Very, very interesting

~ susie

City Hall

There are a LOT of people who won’t want Bloomberg poking around in this:

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records has ordered the City of Philadelphia to release more information about interest-rate swaps transactions and city deals with Wall Street bankers dating back to 1990.

Last October, Bloomberg reporter Romy Varghese asked Philadelphia to make available “all records,” including emails, notes and correspondence as well as financial reports, for at least 18 swaps deals, in which Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co. (now part of Bank of America), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Wells Fargo (and predecessors) variously set up bets on interest rates for the city, the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, the Philadelphia Gas Works, Water Department, and the state Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority fiscal oversight body.

According to the state office’s Final Determination by appeals officer Jill S. Wolfe, the city, which has already made some swaps records available to Bloomberg, is also required to provide emails and an unedited financial report that the city has been withholding, within 30 days. Some “internal” notes that Bloomberg also requested don’t have to be provided, Wolfe added, citing past cases in Radnor Township and other towns.

City officials have said they hoped to use the swaps to limit bond borrowing expenses from inflating when interest rates rise — but ended up owing the banks and their clients millions when rates stayed low. Bloomberg did not request documents from the city school district as part of the city request; the district has also reported multimillion-dollar swaps losses. Both city and district have shown little interest in revisiting what went wrong or who should be held responsible.

Yeah, I’ll bet they have.

H/t Jason Kalafat Defense Attorney.

Cuomo sells out DeBlasio

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Gov1

Andrew Cuomo may be short, but that just means he’s even more suited to giving blowjobs to monied interests. He is and will always be a whore who would suck the chrome off a bumper to get ahead:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has struck a budget deal with Republican legislators that includes unprecedented new giveaways to charter schools, particularly in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened to modestly rein them in. 

Diane Ravitch sums it up:

The private corporations that manage charter schools in New York City will never have to pay for using public space.

The de Blasio administration must offer space to all charters approved in the dying days of the Bloomberg administration. De Blasio had previously approved 14 of 17; now he must approve all 17. Whatever Eva Moskowitz wants, Eva gets.

The charters located inside public school buildings may expand as much as they wish, and the mayor can’t stop them. If this means pushing out children with severe disabilities, so be it. If it means taking control of the entire building and pushing all of the students out of their public school, so be it.

If a charter chooses to rent private space, the New York City public schools must pay their rent. Where will the money come from? Well, the public schools can always increase class size, or they can lay off social workers and counselors and psychologists. Or they could cut back on the arts. That’s their problem.

So the privately run schools that serve six percent of the students in the city get to make decisions over the city’s elected mayor and the best interests of the other 94 percent of students. These are chains that pay their executives more than the city’s education chancellor. Chains that achieve their testing success (when they achieve it) by pushing out special needs kids, back into the public schools that the charters are taking space from; those public schools are also educating the homeless kids and English Language Learnersthat charters disproportionately do not educate.

This is the system that Cuomo is working not just to protect but to expand, giving private companies rights over public property, giving schools that exclude the kids they don’t want to educate rights over the schools that educate all kids. It’s appalling.

H/t Attorney Kush Arora.

‘Deeply held principles’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs), more commonly known as "the morning-after pill" or Plan B, help to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. Unlike “the abortion pill,” ECPs simply interfere with ovulation and cannot induce an abortion if conception

You’re shocked, right?

When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.

Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby’s health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.

Thanks to Jason Kalafat.

Flash mob

~ susie

Link:

As World War I got underway, Romain Rolland and Hermann Hesse, two Swiss writers, appealed to their war-frenzied friends in France and Germany citing the lede to the choral movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen! (Friends, not these sounds! Let us rather make more pleasant, more joyous notes). And last Saturday, in Odessa, a Russian-speaking city of Ukraine, one of the cultural treasure-houses of Europe, the city that gave us Anna Akhmatova and Issak Babel, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milshtein and Emil Gilels, performers from the Philharmonic flash mobbed a performance of the last bars of the symphony at the Odessa fish market. A decidedly political musical statement. Amazing.

Department of the really obvious

~ susie

Walmart Escondido!

Imagine! Not having enough workers actually affects your business:

Walmart will begin adding worker hours this year as part of an effort to address complaints about empty shelves at the company’s understaffed stores. The retail giant’s top executives said that fixing the chain’s stocking problems could be worth $3 billion per year, a tacit acknowledgment that Walmart’s notorious efforts to wring productivity out of skeleton crews have hurt its bottom line.

Executives announced “plans to add labor hours as part of an effort to bolster ‘in-store execution’” at the company’s annual Year Beginning Meeting in March, Bloomberg reports. The news service did not offer specifics on how the plan will work, but Walmart has historically preferred scheduling workers for part-time hours to avoid paying them benefits required for full-time hours. Walmart workers around the country have gone on strike repeatedly in recent years, often listing the need for more staff hours among their reasons for protesting.

Regardless of how the company goes about staffing up, the decision to foreground in-store personnel issues at a major annual meeting confirms that Walmart is reconsidering the relationship between its workforce and its profits. Despite opening more than 600 new stores over the past five years, Walmart now employs 20,000 fewer people than it did in 2008. That aggressive decrease in staff eventually left stores unable to do the most basic thing for any retail company: putting merchandise on the shelves.

‘Cruel, inhuman and degrading to the poor’

~ susie

Nobody's home

The UN Human Rights Committee says the U.S. should stop criminalizing homeless people for being homeless, and the administration says they’re sorry, and they’ll get right on it. Haha, April Fool!

Jerome Murdough, a 56-year-old, mentally-ill homeless veteran, was just trying to stay alive during a New York City cold snap when he thought he found his spot: a stairwell leading to a roof in a Harlem public housing project.

But that desperate act set in motion a nightmare ride through New York’s criminal justice system that would end with Murdough dying of heat stroke in a Riker’s Island jail cell. New York officials now say the system failed Murdough every which way.

When he was discovered, he should have been offered shelter. When he was arraigned, he should not have been slapped with $2500 bail. When, unable to make bail, he ended up in jail, Murdough, because he was on medication for a mental condition, should have been monitored every 15 minutes, not left unwatched for at least four hours. It was during that untended time that Murdough, as an official told the Associated Press, “basically baked to death.”

Now, as New York officials discuss “the tragedy” of last month and scapegoat one Riker’s Island guard for Murdough’s death — suspending him for 20 days — the United Nations has taken notice. Murdough, the latest statistic in a series of needless deaths of homeless people while under arrest for “crimes” related to being unhoused, such as loitering or trespassing, was also the last straw.

No skills gap

~ susie

Visita de Paul Krugman

Wash, rinse, repeat. Remember, businesses used to hire people and train them. So if they weren’t lying (which they are), there’s nothing stopping them from training employees. But, as I’ve been saying for years, there is no skills gap. They’re simply working to suppress wages:

Yes, workers with a lot of formal education have lower unemployment than those with less, but that’s always true, in good times and bad. The crucial point is that unemployment remains much higher among workers at all education levels than it was before the financial crisis. The same is true across occupations: workers in every major category are doing worse than they were in 2007.

Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.

And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”
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