>ACORN Document Dump: Citibank Jeopardizes Customers for ACORN
by Derrick Roach
https://biggovernment.com/author/droach/
What does the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai and ACORN have in common? Both of them have some bankers on Wall Street worried. …
It is understandable why Wall Street would be concerned about Dubai. Why would they be concerned about ACORN? On October 24, 2009, Biggovernment.com revealed that the San Diego office of ACORN dumped thousands of documents into a dumpster in advance of an investigation into the organizations activities by California Attorney General Jerry Brown. I retrieved the documents from a shared public dumpster located behind the local ACORN office. The documents that were retrieved filled the back of my Suburban. Much of what was retrieved was truly trash, items such as banana peels, coffee grounds and marketing materials. After sorting through the documents, though, the 20,000 documents that were retained included sensitive personal information, financial records and documents outlining the internal and political workings of ACORN. One of the documents obtained by Biggovernment.com shows that ACORN had business relationships with 28 major financial institutions for the purpose of assisting homeowners whose mortgages were in foreclosure.
Location: Lincroft, NJ Enrollment: 255 Economically Disadvantaged Students (% of Total Enrollment): n.a. Minority Enrollment (% of Total): 7.1 Quality-Adjusted Exams Per Test Taker: 3.6 College Readiness Index: 98.9
Despite the high cost of education in the State of New Jersey ,according to US New and world Report only one school made the grade
Gov.-elect Chris Christie says not only can we reduce spending, we have to. And if the Legislature can’t go along, he will use his veto. He says they won’t have enough votes to override.
Appearing on 101.5 FM’s “Ask the Governor” (Governor-elect edition) Christie says he will speak out and name names and pointed out, he already has. ”Get used to it, you have four years coming” of his tell it like it is style.
He says business taxes will drop in July when some taxes are scheduled to expire. He said he won’t renew them.
In the short term, he said, the property tax link to funding education can’t be changed. He said he wants to try other ways before de-linking because that is just tax-shifting and he wants tax reduction.
Asked what he would do to help unions thrive, Christie said the only way to do it is make business thrive by lowering business taxes.
He said he doesn’t think the time is right to increase the cost of labor via laws to hike prevailing wages.
A state worker said she saw waste and corruption and wanted to know what he would do to clean it up. Christie said he will do all he can to fix it. Christie said he told staff its job is not to replace Democratic hacks with Republican hacks. Their job is to do away with needless jobs.
Christie said he will evaluate political appointees, not wholesale eliminate appointees.
Christie said he has put forward specific ideas for reducing taxes, auditing school boards, for instance. “One we get those results, tying the amount of school aid to reduction of middle management costs.” He also said he wants school board elections moved to November.
Host Eric Johnson reminded Christie the teachers union, NJEA, was no friend of his during the campaign. Christie agreed. He said contrary to published reports, the NJEA had not contacted his office about a meeting after the election.
“Teachers are not the problem. It’s the over-politicized of the leadership of their union.” He said he will work with the union but if they don’t he will make education changes anyway.
N.J. Gov.-elect Chris Christie during his campaign for governor in Whippany.TRENTON — Gov.-elect Chris Christie says he will call for an audit of all school boards when he becomes governor and wants to move school board elections to November.
During New Jersey 101.5’s “Ask the Governor” program on Tuesday, Christie also suggested tying education funding to a reduction of “middle management” in school districts as he looks to cut property taxes and close an $8 billion budget deficit for the upcoming fiscal year.
Nearly half of all property taxes, which are the highest in the nation at an average of $7,000 a home, go toward education funding.
Health care reform, yes. But at what cost? Senate’s excise tax proposal is the wrong approach By Barbara Keshishian, NJEA President
America needs health insurance reform, and we need it now. But we do not need the kind of reform that the Senate is currently debating, which would shift massive costs onto many middle-class workers who have insurance through their employers. The problem is a sneaky excise tax, ostensibly levied on insurance companies, which would be passed directly on to employees and employers in the form of higher premiums.
The excise tax would be levied against insurance companies on premiums exceeding a certain threshold, which begins as low as $8,500 for single coverage and is slated to rise much more slowly than the average increase in the cost of insurance. In effect, it means that while initially it may affect only a small number of middle-income families, within just a year or two, it will begin to capture many more insurance policies.
One projection, based on the average cost of family insurance coverage provided through the School Employees’ Health Benefits Program, shows that the excise tax is likely to kick in by year two. By year ten, based on projected growth in the cost of insurance, the tax could well exceed $10,000 on a family premium. That cost will certainly pass from the insurance company to the employer who pays the premium. Employers will attempt to shift the burden to employees. The end result: higher costs for middle class families.
Even worse, the quality of insurance coverage will almost certainly decline. To minimize or avoid the impact of the excise tax, employers and employees will be forced to consider reduced benefits, again leaving families more vulnerable to unexpected – and potentially uncovered – medical costs. Ultimately, the excise tax would trigger a race to the bottom, raising costs, lowering quality and putting a greater burden on middle-class families who can ill afford it.
There is a better way. The House of Representatives has passed health care reform legislation that accomplishes essentially the same reform objectives as the Senate version without passing the bill on to middle-class workers. Instead, the House bill finances this critical reform with a modest surcharge on individuals whose adjusted gross income is over $500,000, or couples earning over $1 million.
Both bills greatly expand coverage. Both contain provisions to benefit low-income families and senior citizens. Both ultimately reduce the federal deficit. But the House bill is paid for by asking the super-wealthy to step up and contribute their fair share. The Senate bill, as currently written, tries to sneak another tax onto middle-class families.
During his campaign last year, President Obama promised that individual taxpayers earning less than $250,000 per year would not see their taxes increase during his administration. He took the additional bold step of telling wealthy Americans that they might be asked to contribute a little more. The House bill keeps that promise. The Senate bill violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the president’s pledge.
It is time for our senators to decide whose interests they represent: the super-wealthy, who will benefit from the Senate’s taxing scheme, or the middle-class families who are counting on them for real health care reform.
I noticed that Laurie Goodman’s blog and the Ridgewood Patch both featured a report from REAC about the safety of the turf at Maple Park. The Patch even provided the report on its site. Goodman had a the link (https://ridgewoodreac.com/SustainableFields.html). I spent some time over the weekend going through this report. It is the most informative and objective I have seen on the topic. There were a number of things that I found surprising. It basically shows that the people, who have been critical of artificial turf for environmental or safety reasons have been wrong, at least at Maple Park. I was shocked to learn that the design actually has benefits for the flood plain.
This report is very timely with the referendum vote tomorrow. Why didn’t you feature this report on your blog? This is the kind of information I would expect you to bring to our attention. You let us down on this one.
At dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, naval aviation forces of the Empire of Japan attacked the United States Pacific Fleet center at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and other military targets. The goal of this attack was to sufficiently cripple the US Fleet so that Japan could then attack and capture the Phillipines and Indo-China and so secure access to the raw materials needed to maintain its position as a global military and economic power. This would enable Japan to further extend the empire to include Australia, New Zealand, and India (the ultimate boundaries planned for the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere”). The prevailing belief within the Japanese military and political establishment was that eventually, with the then expected German defeat of Great Britain and Soviet Russia, the United States’ non-involvement in the European war, and Japan’s control of the Pacific, that the world power structure would stabilize into three major spheres of influence:
1.) The Empire of Japan controlling East, Southeast, and South Asia and the entire Pacific Ocean. 2.) The combined powers of Germany and Italy controlling Great Britain, all of Europe, Western and central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. 3.) The United States, controlling North and South America.
Back ground: Eighteen months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had transferred the United States Fleet to Pearl Harbor as a presumed deterrent to Japanese agression. The Japanese military, deeply engaged in the seemingly endless war it had started against China in mid-1937, badly needed oil and other raw materials. Commercial access to these was gradually curtailed as the conquests continued. In July 1941 the Western powers effectively halted trade with Japan. From then on, as the desperate Japanese schemed to seize the oil and mineral-rich East Indies and Southeast Asia, a Pacific war was virtually inevitable.
By late November 1941, with peace negotiations clearly approaching an end, informed U.S. officials (and they were well-informed, they believed, through an ability to read Japan’s diplomatic codes) fully expected a Japanese attack into the Indies, Malaya and probably the Philippines. Completely unanticipated was the prospect that Japan would attack east, as well.
The U.S. Fleet’s Pearl Harbor base was reachable by an aircraft carrier force, and the Japanese Navy secretly sent one across the Pacific with greater aerial striking power than had ever been seen on the World’s oceans. Its planes hit just before 8AM on 7 December. Within a short time five of eight battleships at Pearl Harbor were sunk or sinking, with the rest damaged. Several other ships and most Hawaii-based combat planes were also knocked out and over 2400 Americans were dead. Soon after, Japanese planes eliminated much of the American air force in the Philippines, and a Japanese Army was ashore in Malaya.
These great Japanese successes, achieved without prior diplomatic formalities, shocked and enraged the previously divided American people into a level of purposeful unity hardly seen before or since. For the next five months, until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May, Japan’s far-reaching offensives proceeded untroubled by fruitful opposition. American and Allied morale suffered accordingly. Under normal political circumstances, an accomodation might have been considered.
However, the memory of the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor fueled a determination to fight on. Once the Battle of Midway in early June 1942 had eliminated much of Japan’s striking power, that same memory stoked a relentless war to reverse her conquests and remove her, and her German and Italian allies, as future threats to World peace.
>GET A FREE DINNER AT BLEND! FOR THE WHOLE MONTH OF DEC ON SUNDAY, MONDAY AND TUESDAY NIGHTS, BLEND WILL OFFER ANY CUSTOMER A BUY-ONE-GET-ONE-FREE ENTREE IN THE DINING ROOM ONLY (NO TAKE OUT)! ALL YOU NEED IS THE SECRET PASSCODE AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET THE SECRET CODE IS TO FOLLOW BLENDBAR ON TWITTER AND SEND US A DIRECT MESSAGE REQUESTING THIS PASSCODE…. SEE YOU AT BLEND IN DECEMBER!!!!
>The Village does not own the buildings. The school district owns them. And thus the school district is responsible for managing them.
And BTW last year the school district took the grounds maintenance away from the Village because the Village was screwing them on the price. Way too expensive.
And how about those multi-hundred-thousand $$ bathrooms at Vets…thanks, Village! Haven’t you noticed that the village is allowed to just pass an ordinance any time a project is mismanaged and goes over budget? School district can’t do that. They have to stay within their budget.
So any way you look at it, it’s a GOOD thing the village isn’t taking care of the buildings — we couldn’t afford it!
Michael F. Cannon is director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.
Added to cato.org on December 2, 2009
Amid double-digit unemployment, a record $1.6 trillion federal deficit and a national debt projected to double in 10 years, U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., voted to bring to the floor of the Senate a health care overhaul with so many job-killing tax increases that it’s hard to fit them all into one column. But let’s give it a shot.
For starters, consider the $500 billion in explicit tax increases.
One levy would take $15 billion from sick patients with high out-of-pocket medical expenses, including elderly and low-income patients.
The Senate health care bill would impose massive tax increases on Day One and keep increasing your taxes well into the future.
If you have a health savings account or flexible spending arrangement, there are taxes specific to those health plans, plus a third tax that would apply to all “consumer-directed” plans.
Another levy would tax medical devices, and another would tax prescription drugs. Those two taxes would increase health insurance premiums by about 1 percent, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. There’s another $60 billion tax that would drive health premiums higher still.
If your premiums climb high enough, you’ll become subject to a $149 billion tax on those with high health insurance premiums. Yet many face high premiums simply because they have expensive medical needs, making this yet another tax on the sick.
The legislation would increase the Medicare tax on wages above $200,000, yet divert the revenue toward new entitlement spending.
And lest any corner of the health care sector go untaxed, the bill would even impose a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgeries.
Yet those are just the explicit tax increases. There are trillions of dollars in hidden tax increases, too.
Senate Democrats promise to fund half of their new entitlement with $491 billion of Medicare cuts. Yet those promised cuts are merely a tax increase waiting to happen.
Congress frequently reneges on such promises. Want proof? At the very same time Congress is promising to cut future Medicare spending by $491 billion, it is reneging on a past promise to cut Medicare’s physician payments by $210 billion. Even Medicare’s chief actuary calls the (new) promised cuts “doubtful” and “unrealistic.”
If history is any guide, Congress will scrape up that $491 billion by raising taxes — or by increasing the deficit, which simply raises taxes on future generations.
Another hidden tax comes in the form of price controls that would increase premiums for young adults in order to subsidize their parents, even though the parents typically have higher incomes. The same price controls would increase premiums for people with healthy lifestyles to subsidize those who (for example) overeat or consume alcohol to excess.
Those price controls could even tax farmers to subsidize office workers. The bill would allow populous urban areas like Omaha to make all of Nebraska one single “rating area,” which would increase premiums in rural areas to subsidize wealthier urban areas.
The bill’s largest hidden tax, however, is a mandate that would force all Americans to purchase health insurance, whether they want it or not.
Here’s why that mandate is a tax. When the government forces you to pay $10,000 to the IRS, and then gives that money to a private insurance company — as this legislation would do — we rightly call that a tax.
If instead the government forced you or your employer to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company — as this legislation also would do — the outcome would be the same. That makes the mandate a tax, even though that $10,000 never passes through the federal Treasury.
Including the cost of that “mandate tax” reveals the actual cost of the legislation to be roughly $2.5 trillion — more than double the official estimate.
The Senate health care bill would impose massive tax increases on Day One and keep increasing your taxes well into the future.
Sen. Nelson was one of the key lawmakers who brought this ticking tax bomb one step closer to reality. Let’s hope the ensuing Senate debate exposes why job-killing tax increases are the wrong prescription for health care reform — in this or any economy.
Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.
Added to cato.org on December 2, 2009
This article appeared in the DC Examiner on December 2, 2009.
The more we learn about the purloined e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit the more it resembles Watergate. As was the case in 1974, there will be no one particular spectacular revelation, but rather an unremitting and unrelenting daily drip-drip that ultimately brings down the house.
The latest gem comes from none other than Rajendra Pauchari, the climatologically untrained head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Without the IPCC there would be no cap-and-tax legislation awaiting debate in the Senate. There would be no meeting in Copenhagen, where, next month, world leaders will attempt to globalize cap-and-tax. There would also be no pledge from President Obama to emissions reductions that have never been passed by the Senate.
The last IPCC compendium on climate science, published in 2007, left out plenty of peer-reviewed science that it found inconveniently disagreeable.
The e-mails have given Pauchari the onerous task of defending the IPCC from its own “scientific” leadership, now accused (or, perhaps, incriminating itself) of seriously manipulating the scientific literature that goes into the august IPCC scientific reports.
In one of the e-mails, Penn State’s Michael Mann, long a power player in the production of these reports, said this about some scientific articles he did not like: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
This is pretty serious stuff, because it, and many similar e-mails, paint a picture of IPCC boffins committing science’s capital crime: Trying to game the peer-reviewed literature, which is akin to editing what goes in the Bible.
In this case, Mann is actually speculating about keeping contrary information out of the IPCC reports by blacklisting certain professional journals.
One series of these e-mails called out the journal Climate Research, which had the audacity to publish a paper surveying a voluminous scientific literature that didn’t support Mann’s claim that the last 50 years are the warmest in the past millennium. Along with the CRU head Phil Jones and other climate luminaries, they then cooked up the idea of boycotting any scientific journal that dared publish anything by a few notorious “skeptics,” myself included.
Their pressure worked. Editors resigned or were fired. Many colleagues began to complain to me that their good papers were either being rejected outright or subject to outrageous reviews — papers that would have been published with little revision just a few years ago.
More by Patrick J. MichaelsSo what is Pauchari’s response to all of this? Denial.
“IPCC relies entirely on peer-reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment and follows a process that renders it unlikely that any peer reviewed piece of literature, however contrary to the views of any individual author, would be left out.”
That’s just not true. The last IPCC compendium on climate science, published in 2007, left out plenty of peer-reviewed science that it found inconveniently disagreeable.
These include articles from the journals Arctic, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Earth Interactions, Geophysical Research Letters, International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Quaternary Research.
We have hardly heard the end of Climategate, but don’t expect some climactic grand finale. In 1974, errors, boo-boos, and downright duplicities slowly piled up.
The same is happening now. Like Tricky Dick, Pauchari may soon be headed home
Watching and worrying. That’s what county and local government officials in New Jersey are doing this week as they monitor the bleak national economic condition, bracing for the worst when it comes to the impact the financial crisis will have on their 2009 budgets.
A host of officials said today they already were anticipating tough times next year, with likely decreases in revenue, and have already enacted plans to cut spending – cuts that could lead to reduced services and employee layoffs.
Officials are also paying close attention to possible cuts in state aid to towns and counties after comments this week by Gov. Jon Corzine who said he is reviewing contingency plans he asked state department heads to craft in August that would trim their costs by 5 percent.
“We have a hiring freeze in effect and we are not filling job vacancies unless they are critical positions, such as staffing our nursing home or having enough officers at the county corrections center or juvenile,” Morris County Administrator John Bonanni said. “But what is happening with the economy this week is problematic. It is of great concern.”
Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo said his county expects to lose at least $2.5 million in property taxes due to the downturn of the economy. He does not think there will be a significant impact on the current budget but has asked county departments to tighten their belts next year, starting with a 5 percent cut across the board.
“We’ve been expecting the worst, so we’re a little prepared for this, but I didn’t expect it would be this bad,” DiVincenzo said. “This year, we’ll be fine. What we do next year is going to have to be less.”
The financial woes prompted Union County to postpone a plan to refinance some of its debt, a move that could have saved the county $2 million.
“Recent situations have made that opportunity deteriorate,” said county finance director Larry Caroselli. “Thankfully, we issued (bonds) earlier this year, in February, when market conditions were a lot stronger. If we had to (issue bonds now) because of a need of cash, we’d really be biting our nails.”
Many officials across the state expect a decline in money collected from taxes, due to foreclosures, a decrease in new development and new ratables, plus what could be a large number of tax appeals.
Marvin Joss, administrator in Clinton Township, Hunterdon County, said a credit crisis inevitably leads to a drop in tax collection due to foreclosure and instability in the personal finances of residents. Tax collection can drop between 2 and 5 percent in a township like Clinton when the economy is ailing, Joss said, and that means the money that wasn’t collected has to be raised in additional taxes the next year.
That possibility has sparked interest in shared services between towns and counties, plus a host of cost-saving initiatives.
Madison has begun sharing a municipal court with neighboring Florham Park and is in talks to share senior transport services as well, said Mayor Mary-Anna Holden. In Morristown, town officials approved a plan to install solar panels at the wastewater treatment plant to save between $100,000 to $150,000 annually in energy costs.
Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello said towns and cities are working to cut their budgets and urged Corzine not to balance the state budget by cutting aid to already cash-strapped towns and school districts.
“He needs to look inside first,” Cresitello said, suggesting cuts within the state bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, towns and counties are anxiously eyeing the impact of the economic downturn and stock market on employee pension funds, said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the New Jersey Association of Counties.
“There is a lot of concern out there, a lot of people who could be affected,” said Mozloom. “It’s too early to know right now what the impact of what’s happening this week will have on those funds. But we’re all watching and worrying.”
>I don’t believe unemployment went down, I think our government is fudging numbers now.
The report doesn’t match up with other jobs data: Today’s report will no doubt be a head scratcher for economists as they try to understand how other labor market data could be so divergent. Earlier in the week, ADP reported private payroll losses of 169,000 for November. The Monster Employment Index, which measures online job demand, actually dipped slightly from October’s number. “This was a shocking report because the reported payroll data bear little resemblance to any other evidence concerning the labor market, including the ADP survey, which is based on hard data from a much wider sample of payrolls than is the government’s survey,” says Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at research firm MFR.
In the summer, the Planning Board hired an expert in hospital design to review their proposed H-Zone amendments to the Master Plan. While the draft wording was prepared by the Village Planner the text was almost entirely a copy of the details in the “Renewal” supplied by Valley.
To many people’s surprise, the independent consultant proposed a much more “community friendly” recommendation that included increasing setbacks to 120 feet and putting all parking underground.
The response from Valley, as reported in today’s Ridgewood News to the consultant’s recommendations, is that the hospital has concerns about the “constructability and financial feasibility” of the proposal. What this means in 2009 is that the hospital is concerned about some additional cost because anything is technically possible.
It is very surprising to hear this when Valley is one of the most profitable hospitals in NJ and has benefited from an additional $25 million windfall profit increase from receiving most of the former patients of PVH over the last 2 years.
These statements also seem to run contrary to Audrey Meyer’s statement in the Record of Dec 3, where she suggests that non-for-profit hospital’s like Valley use their profits to benefit the community.
