied to the transferred pensions.

GM, which emerged from bankruptcy in June 2009 after a government bailout, is trying to restore its financial credibility and raise its stock price so that the U.S. Treasury can sell its remaining stake in the automaker. Fitch Ratings Friday called the pension restructuring a “positive step” for GM, and said the company, with $31.5 billion in cash, could easily afford it. But Fitch took no action on the automaker’s debt rating, currently “BB.”

GM isn’t the first to try to unload a huge chunk of its pension debt. . In April, Ford said it would offer 90,000 of its retired engineers and office workers the chance to take a lump sum payment now and forgo their monthly pension checks for the rest of their lives. That program is just getting under way so it is too early to know how many people will accept.

GM’s offer comes with a twist, though: the option to continue receiving the same monthly benefits from Prudential through a group annuity plan. That could be more appealing to retirees worried about whether their money would last if they accepted a a lump-sum. Eligible retirees have until July 20 to decide on their payment options.  The transactions are expected to be completed by the end of 2012, and Prudential would then assume responsibility for the pensions in January 2013.

Amman said transferring salaried pensions to Prudential makes sense. “That is their core business. This allows us to spend more time and resources on our core business which is designing, building and selling world-class vehicles.”


****************************************
Below you see what was a systemically fraudulent bank allowed right away to escape in 2009

It appears to me that since GMAC was the source of billions of dollars in fraud,  that all of the profit made by this bank comes back to the public.

FOLLOW THE PROFIT MADE BY CORPORATIONS INVOLVED IN THE FRAUD BECAUSE IT IS YOUR RETIREMENT!

Some may think I'm being flippant but I am not.  The amount of fraud GMAC was involved would bring that much back to the people and GM workers!


Consumers Beware: Ally Bank is GMAC

By MyBankTracker  Fri May 15, 2009

GMAC Bank becomes Ally Bank

This morning the Wall Street Journal broke the news that today, Friday, May 15, 2009 GMAC LLC will rename itself to Ally Bank.

In becoming a bank holding company back in December, GMAC has taken the opportunity to differentiate themselves in the market by starting fresh – much needed in the banking industry itself.



Building on the foundation of GMAC, Ally is an online bank that looks to show the market that it truly understands what today’s customer is about.  With no monthly fees, no minimum balances and no minimum deposits, as well as 24/7 Customer Care Support and the ability to compare rates against its competitors directly, Ally looks to be the bank for a Web2.0 customer.



Ally Bank has taken a step toward transparency by allowing the consumer to compare Ally’s rates against competitors, such as other online banks ING Direct and HSBC Direct, as well as brick and mortar banks such as, Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo. We applaud their progressive and positive approach in bringing transparency to banking.


************************************
Propublica did a great piece on where the bailout money went.  This is just one of the last posts on the GMAC bailout and as you can see much of the bailout has yet to be paid.  So why is GM being toted as having paid off its debt?  Because a Bain's Capital spin-off of the assets in its financial wing allowed it to pretend none of that bailout was connected to them.  GM then went right back and bought GMAC/Ally having lost nothing but union pensions and wages!

VISIGOTHS THINK THIS ALL LOOKS SOMEWHAT LEGAL BUT RULE OF LAW DOES NOT ALLOW THE CONVOLUTED TWISTING OF RULES AND LAWS THAT HAPPENED IN THE FRAUD.  ROBO-SIGNING NOT ILLEGAL SAYS A MARYLAND COURT?  REALLY?


Propublica Bailout Tracker
Events


$5.93B Payback
Nov. 20, 2013 Partial Repayment

On November 20, 2013, Ally completed a private placement of an aggregate of 216,667 shares of its common stock for an aggregate price of approximately $1.3 billion and the repurchase of all outstanding shares of its Fixed Rate Cumulative Mandatorily Convertible Preferred Stock, Series F-2, held by Treasury, including payment for the elimination or relinquishment of any right to receive additional shares of common stock to be issued (the “Share Adjustment Right”). Ally paid to Treasury a total of approximately $5.93 billion for the repurchase of the Series F-2 Preferred Stock and the elimination of the Share Adjustment Right. As a result of the private placement, Treasury's common stock ownership stake was diluted from 73.8 percent to 63.45 percent. Treasury continues to own 981,971 shares of common stock in Ally.

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Remember, as with AIG, this corporation was soaring in profits from the subprime loan fraud and yet, it was spun off and bailed out.....think of the assets that could and should have been distributed.  Think about the auto workers who were left to pay the price of the massive mortgage fraud of which GMAC was deeply involved!

So, just last year....2012 we are made aware of the taxpayer losses along with the workers as the banks and this bank unit made out like the bandits they are!  At the same time Bernanke, the FED chief, has QE and 0% going full speed to get all those subprime loans off GMAC accounting records and free money created the ability for it to expand overseas ready to go!

THE GM WORKERS......NOT SO MUCH.

Profits in G.M.A.C. Bailout to Benefit Financiers, Not U.S.

By STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF
Harry Campbell Deal Professor August 21, 2012, 6:57 pm

Among the companies that were bailed out by the federal government during the financial crisis, perhaps the most intractable is proving to be the company formerly known as the General Motors Acceptance Corporation. It’s a case study in how bailouts can linger and profits, when they do come, flow not to the government but to the Warren E. Buffetts of the world.

G.M.A.C. was the financial arm of General Motors.

In the years leading up to the financial crisis, it was also G.M.’s most profitable unit, which tells you something about the auto industry at the time. The company earned more profit from lending money to customers than in selling cars.

In 2005, desperate to raise cash, General Motors sold a 51 percent stake in G.M.A.C. to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. Cerberus beat out a rival, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, for the privilege, spurring BusinessWeek to write that Henry R. Kravis’s loss “has to sting.”

During the financial crisis, however, the sting was felt on the other side, as G.M.A.C. staved off collapse thanks only to a government infusion of $17.2 billion. The company was renamed Ally Financial — you have probably seen its catchy commercials on television. The Treasury Department owns 73.8 percent of Ally, with Cerberus retaining an 8.7 percent stake.

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Rescuing a financial arm of GM riddled with fraudulent loans by making it a bank!!!!! OH THAT'S A GOOD IDEA!
Remember, GMAC was a financial arm of GM....the two are separate corporations.


Warren correctly asks why an entity collapsing from broad fraudulent practices was being given the ability to operate as a government insured global bank.


MY POINT IN ALL OF THIS IS THAT ALL OF THIS IS ILLEGAL AND AS SUCH ALL OF THIS CAN BE MADE VOID.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO REINSTATE RULE OF LAW AND THAT IS DOABLE!

Lawmakers question GMAC rescue

By Binyamin Appelbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 26, 2010

The federal government went to extraordinary lengths to save the auto financing company GMAC. It was the only bank to get three separate rounds of federal aid -- the most recent in December, even as the broader bailout was winding down -- and it is the only bank in which the government now owns a majority stake.

On Thursday, congressional investigators questioned whether all those efforts were a mistake. Members of the Congressional Oversight Panel, charged by Congress with policing the bailout, pressed Treasury Department officials to explain why the government did not let the company go bankrupt.

They also questioned whether the rescue of GMAC, achieved in part by making it a bank, had created a long-term situation in which the government guarantee of bank deposits was subsidizing sales at General Motors and Chrysler. GMAC is the primary source of financing for GM and Chrysler dealers, and a major source of loans for buyers of their vehicles.

Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who chairs the panel, said she understood GMAC's utility for GM and Chrysler.

"What I don't understand," she said, "is what the justification is for being an independent bank that takes deposits that has a backup from the United States government."


Ron Bloom, a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, told the panel that the rescue of GMAC was necessary to save the automakers, and that the $17.2 billion price tag was a good deal for taxpayers. He said that no other lender or combination of lenders could have quickly replaced GMAC's role in the marketplace.

"Without orders for cars, GM would have been forced to slow or shut down its factories indefinitely to match the drop in demand," Bloom said in prepared testimony. "Given its significant overhead, a slowdown or stoppage in production of this magnitude would have toppled GM."

Under sharp questioning from panelists, Bloom conceded that GM might have survived, but said that the government did not want to take the risk.

But an independent expert, Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics, told the panel that the failure of GMAC actually would have helped the auto industry.

"Solvent bank and non-bank competitors of GMAC would have been eager to capture both the floor plan and auto sales business," Whalen said.

GMAC fell into financial trouble in part because of its deep plunge into mortgage lending. Its problems then were compounded by the economic crisis.

In December 2008, the Bush administration invested $5.8 billion in the company and the Federal Reserve gave emergency approval for GMAC to become a bank holding company, allowing it to gather deposits to fund lending.

In May 2009, the Obama administration invested $7.5 billion, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. agreed to help GMAC raise a further $7.4 billion from investors by guaranteeing that it would cover any losses.

And in December, the government gave GMAC $3.8 billion in a third round of federal aid.

As a result of the interventions, the government now owns a 56.3 percent stake in the company.

Federal law draws a strong line between banking and commerce. The government bars manufacturers and other kinds of companies from owning banks, so that the federal guarantee of bank deposits is not abused as a cheap source of funding, allowing companies to take risks at federal expense. The federal guarantee increases the availability of loans; the separation of banking and commerce prevents companies from getting that money too easily.

Automakers have long relied on financing arms to facilitate sales, but until the government's rescue of GMAC, none of those arms had access to deposits as a funding source.

The company has pledged to diversify its operations. Michael A. Carpenter, GMAC's chief executive, told the panel that the company would be able to extend its business model to other manufacturers. He said the company was rebranding itself as "Ally" to emphasize that General Motors was no longer its primary focus. But GMAC also plans to shed its mortgage lending business, which will serve to increase its short-term focus on GM and Chrysler.

***************************************
Raise you hand if you understand that an automotive corporation should not have a branch that is involved in the mortgage loan industry!  EVERYONE.  So, we know from the start that the problem is with how GMAC was built.  So, the first thing Rule of Law would do is close GMAC and seize its assets for operating unlawfully in the mortgage business.  GMAC was indeed one of the worst in moving subprime mortgage loans and should have been prosecuted and again, seize its assets.

Rather it was bailed out because they said.....an automobile corporation had to have a financing branch.  GMAC was not only bailed out-----it was allowed to become a global bank.  Now, if you were a VISIGOTH and this was a scheme to make the corporation rich you would turn a finance corporation into a global bank.


This was in 2011 when people still thought that justice may be served and nothing happened!



GMAC Mortgage | Home Loans, Refinance, Mortgage Rates

ProPublica / By Paul Kiel

Mortgage Company Bailed Out By Taxpayers Is Caught Forging Documents to Foreclose on Them
August 1, 2011 |

GMAC, one of the nation's largest mortgage servicers, faced a quandary last summer. It wanted to foreclose on a New York City homeowner but lacked the crucial paperwork needed to seize the property.

GMAC has a standard solution to such problems, which arise frequently in the post-bubble economy. Its employees secure permission to create and sign documents in the name of companies that made the original loans. But this case was trickier because the lender, a notorious subprime company named Ameriquest, had gone out of business in 2007.

And so GMAC, which was bailed out by taxpayers in 2008, began looking for a way to craft a document that would pass legal muster, internal records obtained by ProPublica show.

"The problem is we do not have signing authority—are there any other options?" Jeffrey Stephan, the head of GMAC's "Document Execution" team, wrote to another employee and the law firm pursuing the foreclosure action. No solutions were offered.


Three months later, GMAC had an answer. It filed a document with New York City authorities that said the delinquent Ameriquest loan had been assigned to it "effective of" August 2005. The documentwas dated July 7, 2010, three years after Ameriquest had ceased to exist and was signed by Stephan, who was identified as a "Limited Signing Officer" for Ameriquest Mortgage Company. Soon after, GMAC filed for foreclosure.

An examination by ProPublica suggests this transaction was not unique. A review of court records in New York identified hundreds of similar assignment documents filed in the name of Ameriquest after 2008 by GMAC and other mortgage servicers.

The issue has attracted growing scrutiny in recent months as bloggers, consumer attorneys and media outlets have identified what appears to be part of a pattern of questionable assignments filed across the country.

GMAC, whose parent company renamed itself last year as Ally Financial, was at the center of what became known as the robo-signing scandal. The uproar began last fall after revelations that mortgage servicing employees had produced flawed documents to speed foreclosures. GMAC and other banks have acknowledged filing false affidavits in which bank officials claimed "personal knowledge" of the facts underlying thousands of mortgages. But GMAC and other servicers say they've since tightened their procedures. They insist that their records were largely accurate and the affidavits amounted to errors of form, not substance.

The issues surrounding the Ameriquest loan and others like it appear to be more serious.

"This assignment of mortgage has all of the markings of GMAC finding that it lacked a needed mortgage assignment in order to foreclose and just making it up," said Thomas Cox, a Maine foreclosure defense attorney.

In New York, it's a felony to file a public record with "intent to deceive."

"It's fraud," said Linda Tirelli, a consumer bankruptcy attorney. "I want to know who's going to do a perp walk for recording this."

No criminal charges have been filed in the robo-signing cases.

Asked by ProPublica about the document, GMAC acknowledged Stephan did not have authority to sign on behalf of Ameriquest. The bank said it is still planning to push ahead with foreclosure on the homeowner, who remains in the property.

Company spokeswoman Gina Proia said an internal review last fall into "suspected documentation execution issues" had flagged the loan as problematic and that GMAC is "determining what needs to be done in order to receive the necessary authorization."

"We will determine and complete the necessary steps to remediate and proceed with foreclosure," Proia said.

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So, the scheme goes full circle with GM buying back the business that caused it to go bankrupt only now, ALLY is a global bank that global GM now can use for its global sales.

HOW GLOBAL OF THEM!!!!


General Motors buys Ally Financial foreign operations
general motors financial logo


By Dan Roth Auto Blog

In a move that welcomes former pieces of General Motors back into the fold, GM Financial has reached a deal with Ally Financial, formerly GMAC, to buy a piece of the company's international operations. The $4.2 billion deal is for Ally's Latin America, Europe and China operations.

"GM is entering the most aggressive rollout of new vehicles in its history, and this acquisition will make us an even more formidable competitor by ensuring that competitive financing is available to our customers and dealers around the world," says General Motors CFO Dan Ammann. The ability to finance from a captive unit will let General Motors extend better loan terms to potential customers, which the automaker sees as key to closing a sales gap that's between 10 and 15 percent versus automakers who already have their own financing divisions.

GM will be handing over more than $2 billion in cash to GM Financial, and the unit will more than double its liabilities from $12 billion to $27 billion while also doubling its assets to about $33 billion. GM Financial expects to bolster its yearly pre-tax earnings by $300-$400 million. It will take at least six months to wrap this deal up, provided it gets approvals from various oversight agencies. For more information on the deal, check out the official press release below.
0 Comments

November 12th, 2013

11/12/2013

0 Comments

 
GLOBALIZATION IS IN DECLINE AND THE 1% HAVE THIS POLICY OF LYING, CHEATING, STEALING BECAUSE THEY ARE TRYING TO CORNER WHAT IS LEFT OF THE WEALTH.  DO NOT ALLOW THE 99% TO BE MADE THIRD WORLD IN THIS ATTEMPT------THAT WILL BE THE OUTCOME IF WE DO NOT FIGHT FOR A RETURN TO FIRST WORLD DEMOCRACY!!!!


Wonder why with all the work that is being done for the public sector why, with all the problems in finished work do we continue to go with private contracting of public work?  The intent is to privatize all that is public.  As global markets die the 1% are pressed to lay claim on as much wealth they can get and that is what you have witnessed this last decade.  Labor losses when public sector unions are privatized and busted by public private partnerships and private unions thinking they are going to get the work are finding all the jobs given to immigrant workers. 

The good news is that global corporations are going to shrink and are being forced to move back to the US for business.  This means we can rebuild a domestic economy that uses US labor as consumer to fuel the economy rather than having global corporations worried about building a middle-class overseas.  So, the elements of our former economy centered on domestic consumerism is there.  The bad news is that the 1% do not care if we have a strong economy domestically because they have all the money and can just limp along forever.  This is what is happening as neo-liberals fight to keep wealth and profit at the top and pass laws like the TPP that undermines the US Constitutional rights of citizens as legislators.  We must fight hard to stop this descent into third world autocracy by taking back the democratic party from the neo-liberals and reinstate Rule of Law and democratic principles-----we have a chance to move back to the US of 1950----strong economy and middle-class and first world quality of life. 

WAKE UP AND GET MOVING------CREATE COMMUNITY ACTION GROUPS AND SHAKE THESE BUGS OUT OF THE RUG!!!


We are sitting listening to corporate NPR tell us that we need to dismantle more regulation in order for private contractors to take more of public sector work even as what they say has already failed in Europe.



UK government auditor questions reliance on big contractors

By Christine Murray

LONDON Tue Nov 12, 2013 12:08am GMT

Margaret Hodge, Labour Party Member of Parliament and chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), poses for a portrait after speaking to Reuters about corporate taxation, in Westminster, central London April 24, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Andrew Winning

(Reuters) - A review of Britain's use of big companies to run services from prisons to hospitals raised questions about whether the rise of a few major contractors was in the public interest, the National Audit Office (NAO) said on Tuesday.

And it said transparency on profit made from government contracts was limited, with firms' tax affairs hard to understand, setting the agenda for a parliamentary grilling of some of the state's biggest suppliers next week.

Two NAO reports on government contractors, based largely on information from Capita (CPI.L), G4S (GFS.L), Serco (SRP.L) and Atos (ATOS.PA), will form the basis of two Public Accounts Committee hearings later this month, one with representatives from the four firms, and another with government officials.

  "I asked the NAO to carry out this work after looking at case after case of contract failure ... in each case we found poor service; poor value for money; and government departments completely out of their depth," Margaret Hodge, the lawmaker who chairs the PAC said. "These reports together raise some big concerns". 

SOUND FAMILIAR?????

The political spotlight is firmly on Britain's 187 billion pound public sector contracting market after a series of high-profile contract failures.

There are currently eight reviews of the industry, including a criminal investigation into G4S and Serco's botched prisoner tagging contracts launched earlier this month.

A Serco spokesman pointed to the firm's corporate renewal program, announced in October to rebuild its relationship with its largest customer, as evidence of its improved transparency.

A spokeswoman for Atos said it had been open and transparent with the NAO, whilst balancing its ability to compete for future work.

The NAO added that the Cabinet Office, which is currently deciding whether G4S and Serco can work for government again, should develop a more "mature" approach to dealing with its biggest suppliers.

It said a balance must be struck between short-term savings, which have mostly come from fierce contract renegotiations, and innovation and investment.

Until the austerity-focused coalition came into power in 2010, suppliers like Capita and Serco enjoyed double-digit revenue growth for two decades.

In some markets, such as private prisons, child custody and medical assessments, there are only a few large providers which the NAO said could be considered "too big to fail".


Some 3 billion pounds of the 40 billion spent by central government each year on suppliers is with the four firms in the report.

Capita said in a statement that all its businesses seek to ensure value for money in an open, fair and transparent way.

A spokeswoman for G4S said it was a strong believer in partnerships with customers and it fully supported NAO's work.

The government said earlier this month that 10.5 percent of all government business went directly to small and medium-sized enterprises in 2012/13, up slightly from 10 percent in the previous year. It has a target of 25 percent for that figure by 2015.



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As Congress and Obama race to build global corporations sending all US Treasury wealth and all spending expanding global markets we know that the global market is dying .......

We need to get rid of global corporate pols wasting our wealth on the status quo and bring corporations  back to small and regional businesses. 


ALL OF THIS REQUIRES THAT THE US WORKER EARNS ENOUGH TO BE MIDDLE-CLASS CONSUMERS.  IT IS BAD POLICY TO KEEP LABOR IMPOVERISHED AS NEO-LIBERALS ARE DOING!


TRUST IN GOVERNMENTS, CORPORATIONS AND
GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS CONTINUES TO DECLINE


Global Survey ahead of World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
in Davos shows ‘trust deficit’ deepening

Geneva, Switzerland, 15 December 2005 – A global public opinion survey carried out for the World Economic Forum in 20 countries, interviewing more than 20,000 citizens, paints an alarming picture of declining levels of trust. The survey, carried out by GlobeScan, shows that trust in a range of institutions has dropped significantly since January 2004 to levels not seen since the months following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The poll also reveals that public trust in national governments and the United Nations has fallen the most over the past two years.

Since signalling the importance of trust in world affairs by making it the theme of its Annual Meeting in 2003, the World Economic Forum has been monitoring public trust levels and today presents the most recent responses to a set of questions asked of representative samples of citizens around the world since January 2001. The research, conducted by GlobeScan Incorporated, shows that:

• Public trust in national governments, the United Nations and global companies is now at its lowest level since tracking began in January 2001. • Since 2004, trust in government has declined by statistically significant margins in 12 of the 16 countries for which tracking data is available. The only national government with increased trust is Russia’s, continuing its upward trend since 2001. • The United Nations, while continuing to receive higher trust levels than other institutions, has experienced a significant decline in trust from 2004 levels in 12 of the 17 countries for which tracking data is available, suggesting an impact of the scandal over the Oil-for-Food Programme. • Public trust in companies has also eroded over the last two years. After recovering trust in 2004 to pre-Enron levels, trust has since declined for both large national companies and for global companies. Trust in global companies is now at its lowest level since tracking began. • NGOs remain the leaders in trust, but they also have to contend with some decline. In 10 of 17 countries for which data is available, trust in NGOs has fallen since 2004, in some cases sharply (e.g., Brazil, India, South Korea).
These findings are based on a global public opinion poll involving a total of 20,791 interviews with citizens across 20 countries (n=1,000 in most countries), conducted between June and August 2005 by respected research institutes in each participating country, under the leadership of GlobeScan. (A full list of participating institutes, with contact details, is available at: www.weforum.org.) Each country’s findings are considered accurate to within 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The survey asked respondents how much they trust each institution “to operate in the best interests of our society”. Identical questions were asked in most of the same countries in January 2004, August 2002 and January 2001. Net trust levels are presented here – the difference between the percentage of respondents who express trust and those who express no trust in a given institution.

A full report, including charts illustrating all findings, is available at: http://www.weforum.org/trustsurvey.




NOTE: The 14 countries that were tracked are: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the USA.

Declining trust in governments across the world Of all the institutions examined, national governments have lost the most ground over the past two years. In 12 of the 16 countries for which data is available, public trust in the national government has declined by statistically significant margins, leaving only 6 of the tracking countries today with more citizens trusting their national government than distrusting them.

Trust in government has fallen the most in Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Canada and Spain, followed closely by Argentina and the USA. The case of Nigeria is also noteworthy, where trust in the national government fell by 13 points while trust in all other institutions rose. Even in countries such as Great Britain and India, where trust remains positive, it has suffered its biggest fall since tracking began in 2001. Only in Italy, Indonesia and France has trust in the national government held steady, although polling was completed prior to the recent riots across France. The Russian government is now the only institution in any country polled to have consistently increased trust since 2001.




For complete results across all countries, please see the additional charts available on http://www.weforum.org/trustsurvey.



Changing patterns of trust in global companies While trust in global companies has not fallen everywhere, statistically significant declines have occurred over the past two years in 10 of 17 countries for which tracking data is available, and the overall trust level for global companies is the lowest since tracking began. After global companies had rebounded in 2004 to pre-Enron trust levels, these latest findings will be discouraging for business leaders. Perhaps most worrying for corporate executives are the sharp drops in trust in Spain, the USA and Canada, where net trust in global companies has turned negative for the first time. Trust in global companies is strongest in China, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia and India.




In commenting on the poll’s findings, Ged Davis, Managing Director, World Economic Forum, said: “The Annual Meeting in Davos in January will be held under the theme “The Creative Imperative” and it is clear from these figures that to regain the trust of the general public in institutions and governments we must find new and effective ways to reconnect with citizens and tackle the public trust deficit. If not, the very institutions that govern our world will be increasingly under threat.”

Doug Miller, President of GlobeScan, offered the following perspective: “If Francis Fukuyama was right when he described trust as the necessary glue of any properly functioning society, then these poll results suggest we’re in danger of becoming unstuck – especially when values-driven organizations like non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations are losing trust almost as quickly as large companies. It’s time for all organizations to better understand how to earn the public’s trust.”



Each national survey was based on a representative sample of about 1,000 adults and was conducted in-home or by telephone between June and August 2005 as part of the annual 20-nation GlobeScan Report on Issues and Reputation. Individual country findings are accurate within +/- 3%, with 95% confidence. Multi-country results were calculated using the one nation/one vote method.

Notes for Editors:
A fuller document detailing all the survey’s findings is available at www.weforum.org/trustsurvey
For more details on the report’s findings please contact Doug Miller, President of GlobeScan at doug.miller@GlobeScan.com


_____________________________________________
Just look at this indicator having global shipping in decline.  Obama and states are pushing port dredging and expansion to accommodate global tankers and this is where tens of billions are heading.......Baltimore being in this mode.  Remember, it is the HighStar investment firm with Ivy League universities as major shareholders that are being given public ports all across America. 

This is particularly bad policy for Baltimore because having global tankers chugging up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore is the most environmentally damaging policy anyone could pass.  All of the invasive species coming from ship hulls will kill the Bay habitat and for what?  A DECLINING GLOBAL SHIPPING MARKET!!!!

GET RID OF NEO-LIBERALS BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES!



Global shipping industry in danger of decline


Report released today into the global shipping industry warns of oversupply and high pricing constraining performance   The shipping trade could be entering rough waters

1 12 Aug 2013 Joseph Wilkes  
Supply Chain Digital

A report into the global shipping industry has been released today, warning of decline.

Online market research store Research and Markets has released the Global Shipping Industry 2013 – Forecast, Trends and Opportunities, report from Taiyou Research company, which provides analysis and overview of the entire industry as well as individual elements such as ownership and prices.

The report states that in the coming years, the global shipping industry is expected to decline by five to 10 percent.


Oversupply and high bunker oil prices will eventually lead to a constraining of performance.

The report said: “A sustained oversupply of vessels combined with high bunker oil prices will pressure margins in most shipping segments. The dry-bulk and crude oil tanker segments are likely to have the largest supply-demand gap in 2013, complicating these sectors' ability to meaningfully improve their earnings.

“The tanker market has also been affected by the oversupply of vessels in the near term aided by lower OPEC production levels; though the outlook for the product tanker segment is more favorable since demand growth is likely to outpace supply during 2013, leading freight rates to rise by the end of this year. Box freight rates for the container segment have rebounded since March this year.

“However, strong improvement in earnings should not be expected for the full year in this segment. This reflects sustained high bunker oil costs and pressure on container rates stemming from recent increases in deployed tonnage of box ships.”

But Japanese conglomerates could be affected to a lesser extent by the negative market trends that will damage other global shipping trends. This is due to the scale of the Japanese conglomerates, their diversification, (including their liquefied natural gas, or LNG, fleets) and strong relationships with customers, said the report.

The report includes analysis of 35 major shipping companies such as AP Moller Maersk, China COSCO, China Shipping Development, D/S Norden, Golar LNG, Kawasaki Kisen, Hyundai Merchant Marine.

AP Moller Maersk, Nippon Yusen, Kawasaki Kisen, Mitsui OSK Lines, China COSCO and Evergreen Marine are some of the top players in the industry, the report suggested.


___________________________________________

GLOBALIZATION TOOK A HIT WHEN THE 2008 ECONOMIC COLLAPSE REVEALED AN ENTIRE NETWORK OF US CORPORATE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION  BUT THE SNOWDEN WHISTLE BLOWING WILL SHUT GLOBAL MARKETS DOWN AND THE US KNOWS THIS.

The American people are under assault for their wealth because the 1% know they will have no more markets to build and wealth will decline.  WE NEED TO STOP THE LOOTING AND FIGHT FOR A RETURN TO DOMESTIC CONSUMERISM FUELING THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY.  As global corporations are forced to move back to US they intend to make Chinese sweat shop workers of US labor-----


GET RID OF NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT!!!


Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence: A World Without Privacy

Tuesday, 12 November 2013 09:55 By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch | News Analysis

Protesters rally against mass surveillance during an event organized by the group Stop Watching Us in Washington, DC on October 26, 2013. via Shutterstock)" height="400" width="400">(Image: Protesters rally against mass surveillance during an event organized by the group Stop Watching Us in Washington, DC on October 26, 2013 via Shutterstock)Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake.  If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in May and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence.  At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.

Let’s begin by positing this: There’s never been anything quite like it. The slow-tease pulling back of the National Security Agency curtain to reveal the skeletal surveillance structure embedded in our planet (what cheekbones!) has been an epochal event.  It’s minimally the political spectacle of 2013, and maybe 2014, too. It’s made a mockery of the 24/7 news cycle and the urge of the media to leave the last big deal for the next big deal as quickly as possible. 

It’s visibly changed attitudes around the world toward the U.S. -- strikingly for the worse, even if this hasn’t fully sunk in here yet. Domestically, the inability to put the issue to sleep or tuck it away somewhere or even outlast it has left the Obama administration, Congress, and the intelligence community increasingly at one another’s throats. And somewhere in a system made for leaks, there are young techies inside a surveillance machine so viscerally appalling, so like the worst sci-fi scenarios they read while growing up, that -- no matter the penalties -- one of them, two of them, many of them are likely to become the next Edward Snowden(s).

So where to start, almost half a year into an unfolding crisis of surveillance that shows no signs of ending? If you think of this as a scorecard, then the place to begin is, of course, with the line-up, which means starting with omniscience. After all, that’s the NSA’s genuine success story -- and what kid doesn’t enjoy hearing about the (not so) little engine that could?

Omniscience

Conceptually speaking, we’ve never seen anything like the National Security Agency’s urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet -- to keep track of humanity, all of humanity, from its major leaders to obscure figures in the backlands of the planet. And the fact is that, within the scope of what might be technologically feasible in our era, they seem not to have missed an opportunity.

The NSA, we now know, is everywhere, gobbling up emails, phone calls, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, credit card sales, communications and transactions of every conceivable sort.  The NSA and British intelligence are feeding off the fiber optic cables that carry Internet and phone activity. The agency stores records (“metadata”) of every phone call made in the United States. In various ways, legal and otherwise, its operatives long ago slipped through the conveniently ajar backdoors of media giants like Yahoo, Verizon, and Google -- and also in conjunction with British intelligence they have been secretly collecting “records” from the “clouds” or private networks of Yahoo and Google to the tune of 181 million communications in a single month, or more than two billion a year. 

Meanwhile, their privately hired corporate hackers have systems that, among other things, can slip inside your computer to count and see every keystroke you make. Thanks to that mobile phone of yours (even when off), those same hackers can also locate you just about anywhere on the planet.  And that’s just to begin to summarize what we know of their still developing global surveillance state.

In other words, there’s my email and your phone metadata, and his tweets and her texts, and the swept up records of billions of cell phone calls and other communications by French and Nigerians, Italians and Pakistanis, Germans and Yemenis, Egyptians and Spaniards (thank you, Spanish intelligence, for lending the NSA such a hand!), and don’t forget the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Burmese, among others (thank you, Australian intelligence, for lending the NSA such a hand!), and it would be a reasonable bet to include just about any other nationality you care to mention. Then there are the NSA listening posts at all those U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, and the reports on the way the NSA listened in on the U.N., bugged European Union offices “on both sides of the Atlantic,” accessed computers inside the Indian embassy in Washington D.C. and that country’s U.N. mission in New York, hacked into the computer network of and spied on Brazil’s largest oil company, hacked into the Brazilian president’s emails and the emails of two Mexican presidents, monitored the German Chancellor’s mobile phone, not to speak of those of dozens, possibly hundreds, of other German leaders, monitored the phone calls of at least 35 global leaders, as well as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and -- if you’re keeping score -- that’s just a partial list of what we’ve learned so far about the NSA’s surveillance programs, knowing that, given the Snowden documents still to come, there has to be so much more.

When it comes to the “success” part of the NSA story, you could also play a little numbers game: the NSA has at least 35,000 employees, possibly as many as 55,000, and an almost $11 billion budget.  With up to 70% of that budget possibly going to private contractors, we are undoubtedly talking about tens of thousands more “employees” indirectly on the agency’s payroll. The Associated Press estimates that there are 500,000 employees of private contractors “who have access to the government's most sensitive secrets.” In Bluffdale, Utah, the NSA is spending $2 billion to build what may be one of the largest data-storage facilities on the planet (with its own bizarre fireworks), capable of storing almost inconceivable yottabytes of information.  And keep in mind that since 9/11, according to the New York Times, the agency has also built or expanded major data-storage facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington State. 

But success, too, can have its downside and there is a small catch when it comes to the NSA's global omniscience. For everything it can, at least theoretically, see, hear, and search, there’s one obvious thing the agency’s leaders and the rest of the intelligence community have proven remarkably un-omniscient about, one thing they clearly have been incapable of taking in -- and that’s the most essential aspect of the system they are building. Whatever they may have understood about the rest of us, they understood next to nothing about themselves or the real impact of what they were doing, which is why the revelations of Edward Snowden caught them so off-guard.

Along with the giant Internet corporations, they have been involved in a process aimed at taking away the very notion of a right to privacy in our world; yet they utterly failed to grasp the basic lesson they have taught the rest of us. If we live in an era of no privacy, there are no exemptions; if, that is, it’s an age of no-privacy for us, then it’s an age of no-privacy for them, too.

The word “conspiracy” is an interesting one in this context.  It comes from the Latin conspirare for "breathe the same air." In order to do that, you need to be a small group in a small room. Make yourself the largest surveillance outfit on the planet, hire tens of thousands of private contractors -- young computer geeks plunged into a situation that would have boggled the mind of George Orwell -- and organize a system of storage and electronic retrieval that puts much at an insider’s fingertips, and you’ve just kissed secrecy goodnight and put it to bed for the duration.

There was always going to be an Edward Snowden -- or rather Edward Snowdens. And no matter what the NSA and the Obama administration do, no matter what they threaten, no matter how fiercely they attack whistleblowers, or who they put away for how long, there will be more.  No matter the levels of classification and the desire to throw a penumbra of secrecy over government operations of all sorts, we will eventually know. 

They have constructed a system potentially riddled with what, in the Cold War days, used to be called “moles.” In this case, however, those “moles” won’t be spying for a foreign power, but for us. There is no privacy left. That fact of life has been embedded, like so much institutional DNA, in the system they have so brilliantly constructed. They will see us, but in the end, we will see them, too.

Omnipotence

With our line-ups in place, let’s turn to the obvious question: How’s it going? How’s the game of surveillance playing out at the global level? How has success in building such a system translated into policy and power? How useful has it been to have advance info on just what the U.N. general-secretary will have to say when he visits you at the White House? How helpful is it to store endless tweets, social networking interactions, and phone calls from Egypt when it comes to controlling or influencing actors there, whether the Muslim Brotherhood or the generals?

We know that 1,477 “items” from the NSA’s PRISM program (which taps into the central servers of nine major American Internet companies) were cited in the president’s Daily Briefing in 2012 alone. With all that help, with all that advanced notice, with all that insight into the workings of the world from but one of so many NSA programs, just how has Washington been getting along?

Though we have very little information about how intelligence insiders and top administration officials assess the effectiveness of the NSA’s surveillance programs in maintaining American global power, there’s really no need for such assessments. All you have to do is look at the world.

Long before Snowden walked off with those documents, it was clear that things weren’t exactly going well. Some breakthroughs in surveillance techniques were, for instance, developed in America’s war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. intelligence outfits and spies were clearly capable of locating and listening in on insurgencies in ways never before possible. And yet, we all know what happened in Iraq and is happening in Afghanistan.  In both places, omniscience visibly didn’t translate into success. And by the way, when the Arab Spring hit, how prepared was the Obama administration? Don’t even bother to answer that one.

In fact, it’s reasonable to assume that, while U.S. spymasters and operators were working at the technological frontiers of surveillance and cryptography, their model for success was distinctly antiquated. However unconsciously, they were still living with a World War II-style mindset. Back then, in an all-out military conflict between two sides, listening in on enemy communications had been at least one key to winning the war. Breaking the German Enigma codes meant knowing precisely where the enemy’s U-boats were, just as breaking Japan’s naval codes ensured victory in the Battle of Midway and elsewhere.

Unfortunately for the NSA and two administrations in Washington, our world isn’t so clear-cut any more. Breaking the codes, whatever codes, isn’t going to do the trick. You may be able to pick up every kind of communication in Pakistan or Egypt, but even if you could listen to or read them all (and the NSA doesn’t have the linguists or the time to do so), instead of simply drowning in useless data, what good would it do you? 

Given how Washington has fared since September 12, 2001, the answer would undoubtedly range from not much to none at all -- and in the wake of Edward Snowden, it would have to be in the negative. Today, the NSA formula might go something like this: the more communications the agency intercepts, the more it stores, the more it officially knows, the more information it gives those it calls its “external customers” (the White House, the State Department, the CIA, and others), the less omnipotent and the more impotent Washington turns out to be.

In scorecard terms, once the Edward Snowden revelations began and the vast conspiracy to capture a world of communications was revealed, things only went from bad to worse.  Here’s just a partial list of some of the casualties from Washington’s point of view:

*The first European near-revolt against American power in living memory (former French leader Charles de Gaulle aside), and a phenomenon that is still growing across that continent along with an upsurge in distaste for Washington.

*A shudder of horror in Brazil and across Latin America, emphasizing a growing distaste for the not-so-good neighbor to the North.

*China, which has its own sophisticated surveillance network and was being pounded for it by Washington, now looks like Mr. Clean.

*Russia, a country run by a former secret police agent, has in the post-Snowden era been miraculously transformed into a global peacemaker and a land that provided a haven for an important western dissident.

*The Internet giants of Silicon valley, a beacon of U.S. technological prowess, could in the end take a monstrous hit, losing billions of dollars and possibly their near monopoly status globally, thanks to the revelation that when you email, tweet, post to Facebook, or do anything else through any of them, you automatically put yourself in the hands of the NSA. Their CEOs are shuddering with worry, as well they should be.

And the list of post-Snowden fallout only seems to be growing. The NSA’s vast global security state is now visibly an edifice of negative value, yet it remains so deeply embedded in the post-9/11 American national security state that seriously paring it back, no less dismantling it, is probably inconceivable. Of course, those running that state within a state claim success by focusing only on counterterrorism operations where, they swear, 54 potential terror attacks on or in the United States have been thwarted, thanks to NSA surveillance. Based on the relatively minimal information available to us, this looks like a major case of threat and credit inflation, if not pure balderdash. More important, it doesn’t faintly cover the ambitions of a system that was meant to give Washington a jump on every foreign power, offer an economic edge in just about every situation, and enhance U.S. power globally.

A First-Place Line-Up and a Last-Place Finish

What’s perhaps most striking about all this is the inability of the Obama administration and its intelligence bureaucrats to grasp the nature of what’s happening to them. For that, they would need to skip those daily briefs from an intelligence community which, on the subject, seems blind, deaf, and dumb, and instead take a clear look at the world.

As a measuring stick for pure tone-deafness in Washington, consider that it took our secretary of state and so, implicitly, the president, five painful months to finally agree that the NSA had, in certain limited areas, “reached too far.” And even now, in response to a global uproar and changing attitudes toward the U.S. across the planet, their response has been laughably modest. According to David Sanger of the New York Times, for instance, the administration believes that there is “no workable alternative to the bulk collection of huge quantities of ‘metadata,’ including records of all telephone calls made inside the United States.”

On the bright side, however, maybe, just maybe, they can store it all for a mere three years, rather than the present five. And perhaps, just perhaps, they might consider giving up on listening in on some friendly world leaders, but only after a major rethink and reevaluation of the complete NSA surveillance system. And in Washington, this sort of response to the Snowden debacle is considered a “balanced” approach to security versus privacy.

In fact, in this country each post-9/11 disaster has led, in the end, to more and worse of the same. And that’s likely to be the result here, too, given a national security universe in which everyone assumes the value of an increasingly para-militarized, bureaucratized, heavily funded creature we continue to call “intelligence,” even though remarkably little of what would commonsensically be called intelligence is actually on view.

No one knows what a major state would be like if it radically cut back or even wiped out its intelligence services. No one knows what the planet’s sole superpower would be like if it had only one or, for the sake of competition, two major intelligence outfits rather than 17 of them, or if those agencies essentially relied on open source material. In other words, no one knows what the U.S. would be like if its intelligence agents stopped trying to collect the planet’s communications and mainly used their native intelligence to analyze the world.  Based on the recent American record, however, it’s hard to imagine we could be anything but better off. Unfortunately, we’ll never find out.

In short, if the NSA’s surveillance lineup was classic New York Yankees, their season is shaping up as a last-place finish.

Here, then, is the bottom line of the scorecard for twenty-first century Washington: omniscience, maybe; omnipotence, forget it; intelligence, not a bit of it; and no end in sight.



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September 17th, 2013

9/17/2013

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PLEASE KNOW THAT FREE PRESS AND RULE OF LAW ARE THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY AND BOTH ARE BEING ASSAULTED BY NEO-LIBERALS CONTROLLING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AT ALL LEVELS!  WE MUST SHAKE THESE BUGS OUT OF THE RUG TO REINSTATE THESE PRINCIPLES NEEDED FOR A DEMOCRACY!

In Maryland and especially Baltimore the media is completely captured as reporters simply write what the people in power say and edit out the rest of us.  Even public media is controlled by corporate interests.  We watch as the Baltimore Sun goes on the bankruptcy block and know that the consolidation of US media to just a few of the wealthiest and corporations has to be reversed.

We elected Obama because he ran on the issue of combating corporate mergers and growing anti-trust violations with global corporations.  He stated the problem when media is consolidated and captured.....


AND THEN HE WORKED TO CONSOLIDATE AND MAKE MEDIA LESS FREE!
He did that because he is a neo-liberal working for wealth and profit and not for you and me.


FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND FREEDOM OF PRESS

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, says that "Congress shall make no law....abridging (limiting) the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Freedom of speech is the liberty to speak openly without fear of government restraint. It is closely linked to freedom of the press because this freedom includes both the right to speak and the right to be heard. In the United States, both the freedom of speech and freedom of press are commonly called freedom of expression.




E. B. White on the Free Press and the Evils of Corporate Interests in Media
by Maria Popova “Sponsorship in the press is an invitation to corruption and abuse.”

In 1923, a prominent journalist bemoaned the death of the editor and the rise of the circulation manager as newspapers began grubbing for ever-more advertising revenue tailored their content around that goal, rather than around readers’ best interests. More than a half-century later, in the fall of 1975, Esquire magazine announced a forthcoming 23-page article by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Harrison Salisbury, to be published in their February 1976 issue and sponsored by Xerox — an arrangement in which Salisbury would receive no payment from Esquire, but would be paid $40,000, plus another $15,000 in expenses, by the Xerox Corporation. The announcement spurred profound consternation in E. B. White, which he articulated with equal parts eloquence and rigor in his letters to the editor of the Ellsworth American to to Xerox’s Director of Communications, culled from the fantastic The Letters of E.B. White.

At the heart of the exchange is an infinitely important, at once timeless and incredibly timely discussion of what it means to have free press.

In the first letter, White writes:

This, it would seem to me, is not only a new idea in publishing, it charts a clear course for the erosion of the free press in America. Mr. Salisbury is a former associate editor of the New York Times and should know better. Esquire is a reputable sheet and should know better. But here we go—the Xerox-Salisbury-Esquire axis in full cry!

[…]

Apparently Mr. Salisbury had a momentary qualm about taking on the Xerox job. The Times reports him as saying, “At first I thought, gee whiz, should I do this?” But he quickly compared his annoying doubts and remembered that big corporations had in the past been known to sponsor “cultural enterprises,” such as opera. The emergence of a magazine reporter as a cultural enterprise is as stunning a sight as the emergence of a butterfly from a cocoon. Mr. Salisbury must have felt great, escaping from his confinement.

Well, it doesn’t take a giant intellect to detect in all this the shadow of disaster. If magazines decide to farm out their writers to advertisers and accept the advertiser’s payment to the writer and to the magazine, then the periodicals of this country will be far down the drain and will become so fuzzy as to be indistinguishable from the controlled press in other parts of the world.

E. B. White



The points White raises reflect some of my own profound concerns about journalism, media, and the free press today. On the one hand, a large part of me — the part that has been publishing an ad-free curiosity catalog supported by reader donations for the past seven years — believes that whenever corporate interests and advertising revenue become necessary for the production of content, both the spirit of journalism and the reader’s best interests suffer, and we get atrocities like HuffPostified SEO-optimized sensationalist headlines, vacant linkbait infographics, and endless click-click-click slideshows. On the other hand, I remain keenly aware that quality journalism — especially ambitious endeavors like investigative pieces and longform features — is resource-intensive and requires funding, and the idea that readers would be willing to fund this kind of work directly is at best utopian and at worst highly unrealistic in a fragmented media landscape of commodified content.

It’s the same ambivalence one might feel at seeing a Fortune 100 CEO on the TED stage, as was the case with Bill Ford and PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi at last year’s TED Long Beach. On the one hand, TED’s entire media brand is based on “ideas worth spreading” for the public good, which requires a certain amount of bravery. There can be no bravery when one is accountable to a board of trustees or investors, because the “users,” “consumers,” or whatever dehumanized placeholder we choose for the audience of a product, service, or piece of information should be its sole appropriate stakeholders. On the other hand, in a capitalist society, large corporations may be the only ones with the fiscal power to effect tangible change beyond the mere talk of idealism.

Shortly after his letter, White received a response from W. B. Jones, Xerox’s Director of Communications, featuring the following rationalization:

It seemed to us that the sponsorship was not subject to question provided: 1. Both the magazine and the writer had earned reputations for absolute integrity; 2. Our sponsorship was open and identified to readers; 3. The writer was paid ‘up front,’ so that his fee did not depend in any way on our reaction to the piece; 4. The writer understood that this was a one-shot assignment and he’d get no other from Xerox, no matter what we thought of the piece; 5. The magazine retained full editorial control of the project.

White’s response to Jones gets to the heart of democracy and free press with astounding precision:

The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have the opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are a few owners, or, as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that the truth becomes elusive and the light fails. For a citizen in our free society, it is an enormous privilege and a wonderful protection to have access to hundreds of periodicals, each peddling its own belief. There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases. The reader is free to range around in the whole editorial bouillabaisse and explore it for the one clam that matters—the truth.

White goes on to argue that when the ownership of media lies in the hands of a single entity, be that a government or a media mogul, the direction of editorial accountability shift dangerously in a direction other than the reader’s. The multiplicity and sovereignty of media, he argues, is essential to ensuring we don’t live in a filter bubble of information.

Whenever money changes hands, something goes along with it — an intangible something that varies with the circumstances. It would be hard to resist the suspicion that Esquire feels indebted to Xerox, that Mr. Salisbury feels indebted to both, and that the ownership, or sovereignty, of Esquire has been nibbled all around the edges.

Sponsorship in the press is an invitation to corruption and abuse. The temptations are great, and there is an opportunist behind every bush. A funded article is a tempting morsel for any publication—particularly for one that is having a hard time making ends meet. A funded assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pocket a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting. And sponsorship is attractive to the sponsor himself, who, for one reason or another, feels an urge to penetrate the editorial columns after being so long pent up in the advertising pages. These temptations are real, and if the barriers were to be let down I believe corruption and abuse would soon follow. Not all corporations would approach subsidy in the immaculate way Xerox did or in the same spirit of benefaction. There are a thousand reasons for someone’s wishing to buy his way into print, many of them unpalatable, all of them to some degree self-serving. Buying and selling space in news columns could become a serious disease of the press. If it reached epidemic proportions, it could destroy the press. I don’t want IBM or the National Rifle Association providing me with a funded spectacular when I open my paper. I want to read what the editor and the publisher have managed to dig up on their own—and paid for out of the till.

White drives the point home with his signature style of the deeply personal conveying the broadly relevant:

My affection for the free press in a democracy goes back a long way. My love for it was my first and greatest love. If I felt a shock at the news of the Salisbury-Xerox-Esquire arrangement, it was because the sponsorship principle seemed to challenge and threaten everything I believe in: that the press must not only be free, it must be fiercely independent — to survive and to serve. Not all papers are fiercely independent, God knows, but there are always enough of them around to provide a core of integrity and an example that others feel obliged to steer by. The funded article is not in itself evil, but it is the beginning of evil, and it is an invitation to evil. I hope the invitation will not again be extended, and, if extended, I hope it will be declined.

Nearly another half-century later, “the funded article” describes, directly or indirectly, the vast majority of today’s information landscape. The basic ad-supported monetization model of media today, online and off, is a legacy model that only further commodifies content, erodes editorial integrity, and does the audience — who should be, to reiterate because this can’t be emphasized enough, the only appropriate stakeholder — a tragic disservice. Whoever figures out an intelligent alternative will save journalism from itself and rekindle the hope for a truly free press.


_______________________________________________

As with all the candidates for Maryland State Attorney and City Attorney....I see the NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW but I do not hear one case of white collar crime and systemic corruption that permeates Baltimore and Maryland political and business sectors.  THIS IS THE RULE OF LAW CITIZENS WILL BE VOTING FOR THESE ELECTIONS.

As someone downsized from the States Attorney office decades ago as white collar crime and public justice agencies were eliminated....you should be able to equate the effects of losing billions of dollars of government revenue each year in Maryland to fraud and corruption and the outbreak of crime and violence in communities starved of resources because that money is stolen.

IF WE DO NOT HEAR THIS AS A CAMPAIGN MANTRA...WE WILL ASSUME YOU WILL BECOME CAPTURED JUST AS MOSBY AND BERNSTEIN ARE!

Cindy Walsh




TGR: WHO IS Russell A. Neverdon, Sr.,Candidate for Baltimore City State's Attorney?

:: BIO Russell A. Neverdon, Sr. Candidate State's Attorney of Baltimore City By Doni Glover, www.bmorenews.com


(BALTIMORE - September 12, 2013) - Well, as of a week ago, the race for Baltimore City State's Attorney got officially interesting. Incumbent Gregg Bernstein and challenger Marilyn Mosby - wife of Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby have now been joined by Russell A. Neverdon, Sr., a Baltimore defense attorney. 

Who is Attorney Neverdon? We asked his campaign for his bio, and the following is what we received: 

Born, raised and currently residing in Baltimore City, Russell A. Neverdon, Sr. was raised by his paternal grandparents in the Ashburton Community in Northwest Baltimore since the age of 3 with two siblings.  Despite parental difficulties, his grandparents and a host of aunts and uncles stepped in to ensure that he and his siblings had an opportunity to succeed in life with an emphasis on education.  He attended Ashburton Elementary and then went on to Saint Charles Borremeo School in Pikesville.  He then proceeded to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and then entered the United States Army National Guard as a Military Police Officer.

 

Understanding the significance of the family’s foundation, core values and beliefs, he attended Morgan State University and received a degree in Sociology with a minor in Criminal Justice. Russell always kept in mind the tradition and history of his heritage that his work was “never done” and continued his educational dreams of attending and graduating from The District of Columbia School of Law.  While there he excelled in Clinic and understood early on in his legal career that giving back was essential.  He was a “Jack Oleander Foundation” winner for Outstanding Clinic during law school for HIV Entitlement and Education Law.

 

During his attendance at Morgan State University, he worked at the Charles H. Hickey School and Woodbourne Center for troubled youth as a counselor and youth supervisor.  He would later return to the Woodbourne Center as a Facility Supervisor whereby he was responsible for overseeing the operation and functions of the facility of 15-20 direct staff, security, food staff, educational support and specialized support staff while attending law school full-time.

 

Understanding his commitment to Baltimore for having given so much to him and wanting to give back, he decided to apply for a Law Clerk position at the State’s Attorney’s Office for Baltimore City during the summer months from May through August for two consecutive years with hopes of joining the ranks and eventually becoming the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City.  However, fate would have it that he would be needed to effectuate justice from a different perspective, criminal defense as a result of a hiring freeze experienced by Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office.  Remaining as a law clerk was simply not feasible given he had a family to support and so his career as a criminal defense attorney began.

 

He has tried numerous cases over the last 14 years including murder, robbery, assaults, rape; he has also tried drug offenses and other types of white collar crimes on both the local state and federal levels.  He understands the law and has advocated for justice by ensuring the United States Constitution (specifically the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment) was upheld and each defendant had an opportunity to have his or her day in court and to challenge the allegations brought against them. 


His experience as a law clerk for the Office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City afforded him insight of the state’s burden and the trial strategies.  He has successfully defended persons accused of crimes and negotiated fair plea bargains keeping in mind public safety and the possibility of re-entry (ensuring and requesting drug treatment behind the walls, follow-up after care, that acquisition of GED’s, participation in job readiness programs and mental health treatment where necessary) in an attempt to reduce recidivism and create a greater likelihood of success and productivity once the individual paid their debt to society.

He has performed countless hours of pro-bono work for the indigent to include land lord tenant matters, contract review and negotiations for churches, lectured on elder law and appeared as a guest panelist for many non-profit events involving our youth of Baltimore.  With education at heart, he taught at Coppin State University as an Adjunct Professor where he taught World History I and II.  Throughout his career, he has always emphasized educating his client base and presenting alternative options in life choices.  His concept of the four E’s continues in many facets of his life, especially in the criminal justice arena: ‘Education and enlightenment equals empowerment.’

 

He is a husband, father, grandfather and mentor to many.  He adamantly believes that he is a product of community involvement and despite difficult circumstances early on in life, he holds true that he was not a victim of circumstance, but has instead attained victory over his circumstances that started with love from his grandparents, aunts and uncles and the concern and community input from neighbors and educators.

 

His love for Baltimore continues as he has walked, lived and experienced all that Baltimore has to offer and feels with great certainty that with a collective and cohesive sense of extended family (Community), he as your next State’s Attorney can better address the ails of Baltimore City by:

*Rebuilding the public trust in the criminal justice system, our police department and our community organizations;

*By holding all those who would violate the law accountable (NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW);

*By thinking creatively and outside-the-box to combat crime on the front and back end with not just aggressive prosecution of violent crimes and serious property and theft crimes against our merchants, but ensuring that the hard work of the police does not go in vain by rushing to judgment and allowing cases to fall by the wayside;

*By ensuring that justice is administered equitably and that a review of each case will be done and pursued to the fullest while ensuring a reasonable likelihood of a successful conviction;

*By restoring the public trust and leading by example in holding the very few who would deviate from their position of public trust as police officers and hold them accountable and seeking independent review of officer involved crimes, while restoring an ongoing and active relationship with the many Baltimore City Police Officers (one of, if not the lowest paid law enforcement agencies in the state who are out resourced, over worked and stretched, but fighting crime with integrity and professionalism and ensuring solid convictions);

*By strategically addressing gang and organized crime organizations with realistic approaches;

*By keeping the office visible and available to the public-transparency and reaching out to the communities, families, churches, merchants and other governmental agencies not just at election time, but during the term in office to ensure that your concerns are heard and are inclusive in strategies to fight crime pro-actively and preventative and no longer reactive;

*By not making promises that are unreal and can’t be kept, but keeping the community and citizens of Baltimore abreast of what we are doing, how things are progressing and a constant reminder of the need for community involvement; and

*By reaching out to our legislature and grant writers and non-profit organizations to work with the office and create creative solutions from a holistic approach to establishing safe zones for our school age children, actual and working witness protection programs and ultimately to take our city out of a state of fear and lead us to a state of fearlessness.

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Did you know Mikulski has a Super Nova named for her because she has moved more than a trillion dollars to Johns Hopkins over a few decades just to be used to expand their operations globally..now making them a corporation all while the residents in her district are dying 20-30 years early because of lack of access to health care?

Do you know that if she had directed most of that funding to the VA Administration in Baltimore that Maryland would have a state of the art VA that made veterans feel honored while allowing Hopkins to limp along as a small private university?

We see charities on TV hawking for Veterans since the Federal governent has emptied its coffers to corporate fraud and corporate welfare and neo-liberals led the way as they worked for wealth and profit in global markets. We are disgusted by these false shows of concern as the Affordable Care Act moves to privatize public health and throw veterans, seniors, and the poor into markets rather than the protection of Federal programs. It is no coincidence that all of this movement of wealth to health institutions comes as the Baltimore VA is sighted as being the worst in the nation.

We want voters to remember that the democratic party has been taken by neo-liberals who work against the people's interests. That is why we have the state of the state. We need labor and justice running candidates against all incumbents!


THIS IS WHAT MARYLAND PRESS TELL YOU:


Mikulski demands Baltimore VA improve 'lackluster' performance on key program Senator says she wants action plan for improvement within 10 days



By Yvonne Wenger, The Baltimore Sun 5:47 p.m. EDT, September 16, 2013

In a letter sent Monday to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Maryland's senior senator called on the VA's Baltimore office to develop an action plan within 10 days to improve its "lackluster" approach to an initiative designed to speed up the time it takes to process disability claims.

Democrat Barbara A. Mikulski asked Secretary Eric K. Shinseki to provide a schedule for additional training between the Baltimore office leadership and service organizations, such as the American Legion, that work to expedite fully developed claims. The Baltimore office is among the slowest in the nation at processing claims and has the highest error rate, according to VA data.

Mikulski said she was "deeply disappointed and frustrated on behalf of Maryland veterans" after testimony that Verna Jones, director of the Legion's Veterans Affairs and Rehabilitation Division, gave to Congress last week.

Jones told a House subcommittee in written testimony that the Legion encountered an "obstructionist attitude" during a March visit to the Baltimore office. She also told the House members that the local staff was "aggressively excluding" Maryland veterans from the fully developed claims program.

Mikulski said her staff has heard from veterans' service organizations — which partner with the VA to prepare the claims for the program — that the Baltimore office has shown a "reluctance to work in cooperation" with the organizations. That, in turn, affects the organization's ability to provide a fully developed claim, Mikulski said.

"We cannot continue to allow the Baltimore office to perform at a level that puts our commitment to veterans in jeopardy," said Mikulski, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. She is also a member of the Senate Military Family Caucus and Veterans Jobs Caucus.

The VA did not immediately respond to the senator's letter.

Mikulski also requested that the Baltimore office receive regular training from the Indianapolis office, which Jones highlighted in her testimony for its success with implementing the accelerated claims program.

"While offices such as Indianapolis have embraced the [fully developed claims] program as a means to expedite processing times and reduce errors, the leadership in the Baltimore office doesn't appear to be making the implementation of this tool a high priority," the senator wrote. "This is unacceptable and needs to be addressed immediately."

Jones said Monday in an interview that when the VA's regional offices show "buy in," the fully developed claims program works. She said in the months since the Legion conducted its performance review in Baltimore, the local office has made significant improvement toward the agencywide goal of processing all claims in 125 days with a 98 accuracy rate.

"The American Legion stands ready to assist them in any that we can," Jones said.

The error rate in Baltimore is 23.5 percent, according to the most recent data. More than 77 percent of cases are backlogged.

The VA's Baltimore office acknowledged that some cases were disqualified from the fully developed claims program, but said the cases in question were excluded due to missing documentation, the veteran's refusal or an administrative issue.

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This law that neo-liberals are writing and moving through Congress seeks to define free press as one that has a corporate structure.  Now, as we know, it is corporate structure that is killing free press.

These laws as with NDAA that define the right of government to indefinitely detain US citizens without charge all ignore US Constitutional Rights ------BUT WHEN YOU ARE RE-WRITING THE CONSTITUTION AS THESE NEO-LIBERALS ARE WITH TPP----THAT'S NO PROBLEM!



Feds move to limit who is a “covered journalist” deserving constitutional protection So-called "Media Shield Law" limits 1st amendment protection for independent journalists, establishing a state-sanctioned press. Posted on September 15, 2013 by O.D. in Uncategorized

Share this post on:                 “Is any blogger out there saying anything — do they deserve First Amendment protection?
– Sen.  Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

(Source: Seattle Weekly)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Thursday, a Senate panel formed by Chuck Schumer (D-NY) voted 13-5 to move forward with legislation aimed at codifying the definition of a “covered journalist,” effectively establishing which Americans deserve protection to exercise the freedom of the press under the First Amendment — and which don’t.

Cloaked under the guise of “protecting” selected journalists from having to divulge the identities of their confidential sources, the so-called “media shield” law has the support of both high-ranking government officials as well as many members of the established media. Those in power in Washington agree that journalists deserve legal protection, but only if they get to decide who is a real reporter. While lawmakers decide who should and should not be considered a “real” journalist, one thing appears certain – bloggers and online media outlets are not held in high regard.

The committee vote allows a bill to be brought to the floor for consideration by the full Senate.

The supposed need for a bill of this nature arose from controversies earlier this year involving President Obama’s Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder. In May, we learned of the DOJ’s secretly obtaining two months of telephone records for the Associated Press without notifying the news organization, as well as naming Fox News journalist, James Rozen, a co-conspirator in a case involving leaks from the State Department. Public backlash and criticism of the administration’s actions led to a review of the department by the same department accused of the inappropriate actions. The bill would likely include many proposals from Holder himself, such as notifying the news media of a subpoena in advance. In a letter to Sen. Leahy (D-VT), Holder stated that the new legislation “strikes a careful balance between safeguarding the freedom of the press and ensuring our nation’s security.”

Sen. John Cornyn, (R-TX), rebuked the Obama administration, calling the measure a diversion. “A new law is not what we need,” Cornyn said. “We find ourselves here because of the abuses of the attorney general.”

Chuck Schumer D-N.Y.
(Source: williamsburgobserver.org )

Indeed, this administration constantly diverts attention away from its most recent abuse of freedom by pointing to an even greater abuse of freedom it hasn’t committed yet. It was the Obama administration’s initial pursuit of leakers, in 2009, which led to the White House cosponsoring the second attempt by Congress to pass media shield legislation. Obama backed the reintroduced bill, a revised version of the Free Flow of Information Act, only to demand deep revisions from the Oval Office in 2009—including the exemption for leaks affecting national security. It was the White House’s opposition to the very legislation it sponsored which led to its demise in the Senate.

This bill, Congress’ third attempt at crafting a media shield law for journalists, was again reintroduced by Schumer at Obama’s request just days after the AP scandal became public. Now past committee and headed to the Senate Floor, the media shield law appears to have been revived in an attempt to distract from the Obama administration’s heavy-handed efforts to crackdown on the kind national security leaks revealed by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning over the summer. Sen. Cornyn of Texas went so far as to say, “This bill was called for because of abuses by the Justice Department,” adding that the current administration has “been the most abusive to the press in modern times, but a new law is not what we need.”

Dianne Feinstein D-CA
(Source: thedailydigest.org  )

The sticking point of this particular legislation, and indeed the problem with crafting any law such as this, is determining who is covered under its protection. The original bill sought to protect any person who investigates events and obtains material to disseminate news and information to the public. But Sen. Feinstein, (D-CA) sought limit the law’s protection to “real reporters,” and specifically excluded bloggers and others engaged in alternative media.  Her amendment included the definition of a real reporter as one who: obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity--.  In other words, someone who works directly or indirectly with mainstream media corporations and not those who practice non-salaried, independent journalism.

“The definition does not, however, include a person or entity who posts information or opinion on the Internet in blogs, chat rooms or social networking sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, or MySpace, unless that person or entity falls within the definition of a member of the media or a news organization under the other provisions within this section (e.g., a national news reporter who posts on his/her personal blog).”- emptywheel.net

A compromise was reached this week, The Nation reported: “defining a “covered journalist” as someone who has worked for at least one full year in the last twenty, or for a continuous three-month period within the last five years; has contributed to a “significant number” of published works within the past five years; or is a journalism student.” This narrow definition of a journalist now allows the Senate to limit who is protected by the First Amendment.

In one telling interview, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) expressed his apparent dilemma to Chris Wallace, “What is a journalist today, in 2013?  We know its someone who works for Fox or AP, but does it include a blogger?  Does it include someone tweeting?  Are these people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection?”  Durbin not only labels freedom of the press as an entitlement, he goes on to suggest that the Bill of Rights is outdated, saying, “We need to ask 21st century questions about a provision in our constitution that was written over 200 years ago.”

As the Congress and Justice Department attempt to define what a “journalist” is, they miss the point about protecting the free flow of information. Any shield law should be designed to protect acts of journalism, rather than journalists, and that is the main distinction between providing a defense for journalists and attempting to create an official state approved press. Freedom of speech cannot be defined by a journalist’s paycheck, résumé, or affiliation with a mainstream media outlet.

If you are reading this article, ask yourself, Is this journalism? Does writing this article make me a journalist?  While I am not a journalist by profession, I am engaging in an act of journalism with the intent to “disseminate news and information to the public.” And that is the point; it is journalism itself, if anything, which requires protection from government. As stated in a fantastic article by emptywheel.net, “If the ultimate idea is to protect newsgathering activities, then why not establish what those activities are and then actually protect them, regardless of whether they are tied to a certain kind of institution?”

Lindsey Graham R-KY
(Source: gawker.com )

It seems that the government will go to any length to protect its privacy as far as national security leaks are concerned, while routinely violating our Fourth Amendment rights. And in its present form, the media shield legislation awaiting the Senate vote is nothing but an attempt to limit our freedoms of both speech and press by defining as narrowly as possible who is protected by the First Amendment. The fact that the big news media companies are complicit in the federal government’s attempt to license journalists and create an official press is evidence of their continued slide toward irrelevancy. It is in their best interest to discredit bloggers, free-lancers, and social media sources while begging the government to change the rules to favor their increasingly outdated and financially troubled model.

In the American struggle to remain informed in times of great deceit, it is the truth that matters, not the delivery system. It is not the government’s place to decide who may participate in freedom of the press and who may not.  Anyone shall be a protected member of the press, beginning with their first attempt.  The founders knew this and created the ever-relevant First Amendment to apply universally, plainly stating that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.”  As certain leaders attempt to paint the constitution as outdated, scrambling to “protect” us with their Orwellian-named “Media Shield Law,” anyone with an interest in free and independent media must speak loudly against the federal government’s attempt to establish a state-sanctioned media.


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ONCE AGAIN WHEN JUSTICE IS MENTIONED IN BALTIMORE IT IS DIRECTED AT THE POOR AND NEVER MENTIONS THAT BRINGING BACK THE BILLIONS STOLEN THROUGH CORPORATE FRAUD AND GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION WOULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM.



Whereas the mayor is right to state we need to boost the City Attorney's budget add investigators and prosecutors since we are returning to Rule of Law in Maryland and have massive fraud and corruption throughout the government and business sector that needs justice.....  Starting with the Parks Department would be a start.....her intention is to use it on jailing the poor.

The citizens of MD and Baltimore know that with billions of dollars stolen from government coffers and individuals each year recovering all of that fraud would pay for itself.  No funding needed.  We encourage the buildup of all public justice agencies as this crime is systemic in both government and business and will take lots of work.

Once we rebuild these white collar criminal agencies we can get to work sending all those billions in recovered fraud into these communities where crime and violence exists because poverty has become third world.  This mayor and city council has made dismantling underserved communities and all assets and resources that make healthy communities a priority rather than bringing home the fraud and ending corruption at the top end of the income ladder.

We can reverse this very simply....vote all neo-liberals out of office.  All Maryland pols are neo-liberals who work for wealth and profit at our expense.  That is why we have such wealth inequity in Maryland..the money is moved up through fraud.  Don't think republicans are better!




Council blocks mayor's plan to use recreation and parks money to fund new prosecutors Mayor's office said $100,000 was sitting unused



By Luke Broadwater, The Baltimore Sun 7:57 p.m. EDT, September 16, 2013

The City Council has rejected the mayor's plan to take money from the Department of Recreation and Parks budget to pay for two new highly touted prosecutor positions.

Council members voted unanimously Monday to reject the mayor's proposal to use $100,000 earmarked for recreation centers to instead help fund the two prosecutors, who would work in the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore. The mayor's office argued that the transfer was appropriate because the money was sitting unused.

"There were some concerns that $100,000 was being taken away from recreation and parks," said City Councilwoman Helen Holton, who chairs the budget committee. "The committee members were not happy. ... This was not to say we don't support the need for state prosecutors. It was more about, 'Find some other pot of money other than recreation and parks with which to do that.'"

The two assistant state's attorneys positions together cost $160,000 annually.

Council members have long voiced concern about shrinking services for city youths, including the closure and privatization of some rec centers. Private groups took over most of the 20 recreation centers closed recently by the city, although a few — primarily in West Baltimore — have remained shuttered. The city plans to build 10 new rec centers over the next decade, and private groups are working to reopen others.

"If it would have been from any other agency, I would have been OK with it," said council member Brandon Scott. "But not from rec and parks."

In July, Rawlings-Blake joined Baltimore law enforcement leaders at a news conference to pledge "renewed energy" in cracking down on crime, highlighting an initiative to boost cooperation between state and federal prosecutors.

The new prosecutors were supposed to double the number who can try cases in federal court — where penalties are often stiffer for repeat offenders — and focus their efforts on violent crime in East and West Baltimore.

Kevin Harris, a spokesman for Rawlings-Blake, said Monday the administration proposed the transfer because it wouldn't amount to an actual cut of any city service.

"The funding came from a scholarship fund that was already fully funded and had not been used by rec and parks in recent years," he said. "Therefore the money could be moved to other programs without in any way harming rec center programs. Given how long the funds sat unused, it was identified as one source of funding for other pressing areas in need of funding."

The scholarships were supposed to pay for youths to attend summer programs. According to Harris, the agency has a track record of allowing grant money to go unused. Scott and others said the department should do more to develop and publicize the program so youths will apply.

Last fiscal year, recreation and parks received $200,000 for scholarships but didn't spend it, then got another $200,000 in this year's budget. Since the unspent money was carried forward, the agency now has $400,000 for a $200,000 activity, Harris said.

"That's why we recommended transferring funds," he said.

The two prosecutor positions remain vacant while the administration determines how to fund them from the city's $2.3 billion operating budget. Harris said the administration plans to transfer money from the General Services Department. That plan, too, will have to go to the council for approval.




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September 06th, 2013

9/6/2013

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THESE NEO-LIBERALS ARE EVEN USING PUBLIC MONEY AND OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TO PAY FOR THEIR PERSONAL MARKETING/NETWORKING FOR PRIVATE CORPORATIONS IN MARYLAND.  IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT IS RIGHT FOR THE CITIZENS OF BALTIMORE....IT HAS ONLY TO DO WITH WHAT WILL MAKE THE RICH IN MARYLAND/BALTIMORE RICHER!

BALTIMORE IS ONE BIG CORPORATE WELFARE SYSTEM!!!


WE CAN REVERSE THIS!  DO NOT THINK IT IS A DONE DEAL!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL ELECTIONS!


What people need to know is that with the infrastructure money ready to spout in to cities across America the move to contract out all the work to private contractors has Chow told to create a pay to play around the country for Maryland's 1% in exchange for this bonanza of water and sewage development.  They are working to privatize water and sewage just as Rawlings-Blake did when she made Trash pickup separately charged from property tax.  We now have completely privatized trash pickup and rates will be rising.  So too now water and sewage.

We already know that VEOLA is in town to develop this water infrastructure development and no doubt will be the public private partnership that will run the agency once all is done.  Remember, as we rebuild all public assets new.....neo-liberals hand off these services to private hands to operate making taxpayers responsible for all capital costs and as we know with energy/BGE, all operating costs.

Pay to play is a complicated thing as the interests of the 1% in Maryland must be expanded in the region chosen to represent and profit from work here in Maryland and Baltimore.  That is what Chow's work entails.  How does that work for the public?  NOT AT ALL.  Chow is not working for you and me, he is working for the 1% and their profit on our dime.


If you look closely at what public works has become since privatization of public services went on steroids with O'Malley in Baltimore, one only has to look at all of the dozens of independent contractors all working underground all using different resources and having different approaches to work, and none of it overseen for quality to know that we have a mess in our public works that will be a nightmare for the next generation of repair.  These politicians say....we will be long gone when that mess is discovered.  So too will be this water-sewage project unfolding! -


Travel by city's water chief questioned Rudy Chow spent 35 days this past year at conferences

By Luke Broadwater and Yvonne Wenger, The Baltimore Sun 9:47 p.m. EDT, September 4, 2013

The head of Baltimore's water system spent 35 days attending conferences in the past year, many of them out of state, records show. The travel has raised concerns among some city officials, who say Water and Wastewater chief Rudy Chow is needed here to focus on issues of crumbling infrastructure and erroneous bills.

Chow on Wednesday defended his attendance at 11 conferences, including eight out-of-state trips, as positive for the city. He said he learns from other jurisdictions and often holds up Baltimore's recent progress as a model for other cities.

"Just because I am traveling doesn't mean I am not focusing on work that needs to be done," he said. "By traveling to these different places, having these so-called professional affiliations, we can gain the insight of how other people are doing their business. ...
"We are among the most sought-after organizations in the utility world due to our transformational changes," Chow said. "People in our industry want to hear from us."

Among other trips, Chow traveled to Anaheim, Calif., in August of last year for the American Public Works Association Congress. In October, he went to New Orleans to give a presentation at the Water Environment Federation Technical Exhibit and Conference.

And he traveled twice to Chicago for conferences, with plans for a third trip next month. The city's spending board approved $3,000 for that trip Wednesday.

Chow's trips became a subject of scrutiny at the Board of Estimates meeting when Baltimore Comptroller Joan M. Pratt questioned several of his agency's expenses. "Mr. Chow goes on a lot of travel for speaking conferences, and that information should be shared with the citizens of Baltimore," Pratt said. "It is at taxpayers' expense."

Chow has won praise as an innovative manager who is making improvements since joining Baltimore City government 21/2 years ago. But Pratt and some others pointed to the city's frequent water main breaks and erroneous water bills as evidence that Chow should spend more time here focused on day-to-day issues.

"I like it best when he's at home," said Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke.

Clarke said she has "a lot of respect" for Chow and believes he has taken steps to improve the troubled system. "But we have a long way to go," she said.

Chow has been reimbursed about $8,500 for travel expenses, records show. The city also paid at least $4,000 in registration fees for the various conferences, which can range from about $200 to about $1,000. Some of Chow's travel was paid for by outside entities, city officials said.

Kevin Harris, spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said the administration is working to strike the "right balance between the need to have people travel and advocate on behalf of the city while taking steps to minimize costs to citizens."

Harris said Chow "has led in promoting several innovative reforms to our sewer system" that will bring down water billing and infrastructure costs. "It's not surprising that because of this leadership there is interest in learning more about what we are doing here in Baltimore which requires him to leave the city from time to time," Harris said.

Chow, who makes $132,000 annually, joined city government in 2011. The next year, the city's auditor found that the Department of Public Works overcharged thousands of water customers by at least $9 million. Exorbitant bills were especially infuriating to citizens as decades-old water lines cracked underground with regularity, sending water streaming down streets while disrupting traffic and sometimes gas and electric services. At the same time, the city has raised water rates by 42 percent over three years.

In response, Chow implemented what he has called "corrective actions" — part of a broader, long-term effort to address billing problems attributed to faulty water meters, outdated technology, human error and, in some neighborhoods, fabricated meter readings.

At the Board of Estimates Pratt noted that not all of Chow's travel has been approved by the panel. She also questioned the agency's hiring of consultants who are paid more than city workers, as well as the creation of several new administrative positions that pay in excess of $100,000.

Councilmen Nick Mosby and Edward Reisinger said they had not evaluated Chow's travel. But both praised Chow for his efforts to address Baltimore's water system troubles.

"Mr. Chow has always been a very high professional and very knowledgeable, trying to think outside the box when it comes to our aging infrastructure," Mosby said.

Reisinger said he's not opposed to travel by government workers and sees conferences and workshops as opportunities to improve services. "I support when he goes to the conferences, if he learns something," Reisinger said, "if there's something to take back."

Councilman Carl Stokes said the outward appearance of the travel might not sit well with some Baltimore residents, especially those who have received erroneous water bills in recent months. The best response going forward is for the agency to be completely transparent about the expenses and purpose of the trips, Stokes said.

"It's the perception — I am not saying it's right or wrong," Stokes said. "I don't know the ins or outs of the travel. … When people are threatened by fraudulent or very high water bills, and then to raise the water bill double-digits every year, it would seem to many there should be belt-tightening in discretionary spending or travel that is not necessary."

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If you do not think that the mayor and city council are working to privatize Baltimore's police and fire departments to private contractors -----think again.  We already see International Security corporations being brought in for banks and other institutions and YOU CAN BET THAT THESE POLS ARE BEING PUSHED BY JOHNS HOPKINS TO GO PRIVATE CONTRACTING.

If you think these police ignore you and could care less about obeying ;law.....wait until these International Security people come to town.  These corporations are generally hiring former private military police and special forces people.


STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL CONTROLLED DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES.....RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES!  UNEMPLOYED?  RUN FOR ELECTED OFFICE AND BE A GOOD GUY!


Cities Cut Police, Switch to Private Contractors


By Agence France-Presse

17 November 11

he central Minnesota town of Foley tried having its own police department and contracting with the county sheriff's department for law enforcement.

Nationwide, other cities have supplemented traditional police with contracted officers, said John Firman, director of research for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

But as cities across the US struggle with the economic downturn, more will look at innovative ways of providing public safety, Mr Firman said.

"For the first time in our history … police are no longer immune from budget cuts," he said.

After cuts in state aid and uncertainty about future funding, Foley City Council started looking at options to save money on policing. The town decided to contract with General Security Services Corporation to provide 24-hour coverage starting in January for about $US16,000 ($15,592) a month.

Budget cuts have also forced a county school board in Colorado to sell advertising space on student report cards to help make ends meet.

Jefferson County Public Schools expects to make $US90,000 over three years from Collegeinvest, a college savings plan, for the five-centimeter ads on report cards issued by its 91 primary schools. The school board last year slashed its spending by $US40 million after reduced state and federal government support.

"We're obviously looking for revenue generators and taking them where we can find them," board spokeswoman Melissa Reeves said.

The Jefferson County school board already sells advertising space on buses to a bank. Ms Reeves said it anticipates making a further $US70 million in spending cuts in coming years, as the US struggles to put hard times behind it.

__________________________________

Now, I have already introduced you to VEOLA as the Transportation contractor that is privatizing public transportation MTA.  There is much more to VEOLA and it is a company that just a decade ago did not have much profit but now, since it is now being connected to municipalities all across America.....it is a global corporation with the 1% owning most the company.  It is not just a French corporation....it is globally owned and Maryland's 1% are in on the ground floor. 

As you can see this one corporation is taking all of our public services and making them private.  Could we do the same thing this corporation as far as sustainability and development as a public utility/service?  OF COURSE WE CAN AND WILL!

BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT WITH JOHNS HOPKINS IS MAKING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC PRIVATE AND CITIZENS WILL YET AGAIN BE USED TO FINANCE ALL CAPITAL INVESTMENT AND OPERATING COSTS IN THEIR NEED FOR THIS ESSENTIAL COMMODITY......


WE CAN DISBAND ALL THIS STUFF AND RETURN IT ALL TO PUBLIC SERVICE IF YOU RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.

We already know that the poor and working class will again be placed into a rationing because they will not be able to afford market-value on water and heating/cooling/transportation. SO WHY ARE LABOR AND JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS IN BALTIMORE AND MARYLAND NOT SHOUTING LOUDLY AND STRONGLY AGAINST THIS?


Veolia Energy North America Holdings, Inc. Veolia Energy Boston, Inc Veolia Energy in Philadelphia Veolia Energy Los Angeles,Veolia Energy in Kansas City,

Veolia Water Baltimore

By treating wastewater, Veolia Water helps to protect water resources, spur the economic growth of cities and improve quality of life.

A major challenge Both wastewater treatment and drinking water services fall under the responsibility of public authorities. Critical to public health and environmental balance, wastewater treatment needs to be stepped up in a world in which 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation.

The three steps in wastewater treatment The process deployed by Veolia Water to preserve the quality of water involves three key steps.

  • Collection. This is done through a wastewater collection system consisting of a network of pipes. This conveys the wastewater to the treatment plant. Collection systems are maintained regularly (cleaning, monitoring, etc.) to prevent blockages and corrosion.
  • Treatment. The way that the water is dealt with at a wastewater treatment plant is based on its degree of pollution and the legislative standards governing its discharge into the environment.
  • Discharge into the environment. After processing at a treatment plant, the water is returned to the natural environment in a way that does not adversely impact environmental balances.
A world-class operator A leading global operator of wastewater services for public authorities, Veolia Water provides services to more than 71 million people worldwide and manages some 3,514 municipal treatment plants. We treat the wastewater of a number of major cities, including Milwaukee, The Hague, Budapest and Madrid, and develop innovative technical solutions, especially for managing and recycling wastewater sludge.


Veolia Energy Expands its Baltimore Presence with District

Veolia Energy Expands its Baltimore Presence with District Cooling System Acquisition Working toward a more sustainable Baltimore, Veolia Energy adds the cutting-edge system and its 50 customers, representing over 11.5 million square feet, to its growing networks


Business Wire BALTIMORE -- February 10, 2010

Veolia Energy North America, a leading provider of sustainable energy services and facility operations and management solutions, is delighted to announce that it has purchased the Comfort Link district cooling system business. Comfort Link was previously a partnership of Baltimore Gas and Electric, a Constellation Energy subsidiary, and Monumental Investment Corporation, a subsidiary of EMCOR Group, Inc. One of the largest ice thermal storage systems in the country, Comfort Link serves 50 major customers, representing more than 11.5 million square feet. The acquisition will expand Veolia Energy’s existing district energy (heating, cooling and cogeneration) operations in Baltimore, with 16 new buildings served. Reflecting Veolia Energy’s commitment to sustainable development, Comfort Link’s cutting-edge ice thermal storage system reduces the number of required chillers and cooling towers, which makes it highly energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly. In addition, Comfort Link works as an energy storage system, allowing Veolia Energy to produce thermal energy during off-peak periods, potentially saving money, and reducing the demand for electricity during peak hours. Veolia Energy will provide preventive maintenance and will continue to invest in the system to increase efficiency. Customers connected to the system include federal, state, and Baltimore City government buildings; entertainment and retail establishments; commercial office buildings; hotels; hospitals; and religious and other non-profit facilities. “In addition to being a valued addition to our growing North American portfolio, the Comfort Link acquisition is the perfect complement to our existing heating and cooling network in Baltimore,” said Stewart A. Wood, President and CEO of Veolia Energy North America. “This system was particularly attractive given its high level of energy efficiency and its strong environmental profile, which matches our commitment to ensure that our systems help our customers reduce their carbon footprints. We are committed to providing excellent service to the many high-profile buildings and attractions served by this system, as we collectively work toward a more sustainable Baltimore.” The Comfort Link system delivers more than 32,000 tons of cooling capacity and approximately 40 million ton-hours of chilled water via an 11-mile distribution network. Founded in 1996, the system features four “networked” chilled-water production facilities. Veolia Energy anticipates future growth for Comfort Link as more buildings in the vicinity leverage the network as a cost-effective, highly-reliable and environmentally-responsible alternative to operating and maintaining their own thermal energy equipment. Prior to the acquisition of Comfort Link, Veolia Energy provided centrally produced steam, hot water and chilled water to approximately 250 commercial, government, institutional and hospitality customers, and nearly 30 million square feet of space, in Baltimore’s central business district, East Baltimore and Inner Harbor East areas. About Veolia Energy North America A subsidiary of Veolia Environnement, the world’s leading environmental services company, Veolia Energy focuses on controlling energy costs and reducing carbon footprints through energy-efficient, custom solutions. Solutions encompass the production and distribution of highly-reliable thermal energy; on-site operation of customers’ complex equipment to enhance the technical, economic and environmental performance; combined heat and power generation (cogeneration); and the introduction of renewable fuels into the energy mix where it is viable. Veolia Energy North America serves customers throughout the Continental USA, with a national reach and capability, and owns and operates the largest portfolio of district energy (heating, cooling and cogeneration) networks in the United States. With approximately 335,000 employees globally,

Veolia Environnement reported revenue of $50 billion in 2008.


THINK WHAT O'MALLEY'S HANDING OF MARYLAND TO A NATIONAL ELECTRICITY CORPORATION LIKE EXELON HAS ALREADY DONE TO RATEPAYERS/CITIZENS!  THEN TRIPLE IT!






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

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