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July 24th, 2014

7/24/2014

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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



UMUC’s Mission in Asia


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

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



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


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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

                    

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


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




By Nayana Davis, The Baltimore Sun

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

nadavis@baltsun.com



________________________________________________

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


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



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

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



Study: MOOCs Viewed Positively Among Employers

April 2, 2014 Inside Higher Education

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

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


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


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


Are MOOCs really dead?

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

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

Then, suddenly, a blow was struck. And it came from one of MOOCs’ most famous creators.

“Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger,” Rebecca Schuman wrote at Slate in November 2013.

It was a dramatic way of saying that Thrun had announced that his company, Udacity, would now focus its MOOCs more on vocational training rather than traditional liberal arts courses.

That Udacity was only one company of a growing number focused on MOOCs — and that many of these platforms, including its main competitor Coursera, still aimed to disrupt traditional higher education — did little to slow the wave of speculation.

It was the capper on a year of MOOC hand-wringing. If 2012 was the “year of the MOOC,” then 2013 was the “year of the MOOC backlash.” Those who trust Gartner’s “Hype Cycle” believed MOOCs were going through a common “trough of disillusionment,” that would soon be followed by a “slope of enlightenment.”

But by the start of 2014, many were already asking: “Are MOOCs dead?”

The answer is not as sensational as the question. MOOCs aren’t dead — not yet -- but they likely won’t be replacing any traditional means of higher education, either.




Here is the source of creating a massive online system of education for the 90% in Maryland-----Wall Street itself!  The quality of education drops each time they grow this online education industry.  Since it isn't working at the university level they are now talking of sending it to K-12 vocational.  Sitting children in front of computers for online classes the goal of education reform as vocational K-12----YOU BET


Johns Hopkins Offers Nine-Course Specialization in Data ...www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2014/coursera...   CachedThe series of nine MOOCs are now open for enrollment and free to anyone. ... 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205. ... Courses Careers Accreditation Web Policies ...

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July 23rd, 2014

7/23/2014

0 Comments

 
THE REASON MARYLAND IS SILENT AS THE REST OF THE NATION BRINGS OUT MILLIONS IN PROTEST OF NEO-LIBERAL AND NEO-CONS POLICIES IS THAT ERHLICH/O'MALLEY HAS WORKED HARD TO PRIVATIZE MARYLAND'S PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES.  IT IS HERE THAT HOLDING POWER ACCOUNTABLE BEGINS AND THAT IS WHY NEO-LIBERALS FROM CLINTON TO OBAMA ARE WORKING AS HARD AS THEY CAN TO MAKE THEM INTO CORPORATIONS.

We saw yesterday that it is University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan seeing the need to deregulate universities.  Maryland has allowed for-profit career colleges defraud for a few decades now because of deregulation of private career education so now we need to see the same in our public universities.  Kirwan says we are making money using taxpayer money to patent research but we need to super-size the profits from the products we are now sending to the corporate structures attached to our campuses----YOU KNOW---THE 'BIOTECH FACILITIES'.  Kirwan and Mikulski are not only talking about getting rid of a silly regulation that is out of date----they are intending to deregulate how universities can operate as businesses.  All those requirements for receiving taxpayer money for research that make the public partners in this research need to go.  We have proprietary patents now with that taxpayer funded research and it is heading for the open market for profit! 

Below you see what Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards.  Corporations are dismantling their research facilities because universities ARE THEIR RESEARCH FACILITIES.  University students are now paying tuition to work in a corporate research project for free supported by NIH and NCA research money.  IT'S ALL ABOUT CREATING JOBS!  Actually, college grads are as likely now to remain unemployed now as at the time of the 2008 crash because global corporations and neo-liberals are keeping the US economy stagnant.  So, these students are more likely to work as VISTAs then to get a job in the field for which they received a degree.  Meanwhile, the foreign students coming in to get degrees------doing OK especially if they go back home to work for the US corporation overseas.  FREE LABOR PAID FOR BY TAXPAYERS----NOW THAT MAXIMIZES CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.  See why taxes and tuition are soaring on the working and midde-class?  It costs lots to subsidize every corporate activity.

CORPORATIONS NO LONGER NEED RESEARCH FACILITIES------UNIVERSITIES DO THE RESEARCH AND ANYTHING THAT IS SUCCESSFUL COMES TO THE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS THROUGH STARTUPS BUYOUTS.  THE PEOPLE THEY HIRED TO DO THE WORK IN PRIVATE RESEARCH LABS ARE NOW STUDENTS PAYING TUITION.

The process of patenting university research while having corporations 'partnered' with these universities is a mockery as if people cannot see that this is why student tuition is soaring and all of taxpayer money is funding this 'university' research leaving no money for student financial aid and grants. Directors of these 'university' research facilities being paid like corporate executives.

LET'S GO BACK TO PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES AS PUBLIC EDUCATION!


Below you see what deregulation Kirwan and Mikulski are working towards......making universities driven by profit-----



Colleges Urged to Count Patents in Tenure Reviews

April 29, 2014
  Inside Higher Ed


Universities should begin making patents and other industrial and commercial research count toward promotion and tenure, in an effort to stimulate such research nationwide, argues a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "There is a fundamental disconnect between technology transfer activities and incentives for faculty members in terms of merit raises, tenure and career advancement," Richard B. Marchase, co-author and vice president for research and economic development at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said in a news release. "Beyond the monetary benefit of licensing, which is small in most cases, there is presently little to no benefit to a faculty member's merit raises, tenure and career advancement."

The paper builds on a 2012 report from the National Research Council and other groups saying that business and industry have "largely dismantled large corporate research laboratories that drove American industrial leadership," and which argues that research universities must "fill the gap."
In the new paper, called "Changing the Academic Culture: Valuing Patents and Commercialization Toward Tenure and Career Advancement," the authors argue that filling the research gap will entail changing the university "rewards culture" to value not only large research grants but also professors' patents and other commercial activities. Co-author Eric Kaler, president of the University of Minnesota, notes that this kind of work should not replace but "add to" traditional means of assessing scholarly activity. The paper's lead author is Paul R. Sanberg, senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of South Florida and president of the National Academy of Inventors. An abstract is available here.


_________________________________________________

Keep in mind the same global corporations for whom University of Maryland's Chancellor Kirwan and neo-liberals work are the same entities keeping the US economy stagnant-----and it is deliberate.  Remember, the bond market is going to crash causing a greater recession is so there is no intent to employ these grads----but they do free work and pay to do it with ever-higher tuition.  THIS IS A SWEET DEAL FOR CORPORATE PROFITS SAY NEO-LIBERALS IN MARYLAND!

The media shout that all of this a great education policy.  That more students are being sent to college and graduating with skills that corporations need.  OH REALLY? 

THEY NEED THEM TO WORK FOR FREE WHILE PAYING FOR COLLEGE AND THEN FORGET ABOUT IT AFTER GRADUATION.

The structure neo-liberals and neo-cons are building have the job pipeline coming from the Ivy League schools-----business leaders now come from these schools and any startups that may come from the public universities are simply bought by those corporations in the portfolio of Ivy League schools.  Working and middle-class grads are largely being funneled into poverty jobs or the military.


University of Maryland Baltimore County and Grabinsky were front page news as UMBC is the face of this free labor as corporate university.  While Maryland says its unemployment is 6.1% we all know that is only the number of people receiving unemployment checks.  Maryland's unemployment is 36% and growing with this economic model.  Remember, these are Republican policies of placing corporate profit first so voting Republican will not help----Democrats simply need to shake the corporate neo-liberals out of the Democratic Party!


FOLKS----THIS IS A NEO-LIBERAL ECONOMIC MODEL THEY CALL THE 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY!

All we need is to rebuild state economies having domestic businesses driving the economy and all of this will disappear.


The Deliberate Low-Wage, High-Insecurity Economic Model submitted by pmcovay3 ScienceIndex.com  Dec 2012

In contrast to the general biases of orthodox economists, the jobs crisis in America is not inevitable or natural-and more important, does not contribute to more economic efficiency through lower wages or more productivity. It is the result of deliberate political policy choices the nation has made at least since the early 1980s, when productivity was rising on a secular basis at a slow rate. Also, the policy choices were made before the rise of very low-wage emerging markets like China’s. In sum, there has been a low-wage, high-unemployment policy regime in the rich world, and especially in the United States, for a generation.


Students Call for Reform of Economics Education


May 6, 2014  Inside Higher Ed

Economics students in 19 countries have issued a joint call -- published in The Guardian -- to change the way economics is taught. The students' analysis (similar to that of some professors in the United States and elsewhere) is that economics has become too uniform in its approaches and too removed from real life. "[I]t's time to reconsider the way economics is taught. We are dissatisfied with the dramatic narrowing of the curriculum that has taken place over the past couple of decades," the letter says. "This lack of intellectual diversity does not only restrain education and research. It limits our ability to contend with the multidimensional challenges of the 21st century – from financial stability to food security and climate change. The real world should be brought back into the classroom, as well as debate and a pluralism of theories and methods. This will help renew the discipline and ultimately create a space in which solutions to society's problems can be generated."



All academics and analysts now look at employment figures as below----the employment to population ratio.  We all know some adults of working age may choose not to work but that percentage is not too high.  So, if 58% of the population is working------42% are not.  36% unemployment is about right.  As this article points out----with wages at an all time low people are now forced to have two incomes in a family.  The employment data media and government provides is simply meant to conceal this deliberately high unemployment.

Do you know who is not fooled by the failure of neo-liberalism------ECONOMICS STUDENTS!

The article above shows that university students are fed up with universities that only offer neo-liberal economic models in economic degree programs.  As this article states----WHY STUDY A FAILED ECONOMIC MODEL?  It is the duty of public universities to hold power accountable and give the public real data and we see this is not happening because of this corporate capture.

That is what university heads like Kirwan are doing.....they are appointed to force global corporate policies that no one wants and it is the governor that appoints these people to public universities.

Unemployment Data Manipulation The Economic Recovery is a Lie!
  By Seth Mason
Friday, November 1st, 2013  Wealth Daily

I've argued time and time again that, due to the severity of job losses during the Great Recession, there cannot be a true economic recovery until the labor market has recovered.

Unfortunately, hiring was weak in September, continuing a slowing trend that began in the spring.

To make matters worse, the majority of jobs created last month were menial in nature (nearly 2/3 of them were truck drivers, bureaucrats, salespeople, and temps). These trends have been ongoing throughout this economic depression.

The number of new jobs wasn't enough to keep up with population growth.

And yet the unemployment rate fell.

So, all is well... right?

Clearly, the "headline" 7.2% unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole story about the sad state of the American labor force.

You have to take any data from the Fed with a grain of salt, anyway, as the Obama administration has a vested interest in presenting the best-looking unemployment picture possible, just as all administrations have.

The employment-to-population ratio actually provides a much more accurate gauge of the health of the American job market — and wouldn't you know, it's been showing unhealthy readings since the economy crashed five years ago...

The proportion of Americans in the workforce has barely budged since falling from 63% to 58% during the Great Recession, as you can see on the following chart:



A Precipitous Decline

The last time the employment-to-population ratio was 58% — in the early 1980s — a relatively small proportion of American households sent more than one income earner into the workforce.

Now, in a nation of mostly one-breadwinner households, the 58% employment-to-population ratio was reasonable.

Today, however, due to a decline in real personal income (thanks for the inflation, Federal Reserve), most households send multiple income earners into the workforce.

In fact, it's not uncommon these days for households to have more than two income earners.

Under this paradigm, an employment-to-population ratio stuck at 58% like it's 1982 (when "homemaker" was still a common job title) is very unhealthy.


  Also worth noting is that a large percentage of the 58% of Americans who do work are working lower-quality jobs than they were before the economy crashed.

Although the population of the United States has increased by approximately 20 million since 2008, there are 5 million fewer “breadwinner” jobs in this country than there were before this economic depression.

"Breadwinner jobs" are those positions with a base salary of $35,000 or more that enable one to live independently, however meagerly. 

So the real health of the labor force is even worse than the unsettling 58% labor force participation rate!

Here we are, more than five years since the fall of Lehman, and the job market is still awful... and it's started to backslide again.



Niagara Falls

The Fed's Niagara Falls-scale liquidity pumping measures (I say "liquidity pumping" as opposed to "printing" because QE is only one of the Fed's tricks) clearly haven't had much impact on unemployment — or the federal government's $787 billion spending binge, also known as the grand "stimulus," for that matter.

Remember the laughable estimates of unemployment with and without the "Recovery Plan"?

According to the White House's October 2009 estimate (the dark blue line on the chart above), the Fed/federal government's plan should have taken us back to pre-recession unemployment levels by now...

Yet the unemployment rate sits at an unacceptable 7.2%.

And keep in mind the 7.2% headline unemployment rate belies the true awful state of the job market.

Considering the pitiful 58% employment-to-population ratio and the 5 million fewer breadwinner jobs since 2008, it would be an understatement to say that Washington's stimulus measures have failed to reduce unemployment. (That's assuming they were created for that purpose. More about that in a future article.)

We should expect more of the same from our esteemed central planners.

The Fed, which has officially delayed "tapering," will continue to pump indefinitely.

Uncle Sam will continue to borrow and spend like mad, whether he's wearing a DEM or GOP hat.

As a result, the "mother of all bubbles," as Nouriel Roubini has called it, will continue to expand...

And we'll continue party like it's 2006, only with higher unemployment.

We'll keep ignoring the fact that 2008 is just a couple of years away.

Happy crash 2.0!

Until next time,

Seth Mason for Wealth Daily
_____________________________________________


Having a policy that brings more foreign students into the US with the goal of green cards and employment in high-skilled jobs does nothing for the American people, the high unemployment, or creating quality education and higher achievement in our US students.  It is purely a profit-making scheme that continues to consolidate the wealth at the top.

Maryland pols are all neo-liberals so whether Milkulsi and Cardin working in the Senate on legislation to build corporate universities and send trillions of dollars to expand overseas as corporations-----or the Governor of Maryland O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly appointing these corporate university heads and building the corporate structures in our universities-----

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLY REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IN MARYLAND BY RUNNING AND VOTING FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE.



Currency February 21, 2014

Should Universities Profit From Student Research?
By John Bringardner  The New Yorker





In 2011, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Cornell University and Israel’s Technion would jointly open a new school on Roosevelt Island to help boost New York’s tech sector. The first buildings of the new campus won’t open until 2017, but classes are already under way in borrowed space on the third floor of Google’s New York office. And, on Monday, Cornell Tech, as the school is called, plans to announce that it has enrolled its first batch of post-doctoral researchers in a one-year “Runway” program, designed to launch them into business ventures based on their specialties: urban planning, e-commerce, health care. In an unusual twist, the school will invest in the companies founded through the program, but also allow students to keep ownership of the intellectual property they create on campus; typically, universities profit by keeping the rights to such property.



Cornell Tech isn’t the only institution to invest in student startups. Stanford announced last year that it would invest in companies founded by its students. M.I.T. also takes an equity stake in companies developed on campus. But Stanford and M.I.T. both require those companies to pay royalties on any technologies the students patent while in school.
Rather than negotiate complex patent-licensing rights with their researchers, Cornell Tech will treat the value of each post-doc position it awards—about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as an angel investment in any business spun out of the program; in exchange, Cornell Tech expects to get an average of a five-per-cent stake in each business. The Runway program echoes the accelerators and incubators popular among venture capitalists—three- or four-month programs in which entrepreneurs get resources to build new startups in exchange for a stake in their companies.

Universities didn’t always have the right to the spoils of the research they sponsored. The government spent heavily on research and development at U.S. universities during the Cold War, but new technologies developed with federal cash became government property. By 1980, the federal government had amassed twenty-eight thousand patents but licensed fewer than five per cent to companies that could turn them into products. That year, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to keep and profit from the patents their students and researchers developed on campus using federal funds. The Economist called it “perhaps the most inspired piece of legislation in America over the past half-century.”

Soon, offices focussed on “technology transfer” opened up in schools around the country, staffed with lawyers who poked around campus research labs and flipped through student notebooks to suss out patentable research that they could license to corporations. A new chemical combination might become a blockbuster drug; a technological breakthrough could lead to smaller, faster semiconductors.

In 2012, American universities earned $2.6 billion from patent royalties, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. The tech-transfer model is entrenched in medical schools and in biotech development. But its usefulness in the software world has been less clear. The success of a software startup often depends less on any particular innovation than on how several pieces of technology fit together and appeal to users. A company’s value usually becomes apparent years after it has developed and refined its business model, not at the moment it files a patent application. Plus, the very concept of a software patent hangs in the balance: in December, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case that could eliminate them altogether.

Cornell Tech’s approach—taking an equity stake in each company instead of licensing rights to a handful of patents—may be a more straightforward way for the school to profit from spin-offs. “Universities look to place a value on technology at its inception, finding a fair rate for splitting royalties between the school and the inventor, but that’s not the way digital startups work,” Cornell Tech’s Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, said. “I think intellectual-property protection, especially in software and digital tech, is a very small piece of commercialization, one that becomes too big a part of the conversation when universities are involved.”

The Runway program is designed to turn deep academic research into a marketable product; its first post-docs have already spent years in the lab, sometimes running into dead ends and starting over in a way that pure academic research allows but investors don’t. “A principal mission of Cornell University is the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit and use of society,” the school’s existing intellectual-property policy reads. Whether society benefits most when knowledge is turned into an I.P.O. is an open question.

“The entire Bay Area is enamored with these notions of innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, mega-success,” the historian and Stanford professor David Kennedy told Ken Auletta in 2012, in a report from Stanford. “It’s in the air we breathe out here. It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.” And when students showed up for their first classes at the temporary campus, in January, 2013, Isaac Kramnick, a professor of government at Cornell in Ithaca, told the Times, “The university has been at the forefront of big science since the 1940s and 1950s. Now it’s entering an era in which it seems to be interested in for-profit science, and that does require some thinking as to what the fundamental purpose of a university is.” (“Such potential for conflicts is quite manageable with the appropriate procedures in place, enabling this very effective interaction between students, faculty, and companies,” Huttenlocher told me.)

Yet universities are forging ahead with more business-oriented models. Over the past decade, angel investors, the main source of capital for startups, have made high-risk bets, providing money for startups to get off the ground in exchange for the right to a piece of the company’s equity if it succeeds. Most never do. Venture capitalists call their strategy “spray and pray,” sinking money into lots of different startups in the hope that at least one will be the next Facebook. It’s a gamble, but it could be a better way for universities to take advantage of the work their students are doing. The amount of revenue schools generate from patent licensing is small compared with over-all university budgets. Alumni philanthropy brings in far more money. “What would happen if schools gave up rights to their students’ intellectual property?” Adam Shwartz, the director of Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, which runs the Runway program, asked. “Their patent revenue goes to zero, but down the line the successful alumni give back far more money. Here we have the first controlled experiment of this nature.”

Rendering of Cornell Tech by Kilograph.
____________________________________________

Below you see how bad the success rate of this model is for the student /school so a corporation directs the research it wants to fund----gets free labor and a taxpayer funded research facility----and VOILA all the failures are paid for by you and me.  No need for corporate R and D.  In lieu of corporate taxes these investment firms just send there money to these university projects and we are told this is the best mechanism for funding universities.

All work on campus is now product-driven-----professors are judged on patenting rather than academics or teaching.  Tenure is tied to being this corporate executive.  Students are engaged only in what will pay off and not with a broad education limiting their futures.  As this article shows it is the student that loses and graduates with the tuition debt and limited focus degrees.


What is sad is that the student's future success with whatever they create requires handing a percentage of future earnings to these university/venture capitalist and the few that do create successful businesses simply hand them to these global investment firms.  This is all simply universities as corporate facilities.

THE ENTIRE ACADEMIC MODEL HAS BEEN RUINED AND THE US IS AGAIN ON THE BOTTOM ACADEMICALLY IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENTS.  THIS IS WHAT MIKULSKI AND KIRWAN ARE SITTING DOWN TO BOLSTER.

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS: Here's How Bad Your Odds Of Success Are
  • Henry Blodget  Business Insider

  • May 28, 2013, 11:03 AM

As a wise investor puts it: "Many turtles hatch. Few make it to the sea."


Everyone knows that starting companies — and investing in startups — is a risky way to earn a living. But few people appreciate just how risky it is.

Thanks to a recent tweet from Paul Graham, the founder of "startup school" Y Combinator, we now have a better idea.

Graham says that 37 of the 511 companies that have gone through the Y Combinator program over the past 5 years have either sold for, or are now worth, more than $40 million.

Most entrepreneurs would probably view creating a company worth more than $40 million as a success (unless the company raised more capital than that). And, on its face, the "37 companies" number seems relatively impressive.

In fact, however, the number tells a scary and depressing story.

This number suggests that a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.

(Not all companies that sell for less than $40 million are "failures," obviously. Assuming a company hasn't raised much capital, a sale between $5 million and $40 million could be considered a success. But a high percentage of Y Combinator companies likely end up being worth zero. And for companies that are hand-picked by very smart investors, the 93%-below-$40 million rate is still surprisingly low). 

A company accepted by Y Combinator, therefore, has less than a 1-in-10 chance of being a big success.

More alarmingly, the companies accepted by Y Combinator are only a tiny fraction of the companies that apply.

Some have estimated that Y Combinator's acceptance rate is 3-5%.

If we use the 5% rate, we can estimate that Y Combinator has received about 10,000 applications for the ~500 companies it has chosen over the years.

Assuming Y Combinator has even a modest ability to pick winners, therefore, the odds that a company applying to Y Combinator will be a success are significantly lower than the odds of success of the companies accepted into the program.

If only 37 of the companies that have applied to Y Combinator over the years have succeeded, this is a staggeringly low 0.4% success rate.

Put differently, only one in every 200 companies that applies to Y Combinator will succeed.

The reality is that Y Combinator probably misses a few winners, so the actual odds are probably slightly higher.

But in case any entrepreneur or angel investor is deluding themselves into thinking that startups are an easy way to cash in, they might want to think again.









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July 08th, 2014

7/8/2014

0 Comments

 
CORPORATIONS ARE USING PRIVATE NON-PROFITS TO CONTROL PUBLIC POLICY.  THEY CAPTURE AN ISSUE AND PROMOTE POLICY THAT WORKS TO THE ADVANTAGE OF CORPORATIONS.  IN MARYLAND THE PUBLIC SECTOR HAS BEEN DISMANTLED AND IS REPLACED BY THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS.  IT IS WHY THERE IS NO PUBLIC VOICE OR CONTROL OF POLICY IN MARYLAND.  A DEMOCRAT WOULD NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN....NE0-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ARE DOING THIS!


I have spoken about Maryland's capture of politics centered in the movement away from a strong public sector which has been replaced by private non-profits controlled by corporations that simply place someone as head of the organization that makes sure public policy goes the way the corporations want.  In Maryland we have AGAB serving that goal.  Johns Hopkins creates and controls most non-profits in Baltimore and in doing so captures all public policy.  What we see less of in Maryland and Baltimore are real citizens coming out and organizing and controlling their own non-profits.  My non-profit, Citizens Oversight Maryland speaks freely because there is no corporate connection.  If you see a non-profit that is silent on all of the issues I address here-----they are being controlled by a corporation.  We have great groups doing good work in Baltimore but very few of them will shout against the power structures -----Johns Hopkins and Baltimore Development or identify the fact that all of Baltimore's politicians work for these institutions and not the citizens of Baltimore.  I told you about the anti-fracking environmental group that ran when I asked them to educate about Trans Pacific Trade Pact and the fact that it allows all environmental laws to be ignored.  Now, if an environmental non-profit is not talking about this----it is headed by a corporation.  This is why TPP is not even mentioned in Maryland.....corporations control all of our private non-profits.

PLEASE WAKE UP AND ENGAGE IN POLITICS FOLKS!  THE MIDDLE CLASS CANNOT WATCH AS THE POOR ARE BRUTALIZED BECAUSE WE KNOW THE GOAL OF NEO-LIBERALISM IS TO GET RID OF ALL MIDDLE-CLASS.  YOU OR YOUR CHILDREN/GRANDCHILDREN WILL BE THE POOR.  YOU CANNOT BE SILENT FOR FEAR OF YOUR JOB BECAUSE LOSING DEMOCRACY AND YOUR RIGHTS AS CITIZENS IS MORE IMPORTANT.


Maryland and especially Baltimore is now running just a global corporations do overseas----Non-governmental organizations NGOs control our state and local governments as a 'quasi-governmental agency' and corporations 'donate' rather than pay taxes to private non-profits that then do what that 'donor' wants.  No doubt national non-profits have always been this way but now they are controlling all policy at state and local levels as well.  This is the capture we are feeling in Maryland.  The neo-liberals and neo-cons work to establish these private non-profits and then make sure that these groups are the ones heard in policy discussion.  This is why many community associations in Baltimore are silent to politicians pushing neo-conservative/neo-liberal policies that are killing the residents living in these communities.  They instead are the ones backing these same pols dismantling our democratic structures.  The heads of these organizations sound to be supporting the community when in fact they are working to push corporate policy.

As you see below you must have politicians in office that want the public engaged in public policy.  They build the structures to make sure to stimulate participation.  In Maryland all policy is written behind closed doors and the public is pulled from public meetings if they try to speak on the most important issues.  Go to Baltimore City Hall and you look at pols that are simply sitting there----they are no more connected to the people speaking than a man on the moon.  They are simply meeting a charter requirement to have hearings.

IT IS THE DISMANTLING OF ALL OF THE PUBLIC STRUCTURES OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT THAT HAS PRODUCED THE LACK OF PARTICIPATION AND IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY THESE PRIVATE NON-PROFITS.



The Citizens Most Vocal in Local Government

View detailed demographic data from a national survey about the most and least likely people to speak up. by Mike Maciag | July 2014 Flickr/Kelby Carr


In his first few months in office, Park City, Utah, Mayor Jack Thomas has heard from quite a few constituents. His office phone rings off the hook. Going out for lunch takes about twice as long as before, too, as he constantly fields concerns from residents who walk up. “If you want a quiet moment,” he jokes, “you’ve got to leave town.”

The small resort community is home to some of the nation’s more vocal residents. In a recent survey, 28 percent of city residents reported contacting elected officials to express their opinions and 37 percent said they had attended a local public meeting over a 12-month period.

Nationwide, though, citizen participation in local government remains abysmally low. The National Research Center (NRC), a firm that conducts citizen surveys for more than 200 communities, compiled data for Governing shedding light on the types of residents who are most active. Overall, only 19 percent of Americans recently surveyed contacted their local elected officials over a 12-month period, while about a quarter reported attending a public meeting.

In many city halls, extremists on either side of an issue dominate public hearings. Those who do show up at the sparsely attended meetings are often the same cast of characters week after week. But some public officials have found ways to reach a much wider segment of residents.

Park City’s Mayor Thomas said he’ll go door-to-door along the town’s main corridor to gauge resident sentiment about everything from new development projects to air quality and garbage pickup. “If you want to have a government that’s rooted in the community, you better start that way,” Thomas said. “It’s all about trust.”

NRC survey data identifies types of residents who are the most active or, in some cases, the least vocal. Individuals living in a community for more than 10 years, for example, are about three times more likely to attend public meetings and contact elected officials than new residents. Among racial groups, Asians tend to have the lowest participation rates. Low-income residents also aren’t as active as those earning six-figure incomes.

In general, residents often aren’t compelled to weigh in on an issue unless it negatively affects them, said Cheryl Hilvert of the International City/County Management Association. It’s for this reason that much of the citizen engagement in communities is confined to typical hot-button issues, such as planning and zoning meetings.

Many residents don’t think they have time to participate. Others, particularly newer residents with lower participation rates, may not know where or how to get involved, Hilvert said.

Survey data further suggests that younger residents aren’t inclined to speak up. Those under the age of 35 attend meetings and contact elected officials at far lower rates than those over 35. Hilvert suspects their busy lifestyles may have something to do with it, especially if they have children.

Connecting with these groups of residents requires stepping outside of city hall and meeting residents on their own turf. Park City officials say they’ve held meetings in school lunch rooms, performing arts centers and with local homeowners’ associations.

“To truly engage the community,” Hilvert said, “managers have to think broader about it than in the past.”

Some localities employ unconventional approaches to raise the level of citizen engagement. When the city of Rancho Cordova, Calif., debated permitting more residents to raise chickens on their properties last year, it launched an online Open Town Hall. More than 500 residents visited the interactive forum to make or review public statements. “It is noisy and smelly enough with pigeons, turkeys, feral cats, and untended dogs without adding chickens to the mix,” wrote one resident. The city drafted an ordinance reflecting citizen input, then emailed it to forum subscribers.

Outreach efforts through local media or civic organizations help further community involvement. Some residents also form Facebook groups or online petitions to promote their causes.

The city of Chanhassen, Minn., relied heavily on social media to connect with citizens when it confronted an issue that’s about as contentious as any local government can face: a proposal to build a new Walmart. The city posted regular updates on its Facebook page and uploaded all documents online. Laurie Hokkanen, the city’s assistant city manager, said residents continued hearing rumors even after the city rejected the company’s rezoning proposal. As a result, staff kept lines of communication open.

“A vote by the city council does not end the issue for residents who are invested in it,” Hokkanen said. “It’s important to tell people you appreciate their input.”

Citizen Survey Data Across much of the country, citizens rarely voice their opinion to local governments. The National Research Center provided survey results from local jurisdictions throughout the country participating in the National Citizen Survey, collected between 2012 and earlier this year.

Two questions on the survey assessed how vocal citizens were in government. Survey respondents were asked if they had done the following in the last 12 months:

1) "Contacted [locality name] elected officials (in-person, phone, email or web) to express your opinion?"

  • Yes: 19 percent
  • No: 81 percent
2) "Attended a local public meeting?"

  • Two times a week or more: 1 percent
  • Two to four times a month: 1 percent
  • Once a month or less: 22 percent
  • Not at all: 76 percent
___________________________________________
We all know the quasi nature of Baltimore Development and the University of Maryland Medical Center but let's look at AGAB and how corporations 'donate' for tax write-offs and then simply write the public policy tied to that non-profit.

If you could look at what this organization does------and the details are very private-----you will see that corporations and the rich simply choose a category to contribute and then are allowed to write what that 'donation' will create.  So, greening as a category can channel money to paying for corporate parks that simply subsidize the costs of a corporation's headquarters.  Why pay to landscape your property when you can get a tax write-off as 'donation' to greening and have the city contribute a chunk for example.   A corporation wanting to 'donate' to eduction would direct that money to a national education non-profit controlled by corporations to go into schools and tell parents, teachers, and students just what 'wellness' will look like in the schools.  In Baltimore parents asking for recess for their children may not be discussed in these 'wellness' groups in many schools.

This entire system allows corporations not paying taxes in Baltimore and Maryland to instead 'donate' money and then control the public policy in whatever area they choose.  This is how the citizens of Maryland have lost their voices in their own communities.  When I first moved to Baltimore I had the nerve as a citizen to try to organize for an athletic field on a vacant lot in my community and the response-----JOHNS HOPKINS HOMEWOOD DEVELOPMENT WILL DECIDE WHAT WILL GO THERE----ARE YOU CRAZY?  As a resident of a community you must go to that development corporation for community grants to do anything and that allows that development corporation to decide what they want-----


AND ALL OF THIS IS THE CORPORATION THAT IS JOHNS HOPKINS AND BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT.



This is what happens when the public sector is dismantled-----all money is funneled through private non-profits that have no transparency and whose membership becomes ever more exclusive.

GET RID OF THE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS ALLOWING THIS DISMANTLING OF OUR PUBLIC SECTOR----REMEMBER, IF YOU THINK GOVERNMENT HAS TOO MUCH CONTROL----CORPORATE CONTROL IS MUCH WORSE AS REGARDS DEMOCRATIC FREEDOMS.

About The Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers (ABAG)

ABAG's mission is to maximize the impact of philanthropic giving on community life through a growing network of diverse, informed and effective grantmakers.

The Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers is the region’s premier resource on philanthropy, dedicated to informing grantmakers and improving our community. ABAG was founded in 1983 to provide a forum in which colleagues could address common problems, approaches and interests.

Our members include more than 145 private and community foundations, donor advised funds, and corporations with strategic grantmaking programs - representing the vast majority of institutional giving in our area.

ABAG is …

  • The Resource on Grantmaking
ABAG provides critical information and services to the philanthropic and nonprofit communities.

  • The Network for Givers
ABAG convenes grantmakers and others to address issues and create lasting solutions.

  • The Voice for Philanthropy
ABAG represents the philanthropic sector to key audiences, including the media, legislators, and national organizations, raising public awareness and understanding about the role and impact of philanthropy on our society.


_________________________________________

Maryand Health Care for All and Baltimore Education Coalition are two examples of many.  Maryland Health Care for All is a Johns Hopkins non-profit created to make sure the Affordable Care Act was the health reform that moved forward in Maryland and not REAL health care for all like Expanded and Improved Medicare for All.  People see that the ACA is not about access----it is about building structures that will deregulate and consolidate the health industry killing oversight and accountability and denying most people most access to care.  Maryland has already disconnected from Medicare by receiving exemptions from the Federal government.  All of this makes Maryland have one of the worst health environments in the nation.  The poor have a life span  30 years less than affluent, people are fearful when going to the hospital because of poor quality and staff work in some of the most difficult conditions.  Now, the state health reform is creating a tiered health system that has most people only able to connect to clinic care.  We see this breakdown in health care in Maryland best if we look at the dismantled Veteran's Administration with Baltimore having the worst in the nation.  All of the doctors in this system were moved out and into private health systems that now cater to the world's rich------HEALTH TOURISM.  THIS IS JOHNS HOPKINS SPECIALTY NOW.



Below you see two Hopkins grads placed in charge of controlling the health care policy.  Bill and Hillary tried to do to health care what Obama has done with ACA at the same time they created the conditions for global banks---so this group in 1999 had the goal of moving health policy in that direction.  This is why Maryland sought the exemption from Medicare----to create the private health systems that are tied to the Maryland state health exchange.  Medicare and Medicaid fraud is rampant in Maryland because the oversight and accountability of the public sector was long ago dismantled.

The leaders advocating for the Affordable Care Act knew the goal was maximizing corporate profits and building global health corporations and not REAL health care for all.  The groups joining this coalition often did not.  They assumed they were actually working for health care for all.  This is an example of corporate capture of a policy.  Maryland spent this time from 1999 dismantling the public programs Medicare and Medicaid---and the Veteran's Administration and creating a tiered level of coverage that denied basic access by allowing health institutions to create the most profitable definition of care. 

While neo-liberals claimed to be building the most cost-effective health delivery system------patient outcomes in Maryland worsened and longevity declined.  So much for health care for all.  Johns Hopkins was able to build a global corporate empire with all that Medicare and Medicaid----not to mention Federal, state, and local grants and public funding. 

A GLOBAL HEALTH EMPIRE BUILT ON PUBLIC MONEY----THAT IS A SUCCESSFUL PRIVATE NON-PROFIT.

The people attached to Maryland Health Care for All really seeking this goal now need to join Expanded and Improved Medicare for All in Maryland to actually get health care for all.
  We need to replace the most private and profit-driven health system in the nation that is Maryland health exchange with this public structure that keeps Medicare strong.


The Founder of the Initiative is Peter Beilenson, MD, MPH, and the President is Vincent DeMarco, MA, JD.

The Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative Education Fund (“MCHI”) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit advocacy organization that was created in 1999 with a mission to educate all Marylanders about sound ways to achieve quality, affordable health care for all. In order to create a comprehensive, economically sound health care for all plan, MCHI organized the state’s largest coalition and solicited input from coalition members and thousands of Maryland citizens in town hall meetings.  National experts at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of Maryland Law School then worked to incorporate this community input into MCHI’s Health Care for All! Plan.  In 2002, MCHI released its first plan and conducted a statewide campaign to educate people about how the plan would guarantee health care security for all Marylanders.  A revised version of the plan was released in 2008 by the same set of experts that created the original following another round of public stakeholder meetings. The updated plan includes similar components as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) and is being used to guide analysis and planning for state and local implementation of the federal health reform law.

Over 1,200 faith, labor, business, health, and community organizations have joined the Health Care for All! Coalition to support enactment of MCHI’s plan.  This is the largest coalition ever created in Maryland and certainly one of the largest health care consumer coalitions in the country.

The Coalition successfully advocated for a number of laws that will increase access to care and prescription drugs.  In addition, MCHI continues to work with key state leaders to educate members of our broad coalition about how they can access health care programs now in existence.  In the years ahead, MCHI will continue to educate and activate its powerful coalition to increase health care access in Maryland.

___________________________________________


Baltimore Education Coalition is the Michelle Rhee of privatization groups again created by Johns Hopkins this time with the goal of capturing education policy and making sure reforms go the way of corporate control-----just as did Maryland Health Care for All.  In both cases the leaders knew the goal but the people joining often think they are really working towards the goal of health care for all or quality public education.  It is not until all of the bad policy the BEC unrolls that many people in these coalitions find they did not get what they bargained for.  Good people wanting to work for good public policy captured by joining private non-profits that exist to make sure that does not happen.

This is why activism in Baltimore and Maryland is so low----people trying to organize have to fight these corporate non-profits ! 

Please stop allowing corporate non-profits to control all public policy in Maryland.  Know what the policies these groups are advocating and know that they actually have a goal that works for the people and not only for maximizing corporate profit.

This is a prime example of why getting rid of neo-liberals and neo-cons is so important.  It is not only how they vote in City Hall or the Maryland Assembly.  It is the environment they allow to exist in public community organizations ------where is the public discussion-----is it open and inclusive?  Neither Maryland Health Care for All nor Baltimore Education Coalition would allow Cindy Walsh to come in to educate and/or speak against these policies.
  If they do not allow open dialog----they are hiding something and that is that what they are doing is not in the public interest!


Baltimore Education Coalition

We are public schools – traditional and charter. We are after-school programs and neighborhood associations. We are education policy organizations, religious institutions, broad-based organizations, and schools. We are policy analysts, teachers, students, parents, community members, grandparents, and Baltimoreans working together to organize, mobilize, and energize the City of Baltimore to achieve our mission that all Baltimore students receive an excellent education. We focus on the issues that impact our students and families the most. Together, we have stopped over $100 million dollars in proposed funding cuts to city schools. In the face of potential harmful cuts to School Based Health Centers the BEC responded and advocated to successfully keep this important resource in the budget. We have also worked together to address the deplorable facility conditions in Baltimore City including winning the bottle tax in Baltimore City to support the successful campaign to pass state legislation to provide an unprecedented financing plan providing up to $1 billion to rebuild or renovate schools in Baltimore City. This effort was successful due to the dedication and perseverance of the more than 3,000 parents, students, teachers, administrators, and community leaders who came to Annapolis and City Hall to make their voices heard for Baltimore City’s 85,000 students and their communities.



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July 04th, 2014

7/4/2014

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As I listen to republican voters in Maryland shout out against Race to the Top and Common Core I have to remind them that both are republican education policies written mostly in the Bush/Cheney Administration by US corporations.  These are corporate policies and neo-conservatives are behind them.  Neo-liberals are pushing the implementation of these corporate policies.  THE PROBLEM IS CORPORATE POLS.


'but as Timothy Noah of the New Republic points out—in this case about Maryland’s Prince George County—“When 10 percent of a school district’s teachers are foreign migrants, that isn’t cultural exchange. It’s sweatshop labor—and a depressing indicator of how low a priority public education has become.”'

That sounds pretty different than what Anthony Brown and O'Malley say out on the campaign trail.  Indeed, I have spent years outing the lies regarding education achievement in Maryland as pure propaganda used to pretend these education privatization policies are providing quality.  THESE EDUCATION REFORMS LOWER QUALITY AND ACCESS THEY DO NOT RAISE THEM!  The intent is to eliminate access to strong humanities and democratic education for 90% of the US population......the entire middle/working class and poor.  That means Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland, coming from a middle-class family would not have the multiple degrees I have and the career opportunities that I have had.

Below you see how spin occurs.  Education Week places Maryland as tops on a few issues and O'Malley and neo-liberals milk those rankings for all their worth.  Look at the overall record and Maryland is ranked at the bottom for most measures in education policy and achievement.  That is because neo-liberals do not care about achievement and quality for 90% of Marylanders.  They are working only for those they deem the 'best' students......and that is 10% of Maryland citizens. 

WALL STREET'S MEDIA 'MARKETPLACE MONEY' LAUGHED THAT MOST US STUDENTS ATTENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE POOR BECAUSE THE MIDDLE-CLASS HAS BEEN LOOTED OF ITS WEALTH BY MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD.
  INDEED, THE ATTACK CONTINUES AND IF YOU THINK YOUR UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS STATUS IS SAFE YOU DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE COMING ECONOMIC CRASH!

What we see is a funding level for K-12
that appears at higher levels than in the past.  Look at the distribution-----most of that funding is going to the schools having students that are scoring the best on tests----they are identified in elementary school as the 'best' students and receive a bulk of that education funding.  Again, these students are only 10% of the population so 90% of students are receiving far less.  In Baltimore, neo-liberals and neo-cons have built a system that is far more repressive in that the tiered funding is tied to decentralizing the city's school system into 'schools as businesses' and has created individual schools most of which receive so little funding as to barely pay for toilet paper and a few that receive enough to create the best of programs within the schools.  Add to that the practice of charter schools receiving private donations and the entire public school system and equal opportunity and access is thrown out the door.  Remember, over 70% of Americans are at or near poverty and growing fast so 90% of people will be exposed to this education funding scheme.  Mike Miller of the Maryland Assembly says that state funding of public schools will stop altogether so that 90% will be thrown into the hands of private corporations for support----national charter chains.


Maryland has a second problem with funding in that with no oversight and accountability we do not know that money actually ends up where it is supposed to go.

Take a look at these charts----I am not going to post them in this blog.....just note that what looks to be good is not good for 90% of Marylanders and it is reflected with actual achievement stats which again are skewed by elected officials and the media.  Achievement in Maryland was low to begin with because of poor standards of funding and resourcing schools....it is now only slightly better and that may simply be a statistical error.

State-By-State Report Card Unearths Inequities In School Funding
Education Week

“Is school funding fair"?


A report by that name was released this week. And it answered its own question with a resounding ‘no’ … The authors find that school funding was flat between 2010 and 2011, with about half the states making cuts and 14 spending less in 2011 than in 2007, even without adjusting for inflation … Most states did not allot more money for high-poverty districts, where report authors contend that students have higher needs … All but three states spent a smaller percentage of their GDP on education in 2011.”

Table 2. Fairness Measure #1: Funding Level

Maryland ranked 8th in funding level

Maryland$11,41711
$13,1109
$1,694
$13,4858
$375$12,971

Table 3. Fairness Measure #2: Funding Distribution

Maryland ranked at the bottom for distribution

Maryland89%D
94%D
99%C
93%D
$13,656 $13,167 $12,695 $12,240
90%F

I am not bragging but I would have fallen into this high achieving category and as a student having the skills to achieve early on----I did not need the resources other children needed because I was able to find what I needed and I excelled.  That is what high-achieving students do. 

THEY DO NOT NEED THE BULK OF SPENDING.

It is those children not having the benefit of learning skills that need the funding to allow them the opportunity to achieve in later grades.  So, this funding leaves the children needing that development most without the funding and resources to reach this goal.


Let's not forget that this dynamic moved more children from poverty to graduating with high achievement in the 1950s - 1970s than in any period in history----IT WORKS AND THERE IS NO REASON TO STOP THIS FUNDING EQUITY.

Note as well that Maryland has placed so much emphasis on reading and math to the exclusion of all other courses that children are graduating today with little or no background in humanities and liberal arts----which is what neo-liberals and neo-cons want----children in Baltimore in schools deemed low performance are sitting in front of Rupert Murdoch online lessons for goodness sake.  In Baltimore this is driven by Johns Hopkins.

THIS IGNORES ALL OF THE EQUAL PROTECTION LAWS REGARDING ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY IN EDUCATION.

Consequently, students are graduating not knowing anything about history, civics, social studies, and culture and I dare say that the methods of instruction are so bad in Maryland that even the constant emphasis on math and reading are achieving little.  Again, it is Johns Hopkin infusing the Baltimore education system with methods that do not work and that looks to be the goal.

This is what happens when a state is captured by neo-liberal and neo-con politicians-----the policy is all about corporate profit and benefit and not people's rights and what is best for them.  This is not a black, brown, or white issue.  It is not even a class issue because middle-class is facing the same discrimination.  It is a complete dismantling of a public education system for 90
% of Americans that allows for the movement of students into higher achievement and ability to access the best schools.

Funding Student Needs: Per Pupil Weights

How are schools funded under Student Based Budgeting (SBB)?

PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS14201 SCHOOL LANE, UPPER MARLBORO, MD 20772



High Performance.

Students in grades 3 to 8 receiving the “High Academic Performance” weight have scored advanced in both Reading and Math tests, while students in high school receive the weight if they have passed all HSA exams by the 10th grade.

Low Performance.Students in grades 3 to 8 receiving the “Low Academic Performance” weight have scored basic in both Reading and Math tests, while students in high school receive the weight if they have failed all HSA exams.

________________________________________

As Maryland citizens know our schools were allowed to crumble as the heyday of market boom and bust brought plenty of money to government coffers but all that money went to expand corporations like Johns Hopkins----now a global corporation and its Baltimore headquarters----and to rebuild downtown into global corporate meccas.  So, there is no excuse for crumbling school infrastructure except that neo-liberals and neo-cons do not value public education.  Remember, this happened from the Reagan/Clinton years forward----neo-liberalism took hold of the Democratic Party.

We have the bulk of public schools not receiving the funding they need and these schools are being rebuilt with a funding scheme designed specifically to hand huge profits to Wall Street along with the deed to the school building itself as the coming economic crash will cause the state and city to default on these building funds.

THE ENTIRE FUNDING SCHEME SURROUNDING PUBLIC EDUCATION IS DESIGNED TO HAND OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM TO PRIVATE CORPORATIONS WITH A DISMANTLING OF THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION 90% OF PEOPLE RECEIVE.  THERE GOES OUR SCHOOL BUILDINGS!


This is another reason for public banks -----another issue Cindy Walsh for Governor of Maryland supports!  Boy, no wonder corporate Maryland censured my campaign!

People were brought out to support this scheme not knowing the implications-----
and this happens because there is NO CONVERSATIONS ABOUT PUBLIC POLICY IN MARYLAND!

School districts pay dearly for bonds…ANOTHER reason for publicly-owned banks!

by Administrator Trey Bundy and Shane Shifflett, California Watch • http://www.sfgate.com • January 31, 2013

The Napa Valley Unified School District had a quandary: The district needed a new high school in American Canyon, but taxpayers appeared unwilling to take the financial hit required to build it.

So in 2009, the district took out an unusual loan: $22 million with no payments due for 21 years. By 2049, when the debt is paid, it will have cost taxpayers $154 million - seven times the amount borrowed.

...This form of borrowing has created billions of dollars in debt for taxpayers and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for financial advisers and underwriters. Voters are usually unaware of the bonds' high interest. At least one state, Michigan, has banned their use.


_________________________________________

Each year we listen to O'Malley and the Maryland Assembly tout their funding levels in Maryland and each year they fail to provide close to what is required according to legislation...the Thornton formula.  Each year they pretend to have met or exceeded a goal and that does not even bring them to what they should be doing. 
The Maryland Education Coalition works hard to demand these Thornton requirements are met, but the problem with lobbying is that a group becomes afraid to alienate pols----this makes citizens beggars for policy and not drivers of policy. The reason an education coalition has become a beggar of policy is that the entire Maryland Assembly are neo-liberals and neo-cons---not a democrat to be found. Yet every election labor and justice back the same incumbents killing their membership.  Now, how can politicians act as though they make education in Maryland a priority when all of the education advocacy groups are pushing just to get funding up to where it should have been a decade ago?  The media selects stats and makes it appear that pols are doing something when they are not.
Remember, Maryland has a record amount of money going to corporate subsidy and tax breaks......there is no shortage of revenue.....



'We are currently $700 million per year behind the original Thornton formula for state aid to public schools, and our bill is designed to prevent the State from falling further behind the funding levels necessary to achieve these goals'. 


Maryland Education CoalitionMEC Newsletter
April 1, 2013 


The 430th Maryland General Assembly Legislative Session is drawing towards an end.  This is our second newsletter, and we will publish a Session wrap-up edition in April. Please feel free to email David Beard at dbeard@acy.org if you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns.    MEC Priorities 


We worked hard on MEC’s main policy initiative for the 2013 session – to make the State actually protect public school funding. House Bill 1474 and Senate Bill 958 would directly advance our mission and our current priorities
Directly countering a very serious threat to learning – the eroding power of school funding under the current inflation  cap on State aid;  Protecting the Geographic Cost of Education Index (GCEI) so that children in higher-cost jurisdictions have fair funding.  Setting a goal for State capital aid that updates the target– set by the Kopp Commission nine years ago - to reflect current construction costs.  In the Thornton Commission process, the State very carefully considered the cost of providing an adequate education and closing achievement gaps.  We are currently $700 million per year behind the original Thornton formula for state aid to public schools, and our bill is designed to prevent the State from falling further behind the funding levels necessary to achieve these goals.  Considering the past five years of structural deficits, it was an accomplishment to win the support of well-positioned sponsors: Sen. Madaleno of the Budget and Taxation Committee and Del. Luedtke of the Ways and Means Committee, but we missed the filing deadline.  The Ways and Means Committee heard HB 1474 on March 19th.  The local school boards, the State teachers’ union, and the Budget and Tax Policy Institute provided strong support and testimony.  Baltimore City English teacher Iris Kirsch told her compelling story of how less funding in the classroom is affecting students.  To date, however, the bill has not been brought to a vote.  


_______________________________________

This is a message from a teacher to a parent in Chicago----we know this is happening in Maryland.  Teachers are so pressed to have students appear to be improving under an education regime that is the worst of possible approaches to educating students----that they will naturally look for any means possible to raise scores.  This is what pushes the best teachers out of the teaching profession and it pushes education right into the same corruption that has our corporations and government---

FORCING TEACHERS TO REACH GOALS THAT ARE UNATTAINABLE IN THE CURRENT CLIMATE WILL CREATE A CORRUPT EDUCATION SYSTEM.  WHEN THE GOAL IS SIMPLY SKEWED DATA---THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM.



CPS test cheating – focus on “bubble” kids From a parent who received this message from a teacher:

This kind of thing is happening all over, and it’s awful. This idea of concentrating on kids “on the bubble” is terrible educational practice (or malpractice…)

Begin forwarded message:

From: (teacher wishes to remain anonymous)
Date: February 12, 2014 at 9:39:42 AM CST
To: ******
Subject: NWEA

Today we had a grade level meeting about the NWEA scores for the fourth grade students at my school. We teachers were all given printouts of our students’ most recent scores: RIT bands, percentiles, the whole shebang.

Then we were instructed to highlight the students in our classes who had scored between the 37th and 50th percentile. These students, the admin informed us, are the most important students in the class; they are the ones most likely to reach the 51st percentile when students take the NWEA again in May.

Making the 51st percentile is VERY important to CPS, and thus to principals, literacy coordinators, test specialists and teachers-who-don’t-want-to-lose-their-jobs.

It might not be important to individual students, their parents or anyone else, but it is life or death in Chicago Public Schools.

We nodded, wide-eyed.  These students, our guide continued, should be your primary focus.  Make sure they get whatever they need to bring them up to that percentile. Sign them up for any and all academic programs, meet with them daily in small groups, give them extra homework, have them work with available tutors…whatever it takes.

What about the kids at the very bottom, one teacher wondered, the kids under the 20th percentile…shouldn’t they be offered more support too?  The admin squirmed a bit. Well, they don’t really have any chance of hitting the goal, so for right now, no.  There was silence.

Left unsaid was what might, could, will happen to any school that does NOT have enough students meet that magic number. No one really needs to say it. We all saw the 50 schools that got closed down last year.  We see the charters multiplying around us.  We’ve also seen the steady stream of displaced teachers come through our school doors as substitutes.  We know that we could be next.

- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=21149#sthash.KYq3Vl6C.dpuf

_______________________________________
I use reports from other cities and states because there is no education activism in Maryland....there is only collected voices by private non-profits aligned with the education privatization groups.  In Baltimore, that is the Baltimore Education Coalition----BEC, a Johns Hopkins organization of charter school, Teach for America, and Michelle Rhee supporters.  They, like this article below are the ones who bring bus loads of citizens from Baltimore to support policy that works against the interest of the communities where the policy is being implemented.  Charter and Teach for America advocates seem less worried about the tiered funding and closing of schools then they are about the right to have charters used in Baltimore as development tools.  If you think using  schools as development tools is OK since you are in the midst of needing better schools----please look at the longer term implication of these policies----they do not stop with moving the poor out of neighborhoods----these policies will effect your schools as well!

All across the country we know the stats on charters are largely fictional and skewed.  Yet, we are subjected to these reports because we have pols simply moving these privatization policies forward with no regard to citizens and the quality of education children will receive.

PLEASE STOP RE-ELECTING THESE VERY INCUMBENTS EACH ELECTION CYCLE.  IF THEY ARE NOT SHOUTING THESE EDUCATION POLICIES ARE BAD FOR EVERYONE-----THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS OR NEO-CONS AND NEED TO GO.


In Baltimore, the stats on charters are not online and when you call Baltimore School Board they pretend they do not have a problem.  All of this is illegal and has nothing to do with public education.



PSAT for 4-8-14: Let Springfield know the truth about charter schools Today, charter school advocates will be taking out their checkbooks to fund Springfield trips for folks to lobby for less oversight of and more money for charter schools.

Mayor Emanuel says that the truth about charter schools’ mediocre performance compared with regular schools is “yesterday’s debate.”

Not really. The truth always matters, and the truth about charter schools is only beginning to get front page coverage.

So, while Bill Gates’ and the Walton’s minions are trudging down to Springfield to echo the Mayor’s efforts to brush off the truth about charters, please call, fax, or e-mail your state representative and senator with the truth.

Here’s what I faxed to every member of the Illinois House:

Look at charter school evidence, not expensive PR


Yesterday, Chicago’s two major newspapers made it very clear that charter schools can be very problematic and DO NOT provide better academic results.

But today you will be approached by busloads of well-financed charter school advocates trying to spin the facts while they ask you to ignore the truth and pave the way for more money and  “freedom” for charters.

Here’s the truth about charter schools:

The Chicago Tribune reported on the drastic, regressive discipline policy of one of the largest of these charter franchises, the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Even as the Chicago Public Schools is working toward more effective, positive discipline policies that keep students in school and learning, Noble is suspending and expelling students at a vastly greater rate than the district, and making their families pay significant dollars in the process.

The Sun-Times reported that Chicago’s charter school achievement rates are no better than that of the district overall, and far worse than the more comparable district magnet schools which have similar non-selective lottery enrollment systems. This confirms years of research which has been largely ignored as corporate reformers demand an ever-expanding “marketplace” for privately-run charter schools.

PURE ASKS YOU TO :

  • Pay attention to the research, not the rhetoric about charter schools.
  • Support HB3937, (HCA1) which extends the moratorium on virtual charter schools.
  • Support HB4591, which would require charter schools to return pro-rated funds for the kids they “counsel out.
  • Support HB5328, LSCs and other accountability for charter schools.
  • Support HB5887, which puts reasonable financial accountability on virtual charter schools.
  • Support HB6005, a major charter school accountability act.
Thank you!

- See more at: http://pureparents.org/?p=21237#sthash.6dWJajMn.dpuf

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June 26th, 2014

6/26/2014

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CENSURING A CANDIDATE BECAUSE OF PLATFORM IS THE ISSUE FOR ELECTION VIOLATIONS IN MARYLAND.  THE DIFFERENCE FALLS BETWEEN NEO-LIBERAL AND LABOR AND JUSTICE PLATFORMS IN THE MARYLAND DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THEY ARE ENTIRELY IN OPPOSITION.


I do want to spend today and tomorrow talking of the court challenge of this primary election so people understand the extent of corruption in the system and to encourage more people to run for office with the idea of challenging this process if it continues to operate illegally.  Movement of operations and oversight from public institutions to private non-profits often funded by the rich and corporations sets the stage for these abuses in the system.  If private media becomes the only source of election coverage......if public media is allowed to skirt FCC and IRS election laws.....if the state does not provide rigorous outlets for political discussion in communities across the state to assure the opportunity for citizens to be informed and intelligent when going to cast a ballot-----

THEN YOU DO NOT HAVE A FUNCTIONING ELECTION PROCESS----AND MARYLAND RECEIVES A GREAT BIG 'F'.


My task in this case will be to prove there were violations so severe as to change the results of this primary election.  This will be easily done.  I must prove I was a viable and legal candidate and since Supreme Court rulings in the past use terms like 'cannot exclude because of platform' and 'can select candidates with strong public support' that the exclusion from election venues occurred as a consequence of my platform.  I have proven through the polling debacle the claim of 'strong public support' was not there.  I contend that 501c3s have the obligation of participating in ways that do not damage a candidate's campaign so none of the above should matter.  It is obvious if a candidate is left out of major venues.....damage is done.  It is obvious if exclusion from smaller local events occurs to a great degree.....damage is done.  The targeting of Prince George's County and Baltimore City for the greatest of election violations is not only a civil rights issue but targets a population that would most readily embrace the issues encompassed in my platform and this is willful and deliberate.  I do not believe I should have to prove platform is the issue as 'damage' should prevent exclusion, but I will focus on the issue of platform because of the previous Supreme Court rulings regarding the FCC election laws and media participation---the largest factor in electioneering.

The Maryland Democratic Party has for a few decades been controlled by Clinton neo-liberals.  O'Malley is a neo-liberal politician who controls much of the Maryland democratic apparatus and as governor appoints the people to head agencies like the Maryland Board of Elections, Maryland public universities, and Maryland Public Television.  I go further to contend that since the politicians in Baltimore work for the Baltimore Development Corporation and Johns Hopkins which write all of the city's public policy-----and the fact that they are both the most neo-conservative of institutions----the Baltimore democratic committee are largely neo-conservatives.  Anyway you look at the Maryland Democratic Party today it is 'neo'.  What does 'neo' mean?  The conservatives of the republican party will say that neo-cons are not republicans----hence the term RINO just as labor and justice of the democratic party will say that neo-liberals are not democrats-----hence the term DINO.  Both neo-conservatives and neo-liberals embrace global markets, global corporate control of the economy and government, and what they call free market although everyone knows what we have today is not free market.  The republican and democratic platforms both are tied to the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights albeit with different interpretations.  We are guaranteed rights as citizens to legislate....we are guaranteed rights to equal protection under Rule of Law.  We are guaranteed protection under the Bill  of Rights.  The republican and democratic platforms are built with these rights central to the party.  Republicans differ from democrats in wanting free enterprise -----which we do not have now---- while democrats want regulations enforced that enforce labor and justice laws  and public institutions to protect civil rights and liberties.

NEO-CONS AND NEO-LIBERALS DO NOT WANT ANY OF THIS.  THEY WORK STRICTLY TO MAXIMIZE CORPORATE PROFITS AND TO HAND CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY AND GOVERNMENT TO CORPORATIONS.  THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT EITHER PARTY PLATFORM STATES.  NEO-CONS ARE NOT REPUBLICANS AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE NOT DEMOCRATS YET THEY HAVE GAINED CONTROL OF BOTH PARTIES AND ARE MOVING THE US TOWARDS THIS STRUCTURE OUTLINED IN THE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT.

This is what I mean when I identify 'platform' as the reason for my exclusion from the democratic party primary events in the Maryland race for governor.  Yet, it happens at all levels of political races.  Neo-liberals controlling the democratic party today are willfully and deliberately excluding candidates that have this labor and justice platform.  Republican voters are feeling the same exclusion hence the large number of 'unaffiliated' and the extremely low voter turnout.  It is not lack of interest----it is apathy caused by chronic and systemic election fraud.


Below we see the contradiction in philosophy-------one wants to dismantle all of the public structures that provide oversight and accountability and public justice.  It wants to privatize all that is public to send all the power of public policy and enforcement of that policy to corporations-----

THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM.

No matter how many times a candidate says they support public justice, or strong public education, or strong public health care.....when they are neo-liberals working to deregulate and consolidate all industries to a global corporate they have no intention of protecting these issues.  Throwing these progressive bones is what media labels a progressive candidate.  As you can see Brown, Gansler, and Mizeur all support public private partnerships, Wall Street development and financial instruments of leverage and credit that have mortgaged the future of Maryland.  They all support dismantling the public sector, none speak of the ranking of Maryland at the bottom nationally for fraud, corruption, and lack of transparency, and they never mention Trans Pacific Trade Pact TPP ----the very policy towards which all legislation in Maryland works because of neo-conservative/neo-liberal control of politics.


THIS CLEARLY DELINEATES BETWEEN ISSUES WITHIN A PLATFORM AND CLEARLY SHOWS THAT THOSE ESPOUSING A LABOR AND JUSTICE PLATFORM ARE COMPLETELY CENSURED IN MEDIA AND LARGE 501C3 VENUES.  IT IS THE PLATFORM THAT DRIVES THIS EXCLUSION.


Neoliberalism
From Wikipedia,

Neoliberalism is a form of economic liberalism, which advocates support for great economic liberalization, free trade, open markets, privatization, deregulation, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.[1][2]



National Democratic Platform
  • Moving America Forward
  • Rebuilding Middle Class Security
    1. Putting Americans Back to Work
    2. The Middle Class Bargain
    3. Cutting Waste, Reducing the Deficit, Asking All to Pay Their Fair Share
    4. Economy Built to Last
  • America Works When Everyone Plays by the Same Rules
    1. Wall Street Reform
    2. 21st Century Government: Transparent and Accountable
    3. Lobbying Reform and Campaign Finance Reform
  • Greater Together
    1. Strengthening the American Community
    2. Protecting Rights and Freedoms
    3. Ensuring Safety and Quality of Life
  • Stronger in the World, Safer and More Secure At Home
    1. Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq
    2. Disrupting, Dismantling, and Defeating Al-Qaeda
    3. Responsibly Ending the War in Afghanistan
    4. Preventing the Spread and Use of Nuclear Weapons
    5. Countering Emerging Threats
    6. Strengthening Alliances, Expanding Partnerships, and Reinvigorating International Institutions
    7. Promoting Global Prosperity and Development
    8. Maintaining the Strongest Military in the World
    9. Advancing Universal Values

    ___________________________________

Heather was assigned the moniker of progressive because she supports some social issues that are deemed progressive.  Yet, she is solidly in the Clinton camp of neo-liberals as her views of economy and business go.  Embracing a Wall Street everyone knows is predatory and rife with fraud and corruption as an answer to development while supporting corporate subsidy and corporate tax breaks that are needed for our government coffers to do these public works clearly shows this conflict.  Pushing the neo-liberal sound bite that the economy is suffering because of the need to shed even more business regulations when the state suffers from absolutely no oversight and accountability leading to extremely high levels of fraud and corruption shows Mizeur is not a progressive.  Commercializing our public universities is what has created the high tuition that Heather says she will work to lower not to mention compromising the one unbiased source of all public data.  Embracing a transportation public private partnership of this magnitude in this environment of fraud and corruption and lack of oversight while not mentioning that simply rebuilding oversight and accountability first would bring the money to government coffers to publicly finance the entire project shows you are a neo-liberal.

Read Heather's plan to use innovative financing options



Read Heather's plan to facilitate greater commercialization of academic research.

Read Heather's plan to fund much-needed infrastructure projects across the state


Read Heather's plan to Streamline Our Regulatory System


Brown, who is running in the Democratic primary for governor, released the five-point plan on Tuesday.

At the top of the list is using innovative financing to pay for infrastructure. Brown led an effort to better define public-private partnerships in the state last year.

Using a P3 for a transit project of this size is rare.
The four candidates expressed support for the decision to seek a public-private partnership (P3) to build the Purple Line


Please look at what these politicians say and how these progressive issues fit in with the larger visions of economic and business models and you will see-----giving more and more of our public sector control to corporations and tying the state to ever larger amounts of global corporate investment in lieu of collecting corporate taxes and giving corporate subsidy-----prohibits the interjection of these progressive issues.  This is why time and again we elect these neo-liberals running as progressives and watch as they ignore all those progressive promises.  NEO-LIBERALISM CANNOT BE PROGRESSIVE----IT IS REGRESSIVE.

The Maryland Assembly passed the most private and profit-driven health system in the nation; Baltimore has one of the most privatizing and tiered K-12 reform in the nation that will serve as a platform to expand across Maryland and the Maryland Assembly passed these laws to allow this.  Maryland and Baltimore are at the bottom for fraud and corruption that is killing the middle/working class----and that is not what a democrat would allow---it is a neo-liberal policy of profiting any way possible.  So, we know Maryland has a political system controlled by neo-liberals and neo-cons and this is why it is the candidates on the democratic primary side that always see exclusion from the election process.  It is strictly based on platform of rebuilding oversight and accountability of corporations and government and holding global corporations at bay and building a domestic economy fueled primarily on small and regional businesses.

The State of Maryland allows contract awards to go to national and global corporations that then subcontract to Maryland businesses and force bids so low as to put Maryland small businesses out of business.  This process exists at state and local levels. So, how are you advocating for small business development when you work within this contracting dynamic?  The objective of global corporations is to take all consumer market share and eliminate small and regional businesses.  Do you hear anyone in the democratic race shouting that this is the problem of losing businesses in Maryland?  That is how you know you are dealing with neo-cons and neo-conservatives.

IT'S A HOSTILE TAX AND REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT THAT IS CREATING HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT AND A STAGNANT ECONOMY SAY NEO-LIBERALS!  NO, IT IS GLOBAL CORPORATE CONTROL OF OUR ECONOMY AND THE FACT THAT THEY ARE PUTTING ALL SMALL AND REGIONAL BUSINESSES OUT OF BUSINESS.



BELOW YOU SEE WHERE NEO-LIBERALISM HAS TAKEN THE MARYLAND ECONOMY AND THE SOLUTIONS OFFERED BY CANDIDATES LIKE MYSELF.  THE POLICY STANCES ARE AT OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM----ERGO----THE REASON FOR EXCLUDING MY PLATFORM FROM THIS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY FOR GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND.

1. Living Indicators. The use of financial indicators like gross domestic product (GDP) and the Dow Jones average to assess the performance of the economy gives priority to false values. We currently see just how invalid these financial measures are: GDP grows, but jobs don’t. The Dow Jones climbs, but wages are stagnant and foreclosures continue. Neither is a valid measure of the kind of economic performance we need.

Replace financial indicators like GDP with indicators of human- and natural-systems health as the basis for evaluating economic performance. The Bhutan experiment with a happiness index is an excellent start.

2. A Real Wealth Money System. Wall Street control of the creation and allocation of money concentrates the power to set national priorities in institutions that recognize no interest beyond their own profits. As we become ever more dependent on money to meet our basic daily needs, this control becomes ever more complete—and more destructive of all that we truly value.

Decentralize and democratize the money system so that it redirects the flow of money away from Wall Street speculators to productive Main Street businesses. We once had a system of community banks, mutual savings and loans and credit unions that were locally rooted and served local needs. But that system has been largely dismantled and transformed into too-big-to-fail Wall Street mega-banks that suck wealth out of communities and depend on government subsidies and protections. There is nothing esoteric about the banking system we must create. It looks a great deal like the system we had before the start of banking deregulation in the 1970s.

3. Equitable Distribution. Wall Street political influence has produced trade, fiscal, workplace and social policies that create ever more extreme inequality by suppressing wages and eroding protections, services and safety nets for those who do productive work to increase profits for the owning class. Aren’t we glad politicians restored tax breaks for the very rich so they could continue to inflate their claims against the real wealth of the rest of us?

Implement fiscal, workplace and social policies that distribute income and ownership equitably. Equitable societies are healthier, happier, more democratic and avoid the excesses of extravagance and desperation.

4. Living Enterprises with Living Owners. An ideology of market fundamentalism has embedded a belief in public culture that the sole purpose and responsibility of a business enterprise is to maximize financial returns to its owners. This belief, combined with a system of absentee ownership and instantaneous trading of corporate shares, encourages short-term over long-term thinking and strips corporate decision making of concern for social and environmental consequences. 

Recognize the primary purpose of any enterprise is to serve the needs of a living community. Favor living enterprises with living, locally rooted owners who have a direct stake in the social and environmental consequences of the firm’s management decisions—people who are looking not for maximum financial return, but for a living return that includes a healthy community and natural environment. This means favoring cooperative, worker- and community-owned enterprises and discouraging the speculative public trading of corporate shares.


5. Real Markets/Real Democracy. The institution of the global corporation is designed to facilitate the creation of global-scale, legally-protected concentrations of economic and political power dedicated to extracting social, environmental and governmental subsidies to advance the exclusive and narrow private interests of financial elites beyond public accountability. This violates the principle of shared and distributed power foundational to democracy and a market economy.

Create real rule-based markets and democracy by breaking up concentrations of corporate power, barring corporations from competing with human beings for political power and implementing rules and incentives that support cost internalization.

6. Local Living Economies. Fragmented local economies dependent on global corporations for jobs and basic goods and services leave people and nature captive to the financial interests of distant institutions that have no concern for their well-being or accountability to their interests.

Pursue local economic development programs that build diversified, self-reliant, energy efficient, democratically self-organizing local economies comprised of locally-owned living enterprises devoted to serving local needs.


7. Supportive Global Rules. Global rules put forward by institutions like the WTO that are largely captive to corporate interests circumvent institutions of democracy to support the other six Old Economy dysfunctions.

Restructure global rules and institutions to honor and serve life values and local control.

Leadership in framing and popularizing a vision for a New Economy must come from We the People. We are the one’s we’re waiting for.

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May 29th, 2014

5/29/2014

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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

THIS IS WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT LOOKS LIKE.

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

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

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

March 13, 2014|By Alison Knezevich,

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

___________________________________________

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

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


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


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

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

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


Why Exelon chose Harbor Point over downtown – more like suburbia

Baltimore Brew Stirring up News and Views in Baltimore Maryland

Thursday, May, 29th, 2014 29
Fern Shen


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

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

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

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

“Where’s My Office Park?”


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

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

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

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

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

Branding Safety in the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cubicle Workers and a Lacrosse Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

Double Tax Breaks

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


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

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

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

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

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

Embry and Others Question Tax Breaks


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Transit-Friendly or Car-Oriented?

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

“Definitely not,” Beatty told reporters yesterday.

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

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

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

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

That makes for a very big office park.


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

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





Friday, May 17, 2013

More invasive species detected at US ports in the Mid Atlantic

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

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

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


___________________________________________

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

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


THIS IS PUBLIC MALFEASANCE AND EVERYONE INVOLVES KNOWS IT!


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


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

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

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

116 Port of Baltimore workers to lose jobs

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Ports America

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

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

About Highstar Capital

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

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

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May 15th, 2014

5/15/2014

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CORPORATE POLITICIANS ARE NOW MOVING ALL PUBLIC REVENUE TO MAXIMIZING CORPORATE PROFITS.  LET'S LOOK AT THE TAX CODE TO SEE WORKING AND MIDDLE-CLASS MADE TO PAY MORE BECAUSE CORPORATIONS ARE PAYING NOTHING AND IN FACT USING TAXES IN PROFIT-MAKING.

WHILE DISMANTLING PUBLIC SERVICES AND HANDING PUBLIC ASSETS TO CORPORATIONS ------THE PUBLIC IS INCREASINGLY BECOMING THE DEEPLY POOR RELIANT ON GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS FOR BASIC NEEDS.

AS WALL STREET COLLECTION AGENCIES ARE INFUSED THROUGH ALL PUBLIC AGENCIES TAPPING MORE PUBLIC WEALTH IN FEES, FINES, AND OUTRIGHT FRAUD -------THE PUBLIC JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT HOLDS WHITE COLLAR CRIME AND CORPORATE TAX EVASION ACCOUNTABLE IS BEING COMPLETELY DISMANTLED.

The Trans Pacific Trade Pact will have all US government reporting to global corporate tribunals which will write all public policy, decide how law is enforced, will extract ever higher taxes, fees, and rates from people living in a corporate state.  The building of this structure starts by centralizing all power of public policy and justice to the executive offices-----mayor, county executive, governor, and President and away from legislative bodies and the courts.  This is why you see so many 'commissions' that make vital decisions all appointed by these executives.  When you have corporate public executives you have corporate appointments to commissions and hence no public policy in the public interest.  THIS IS A DELIBERATE BUILDING OF GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE AWAY FROM OUR NORMAL DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.  When a governor and state assembly simply tell a court that awards damages to citizens that the state will not pay those damages.....you see the court system undermined. 

That mayor, county executive, governor, and President is reporting and taking action from this global corporate tribunal and not you and I.


Let's look how the rich and corporations are now not only paying no taxes but the taxes you and I pay go right to the pockets of corporations.  I have talked at length about corporate subsidy at all levels of government.  Maryland raised taxes across the board through the Erhlich/O'Malley terms to augment this corporate subsidy.  Now, they are passing the estate tax break which allows the same people enriched from the massive corporate frauds to keep their loot.

REPATRIATION OF GLOBAL CORPORATION TAX REQUIREMENTS.


Obama made a mantra of holding corporations accountable and reversing wealth inequity and we see has done the complete opposite.  Below we see the most important corporate tax issue------how to extract tax revenue from US global corporations working in the US and controlling all of our public policy yet not paying a cent in corporate tax.  Why is it important for corporations to pay taxes?  THEY USE LARGE SECTORS OF THE PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE.....OF ENERGY AND PUBLIC SERVICES.....THEY BENEFIT FROM OUR PUBLICLY EDUCATED CITIZENS......AND ARE PROTECTED IN COURT BY OUR PUBLIC JUSTICE SYSTEM.  Corporations use all of these public benefits 1000% more than a single individual.  THAT IS WHY CORPORATIONS PAY TAXES.  It is not a double-tax burden as opponents to corporate tax say.  Keep in mind corporate tax designations like s-corporation status move much tax burden off to shareholders who now rarely pay taxes at all----because there is no accountability. 

ALONG WITH SYSTEMIC CORPORATE FRAUD, IT IS THIS CORPORATE TAX EVASION MAKING OUR GOVERNMENT COFFERS EMPTY.


The big corporate tax issues of 2008 election were how the US would make US global corporations pay their fair share as most business moved to expanded global markets.  US global corporations have spent these last years since the crash consolidating overseas and building overseas headquarters from which they operate yet they lord over all of us here in the US.  IF THEY DO BUSINESS AND HAVE OFFICES IN THE US-----THEY MUST PAY TAXES.  Since these corporations have left the US economy stagnant as they expand overseas the money earned and taxed has fallen dramatically, starving our government coffers.  The effects of global markets and corporations on our domestic economy is STARK.  We cannot maintain a democratic society with global markets.

The REPATRIATION TAX was meant to address these global market gains back when NAFTA passed with Reagan/Clinton.  Don't worry they said----we will make sure all that money gained overseas brings revenue to our government coffers.  Then, they wrote the law with so many loopholes that no money from overseas profits has come to the US-----US corporations have simply left those profits sit off-shore.  So, the US loses billions of corporate tax revenue each year because neo-liberals with a super-majority in Congress ignored all policy issues that would have held corporations accountable.  Just think, this expansion since 2008 has almost all business executed by US corporations now overseas.  This was the issue all democratic candidates for office ran with in 2008-----and then ignored.  This is how you know your candidate is a neo-liberal.

THE US IS NOW LIKE A THIRD WORLD NATION THAT SIMPLY EXPORTS ALL MONEY RESOURCES AND KEEPS ITS OWN COUNTRY IMPOVERISHED. 



Obama just offered up an override of the corporate repatriation tax of trillions of dollars in tax avoidance as a way to pay for infrastructure work. Obama cannot see the corporate fraud but he is an expert on giving trillions of dollars in corporate tax cuts. THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU----WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT.
  Keep in mind this repatriation issue has existed since Clinton and NAFTA.  When your pols allow a corporation to become too large to oversee-----they have failed the American people.  The 2008 election was about reversing these policies and it was instead met with trillions of dollars in corporate tax breaks and FED policy that expanded these corporations ten fold.

REMEMBER, SIMPLY REINSTATING RULE OF LAW WOULD IMMEDIATELY DOWNSIZE ALL OF THESE GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.  THIS IS WHY ELECTIONS HAVE BEEN CAPTURED TO MAKE SURE ANY CANDIDATE SEEKING TO DO THIS IS CENSURED.

Global corporations are now telling us they will repatriate these tax evasive profits at a 3.5% tax
and Obama suggests this tax revenue will go right into infrastructure.  Remember what infrastructure means----corporate infrastructure------gas pipelines and export terminals, high-speed rail and CSX cargo rails and bridges for example.  Remember, the American people are paying huge amounts of money in taxes for the roads and high utility rates for water and sewage infrastructure.  SO, neo-liberals are saying OK......let's bring in just enough to allow US global corporations to pay for their infrastructure development.  See the parallel with Enterprise Zone corporate tax breaks-----any corporate taxes paid stays right in that Enterprise Zone maintaining corporate infrastructure.


Caterpillar dodged $2.4 billion in US taxes by booking 85% of its profits in Switzerland, where the company employs a mere .5% of its workforce and has zero factories or warehouses.




Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Cash
By Jesse Drucker Dec 29, 2010 12:01 AM ET   Forbes



At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.


The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.

What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. Over the years, they’ve brought cash home, tax-free, employing strategies with nicknames worthy of 1970s conspiracy thrillers -- including “the Killer B” and “the Deadly D.”

Merck & Co Inc., the second-largest drugmaker in the U.S., last year brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax to help finance its acquisition of Schering-Plough Corp., securities filings show. Merck is also appealing a federal judge’s 2009 finding that Schering-Plough owed taxes on $690 million it had earlier brought home from overseas tax-free.

Photographer: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems Inc.

The largest drugmaker, Pfizer Inc., imported more than $30 billion from offshore in connection with its acquisition of Wyeth last year, while taking steps to minimize the tax hit on its publicly reported profit.

Disclosures in Switzerland and Delaware by Eli Lilly & Co. show the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company carried out many of the steps for a tax-free importation of foreign cash after its roughly $6 billion purchase of ImClone Systems Inc. in 2008.

‘Trivially Small Taxes’

“Sophisticated U.S. companies are routinely repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign earnings and paying trivially small U.S. taxes on those repatriations,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They devote enormous resources first to moving income to tax havens, and then to bringing those profits back to the U.S. at the lowest possible tax cost.”

With the exception of the Schering-Plough case, no authority has accused Merck or Pfizer or Lilly of paying less tax than they should have. While corporations have no obligation to pay any more than the legal minimum, “the question is what should that minimum be?” said Kleinbard, a former corporate tax attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

U.S. companies overall use various repatriation strategies to avoid about $25 billion a year in federal income taxes, he said.

‘Best of Worlds’

“The current U.S. international tax system is the best of all worlds for U.S. multinationals,” said David S. Miller, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York.
That’s because the companies can defer federal income taxes by shifting profits into low-tax jurisdictions abroad, and then use foreign tax credits to shelter those earnings from U.S. tax when they repatriate them, he said.


They’re aided by a cadre of attorneys, accountants and investment bankers in the tax-planning industry -- such as a panel of KPMG LLP tax advisers who held forth in a chilly hotel ballroom at a Philadelphia conference last month. There, they discussed a series of techniques for multinationals to return cash from overseas while avoiding or deferring the taxes.

KPMG tax advisers Kevin Glenn and Tom Zollo used slides to describe several methods. One diagram resembled a schematic from the Manhattan Project. Another strategy would require certain “bells and whistles” to convince regulators of an actual non-tax business purpose, Glenn explained.


Cat and Mouse

Such maneuvers reflect a decades-long cat-and-mouse game. As regulators and lawmakers tighten the rules, companies seek new, legal methods for getting around them. One of the techniques the KPMG advisers discussed was in response to loophole-closers Congress passed in August to address a projected $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit. The changes will make it harder for companies to manipulate the credits they get for taxes paid overseas.

“Some of the best minds in the country are spent all day, every day, wheedling nickels and dimes out of the tax system,” said H. David Rosenbloom, an attorney at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C., and director of the international tax program at New York University’s school of law.

Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive officer, brought up a repatriation break during the White House meeting, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
It could reprise a 2004 tax holiday that allowed multinationals to return profits to the U.S. at a tax rate of 5.25 percent. U.S. corporations brought home $362 billion, with $312 billion qualifying for the relief, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

Short-Term Fix

Such a move “is a short-term fix to a long-term problem, which is the uncompetitive U.S. tax structure,” said Cisco spokeswoman Jennifer Greeson Dunn. The San Jose, California-based company reported $31.6 billion of undistributed foreign earnings, on which it had paid no U.S. taxes, as of July 31.


President Obama, who campaigned in part against companies’ use of offshore havens to avoid U.S. taxes, asked Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to follow up on the issue with business leaders, according to a White House official who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private.

The argument that a new tax break for offshore earnings would generate a domestic stimulus “holds no water at all,” said Joel B. Slemrod, an economics professor at the University of Michigan’s school of business and former senior tax economist for President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. U.S. companies are already sitting on a record pile of cash -- $1.9 trillion in liquid assets, according to Federal Reserve data.

‘Cash Hoards’

“The fact that they have these cash hoards suggests that investment is not being constrained by lack of cash,” Slemrod said.


U.S. multinationals boost earnings by shifting income out of the country via transfer pricing, a system that allows them to allocate costs to subsidiaries in high-tax countries and profits to tax havens. Google Inc., for example, cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years by moving most of the income it attributed overseas ultimately to Bermuda, Bloomberg News reported in October.

The tax benefits from such profit shifting can have a greater impact on share price than boosting sales or cutting other expenses, since the reduced rate goes straight to the bottom line, said John P. Kennedy, a partner at Deloitte Tax LLP, speaking at the conference in Philadelphia Nov. 3.

Boosting Share Prices

For a hypothetical company that has 1,000 shares outstanding, has pretax income of $5,000 and trades at 20 times earnings, cutting just 2 percentage points off the rate could drive the share price up $2, Kennedy said.

“You may think two bucks isn’t much, but when you’re the CFO and she has 100,000 options, that’s pretty interesting,” he said. He cited large pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including Merck, Amgen Inc. and Eli Lilly, which have reported effective income tax rates at least 10 percentage points below the statutory 35 percent rate.

The bottom line: The effective tax rate “is, and will continue to be, the metric that is used to judge your performance,” he told the audience of corporate tax accountants and attorneys.


U.S. drugmakers shift profits overseas far in excess of actual sales there. In 2008, large U.S. pharmaceutical companies reported about four-fifths of their pre-tax income abroad, up from about a third in 1997, according to a March article in the journal Tax Notes by Martin A. Sullivan, a contributing editor and former U.S. Treasury Department tax economist. Their actual foreign sales grew more slowly, to 52 percent from 38 percent.

Stranded Cash

Deloitte’s Kennedy warned that booking large portions of income overseas can mean “you are going to strand so much cash offshore that your business chokes.” That’s because the foreign profits cannot be used for such purposes as building domestic factories without triggering federal tax. Overall, U.S. companies reported more than $1 trillion in such “indefinitely reinvested earnings” offshore at the end of 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Last year, Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, tapped its offshore cash, tax-free, to pay for just over half the cash portion of its $51 billion merger with Schering-Plough, according to company filings.

At the deal’s closing, Merck’s foreign subsidiaries lent $9.4 billion to a pair of Schering-Plough Dutch units. Then the Dutch companies used those funds to repay a pre-existing loan from their U.S. parent, securities filings show. The $9.4 billion ended up with Schering-Plough shareholders as part of the cash owed under the merger, according to the company’s disclosure.

No Tax Hit

Bottom line: Merck used its overseas cash to pay the former Schering-Plough shareholders -- with no U.S. tax hit. In considering whether companies owe taxes in such cases, the IRS often asks whether payments from an offshore unit constitute a dividend, which would be taxable.

In Merck’s case, it arguably could be, said Robert Willens, who runs an independent firm that advises investors on tax issues.

“Merck was obligated to pay Schering-Plough shareholders and they tapped into the funds of their overseas subsidiaries to do it,” he said. “You’d have to be concerned about a constructive dividend there.”

Merck objected to any characterization of the payment as a dividend. “We don’t think the characterization is accurate and we remain confident with our tax position,” said Steven Campanini, a company spokesman.

On Appeal

In the Schering-Plough case decided last year, the drugmaker brought home $690 million tax-free as a result of assigning its rights to income from a complex interest-rate swap to a foreign subsidiary in the 1990s. A judge found the company “failed to establish a genuine purpose for the transactions other than tax avoidance” and said Schering-Plough was not entitled to $473 million in back taxes in dispute. Merck is appealing the judgment.

Even when companies pay large tax bills to import their foreign profits, they find ways to minimize the impact on the earnings they show investors. Last year, New York-based Pfizer repatriated more than $30 billion from offshore to help pay for its $64 billion purchase of Wyeth, according to company disclosures and a person familiar with the transaction.

The acquisition created a so-called deferred tax liability on Pfizer’s balance sheet of about $25 billion, according to securities filings, in part to allow for an anticipated tax hit on the earnings that would be repatriated.

Impact Wiped Out

While bringing home more than $30 billion helped generate a $10 billion tax obligation, Pfizer was able to draw down $10 billion of its new deferred liability through its income statement. Doing so wiped out the tax impact of the repatriation on its earnings reported to shareholders. 

So while the company paid a real tax bill to the U.S. government stemming from the repatriation, that tax payment had limited impact on its publicly reported profits.

Pfizer made use of a legal accounting quirk that allowed it to set up the deferred liability on its balance sheet, but reverse part of that liability through its income statement, said Edmund Outslay, a professor of tax accounting at Michigan State University.

“Had Pfizer repatriated these earnings independently of the purchase of Wyeth, it would have incurred a huge tax charge” on its income statement, Outslay said. “So through the magic of purchase accounting, you create an opportunity to bring this money home while mitigating its impact on your effective tax rate.”

Effective Tax Rate

Pfizer spokeswoman Joan Campion said the $10 billion tax hit was indeed erased on the income statement because of the accounting treatment, but noted that the company’s effective tax rate rose in 2009 in part because Wyeth’s overseas profits were repatriated to help finance the deal.

Other strategies based on acquisitions have achieved nickname status among corporate tax advisers.

The “Killer B” maneuver is named for section 368(a)(1)(B) of the Internal Revenue Code, which deals with tax-free reorganizations. A U.S. company using the technique would sell its shares to an offshore subsidiary, bringing cash back to the U.S. tax-free. The offshore unit could then use the stock to make an acquisition. In 2006, the IRS issued a notice aimed at shutting down the maneuver.

Using a Variation

International Business Machines Corp. used a variation on the technique in May 2007, with an offshore unit purchasing the shares from a trio of banks, according to a company securities filing. That permutation wasn’t covered by the IRS in 2006. Two days after IBM’s disclosure, the agency announced plans for additional rule changes addressing stock sales to subsidiaries from shareholders as well as directly from parent companies.

The “Deadly D,” also named for a section of tax law, allows a U.S. company to attach the high tax basis in a newly acquired company to one of its existing foreign units. In some cases, doing so enables the U.S. parent to pull cash from the subsidiary up to the amount of the recent purchase price tax-free. The Obama administration has proposed changing the provision that enables the maneuver.

Lilly closed on its purchase of ImClone in November 2008. The next month, the newly acquired company converted to an LLC and Lilly transferred the investment to its main Swiss subsidiary, Eli Lilly SA, according to disclosures in Switzerland and Delaware. The transfer was in exchange for a $5.8 billion note payable to the U.S. parent company due at the end of 2011.

Extracting Earnings

Willens, the independent tax adviser, said the steps indicated a likely D reorganization, or another method “to extract earnings from overseas without tax consequences -- of course.” Lilly had no comment beyond its filings, said David P. Lewis, the company’s vice president for global taxes.

The KPMG panel discussion in Philadelphia, called “Global Cash Tax Management Plans and Repatriation Planning,” dissected other techniques, including one that took six slides to explain. It works like this:

Soon after a U.S. multinational has purchased another U.S. company, the new unit promises to pay the parent a large amount of cash pursuant to a note agreement. Since both parties are U.S. companies, there is no tax bill for the parent under current U.S. law.

Then the new acquisition converts to a foreign company. So when the payment pursuant to the note is made, it comes from overseas. That means the foreign cash is treated as a nontaxable payment under the note, instead of a taxable dividend.

Going Offshore

The newly converted foreign subsidiary could access the multinational’s existing offshore cash by borrowing from a foreign sister unit, said Glenn, the KPMG tax partner. He and Zollo were joined by colleague Frank Mattei, as well as Don Whitt, a Pfizer tax official.

“This basic transaction is something that at least a couple of taxpayers have done, and I know a number of others have evaluated,” Glenn said. The strategy’s name follows the alphabetic tradition of Bs and Ds. It’s called “the Outbound F.”

______________________________________________
Remember, the biggest way of recovering massive corporate fraud is through direct taxation.  This is what the Robin Hood----financial tax on banks was to do.  Neo-liberals intend to cut all corporate taxes just as republicans they simply have to pretend they hate doing it.  So, you hear all kinds of data pushed in the media that US corporations are uncompetitive because of high tax rates-----only, they do not pay those tax rates.

The media never points out as well that other nations have tax systems that capture corporate tax in other ways then income tax so actually other nations do tax their corporations as much and more that US corporations. 

IT IS A LIE TO MAKE US CORPORATIONS SEEM AT A DISADVANTAGE FROM HIGH TAX RATES.

When your neo-liberal paints corporate tax reform as holding corporations accountable----they are lying to you. Any changes to corporate tax code will be loosely written for plenty of loophole avoidance.

STOP ELECTING NEO-LIBERALS WHO ONLY WANT TO BOOST CORPORATE PROFIT.

The Tax Repatriation Issue


  By Matthew Yglesias Slate

The idea of a corporate income tax repatriation holiday seems to have fallen off Washington's political agenda for now, but since a lot of very rich well-known companies would benefit from it I imagine the idea will come back and in light of Apple CEO Tim Cook's remarks today I thought I should try to explain it.

The way the American corporate income tax works is that the actual location of the corporate income in question matters. So if Apple runs a subsidiary in Japan that earns huge profits selling iPhones to Japanese people, the federal government deems this none of the IRS' business. The tax is paid only on American income based on US-based operations. And obviously US-based multinationals are happy to not pay those taxes. The problem arises, however, because in order to use those profits to pay a dividend or acquire a US-based company you would need to bring those foreign profits home and pay taxes on them. This becomes a scenario where the high statutory rate of the corporate income tax makes a big difference. As we've seen before, thanks to extensive availability of loopholes and deductions the overall corporate income tax burden isn't very high. But the headline rate is 35 percent. That's kind of a big deal. If it was somehow possible for Congress to commit itself to never altering the corporate income tax, at some point the stockpiles of foreign cash would just get too ridiculous and firms would suck it up and pay the bill. But because everyone knows there's a chance that congress will either cut the corporate income tax rate or declare a temporary "repatriation tax holiday" the rational shareholder prefers to not get paid a dividend out of foreign earnings. Better to sequester the funds abroad and wait for President Romney to create a more favorable tax environment. So in a funny way, the fact that a tax holiday might happen ends up strengthening the case for doing a tax holiday.

More fundamentally it strengthens the case for corporate income tax reform and over the long term for finding a different, less distortionary form of revenue.



_________________________________________

Corporate politicians always use the idea of simplifying the tax code as a way to increase tax revenue paid by the rich and corporations.  They always tie this sacrifice by corporations to ending a social program for example.  Clinton famously did this when he ended Welfare and started to privatize public agencies.  You see where this repatriation law went in exchange for huge losses to the public sector services and programs.  This is what you are now hearing in Congress, the Maryland Assembly, and even locally in Baltimore.  WE CANNOT AFFORD PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS AND THEIR BENEFITS BECAUSE NO CORPORATE AND WEALTH TAXES ARE BEING COLLECTED.  So, Doug Gansler and Heather Mizeur----running for Governor of Maryland use a Combined Reporting scheme for making corporations pay while privatizing all that is public and bashing public sector pensions and wages.  Combined Reporting has been shown to be too expensive to implement and indeed states having these laws do not enforce them.

IT IS JUST A SCHEME USED TO MAKE IT APPEAR CORPORATIONS ARE PAYING THEIR FAIR SHARE.

Keep in mind that Maryland has absolutely no oversight and accountability in corporate and tax responsibilities as it is-----can you imagine the state actually building a structure that would hold corporations accountable in this complex fashion? 

OF COURSE NOT----IT IS A PLOY FOR ENACTING EVER LOWER TAXES ON CORPORATIONS.  THIS IS NOT PROGRESSIVE FOLKS!



'The definition of a "unitary business," which determines the entities that are part of the combined report, is notoriously imprecise and subject to controversy, resulting in the under-inclusion of entities; prolonged administrative and court disputes; and arbitrariness by the revenue department in seeking to include profitable entities but excluding loss entities'.


Combine reporting of corporate income taxes isn't a panacea for Maryland


May 31, 2013

Regarding your recent editorial on combined reporting for corporate income tax in Maryland, you argue that a switch to combined reporting in favor of a 0.65 percent decrease in the corporate rate would represent only a temporary "inconvenience" (How to make Md.'s taxes more competitive," May 9).

The Council On State Taxation, a trade association representing almost 600 corporations engaged in interstate commerce, including significant operations in Maryland, has found that combined reporting neither provides the panacea for perceived "hiding" of profits nor provides the "permanent" revenue benefit asserted in the editorial.

The editorial notes that combined reporting is "a decades-old idea that is the law in a majority of states." While it is true that combined reporting has spread from its mainly western confines to some eastern states, with the exception of West Virginia and Washington, D.C., the mid-Atlantic and South are otherwise devoid of this mandatory filing method.

Had the editorial page ever canvassed corporate tax departments, it would have found that combined reporting is not a short-term inconvenience. The definition of a "unitary business," which determines the entities that are part of the combined report, is notoriously imprecise and subject to controversy, resulting in the under-inclusion of entities; prolonged administrative and court disputes; and arbitrariness by the revenue department in seeking to include profitable entities but excluding loss entities.

The editorial cites the current anti-abuse provisions in the Maryland corporate tax law as an example of complexity. Rather, these provisions underscore that every reporting regime will be subject to scrutiny as to whether it creates opportunities for abuse; it is hardly an argument for why including every related entity under the uncertain unitary business standard, and determining taxable income for the "multi-state conglomerate," to use the words of the editorial, is no more difficult than determining the income of a single entity doing business in Maryland.

One need only look to California and Illinois to see prime examples of states with hopelessly complex combined reporting regimes that are constantly seeking revisions in response to other perceived "loopholes" in the law.


The editorial also asserts that combined reporting "seeks to more accurately calculate a corporation's economic activity in a state." This statement may well reflect the intent, but not the reality.

In practice, combined reporting may actually reduce the link between income tax liabilities and where income is earned. Combined reporting regimes vary across the states; it is fair to say that each state's system is unique. Combined reporting variables include what entities are included or excluded from the combined report; how inter-company transactions are handled; treatment of net operating losses and credits among group members; treatment of foreign income and expenses; and many more complex and arcane tax rules.

Perhaps the greatest variable is apportionment. This imprecise gauge of income attributable to the taxing state becomes even more inaccurate in combined reporting states, as states and taxpayers struggle with the proper inclusion of factors of numerous corporate and pass-through entities. Add on the tendency of taxpayers to exclude profitable entities and revenue departments to exclude loss entities and you get a pretty clear picture of how combined reporting works in the real world.

This leads to the main point of the editorial: revenue. The editorial makes the simplistic "trade-off" argument for a modestly lower corporate rate, saying that there would be some immediate and permanent revenue benefit from a combined reporting move.


In bad times, the Maryland Business Tax Reform Commission found, combined reporting would be a revenue loser. As profits continue to grow (hopefully), the Department of Legislative Services projects revenue gains. Ignore the uncertainties mentioned above that make this revenue spike anything but a certainty, especially in the early years after adoption, when compliance and enforcement will be in their fledgling stages.

Do Marylanders really think a demonstrably fluctuating revenue source will fund long-term tax relief for business? Or, more likely, would Maryland be saddled with a complex, anti-competitive, under-performing corporate tax regime the next time trouble approaches and the state looks to raise revenue?

Independent studies have shown that combined reporting at best is an uncertain proposition for raising revenue – it could just as well be a revenue loser (see, for example, the recent University of Tennessee study on the topic, cited in our opposition testimony to SB 469).

Further, the editorialists should remember that any tax increases will ultimately be borne by labor in the state, through fewer jobs (or lower wages over time), or by in-state consumers (through higher prices for goods and services).

The editorial also seems to embrace the idea that Maryland shouldn't try to compete for investment by larger businesses, instead looking to "start-up" companies for its future. Don't throw in the towel, Maryland! Go for both. Improve your business climate, including your tax regime. Demand performance for business tax breaks by all means. But don't embrace combined reporting as the panacea it isn't.

Douglas L. Lindholm, Washington, D.C.

The writer is president and executive director of the Council on State Taxation.

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New Report: Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently Military contractors, oil companies and banks are the biggest 'welfare queens' around.



March 19, 2014  |      Alternet    

Most of us are aware that the government gives mountains of cash to powerful corporations in the form of tax breaks, grants, loans and subsidies--what some have called "corporate welfare." However, little has been revealed about exactly how much money Washington is forking over to mega businesses.

Until now.

A new venture called Open the Books, based in Illinois, was founded with a mission to bring transparency to how the federal budget is spent. And what they found is shocking: between 2000 and 2012, the top Fortune 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the government. That doesn't include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers. 

What Open the Book's forthcoming report does reveal is that the most valuable contracts between the government and private firms were for military procurement deals, including Lockheed Martin ($392 billion), General Dynamics ($170 billion), and United Technologies ($73 billion). 

After military contractors, $21.8 billion was granted out to corporate recipients in the form of direct subsidies;
literally transfers of cash from the pockets of Americans to major corporations. The biggest winners were General Electric (GE) ($380 million), followed by General Motors (GM) ($370 million), Boeing (BA) ($264 million), ADM ($174 million) and United Technologies ($160 million). 

$8.5 billion in federally subsidized loans were also doled out to giant oil companies Chevron and Exxon Mobile, and $1 billion went directly to massive agri-business Archer Daniels Midland.    Of course, the banks also got their piece of the pie: $10 billion in federal insurance went to Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, not including any of the 2008 bailout money. Walmart enjoyed its share of federal insurance backing as well.    Thanks to Open the Books, the curtain has been lifted and the whole country can now witness the great suckling of corporate America. As Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski put it: "Mitt Romney had it wrong: When it comes to the Fortune 100, it's 99%, not 47%, on some form of the government's gravy train." 

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Republicans try their best to make it sound that most money in the Farm Bill goes to Food Stamps----but it is not true.  What should disturb more people is that Americans are now overwhelmingly so poor as to be dependent on Food Stamps and this is what a third world society does----makes its people desperate for government food sources.

So
, progressives would not be shouting as loudly for more Food Stamps then they would that too many Americans now depend on Food subsidies....ALL WHILE EACH CITIZEN IN AMERICA IS OWED A FEW HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD.


IF YOUR POL IS NOT DEMANDING JUSTICE FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FROM MASSIVE CORPORATE FRAUD OF PUBLIC WEALTH-----T
HEY WORK FOR CORPORATIONS----GET RID OF THEM!!!!



Who Are the Real Welfare Queens?

55 Billion Goes to:

School lunch & breakfast programs
WIC (Women, Infants, & Children)
Food subsidies
Food stamps
Nutrition education
Other food and health programs

127 Billion Goes to:


Corporate funding (direct & indirect)
Grants to Fortune 500 companies
Big Agra subsidies (including sugar)

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

Let's look beyond the direct corporate subsidy in the Farm bill to how Food Stamp revenue is spent.  As health care reform pushes the poor out of health care access because -----'those people who are obese and/or have diabetes and heart disease brought it on themselves'-----we see the entire SNAP program has been driven by forcing people to buy the cheapest food sources that happen to be bad health choices but make corporations fabulously rich.

There is a movement to make SNAP more nutritious by promoting SNAP debit cards at farmers markets----this is good yet the 7-11 stores have SNAP signs that say they sell healthy food.  We want people to have choice in what foods to buy----but if you have food deserts where the most people are on food stamps-----you are not really addressing the issue. 

WHY DOES THE PUBLIC SECTOR NOT MAKE SURE THESE COMMUNITIES HAVE ACCESS TO GOOD FOOD WITH PUBLIC MARKETS?  OH, THAT'S RIGHT-----WE ARE ELIMINATING THE PUBLIC SECTOR!


Also note that as shown above-----a super-sized majority of farm bill spending goes to US global agriculture and its infrastructure and profit-subsidy.
....not small farmers.



Washington

7
Farm Bill 2013: Corporate Welfare on Steroids
  • By David Zeiler, Associate Editor, Money Morning  ·   June 17, 2013  ·

If you're like most Americans, you probably think the primary purpose of the Farm Bill up for congressional authorization this year is to help farmers.

Of course, when it comes to the ways of Washington, nothing is ever that simple.

The 2013 edition of the Farm Bill, which is the main federal legislation for setting U.S. food policy, passed the Senate last week and now moves on to the House.

First crafted during the Great Depression to help struggling farmers, the Farm Bill is renewed and modified every five years. Congress was supposed to renew it last year, but instead merely extended it in deference to the 2012 election.

This year's Farm Bill calls for spending of $955 billion over 10 years and is 1,150 pages long.

And yes, some of that nearly $1 trillion does go to programs that help farmers. But not much of it.

Nearly 80% goes to fund the food stamp program, otherwise known by the more politically correct name of "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" (SNAP) it was given in 2008.

Yet what's most appalling about Farm Bill 2013 is how much it benefits dozens of large U.S. corporations, such as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT), Monsanto Co. (NYSE: MON), Kraft Foods Group Inc. (Nasdaq: KRFT) and Tyson Foods Inc. (NYSE: TSN).

Back in 2008, $173.5 million was spent on lobbying that year's farm bill, most of it by corporations eager to ensure that their subsidy gravy train wouldn't get derailed.

It was the second-most lobbying money ever spent on any U.S. legislation, falling short only of the $250 million spent on Dodd-Frank.

That kind of money buys top-of-the-line lobbying power.

"On the [2008] Farm Bill, special interests hired an army of well-connected lobbyists to press their case with Congress, including 45 former members of Congress, [and] at least 461 former congressional and executive branch staffers (including 86 that worked for former agriculture committee members or the U.S. Department of Agriculture)," noted a report on Farm Bill lobbying by Food & Water Watch.

It's little wonder that Farm Bills are chock full of corporate welfare.

Digging into Farm Bill 2013 -- Where the SNAP Money Ends Up While most Americans who receive SNAP benefits need them to get by, most of that money ends up in the hands of big, profitable corporations.


The Farm Bill 2013 allocates $760.5 billion to the food stamp program, and many corporations have gone to great lengths over the years to ensure their share of that pie is as large as possible.

One of the best examples is the soda industry. The Center for Science in the Public Interest estimated that $4 billion in SNAP money was spent on soda purchases in 2010 (this despite that the primary purpose of SNAP is to make sure low-income people can purchase nutritious food).

That's a significant incentive. And sure enough, two All-American companies - Coca Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) and Pepsi Co, Inc. (NYSE: PEP) -- helped get soda eligible for food stamps back in 1964, and continue to spend large sums on making sure it stays that way.

Back in 2008, Coca-Cola spent $513,000 lobbying the Farm Bill; Pepsi spent $437,000.

The fight to keep snacks and sodas on the list of SNAP eligibility is a running battle, and big corporations are definitely winning.


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May 14th, 2014

5/14/2014

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IF OBAMA ISN'T MAKING EXECUTIVE DECISIONS TO BUILD STRUCTURES TO END SOCIAL SECURITY----myRA, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID----THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT-----HE IS BUILDING THE STRUCTURES FOR IMMIGRATION NEEDED TO MOVE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT FORWARD.......THE HIGH-SKILLED GREEN CARD POLICY AND GENERAL LIFTING OF IMMIGRATION NUMBERS EACH YEAR.

WE LOVE IMMIGRANTS BUT NOT POLICY THAT SEEKS TO LEAVE ALL WORKERS  EXPLOITED AND IMPOVERISHED.

Do you hear your labor unions shouting and fighting this? 


As republicans pretend to fight this high-skilled immigration reform policy now fast-tracked by Obama remember again-----the immigration policy that allows high-skilled immigrants only is a republican policy so it is not the democratic party moving these bad policies forward----it is neo-liberals and republicans.



As we see below, NPR's favorite 'good billionaire' Bill Gates is now being exposed as really, really bad.  When he isn't off pushing the Trans Pacific Trade Pact that seeks to end public health and health care subsidy so his PHARMA can maximize profits----ending public education so his education tech industries and selling of computers for online lessons can maximize profits---and while at it let's garner a majority share of militarized food with the Monsanto/Blackwater corporate merger. 
WHAT A GUY.

He just keeps on taking and killing democratic societies all for market share.  Below you see he and his tech buddies are now building an immigration policy that kills not only US workers, but Hispanic workers already in the US and even the foreign grads indentured to jobs that exploit them.

Obama just used Executive privilege yet again to move immigration reform to only high-skilled immigrants and their spouses.  So, he is single-handedly putting into place the structures for Trans Pacific Trade Pact while your neo-liberal incumbents are silent. 
Remember, TPP allows global corporations to bring people from developing nations to work in the US under the conditions of that third world nation....say India or China.  This is especially true for low-wage immigrant workers but it affects high-skilled workers as well.  The path to citizenship never comes for 99% as buying your citizenship is now the policy and the cost is prohibitive.

These are not democratic policies----they are neo-liberal and neo-con policies meant only to maximize profit at the expense of further impoverishing workers.


Remember as well each time the President uses Executive privilege.....we move away from having a legislative branch.  Clinton started using this once rarely used executive practice, Bush increased the use, and now Obama is moving the most controversial polices through this practice.  If your pol is not shouting loudly about how bad this is for US democracy no matter what party does it----they are not working for you and me.

THOSE HISPANICS WHO THINK NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR THEM----THINK AGAIN.  ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.

The foreign grads falling into these high-skill jobs become indentured into often the most menial of jobs.
__________________
STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages... 
__________________
We had a glut of nursing staff last decade as college students were told nursing would always be a strong field for hiring.  Then, neo-liberals and neo-cons starting bringing immigrant labor over to the US to take those health care jobs.  Now we have high unemployment for nursing and professional health positions.

The American people and especially progressive labor and justice love immigrants and work to protect their rights as workers just as all workers.  Immigrants already in the US must see that flooding the labor market now while unemployment is at 36% and hirer for Hispanic workers already in the US-----that this kind of immigration policy means to hurt all workers.


So, when we hear the mantra of STEM in K-12 and we see a steady stream of health care and tech industry layoffs and grads with no jobs-----we are not getting accurate data. 

This article does a good job showing that media is deliberately misinforming the American people and research data is being skewed by corporate universities and a corporate run government.


Columnist Diane Ravitch: Why Are So Many STEM Graduates Unemployed?

By Wired Academic on July 24, 2012


By Diane Ravitch, Guest Columnist

How many times have we heard the President, the Secretary of Education, and leaders of corporate America tell us that we must produce more scientists? That there are thousands of jobs unfilled because we don’t have qualified college graduates to fill them? That our future depends on pumping billions into STEM education?

I always believe them. Science, engineering, technology and mathematics are fields critical for the future.

But why then, according to an article in the Washington Post, are well-educated scientists unable to find jobs?

Three years ago, USA Today reported  high unemployment among scientists and engineers.

Some experts in science say there is no shortage of scientists, but there is a shortage of good jobs for scientists.

Some say that the pool of qualified graduates in science and engineering is “several times larger” than the pool of jobs available for them. And here is a shocker: The quality of STEM education has NOT declined:

Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today’s American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today’s students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study. 

Why don’t our leaders tell us the truth? Why don’t they tell us that many of our highly trained young people will not find good jobs in research labs or universities or anywhere else?

I have said before on this blog that the economy is changing in ways that no one understands, least of all me.

Over the past century, whenever reformers told the schools to prepare students for this career or that vocation, the policymakers and school leaders were woefully inadequate at predicting which jobs would be available ten years later. When the automobile was first invented, there were still plenty of students taking courses to prepare them to be blacksmiths. The same story could be repeated over the years. We are not good at prognosticating.

My own predilection is to believe that all young people should get a full and rounded general education, which will teach them to think and evaluate new information. I prefer an education that includes the usual range of disciplines, not because of tradition but because each of them is valuable for our lives.

We don’t know what the future will bring, but we all need to learn the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. We don’t know what jobs will be available in ten or twenty years, but we all need to study history, so that we possess knowledge of our society and others; we need an understanding of science so we know how the world works; we need to be involved in the arts, because it is an expression of the human spirit and enables us to think deeply about ourselves and our world. I could make the same claims for other disciplines. The claim must be based on enduring needs, not the needs of the job market, because the only certainty is that the  job market will be different in the future.

Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. This post first appeared on DianeRavitch.net

________________________________________
This is a long article but a good one.  You see Mikulski's office is targeted as Johns Hopkins is the worst for exploiting foreign green card professionals.  I have a friend here in Baltimore working at Hopkins from India left with the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive lab tests garnering only a grad assistant wage and after years in this position------no hope in site for citizenship or a better job.  Hopkins is of course now a corporation so is using this Indian immigrant purely to maximize profit.  Meanwhile------unemployment across America and in Maryland is 36% and as you see US STEM grads are the largest group.

Remember, this immigration reform was never about giving justice to Hispanic workers already in the US.....neo-liberals are trying to create a third world system of deeply impoverished professional workers-----even doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs are impoverished in the third world.  There is more to these policies.  When heading for the third world status those in power always surround themselves with administrative professional that are not citizens----they have no rights as US citizens and are kept in an indentured state with fear of deportation to maintain loyalty as conditions worsen in the US.  This is why you always see an exodus of immigrant workers fleeing a collapsing dictatorship. 

AUTOCRATIC SOCIETIES NEED LOTS OF PEOPLE WORKING KEY JOBS HAVING NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.


Meanwhile, the Hispanic workers fighting for REAL immigration reform are left with no hope for the pathway to citizenship or enforcement of labor laws to their benefit-----because abuse of labor is the goal of neo-liberals and republicans.

AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE RUNNING IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES!  STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----LET'S REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!



'But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them'.


12:00 AM - May 1, 2013

It doesn’t add up A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers

By Beryl Lieff Benderly  Columbia Journalism Review


Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)

In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.

According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”


Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.


The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.

It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.

High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.

Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs.
Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.

* * * Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.


Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.

Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.

In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.

The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”


These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.


The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets,
according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing,
it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”

Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.

* * * Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”

These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.

But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion.
In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.

Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim. Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.

* * * As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers
. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.

Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.

After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?


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Below you see Pritzker-----Hyatt heiress as Obama's Commerce Secretary.  She is of course the face of impoverishment and workplace abuse of many immigrant workers coming through her hotel chain.

This Senate Immigration bill was never about a pathway to citizenship or even Hispanic immigrants....it was always about a market-based immigration policy that seeks only to lower US global corporation's labor costs using immigrant labor mostly from Asian nations and mostly at the high-skilled level.  So, the millions of Hispanic immigrants who are always made the face of these immigration reforms are being relegated to the same underserved and underfunded schools as US children having little opportunity to access the higher education paths needed to land anything other than poverty jobs.

The foreign graduates that are allowed to stay are trapped in an indentured state with low wages never truly advancing from the most menial of jobs in the high-skilled areas.  At the article above made clear------there are fewer than 20% of foreign grads that go on to building viable corporations that contribute to the US economy.

The other side of this is that these foreign grads now allowed to work in US corporations are hired to work on overseas expansions of global corporations giving little value to the US economy------and in fact contributing to the stagnation of the economy by displacing thousands of US citizens graduating with STEM degrees. 

OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING THE CONDITIONS TO KEEP UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH FOR US WORKERS AND GRADUATES LEFT WITH TONS OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND WITH A WALL STREET STUDENT LOAN COLLECTION PROCESS-----STUDENTS ARE NOT ONLY UNEMPLOYED----THEY ARE PREY TO WALL STREET FEES, FINES, AND HARASSMENT.


Obama to ease rules for foreign high-skilled workers

Alan Gomez, USA TODAY
5:48 p.m. EDT May 6, 2014(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)


The Obama administration wants to let nearly 100,000 spouses of foreigners working in high-tech fields to work here as well in a move critics say is harmful to nearly 10 million jobless Americans.

The administration also hopes to ease the process for foreign professors and researchers who are trying to extend their stays in America.

The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, come as high-tech companies and university officials continue pressing Congress and the Obama administration to ease restrictions that they say make it difficult to import highly skilled foreign workers.

Groups like FWD.us, created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech organizations are lobbying Congress for expanded visa programs they use to hire foreign workers.

Mayorkas said the proposed rule changes keep America competitive as more countries offer incentives to attract the workers.

"The proposed rules announced today provide important support to U.S. businesses while also supporting economic growth here in the U.S.," he said. "This enhances our country's competitiveness to attract skilled workers from other countries."

But critics accuse the pro-visa groups of wanting cheap labor, and say Obama should be helping U.S. citizens get jobs rather than making it easier for foreigners to expand their employment opportunities in the United States.

"The U.S. already provides businesses with 700,000 temporary guest workers every year to compete against unemployed Americans, in addition to the annual flow of 1 million permanent legal immigrants," said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has opposed efforts to import more foreign workers.

"The administration's unilateral decision to increase that number will hurt already-struggling American workers."

The proposed changes will be published in the Federal Register this week and then be open to 60 days of public comment before the administration can implement them.

The first proposed change affects holders of H-1B visas, which are granted to foreigners trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Current rules allow their spouses to move to the U.S. with them, but restricts them from working.

The new rule would allow the spouses of those H-1B holders who are in the process of applying for a green card to find work.

Mayorkas estimated that 97,000 people could benefit from that rule change in the first year, and 30,000 each year after.

The second proposed change focuses on a series of visa holders who come from Chile, Singapore, Australia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Current rules allow workers from those countries who have at least a bachelor's degree in a specialized field to extend their stay, but they must produce certain evidence of the success they've had. The proposed change would extend the time those workers could stay in the U.S. and allow them to use new forms of evidence to win their stay in the U.S.

Microsoft vice president of government affairs Fred Humphries said they remain committed to getting a broader immigration fix through Congress. But in the mean time, he said the two "thoughtful, commonsense changes" would help them recruit abroad.

"These changes will improve American competitiveness for the best talent in the world," Humphries said.

Critics say the changes are not being implemented for economic reasons.


"The administration's political motivation in announcing this change now is to throw a bone to the tech firms to keep them in the (comprehensive immigration reform) camp and not try to cut a separate deal with Republicans," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Mayorkas and Pritzker said the changes will help U.S. business and universities retain the workers they need, but they stressed that Congress needs to find a broader immigration solution to address all the deficiencies in the system.

"As the president said in his State of the Union Address, we are committed to achieving a lasting solution," Pritzker said. "Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle can make this happen."


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May 13th, 2014

5/13/2014

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PLEASE DO NOT LOOK THE OTHER WAY AT ATTACKS ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE HAPPENING TO THE WORKING CLASS AND POOR-----THE MIDDLE-CLASS KNOWS IT TOO IS VICTIM AND THESE ASSAULTS BELOW WILL COME TO YOU AND I.


As a middle-class professional I try in my blogs to encourage the upper-middle and middle class to not be complacent with the loss of civil rights and liberties of the working class and poor in our country.  Remember, neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism is about making all but a very few impoverished so you and/or your children and grandchildren will be facing this dismantling of public justice and Bill of Rights.  Residents in cities may think its good to push out the poor but let's think how an injustice to one becomes an injustice for all.

There is a social media meme circulating that says----

the richest are telling the richer
to tell the middle-class the problem is the poor.

Well, the problem is that the richest have stolen tens of trillions of dollars from the US economy and off-shored it to overseas accounts and our entire democracy and public justice and public sector works and services are being dismantled.  This is causing poverty to soar and crime and violence with it.  So, the problem is the richest have yet to have Rule of Law brings back the loot THEY STOLE FROM GOVERNMENT COFFERS AND INDIVIDUAL'S POCKETS.

The US is now in a state of propaganda as is found in second and third world countries.  When corporations control data creation-----they will skew it to their benefit and not the public interest.  Whether at the Federal level with Obama or the State level with O'Malley, or the city level with Rawlings-Blake-----ALL DATA BEING PRODUCED IS SKEWED. Below you see how corporate media now simply reports the propaganda as news.  For people liking public radio, NPR in 2009 was doing a fine job holding power accountable.  In 2010 NPR was reorganized to corporate control and the reporters made clear that they were being forced to report 'spin'------propaganda----and not journalism.  This is what you see below.  Maryland is king of spin.....Baltimore is supreme.  The middle-class in Baltimore now have to watch as citizens are completely stripped of all rights as citizens-----they are stripped of any way to earn money and are reduced to crime to survive------and of course it is the small businesses and middle-class who become the targets of desperate attempts to get money.  The violence of poverty is skyrocketing with the huge increase in poverty in Baltimore and will come to all communities as people lose hope and embrace retaliation.  THAT IS WHAT THIRD WORLD SOCIETIES LOOK LIKE.  This is Baltimore City today.

Gentrification is a natural process.  It has happened throughout civilization.  It can be done equitably and within Rule of Law.  The State of Maryland and Baltimore lose billions of dollars each year to fraud and corruption that should be going to these communities to rebuild opportunity. 

STOP THE FRAUD AND CORRUPTION AND SEND MONEY TO DEVELOP THESE UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES FOR THE UNDERSERVED.

That does not mean the poor cannot be moved or ratios of populations cannot change.  It means that development will be fair in making sure people stay in the communities or areas they have lived all their lives.  It means that development funded with Federal, State, and local tax money be held to the laws of equal opportunity and access in housing and education.  You do not use Federal money from HUD to dismantle public housing buildings and then not provide public housing nearby.  It may not need to be public housing if grants allowed low-income and homeless to occupy these thousands of blighted houses all through these neighborhoods.

Instead, public policy written by Johns Hopkins and the Baltimore Development Corporation are set on forcefully removing all working class and poor from city center and downtown and go so far as using city services to bankrupt low-income homeowners with deliberately inflated water bills and tax bill and fines----driving these homeowners into bankruptcy and foreclosure.  As I have said----Johns Hopkins is the most neo-conservative institution in the world having Baltimore democrats pushing these undemocratic policies. 

WE NEED TO REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AWAY FROM CORPORATE CONTROL AND BACK TO THAT OF PUBLIC INTEREST AND CIVIL RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES.


When a society allows the deliberate targeting of communities with fraud and corruption in order to advance development----you have an autocratic society.  Using police brutality and misconduct to scare people away and jailing people known not to have committed a crime is all intimidation tactics used in covert warfare folks.  IT IS AUTOCRATIC AND IGNORES ALL RULE OF LAW----IT DOES NOT BELONG IN AMERICA.

If you do not care if the poor lose their rights as citizens think of what is happening to the middle-class with the attack on retirements, home equity, pensions, health care coverage and Medicare, and even our children's students loans----all losing wealth from corporate fraud and government corruption.  So, this is not simply something hitting the lower class-----it pushes all of us into impoverishment and loss of rights as well.

WAKE UP======AN INJUSTICE FOR ONE WILL BECOME INJUSTICE FOR ALL!
Below you see martial law being implemented in Baltimore City because City Hall has defunded communities and community services, have put minority and women contractors and the people they hire out of business......they have eliminated the public sector and cleansed the school system of the city's middle-class killing all of the ability of families to provide support for  extended family.  City Hall allows people's homes to be stolen, police brutality to run wild, fraud and corruption to take a billion and more from city coffers each year -----money of which would help these youth.  They are doing it because the goal is to make it impossible for the working class and poor to survive in the city.  Two decades of these kinds of attacks on the poor with O'Malley and now Rawlings-Blake and the neo-conservative Baltimore City Hall has succeeded in pushing some of the poor out to the counties-----but you know what-----these people simply come back because there is no support mechanism for these families.

THE ENTIRE SOCIAL SERVICES AND SOCIAL WELFARE SYSTEM IN BALTIMORE IS BROKEN.


Mind you-----these children are living in homes torn with drug abuse and parents incarcerated on and off through life.  This children have parents having to work 3 jobs because Baltimore has a system of enslavement in lieu of wages that allow citizens to actually support themselves-----all driven by Johns Hopkins.  Closing community recreation centers where youth could go for support?  REALLY???????  The use of national corporate/ church non-profits  etc.  to replace these public community centers takes the one avenue for social gathering and organizing, developing of leadership, for political discussion out of the communities
. 

YOU MUST NOT BRING POLITICS INTO THESE NON-PROFITS AND IF WE DO-----WE WILL DECIDE WHO TALKS AND ABOUT WHAT. 


That is what Baltimore City Hall is creating in Baltimore.  It is totalitarian in its exclusion of the public and in enforcement of law.
  Mind you-----Baltimore has some fine private non-profits and community groups doing good work-----they are fighting for funds and support and these connected groups receive the bulk of funding.  The #1 institution receiving and then deciding how public policy as regards the working class and poor unfold-----JOHNS HOPKINS IS BALTIMORE'S PUBLIC SECTOR.

There's no doubt these children need to stay off the streets and especially at night.  If they have no computers, cannot afford phones, have no real parks and amusement facilities.....and now, no rec centers-----WHAT DO YOU EXPECT THESE YOUTH TO DO?

An autocratic society crushes these families with more fines, penalties, and exposure to police action.


Council approves tough new curfew for city youths Some kids would be required to be inside by 9 p.m.




By Luke Broadwater, The Baltimore Sun 8:24 p.m. EDT, May 12, 2014

A tough new curfew forcing kids off the streets as early as 9 p.m. was approved Monday by the Baltimore City Council over objections it will place too much stress on the Police Department and lead to conflicts between youths and officers.

The legislation requires one more vote for final passage, which is expected next month. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has said she'll sign it into law.

The bill's sponsor, Councilman Brandon Scott, said it is intended to keep small children from wandering the street, becoming victims of crime or suffering from neglect.

"We have to do something," Scott said. "Young children are out there. ... This bill is not about arresting kids. This bill is not about dropping crime. It's about connecting young people and their families with the services they need."

The legislation, approved 11-2, calls for youngsters under 14 to be indoors year-round by 9 p.m. Youths ages 14 through 16 could stay out until 10 on school nights and 11 on other nights.

Currently, all children and teens younger than 17 can stay out until 11 on weeknights and until midnight on weekends. Parents can be fined up to $300 if their children are caught outside after curfew.

TALK ABOUT IT: Should Baltimore enact an earlier curfew for city youths?

The legislation increases penalties to $500, though they could be waived if parents and children attend counseling sessions provided by the city.

"We all know that when children are on the streets late at night without proper supervision, they are more likely to either become the perpetrators or the victims of violent crime," Rawlings-Blake said in a statement. "I believe this legislation will be another much needed tool to help reduce the number of juveniles on the streets at night, while furthering a commitment my administration has made to provide more services for young people we know are vulnerable."

The bill was opposed the American Civil Liberties Union and criticized by the head of the city's police union. City Councilmen Carl Stokes and Warren Branch voted against it.

Branch, the chair of the council's public safety committee, said he worried the legislation would force yet another responsibility on police.

"There should be more agencies involved instead of putting the stress and pressure on our Police Department," he said.

Sonia Kumar, an attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, sent a letter to council members expressing concern about the "constitutionality and policy implications" of the curfew.

"The bill is a very significant expansion of Baltimore's curfew laws," she said. "Whatever the intention of the bill, there's no evidence that the bill will accomplish those goals. There are really significant reasons for not entangling young people and their families in the criminal justice system."

Kumar said she saw difficulties in enforcing the legislation fairly without police stopping kids and demanding they produce an ID card.

"The breadth of what is proposed is deeply troubling and a poor use of city resources," she said.

Rawlings-Blake has announced plans to expand the city's curfew center to become two year-round Youth Connection Centers for kids and teens who violate the curfew.

"We continue to invest in programs such as basketball leagues, jobs programs and rec center improvements that provide constructive alternatives for our young people," she said. "We need an all-hands-on-deck approach."

The legislation continues current exemptions from the curfew, including a provision for youths to be out late if they're with a parent, or going to or from a job, religious event, or school or recreational activity. The legislation eliminates an exception that has permitted young people to run errands for their parents.

Scott said those opposed to the bill have an outdated view of the curfew center.



_____________________________

The City of Baltimore loses a billion dollars and more to fraud and corruption, gives a billion more to subsidize global corporate wealth in development, and loses hundreds of millions more in waste and mismanagement of Federal and State funds----this is why it just cannot seem to find a million to fund strong public recreation centers for the citizens of all communities.

REMEMBER, THE GOAL IS TO PRIVATIZE ALL THAT IS PUBLIC INTO THE HANDS OF GLOBAL CORPORATIONS.

Keep in mind that these rec centers being closed are run by the communities themselves.  The goal of tying the new recreation centers to charter schools-----which will be the new school buildings identified as where these new rec centers will be built----is that charter schools will be taken private and run by corporations----yet another end of public gatherings and freedom to discuss, organize, and implement policy as the community sees fit.

Lack of funding could close Baltimore City rec centers
11:26 PM, Oct 24, 2011 5:31 AM, Oct 25, 2011 BALTIMORE -

Advocates say the 55 recreation centers around Baltimore City give kids a safe place to play and learn after school. But now there's a controversial plan that could result in the closing of many of those rec centers.

The Cecil Kirk Recreation Center doesn't look like much from the outside. In fact, the sign on the wall is missing some letters. But "The neighborhood kids come here. We're packed all the time in there," said parent Russell Smith, who also coaches basketball at Cecil Kirk.


It's packed, he says, day after day -- with kids from this neighborhood near North Avenue. "If I wasn't here I would probably be at home, but being at home wouldn't be as much fun as being at the rec," said Alanna Jones, who visits the center every day after school.

They come after school to find a safe place to play, meet friends, and get help with homework.


"There are some of us who are still barely making it and we need places like Cecil Kirk," said Angelique Jones, Alanna's mother.


A plan proposed by City Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake would shift the funding and operation of many of the city's 55 rec centers to private companies, or charities.

But a call for bids on running them brought only six viable entries. A spokesman for the mayor tells ABC-2 news that could mean many of the centers will be forced to close in just a couple months.

"If they're closing the recs where are we going to send our children to? What are we going to do?" Angelique Jones said.


Several members of city council say they have concerns with the mayor's plan.
Monday night, Councilman Bill Henry (D-4th) called for a public hearing on the issue. "This is not something that the city can step away from. We say all the time, the kids are our future. But if we mean that, we would spend money on them," he said.

Ian Brennan, a spokesman for Mayor Rawlings-Blake, said "The (privatization) plan is part of a larger effort to revitalize the rec center system. We need to stop doing things because that's the way we've always done things."


But parents outside Cecil Kirk say the old way, still works for them. "They're still serving their purpose because kids still come here," Smith said. "I could see if the kids weren't coming. That's a different story if the kids are not showing up. But the kids are here, and what are you going to do with them?"
The mayor's spokesman says they are looking for more companies and organizations to bid on running those rec centers.

The councilman's hearing, in which the head of the Rec and Parks Department is expected to come before council and explain how the plan would work, is expected to be on November 2nd.
_____________________

This is just one example of the largesse sent to national corporations for no reason at all----this case was actually racketeering.  Downtown has mortgaged tax collection for the richest of corporations and developments while the city residents send their tax revenue to maintain and build this infrastructure. 

Meanwhile, the citizens of Baltimore simply want small and small and regional businesses in their communities.....not corporations that are ground zero for massive fraud and corruption.

City Council votes on controversial Harbor Point tax plan $100M tax break is on the line for developer


UPDATED 7:07 AM EDT Aug 13, 2013
A $100 million tax break from Baltimore City is on the line for a developer who wants to rebuild a piece of land between Harbor East and Fells Point.

The most controversial part of the measure is the tax break. The city wants to use tax dollars to help finance the Harbor Point project.

The City Council took a preliminary vote on that strategy Monday night and passed it.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called this a once in a generation project that she and supporters said will eventually mean thousands of jobs and a much bigger tax base for the city.

Plans call for Harbor Point to house the new regional corporate headquarters for Exelon and other businesses. There's also supposed to be high-end living space and retail, along with a hotel.

The tax break from the city is supposed to help pay for infrastructure and other improvements to the site of the project.


But opponents of the tax break deal are skeptical about it and who it will actually benefit. Some said the developer, William Beatty, should give a portion of his tax break to the surrounding impoverished neighborhoods and city schools.

"It really doesn't contribute to uplifting the people who live in that community. This seems to be an intentional, direct benefit to a developer and all of the hangers-on of this developer, and I don't see that the residents or the surrounding community are going to benefit," concerned citizen Kim Trueheart said.

A final vote on the whole project is expected to happen Sept. 9.

_________________
The idea that we want Baltimore's youth coming into contact with a police force known nationally as being one of the most brutal in the country----the idea we want these working class and poor families ticketed and fined right into jail===where by the way they will find a job as private prison and jail contractors now work the incarcerated for $2 an hour doing formerly public sector work-----a middle-class job.

From stop and frisk to high speed police chases ending with citizens shown to have nothing but maybe a previous arrest record----to police deliberately planting drugs and guns to create the reason for apprehension.....we all know this is happening and using yet another assault on public justice and rights on youth----is a disgrace.  It is a policy written by Johns Hopkins----the City Hall are neo-conservatives running as democrats!

Baltimore City Officer Suspended On Allegations Of Excessive Force

July 30, 2013 5:52 PM

Christie Ileto Christie Ileto joined WJZ's News Team in the fall of 2012.

BALTIMORE (WJZ)– A city police officer is suspended for allegedly using excessive force on a suspect in their custody.

Christie Ileto has more on the incident being investigated by top brass.

Sky Eye Chopper 13 caught the aftermath of a car crash Baltimore City police say started as a pursuit on Belair Road on Monday evening.

“During the course, the vehicle went off the road and collided,” said Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez.

Members of the regional auto theft task force were trying to stop a car they believed to be stolen.

“By the time I got the corner, a little young dude, a teenager, was laying on the ground,” said a witness.

Baltimore City police say it wasn’t the pursuit of the young driver, but what happened after he crashed into an auto car lot that had top brass concerned.

“They threw him on the ground, and it looked like the other police smacked him,” a witness said.

“The message is clear. We will not tolerate officers breaking the law in order to enforce the law,” Rodriguez said.

Police brass say the alleged assault occurred after the juvenile was on the ground.

And rather than a citizen filing a complaint, Rodriguez says police initiated the investigation themselves.

“While the age of the individual certainly gives us concern, we want everyone to be treated fairly and professionally,” Rodriguez said.

City police have policies that allow them to use force and instruct them when it’s appropriate to initiate a pursuit. But Rodriguez couldn’t tell us at this point if any rules had been broken.

This case is under investigation.

Police have not been able to confirm the age of the driver or his name.

The department says not only will they investigate the officer allegedly involved, but his supervisor’s actions as well.



__________________

Congress included in the Affordable Care Act that authorities can now sedate a citizen without their consent -----setting the stage for the kinds of imprisonment of political dissidents in third world countries.  More importantly, our children are being subjected to high levels of drugging all in an effort to control behavior.  Behavior problems in city youth often come from chemical exposures like lead----from parents with drug addiction and abuse at home.  All of this is tied with poverty.  So, to reverse these problems you end poverty......NOT SUPERSIZE IT. Are these youth reacting to dosing with anti-psychotics and hyperactivity drugs in a negative way-----?   Wealth inequity is a myth.  The rich at the top simply stole tens of trillions of dollars and left massive amounts of impoverishment at the lower levels. 

SIMPLY REINSTATING RULE OF LAW AND RECOVERING THOSE FRAUDS WILL BRING RELIEF FROM POVERTY AND MANY OF THE SYMPTOMS.


If the middle-class cannot see how these policies will come to your neck of the woods----WAKE UP!!!!
Dosing children with drugs known to have serious side-effects and physical reactions is unethical and immoral.  It is policy you would find in China and Soviet Russia to control citizens.  We do not do this in America. 

THINK WHO YOU ELECTED TO OFFICE IN BALTIMORE CITY HALL AND MARYLAND ASSEMBLY TO SEE WHO IS ALLOWING THESE POLICIES TO ADVANCE.  THEY ARE NOT DEMOCRATS.


Antipsychotic Use Skyrockets in America's Poorest Children


Fran Lowry

March 12, 2013

Investigators from the University of Maryland in Baltimore found that from 1997 to 2006, use of antipsychotic medications in this population increased 7- to 12-fold, with most of the increased use associated with treatment for behavioral problems.


"Awareness of the expanding use of antipsychotic medications in the emotional and behavioral treatment of children has been noted in several studies of community-based pediatric populations," lead author Julie Magno Zito, PhD, from the University of Maryland, told Medscape Medical News.

"But," she added, "additional information is needed on trends in our neediest youth, namely according to how antipsychotic users differ in terms of their eligibility for Medicaid insurance coverage and the reasons for use. Such information would help to characterize the 'who' and 'why' of expanded antipsychotic use."

The study is published in the March issue of Psychiatric Services.

Call to Action

In the current observational, cross-sectional study, Dr. Zito and colleagues analyzed claims data for 456,315 youths aged 2 to 17 years who were continuously enrolled in Medicaid in a mid-Atlantic state from 1997 to 2006.

They focused on the use of antipsychotic drugs in the following Medicaid-eligibility categories: foster care; State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), currently known as the Children's Health Insurance Program; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), for children whose family income was at or below the federal poverty level; and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

The researchers found that the prevalence of use of antipsychotic medications almost tripled, from 1.2% in 1997 to 3.2% in 2006.

This growth was greatest in youth enrolled in SCHIP (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 5.9), followed by those in foster care (AOR, 4.1) and TANF (AOR, 3.6), and least among children with SSI (AOR, 2.8).

"The children on SSI are the ones we would presume to be the sickest," Dr. Zito noted. "This 6-fold increase for near-poor or SCHIP children and the 3.6-fold increase among poor or TANF children in a decade means that there was increasing use among the vast majority of enrollees and not, as one would expect, among the small minority, approximately 10%, on SSI, who qualify as the most vulnerable."

During this decade, 9320 children received a prescription for an antipsychotic. The growth in prescribing was most pronounced for pediatric bipolar disorder (AOR, 3.77) and behavioral conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder (AOR, 3.48).

The researchers also found that the proportion of children using antipsychotics from 1997 to 2006 increased significantly more among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites.


"These data support a call to action for outcomes research to better establish clinical appropriateness and to encourage system-wide oversight for quality assurance," Dr. Zito said.

Postmarketing surveillance studies are also needed to assess the outcomes of community-based psychiatric treatment, she added.

"This is particularly true when medications are used for off-label conditions that have minimal or no evidence of benefit relative to medications with FDA labeling for a particular diagnosis," she said.

Psychotherapy Undervalued

"This is a continuation of the important work by Dr. Zito and her group," R. Scott Benson, MD, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in private practice in Pensacola, Florida, told Medscape Medical News.

In this article, the researchers acknowledge that there are many factors involved in the increased rate of prescriptions for antipsychotics in children, Dr. Benson pointed out.

"There is always the suggestion that these children are given a diagnosis without the benefit of the comprehensive assessment that these psychiatric conditions demand. And there is the suggestion that the reimbursement system undervalues effective psychotherapy interventions and overvalues prescribing medication," he said.

He added that the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have developed guidelines for the evaluation of children and the use of evidence-based treatment.

"Florida and other states have developed consultation services for physicians who are providing care to these children, and we have seen a reduction in the prescription of these medications. Also, when they are prescribed, there is closer monitoring for safety and effectiveness," Dr. Benson said.

_____________________

SPEAKING OUT:

Baltimore’s Poverty Cleansing Program


by Brendan Walsh      

REMEMBER the game of musical chairs? Players circle around assembled chairs until the music stops. Then everyone rushes for a chair. There are never enough chairs for each player. The object of the game is to gradually eliminate the players until one player grabs the last chair. During the game, stronger players often knock weaker ones off the chairs. It can be a fierce game if you want to win. And you can always assure victory if you control the music and own the chairs.
      We are playing this game in Baltimore. It’s a “poverty-cleansing” game, and the poorest of the poor are gradually being eliminated. No one is assessing the ramifications of the policies that are causing people to lose life’s necessities--a home, a just living wage, a real chance at an education, and even basic food stamps.
      According to “Plan Baltimore,” more than 156,000 Baltimoreans live in poverty. That’s 24% of the city’s population struggling to hold on to the “chairs” that sustain life.
      To live a human life, to raise a family, to build a community, you need housing. You need meaningful work that pays a living wage. You need food, a sense of dignity, human recognition and respect, and hope in large doses. Poor people are being denied each of these necessities.
      Keep a close eye on our housing programs, our jobs and wages, our incarceration rates, and our educational disasters. We are developing a “zero tolerance” for poor people. We are, intentionally or through neglect, cleansing Baltimore of poor people.
      On July 3rd, when the Murphy Homes were demolished, there was rejoicing. Buildings designed to “teach the poor a lesson” were leveled in a controlled implosion. Bleak, sterile, cheap places of confinement were removed from the landscape. It also means the loss of 658 units, housing for 1,500 to 1,700 people.
      One decade ago there were 18,162 public housing units, 18,526 “other subsidized” units, and 53,002 families “still in need” in Baltimore City. These numbers represent at least 90,000 families--more than 200,000 Baltimoreans, some of the poorest of the poor--all of them desperate for housing.
      But, as we enter the new millennium, we learn that the federal government is getting out of the housing business. When they level places like the Murphy Homes, they do not build new units for the majority of those displaced. The major fact in Baltimore is demolition. Houses are bulldozed without rhyme or reason. There is no comprehensive plan. Of the 66,000 rowhouses in center city, the plan is to demolish 20% by the year 2004. Virtually all of these houses are in the poorest neighborhoods.
      Think about it. We have a poverty rate of 24%. We are in the process of tearing down all public housing and 20% of the existing affordable rowhouses. So where will the poor go?
      We are told that the private sector, through programs like Section 8, will take up the slack. It is suggested that the poor should just get themselves to the five surrounding counties and “things” will work out. The unbinding of Baltimore will save us all. Does anyone believe there is a welcome mat in Baltimore, Howard, Carroll, Anne Arundel and Harford counties?
      The reality is that the poorest of the poor will just go wandering--a forced march to nowhere. Or they will “double up” with a relative or friend, or simply hide out in whatever abandoned building is still standing.
      If you are one of our 50,000 addicts, you will not be considered “housing-ready.” Thus, you will not be eligible for any subsidized housing. If you have been arrested for some drug-related offense, you too will not be eligible for subsidized housing. The number of people not “housing-ready” grows daily.
      Look at jobs and wages in the Baltimore metropolitan area. According to the recent report of the Job Opportunity Task Force, 62% of all jobs in the region are “low skill” jobs, and two out of three of these jobs are located outside the city. A “low-skill” job means a “low-wage” job--a poverty wage. The economic boom of the ’90’s has clearly created a sharp division between “high-skilled,” well-paid workers and “low-skilled” underpaid workers, and more and more unemployed. For every “low-skill” job, there are three “low-skill” job seekers.
      Our response to this crisis is abominable. We continue to remove the necessary chairs. There are more cries for “quality of life” arrests and we build more and more prisons. We lock people up and add fuel to the fire. People get out of jail fully enraged and then return to poor neighborhoods with no skills, no hope.
      One big result of our “welfare to work” program is that young children often have no adult parent or guardian at home when they return from school, or during the summer months. At our soup kitchen, more and more children are coming without an accompanying adult.
      When we began Viva House 30 years ago, we only saw single men over the age of 50. Now women and children are 70% of our guests. By the year 2004, will it be only children coming to soup kitchens?
      We are going in exactly the wrong direction.
      It is time to end the game of musical chairs. We can’t eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor. The federal government can’t drop out of the housing business at precisely the moment people are in dire need of housing. We can’t permit 62% of our labor force to work “low-skill,” “low-wage” jobs, while a few people pile wealth on top of wealth. We need to invest in the poor. In their lives. In their schools. In their neighborhoods.
      We can either change priorities, or that big bulldozer will level all of us.
      Everyone is entitled to a chair at the table.
____________________

The same people creating the subprime fraud are now receiving all the foreclosures and state funding for affluent development using the subprime mortgage fraud while victims remain homeless.  This article shows the plan to corner people forced into renting in a captured real estate market that will be predatory and criminal. 

This is what Baltimore City Hall thinks is great!  This is what has Baltimore youth disconnected and disenfranchised.
  These residents are what is replacing public housing and section 8-----


Last Updated: March 31, 2014

Delancey Closes on 3rd Baltimore Multifamily

By Erika Morphy | Baltimore

BALTIMORE—"We feel that Class B multifamily is the right place to invest due to the opportunity to buy properties below replacement cost that generate significant yield, and have a captive renter base," says CEO Daniel M. Kline.


___________________
WPC is a market-based policy group pushing privatization of public education.  Baltimore is ground zero for ending public education and handing all education to corporations, creating schools as businesses and vocational tracking from K-college.  Underserved children and schools are taken first because they have no advocates protecting public education.  Once established in Baltimore---this privatized system will expand across Maryland.

Underserved schools are subjected to tiered funding---principles literally cannot afford toilet paper.  Students are placed in front of computer terminals and online lessons that do not engage and have the students feeling negatively about education.  This is what youth in Baltimore have to face as the one community source that should be positive.  Making these youth travel by buses to reach schools that offer enriched programs means students will drop out or be truant more times than necessary.  These are the public policies that create negative youth behavior.  If you do not respect a person----that person will not respect the system.


As you see below, Baltimore is one of a few that subject its schools to tiered funding -----deliberately defunding schools for underserved and special needs creating a warehousing that ends democratic public education.  These schools will simply become Wall Street charter chains---and this will expand to middle-class public schools as well.

Alonzo is a Bloomberg---Wall Street ax-man willing to dismantle American public education for corporate control and profit.
  Students drop out rates and truancy are soaring in Baltimore with Alonzo's and Wall Street's reforms.  Remember, this is Johns Hopkins policy pushed by Baltimore City Hall and Maryland Governor O'Malley---formerly of Baltimore's neo-conservative pols running as democrats in Baltimore.  Anyone in Baltimore can tell you this article below is pure propaganda.....schools are not doing well, the curricula is hated, the students are falling in performance and leaving school----ergo, the problems that extend to the streets.

What We Can Learn from Baltimore City Public Schools


By Liv Finne, Director, WPC’s Center for Education

, October, 2010 Forward-thinking school superintendents, like C.E.O. Andres A. Alonso of Baltimore City Public Schools, are reorganizing the way they run their schools, and achieving dramatic gains for students. They are implementing Fair Student Funding. This reform shifts control over school spending from central districts to individual school principals. Under Fair Student Funding, school principals are able to control the actual dollars in their school budgets, instead of having to manage a building already staffed by the district. Principals with budget power are then able to customize their programs to meet the individualized educational needs of their students. In return for this new flexibility and control, school principals are held accountable for student performance.

Thirteen other school districts across the nation have adopted Fair Student Funding, also known as Student-Centered Funding, student “backpacking,” or Weighted Student Formula.
The idea is the same. Instead of providing funding based on staffing ratios or categorical program, the money follows and funds the child, weighted according to his educational needs. The districts employing this strategy for funding schools include the following: Belmont Pilot Schools in Los Angeles, Boston’s Pilot Schools, Renaissance 2010 Schools in Chicago, Cincinnati, Clark County (which includes Las Vegas), Denver, Hartford, State of Hawaii, Houston Independent School District, New York City, Oakland, Poudre School District in Colorado, St. Paul, and San Francisco.

The story of how Baltimore City Public Schools achieved this reform is well worth telling. It started with a visionary leader: Andrés A. Alonso. He was selected as Chief Executive Officer of Baltimore City Public Schools in the summer of 2007.

Elements of Fair Student Funding

  1. Create a system of great schools led by great principals who have the authority, resources and responsibility to teach all students well.
  2. Engage those closest to the students in making key decisions that impact them.
  3. Empower schools, then hold them accountable for results.
  4. Ensure fair and transparent funding that schools can count on annually.
  5. Size the district appropriately -- schools and central office -- to address the realities of revenues and expenditures.
  6. Allow dollars to follow each student.
  7. Put the resources in the schools.
Read the full Policy Note here








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March 21st, 2014

3/21/2014

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Corporate NPR/APM made the news of the day surround new Federal Reserve Chief Yellen and her taking of the FED baton from Bernanke at a time that the US economy is ready to collapse for the same reasons as in 2007.  So, her concern lies with protecting bank wealth and she states that Bernanke's FED policies have made sure the banks are so well capitalized and removed from the US economy that any domestic downturn or collapse will not be felt by banks!  You see her concerns.

MEANWHILE THE FED POLICY IS DESTROYING THE PEOPLE'S WEALTH FROM ALL DIRECTIONS.  THINK YOU MADE SOME GAINS ON YOUR 401K THIS BULL MARKET---WELL, IT'S GETTING READY TO CRASH AND PENSIONS AND 401Ks will lose most of those gains.

Unemployment nationally is 35-45%, banks leveraged above $600 trillion involving the bond market this time with the FED unable to contain another crash.  Now, it is the FED's mission to keep unemployment low and the economy stable.

THIS IS MALFEASANCE.


Regarding FED Chair Yellen's first policy statement:

This is my interpretation with paraphrase:


'I AM THROUGH PRETENDING THIS FED POLICY IS ABOUT ADDRESSING HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT AND MARKET STABILITY-----WE ARE PROUD TO BE A CRONY AND CORRUPT BRANCH OF WALL STREET WORKING ONLY TO ENRICH THE RICHEST'! 

This was Yellen's announcement and it even made the most corporate of mainstream anchors----Scott Pelley of CBS hang his head in shame.

We all have known the FED's policies had nothing to do with its stated mission of controlling unemployment and stabilizing the US economy, but after several years of the Obama's term and policy that created economic stagnation and an unemployment rate of 35-45% across the country with an economy ready to implode from a bond market bubble-----Yellen said, heck, we can no longer hide it.

 IT IS IMPORTANT TO SHOUT AND DOCUMENT THAT IT IS ILLEGAL FOR THE FED TO MOVE AWAY FROM ITS STATED MISSION.  IT CANNOT JUST ARBITRARILY CHOOSE TO EMBRACE POLICY THAT HARMS THE PEOPLE IT IS SUPPOSED TO PROTECT.


So, where Greenspan shouted 'LET THE MASSIVE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE FRAUD CONTINUE AT RECORD SPEED', Bernanke served saying THE CRONY WALL STREET MARKET SERVES TO MAKE A FEW THE RICHEST IN WORLD HISTORY AND THAT IS WHAT THE FED IS ALL ABOUT UNDER ME!  Yellen is posturing that she will super-size wealth inequity by using the FED in crony finance just as Bernanke did.  What the heck, US has no public justice system right now they say!  You know, Trans Pacific Trade Pact makes US law enforcement against corporations NULL and VOID and Wall Street considers TPP already in place!

Let's take a look at what Yellen is telling you and I.  After all we are peasants waiting to have law and policy pushed upon us and not citizens who write law the works in the public interest.

Manipulating inflation rates and interest rates to zero are near zero works to give corporations free money while keeping the public impoverished.  So, zero interest rates make it impossible for people to place their money in a savings account -----the goal is to force everyone back into a stock market we all know is criminal and corrupt.  If you lose money to inflation unless you place it in the stock market-----you are being fleeced.  So, for several years now the American people have lost millions of dollars to manipulated interest rates of zero.  Meanwhile, corporations are being paid by the FED not to work.....hire.....by giving them free money to invest in the stock market and expand overseas instead of growing the domestic economy.  WAIT UNTIL THESE CORPORATIONS GET RICH ENOUGH AND THEY WILL ALLOW IT TO TRICKLE DOWN WALL STREET SAYS.  Remember when Obama ran in 2007 saying he did not believe in trickle-down and yet-----that is the entire enchilada of his administration.


ZERO PERCENT INTEREST MAKES FOR PUBLIC LOSS OF MONEY IF TRYING TO SAVE IN A SAVINGS ACCOUNT.  IT IS MEANT TO FORCE YOU BACK INTO THE STOCK MARKET AND REMEMBER.....IT IS READY TO IMPLODE!

The next important issue regarding deliberately claiming low inflation when inflation is not low is that when the FED is forced to stop these manipulations inflation will soar.  Now, moderate inflation around 5% has always been a goal and is good for public wealth and the economy.  What is coming will be much higher inflation and that is really bad for the public.  Don't worry says the FED, the big banks are prepared to weather the next recession!



'Negative effects of inflation include an increase in the opportunity cost of holding money, uncertainty over future inflation which may discourage investment and savings, and if inflation were rapid enough, shortages of goods as consumers begin hoarding out of concern that prices will increase in the future.

Is the Fed Waging War on Bank Savers?

By: Brian O'Connell

NEW YORK (BankingMyWay) — A new white paper on Federal Reserve economic policy draws the sharp conclusion that the Fed is waging a three-pronged war on bank savers.

Obviously, the Fed, led by chairman Ben Bernanke, has held fast to its low interest rate policy since the Great Recession began in 2008, and hasn’t let up since. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the national average savings account rate is in the basement, at 0.14% , and the BankingMyWay Weekly Savings Rate tracker mirrors that number closely, at 0.15%.

If there’s any upside to the story, it’s that the Fed has decided to end the latest round of its monetary easing program and will likely no longer use artificial means to tamp down U.S. interest rates. But for bank savers, the damage is already done, and it’s not all just about interest rates.


Here’s a look at what one research outfit is calling Ben Bernanke’s “war on bank deposit savers” and the three ways it’s already under way:

Paltry savings rates at big banks. Big banks like Bank of America (Stock Quote: BAC) and JP Morgan Chase (Stock Quote: JPM) are offering savings rates at below 0.05%, points out FedUpUSA.org, a consumer financial advocacy organization. Since the 1960s the Fed has gone out of its way to give Americans a viable investment and savings alternative to the stock market, often keeping the key Fed Funds rate above 5%. But those days are long gone and bank deposit investors are paying the price.

Inflation is crushing bank deposit yields. In its April 2011 white paper, “Federal Reserve Punishes Savers By Subsidizing Big Banking Bailouts,” FedUSA.org argues that the Fed is trying to steer U.S. investors into the stock market, in large part by keeping interest rates so low that it isn’t worth it for investors to place their money in bank savings vehicles like certificates of deposits and money market accounts.

"The Federal Reserve is doing everything within its power to get people to spend or speculate in the stock market and hopefully over time create enough inflation to devalue our current debts,"
the FedUSA paper says. "This is why mortgage lending has gotten tougher (aside from government backed loans), getting a credit card is now for credit worthy customers and getting a small business loan is much more stringent. The purpose is to work through the current banking led fiasco by pushing on the debt to working and middle class Americans through lower savings rates and a push for higher inflation."

When inflation rises, as it has so far this year, bank CDs and money market accounts can’t keep up and thus are significantly reduced in value.

A smaller choice of consumer banking programs. Big banks and the Fed are currently entangled in a vicious wrestling match over bank fees. Front and center in that war are swipe fees that banks charge merchants who accept debit cards. The Federal Reserve is dropping those fees, from 44 cents per transaction to 12 cents per transaction, and in response, banks with $10 billion or more in assets are cutting bank credit card reward programs and are amping up bank deposit and ATM fees. The Fed just hasn’t learned a lesson that consumers already know too well – never get between a banker and his fee revenues.

Going forward, can consumers look forward to a break on the so-called ‘war on bank savers”? Probably. As rates rise, which they eventually will now that the Fed has taken its foot off the low-rate pedal, bank depositors will earn more on their savings and investments. But it won’t happen overnight. It’s going to take a while for things to wind down.

—For more ways to save, spend, invest and borrow, visit MainStreet.com.

_____________________________________

EVERYONE KNOWS INFLATION HAS RISEN THESE SEVERAL YEARS AS PRODUCTS COST MORE ----YET, THE FED HAS STATED INFLATION IS ZERO OR 1%.

Whether you are a supporter of CPI-E which changes the way COLA are calculated to address the Cost of Living today or if you are someone who knows inflation today is far greater than even CPI-E would calculate, the point is that the manipulation of inflation and COLA has gotten too far out of hand.  As we watch cereal boxes shrink considerably while prices rise....when my cat litter jumps from $6 to $10....we have considerable inflation.  Health care costs are of course the biggest inflation cost for Americans and it is not even included in the current CPI.

AS WE REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE WE NEED TO REMEMBER THESE LOSES TO SOCIAL PROGRAMS LIKE SOCIAL SECURITY AND VETERAN'S BENEFITS!


Do not think it is hyperbole when economists predict US inflation will soar when the FED is forced to change these manipulations.  Inflation may indeed hit 10-15% or higher.





 Manipulated inflation rates by government leading to lower COLA on Social Security for 2013


10:50 AM  John Williams, Shadowstats,

With the Federal Reserve and Federal government blatently manipulating the true rate of inflation in the economy, the results for 2013 are going to be a 1 or 2% COLA increase for Social Security recipients next year.



Charts courtesy of Shadowstats

Social Security recipients shouldn't expect a big increase in monthly benefits come January.

Preliminary figures show the annual benefit boost will be between 1 percent and 2 percent, which would be among the lowest since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. Monthly benefits for retired workers now average $1,237, meaning the typical retiree can expect a raise of between $12 and $24 a month.

The size of the increase will be made official Tuesday, when the government releases inflation figures for September. The announcement is unlikely to please a big block of voters _ 56 million people get benefits _ just three weeks before elections for president and Congress.

According to John Williams and Shadowstats, true inflation for 2012 is between 5 and 9%, dependent upon which model (1980 or 1990) one chooses to reference.  The government has manipulated real price inflation for more than two decades to ensure COLA increases are not in line with real inflation, to both save 10's of billion of dollars in benefit payouts, and to hide the fact that their deficit spending is causing massive inflation on essentials people need like food, energy, and rents.

Going into the 2012 election, the current administration doesn't want you to see the 30-80 rise in food prices over the past four years, and are making sure their media propagandists lie to you on what the real inflation rate is in the economy.


___________________________________________________________________

Bernanke and neo-liberals in Congress along with Obama have tried to pretend inflation is at zero or close when everyone knew it wasn't.  Inflation has been at 3-5% just as always with the inflation rate ready to explode as soon as the FED ponzi scheme of QE has maximized the FED's debt ratio to its limit, which is coming now.  This is why Yellen is having to back out of QE----the FED is maxed with debt.  When Yellen does this the manipulation of inflation rate will end and they will not be able to hide the fact that inflation has been higher than stated and will grow to a very high rate when QE ends and interest rates rise to normal.

Remember, inflation was manipulated to zero to make it look as though the FED policy was not hurting the economy.  At the same time these manipulated inflation rates did a number on the public's wealth yet again!  THOSE NEO-LIBERALS TRYING TO SUCK ALL THE WEALTH THE PUBLIC CAN AMASS ANY WAY POSSIBLE.  That is what FED policy has been about since the 2008 crash.  So, the zero COLA for several years lowered senior's Social Security payments by on average a hundred dollars a month as did the Veteran's payments.  This is big money for a class already teetering below the poverty line.  It is why the national debt fell during Obama's term---a success to Wall Street.  National debt paid by falling social safety net cuts while Wall Street fraud stays with the looters.

ARTIFICIALLY MANIPULATED INFLATION RATES OF ZERO CREATED THE LARGEST CUTS TO SOCIAL SECURITY IN THE PROGRAM'S HISTORY COURTESY OF NEO-LIBERALS IN CONGRESS AND OBAMA.

This is no surprise.....Obama laid out these plans in 2009.....the question is why have no democrats shouted out against all of this.  If your incumbent has not sounded the alarm these few years....THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND GET RID OF THEM.



Keep in mind these inflation rates of zero are fake.....all articles on the subject show everyone knows inflation was the normal 3-5% yet the FED listed it at zero and the Federal government under Obama allowed this fake inflation rate be used for SS and Vet COLAs. 

IT WAS DELIBERATE TO IMPOVERISH FURTHER PEOPLE RECEIVING MONEY FROM A PUBLIC TRUST.

So, we need labor and justice politicians to keep in mind seniors and Vets will need these several years of losses to monthly payments replaced with higher COLAs for several years.  We may need 7% COLAs for example over a decade to make up for losses these several years.  This actually fits with progressive policy that sees Social Security increases by larger amounts as we replace all the stolen pensions and retirements with Social Security
.



Social Security COLA Doesn't Match Inflation

Retirees are falling further behind each year as medical costs rise by more than overall inflation.


By Philip Moeller Aug. 9, 2010

Last week's annual trustees' report on the financial health of Social Security showed the program did not suffer serious erosion during the past year. Current Social Security resources are sufficient to pay all benefits for the next 27 years. That's hardly the self-sustaining funding model that we'd like to see but it's good news nonetheless. However, it won't stop efforts to "fix" the program. And it won't halt the discussion over the adequacy of the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) with which Social Security tries to keep retirees' benefits from being eroded by inflation.

Low rates of inflation in the year ended last fall caused the COLA to be zero for the first time in the 25-year history of these annual adjustments. Recipients received a one-time $250 payment, which helped compensate for that and was also pitched as an economic stimulus program.


Now, we're coming up on a second year with little if any inflation, as measured by a version of the Consumer Price Index used to determine the Social Security COLA. The index measures price changes for working people. Legislation has been introduced for another $250 payment, and AARP and other groups are lobbying for its approval.

However, the fiscal picture is much darker than it was even a year ago. And while Social Security's finances may have held up, the same is not true of the government's budget. We are awash in red ink with no end in sight to deficits. With mid-term elections this fall, just about everyone has found religion when it comes to government spending. So, the argument for another round of make-good Social Security payments is a tougher sell in 2010 than it was last year.

However, according to a recent academic study, the fairness of such a payment is beyond dispute. The study reviewed Social Security payments over many years, backed out spending on basic Medicare premiums (for part B physician and outpatient services) and other out-of-pocket medical spending, and then compared the remaining amounts with money that recipients paid for other goods. Researchers studied a group of older retirees who turned 65 in 1983 (the year the COLA began), and a second group of persons born in 1928. The authors -- Gopi Shan Goda and John B. Shoven at Stanford and Sita Nataraj Slavov at Occidental College -- found the value of recipients' benefits for non-healthcare spending had eroded by about 20 percent for men and nearly 27 percent for women. Those are big cuts: one out of every five dollars in benefits is effectively gone for men; one of every four dollars for women.

And their findings probably understate the actual ground lost, because the study did not include the cost of other health insurance premiums when considering out-of-pocket healthcare spending. Besides Part B premiums, other insurance includes Medicare Supplement, Medicare Advantage, Part D prescription drug coverage, and other private coverages. To the extent that the rise in premiums for such insurance has exceeded the overall rate of inflation, the study's findings would need to be adjusted to show further erosion in the effective non-medical buying power of Social Security benefits. And by all accounts, health insurance price inflation has far outpaced the rise in overall prices.


"Of course, these results assume no other income besides Social Security," the researchers say, "but a sizable fraction of the elderly depend on Social Security for the majority of their income: 64 percent of beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 50 percent or more of their income, and 35 percent of beneficiaries rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income."

Even if funds were available, fixing this situation is no easy matter. This is because there are two root causes for how healthcare expenses erode the true value of Social Security benefits. The first is the rate of inflation for such expenses. The second is the fact that people simply use more healthcare as they age. "Even if medical costs did not rise faster than the prices of other goods," the study says, "as retirees aged, their medical spending would still tend to increase as a share of income."

There is an experimental government price index called CPI-E that is designed to measure the actual spending of retirees. It thus includes more weighting for medical costs. "The CPI-E has increased faster than the CPI-W over the past 20 years," the study says, "due primarily to the relative rise in health costs, and the fact that the elderly spend more on health care than the non-elderly, even after taking into account the availability of Medicare." Using the CPI-E to determine the annual COLAs for the study's subjects would have narrowed the gap, with men falling only 11 short of maintaining their effective buying power for non-medical items, and women falling 18 percent short.

But the financial consequences of even this seemingly simply shift are huge. Remember that 27-year estimate for Social Security sufficiency? According to one study, using the CPI-E to set annual COLAs would slice five years from that cushion all by itself. Further, like all measures of price change, the CPI-E does not even try to factor in changes in product quality. The $1,000 television set you buy today is vastly superior to the $1,000 set you could have bought 20 years ago. Such qualitative improvements have been enormous in healthcare.

With all the talk about changing Social Security, it would seem to make great common sense to take a careful look at the COLA mechanism. What good is it to put the program on a sound 75-year trajectory again if the interests of seniors aren't appropriately considered and protected in the process?

______________________________________________

You will not hear corporate media explain to you that Obama's myRA is Social Security privatization -----a republican plan to end yet another public Trust only a politician running as a democrat is doing it.  You will hear corporate NPR advertise this policy as a good thing for the impoverished masses who just cannot seem to save money themselves.

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

Wall Street wants all of the Social Security and Medicare Trusts back in the stock market where Wall Street can use the money to maximize profit with leveraging that always sends public money out to act as fodder in investments with huge losses over and over and over.  Who wouldn't want Social Security tosses into the stock market?  EVERYONE!!!!!



'The same plan may be in the works for Social Security. In his speech, the President announced a new retirement savings program, MyRA. Although the details of MyRa are not clear, it is based on creating individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who don’t currently have them'.



Obama Lays Groundwork to Destroy another Social Insurance


by MFlowers   

By Margaret Flowers

Originally published in GreenShadowCabinet.us

President Obama’s comments about the health law in his State of the Union speech lacked substance and were primarily focused on selling his law, and more insurance, to the public. He avoided discussing the root causes of our ongoing healthcare crisis and set the ball in motion to destroy another pillar of our social infrastructure, Social Security.

The bottom line of President Obama’s comments on the health law was that more people have health insurance and insurance companies can’t deny people based on pre-existing conditions. He urged everyone to make their friends and family buy insurance.

What he didn’t say is that people with health insurance in the United States still can’t afford the care they need and face bankruptcy if they have a serious health problem. And although insurance companies cannot deny policies to people with pre-existing conditions, they have a number of ways to avoid paying for peoples care.


The health law perpetuates a health system that treats health care as a commodity so that people only receive the amount of health care they can afford rather than treating it as a public good, as does every other industrialized nation. This is the root cause of the health crisis in the US. Any system that leaves healthcare in the marketplace, because it is based on generating profits for investors, will result in inequalities of access to care and rising healthcare costs.

Using a market-based model for social insurances sets a dangerous precedent. Traditional social insurances are provided by the government and are paid for through taxes. They are designed to meet the needs of the public rather than to provide a profit and so they guarantee a universal set of benefits for everyone. Each pays in according to their means.

The health law is doing the opposite. It is driving our entire health system to one that is provided by private entities and is paid for by individuals. Each person gets the amount of coverage they can afford. Those who cannot afford what they need are left to suffer. Since the health law was signed, there has been greater privatization of Medicaid and Medicare and billions of taxpayer dollars have been used to sell and subsidize private insurance. If we continue on this path, down the road Medicaid and Medicare will be rolled into the health exchanges and only private insurance will be available.

The same plan may be in the works for Social Security. In his speech, the President announced a new retirement savings program, MyRA. Although the details of MyRa are not clear, it is based on creating individual retirement accounts (IRAs) for workers who don’t currently have them.

What we do know is that Social Security has been under attack throughout the President’s time in office. Rather than doing what is needed, raising the cap, or going beyond that and raising benefits, there have been attempts to cut benefits and raise the age of eligibility. The public is being told that Social Security is in a crisis but is not being told that this ‘crisis’ is intentional. Unlike Social Security, IRAs are managed by financial institutions that profit from them. MyRa is another gift to Wall Street by President Obama.

We are living in an era of big finance capitalism, a predatory capitalism, based on the neoliberal economic model. It is being applied to every aspect of our society through dismantling of our public programs and privatization of our resources and services. Under this system, the basic necessities of each person are not guaranteed. Instead, it is designed to funnel wealth to the top by making everything into a commodity, a profit center for investors.

This path will continue until we rise up to challenge it. We must understand what is happening and that the destruction of our public programs is intentional, but not inevitable. There are solutions to the crises we face. For example, a health care system based on a non-profit Medicare for all model and a retirement system based on a stronger Social Security. These are obvious solutions, supported by a majority of Americans and logistically easy to put in place – if the government actually represented the people.

The President closed his remarks on health care by saying, “So again, if you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice, tell America what you’d do differently.” The last time he said that in a State of the Union speech, I tried to respond and was arrested. This time we must respond together by working to build a mass social movement that has the power to make our demands a reality.

~ Margaret Flowers MD, Serves as Secretary of Health in the General Welfare Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.


____________________________________________

It has been a sad state of affairs to watch the neo-liberal media and economists send out all kinds of propaganda on Social Security and threats to its future.  Keep in mind, neo-liberals are committed to ending all War on Poverty and New Deal programs----that has to happen for Trans Pacific Trade Pact to become enacted.  So, neo-liberals are creating drama around Social Security to hide the ultimate goal----myRA.  As we are fighting Chain CPI and fake inflation rates and direct cuts to how much Social Security payments will be, the policy neo-liberals are pushing simply ends Social Security as a Federal program.  You do not hear one neo-liberal economist saying anything about how myRA will end Social Security-----they are saying we won the fight to protect Social Security from Chain CPI.  Chain CPI was not good but myRA ends SS for goodness sake!


IF YOUR PUNDIT OR POLITICIAN IS NOT SHOUTING THAT myRA FROM OBAMA IS ABOUT ENDING SOCIAL SECURITY-----THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS!

Baker, Reich, Krugman are all neo-liberal economists feeling the American people's pain yet never quite able to shout that neo-liberalism is the killer.
  They never speak to the Social Security and Medicare Trusts being raided either.  I have shown often that payroll taxes diverted to the US Treasury to the tune of almost $4 trillion dollars has been spent building the Homeland Security network and private military.



Social Security COLA to increase by 1.5 Percent in 2014
   
Written by Dean Baker  
Wednesday, 30 October 2013 10:00


Changing the basis of the COLA to the chained CPI would cut an already modest cost-of-living-adjustment.

The Social Security Administration has announced the Social Security cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) will be 1.5 percent in 2014. Beneficiaries will begin seeing the increase in their checks in January.

It is worth noting that this COLA based on the consumer price index for wage and clerical workers (CPI-W) is likely to be lower than the rate of inflation shown by the BLS experimental elderly index (CPI-E), which is designed to reflect the purchasing patterns of the elderly. The biggest differences between the two indices are the weights assigned to health care and housing, with both components accounting for a much larger share of the CPI-E than the CPI-W.

The price of medical care services was up 3.1 percent in August from its year-ago level. The price of the CPI’s shelter component was up 2.4 percent from its year-ago level. As a result of the more rapid price increases in these components, the CPI-E would likely show a rate of inflation that 0.1-0.2 percentage points higher than the CPI-W. This would suggest that the rate of inflation seen by seniors is somewhat higher than the COLA they are now getting for Social Security.

However, this gap would increase if the COLA indexation switched to the chained CPI (CCPI-U). This index typically shows a rate of inflation that is 0.2-0.3 percentage points lower than the CPI-W. The reason for the difference is that CCPI-U incorporates the impact of substitution on consumption costs. If the price of apples rises less rapidly than the price of oranges, and people switch from consuming oranges to apples, then the CCPI would lower the weight it assigns to oranges and increases the weight it assigns to apples. This leads it to show a lower measured rate of inflation, which arguably reflects actual patterns in consumption.

While the CCPI-U may be picking up substitution patterns for the population as a whole, it is not clear that it accurately reflects substitution patterns among seniors. The goods disproportionately consumed by seniors, health care and housing, don’t lend themselves to easy substitution. Furthermore, it is not clear that seniors can substitute for other goods with the same ease as the rest of the population.

Unfortunately, neither BLS or the proponents of adopting the chained CPI for the COLA have done research on this topic.

In short, there is some reason to believe that the current COLA already does not adequately compensate seniors for the rate of inflation they experience. This problem would be worse if the basis for the COLA is changed to the chained CPI.


__________________________________________


ISN'T THIS LOL----IT IS THE FED'S REFUSAL TO SEEK JUSTICE AND RECOVER FRAUD THAT HAS SUPER-SIZED THE BANKS WITH SO MUCH WEALTH AND EXPANSION THAT WALL STREET IS NO LONGER CONNECTED TO THE US ECONOMY OTHER THAN CONTINUING TO IMPLODE IT WITH BOOM AND BURST BUBBLES.



Well, the FED policy was all about feeding free money at zero percent so corporations could do nothing for the last several years but merge and acquire and expand overseas. The FED policy was crony and corrupt by every measure and professionals have shouted for years that the FED's actions are no longer matching the goals of its mission. The banks, rather than be nationalized so as to complete investigations, recover tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, and prosecute the criminals that are systemic in the financial industry so as to start to rebuild a healthy economy were instead simply allowed to keep the loot, use it as investments in a BULL market all of which made them extraordinarily rich with other people's money! How crony is that?

The reason the FED notes that banks and corporations will not be effected by the next recessions is just that.....the FED and Obama/Congressional neo-liberals have allowed the banks to grow separate from the US economy and while still working to implode the US economy from fraud and corruption, a collapse for you and me will see Wall Street simply move its money elsewhere until it is over. The FED, Obama, and Congressional neo-liberals have indeed allowed the banks to get to just the same place as 2007 as regards collapse by super-sized leverage and fraud and corruption, this time in the bond market.

The good news for WE THE PEOPLE is that since the banks still have those tens of trillion in massive fraud and made a killing investing our money.....we get all that fraud and the gains Wall Street made from the BULL market back as soon as Rule of Law is reinstated and fraud recovered to government coffers and individual's pockets.

When we do nationalize the Wall Street banks to do this, they will become the regional banks they are meant to be. So, they may weather the coming recession caused by the implosion of the bond market, but they will not weather justice delayed! Remember, when a government suspends Rule of Law, it suspends Statutes of Limitation!



Nearly all top U.S. banks could withstand severe recession, Fed says

WASHINGTON -- Only one of the nation's 30 largest banks would not be able to withstand a severe recession and the firms collectively are in better financial position to handle economic shocks than five years ago, according to Federal Reserve stress test results released Thursday

Under the most extreme of three economic scenarios, Zions Bancorporation of Salt Lake City would be the only large bank at risk of failure because a key measure of financial strength would fall below the Fed's standard.

The Fed conducts two rounds of stress tests and next week will give what amounts to pass/fail grades for the banks after factoring in each firm's plans for dividend payments or stock buybacks this year.



“The annual stress test is one of the Federal Reserve’s most important tools to gauge the resiliency of the financial sector and to help ensure that the largest firms have strong capital positions,” said Fed. Gov. Daniel K. Tarullo, who oversees the central bank's regulatory functions.

“Each year we are making substantial improvements, which have helped make the process even stronger than when we first conducted the stress tests in the midst of the financial crisis five years ago,” he said.

The banks have a combined $13.5 trillion in assets, nearly 80% of the U.S. industry.

Under the Fed's severely adverse economic scenario, those 30 firms would lose about $501 billion over 27 months.

That scenario, designed to replicate a downturn similar to the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, involves a sharp rise in the unemployment rate to 11.25%, a 25% decline in home prices and a nearly 50% drop in the stock market.

Under such conditions, Zions would fall below a Fed gauge of bank health. The firm's ratio of capital to its risk-weighted assets would fall to 3.5% from the 10.5% level as of Sept. 30.

Banks are supposed to stay above 5%.

The next weakest bank was M&T Bank Corp., with a ratio of 5.9%. The nation's two largest banks fared only slightly better: Bank of America Corp.'s ratio was 6% and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s was 6.3%.

The best performers under the scenario were State Street Corp, at 13.3% and the Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Discover Financial Services, both at 13.1%

Overall, the combined ratio for the 30 largest banks would fall to 7.6% from 11.5%. Those same banks had a ratio of 5.5% at the beginning of 2009, the Fed said.

The Fed's two stress tests are designed to determine the strength of the nation’s largest financial institutions.

The first, whose results were released Thursday, were required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law and measure the firms in three economic scenarios -- normal conditions, a moderate recession and a severe economic downturn.

This year, as required by the Dodd-Frank law, the Fed expanded the tests to the 30 largest bank holding companies.

Previous stress tests, which began after the crisis, looked at the top 18 banks.

The second test looks at each bank's plans to pay dividends or buy back stock. The results of the first stress test will be applied to those plans.

On Wednesday, the Fed will announce which banks will be allowed to proceed with their plans and which would first have to raise more capital. The Fed also will determine if the planning processes of the banks, which include how they project revenue and losses, are sufficient.

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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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