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August 12th, 2014

8/12/2014

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

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

Make a good life for your children and grandchildren.


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


October 18, 2007, 10:28 am  PR WATCH


Corruption widespread in India, says US report |

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

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




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


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

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

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



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






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


_________________________________________________

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

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


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


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

by 

Robert Freeman


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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











_____________________________________________

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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

From The New York Times:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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




John Danilovich

Secretary General
International Chamber of Commerce



0 Comments

July 21st, 2014

7/21/2014

0 Comments

 
IT'S CALLED SOVEREIGN DEBT/MUNICIPAL BOND FRAUD FOLKS------NEO-LIBERALS SIMPLY FOLLOW WALL STREET'S LEAD NO MATTER WHERE IT ENDS.


I'd like to spend one more day on the bond market and the coming crash.....looking today at the public and private pensions.  Folks, neo-liberals and neo-cons look at pensions as fodder only meant to boost Wall Street profit. 

LOOK AT WHERE YOUR PENSIONS ARE INVESTED BECAUSE MARYLAND IS RUN BY NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WALL STREET PROFIT AND NOT YOU AND ME!

I pointed to Maryland pol Dulaney and his focus on repatriation taxes and bond market for corporations.  The timing of this legislation is no accident----the bond market crash will place this market at the bottom ready to climb to profits just as the 2008 crash made the stock market bottom.  So, Dulaney is not warning his constituents that the bond market crash is coming and will take away most of the value recovered since the last crash-----he is only thinking of what legislation with maximize corporate profit.  THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU BUT WHY IS HE RUNNING AS A DEMOCRAT????

The second point is that as you can see all of the major news journals are now reporting the crash is coming just as I have written for four years.  What I said was the plan-----and everyone knew it.
  Please consider where you get your information-----all neo-liberal media like MSNBC and NPR never mentioned these policy goals-----

I spoke of the public malfeasance behind the public pension losses last crash were politicians moved public pensions from the then safety of the bond market into a collapsing stock market in 2007 just to buoy the Wall Street banks.  THIS WAS ILLEGAL AND PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AND FRAUD. All of the pols in Maryland involved in doing this were simply re-elected and public sector unions simply agreed to cuts rather than take the fraud to court.  The failure to address the last fraud has the same thing coming with this bond crash.....public and private pensions have been used to buoy the coming bond market as investment firms jump ship. 

DO YOU HEAR YOUR POLS SHOUTING ALL OF THIS IS BAD FOR THE PEOPLE WHO ELECTED THEM???????  I DON'T HEAR A THING!


Below is a UK article that speaks to what is coming.  Look how it states the FED is considering making people stay in the bond market to stop a run.  It created the conditions for the crash and now it wants to force people to stay in......punitive exit fees.
  Remember, people went to bonds because the stock market is criminal.......they are now being forced back into this criminal market because Wall Street imploded the only safe investment ------bonds.

Can you save your pension from the great bond bubble? Why a bank rate rise could ruin your retirement...

‘Those limits will be set by each individual fund — they may put a cap on how much you can withdraw, or reduce the value by a percentage.’


By Holly Black  Daily Mail Pensions and Retirement

PUBLISHED: 18:34 EST, 17 June 2014 | UPDATED: 03:20 EST, 18 June 2014

About £800billion of savings and investments sitting in bond funds could fall in value if interest rates begin to rise.


An increase in the Bank of England base rate threatens to burst the five-year bond bubble that has seen the value of funds soar by as much as 137 per cent.

It threatens to wipe out a chunk of the life savings of an estimated 500,000 people who have put their money into bond funds, and millions more in company pension schemes.


Bond bubble: When interest rates rise the value of bonds will fall



However, while any rise in rates is likely to cause a fall in bond funds - any increases should be small, giving investors time to react. There are, though, fears that money in bond funds could be locked up.

In the U.S. there are already reports that the Federal Reserve is considering imposing punitive exit fees on anyone trying to take their money out of bond funds to halt a run on the investments.



Brian Dennehy, founder of investment research site Fund Expert, explains: ‘When there is sustained heavy selling there will almost certainly be restrictions, if you’re allowed to sell at all.


‘Those limits will be set by each individual fund — they may put a cap on how much you can withdraw, or reduce the value by a percentage.’


Bonds are essentially IOUs issued by companies and governments. In exchange for your money, they promise to pay you a rate of interest. These are not fixed-rate savings bonds offered by High Street banks and building societies, which keep your capital safe and your interest fixed.


With investment bonds the value can rise and fall, and they were often seen as a safer type of investment, as they don’t change in value very much. But because of poor rates on High Street savings accounts, bonds have become wildly popular and, as a result, prices have surged.


Someone who put £10,000 into the average strategic bond fund five years ago would have £15,500 today. The best fund would have grown to £23,700.


At risk: A substantial chunk of the £770bn of our pensions is invested in bonds



How £800billion could be trapped
Fears of a fall in value of these funds could now lead to a great bond sell-off. A bond-fund plunge has been widely expected since late 2012.



Then, the value of funds had increased by 50 per cent following the Government’s policy of printing money to boost the economy, known as Quantitative Easing. This involved the Bank of England flooding the economy with cash, by buying bonds — which led them to increase in value.


Now that QE has come to an end, and the economy is recovering, interest rates could soon rise. When this happens, the value of these bonds will fall, and the interest they are paying will suddenly seem less attractive.


Unlike with shares, the money in bonds is tied up. It means that investors may not be able to trade their bonds freely to eager buyers, leaving them trapped because no one will want to buy them.


Retail investors who have relied on bonds for the past six years have a massive £126billion of their savings tied up in these funds. But a substantial chunk of the £770billion of our pensions is invested in them, too, because many stock-market-linked company schemes move savers’ money into bonds the closer they get to retirement.


This is done to protect the cash they have built up over the years by transferring it out of supposedly riskier stocks and shares. The strategy is known as life-styling and happens automatically. But it has meant that workers are being unwittingly exposed to any potential fall in the bond market.


Thousands of investors found themselves stuck in property funds in 2008 when there was a run of people withdrawing cash from these investments. A lack of ready cash available in them meant firms were telling their customers they could not have their money.


Many property funds own entire buildings directly so that if they need to raise money they have to sell them, rather than just sell shares, which is a much quicker and easier process. Bond funds face similar problems.

Bonds have a fixed duration and if funds can’t find a willing buyer to dispose of them, they will have to hold onto the investment. That means they can’t raise any money to give back to investors looking to sell their units in the fund.

Should you hang on or try to sell?
Many fund managers are already selling their bonds. Marcus Brookes, head of multi-manager funds at Schroders’, has reduced his bond holdings to just 10 per cent of his assets and he is planning to sell more.

  ‘Returns have been amazing for too long and we’re starting to worry,’ he says. And Mr Dennehy points out that with interest rates likely to rise in ‘baby steps’, investors shouldn’t have to rush out of all of their bonds at once.

‘But you should still ask yourself why you are bothered to invest in bonds,’ he adds. ‘At best, they won’t lose any of your money this year, but I don’t think they will make any either.’


Yet this could leave investors with another dilemma. Ben Gutteridge, head of fund research at wealth management company Brewin Dolphin, explains: ‘If you are taking your money out of bonds, where are you going to put it?


‘The obvious choice is equities. But if all of your investments are equities, that’s incredibly risky.’


Because of this, investors may be forced to accept the risk of staying in bonds in a bid to spread the risk in their portfolio.

Or else they may have to pull out of the stock market completely and bide their time in cash just to make sure that they’re not losing any money.


__________________________________________

Wall Street and their pols knew people would leave the stock market for the safety of the bond market after the 2008 crash so they started immediately to create the conditions to fleece these bond investors.  Congress and Obama created legislation that pushed US bonds to the world market just as they did subprime mortgage loans they knew were fraudulent.  Watching the FED and QE create the ballooning of the bond market just to accommodate Wall Street profit knowing a bond collapse would hit Federal, state, and local governments hard.

IT IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY!!!!  THESE ARE SOCIOPATHS FOLKS!


Public pensions were never too much to handle for states and local governments-----neo-liberals simply never intended to fund them just as corporations were never made to actually fund their contributions as these benefit packages required.  So, there is no pension deficit weighing on governments----it is the fiscal policy schemes that are designed to bring ever more money to Wall Street that are soaking taxpayers.  Below you see just another financial instrument that again placed public wealth in harms way.  Remember, we went through a fiscal boom last decade albeit fueled by corporate fraud so government coffers should be flush.  Rather, billions of dollars were lost to public malfeasance and fraud.  The article below shows states using pension investments that were known to be bad policy-----placing bonds into plans at the wrong time and this is not an accident.  It takes no rocket scientist to know all of these investment strategies were bad for the public.  These neo-liberals did it to hide debt to take on more debt knowing Wall Street would bring in tons of profit.


The story of Oregon is Maryland's story and Martin O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly are the stars of this public abuse.
  Now, the same thing was done for private pensions as corporations were allowed to fail to fund and place pensions into ever riskier investments everyone knew would fail.

Just think.......if we all knew years ago that the policies since the 2008 crash would implode the bond market-----do you leave state and local governments exposed to bond leveraging?  OF COURSE NOT UNLESS YOU WANT TO IMPLODE GOVERNMENT BUDGETS.

Pension Obligation Bonds: Risky Gimmick or Smart Investment?

Pension obligation bonds have bankrupted whole cities. Yet some governments are still big players. BY: Eric Schulzke | January 2013



“It’s the dumbest idea I ever heard,” Jon Corzine told Bloomberg.com in 2008 when he was still governor of New Jersey
. “It’s speculating the way I would have speculated in my bond position at Goldman Sachs.”

Corzine, who followed up his tenure as governor with a $1.6 billion investment debacle as chairman of MF Global, seemed to know a thing or two about risky ventures. In this case, he was speaking of pension obligation bonds. POBs are a financing maneuver that allows state and local governments to “wipe out” unfunded pension liabilities by borrowing against future tax revenue, then investing the proceeds in equities or other high-yield investments. The idea is that the investments will produce a higher return than the interest rate on the bond, earning money for the pension fund. It’s a gamble, but one that a lot of governments are willing to take when pension portfolio returns plummet, causing unfunded liabilities to run dark and deep.

Almost every fund has faced such liabilities from time to time, though current times have been more treacherous than others. As Paul Cleary, executive director of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) points out, since 1970 his state’s pension fund has suffered annual losses only four times
. But three of those losses were in the last decade, and one, in 2008, was a catastrophic 27 percent decline.

Faced with such losses -- and with a dearth of state and local revenue to make up for the shortfalls -- POBs have become a favored tool to fix pension woes. Oregon is a big player in the POB market, along with scores of its cities, counties and school districts. Other major POB issuers include California, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey.

The bonds took on some notoriety this past summer when two California cities, Stockton and San Bernardino, went bankrupt. Generous pensions awkwardly propped up with ill-timed POBs contributed to both debacles.


Over the years, returns on POBs have often fallen below the interest rate the state or locality paid to borrow the money, digging the liability hole even deeper
. Nonetheless, they remain popular with politicians in a revenue pinch. Politically, it is easier to borrow money to pay for pension costs than it is to squeeze an already-stressed budget. While many economists and policy analysts view them as risky gimmicks and question the high market growth assumptions that make them seem viable, POBs have defenders who believe that with careful timing they can pay off.

When Oakland, Calif., launched the first pension obligation bond in 1985, it appeared to be a reasonable strategy. It qualified as a tax-free bond that could be issued at the lower municipal bond rates. A state or city could then pivot and invest the funds in safe securities -- a corporate bond, for instance -- at a slightly higher rate. “That was classic arbitrage,” Cleary says. “You were locking down the difference between nontaxable bonds and taxable bonds.”


The Tax Reform Act of 1986 ended that strategy by prohibiting state and local governments from reinvesting for profit the money from tax-free bonds. When the concept resurfaced, the strategy called for states or localities to issue a taxable bond and leverage the higher interest rate of that bond against higher return but riskier equity market plays. So long as markets boomed, the new tactic seemed savvy. “Some people call this arbitrage, but it’s not,” Cleary says of post-1986 POBs. “It’s really an investment gamble.”

Arbitrage occurs when prices for the same product differ between two markets, allowing a nimble player to exploit the difference. “Real arbitrage is free money,” says Andrew Biggs, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “But it doesn’t hang around very long.”


Safe bonds and risky equities are not the same product, but public pension accounting currently permits state and localities to treat them as if they were.
“They are counting the return on the stocks before the return is there,” Biggs says. “If you borrowed money to invest in the real world, you would factor the current value of the debt with the current real value of the stocks.”

Given the inherent risks and possible rewards, how have POBs fared? In 2010, a research team led by Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, ran some numbers to find out. The team took 2,931 POBs issued by 236 governments through 2009. They used each bond’s repayment schedule to calculate interest and principal, and then clustered them into cohorts based on the year issued. They assumed a 65/35 investment split between equities and bonds and tracked the results with standard indexes. They then produced two composite graphs -- one at the height of the market in 2007 and the second in 2009, after a crash and before recovery.

In general, bonds issued in the early stages of a stock boom performed well prior to the crash. Thus, POBs issued in the early 1990s were healthy, ranging from 2 to 5 percent net growth. Borrowings in 2002 or 2003 also looked good.


Those issued in the latter years of the 1990s or 2000, however, were in negative territory even before the 2008 crash, having suffered serious losses to their principal in the 2001-2002 downturn. After 2008, all POBs were under water -- except those issued in the trough of the collapse, which by 2009 were already pushing 25 percent gains.

Oregon’s numbers mirror Munnell’s findings. Local government POBs issued in 2002 at the depth of that market collapse and managed by Oregon PERS gained an annual average of 8.84 percent through 2012, before principal and interest on the bond. Less lucky were bonds issued in 2005. The Springfield School District’s POB earned just 5.53 percent, for example. Since that bond carried 4.65 percent interest, it likely earned roughly one point annually -- not much, but slightly above neutral. Oregon’s 2007 issuers earned just 2 percent on their investments through 2012, and are upside down today after debt service.

The same fate befell Stockton, Calif., which also came to market in 2007. Similarly, New Jersey issued a $2.8 billion POB in 1997 -- on the wrong side of another stock bubble.

“The whole thing is the timing,” Oregon’s Cleary says. “You are trying to issue them when the market has bottomed out and when interest rates are reasonable, because really what you are doing is making an investment bet. If people thought when they did POBs that they were refinancing a debt or doing a locked-in arbitrage, rather than an investment play, I’m sure they have been very surprised by the results.”


And yet that is exactly how they were sold. When Oregon voted on new POBs in 2009, the voter education pamphlet argument in favor of issuance explicitly framed the choice as a “refinance” and cast the projected returns as money “saved.”

“Just like many homeowners are refinancing their home mortgages,” the pamphlet read, “the State should take advantage of these historically low rates, which can save Oregon more than $1 billion over the next 25 years. The money saved will help reduce cuts and protect services that all Oregonians rely on.”

Because POBs demand headroom between the interest an issuer pays to borrow and the high returns promised on resulting investments, their investment strategies tend to chafe against safer portfolios. Without a hefty “discount rate” -- as the projected annual gain assumed by a pension fund is known -- the pension bonds would not be possible.

In a 2012 paper, Andrew Biggs argues that the aggressive 8 percent discount used by many states overstates likely earnings and understates risks. A fund that required $100 million in 20 years and employed an 8 percent discount rate would be “fully funded” with $21 million, Biggs notes. But if that same fund were to gain only 5 percent annually, it would need $38 million today to be fully funded in 20 years.


Many experts argue that because public pension obligations are legally binding, pension funds should be discounted at close to zero risk on the front end -- at or near the rates offered by government bonds.
“While economists are famous for disagreeing with each other on virtually every conceivable issue,” wrote then-Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Donald Kohn in 2008, “when it comes to this one there is no professional disagreement: The only appropriate way to calculate the present value of a very-low-risk liability is to use a very-low-risk discount rate.”

In point of fact, the 8 percent discount rate may be on its way out. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) is launching a complex hybrid discount standard in 2014, which will affect the assumptions states make with their funds. Some fear the GASB rule will only create more confusion. Bond rater Moody’s is taking a simpler tack in weighing government pension plans, having recently proposed to shift its pension discount rate down to the level of AA taxable bonds, which are now at 5.5 percent. “Currently, discount rates used by state and local governments are all over the place,” says Tim Blake, Moody’s managing director of public finance. “Most are in the range of 7.5 to 8 percent. We need a uniform rate.”

Not surprisingly, 5.5 percent is very close to the rate at which many POBs are sold to investors.


With aggressive 8 percent discount rates now under attack by economists, oversight boards and rating agencies, issuers who counted on rosier outcomes have learned some hard lessons. Five years ago, when Connecticut State Treasurer Denise L. Nappier announced a new $2.28 billion pension bond, she noted that the state had “achieved a favorable borrowing cost of 5.88 percent, which is well below the 8.5 percent assumed long-term return on assets of the Teachers’ Retirement Fund. This will provide significant cash flow savings over the long term and a potential savings to taxpayers of billions of dollars.”

When the bond was issued in April, the Dow Jones average stood just shy of 13,000. By November, the market was in free fall. It bottomed out the following March at just over 6,600. Connecticut’s timing could hardly have been worse. As the market plunged, Pensions & Investments lit into POBs, singling out Connecticut. The editors argued that POBs shove obligations “that should have been paid as earned” onto future generations, along with the risk of the debt.

By 2010, with the market still emerging from the trough, Connecticut’s finances were as messy as ever. But now there was little appetite for more bonds. POBs “are certainly a risky proposition,” Michael J. Cicchetti, chairman of Connecticut’s Post Employment Benefits Commission, told the CT Mirror. “Things are different now than they were then.”


______________________________________________

Wall Street has the nerve to state that public sector pensions are too big of a liability for governments.  After all, Wall Street fraud caused a loss of 1/2 pension value in 2008 and the rating corporations like Moody's was ground zero for the fraud---they should know pensions are limping along!

Indeed, simply taking the assets of the three major rating corporations and pushing them into bankruptcy for their part in the fraud would have made pensions flush with cash.  RULE OF LAW WOULD HAVE SOLVED GOVERNMENT PENSION SHORTFALLS.  No one shouted this!  Did you hear your pols shouting for recovery of pension losses from fraud to make up the shortfall?  They went straight to cutting benefits.  They through pensions into bad investments just to claim they were liabilities that needed to be cut.

THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU-----WORKING TO MAXIMIZE WALL STREET PROFITS AT PUBLIC EXPENSE!

Now, why should all citizens be concerned about pension fraud ----even those with no pensions? 


THE SAME THING IS HAPPENING WITH SOCIAL SECURITY!  YOUR RETIREMENT PROGRAM IS BEING RAIDED BY THE SAME PEOPLE.  DO NOT THINK IT OK FOR SOME PEOPLE TO LOSE THEIR RETIREMENTS WHEN THE PROBLEM IS CORPORATE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION AND NOT THE BENEFIT!

So while neo-liberals like Dulaney are busy making sure legislation places corporations into positions to earn grand profits-----they are setting you and I to take the losses once again.

The policy of risk-free rating is not a bad thing-----what is bad is that it comes at a time when pensions are waiting for recovery from fraud by Moody's and it comes as the bond market is ready to implode from public sector malfeasance.  Can you imagine how impossible it will be to meet these obligations after an economic crash bigger than 2008? 

THAT'S RIGHT-----THEY DO NOT WANT TO BE ABLE TO MEET THEM!  THAT IS WHY THEY ARE IMPLODING THE BOND MARKET FOR GOODNESS SAKE!


A Maryland neo-liberal running for Governor of Maryland Heather Mizeur actually stated-------if public employees gave up pension benefits we could build all these schools in Baltimore.  That is what neo-liberals do----pit people in the same Democratic base against one another.  It is not an either/or----STOP THE CORPORATE FRAUD AND PROFITEERING!

LABOR AND JUSTICE ARE THE DEMOCRATIC BASE!

Moody’s Playing Dangerous Games With Public Pension Funds

Tuesday, 07 May 2013 09:29 By Dean Baker, Truthout | Op-Ed

The bond-rating agency Moody's made itself famous for giving subprime mortgage backed securities triple-A ratings at the peak of the housing bubble. This made it easy for investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to sell these securities all around the world. And it allowed the housing bubble to grow ever bigger and more dangerous. And we know where that has left us.

Well, Moody's is back. They announced plans to change the way they treat pension obligations in assessing state and local government debt.

Instead of accepting projections of pension fund returns based on the assets they hold, Moody's wants to use a risk-free discount rate to assess pension fund liabilities. This will make public pensions seem much worse funded than the current method.

While this might seem like a nerdy and technical point, it has very real consequences. If the Moody's methodology is accepted as the basis for accounting by state and local governments then they will suddenly need large amounts of revenue to make their pensions properly funded. This will directly pit public sector workers, who are counting on the pensions they have earned, against school children, low-income families, and others who count on state supported services.

In other words, this is exactly the sort of politics that the Wall Street and the One Percent types love. No matter which side loses, they win. While public sector workers fight the people dependent on state and local services, they get to walk off with all the money.

Wall Street is expert at these sorts of accounting tricks; it is after all what they do for a living. And this is not the first time that they have played these sorts of games to advance their agenda.

The current crisis of the Postal Service, which is looking at massive layoffs and cutbacks in delivery, is largely the result of accounting gimmicks. In 2006 Congress passed a law requiring an unprecedented level of pre-funding for retiree health care benefits. The Postal Service is not only required to build up a massive level of prefunding, it also is using more pessimistic assumptions about cost growth than any known plan in the private sector.

This requirement is the basis for the horror stories of multi-billion losses that feature prominently in news stories about the Postal Service. The Postal Service would face difficulties adjusting to rapid declines in traditional mail service in any case (it doesn't help that they are prohibited from using their enormous resources to expand into new lines of business), but this accounting maneuver is imposing an impossible burden. The change in pension fund accounting could have a comparable impact on state and local governments.

Moody's change in accounting is not just bad politics, it is horrible policy. The key question is how we should assess the returns that pension funds can anticipate on the assets they hold in the stock market. Moody's and other bond rating agencies did flunk the test horribly in the 1990s and 2000s. They assumed that the stock market would provide the historic rate of return even when price to earnings ratios were more than twice the historic average at the peak of the stock bubble.

While some of us did try to issue warnings at the time (here) and (here) the bond rating agencies were not interested. As a result, when the stock market plunged, many pensions that had previously appeared to be solidly funded, suddenly faced substantial shortfalls.

It is possible to construct a methodology that projects future returns based on current market valuations and projected profit growth that maintain proper funding levels, while minimizing the variation in contributions through time. By contrast, if the pension funds adopted the Moody's methodology as the basis for their contribution schedules, they would find themselves making very large contributions in some years followed by years in which they made little or no contribution.

A state or local government that used the Moody's methodology to guide their contributions would effectively be prefunding their pensions in the same way that it would be prefunding education to build up a huge bank account so that K-12 education was paid from the annual interest. While it would be nice to have the cost of these services fully covered for all time, no one thinks this policy makes sense. We would be hugely overtaxing current workers so that future generations could get a huge tax break.

Even worse, Moody's scoring of pensions may discourage pension managers from holding stock as an asset. They would be held accountable for any losses in bad years, but would not get credit for the higher expected returns on stock. For this reason, risk averse pension managers may decide to hold safe but low yielding bonds.

This would lead to the perverse situation in which collectively invested funds held in pensions only hold safe bonds, even though market timing carries little risk for them. On the other hand individual investors, who are hugely vulnerable to market timing, would be holding stock in their 401(k)s.

That outcome makes no sense. But of course it didn't make sense that subprime mortgage backed securities were Aaa. This is Moody's we're talking about.


0 Comments

June 12th, 2014

6/12/2014

0 Comments

 
NEO-LIBERALISM IS A WAR AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN AS POVERTY DEEPENS AND BROADENS AND OUR US CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS AND EQUAL PROTECTION ARE SUSPENDED.



I will talk about elections in Maryland today and Friday and then return to the policy issues.  Maryland can easily have free and fair elections but it must have leadership that creates this environment.  Whether republican or democrat if all candidates in a race cannot get name recognition and their platform to the public through 501c3 to balance the onslaught of private media ads and coverage----there will be no elections.  I hear Sarbanes, Cardin, Cummings, and Mikulski all of Baltimore pushing for early voting, for getting out the vote, and for campaign finance reform and all of them are the face of the democratic system in Maryland that allows such blatant censure of candidates-----   AND THIS HARMS ELECTIONS THE MOST.  THESE ARE NEO-LIBERALS FOLKS---NOT DEMOCRATS!

Let's look at Maryland political organizations and how they work within this captured system.  First, let's look at neo-liberalism and how it moves towards third world society and how women and people of color are harmed most in third world poverty and then ask----why are these organizations saying they support women and people of color supporting neo-liberals and allowing captured elections?




________________________________________________

The Maryland State office of the League of Women Voters controls all of the branches and they have partnered throughout this primary with events they know break the election laws.  They themselves use this poll number guideline and break it whenever necessary.  The League allows this arbitrary election process.

It has as its mission protecting elections and advocating for women in the election process but has told Cindy Walsh---we accept all of the republican candidates and neo-liberals.

THIS IS A CAPTURE OF A VITAL ORGANIZATION WITH LEADERSHIP WORKING FOR NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PUBLIC JUSTICE.  WE NEED TO SHAKE UP LEADERSHIP ALIGNED WITH GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.



Mission:

The League of Women Voters,

a nonpartisan political organization, encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influences public policy through education and advocacy.

Watch the MPT/LWVMD Republican and Democratic Gubernatorial Debates On-Line

The one-hour debates between Republicans Ron George, Larry Hogan, Charles Lollar, David Craig and Democrats Anthony Brown, Doug Gansler, Heather Mizeur can be seen at http://www.mpt.org/debate/

___________________________________________

Below you see what the most pressing issue in Maryland is-----fraud and corruption and not one political organization, justice organization, or candidate mentions it-----and if that candidate does----they are censured.  Remember, these frauds hit women and children the hardest----people of color as well so if an advocacy group is not making this their top issue in selecting a candidate to endorse----THEY HAVE LEADERS WORKING WITH NEO-LIBERALS.


THIS IS WHAT NEO-LIBERALISM HAS DONE TO GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS:

Maryland Corruption Risk Report Card Center for Public Integrity

Rank among 50 states: 40th  

Overall grade: D-

Click a category to see detailed scores and notes.

Public Access to Information F

Political Financing C

Executive Accountability F

Legislative Accountability F

Judicial Accountability D+

  State Budget Processes C-

State Civil Service Management D-

Procurement D-

Internal Auditing C+

Lobbying Disclosure D-

  State Pension Fund Management F
 Ethics Enforcement Agencies D

State Insurance Commissions F

Redistricting D-
 

Click here to share this report card on your site The story behind the score

In Maryland’s “clubby” Capitol, there’s little transparency, procurement policies are byzantine, and audit results are often ignored. Read more from SII State Reporter Christian Bourge

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Maryland ranked fifth nationally in mortgage fraud incidents ...
Maryland Among Top States with Most Fraud Complaints ...

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Top States in Internet Fraud Complaints
Complainants per 100,000 People
(rank state per 100,000 people)
Maryland 121.67     is #7.

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America's 10 Worst States for Fraud - DailyFinancewww.dailyfinance.com/.../americas-10-worst-states-for-fraud 


Maryland has the fifth highest rate of fraud regarding debt collection at 56.2 complaints per 100,000 population. In the identity theft category, ...

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THE CANDIDATES IN MARYLAND MAKING OVERSIGHT AND ACCOUNTABILITY AND PUBLIC JUSTICE CENTRAL---WHO SHOUT OUT AGAINST GLOBAL CORPORATIONS IN THEIR PLATFORM ARE THE ONES NOT INCLUDED IN THESE ELECTION EVENTS.


It's important to know that neo-conservatives are the same as neo-liberals and this is why the right has created the Tea Party.  Labor and justice are still at opposites with Tea Party in many ways, but we both know that global corporations are killing our democracy and US Constitutional rights.  Here in Maryland all pols are working for global corporations------ and we are taking the democratic party back to the people.  The reason republican voters are just as mad at neo-cons is that the economy of today is not free-market----is is naked/crony capitalism---- the opposite of free-market and George Bush is equally responsible for it as Clinton and now Obama.

For those thinking Heather Mizeur is not a neo-liberal----why is she in every forum and not speaking to any of the issues my campaign brings forward?  She has talking points.

No matter your political stance everyone knows that the corporate and government systems are full of fraud and corruption and this is the crony of naked capitalism-----no regulation---no oversight or accountability.  The US Constitution is built on Rule of Law and Equal Protection so none of what is happening is legal.

Below you see the goal of neo-liberalism-----third world status for even the formerly first world Western nations.
  Neo-cons/neo-libs = third world society.  Clinton is the face of neo-liberalism as he dismantled all of the protections against corporate power knowing it would end democracy and our rights as citizens.  Bush ran with it----and Obama is now protecting the massive movement of wealth to the top mostly through systemic corporate fraud. 

'WE SEE NO FRAUD' SAY NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS BECAUSE PEOPLE HAVE NO RIGHTS OF PROTECTION.


Global Capitalism, Third World Development:

Is the Sweat Shop the Destination or
the start of a Take Off into Self-Sustained Growth?


In a deregulated world, the sweat shop is not a step on the road to 'economic development', it is the destination of most Third World people who aspire to Western-style economic development.

Western economic forces, given free rein, lead to people living lives of borderline starvation, of endemic poverty, with the few who control access to finance and resources, or who can become involved in international corporate activity, able to maintain wealthy lifestyles 43.




Neo-liberalism is dead as people realise markets need regulation

Date May 6, 2009

Chris Bowen

'It's very clear we're in the middle of a paradigm shift. We are witnessing the end of the neo-liberal project."


Remind Me Again How Neo-Cons Are ''Conservatives''

... by Josh Robinson Posted September 03, 2012

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CINDY WALSH CREATED CITIZENS OVERSIGHT MARYLAND-----MARYLAND PROGRESSIVES SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE I SAW MARYLAND PROGRESSIVE AND OTHER PROGRESSIVE GROUPS WERE CONTROLLED BY NEO-LIBERALS.

THERE IS NOTHING PROGRESSIVE ABOUT NEO-LIBERALISM.

Each election since I moved to Maryland I have had to watch as groups calling themselves 'progressive' all back the most neo-liberal of candidates.  There is not a person in Maryland that does not know Anthony Brown is O'Malley and O'Malley is Clinton and all are neo-liberals.  EVERYONE KNOWS THIS.  There is nothing progressive about neo-liberalism----it is autocratic and repressive so when people try to call a neo-liberal progressive----THEY KNOW THEY ARE NOT SPEAKING TRUE. 

THE REASON BROWN, GANSLER, AND MIZEUR POLLED AT NEAR 10% THROUGHOUT THESE PRIMARIES IS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS.  IT TOOK A BOGUS POLL TO MOVE THOSE POLLING NUMBERS UP----AND THESE GROUPS KNOW THAT.


Every year Progressive Maryland chooses neo-liberals as their choice and never mention the main problems in Maryland----dismantled public justice, no oversight and accountability, and global corporate control of our economy----and never shout against an election system rife with violations.

NEO-LIBERALISM IS NEVER PROGRESSIVE FOLKS!


PROGRESSIVE MARYLAND & ELECTIONS

Progressive Maryland exists to advocate for and improve the lives of working families in Maryland and reduce income inequality. In order to accomplish our goal of turning progressive legislation into progressive laws, we need legislators who share our values. This means Progressive Maryland must actively engage in the political process to ensure the most effective, most progressive legislators are sworn in. For more than a decade, our organization has worked hard to achieve electoral success. We examine closely the records of candidates for office, get to know them, educate them on our issues, and obtain their commitment through candidate questionnaires to support measures we intend to push for in the upcoming legislative sessions. We endorse candidates who are authentically supportive of working families, promote their candidacies, and aggressively work to get them elected. In some cases, we go door-to-door in priority races, and we work the polls on Election Day. Engaging in the process in this fashion ensures that elected officials will be accessible to us and allow us every opportunity to present our perspective on priorities. It also helps to guarantee the votes we need to make Maryland a leader among progressive states. Our track record speaks for itself.In 2010, 90 percent of candidates we endorsed won election. In 2006, we helped elect over 90 endorsed candidates.

OUR ENDORSEMENT PROCESS

All candidates registered with the Board of Elections are emailed at the address listed with the State Board of Elections an invitation to seek Progressive Maryland’s endorsement, with a link to our electronic questionnaire. Completed questionnaires for all candidates are made available to Progressive Maryland Board members prior to recommendations being made, and copies of the completed questionnaires for all candidates are posted online on the Progressive Maryland website. Before ProgressiveMaryland employs our organizational resources to support candidates, we apply rigorous standards for our endorsement process based on more than a decade of on-the-ground electoral experience. An endorsement requires supermajority 2/3 support of our board of directors. We take into account the level of support for ProgressiveMaryland's full range of priority issues and how they have translated their support with action in their communities.
For incumbents, we consider an individual's voting record and their leadership on passing legislation and advancing key policies that improve the lives of working families. We also weigh viability by examining objective metrics of public support for a candidate.Progressive Maryland’s final candidate recommendations are posted online, as soon as the recommendation process is completed. To view the completed questionnaires for every candidate who applied for our endorsement, visit: http://progressivemaryland.org/endorsements/2014/Have any other questions about Progressive Maryland’s endorsement process?  

Please do not hesitate to contact Kate Planco Waybright at kate@progressivemaryland.org


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As I said----neo-liberals know they are killing all of the public justice and equal protection and that largely hits people of color and women so they are deliberately giving this push the face of the very people hurt most by it.  This is why we had Obama and now they are gearing up for Hillary.  Hillary will be sold as the woman's candidate----the glass ceiling breaker as Obama was but we know both Obama and Hillary are the face of neo-liberalism and Trans Pacific Trade Pact (TPP).

Remember, in Maryland it was Cummings, Sarbanes (Sr), Cardin, and Hoyer that voted with Clinton for NAFTA and breaking the Glass Steagall wall to create this global market and corporations.  They did it knowing these corporations would become unaccountable and take over our democracy.  Well, this next Presidential election is about bringing neo-liberalism full circle with Hillary bringing in TPP.

Note the long list of women in Congress supporting Hillary and neo-liberalism.  That is what is reflected by Maryland's women and justice organizations doing the same.

IF YOUR JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS ARE PRETENDING HILLARY IS ABOUT SENDING A WOMAN TO BREAK A GLASS CEILING ------THEY NEED TO GO!


The politicians below are not progressives-----they are neo-liberals!

January 28, 2014, 06:00 am


Dems' 2016 endorsement list starts here
By Jasmine Sachar and Bob Cusack

  The following congressional Democrats have endorsed Hillary Clinton’s possible presidential bid in 2016:

CLINTON BACKERS

Senators who have endorsed Clinton (19)

Tammy Baldwin (Wis.)

Barbara Boxer (Calif.)

Maria Cantwell (Wash.)

ADVERTISEMENTDianne Feinstein (Calif.)Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.)

Kay Hagan (N.C.)

Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.)

Mazie Hirono (Hawaii)

Tim Kaine (Va.)

Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)

Mary Landrieu (La.)

Claire McCaskill (Mo.)

Barbara Mikulski (Md.)

Patty Murray (Wash.)

Charles Schumer (N.Y.)

Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.)

Debbie Stabenow (Mich.)

Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)

Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.)

House members who back Clinton  (41)

Robert Andrews (N.J.)

Tim Bishop (N.Y.)

Joaquín Castro (Texas)

David Cicilline (R.I.)

Joseph Crowley (N.Y.)

Danny Davis (Ill.)

John Delaney (Md.)

Lois Frankel (Fla.)

Gene Green (Texas)

Raúl Grijalva (Ariz.)

Luis Gutiérrez (Ill.)

Janice Hahn (Calif.)

Colleen Hanabusa (Hawaii)

Alcee Hastings (Fla.)

Brian Higgins (N.Y.)

Mike Honda (Calif.)

Steny Hoyer (Md.)


Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas)

Hank Johnson (Ga.)

Jim Langevin (R.I.)

Sandy Levin (Mich.)

John Lewis (Ga.)

Nita Lowey (N.Y.)

Stephen Lynch (Mass.)

Carolyn Maloney (N.Y.)

Doris Matsui (Calif.)

Gregory Meeks (N.Y.)

Grace Meng (N.Y.)

Jim Moran (Va.)

Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.)

Richard Neal (Mass.)

Chellie Pingree (Maine)

Cedric Richmond (La.)

Tim Ryan (Ohio)

Jan Schakowsky (Ill.)

Allyson Schwartz (Pa.)

David Scott (Ga.)

Terri Sewell (Ala.)

Louise Slaughter (N.Y.)

Dina Titus (Nev.)

Frederica Wilson (Fla.)

This list was last updated at 12:30 p.m on 5/6/14




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April 02nd, 2014

4/2/2014

0 Comments

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

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

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

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



Regarding rebuilding Rule of Law in Maryland:

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

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

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

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

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


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

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




Law fees rise despite lawyers’ protests
Tynwald buildings

Tynwald buildings

Published on the 27 June
2013
11:45


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________


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



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

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

About Us

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


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

___________________________________________



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

SEE WHERE EQUAL PROTECTION UNDER LAW HAS GONE?



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


Protecting the Public


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

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

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

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


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

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

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



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


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





Maryland Bar Bulletin
Publications : Bar Bulletin : March 2010     

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


~ Give close to $3 million in financial support ~

By Janet Stidman Eveleth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________________________________


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


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


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

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


Clients are up, funding is down for free legal aid

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

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

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

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

Demand rising

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

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

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

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

3,000 attorneys volunteer


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

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

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

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

Too many clients, too few chairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________________________________


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

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


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

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


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

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

SENATE STANDING COMMITTEES FINANCE COMMITTEE

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


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




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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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



__________________________________________________


SENATE STANDING COMMITTEES BUDGET & TAXATION COMMITTEE
Origin & Functions

Subcommittees

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


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

Richard F. Colburn
Ulysses Currie
James E. DeGrange, Sr.
George C. Edwards
Joseph M. Getty
Verna L. Jones-Rodwell
Nancy J. King
Richard S. Madaleno, Jr.
Roger Manno
Douglas J. J. Peters
James N. Robey
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April 01st, 2014

4/1/2014

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MARYLAND IS HANDING ALL THAT IS PUBLIC TO PRIVATE HANDS AS ALL PUBLIC SECTOR OVERSIGHT AND REGULATIONS AND ALL PUBLIC JUSTICE IS ELIMINATED.  AFTER ALL----TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT---TPP ----IS ALL ABOUT ENDING US SOVEREIGNTY AND HAVING GLOBAL CORPORATIONS WRITE LAWS AND PROVIDE THE OVERSIGHT THEY WANT.

THIS IS MUNICIPAL DEBT FRAUD AS ALL INVOLVED KNOW THE US ECONOMY IS READY TO IMPLODE FROM MUNICIPAL AND SOVEREIGN DEBT EXTREME LEVERAGING.

Public private partnerships are the neo-liberal way of privatizing all that is public while making the public pay for all the cost of corporate operation.  While republicans call it socialist to hide the fact that it is naked capitalism, neo-liberal pols like O'Malley and Rawlings-Blake pretend its all about job creation and development.  From waterfront property to public parks, to school playgrounds and public community centers and health care----all of it is disappearing under the auspices of public-private partnership.

I asked a minister who attended a protest in Annapolis where the nearest public library was......we were at the State Capital.  She had to take a minute to think about where the nearest public space in Annapolis not a government building would be-----ALL THE WAY OUT WEST STREET AT THE CITY'S BORDER.

People need to WAKE UP because neo-liberals and neo-cons are working together to end all existence of public space.  As when the USSR was taken private during PERESTROIKA with all of its publicly owned spaces and businesses handed to a few private Oligarchs in this new Russia-----

THIS PRIVATIZATION OF ALL THAT IS PUBLIC BY NEO-LIBERALS IN THE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND CITY HALL IS THE SAME AS THIS RUSSIAN PERESTROIKA.

They are taking public land and setting private businesses on this land all so these businesses will not pay property tax.  That private business sitting on that land will control that property.  Baltimore and Maryland is ground zero for this PERESTROIKA of the 1% as fraud and corruption goes wild and a free-for-all with public assets has Wall Street investment firms already owing the citizens of Maryland hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud-----taking all of our wealth a second time around.

Heather Mizeur said in an forum for Governor of Maryland that in order to create jobs trades-people should give up some of their pensions in order to fund school building.  This is the same labor/union busting in these deals.  CAN YOU IMAGINE A CANDIDATE RUNNING AS A PROGRESSIVE WANTING A WORKING CLASS PERSON TO GIVE UP PENSION MONEY TO BUILD AND BE SILENT ON CORPORATE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION?  That is because Heather Mizeur is not a progressive ------she is a corporate poser who will do the same as O'Malley, Brown, and Gansler in handing all wealth to the top!


STOP ELECTING THESE SAME NEO-LIBERALS WHO ARE KILLING OUR DEMOCRACY!

Below you see articles showing this growing wealth divide as all costs of doing business for global corporations are now being thrust on the public.  We start with Dan Rodricks who works for these developers but does make a good point every now and then.

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Dan makes a good point in shouting that the Trusts meant to build MD's environmental strengths are gutted and underfunded seeming more of a shell operation than money designated for a specific use. Think Transportation/Innovation Trusts. What we don't hear from MD media enough is the outing of O'Malley and MD pols for progressive posing; pretending to support issues that are environmental or labor and justice and then ignoring them if they are passed. MD media has given the world's worst environmentalist headlines for his national campaign meant to sell him as an environmentalist and none of it is true as this one example shows.

US media was free press until a decade or so and had as a mission to hold power accountable and now they work hard providing the headlines and the campaign snippets to hide the facts. The truth with open space is that in Baltimore all public property is being handed to private developers right and left and all areas designated as public are really private campuses built with public money. The entire Inner Harbor is now privately owned with the public designated for costs.

Then take the scam of preserving farms with estate tax reduction where the rich pretend to have a working farm to have huge estates that could be 10 real working farms. MD is far from sustainable or environmental because it has no democratic party.



Marylanders need to speak up for open space A program designed to save trees and farms under constant legislative attack


Gunpowder Falls State Park (Sun photo by Dan Rodricks / April 1, 2014)

Dan Rodricks 5:00 a.m. EDT, April 1, 2014  Baltimore Sun

When I have a hard time understanding government spending — the construction and tinkering that goes into, say, Maryland's multibillion-dollar annual budget — I just imagine the whole thing as a kitchen-table conversation with members of a household declaring and negotiating priorities. (Pardon the time-worn metaphor, but it works for me.)

After we cover the big-ticket items (health, education, roads, public safety, the mandatory areas of spending), we get around to the other pieces of the budget that need to be maintained — public employee pensions, for instance — and arguments break out about obligations, fiscal discipline and not "kicking the can down the road." It can get rough, even ugly.

But after the dust settles and everyone's exhausted, someone at the far end of the table, who has waited her turn to speak, reminds us about a certain obligation: One half of one percent of all transfer taxes paid at real estate closings must be set aside for protection of land against future development; that's state law.

In Maryland, it's called Program Open Space. It was established in 1969 with bipartisan support, and for good reason: The legislators of that time saw massive development coming to the state's suburbs, and they wanted to preserve farms and acquire land for public parks and playgrounds to keep things in balance — Maryland as "the land of pleasant living" even as it became a huge bedroom for Washington and Baltimore.

With white flight from the cities, the construction of the interstate highway system and two beltways, environmentalists and lawmakers saw Maryland's potential to become an utter mess as population grew and development spread.

Forty-five years along, we pride ourselves on being a state that still boasts postcard vistas from the Eastern Shore and the Chesapeake to the mountains of Garrett County, with a lot of nice spots in between.

The $2 billion that went into Program Open Space has a lot to do with that. It's a smart program, a legacy of Maryland's progressive approach to conservation, built on a simple idea:

Take a tiny piece of the revenue from each real estate transaction and fund a program to save open space — buy development rights from Maryland's family farmers so they can keep farming, acquire land for state parks, and send money to Baltimore and our smaller cities and the counties so they can build playgrounds, bike trails and lacrosse and soccer fields.

The logic is beautiful.

Because Program Open Space is tied to real estate transactions — only 0.5 percent of transfer taxes go into the fund — it tracks with the economy. If development and house sales slow, so does Program Open Space. In better times, when there's more action in commercial and residential real estate, more money goes into land preservation.

But the wise lawmakers who established the program are gone, and their political descendants have raided the fund countless times — to the tune of about $1.5 billion, according to calculations by the nonprofit Partners for Open Space — and they did this most famously during the savings-and-loan mess of the mid-1980s.

Annapolis has scoffed repeatedly at the spirit of the law that established Program Open Space with little worry about political fallout.

That last part is what gets me. That's why I'm writing about this today. The muldoons in Annapolis are messing with Program Open Space again. In his new budget, Gov. Martin O'Malley designates no cash for the program, using instead a more complicated system of bonds to finance specific projects, while some in the General Assembly want to cap the fund at $100 million. (Yeah, baby, time to rein in all that wild spending going on for open space!)

In the program's original form, there was never supposed to be a cap; Porogram Open Space was supposed to try and balance land gobbled up for development with land conserved for farms, forests and local parks and playing fields, all through a tiny fraction of the revenue from each real estate transaction.

Partners for Open Space says there are 150 Maryland farm families lined up for the state's agricultural preservation program, but not enough money to handle the demand because of Annapolis's constant raiding of Program Open Space.

Doing a budget — in a household or for the entire state — requires many skills, discipline and adherence to principles, including respect for an established rule.

In this case, here's the rule: We will devote 0.5 percent to a fund to acquire land, and it will be tied to income from a specific source; we won't be obligated to put any additional money into that fund but, at the same time, we won't raid it for the general budget, either.

In violating the spirit of Program Open Space, Annapolis counts on Marylanders not caring enough about grass and trees to bother them with phone calls and emails. And if that happens, then in time maybe they'll think it's OK to just end the program altogether.

We can't let that happen. We need to take a stand for open space, and now.


_______________________________________
In Baltimore, city buses and fire department engines are being covered with corporate advertisement because when corporations pay no taxes the public coffers are empty.  So, all across the city public parks and athletic courts are left in disrepair or closed because UnderArmour is allowed to get tax breaks.  Yet, public work is outsourced to allow UnderArmour to 'donate' money to repair a park for 'free' courtesy permanent corporate advertising.

So, no public employees maintaining parks and recreation and the city's public spaces littered with corporate tags all paying for corporate operations with a dash of tax relief to maximize profits------


THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL/NEO CON FOR YOU----ALWAYS WORKING TO HAVE THE PUBLIC PAY TO MAXIMIZE PROFIT!

Jul 13, 2011, 2:33pm EDT Updated: Jul 28, 2011, 7:08am EDT

Under Armour to renovate Federal Hill court


 Scott Dance, Staff Baltimore has hired Under Armour Inc. to renovate a basketball court at Federal Hill Park at no cost — other than some brand advertising.

The Tide Point-based sportswear maker has agreed to replace the chain-link fence around the court and install a new playing surface, goals and goal posts. The city is not paying Under Armour for the work, but is allowing it to include its logo on the court surface. The city Board of Estimates approved the deal Wednesday morning.

It’s not the first time Under Armor has emblazoned its logo on city property. The city and company caught flak from residents in April 2010 for an Under Armour ad painted on the grass of Federal Hill Park, facing the Inner Harbor with the company’s logo and slogan “Protect this house”. Under Armour also has its logo on a baseball field in Locust Point, near its headquarters. That field is not city-owned, according to City Councilman Bill Cole.


____________________________________________
O'Malley and neo-liberals and neo-cons are working hard to hand all of Maryland's public land to private gain and as we see below, a great big State Center complex is now giving businesses an opportunity to operate without paying property tax because after all its public land.  So, instead of rehabbing this building for the much needed rebuilding of public oversight and regulation and hiring thousands of public employees to do this, O'Malley is taking this public space private subsidizing costs of taxes and maintenance for what is almost always global corporate chain stores.

The jobs created are poverty while the state public jobs that are middle-class are slowly eliminated because after all-----Trans Pacific Trade Pact gives Global Corporate Tribunals and legal teams all the functions of today's public sector.
  Keep in mind that another public-private partnership with O'Malley is the Hilton Hotel now having the public subsidize corporate loses, no tax revenue coming in, and employees fleeced of money and paid poverty wages.  City Hall sold that project just as they are selling this State Center project that will end up the same.  This State Center has been left to deteriorate and the thousands of state employees earning strong wages have be culled as all oversight and regulation has been eliminated in Maryland.

IT IS ALL PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AS IT HAS NO INTENT TO OPERATE IN THE PUBLIC GOOD.


GET RID OF ALL PUBLIC SPACE BY HANDING THEM TO PRIVATE CORPORATIONS SAY NEO-LIBERALS LIKE O'MALLEY!  PUBLIC HOUSING REAL ESTATE BECOMING A PUBLIC PARK OR PUBLIC COMMUNITY CENTER?  NOT ON MY WATCH----IT WILL BE PUBLIC LAND USED FOR AN AFFLUENT PRIVATE HIGH-RISE!


THIS IS THE UGLIEST, BRUTAL, MOST OBSCENE ABUSE OF PUBLIC TRUST I HAVE EVER SEEN.

Governor O'Malley Unveils Plans for First Phase of State Center Redevelopment Phase One of redevelopment to create new office and retail near transit hub and support 1,200 construction jobs and attract another 800 permanent jobs in the heart of Baltimore City


BALTIMORE, MD (July 27, 2010) –

Joined by local officials, construction workers, community leaders and others today, Governor Martin O’Malley announced plans for the first phase of the landmark State Center redevelopment project in the heart of Baltimore City.  Pending Board of Public Works approval tomorrow, the State will lease 500,000 square feet of newly developed office space in the first of two new buildings to be built on the 28-acre site by a state-selected private development team.  The five-phase, 15-year redevelopment is the culmination of six years of planning, and is expected to bring nearly 10,000 jobs during the construction phase and more than 5,400 permanent, private-sector jobs to the heart of Baltimore City when the project is complete, in addition to more than 4,800 indirect and induced jobs upon the project’s completion.

“This is the beginning of an ambitious public-private partnership that will transform a stagnant, government office complex into a vibrant, walkable, ‘green space’ that will link nine surrounding communities, revitalize a key part of Baltimore City, and bring thousands of private-sector jobs to the heart of Baltimore,” said Governor O’Malley.  “The state commitment to lease office space opens the door for the development team to seek the private funding necessary to build the project, a project that will assist Maryland’s economic recovery by supporting jobs and attracting new business to the area with work beginning this fall.”

The entire State Center redevelopment, a five-phase, 15-year plan, will create 9,403 jobs during construction and 5,439 permanent, private-sector jobs when the project is complete.  An additional 4,862 indirect and induced jobs will be added upon the project’s completion.

“The O’Malley-Brown administration has been focused like a laser on job creation in Baltimore and throughout Maryland,” Mayor Rawlings-Blake said. “The State Center redevelopment is a tremendous opportunity for Baltimore, providing more job opportunities and new investment.  The City of Baltimore will continue to work in strong partnership with the State to move this exciting project forward.”

The State Center redevelopment transforms an out-dated, 28-acre concrete complex valued at $1.8 million into multi-million dollar retail, commercial and residential transportation oriented development where the State is projected to be $144 million in the black by year 20.  This is made possible by the use of the public private partnership which includes a projected $28 million in parking revenue, $30 million in ground rents and shared profits, and $160 million in new state taxes over the first 20 years of the project.

Phase One of State Center Redevelopment

The $215 million Phase One development at State Center will include two new office buildings and a parking garage.  In addition to the 500,000 square feet of office space, the two buildings combined will include 70,000 square feet of street-level retail space, including a grocery store that the has been a priority for the surrounding communities for years.  In addition to the 1,200 jobs supported by construction of Phase One, the project, when complete, will attract another 800 permanent jobs to the State Center site. 


Over the next 20 years the first phase of the State Center redevelopment will generate more than $200 million in state and city taxes and another $30 million in lease payments to the State of Maryland.  Phase One will Support 1,200 construction jobs and attract 800 permanent, private-sector direct jobs. 


Phase One will construction two office buildings and a parking garage where a parking lot currently sits, creating 500,000 square feet of office space and 70,000 square feet of retail space, including a grocery store.

“This milestone follows three years of intensive planning, research and community involvement,” said Caroline Moore, Chief Executive Officer of Ekistics, LLC and the managing member of the private development team.  “We have worked hand-in-hand with citizens and both state and city government to develop a concept that meets the various needs of the community and we have done it in award-winning fashion.”

Currently, State Center is home to four state government office buildings and 3,500 state employees, the largest concentration of state employees in Maryland.  However, the layout of the existing complex hinders the ability of residents to move between the nine surrounding communities.  The redevelopment of State Center will create a more pedestrian friendly environment, consolidating 14 state agencies and more than 3,500 state employees, in addition to employees and customers of added retail and commercial space, in a complex sits at the intersection of six different public transportation systems.

In May 2010, the overall $1.5 billion State Center redevelopment project received a Charter Award from the Congress on New Urbanism as one of the seven best urban smart growth projects in the world.  The 28-acre State Center site will be redeveloped in five phases over fifteen years converting the property from an underutilized government owned and operated office campus into a mix of privately owned and operated office, retail and mixed income residential units, forming a green, walkable community adjacent to Metro, Light Rail and MARC transit stations.

The State Center redevelopment project is a transit oriented development that reflects the goals of Governor O’Malley’s Smart, Green and Growing initiative.  Introduced in October 2008, the Smart, Green & Growing initiative was created to strengthen the state’s leadership role in fostering smarter, more sustainable growth and inspire action among all Marylanders to achieve a more sustainable future. The initiative brings together state agencies, local governments, businesses and citizens to create more livable communities, improve transportation options, reduce the state’s carbon footprint, support resource based industry, invest in green technologies, preserve valuable resource lands and restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

State Center is the second major public-private partnership to move forward under Governor O’Malley in the past year.  In November 2009, the State agreed to lease operation of Seagirt Marine terminal at the Port of Baltimore to Ports America Chesapeake.  The State maintains ownership of Seagirt while day to day operations and capital investments are now the responsibility of Ports America Chesapeake.  As part of the agreement, Ports America Chesapeake is now constructing a new 50-foot berth at Seagirt using private funds.  The new berth is critical to the future success of the Port of Baltimore as an expansion of the Panama Canal will bring larger ships to the US East Coast when completed in 2014.  In total, the Seagirt agreement will support 5,700 jobs.




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Baltimore is a city of crumbling infrastructure and schools closing because of decades of neglect in maintenance but we do have a Wall Street copy at Harbor East complete with plated sidewalk fixtures and a billion-dollar East Baltimore Hopkins Corporation campus all heavily funded with public money.

Public docks, public Port of Baltimore, and public land surrounding the harbor are all falling to public private partnerships that have the public paying for and maintaining infrastructure built for these corporate office campuses.  As this article shows, the money put forward in these developments offer little value to the city and as has happened in other cities-----like Detroit-----these development schemes based on global corporate businesses fall flat in all ways.

  • The mayor is quoted below promoting what everyone knows is not true about these developments---new jobs, new tax revenue---new amenities.

The entire development process is designed so that little tax revenue is paid and if it is the tax stays right around this development.  The jobs are abusive and poverty with government watchdogs saying that the Inner Harbor has lost over 100,000 jobs in these few decades along with all small business vendors pushed out of business to make way for global corporations that make all American cities look the same.  Tourists come to Baltimore to see the same businesses they have in their cities?  I THINK NOT. 

The comparison of Baltimore to Detroit is valid.  Building debt until the city goes bankrupt is a business model for Wall Street.


Harbor Point: Do we really need $80 million in bells and whistles? Opinion: The East Baltimore project is front-loaded with city-funded projects that needn't be started now.

Gerald Neily June 7, 2013 at 10:20 am

Artist’s rendering of Harbor Point, a $1 billion project that’s due to receive a hefty city subsidy.

Photo by: City of Baltimore


The press release issued this week by the Rawlings-Blake administration to justify its $107 million financing plan for Harbor Point presses all the usual buttons: “Like the Inner Harbor revitalization effort of 30 years ago, the Harbor Point project represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to grow Baltimore by attracting new jobs, new residents, new tax revenue, and new public amenities.”

But Harbor Point is nothing like the Inner Harbor. The latter was a gaping hole of abandoned piers and obsolete factories that needed to be filled, while Harbor Point is extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the city.

The press release promises “blight elimination.” But there is no blight to eliminate at this former site of a chromium-processing factory.

Harbor Point is literally a blank canvas, covered by an asphalt cap to contain buried factory wastes. Unlike most of Baltimore, everything at this 28-acre site is under control – and unoccupied by people or roadways or infrastructure that need to be cleared away.

Which means we don’t have to spend public money on its redevelopment until we’re good and ready.


Direct Public Money to Real Needs

Let me explain: only a relatively small amount of the proposed public financing is going for traditional infrastructure.


The mayor proposes just $23 million in TIF (tax increment) bonds for sidewalks, utilities and a bridge connecting Harbor Point with Harbor East, but well over half ($59 million) for five parks.

Parks are nice (though one wonders how many non-Harbor Point residents and office workers will use them). Let’s, though, build them when development justifies them.

Another $21 million is for the waterfront promenade. The press release misstates that the “promenade will connect Fells Point with Harbor East.” Wrong. The best pedestrian connection between those places already exists along Lancaster and/or Caroline Street.

Michael Beatty (left) listens to Mayor Rawlings-Blake extol his project at press conference yesterday. The conference was held on the cleared site, with the Harbor East skylight as a backdrop. (Photo by Mark Reutter)

The Harbor Point promenade will be a free-standing amenity that should be built when conditions warrant – not to fulfill some kind of perceived pedestrian demand or to add value for high-rent private office buildings.


Let’s Not Get Ahead of Development

So $80 million of the $107 million spending can be triggered by real-time reality, starting with the completion of the Exelon Tower, which the energy giant has committed itself to leasing regardless of what the city spends on parks and promenades.

The developer, Michael Beatty and his longtime financial benefactor, John Paterakis, are gambling on public subsidies to fill the gap between their ambitions and market reality.

Another rendering of the proposed development, biggest in Baltimore history. (Harbor Point Development)


The same game was played at their previous project, Harbor East, when the city allowed itself to pay for public improvements far ahead of  development (as well as subsidize with tax breaks the development itself).

The Harbor East promenade was torn up for the Four Seasons complex, and the walkway still hasn’t been rebuilt right.

On the other hand,  Morgan Stanley is currently occupying the Thames Street Wharf building – the only part of Harbor Point that’s been completed – without any public complaints about the lack of surrounding amenities.


Grand Plans Foiled Before


The city’s experience with the Harbor View development in South Baltimore is a perfect illustration of the problem of “front-loading” public assets onto private projects.

Back in the 1980s, Richard Swirnow planned a whole wall of high-rise residential buildings along Key Highway, which was approved by the city over the objections of a mostly enraged community.

Only one was actually built. The high-end waterfront residential market became oversaturated and the rest of the site was slowly built-out as townhouses.


With Harbor Point, the stakes would be much higher. The mayor’s press release summarizes a jigsaw puzzle of financial considerations with a bottom line of dubious accounting legitimacy: “average new City revenue per year (30 years), $19,623,928.”

This metric sweeps away the city’s recent history of development projects that have failed to meet their hype with a single word: “average.”

Another Detroit?

Perhaps the most comparable development plan to Harbor Point is Renaissance Center in Detroit. It, too, was hyped as Detroit’s savior, but was really just a massive isolated urban ego-trip that sapped all the city’s high-end development demand.

Detroit’s showcase Renaissance Center has unintended consequences for Motor City’s old downtown.

RenCen’s chronic vacancy eventually compelled General Motors to move its corporate headquarters there on its road to eventual bankruptcy and government bailout.

Harbor Point is better designed but equally isolated, with far poorer access and a far greater infrastructure budget.

RenCen took advantage of Detroit’s once powerful corporate sector – and then helped destroy that sector.

Aren’t There Higher Priorities?


Baltimore should be in no hurry to complete the promenade or stamp out alleged Harbor Point “blight.”

Instead, the mainstream development market should be encouraged to build up the Central Avenue corridor to Old Town, or to fill up vacant and underutilized downtown office buildings, or to turn around areas that are truly blighted like Westport and Poppleton.

There are plenty of needy neighborhoods and stalled projects that the mayor should address before throwing public money at what she described yesterday as one of the best real estate locations on the East Coast.

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March 14th, 2014

3/14/2014

0 Comments

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

NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND REALLY HATE WORKERS!



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

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

AN INJUSTICE FOR ONE WILL BECOME AN INJUSTICE FOR ALL!


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

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


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

Rally and March in Annapolis

Public · By Unite Here Local 7


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

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

    Why are we marching?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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



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


January 17, 2014 at 6:58 am

By Len Lazarick

Len@MarylandReporter.com

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

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

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

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

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

Unions unaware of the change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut made to balance budget, reduce structural deficit

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

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

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

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

________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Immigrants' Rights

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


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

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

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



  • December 27, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Targets

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

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

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

Seventy percent of the workers surveyed were foreign-born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying the Boss

There is an added dimension to Kim’s struggles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim’s is not an isolated case.

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

Cracking Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Room for Improvement

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

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

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

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


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March 08th, 2014

3/8/2014

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IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY CRIME AND VIOLENCE IS SO HIGH IN BALTIMORE-----LOOK BELOW AT HOW BAD PUBLIC POLICY IMPOVERISHES JUST TO ENRICH A FEW!

ALL OF OUR PUBLIC ASSETS ARE BEING HANDED TO RICH DEVELOPERS FOR NEXT TO NOTHING IN AREAS SLATED TO HAVE HIGH PROPERTY VALUE.  IF KEPT PUBLIC PROPERTY------THAT WOULD BE PUBLIC WEALTH.  EVERYONE SHOULD BE CONCERNED BECAUSE THIS IS NOT ONLY ABOUT GETTING THE WORKING CLASS OUT OF CITY CENTERS....

WOMEN AND CHILDREN ARE THE VICTIMS.

IT IS ABOUT TAKING PUBLIC LAND AND ASSETS THAT MIDDLE-CLASS TAXPAYERS BUILT.


The Obama Administration is privatizing all that is public faster than Bush and that includes the Housing Urban Development agency  HUD.  Federal policy sends all kinds of taxpayer money to dismantle public housing and projects with the idea that these are bad for the poor and communities.  This is likely true------concentrated poverty in these projects is not a good idea.  The problem is that there is no intention of providing any other opportunity and in fact, the policies are leaving even more people homeless and impoverished AND THE MONEY IS BEING FUNNELED INTO THESE CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS.

Below is a good article giving a long view of public housing policy. I include just the Obama years because we need to look at again, a neo-liberal saying they are going to do something progressive and not doing it.  So, with public housing like with fraud,......supposedly we cannot easily seek justice because the definitions are left vague.  OBAMA HAS LEFT PUBLIC HOUSING DISCRIMINATION VAGUE AS HE HAS IGNORED FRAUD. 

What I want to emphasize is that tons of Federal money is coming for public housing and being funneled into projects that are making the rich richer and doing nothing for the people paying the taxes.  Here in Baltimore, consolidation of real estate into the hands of a few is indeed aided by these funds and it is all illegal.  So, the low-income lose and the taxpayers lose. 

ALL GOES TO THE PEOPLE AT THE TOP.  WE NEED THAT MONEY BACK.  IT IS THE PUBLIC'S MONEY.

Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a
Landmark Civil Rights Law

 
 
by
Nikole Hannah-Jones
ProPublica,  Oct. 28,
2012, 11 p.m.




A 2009 internal HUD study found that many communities were not even bothering to complete the required fair housing paperwork when they applied for block grants.
In a sample of 70 applicants, 35 had not provided an "analysis of impediments" to fair housing, prompting HUD to conclude that they were "apparently not performed at all." Nearly all of the reports received were considered substandard, the review found.  A year later, investigators from the Government Accountability Office confirmed what civil rights advocates had long known:
HUD's system for ensuring compliance with the fair housing law was a sham.
GAO officials reviewed documents filed by 441 recipients of
block grants, a step HUD officials do not routinely take.


They found that about one-third of the fair housing materials were out of date. More than one in 10 hadn't been updated since the '90s. Communities in the Midwest and Northeast — the most-segregated regions of the country — performed
the worst.

The GAO dismissed the analyses of impediments to fair housing that some communities provided as worthless because of their "brevity and lack of content." Most did not offer time frames for when the communities would
eliminate barriers to integration or include the required signatures of the relevant elected officials.



Investigators noted that 25 recipients of block grants had filed no analysis, "raising questions about whether some jurisdictions may be receiving federal funds without preparing the documents required to demonstrate that they have taken steps to affirmatively further fair housing."


According to the GAO, HUD staffers in seven regions had read the key documents for just 17 of 275 block grant recipients. Efforts to ensure "the integrity of the AI process...were not common," the report said.

The GAO made a number of recommendations. But HUD didn't even adopt the simplest one: to require that grantees submit their analysis of impediments for HUD to review.
In interviews, many HUD officials acknowledged they have no idea how to enforce the provision for affirmatively furthering fair housing. Already overstretched, they focus on what is clear: the disability accommodations provision of the Fair Housing Act. It's simple, they say, to check off whether
an apartment door is wide enough for a wheelchair or if a parking lot has enough handicapped spots.


But compliance officers stumble when it comes to race and segregation.  One said she received little training on how to apply the 1968 act to block grant recipients. "The one week of training I was sent to, you focus on the civil rights law as a whole," she said. "You're not focused per se on
segregation." The official said she did not review broader issues such as the impact of discriminatory zoning "because I don't even know what they are."


Rolando Alvarado supervised fair housing enforcement for HUD in New Jersey for more than a decade. When asked to define "affirmatively furthering fair housing," he exhaled and then paused. Ten seconds passed.  "That is tricky. There is no exact regulation, it's a gray area," said Alvarado, who retired in 2009. "I've never seen anything that clearly defines
that in my time at HUD."


Alvarado said he relied on his staff to ensure enforcement of the mandate. But how could his subordinates enforce something he himself could not explain?
"You are right. I don't know," he said. "It was reliance on if staff had conducted enough investigations and compliance reviews they would have an inkling of what to look for."


Alvarado said he could not recall a single instance in which he challenged a community's assertions about its efforts to further fair housing. When it comes to these issues, he said, "You are basically taking them at their word."  After the Westchester settlement, in which the judge criticized the
department for failing to enforce the law, the word came down from HUD leaders that there should not be a recurrence. Officials say that directive was not accompanied by any training, additional staff or instructions on what practices
should be examined.


"The message is that we need to be more aggressive but absent the new rule, there is very little guidance as to what would constitute a failure to affirmatively further fair housing," said a senior fair housing official. "There's a car here and nobody knows how to drive it."



Trasvina promised Congress in January 2010 that by the end of the year the agency would release a rule requiring communities that receive money from the
agency to "promote integration." More than two years later, those regulations have not been issued. HUD has declined to say when they might appear or give a reason for the delay.



The focus of HUD's civil rights work appears to have veered away from race.  In March, the department issued a rule banning discrimination against gay and transgender people in HUD-assisted housing and by lenders receiving guarantees
from the Federal Housing Authority.

Asked what they are doing to fulfill the Fair Housing Act's mandates, HUD officials pointed to Joliet, Ill., where HUD has withheld block grant funds over the city's attempt to demolish a mostly black federally subsidized apartment complex. HUD also has withheld block grant money from Westchester County, which the Justice Department says has failed to live up to the terms of its settlement agreement.


Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the housing agency, said in an email that HUD "very nearly" cut off block grant money for Galveston, Texas, and threatened to do so in Delaware's Sussex County.  But other communities with serious questions about fair housing continue to receive federal housing dollars, and fair housing officials say the agency still
brushes civil rights concerns aside. One senior housing official pointed to New Orleans, which hasn't lost its block grant despite the Department of Justice lawsuit. "If that's not enough to reject a grantees' funding," he said. "Any finding from the fair housing office will not ever be sufficient."


Another example is Waukesha County, Wisc. HUD launched an investigation of the 90 percent-white county last year following a complaint from a fair housing group. The group accused the county of allowing its nearly all-white communities to block rental housing to keep out African Americans and Latinos from neighboring Milwaukee. African Americans and Latinos account for 57 percent of
the city's population.  Yet the agency treats Waukesha County no differently from racially integrated Montgomery County, which has a 30-year track record of placing affordable
housing in its most prosperous neighborhoods. Waukesha still receives its automatic influx of HUD dollars.


"It is fair to say, it is accurate to say, that the only situation in which HUD is doing anything effectively to affirmatively further fair housing are situations where there has been litigation," said Florence Wagman Roisman, a law professor at Indiana University. "Then it does as little as possible, as
grudgingly as possible."

Prospects for substantial change appear dim.



Obama administration officials say that if the president is re-elected, they will complete work on the long-delayed rules defining what it means to "affirmatively further fair housing."


At a private fundraising event in Florida in April, Mitt Romney said he would consider closing down HUD if he wins the election."I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them," he said. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad
was head of, that might not be around later."


Have you experienced discrimination under the Fair Housing Act?
Share your story with us.



ProPublica's Kirsten Berg contributed to this story.



_________________________________________-

NEO-LIBERALS HATE ALL WAR ON POVERTY AND NEW DEAL POLICY AS MUCH AS REPUBLICANS.  SO LABOR AND JUSTICE ARE BEING ATTACKED BY NEO-LIBERALS.  DO NOT BELIEVE THE TOKEN PROGRESSIVE BONES BEING THROWN.

What to do with public housing and the people they support.  Well, logic has it that you can demolish the high-rises with the Federal money and invest in low-income housing within all Enterprise Zones.  That is what should be happening.  All of those public housing are on property in the city centers that will become valuable as development continues so keeping them public.......a park, public community/recreation centers, etc are what public interest requires.  Yet, in Baltimore, all of this public land is going to developers.....again in large parcels to control all of how the community will be developed. MARKET-RATE IS THE THEME!!!


Below you see exactly what they intend to do in Baltimore and Maryland-----what this does is eliminate any future use of that property for the public AND IT KEEPS THE PRIVATE CORPORATION FROM PAYING PROPERTY TAXES ON THIS DEVELOPMENT.  In Baltimore, they will even get deferment on all other taxes and they will get tax breaks for remodeling the building.  It's like placing public garages under private buildings to have public subsidized private parking.  Remember, all of this public housing property will become high-end as development continues saving tons of money in property taxes.

EVEN IF YOU WANT TO BE RID OF LOW-INCOME PUBLIC HOUSING....THINK OF THE PUBLIC LAND INVESTMENT AND WHERE THESE PEOPLE GO----IT ALL CREATES THE ENVIRONMENT OF CRIME AND VIOLENCE AS PEOPLE LOSE JOBS AND HOMES.



New York Public Housing Land To Be Leased For Pricey Apartments

By MEGHAN BARR and JENNIFER PELTZ 
03/08/13 03:17 AM ET EST                                        
 
NEW YORK -- New Yorkers pay dearly for the privilege of living in one of the world's great cities. But would they shell out top dollar for an apartment on the grounds of a public housing project?


That scenario could play out across Manhattan under an unprecedented proposal by the city housing authority to lease out public housing land and allow developers to build market-rate apartment buildings – intended for much wealthier residents – on areas currently occupied by basketball courts, parking lots and outdoor plazas.



City Council Moves to Stall Land Leases at Public Housing
By 
MIREYA
NAVARRO

Published: October 10, 2013    
 
    
The New York City Council and a group of tenants sued
the
Bloomberg administration on Thursday over plans
to lease land in public housing developments for the creation of market-rate apartments.
  
   
 
The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in
Manhattan, stems from a long-running controversy over the
New York City Housing Authority’s proposal to
raise revenue for repairs and capital projects by allowing private developers to build on the grounds of eight public housing projects in Manhattan.
     
  


Housing officials have given developers a Nov. 18
deadline for proposing ideas — so-called expressions of interest — but it was unclear whether they would be able to select construction projects before the change in administration that will follow the November mayoral election.        

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the lawsuit is intended
to forestall any deals with developers before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s term is over. “The city has the ability to designate a developer and tie the hands of the incoming administration,” said Steven Banks, attorney-in-chief of the Legal Aid Society, which is representing the tenants. “The new administration would be without remedy.”       


Democrat Bill de Blasio, the leading candidate for
mayor, has not ruled out developing land owned by the housing authority, but he has said he favors building affordable housing, not market-rate units. The public housing system has more than 400,000 residents and $6 billion in unmet capital needs.       


The Council objected to being left out of the
decision-making regarding the plan to build on public housing grounds. In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs seek to have the city rescind the request for expressions of interest. They argue that under state law, housing officials have no authority to lease public housing land for high-income residents and that
they must submit their plan to the Council for approval
.       

“There’s still a need for more low- and middle-income
housing, and that should be the city’s priority,” said Rosie Mendez, who heads the Council’s committee on public housing.
       


In response to the lawsuit, the housing authority
issued a statement saying that it “has heard significant interest from developers and looks forward to receiving their proposals next month.”        

“It’s unfortunate that the City Council is attempting
to block a proposal that would generate significant revenue for the New York City Housing Authority — money that would go directly into developments and repairs for residents,” the statement said.




FEDERAL MONEY YET AGAIN FUNNELED TO THE SAME INVESTMENT FIRMS/DEVELOPERS GETTING TAX BREAKS FOR DEVELOPING IN UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES AND ALL THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THESE COMMUNITIES WILL BE DISPLACED.


What Rawlings-Blake and O'Malley with City Hall
are doing is privatizing all that is public.  Public employee unions are busted and pay is lowered to poverty.  This is what happened as MTA is privatized with VEOLA and it is what is being tried with longshoreman unions at the Port of Baltimore.  It is all union-busting and impoverishing of labor.  So, why are unions backing all of Maryland's neo-liberals every election rather than running labor and justice?



 The US Constitution protects equal opportunity and access in housing and education.  What Baltimore is doing is illegal because they not only ignore equal access, they try to pass laws that say 'we will accept Federal funding for development but not honor equal access and opportunity laws'.  They pretend they can do this and they cannot.  It is public malfeasance.

Below is  a good analysis of Baltimore's situation.  It is too long to copy but check it out.  I would just like to emphasize throughout is the disregard of real data and deliberate disregard to Rule of Law and adherence to Federal requirements.  This is important in getting the public's wealth back and hopefully helping those displaced with justice.  Breaking these laws is not only public malfeasance but fraud on the part of the developers knowingly failing to meet terms of Federal and State contracts.


September
2007
Volume 20, Number 4


What we think about, and what we’d like you to think
about

THE ABELL REPORT
Published as a community service by The Abell Foundation


Erroneous reporting leads to a
lack of public concern



“Baltimore Housing currently serves
over 40,000 residents in more than
14,000 housing units.” This statement
appears (as this study is being written) on
the city’s public housing website. HUD
also reports a similar number — 14,446.
But the true numbers of public housing
units being used in Baltimore are far
lower and can be found in the Housing
Authority’s most recent annual plan, as well
as City Hall’s Citistat Reports.
Nevertheless, the Housing Authority and
HUD continued to use these outdated
numbers in 2007. The HUD official
who oversees Baltimore’s housing
authority appeared unaware that as of
spring 2007, Baltimore only had 10,748
available units in its inventory (with
1,123 of them vacant).
The absence of accurate and consistent
reporting and the lack of analysis of
the loss of public housing has served as
a convenience in a political climate
where even a suggestion of building a
small number of public housing units
can cause a neighborhood uproar.

A lack of public
participation



Housing advocates have complained
of a lack of public input in the demolition
plans, despite federal law requiring
a housing authority to “conduct reasonable
outreach activities to encourage
broad public participation” in its annual
public housing plan.  At a sparsely
attended April 17, 2007 hearing on the
future of Baltimore’s public housing,
several advocates protested that they
found no public notice of the event, and
questioned why it wasn’t posted on the
agency’s website.

Housing officials said sufficient
notice was given when they advertised
in The Baltimore Sun and the Afro-
American in March and at the Enoch
Pratt Free Library. The Baltimore Sun
notice, however, was a tiny, one inch by
three- and three-quarter-inch ad buried
in the classified ads that ran for three
days, a month before the hearing.  During
the hearing, no copies of the 100-
page plan were available (though an
electronic copy was on HABC’s website),
and housing officials gave no
overview or public explanation for their
decision to demolish projects.  One
advocate accused housing officials of
trying to “circle its wagons” against
public participation and called the plan
“a roadmap for the continued decline of
public housing.”  Each of the eight
people testifying was given two minutes to speak. The hearing was over in a half hour.


__________________________________________



 Equally important for citizens of Baltimore is the
fact that Baltimore HUD is probably the most corrupt of all corrupt agencies in Baltimore and as such all kinds of red flags will go up with these public properties.  Keeping this property in city central that will become valuable as
development occurs is the only thing to do in public interest.  We could build multi-income housing, parks, public community centers with this public
land.  Since Baltimore HUD is corrupt, they will hand it off undeveloped for cheap to a connected investor who will make tons of money on this property when development of this area is finished.  See why it is public malfeasance.

The second part to this is the workers who represent a
dying middle-class in Baltimore with the attack of middle-class jobs and leaving Baltimore families desperate and poor.  Extended families depend on these strong
jobs and it is this policy of killing Living Wage jobs that give us Baltimore's high crime and violence culture as people turn to drug dealing et al to survive. All for no good reason.

The City of Baltimore loses billions of dollars
to fraud and corruption and rebuilding public justice in the city would fill the  city's coffers and allow for a healthy public sector.  Handing all that is public to private ownership or public private partnerships is what fuels all the fraud and corruption.  We will need to investigate these sales to assure this is not yet another example of public malfeasance.  You see, these residents know the history of these promises to the underserved....the Federal money is used but none of the requirements to help the low-income are carried through.

Workers nervous about layoffs as Baltimore Housing Authority sells off  buildings Residents say they want protections from private developers in writing

Below you see the other side of what this privatization brings-----more public sector jobs
lost with the prospect of private jobs paying nothing.


The Lakeview Towers
  on Druid Park Lake Drive are among the first of 22 housing complexes to be 
offered for sale under a plan by the housing authority.
   

 
                      
(Kim  Hairston, Baltimore Sun / August 10, 2005)            
                                                               
 
Union officials warned Thursday that as many as 200 maintenance workers and  building monitors at Baltimore's public housing properties could lose  their jobs under a plan intended to infuse the buildings with private money.


Employees such as maintenance mechanic Lucky Crosby Sr., who has worked for  the
Housing  Authority of Baltimore City for a decade, say they took the jobs with the  understanding that the pay was relatively low, but the work was secure.


"By working for the Housing Authority, we joined the credit union so we could buy homes that we have to finance," said Crosby, 46, of Sandtown-Winchester.  "We  bought cars that we have to finance."


Housing Commissioner Paul T. Graziano acknowledged that some jobs might be  lost as 22 of the agency's 28 properties are sold to developers over the next 
two years. He said the Housing Authority is keeping some positions vacant and  filling others with temporary workers to reduce the potential number of 
layoffs.  Graziano said the agency is encouraging the developers to hire some of the  workers, and to keep them apprised of the latest information as soon as it's 
available.


"This is a very large change, a massive change in the way we're doing  business, and I understand change does create anxiety," Graziano said. "We're  trying to provide whatever assurances we can." 
The Housing Authority has identified 11 developers to buy the buildings.  Several of them declined to comment Thursday.


The federal government is offering tax credits to developers who buy and renovate public housing.
Officials say the effort is intended to improve the lives of low-income  Americans. But in the case of the maintenance workers, Anthony Coates said, it's 
doing just the opposite.


Coates, president of AFSCME Local  647, said members who lose their jobs could lose their homes.


"We're the working poor," he said. The maintenance workers, who earn between about $15 and $20 an hour under  their most recent contract, want the Housing Authority to tell them how many  workers face layoffs, Coates said.

He said knowing the scope of the layoffs is especially important for the  older maintenance workers on staff, who may find it harder to get new jobs.

Coates accused the agency of stalling contract negotiations. Senior housing 
officials rejected the accusation, and said a meeting is scheduled for next  week. They said inclement weather forced them to postpone some meetings.


Anthony Scott, executive director of the Housing Authority, said the federal 
program has unfolded rapidly. The Housing Authority began preparing its 
application to the
U.S.  Department of Housing and Urban Development over the summer, submitted it in  October and found out it had been approved in
December.

"We informed our employees as quickly as we could," Scott said. Graziano said the agency already has a "significant number of vacancies," but declined to say how many.

It's "a moving target," he said.

On top of that, he said, at least 10 percent turnover is expected each  year.  He said Housing Authority workers would be attractive employees for the 
developers

______________________________________________
 Neo-liberals are working for control of all real estate by a few.  The good news is that most of the wealth lost to the middle-class is through fraud and needs to come back.  Think of the tens of millions of homes caught in the subprime loan fraud and foreclosed....many families need these homes replaced.  So, the middle-class is still the middle-class.....just waiting for justice!

If you notice the list below include the same financial and investment firms that created and profited from the massive subprime mortgage frauds and indeed, they all still owe trillions in total fraud.  We can rebuild all public housing by simply recovering the fraud.  Yet, the plan was to steal the homes through fraud and then hand all the city center property to those same people and that is what these Enterprise Zone and Public Housing deals do......with taxpayer subsidy as the cherry on top!

THE LOW-INCOME LOSE, THE TAXPAYERS LOSE, AND THE MIDDLE/WORKING CLASS LOSE ALL TO NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT.



10 Largest Private Equity Real Estate Firms               
         by
Andy
Macalaster
 • February
21, 2010    
 

The PERE 30 (from Private Equity Real Estate Magazine) revealed that the top 30 real estate private equity firms raised $211.9 billion over the past five years, up from $190 billion as calculated by last year’s ranking. Listed are the
top 10 largest real estate private equity firms.


As a note: the top two largest firms raised $25.6 billion and $20.15 billion respectively in dedicated real estate funds between January 2004 and April,
2009. Together the pair raised a fifth of all the direct-investment capital secured by the world’s 30 largest real estate private equity firms.



10. Westbrook Capital Partners
Westbrook has raised and invested $10 billion of equity in over $35 billion of real estate transactions in major markets throughout the world. Westbrook’s investment equity is
committed by a broad base of institutional investors, which includes public and private pension funds, endowments, foundations, and financial institutions.


9. The Carlyle Group
The Carlyle Group is one of the world’s largest private equity firms, with more than $87.9 billion under management with funds across four investment disciplines (buyouts, growth
capital, real estate and leveraged finance). Carlyle has committed more than $3.6 billion of its own capital to its funds.

8. Tishman Speyer
Tishman Speyer has acquired, developed and operated over 325 projects totaling over approximately 116 million square feet and more than 92,000 residential units,
and a property portfolio of US$50.2 billion internationally.


7. LaSalle Investment Management
LaSalle Investment manages approximately $39.9 billion (as at Q3 2009) of private and public property equity investments. Their client base includes public and private
pension funds, insurance companies, governments, endowments and private individuals from across the globe.


6. Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners
Lehman Brothers Real Estate Partners has raised over $10 billion in capital over the last five years with a total of $44 billion in transactions among 1,150 properties.


5. Beacon Capital Partners
Since its inception in 1998, Beacon Capital Partners has sponsored six investment vehicles representing over
$8.5 billion aggregate equity capital from various endowments, foundations and pension funds. Beacon Capital Partners was established after the predecessor public company, Beacon Properties Corporation (a New York Stock Exchange listed
company), merged with Equity Office Properties Trust in a transaction valued at $4 billion.


4. Colony Capital
Colony Capital is a private, international investment firm based in Los Angeles, California. The company focuses on real estate opportunities around the world either on its own, through funds run by the company, or in joint ventures. The company is run by billionaire Tom Barrack.


3. Goldman Sachs Real Estate Principal Investment Area

The Real Estate Principal Investment Area (REPIA) manages a series of global opportunistic real estate funds, known as the Whitehall Funds, and other niche products. REPIA, through the Whitehall Funds, offers Goldman clients the opportunity to co-invest in real estate and real estate related assets
worldwide.


2. Morgan Stanley Real Estate Investing
Morgan Stanley Real Estate has the longest uninterrupted real estate industry presence of any Wall Street firm. MSREI has raised over $20 billion in capital in the last five years and has completed over $58 billion in transactions.



1. The Blackstone Group
Blackstone’s real estate fee earning assets under management totaled $23.7 billion as of September 30, 2009.
Assets include office, hotel, healthcare, retail and multi-family properties around the world.  Blackstone has the world’s leading hotel portfolio, as well as one of the largest portfolios of office buildings in the United States.
Blackstone’s real estate group currently has over $12 billion of equity capital available for investment, the largest pool of capital for real estate investments available today.


For a full list of the top 30 real estate private equity firms with an executive summary click
here.

_________________________________________

Below you see reverse mortgages as a tool to make sure homeownership does not go beyond this generation for most of the middle/working class.  Land ownership is for the gentry you know!  Reverse mortgages are not always bad.  We had our mother's retirement supplemented by reverse mortgage.  The problem these least several years is that people are not having the money for retirement because it was stolen and not because they did not save.  These are the people being forced into reverse mortgage now. 

THESE HOMES SHOULD NOT BE LOST TO FAMILIES AS FRAUD AND DAMAGES HAVE NOT BEEN RECOVERED TO THE PUBLIC. 

Remember as well, Obama's Administration is deliberately allowing a manipulated inflation rate of near zero lower all of the public's COLAs by hundreds of dollars.  So seniors and vets owning homes are losing hundreds of dollars in monthly payments because of what is a 'manipulated' inflation rate.  Never in the history of public programs has the COLAs not been 3-5% as inflation never has been lower.  Please look at my blogs on faulty inflation data if you cannot see that what you are buying at the store is costing much more.

Low-income people are being hit from every direction in fraud and corruption making sure they do not have what they need for retirement and neo-liberals are in office to see this happens.  It is not only republicans.....it is neo-liberals running as democrats!


Sun Aug 18, 2013 at 06:45 PM PDT


Reverse mortgages: The final blow killing middle class
wealth

byEgberto WilliesFollow forDaily Kos


 Many fellow Americans that have worked their entire lives, weathered several
recessions and depressions, put their children through school, helped many in
need, and faithfully paid their mortgages for decades are now being taken advantage of once again. Most have followed all the rules necessary to be considered fiscally responsible, yet because of "legal fraud" by the financial sector and policies effected by purchased politicians, their years in retirement
will be compromised.


The Plutocracy, the one percent has walked away with a large percentage of their 401Ks, their SEPs, and to some extent their financial security. Because of stagnant or falling real wages, much of the working middle class
have maxed out on their credit in the attempt to maintain their standard of living. For a Plutocracy that feeds on perpetual growth, from where will it feed now? An old and well-crafted financial instrument known as the reverse mortgage is being marketed on steroids to a baby boomer population.


Before any reader of this article that may have already taken out a reverse mortgage gets upset, please note that it is understood that for many this is the
only option left. That said, every American should be fighting for a system that allows all the ability to build a nest egg that can be transferred to the next generation.

 Back in 2010, Sen. Fred Thompson was a spokesman for AAG and was pushing their government back reverse mortgages. I was writing
my book when the
commercial came on and I wrote the following in a chapter right then.
While taking a short coffee break from writing this book I saw former Republican Senator Fred Thompson, an AAG spokesman hawking reverse mortgages. He
says:
“Hi folks, I am Fred Thompson. Now like me you probably heard a lot about
reverse mortgages but weren’t quite sure how they worked or whether they would
be the right financial solution for you. Well take my word for it and hundreds
of thousands of other Americans who have used the Government Insured reverse
mortgage as a safe effective financial tool. If you are 62 year or older and own
your own home, give AAG a call and find out how a reverse mortgage can help you.
I am extremely proud to be associated with AAG, a national reverse mortgage
lender that is helping seniors overcome their financial worries and live the
lives they’ve dreamed. Why don’t you find out more by calling AAG today? Find
out how much call you may qualify for today.”



My first thought was how could a former Senator, a senior, a person who likes to tout morality be so callous to entice the elderly to splurge their wealth away. Most Americans have a large portion of their wealth in their homes. Having
some wealth to transfer to one’s offspring helps the next generation to the next financial level.


Unfortunately, yet another financial instrument designed to use the ignorance of the average American citizen’s knowledge of our economic system to donate
their money up the wealth tree to the rich. At the end of the reverse mortgage’s term, the elderly is left without an asset to transfer to their offspring at the time of their death.


Ironically as this piece is being written Fred Thompson is back on with the 2013 version of his "working middle class pilfering" commercial.  The most deceptive part of the ad is stating that the owner of the house retains ownership of the home. You cannot own something that you cannot give to
someone free and clear. Even more ironic is that Thompson, a professed small government conservative, is pushing a product that depends on the good faith and
capital of the United States government.


Most Americans amass most of their wealth within their homes. Each generation in a responsible family is better off when the previous generation wills their assets forward. Reverse mortgages are yet another financial instrument that
stunts the growth of the middle class by encouraging home owners to extract the capital out of their homes and use it as a supplement to their retirement or to simply splurge. Inasmuch as most reverse mortgages are federally regulated,
their upfront costs are very high. These costs amount to free cash for the bank and mortgage insurance companies, your money transferred to them for a marginal service.


The big dirty secret is that reverse mortgages, like student loans pre-Obama, are nothing but a no-risk gift to the bankers, a wealth transfer engine from the masses to a select few. When the "owner" of the home dies, the government pays
the bank any difference between the amount owed (interest plus principal) less the sale price of the home. If the heirs want to keep the home, they must pay the loan off in full. If the amount owed is more than the value of the home, the
heirs must pay 95 percent of what is owed to the bank with the government paying
the rest. What is the reason for the bank being in the transaction? It is there simply to extract from the government and the homeowner. They have absolutely nothing at risk for the profits they make.

Reverse mortgages mask a systemic problem that affects the American worker, a backward and inhumane retirement system. Every American worker makes a vibrant
economy possible by providing 40, 50 or more years of work, taxes, and spending. It is appalling that a worker is incapable of having Social Security capable of providing a decent living. No one should have to deplete all of their assets to
survive.


The trajectory in this country has been that the wealth and income of the very few at the top grows faster than the growth of the economy as a whole. This means that some of that growth is directly coming out of the pockets of the
working middle class in the form of lower wages, extractions from the government (tax dollars, interest payments, etc.), reverse mortgages, higher tuitions as states lower taxes, commercial student loans, etc.
This is an unsustainable path
and it is leading to a country where the vast majority of citizens will have no assets.
They will be functionally indentured servants. They will be nothing but a commodity, a unit of work and service.


Wake up America. Taking this country back from the Plutocracy will require education, resolve and action.
Taking this country back will entail taking back what was stolen through well designed redistribution mechanism that foments a vibrant working middle class.



0 Comments

February 10th, 2014

2/10/2014

0 Comments

 
WHEN NEO-LIBERALS SAY 'SUSTAINABILITY' THEY MEAN....NOW THAT WE HAVE ALL THE MONEY.....EVERYTHING PUBLIC HAS TO GO!!!



As we know, big investors are dumping the bonds and heading to gold investments as the bond market is ready to implode.  So what do we see below as a result?

PENSIONS ARE BEING THROWN INTO THE BOND MARKET TO KEEP IT AFLOAT JUST A LITTLE LONGER BEFORE THE COMING ECONOMIC CRASH.

Remember, in 2007 pensions were taken from the then safe bond market and placed into the stock market as it was ready to collapse causing pensions to lose 1/2 their value.  Mind you....these pension-fund managers, whether public or private, know these are bad investments as does the public officials involved in allowing it.  This coming crash will take all the value again from pensioners as big private investors run and insure against losses with Credit Default Swaps.
  The entire bubble was manufactured with the intent to blow up the bond market with sovereign and municipal bond debt -----THE PUBLIC SECTOR------taking the hit.

Bonds are low because the market is ready to crash and that is not the same as a simple low in a normal stock cycle.

Pensions Sell Stocks to Buy Bonds

By Roben Farzad January 24, 2014


Coming off a year when the broad U.S. stock market enjoyed a 30 percent gain, investors and financial advisers are struggling to determine the most appropriate portfolio asset allocation consistent with their tolerance for risk, says Andrew Clinton, president of Clinton Investment Management, in Stamford, Conn. Pension funds, in particular, are striving to lock in the outsize gains they have enjoyed over the past few years in the booming debt and equity markets. To do so, they are going against the broader fund-flow trend by selling equities and shifting money to fixed income. Deutsche Bank (DB) forecasts that pensions will liquidate about $150 billion in equities this year alone to buy bonds with maturities of 10 years or longer.

“It’s only logical,” says Clinton. “Pensions struggling with underfunded status need to lock in the lift of the past couple of years. From a risk-adjusted perspective, equities, for all their recent outperformance, are nearly four times as volatile as municipal bonds. Pension managers are in a different dialogue than everything you hear now about people rotating out of stocks, etc.”

Clinton believes this asset reallocation is likely to last for years. As for domestic equities, which are near their all-time high: They are their costliest compared with government debt in three years. The Standard & Poor 500-stock index’s profits as a percentage of the index’s price is just under 3 percentage points higher than the yield for 10-year government notes, the smallest premium since March 2011.

Video: Stocks vs. Bonds vs. Commodities: Where to Invest? In the third quarter, U.S. pension funds, which have assets of $16 trillion, swapped out of equities and into bonds at the fastest clip in five years, data compiled by the Federal Reserve show. According to Matt Robinson of Bloomberg News, they bought $117 billion of debt on an annualized basis and offloaded $135 billion of stocks. The 100 biggest corporate pension plans thinned their deficits by a net $319 billion, according to consultancy Milliman; they are now 95 percent funded, compared with a low of 77 percent two years ago.

“It makes sense,” says Michael Gayed of Pension Partners in Manhattan. “Rebalancing to target weights is a time-tested approach to enhancing longer-term returns--forcing you to buy low and sell high.” He says the “Great Rotation” is presently, at the margin, from stocks back to bonds.


______________________________________
This is the reason the Spanish citizens are marching in the street.  Their pensions are being eliminated because TROIKA payments are being made by Spanish leaders by the citizen's public assets.  It is incredible as Spain is one of the hardest hit with fraud and corruption.  They had all that debt created by leaders tied with Wall Street and DeutschBank with development that was not deeded.....money simply spent to move it to the top.  This is what is happening with US pensions as well as they are moved to the bond market ready to implode!

'Retiring' The Debt: Spain Drains Pension Fund To Prop Up Bonds

Jan. 14, 2013 9:33 AM ET  |  Includes: EWP Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. (More...)

Last week, Spain's Treasury raised $5.82 billion euros at auction in the country's first debt sale of the year; this was well above even the upper end of the target range. The auction, which the Wall Street Journal described as 'robust,' was enough to drive yields on Spanish 10-year notes below 5% for the first time in 10 months.

The Treasury in Madrid sold three bonds, one maturing in 2015, one maturing in 2018, and a 2026 note. Yields were down across the maturities compared with the last time the notes were sold and, in the case of the 2026 note, compared with where it traded in the secondary market. The consensus, which of course is somewhat justifiable, is that the successful auction indicates demand for Spanish debt isn't going to dry up anytime in the very near future. Here's Annalisa Piazza, a fixed income strategist quoted by the Wall Street Journal:

Today's Spanish auction suggests that market appetite for euro-zone periphery's debt remains solid despite uncertainties regarding the request for a bailout and eventual activation of the European Central Bank's Outright Monetary Transactions.

The problem for Spain in 2013, however, is that two major sources of demand for the country's debt are likely to be largely unavailable in the coming year. In a rather disconcerting piece published on January 3, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Spain has now spent over 90% of its Social Security Reserve Fund buying its own debt. Just to reiterate: Spain has spent pretty much the entirety of its pension fund on its own bonds.

There are three obvious problems here. First, this means that the fate of pensions in Spain is now hopelessly intertwined with the fate of Spanish government bonds, a fact that doesn't inspire much confidence, given the market for periphery sovereign debt in 2012. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal notes that the decision to invest the Social Security Reserve Fund's cash in Spanish government bonds violates a Spanish government decree which states that the fund can only purchase securities "of high credit quality and a significant degree of liquidity." This is terribly ironic given that if anyone should know that Spanish government bonds are not of the highest quality and are certainly not highly liquid, it's the Spanish government.

__________________________________________
Keep in mind that the California pension fund was found to be the worst for fraud and corruption in investments the last economic crash.  Tons of lawsuits for bad investments bringing little back as 'settlements' were just as bad in pension claims as Wall Street financial fraud and the US Justice Department. 

Here we see California pensions back in the action of losing money.  Keep in mind that corporate stocks have soared through this BULL market....mergers and acquisitions from free money by the FED made corporations rich.....yet pensions are again dying on the vine because they are invested in markets that are ready to implode.


Keep in mind that if the US Justice Department had brought back all of the fraud lost to pensions in 2008 and all that had been invested in the BULL market these few years....pensions would be flush.  Rather, neo-liberals deliberately placed pensions into investments they knew would fail and now pretend these pensions are unsustainable.

As this article shows.....this was a national plan by neo-liberals to dismantle public sector pensions and just as Rawlings-Blake is ready to throw Baltimore's pensions into the market as 401Ks and O'Malley sends teacher's union pensions to localities knowing localities cannot pay....this pension dismantling was planned and it is all illegal!

California teachers’ pensions sink further into debt
By Kevin Martinez
27 November 2013

A new report released by the California Public Policy Center on November 12 reported that the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) added $4 billion to its unfunded pension obligations for the 2012 fiscal year.

CalSTRS, the largest teachers’ pension fund in the United States, collected $5.8 billion from employees and employers last year. Of this, $4.7 billion was considered a “normal contribution,” while $1.1 billion was used to pay unfunded liabilities, which by 2012 were estimated to be $71 billion in debt. As a result, plans to dismantle the pension fund in the name of fiscal solvency are being aggressively developed.

The study shows that the so-called “catch up” payment should have been 7 times higher based on unfunded liability payback terms recommended by Moody’s Investor Services in April. The study also shows that if the rate of return projection drops to 6.2 percent, the unfunded liabilities recalculate to $107.8 billion and the catch-up payment increases to $9.6 billion, assuming a rate of return of 6.2 percent. Because of overly optimistic forecasts, the study estimates that CalSTRS actually increased its debt in 2012 by $4 billion.

Should CalSTRS lower its rate of return projections, its funded ratio of 67 percent will fall dramatically.
The dependency on stock market profits thus sets the stage for volatility, even more indebtedness and, ultimately, privatization. While in Detroit, with President Obama’s backing, banks are using the bankruptcy courts to tear up pensions and privatize city services, California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown has pursued similar results by signing a pension “reform” last year which demands workers pay more toward their own pensions and work many more years before they collect it.

The corporate media is supporting the argument that there will be no money to fund pensions in another 30 years. This is the same strategy used to argue for the dismantling of Social Security and other basic entitlements. The claim is being made that pension enhancements from 1999 are responsible for the unsustainable obligations, when in actuality calculations were based on optimistic Wall Street investment projections. Now, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, these same financial forces are trying to justify a “take back” of benefits.

In San Jose, Democratic Mayor Chuck Reed is being touted for his work on pension “reform.” After a referendum was passed last year, the city will now force current employees to contribute up to 16 percent toward their pensions or switch over to an even more expensive private plan, and new workers will have a pension that pays even less, while they are required to contribute half toward their pensions.


Plans for the dismantling of these funds are clearly well advanced. In addition to Governor Brown’s “reform” and various municipal initiatives, powerful lobbyists are pursuing similar plans which would ensure workers’ loss of hard-fought, essential survival benefits.

One such initiative is the so-called Pension Reform Act of 2014, proposed by the Coalition for Fair and Sustainable Pensions, made up of a group of mayors from cities with similar problems (San Jose, Vallejo, San Bernardino). Based on San Jose Mayor Reed’s brutal attack on municipal workers’ retirement, the plan, according to its web site, “would amend the California Constitution to give government agencies clear authority to negotiate changes to existing employees’ pension or retiree healthcare benefits on a strictly going-forward basis.” In essence, it’s open season for the demolition of pension benefits.


The premise that these funds, including CalSTRS, are going bankrupt, is a lie. First of all, workers have paid their whole lives into these funds, making it their money and no else’s. Secondly, while the banks and major corporations were bailed out during the crash and continue to be supported to the tune of $85 billion a month, no one in the political establishment is arguing for pensions to be rescued, although these funds have also invested billions in the same “free market.”

Lastly, there is plenty of money to be found. California is home to more billionaires than anywhere else in the world. One out of nine of the world’s billionaires reside there. The total combined wealth of California’s billionaires amounts to $1 trillion, nearly the total GDP of countries like South Korea or Mexico.

While in the post-war era the US economy was based on industrial production and pension fund operations were regulated in order to ensure a degree of stability, now the economy has been financialized and pension fund portfolios rise and fall with the gyrations of the stock market. Not only are they exposed to financial crises in the US, but to international fluctuations as well, such as the European debt crisis or derivatives markets. According to CalSTRS’s website, the portfolio invests over 56 percent of its assets into global equity, 12 percent into real estate, and another 12 percent into private equity funds.

The situation for workers is now so desperate that many have to work until they are elderly to get a decent pension. According to a recent poll by Harris Interactive, 48 percent of middle-class Americans don’t think they have enough money saved for a comfortable retirement and a full one-third think they will work “until at least 80.”

The poll also found that more than half of the people said that paying monthly bills comes before saving for retirement. More than 4 out of 10 Americans say that saving for retirement and paying their bills at the same time is not possible.

For their part, the California Teachers Association (CTA) has been instrumental in the implementation of the pension “reform.” It has been complicit with the Democrats in supporting these initiatives to dismantle pension funds. All it asks for is a seat at the table.

On the CTA website, under the headline, “Where we stand on Teachers’ Retirement,” they write on the estimated $56 billion shortfall that “this does not have to be paid overnight. Like a mortgage, this is an amount that will need to be closed over a 30-year period.” The CTA does not bother to explain how, because, in essence, it agrees that teachers will have to pay for the shortfall by increasing their contributions to the pension fund.

Moreover, the CTA supported Prop. 30, which promised to restore funding to education at the expense of thousands of teachers being laid off and no budget cuts rescinded. The CTA also supports Common Core, which tailors school curriculum to the demands of big business.

In related developments, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) is also reporting $340 billion in liabilities with only $260 billion in assets as of September 2013. A 2011 study by Joe Nation, a former Democratic state legislator and professor at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, estimated that the real number is closer to $170 billion in unfunded pension obligations, not $80 billion as previously assumed.

According to Nation, CalPERS uses an overly optimistic formula to calculate returns on investments averaging 7.5 percent annual growth. A more realistic figure would be 5 to 6 percent. Even with this model, both CalSTRS and CalPERS are expected to run out of funds by 2043.

CalPERS, like its CalSTRS counterpart, is intimately involved in Wall Street investments. As of April, the $263 billion fund was 65 percent invested into “growth investment” (i.e. stocks), with 52 percent in public equity, 12 percent in private equity, and 8 percent in real estate. For every dollar paid to CalPERS, 66 cents comes from “investment earnings,” 21 cents from CalPERS employers, and 13 cents from CalPERS members. This last figure is likely to increase if the ruling class continues its policies unabated.

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Below you see a LOL comment from the last economic benefactor of massive corporate fraud.  As people reading my blog know I have these four years shouted that inflation was already high and that the FED was simply pretending/hiding it in order to justify all that FREE MONEY FROM THE FED.   They all knew they were creating huge inflation and that when the bond market imploded the inflation would create what will be a Great Depression.  This is not hyperbole ......it is coming and deliberate.

Remember, the investment firms for the rich have protected their wealth from this coming catastrophe....investment in real estate and gold with little in the bond or stock market.  See why they need to move pensions into these markets as they pull out....just as they did in 2008!

IT IS ALL PLANNED AND ILLEGAL!


Either way, I think we're all best served to heed the words of John Paulson, the preeminent hedge fund manager who oversees $14 billion in assets: "By the time inflation becomes evident, gold will probably have moved, which implies that now is the time to build a position."

What Inflation Could Look Like in 2014
By Jeff Clark, Senior Precious Metals Analyst

Most economists, especially those from the mainstream, will tell you that inflation is widely expected to remain benign for the foreseeable future. And for those who think it could climb higher, it's usually because they think it should be higher. History has a message for them: be careful what you wish for.

There are plenty of examples in history showing that once inflation takes hold, it can quickly spiral out of control. That's the danger we face now. Here's what I mean…

A recent article about sudden inflation by Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow of economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and a best-selling author, provides some examples from the past century of US inflation that was at first subdued but then abruptly rocketed to alarming levels. I put them into a chart so you could see how quickly inflation rose within just two years from "benign" levels. I then made some projections for us today based on these historical examples.

According to Shlaes, US inflation was 1% in 1915 (based on an earlier version of the CPI-U). Over just two years, it hit 17%. As she states, it happened because the Treasury "spent like crazy on the war, creating money to pay for it…"

Given the fact that our spending and money-printing is now out of control, I projected what our inflation rate would be if we matched the inflation rates of these time periods. The first striped bar to the right represents what the CPI would register if we matched the 1915-1917 rise. Inflation would hit 19% by 2014. (Yes, the CPI has been tinkered with many times, but this is at least what "unofficial" or "authentic" inflation would register.)

In 1945, the official inflation rate was 2%. It accelerated to 14% in 24 months. If we matched this percent rise, we'd hit 15% by 2014 (middle striped bar)..

And the example that kicked off the greatest bull market in gold and silver, the early 1970s. The CPI stood at 3.2% in 1972, a level close to ours today. It soared to 11% just two years later. Mimicking this rise, the third striped bar shows we'd also be at 11% in 2014. (Shadow Stats says we're already at 10% based on 1980 methodology, so from this level we'd hit 17% in 24 months.)


Could we really have inflation that high within two years? Consider the following:

  • Fox Business reported on March 7 that "wages grew much more quickly at the end of last year than originally estimated…" This is an important data point because most economists believe you can't have higher inflation without rising wages.
  • Commercial and industrial loans have risen 14% year over year, and business and consumer spending are in an uptrend.
  • Home-building permits are at their highest point since October 2008. Existing home sales fell 0.9% last month, but that's after January sales were up 4.6%.
     
  • Jobless claims are coming down, retail sales gained the most in five months, and auto sales were up 16% last month. One report I read stated that we've had 24 consecutive weeks of stronger US data.
If the economy continues to improve and more money is sloshing through the system, it's easy to see how inflation could grab hold. Yet, if you understand Austrian economics, you'll look beyond how the mainstream views inflation and to its root cause: monetary debasement.

  • The US monetary base stands at $2.72 trillion, a 168% increase since October 2008.
  • The national debt in the US has risen by a whopping $4.9 trillion just since Obama took office. It now stands at $15.5 trillion.
  • The US budget deficit this year is projected to be over $1.3 trillion, an obscene amount that exceeds the entire annual budget of just 20 years ago.
  • According to ISI Group, there have been an incredible 122 "stimulative policy initiatives" from central banks around the world over the past seven months.
Remember, in these historical examples, inflation was initially low and therefore off everyone's radar. But government tinkering with the monetary system lit the spark that led to a sudden and rapid rise in inflation. It caught many off guard, just like I suspect it would now. Don't think there are no consequences to our unwise fiscal and monetary course; a potentially ugly tipping point is more likely than not at some point.

Given the abuse most fiat currencies are undergoing around the world today, coupled with obscene amounts of deficit spending, I think gold should be viewed not just as a potential moneymaker but as protection against the rabid inflation that will invariably damage our economy and dilute our pocketbooks.
If you think deflation is next, I'll accept that argument – for a time – if you accept mine, that the Fed would almost certainly panic at another deflationary event and print to the max. This is why we're convinced that inflation, à la currency dilution, is inevitable. (Harry Dent, best-selling author of The Great Crash Ahead, is convinced deflation poses our biggest economic threat, while Currency Wars author James Rickards believes inflation is the real danger. You can hear them debate the issue – and participate as a member of the audience – during the Inflation-Deflation Face-Off program at the upcoming Casey Research Recovery Reality Check Summit.)

To those of you who say gold hasn't always kept up with inflation, don't kid yourself about what it would do in a highly inflationary environment: it would surely climb like it did in the 1970s. And those "productive assets" Warren Buffett prefers over gold? They would have a difficult time raising the prices of their products quickly enough to keep up with a rapidly escalating CPI. Gold may not perfectly track inflation when it's low, but it is precisely a high-inflation environment where it serves one of its core purposes.

You may think high inflation is further away than 2014, but don't dismiss the fact that it can happen suddenly. And keep in mind the possibility that a sudden shift in inflation – especially inflation expectations – could be the spark for a mania in precious metals. I can easily see this being the catalyst that finally pushes the greater public into our sector, causing a paradigm shift that eventually sends it into a bubble.


Either way, I think we're all best served to heed the words of John Paulson, the preeminent hedge fund manager who oversees $14 billion in assets: "By the time inflation becomes evident, gold will probably have moved, which implies that now is the time to build a position."

We agree. As we stated in the February BIG GOLD, if 10% of your total investable assets (i.e., excluding equity in your primary residence) aren't held in various forms of gold and silver, we think your portfolio is at risk. And as Doug Casey reminded us last week, "Anyone who thinks they have any measure of financial security without owning any gold – especially in the post-2008 world – is either ignorant, naïve, foolish, or all three."

This is the time to accumulate, while gold and silver prices are below their peaks. Buy a little every month and store it in a safe place. And for even better bargains, look to the undervalued stocks, which I would argue offer better protection against inflation than most other equity investments since their cash flow will climb commensurate with gold and silver prices. We identified the two best stocks for new money right now in the current issue of BIG GOLD, and you can get the brand-new pick from International Speculator – an African company that has built its first gold mine and is already working on its second.


If we match the inflation rates seen several times in the recent past, what will your savings be worth in a few years? We'll have lots to worry about in a high-inflation climate, but our purchasing power can be protected by owning gold.

________________________________________________
Mainstream media pretended that the economy was on its way to recovery each year even as they knew it was being positioned to implode.  That is why you and I did not know anything and it is why I am a blogger today....so I will know what is happening and share it with you!  It is true we cannot stop this....but all we need to do is

REINSTATE RULE OF LAW AND REBUILD WHITE COLLAR CRIMINAL AGENCIES TO RECOVER ALL THIS CORPORATE FRAUD.....EASY PEASY.  WHEN GOVERNMENT SUSPENDS RULE OF LAW, THEY SUSPEND STATUTES OF LIMITATION!



THE 1% ARE READY FOR THIS NEXT CRASH THAT WILL TAKE ALL PENSIONS AND PUBLIC SECTOR ASSETS WITH IT.  HEAVILY LEVERAGED CREDIT BOND DEBT IN MARYLAND AT A TIME OF ECONOMIC COLLAPSE?  THERE IS A REASON FOR THAT!

Zero Coupon Inflation Swap

  Definition of 'Zero Coupon Inflation Swap'


An exchange of cash flows that allows investors to reduce or increase their exposure to the risk of a decline in the purchasing power of money. In a zero coupon inflation swap, which is a basic type of inflation derivative, an income stream that is tied to the rate of inflation is exchanged for an income stream with a fixed interest rate. However, instead of actually exchanging payments periodically, both income streams are paid as one lump-sum payment when the swap reaches maturity and the inflation level is known. Investopedia explains 'Zero Coupon Inflation Swap'
The currency of the swap determines the price index that is used to calculate the rate of inflation. For example, a swap denominated in U.S. dollars would be based on the Consumer Price Index of the United States, while a swap denominated in British pounds would typically be based on Great Britain's Retail Price Index. Other financial instruments that can be used to hedge against inflation risk are real yield inflation swaps, price index inflation swaps, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS), municipal and corporate inflation-linked securities, inflation-linked certificates of deposit and inflation-linked savings bonds.



0 Comments

January 27th, 2014

1/27/2014

0 Comments

 
Regarding the next phase to the New Economy....economic collapse:

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.


It is interesting that when I first hit on this Forbes article yesterday I had no problem opening it.....and today, the page was inaccessible.

Below you see what has been coming since Obama took office.  Since all Obama did was oversee massive movement of money from one place to another to make it look like economic activity was happening while tens of trillions of dollars have  been carted out of the US and into off-shore accounts....making the economy starved of cash and stagnant.....China/Europe has been doing the same thing.  So, all the Wall Street news about recapitalized banks ready to get on with business is a lie.  What is happening is the few families at the top who have the massive wealth are now fighting on how to hide it and/or use it to their benefit while the entire economic system collapses.


REMEMBER, WE NEEDED TO NATIONALIZE THE US BANKS IN 2009 TO DOWNSIZE THEM BY SIMPLY RECOVERING TENS OF TRILLIONS IN CORPORATE FRAUD.  EASY PEASY.  OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS WERE THERE TO MAKE SURE THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN....RATHER, ALL THAT MONEY HAS BEEN MOVED AROUND THE WORLD TO HIDE IT.



China Halts Bank Cash Transfers: Forbes

Sunday, January 26, 2014 15:59
0

(Before It's News)


According to this breaking story from Forbes.com, China has halted all bank cash transfers as shared in the story below. WHY would China’s central bank ORDER commercial banks to put an end to cash transfers? Is this the next step in the global currency war? Could this lead to WW3 as is now being argued by some? With America already practically ‘owned’ by China and getting more in debt every year, this can’t be a good thing. Video reports on China’s money problems also below.
The People’s Bank of China , the central bank, has just ordered commercial banks to halt cash transfers.
In short, there will be a three-day suspension of domestic renminbi transfers. There will also be a suspension, spanning nine calendar days, of conversions of renminbi to foreign currency.
The specific reason given—“system maintenance” at the central bank—is preposterous.  It is not credible that during the highest usage period in the year—the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday beginning January 31—the central bank would schedule an upgrade and shut down cash transfers.
A better explanation is that the country’s banking system is running dry.  Yes, there is an increased need for money in the run-up to and during the Lunar New Year holiday, but that is only a small factor.  After all, central bank officials knew this spike in demand was coming—it occurs every year at this time—and a core function of central banks is to manage seasonal liquidity fluctuations.  Moreover, the holiday has not started yet, and the PBOC, as that institution is known, could have added more liquidity to meet cash needs.


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As we see, a US bank crash is coming because all that has happened over these few years is scuffling around of money to prop up the European market and hiding and expanding in a Chinese market all of which having money sucked out of economies.  

THIS IS OF COURSE ALL FRAUD AND CORRUPTION THAT YOUR NEO-LIBERAL IS AIDING AND ABETTING BY PASSING LAWS THAT MAKE ONCE ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES NOW LEGAL....OR SO THEY SAY.  THE US HAS ANTI-TRUST AND MONOPOLY LAWS THAT ARE SIMPLY BEING IGNORED.

You know I have called for this for three years as US media played the propaganda machine yet again....acting as if something real was being done.  There is nothing that can be done to stop this crash.....citizens in Europe will stop the TROIKA sucking of all public wealth and the US citizens are waking to the fact that all their wealth is being sucked up as well in this US Perestroika.  Without that sucking of public money the economies will collapse.  Not so bad for the few families at the top they say......the plan is to soak the public sector with debt as Rawlings-Blake and O'Malley have done with tons of credit bonds, Wall Street leverage deals,  and TIFs, so that when the collapse comes, even more public wealth comes as cities and states default and public property and partnership deals go into the hands of Wall Street and public sector pensions and benefits are dismissed in bankruptcy.  

THIS IS THE BAINS CAPITAL GUTTING OF PUBLIC SECTOR WEALTH....SAME THING THAT WAS DONE WITH PRIVATE CORPORATIONS SHEDDING ALL THEIR DEBT AND LABOR CONTRACTS WILL NOW HAPPEN WITH THIS CRASH.

Look at what has happened with HSBC to see the wave of the future in the UK, Europe, and US.....this is the next bank bailout.....it involves simply capturing the people's bank accounts to pay a municipal debt created by mayors and governors across the country all under the guise of 'development and jobs'.

HSBC is simply the British version of Wall Street banks like Bank of America and Citigroup.....that spent these few years expanding all over the world with the free money the FED gave them and now all of them are exposed to these global economic calamities.  So, Obama and neo-liberals......ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS....were not deadlocked these few years.  They were working on TPP and international marketing and growth while allowing the US economy to be starved.  That was their job.  So, US banks have been operating under the wild west of no regulation as they expanded overseas and our economy is now tied ten times more to this TOO BIG TO FAIL.  Only this time the Federal government has been tapped and it will be your bank account and mine that banks seize to keep them afloat.  Add to that all kinds of public infrastructure like roads, bridges, water and sewer infrastructure and you betcha......PERESTROIKA'S NEXT STEP IN THE NEW ECONOMY!

It is valuable to record all of this....I for example print all FACEBOOK and website entries because I know they could disappear any time.....please do the same.  Documenting that all of this was known beforehand allows for legal retribution when the people reinstate Rule of Law and bring back all those tens of trillions of dollars.....remember, when a government suspends Rule of Law, it suspends Statutes of Limitation!



A Closer Look at China and HSBC – Are they Running Out of Cash?
Kerry-anne


January 26, 2014


Fears are growing that HSBC bank is insolvent, after the Bank refused cash withdrawals and has an $80bn blackhole in their balance sheet.  Last night,Forbes and a variety of sources including Max Keiser, and FXstreet (Forex) reported a Bank of China announcement suspending all cash transfers for the next several days.  So what’s really going on?


HSBC Collapse

 

HSBC is scrambling to manage a seemingly terminal liquidity crisis (a lack of hard cash) that could see the bank become the next Northern Rock – and trigger a bank crash. The analyst’s advice is for shareholders to sell HSBC investments, and customers to move their accounts elsewhere before the crash.


This from the Telegraph:

Forensic Asia on Tuesday began its coverage of Britain’s largest banking group with a ‘sell’ recommendation, warning the lender had between $63.6bn (£38.7bn) and $92.3bn of “questionable assets” on its balance sheet, ranging from loan loss reserves and accrued interest to deferred tax assets, defined benefit pension schemes and opaque Level 3 assets.

According a report by the BBC’s MoneyBox Programme, HSBC customers have gone to withdraw cash from their accounts, only to find HSBC would not release the funds. Customers were told to make a bank transfer instead, unless they provided documentation proving the intended use of the money. Stephen Cotton attempted a withdrawal and told the programme:

“When we presented them with the withdrawal slip, they declined to give us the money because we could not provide them with a satisfactory explanation for what the money was for. They wanted a letter from the person involved.”

Mr Cotton says the staff refused to tell him how much he could have: “So I wrote out a few slips. I said, ‘Can I have £5,000?’ They said no. I said, ‘Can I have £4,000?’ They said no. And then I wrote one out for £3,000 and they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you that.’ “

He asked if he could return later that day to withdraw another £3,000, but he was told he could not do the same thing twice in one day.

As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change”

He wrote to complain to HSBC about the new rules and also that he had not been informed of any change.

The bank said it did not have to tell him. “As this was not a change to the Terms and Conditions of your bank account, we had no need to pre-notify customers of the change,” HSBC wrote.

Mr Cotton is not alone, with other customers seeking to withdraw cash amounts over £3,000 facing the same obstacles. While HSBC argue there is comes customer security interest here, the story simply doesn’t add up. Customer identification is required for large withdrawals, not customer intentions – a person’s cash is theirs to withdraw and place wherever they so wish. Instead, HSBC has been found to have a capitalization black hole (gap between actual cash and obligations) of $80bn. The message is simple, get your money out now.
The Gold Rush

The major banks and states appear to be preparing for impending crisis, while pretending to the public that the economic situation is improving.

There is a gold rush underway, with Banks and States frantically buying up as much gold reserve as they can, stoking fears that confidence in currency is at an all-time low. In recent months and weeks, banks like HSBC and JP Morgan, and states such as the US, Germany and China have joined the gold rush, making vast purchases of stocks.

Investment analysts at Seeking Alpha have been monitoring the strange activity on the COMEX, stating:

“keeping track of COMEX inventories is something that is recommended for all serious investors who own physical gold and the gold ETFs (SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), PHYS, and CEF) because any abnormal inventory declines may signify extraordinary events behind the scenes.”


Another Bank Crash? Why?

 

The crash is in some ways a replay of the last one. The US dollar is a fiat currency (as is the pound sterling, the euro and most other major currencies). This means, it is monopoly money. There is no gold reserve that its values are pegged to. It is simply made up. So how does money get made? A private, for profit central bank prints it and lends it to the government (or other banks) at an interest rate. So the Central Bank prints $100, and gives it to the government on the basis that it returns $101. You may have already spotted the first flaw in this process. The additional $1 can only ever come from the Central Bank. There is never enough money. The second issue is that all money is debt.

This used to be the way pretty much all of the money in circulation came to be. That is, until Investment and Retail Banks got tired of this monopoly on debt based currency, and kicked off the commercial money supply. You might assume that when you take out a loan or other form of credit, a bank gives you that money from its reserves, and you then pay back that loan to the Bank at a given interest rate – the Bank making its profit on the interest rate. You would be wrong. The Bank simply creates that loan on a computer screen. Let’s say you are granted a loan for $100,000. The moment that loan is approved and $100k is entered on the computer – that promise from you to the bank creates $100k for the bank, in that instant. This ledger entry alone creates the $100k, from nothing. Today, over 97% of all money that exists, is made this way.

This is what drove the dodgy lending practises that created the last crisis. But since then, the failure to regulate the markets means that while bailouts hit public services and the real economy – banks were free to continue the same behaviour, bringing the next crash.

The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse.

The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.

Global GDP stands at $69.4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.

Not only can the Bankers not pay it back, the combined earning power of the earth could not pay it back in less than ten years if every last cent of our productive power went solely to pay off this debt.

This is why answering the issues with our currencies, our banking practices and economic system are not theoretical or academic – they are a most practical matter of keen urgency.


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Below you see what is about to happen in the UK, Europe, and the US.  When this happened in Cyprus there was all kinds of discussion as to how this could be legal, but what happens when a government allows itself to be called bankrupt and tied to the IMF is that all sovereignty is lost.  This is what they are doing to the southern European nations and they know that banks will do the same thing in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece as was done in Cyprus.

For the US and Americans.....remember the first thing neo-liberals did when the last collapse came was to raise the FDIC insurance of bank accounts to $250,000 per bank, protecting the affluent from losses.  The wealthy no longer have much wealth tied to these accounts and just as Congress voted to raise the FDIC.....it can lower/eliminate it because.....it will not be able to afford to pay the protection....it will default on you and me.


ARE MY DEPOSITS INSURED?

FDIC insurance covers all deposit accounts, including checking and savings accounts, money market deposit accounts and certificates of deposit. The standard insurance amount is $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank, for each account ownership category.




Cyprus banks remain closed to avert run on deposits

By Michele Kambas and Karolina Tagaris

NICOSIA Mon Mar 25, 2013 7:44pm EDT


People sit at a cafeteria as Cyprus' President Nicos Anastasiades addresses the nation in Nicosia March 25, 2013. REUTERS-Yorgos Karahalis


Anti-Troika protesters hold a 'Hands off Cyprus' banner during a demonstration outside the EU offices in Nicosia March 24, 2013. REUTERS-Yannis Behrakis

 
(Reuters) - The president of Cyprus assured his people a bailout deal he struck with the European Union was in their best interests, but banks will remain closed until Thursday - and even then subject to capital controls to prevent a run on deposits.

Returned from fraught negotiations in Brussels, President Nicos Anastasiades said late on Monday the 10-billion euro ($13 billion) rescue plan agreed there in the early hours of the morning was "painful" but essential to avoid economic meltdown.

He agreed to close down the second-largest bank, Cyprus Popular, and inflict heavy losses on big depositors, many of them Russian, after Cyprus's outsize financial sector ran into trouble when its investments in neighboring Greece went sour.

European leaders said a chaotic national bankruptcy that might have forced Cyprus from the euro and upset Europe's economy was averted - though investors in other European banks are alarmed by the precedent of losses for depositors in Cyprus.

"The agreement we reached is difficult but, under the circumstances, the best that we could achieve," Anastasiades said in a televised address to the nation on Monday evening.

"We leave behind the uncertainty and anxiety that we all lived through over the last few months and we look forward now to the future with optimism," he told compatriots who face an immediate, deep recession and years of hardship unlikely to be milder than those experienced by Irish, Greeks and Portuguese.

Many Cypriots say they felt anything but reassured by the bailout deal, however, and are expected to besiege banks as soon as they reopen after a shutdown that began over a week ago.

Reversing a previous decision to start reopening at least some banks on Tuesday, the central bank said late on Monday that they would all now stay shut until Thursday to ensure the "smooth functioning of the whole banking system".

Little is known about the restrictions on transactions that Anastasiades said the central bank would impose, but he told Cypriots: "I want to assure you that this will be a very temporary measure that will gradually be relaxed."

Capital controls, preventing people moving funds out of the country, are at odds with the European Union's ideals of a common market but the government may fear an ebb tide of panic that would cause even more disruption to the local economy.

Without an agreement by the end of Monday, Cyprus had faced certain banking collapse and risked becoming the first country to be pushed out of the European single currency - a fate that Germany and other northern creditors seemed willing to inflict on a nation that accounts for just a tiny fraction of the euro economy and whose banks they felt had overreached themselves.

Backed by euro zone finance ministers, the plan will wind down the largely state-owned Cyprus Popular Bank, known as Laiki, and shift deposits under 100,000 euros to the Bank of Cyprus to create a "good bank", leaving problems behind in, effectively, a "bad bank".

Deposits above 100,000 euros in both banks, which are not guaranteed by the state under EU law, will be frozen and used to resolve Laiki's debts and recapitalize the Bank of Cyprus, the island's biggest, through a deposit/equity conversion.


PRECEDENT SET

The raid on uninsured Laiki depositors is expected to raise 4.2 billion euros of the 5.8 billion euros the EU and IMF had told Cyprus to raise as a contribution to the bailout, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said.

Cyprus government spokesman Christos Stylianides said losses for uninsured depositors would be "under or around 30 percent".


Laiki will effectively be shuttered, with thousands of job losses. Officials said senior bondholders in Laiki would be wiped out and those in Bank of Cyprus would have to make a contribution - setting a precedent for the euro zone.

Comments by Dijsselbloem on the need for lenders to banks to accept the potential risks of their failure had a knock-on effect in the euro zone, raising the cost of insuring holdings of bonds issued by other banks, notably in Italy and Spain.

Global equity markets and the euro retreated on his comment that the Cyprus bailout could be a template for solving other problems, by shifting more risk to depositors and stakeholders:

"What we've done last night is what I call pushing back the risks," Dijsselbloem, who heads the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers, told Reuters and the Financial Times.

A first attempt at a deal 10 days ago had collapsed when the Cypriot parliament rejected a proposed levy on all deposits, large and small. That proposal outraged ordinary Cypriots, leading to queues at bank cash machines.

The central bank has imposed a 100-euro daily limit on withdrawals from ATMs at the two biggest banks to avert a run.

PUBLIC SCEPTICAL

Russia signaled it would back the bailout even though it would impose big losses on Russian depositors, who by some estimates may hold a third of all deposits in Cypriot banks.

President Vladimir Putin ordered officials to restructure a loan Moscow granted to Cyprus in 2011 - having rejected Nicosia's request for easier terms in crisis talks last week.

Among Cypriots sipping coffee in warm sunshine, there was a mood of wariness about the deal: "How long will it last?" asked Georgia Xenophontos, 23, a hotel receptionist in Nicosia.

"Why should anyone believe anything this government says?"

In the morning, a public holiday, residents of the capital lined the streets to watch a parade by soldiers and students to mark Greek Independence Day, waving the Greek and Cypriot flags.

"On this day I'm proud to be Greek, but at the same time I feel humiliated," said Marios Charalambous, 56, a print-shop owner. "I'm worried what will happen when the banks reopen."

Cyprus' tottering banks held 68 billion euros in deposits, including 38 billion in accounts of more than 100,000 euros - enormous sums for an nation of 860,000 people that could never sustain such a big financial system on its own.

The U.S. Treasury, noting the importance to the United States of financial stability in Europe, its largest trading partner, said it was now up to Cypriots to rebuild their economy: "It is critical to lay the foundation for a return to financial stability and growth in Cyprus," the Treasury said.

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China's Epic Offshore Wealth Revealed: How Chinese Oligarchs Quietly Parked Up To $4 Trillion In The Caribbean

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/21/2014 20:02 -0500


  The last time the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists made a splash in the financial media was in April of last year year when it disclosed a trove of secret documents revealing a massive treasury of offshore wealth parked away from taxation-happy host governments. The context was clear: in the aftermath of the Cyprus deposit confiscation, public opinion had to turn against those who were exploiting offshore tax loophole in order to avoid a panic that the same "bail in" could happen to the common man.

Needless to say, the circumstances surrounding the release then were rather curious: one day thousands of files - revealing the names behind covert companies used by people from American doctors to Russian executives and international arms dealers - just happened to turn up at a source's house.

Well, the ICIJ is back in the spotlight once again, this time revealing "nearly 22,000 tax haven clients from Hong Kong and mainland China. Among them are some of China’s most powerful men and women — including at least 15 of China’s richest, members of the National People’s Congress and executives from state-owned companies entangled in corruption scandals."

Once again, the source of this treasure trove of data is secret, although we feel the recent Bloomberg cover up (and suspension and termination of Michael Forsyth) regarding a certain investigation into Chinese tycoons' connections with Communist party leaders may have something to do with it. All ICIJ says on the matter is that "In November, a mainland Chinese news organization that was working with ICIJ to analyze the offshore data withdrew from the reporting partnership, explaining that authorities had warned it not to publish anything about the material. ICIJ is keeping the identity of the news outlet confidential to protect journalists from government retaliation." But where the data comes from is largely irrelevant.

What is relevant is that once again the two largest Swiss banks are about to be embroiled in yet another money laundering scandal, this time involving the parking of wealth belonging to China's aristocracy - including its princelings - in various Caribbean, and mostly British Virgin Island, tax havens.

From the ICJC's findings:

PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS and other Western banks and accounting firms play a key role as middlemen in helping Chinese clients set up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other offshore centers usually associated with hidden wealth, the records show. For instance, Swiss financial giant Credit Suisse helped Wen Jiabao’s son create his BVI company while his father was leading the country.

The files come from two offshore firms — Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited — that help clients create offshore companies, trusts and bank accounts. They are part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked files that ICIJ has sifted through with help from more than 50 reporting partners in Europe, North America, Asia and other regions.

Since last April, ICIJ’s stories have triggered official inquiries, high-profile resignations and policy changes around the world.

Until now, the details on China and Hong Kong had not been disclosed.

What is notable, if not unexpected, is just how pervasive the parking of offshore capital has been, and confirms that it is not inflow of money that the PBOC has to be afraid of when its internationalizes the Yuan, it is the outflow that will be far more worrisome.

The data illustrates the outsized dependency of the world’s second largest economy on tiny islands thousands of miles away.  As the country has moved from an insular communist system to a socialist/capitalist hybrid, China has become a leading market for offshore havens that peddle secrecy, tax shelters and streamlined international deal making.

Every corner of China’s economy, from oil to green energy and from mining to arms trading, appears in the ICIJ data.

But the biggest stunner is the sheer size of the wealth transfer: according to ICIJ estimate, up to $4 trillion in "untraced assets" may have left China since 2000.

Chinese officials aren’t required to disclose their assets publicly and until now citizens have remained largely in the dark about the parallel economy that can allow the powerful and well-connected to avoid taxes and keep their dealings secret. By some estimates, between $1 trillion and $4 trillion in untraced assets have left the country since 2000.

And while the parking of capital abroad is not illegal, it does contribute to concerns about vast corruption in China, which is also why the current Politburo has been scrambling to cut down on superficial among China's higher echelons. At least optically... And certainly not going to the very top, where it appears the bulk of the corruption resides as the initial data dump discloses.

To be sure, this is just the start of peeling away the layers of China's offshore wealth: the ICIJ provides this teaser: "Along with the China and Hong Kong names, ICIJ’s files also include the names of roughly 16,000 offshore clients from Taiwan. ICIJ will continue to publish stories with its partners in the next few days and will release the Greater China names on its Offshore Leaks Database on Jan. 23."

In the meantime, the ICIJ has disclosed select key individuals that suddenly may have a lot of explaining to do, considering China's very theatrical crackdown on corruption and all that.

The key players, whose life is about to get a whole lot more difficult, are without doubt China's princelings.

China's Politburo Standing Committee is the all-powerful group of seven (formerly nine) men who run the Communist Party and the country. The records obtained by ICIJ show that relatives of at least five current or former members of this small circle have incorporated companies in the Cook Islands or British Virgin Islands.

China’s “red nobility” — elites tied by blood or marriage to the current leadership or Party elders — are also popularly known as “princelings.” Ordinary Chinese have grown increasingly angry over their vast wealth and what many see as the hypocrisy of officials who tout “people-first” ideals but look the other way while their families peddle power and influence for personal gain.

The leaked offshore records include details of a BVI company 50 percent owned by President Xi’s brother-in-law Deng Jiagui. The husband of Xi’s older sister, Deng is a multimillionaire real estate developer and an investor in metals used in cell phones and other electronics. The records show the other half of Excellence Effort Property Development was owned by yet another BVI company belonging to Li Wa and Li Xiaoping, property tycoons who made news in July by winning a $2 billion bid to purchase commercial real estate in Shenzhen.

Since taking over as the Communist Party’s top official in 2012, Xi has sought to burnish his image with an aggressive anti-graft campaign, promising to go after official corruption involving both low-level “flies” and high-level “tigers.” Yet he has crushed a grassroots movement that called for government officials to publicly declare their assets. Wen Jiabao, who stepped down as premier in 2013 after a decade-long tenure, also styled himself as a reformer, cultivating an image of grandfatherly concern for China’s poor.

The ICIJ offshore files reveal that Wen’s son Wen Yunsong set up a BVI-registered company, Trend Gold Consultants, with help from the Hong Kong office of Credit Suisse in 2006. Wen Yunsong was the lone director and shareholder of the firm, which appears to have been dissolved in 2008. 

Bare-bones company structures are often created to open bank accounts in the offshore firm’s name, helping obscure the relationship to the real account owner. It isn’t immediately clear from the documents what Trend Gold Consultants was used for. A U.S.-educated venture capitalist, Wen Yunsong co-founded a China-focused private equity firm and in 2012 became chairman of China’s Satellite Communications Co., a state-owned firm that aspires to be Asia’s largest satellite operator.

ICIJ made repeated attempts to reach Wen Yunsong and other individuals named in this story. Only a few responded. Wen was among those who did not. Citing confidentiality rules, a Credit Suisse spokesman said the bank is “unable to comment on this matter.”

The ICIJ files also shed light on the BVI’s previously unreported role in a burgeoning scandal involving Wen Jiabao’s daughter, Wen Ruchun, also known as Lily Chang. The New York Times has reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co. paid a firm that she ran, Fullmark Consultants, $1.8 million in consulting fees. U.S. securities regulators are investigating the relationship as part of a probe into the bank’s alleged use of princelings to increase its influence in China.

Fullmark Consultants appears to have been set up in a manner that obscured Wen Ruchun’s relationship to the firm, the ICIJ files indicate. Her name does not show up in any of the incorporation documents in the ICIJ data, though a 'Lily Chang' is CC’d in one August, 2009 email correspondence about the company. Her husband Liu Chunhang, a former Morgan Stanley finance guru, created Fullmark Consultants in the BVI in 2004 and was the sole director and shareholder of the firm until 2006, the same year he took a government job at the agency that regulates China’s banking industry.

Liu transferred control of the company, the ICIJ files show, to a Wen family friend, Zhang Yuhong, a wealthy businesswoman and colleague of Wen Jiabao’s brother. The Times reported that Zhang also helped control other Wen family assets including diamond and jewelry ventures. 

The ICIJ files show that offshore provider Portcullis TrustNet billed UBS AG for a certificate of good standing for Fullmark Consultants in October 2005, indicating a business relationship between Fullmark and the Swiss bank. In response to ICIJ’s questions, UBS issued a statement saying its “know-your-client” policies as well as procedures to deal with politically-sensitive clients are among “the strictest in the industry.” Liu and Zhang did not respond to ICIJ's requests for comment.

A 2007 U.S. Department of State cable passed along a source’s tip that Premier Wen was “disgusted with his family’s activities,” and that “Wen’s wife and children all have a reputation as people who can ‘get things done’ for the right price.” The cable, part of the Wikileaks document dump, reported that Wen’s kin “did not necessarily take bribes, [but] they are amenable to receiving exorbitant ‘consulting fees.’ ”

The records also include incorporations by relatives of Deng Xiaoping, former Premier Li Peng, and former President Hu Jintao.

China experts say that the growing wealth and business interests of the princelings, including offshore holdings, are a dangerous liability for the ruling Communist Party but that people in leadership positions are too involved to stop it.

“What’s the point of running the Communist Party if you can’t get a couple billion for your family?” said Steve Dickinson, a China-based American lawyer who has investigated fraud cases involving BVI companies. “The issue is enormous and has tremendous significance for China, and the fact that everybody dances around it and doesn’t want to talk about it is understandable but scandalous.”


Perhaps now, finally, the dancing will stop. Because for the first time, key players are named. First the "Red Nobility" (full list here)


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January 03rd, 2014

1/3/2014

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

  By Quentin Fottrell, MarketWatch

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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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



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

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

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


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

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



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

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

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


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


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

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


Unpaid Water Bills Leading to Foreclosed Homes

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Edgemere Man Receives $15,000 Water Bill

WBFF News

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



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

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


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


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


By Fred Schulte, Ben Protess and Lagan Sebert

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

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

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

WATCH Vicki Valentine's Eviction Day:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Unintended Consequences'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleas - and More Fees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feds Say Bids Rigged

Though Valentine had no way of knowing it, some investors rigged the 2006 Baltimore tax sale auction that led to her eviction, federal prosecutors alleged in court.

The roots of that conspiracy run deep, prosecutors said. For years, a handful of Baltimore real estate lawyers and their investment partners quietly dominated Maryland tax sale auctions, with few questions asked about their bidding tactics or collection policies.

That changed after The Baltimore Sun used city records and court filings to report in March 2007 that hundreds of mainly low-income city residents had been kicked out of their homes over small unpaid bills, ranging from water and sewer charges to minor environmental citations. Some people were driven from family property because they couldn't afford to pay thousands of dollars demanded by lien holders.

The Baltimore newspaper also documented for the first time that while dozens of parties bid in Baltimore tax auctions in 2006 and 2007, just three investment groups had won about two-thirds of the liens.

Prosecutors went on to charge three men with conspiring to rig bids at 21 auctions in Baltimore and four other jurisdictions, including Montgomery and Prince George's counties in the suburbs of Washington D.C. between 2002 and 2007. All three have since pleaded guilty. No other charges have been filed.

Another investment group involved in the conspiracy was DRT Fund, according to court filings by federal prosecutors. DRT is owned in part by De Laurentis and Reiff. DRT participated in a dozen of the 21 fixed auctions, though not the Baltimore City auction in 2006 in which Valentine's lien was sold, according to court filings.

The Justice Department filed no charges against DRT, which came forward in the fall of 2007 and "fully and truthfully reported their own wrongdoing and that of their co-conspirators and terminated their part in the conspiracy," prosecutors wrote in court papers filed last month.

DRT went on to sign an amnesty agreement with the Justice Department that commits it to "pay restitution to any person or entity injured as a result of the bid-rigging activity being reported in which it was a participant," court records state.

Neither De Laurentis nor Reiff would discuss DRT's settlement with the Justice Department.

Water Bill Woes

Some lawmakers have tried for years, with modest success, to rein in the tax-sale fees that can steamroll low-income homeowners. Maryland legislators passed a bill in 2008 that raised the minimum lien sold from $100 to $250. But a bill to prohibit cities and counties from selling delinquent water bills to investors failed in the state Senate earlier this year by a single vote.

Legislators also rejected a bill that would have prevented the sale of any lien of less than $750, as happens in some other locales outside of the state.

Both bills failed, lawmakers said, largely due to fierce opposition from tax collectors and officials in Baltimore, which conducts the largest tax sale in the state.

Andrea Mansfield, of the Maryland Association of Counties, testified that the tax sale process provides "a much-needed device to ensure that property owners remit payment for their fair share of taxes and charges connected to public services."

Eliminating water bills from the tax sales would result in more "deficient accounts," and lead to "increased rates on citizens who properly pay," she wrote.

Sen. James Brochin, a Democrat from Baltimore County who co-sponsored the legislation that would have banned the sale of delinquent water bills to investors, vehemently disagrees. "It's just disgusting. It's highway robbery. It's dead wrong. It's immoral," he said.

While city officials publicly defend the practice, he said, in reality "they're humiliated and embarrassed by it. Deep down they know how immoral it is."

Baltimore's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, declined requests for an interview on the topic with the Investigative Fund.

City officials were more talkative earlier this year when they sought to block lawmakers from banning the sale of water bill liens. Mary Pat Fannon, a lobbyist for the mayor's office, said in prepared testimony for a February 5 hearing that the city had begun offering repayment plans for water bills to help homeowners avoid tax sale.

She said that the 666 water bill liens sold by Baltimore City in 2009 was way down from the 1,129 sold to investors the previous year and credited the repayment plans for the reduction.

And she went further, testifying that nobody had lost a home due to an unpaid water bill from either sale in 2008 or 2009. What Fannon neglected to mention: Because of the lengthy transfer process in the courts, it was too early for those groups of property owners to begin losing their homes. Most tax sale lawsuits have taken longer than two years to resolve through the courts.

Fannon also said that without the tax sale, the city would need to file debt collection lawsuits against each delinquent property owner, which she said "would be very expensive, time consuming and flood the courts."

Two days before Fannon's testimony at the state capital, Valentine stood watching as her belongings piled up on the sidewalk in Baltimore.

A Neighborhood's Decline

More than three years after Valentine's small debt drew her into the tax sale, neither the city nor the investors seem to have won much.

The property is unlikely to be fixed up any time soon. Instead, it adds to a sense of decay that permeates some parts of urban Baltimore. On Valentine's old block in the Sandtown neighborhood, all but a handful of houses, abandoned long ago, are boarded up.

Such decline has summoned other ills. "Drugs moved in and replaced the good with the bad," said Valentine, who is living temporarily with her mother. Many of her possessions are in storage.

De Laurentis and Reiff now hold a "writ of possession" for a property that's in need of substantial repair. Though the home is assessed at $46,000, in such dilapidated condition the investors said they probably would have trouble selling it for more than $16,000.

In addition, investors could be on the hook for a $7,000 water bill of their own. Just how that happened is unclear; there may have been an undetected leak in Valentine's home. Last month, the city finally turned off the water.

If the investors take the final step to secure a deed to the property, they would have to pay the city roughly $6,300, which the city is then supposed to turn over to Valentine. The law entitles original property owners to receive at least some compensation.

De Laurentis and Reiff say they're still willing to work with Valentine to resolve the matter. Reiff said he gave her a key to the new lock so she could have more time to remove her belongings as a good faith gesture.

"We'll definitely work something out with her," Reiff said.


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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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