After receiving a speeding citation, defendant Dr. Nickesh Pravin Shah duped an employee into signing a letter falsely stating that defendant was responding to a medical emergency at the time of the traffic stop. Defendant’s attorney eventually entered the letter in evidence at his traffic trial.
After the traffic trial, defendant was charged with violating Penal Code sections 132 and 134 by preparing and offering the forged letter as false evidence. A jury found defendant guilty of both offenses, and the trial court suspended imposition of sentence and placed defendant on 36 months’] probation….
In early 2013, defendant accepted through a staffing agency a temporary position as a physician at a health clinic. The clinic was small, with just two physicians and a staff of approximately eight to nine people. The clinic hired defendant to care for the patients of one of the doctors who was on leave.
On the morning of April 3, 2013, at approximately 10:00 a.m., defendant was driving to work when a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer stopped him for speeding. At the time of the stop, defendant was late for work, which was not unusual.
When informed of the reason for the stop, defendant told the officer that he was en route to a medical emergency and needed to be there within the next 10 minutes. The officer asked defendant the nature of the medical emergency, and defendant responded, “A gall bladder.” Defendant told the officer he would be performing surgery on the patient.
The officer asked defendant if there was someone who could confirm this information. Defendant gave the officer the name and telephone number of a supervisor at the clinic. Defendant said she would know if there was an emergency. The officer called the number and spoke to the supervisor. The supervisor denied there was an emergency and told the officer that defendant “was just late to see his regularly scheduled patients.” {This was not the first time that defendant falsely claimed he was responding to an emergency to avoid a speeding ticket. At trial, a San Francisco police officer testified that when he stopped defendant for speeding in 2010, defendant told the officer he was “on an emergency call” heading to the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center. The officer asked for proof, but defendant was unable to substantiate the emergency.}
When the officer relayed this information, defendant responded that the supervisor must be working on the other side of the facility and unaware of the emergency. The officer, unpersuaded, cited defendant for speeding, but suggested that the district attorney might dismiss the citation if defendant could provide documentation showing that he was, in fact, responding to an emergency.
A couple of weeks later, defendant had his office manager sign a letter relating to the traffic stop. The letter stated: “This letter is to confirm that [defendant] was on his way to an emergency in order to attend to a patient at this facility on April 3rd, 2013[,] at 10:00 a.m. with severe abdominal pain and concern for a gall bladder infection.” The letter was dated April 16, 2013. Defendant, through his attorney, subsequently offered the letter in evidence at the trial on his speeding citation. The traffic court judge nevertheless found defendant guilty.
After the traffic trial, the prosecutor filed a felony complaint against defendant charging him with violations of Penal Code sections 132 and 134 for preparing and offering false and fraudulent evidence at the traffic trial…. The jury found defendant guilty of violating sections 132 and 134.
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This past week, Trump announced he had reached an agreement with Congress to pass a continuing resolution which will suspend the debt ceiling until July 2021.
The good news is that it will ONLY increase spending by just $320 billion.
What a bargain, right?
It’s a lie.
That is just the “starting point” of proposed spending. Without a “debt ceiling” to constrain spending, the actual spending will be substantially higher.
However, the $320 billion is also deceiving because that is on top of the spending we have already committed. As I noted just recently:
“In 2018, the Federal Government spent $4.48 Trillion, which was equivalent to 22% of the nation’s entire nominal GDP. Of that total spending, ONLY $3.5 Trillion was financed by Federal revenues, and $986 billion was financed through debt.
In other words, if 75% of all expenditures is social welfare and interest on the debt, those payments required $3.36 Trillion of the $3.5 Trillion (or 96%) of revenue coming in.”
Do some math here.
The U.S. spent $986 billion more than it received in revenue in 2018, which is the overall “deficit.” If you just add the $320 billion to that number you are now running a $1.3 Trillion deficit.
Sure enough, this is precisely where I forecast we would be in December of 2017.
“Of course, the real question is how are you going to ‘pay for it?’ On the ‘fiscal’ side of the tax reform bill, without achieving accelerated rates of economic growth – ‘the debt will balloon.’
The reality, of course, is that is what will happen because there is absolutely NO historical evidence that cutting taxes, without offsetting cuts to spending, leads to stronger economic growth.”
More importantly, Federal Tax Revenue is DECLINING. Such was NOT supposed to be the case, as the whole “corporate tax cut” bill was supposed to lift tax revenues due to rising incomes.
More spending, less revenue, equals bigger deficits, which equates to slower economic growth.
“Increases in the national debt have long been squandered on increases in social welfare programs, and ultimately higher debt service, which has an effective negative return on investment. Therefore, the larger the balance of debt becomes, the more economically destructive it is bydiverting an ever growing amount of dollars away from productive investments to service payments.
The relevance of debt versus economic growth is all too evident, as shown below. Since 1980, the overall increase in debt has surged to levels that currently usurp the entirety of economic growth. With economic growth rates now at the lowest levels on record, the growth in debt continues to divert more tax dollars away from productive investments into the service of debt and social welfare.”
“The irony is that debt driven economic growth, consistently requires more debt to fund a diminishing rate of return of future growth. It now requires $3.02 of debt to create $1 of real economic growth.”
Over the next 12-18 months, spending will expand, and the deficit will quickly approach $2 Trillion.
But, here’s the worse part: The projected budget deficits over the next couple of years are coming at the end of a decade-long growth cycle with the economy essentially at full employment. This is significant because, while budget deficits can be helpful in recessions by providing an economic stimulus, there are good reasons we should be retrenching during good economic times, including the one we are in now.
As William Gale stated:
“As President Kennedy once said, ‘the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.’ Instead, we are punching more holes in the fiscal roof. The fact that debt and deficits are rising under conditions of full employment suggests a deeper underlying fiscal problem.”
During the next recession, revenue will drop sharply, deficits will explode, and the Government will be forced into another round of bailouts.
“An April 2016 Moody’s analysis pegged the total 75-year unfunded liability for all state and local pension plans at $3.5 trillion. That’s the amount not covered by current fund assets, or future expected contributions, or investment returns at assumed rates ranging from 3.7% to 4.1%. Another calculation from the American Enterprise Institute comes up with $5.2 trillion, presuming that long-term bond yields average 2.6%.
Since then, we have gotten some updated estimates. Surely, after 3-years of surging stock market returns things have gotten markedly better, right?
“Moody’s Investor Service estimated last year that the total pension funding gap in the US is $4.4 trillion. A few months ago the American Legislative Exchange Council estimated it at nearly $6 trillion.”
“The real crisis comes when there is a ‘run on pensions.’ With a large number of pensioners already eligible for their pension, the next decline in the markets will likely spur the ‘fear’ that benefits will be lost entirely. The combined run on the system, which is grossly underfunded, at a time when asset prices are declining will cause a debacle of mass proportions. It will require a massive government bailout to resolve it.”
Fortunately, Congress has made some movement to get ahead of the problem with the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act. The legislation, if passed, is an attempt to address the multi-trillion dollar problem of unfunded pension plans in America.
By the way, this isn’t JUST an American problem, it is a $70-Trillion global problem, as noted recently by Visual Capitalist.
“According to an analysis by the World Economic Forum (WEF), there was a combined retirement savings gap in excess of $70 trillion in 2015, spread between eight major economies…
The WEF says the deficit is growing by $28 billion every 24 hours – and if nothing is done to slow the growth rate, the deficit will reach $400 trillion by 2050, or about five times the size of the global economy today.”
This is why Central Banks globally are terrified of a global downturn. The pension crisis IS the “weapon of mass destruction” to the global financial system, and it has started ticking.
While pension plans in the United States are guaranteed by a quasi-government agency called the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the reality is the PBGC is already nearly bust from taking over plans following the financial crisis. The PBGC is slated to run out of money in 2025. Moreover, its balance sheet is trivial compared to the multi-trillion dollar pension problem.
The proposal from Congress is simply to use more debt. According to the new legislation, whenever a pension plan runs out of funds, Congress wants the pension plan to borrow money in order to keep making payments to beneficiaries.
Think about that for a moment.
Who would loan money to an insolvent pension fund?
Oh, that would be you, the taxpayer.
In other words, the Government wants you to bail out your own retirement fund.
Genius.
But it’s going to get far worse.
We Are Out Of Time
Currently, 75.4 million Baby Boomers in America—about 26% of the U.S. population—have reached or will reach retirement age between 2011 and 2030. And many of them are public-sector employees. In a 2015 study of public-sector organizations, nearly half of the responding organizations stated that they could lose 20% or more of their employees to retirement within the next five years. Local governments are particularly vulnerable: a full 37% of local-government employees were at least 50 years of age in 2015.
The vast majority of these individuals, when they retire, will depend on their pension (if they are in the 15% of the population that has one, and Social Security for a bulk of their living expenses in retirement.
The problem is that pension funds aren’t going to be able to keep their promises. Social Security, according to its own annual report, will run out of money in 15 years. Medicare has a massive underfunded problem as well.
But yet, the current Administration believes our outcome will be different.
More debt, and lack of any budgetary controls, will somehow lead to surging levels of economic growth despite no historical evidence of that being the case.
The reality is that the U.S. is now caught in the same liquidity trap as Japan. With the current economic recovery already pushing the long end of the economic cycle, the risk is rising that the next economic downturn is closer than not. The danger is that the Federal Reserve is now potentially trapped with an inability to use monetary policy tools to offset the next economic decline when it occurs. Combine this with:
A decline in savings rates to extremely low levels which depletes productive investments
An aging demographic that is top heavy and drawing on social benefits at an advancing rate.
A heavily indebted economy with debt/GDP ratios above 100%.
A decline in exports due to a weak global economic environment.
Slowing domestic economic growth rates.
An underemployed younger demographic.
An inelastic supply-demand curve
Weak industrial production
Dependence on productivity increases to offset reduced employment
The combined issues of debt, deflation, and demographics will continue to push the U.S. closer to the “point of no return.”
As the aging population grows becoming a net drag on “savings,” the dependency on the “social welfare net” will continue to expand. The “pension problem” is only the tip of the iceberg.
It’s an unsolvable problem.
It will happen.
It will devastate many Americans.
It is just a function of time.
“Demography, however, is destiny for entitlements, so arithmetic will do the meddling.” – George Will
But here is the real question that needs to be answered:
“Who is going to buy all the debt?”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SCfOtT Tyler Durden
While the western world (and much of the eastern) has been preoccupied with predicting the consequences of Trump’s accelerating global trade/tech war and whether the Fed will launch QE before or after it sends rates back to zero, Beijing has quietly had its hands full with avoiding a bank run in the aftermath of Baoshang Bank’s failure and keeping the interbank market – which has been on the verge of freezing – alive.
Unfortunately for the PBOC, Beijing was racing against time to prevent a widespread panic after it opened the Pandora’s box when it seized Baoshang Bank, the first official bank failure in an odd replay of what happened with Bear Stearns back in 2008, when JPMorgan was gifted the historic bank for pennies on the dollar.
And with domino #1 down, the question turned to who is next, and could it be China’s Lehman.
As a reminder, back in May, shortly after the shocking failure of China’s Baoshang Bank (BSB), and its subsequent seizure by the government – the first takeover of a commercial bank since the Hainan Development Bank 20 years ago – the PBOC panicked and injected a whopping 250 billion yuan via an open-market operation, the largest since January. Alas, as we said at the time, it was too little to late, and with the interbank market roiling, with Negotiable Certificates of Deposit (NCD) and repo rates soaring (in some occult cases as high as 1000%) we said that it’s just a matter of time before another major Chinese bank collapses.
And, in order to present the list of the most likely candidates, will picked those names that – just like Baoshang – had delayed publishing their latest annual reports, the biggest red flag suggesting an upcoming solvency “event.” The list is below.
We were right, because not even two months later, the second biggest bank on the list, Bank of Jinzhou has crawled in Baoshang’s foosteps and is about to be seized by the government.
According to Reuters and Bloomberg, Bank of Jinzhou recently met financial institutions in its home Liaoning province to discuss measures to deal with liquidity problems, and in a parallel bailout to that of Baoshang, the bank was in talks to “introduce strategic investors” after a report that China’s financial regulators are seeking to resolve its liquidity problems sent its dollar-denominated debt plunging.
Officials including those from the People’s Bank of China and China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission recently held a meeting with financial institutions in Bank of Jinzhou’s home province of Liaoning to discuss measures to resolve the lender’s liquidity issues, Reuters reported Wednesday.
In response to market fears the bank issued a statement on Thursday that “currently, Bank of Jinzhou’s business operations are normal overall,” which however did not refer to its liquidity situation. “Recently, the bank’s board of directors and some major shareholders have been in talks with several institutions that wish to and have the ability to to become strategic investors” adding that talks have been “going smoothly.”
By strategist investors it of course meant banks, backstopped by the government, who would “absorb” the bank, effectively nationalizing it a la what happened with Baoshang. The only question is whether stakeholders would also be impaired.
As we reported in June, Jinzhou’s Hong Kong-listed shares have been suspended since April after it failed to disclose its 2018 financial statements; adding to its woes, its auditors Ernst & Young Hua Ming LLP and Ernst & Young resigned. As the bank – which first got in hot water in 2015 over its exposure to the scandal-ridden Hanergy Group – wrote in a filing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, E&Y was first appointed as the auditors of the Bank at the last annual general meeting of the Bank held on 29 May 2018 to hold office until the conclusion of the next annual general meeting of the Bank. That never happened, because on 31 May 2019, out of the blue, the board and its audit committee received a letter from EY tendering their resignations as the auditors of the Bank with immediate effect.
The reason for the resignation: the bank refused to provide E&Y with documents to confirm the bank’s clients were able to service loans, amid indications that the use of proceeds of certain loans granted by the Bank to its institutional customers were not consistent with the purpose stated in their loan documents.
As a result, “after numerous discussions and as at the date of this announcement, no consensus was reached between the Bank and EY on the Outstanding Matters and the proposed timetable for the completion of audit.” At this time, the bank also requested the trading in the H shares (which was frozen on April 1) on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited to be suspended until the publication of the 2018 Annual Results, which will likely never come.
There is another reason why this particular failure is notable: Bank of Jinzhou is the second-most reliant on interbank financing, particularly non-bank financial institutions’ deposits, among more than 200 local banks, according to UBS analyst Jason Bedford said when reached by phone on Thursday.
Which explains its failure: just last month we reported that China’s interbank market, especially for smaller banks, had effectively frozen. It was therefore only a matter of time before other banks reliant on it for funding threw in the towel, as Jinzhou has now done. To wit, Jinzhou’s Its dollar-denominated loss-absorbing debt instruments, known as AT1 bonds, plunged near all time low…
… while the bank’s seven negotiable certificates of deposits – which would be taken over by another, bigger bank when (if) the bank is seized and bailed out, were indicated at yields ranging from 3%-5.5% on Thursday, higher than valuations of 2.8%-3.45%.
Incidentally, back in early June when first reporting on the resignation of the bank’s auditors, we said that “the real question facing Beijing now is how quickly will Bank of Jinzhou collapse, how will Beijing and the PBOC react, and what whether the other banks on the list above now suffer a raging bank run, on which will certainly not be confined just to China’s small and medium banks.”
The answer: less than 2 months.
Unfortunately for China, it won’t stop there. As a reminder, China’s smaller lenders have been under growing scrutiny since Baoshang Bank’s failure and takeover which led to a sharp repricing of risk for much of China’s banking system which had long operated under an assumption that policy makers would support firms in trouble.
“We expect the regulators to step up their support if more financial institutions run into liquidity issues,” said Becky Liu, head of China macro strategy at Standard Chartered Plc, who declined to comment directly about Bank of Jinzhou. “Over time, the cost of funding between the stronger and weaker financial institutions will see further divergence.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MkexpU Tyler Durden
Some progressive pundits and policymakers have embraced the idea of increasing the number of Supreme Court justices in order to offset the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and enshrine a liberal majority on the Court. To some, this is a proper response to the Senate’s failure to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Unlike other Court reform proposals, such as the imposition of judicial term limits, increasing the size of the Supreme Court could be achieved by ordinary legislation. Article III of the Constitution does not specify how many justices the Supreme Court must have.
In a recent interview with Nina Totenberg, Justice Ginsburg explained that increasing the number of justices would be a bad idea and could further undermine the Court’s legitimacy.
From the interview:
“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.” . . .
“If anything would make the court look partisan,” she said, “it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’ “
That impairs the idea of an independent judiciary, she said.
Some progressive pundits and policymakers have embraced the idea of increasing the number of Supreme Court justices in order to offset the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and enshrine a liberal majority on the Court. To some, this is a proper response to the Senate’s failure to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Unlike other Court reform proposals, such as the imposition of judicial term limits, increasing the size of the Supreme Court could be achieved by ordinary legislation. Article III of the Constitution does not specify how many justices the Supreme Court must have.
In a recent interview with Nina Totenberg, Justice Ginsburg explained that increasing the number of justices would be a bad idea and could further undermine the Court’s legitimacy.
From the interview:
“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.” . . .
“If anything would make the court look partisan,” she said, “it would be that — one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’ “
That impairs the idea of an independent judiciary, she said.
Ukraine’s security services said on Thursday they had detained a Russian oil tanker that had blocked Ukrainian warships near Crimea in November, drawing reaction from Russia which vowed ‘consequences’ should Russians aboard the tanker be taken hostage.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s security service seized Russian tanker Neyma, which Ukraine believes took part in the incident in the Kerch Strait near Crimea in November 2018.
Russia seized at the end of November three Ukrainian ships near Crimea in an incident that risked spilling over into a wider conflict between the two countries, exacerbating the disputes between Moscow and Kiev over oil and gas resources and infrastructure.
Russia—which annexed Crimea in 2014, for which the U.S. and the EU imposed sanctions on Moscow—said at the time that three Ukrainian vessels had violated its state border in waters near Crimea.
Ukraine, for its part, said that it had informed Russia about the plans for the ship movements and said that the seizing of the vessels was “another act of armed aggression” by Russia.
The November 2018 incident was the first open conflict between Russian and Ukrainian militaries in recent years. Tensions had been rising over the access to the Kerch Strait, where the incident took place, and the Sea of Azov.
Today, Ukraine said that it believes that the Neyma was the same ship with a changed name that took part in the seizure of the Ukrainian ships in November. The investigation found that the Neyma tanker changed its name to Nika Spirit to conceal its involvement in the “illegal acts and an act of aggression that took place on November 25, 2018,” Ukraine said.
Russia, for its part, said there would be consequences soon “if Russians have been taken hostages.”
Russian lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov, who is deputy chairman of the committee on international affairs at Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said that Ukraine seizing the Russian tanker today was “absolutely illegal.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LN2Xob Tyler Durden
A Pennsylvania school district took the old cliché about bullies stealing lunch money and amped it up. If parents don’t settle their unpaid lunch debts, the district said, it might steal their kids.
Wyoming Valley West School District sent letters to parents with at least $10 in unpaid lunch costs threatening to place their children in foster care if the bills weren’t paid. The district tried to justify the threats by pointing out that it was trying to collect more than $22,000 in unpaid lunch costs—a fraction of its $80 million annual budget—and that some families owed as much as $450.
Sending children to school without lunch or money to buy lunch, the letter informed parents, counted as “a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition.”
“You can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food,” the letter read. “If you are taken to Dependency Court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.”
The letter sparked widespread outrage and condemnation in local and eventually national media—as well as condemnations from Luzerne County officials who pointed out, correctly, that the foster care system should not be used “as a punitive agency or weaponized to terrorize children and families.”
And, at the risk of stating the obvious, no parent should be threatened with the prospect of losing their children to the state over a $10 debt.
No child should have to imagine the horror of being ripped away from their parents because their family is struggling economically. These letters were callous and should never have happened. https://t.co/TVbsh2XIRy
The school district’s stance only got more absurd when it initially rejected a Philadelphia businessman’s offer to settle the full $22,000 debt on behalf of Wyoming Valley West parents.
Todd Carmichael, the CEO of La Colombe Coffee, published an op-ed in the Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice on Tuesday detailing his attempts to settle the debts.
“As a child, I received free meals at school when my mother struggled to make ends meet. I know what it means to be hungry. I know what it means to feel shame for not being able to afford food,” Carmichael wrote. After reaching out to Joseph Mazur, president of the Wyoming Valley West school board, Carmichael wrote that he was shocked by the response.
“Mr. Mazur turned us down,” Carmichael wrote. “I can’t explain or justify his actions. Let me be clear: we offered over $22,000 with no strings attached. And he said ‘No.'”
On Wednesday evening, Mazur changed course and agreed to accept the money. In a statement, the school board president also apologized for having sent the letters in the first place.
Obviously, parents should pay for their kids’ lunches or otherwise make sure their children are being fed. That’s a basic responsibility that comes with having offspring.
But the school district’s actions—at least until the reversal on Wednesday evening—are indefensible. If district officials were motivated purely by the need to settle the debts, then the district should have accepted the donation when it was offered the first time. If it wasn’t about the money—if it was about “getting their attention,” as the district’s lawyer explained to a local TV station—then threatening parents with the loss of their children is hardly an appropriate way to collect a debt.
Instead of teaching a lesson about the importance of paying your bills, the school district ended up teaching both parents and kids a lesson about the arbitrary and terrifying power of government.
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On Thursday the Department of Justice announced that for the first time in nearly two decades it will resume capital punishment, with Attorney General William Barr the process for the execution of five death-row in mates is set to move forward. It will mark the first federal executions since 2003.
“Congress has expressly authorized the death penalty through legislation adopted by the people’s representatives in both houses of Congress and signed by the President,” Barr said in a written statement released by the DOJ.
The first among the five new executions announced is Daniel Lewis Lee, convicted in 1999 of murdering family of three in Arkansas, including children. Notably all five death-row inmates now scheduled to face execution are child murderers.
“The Justice Department upholds the rule of law—and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said further in his statement.
The DOJ release indicated the Federal Bureau of Prisons will use a single drug, pentobarbital, for all federal executions, currently used by a number of states for lethal injections.
“Under Administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals, including these five murderers, each of whom was convicted by a jury of his peers after a full and fair proceeding,” Barr’s statement continued.
The five inmates are scheduled for executions to take place at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, reportedly in December and early January.
Prior to stopping federal execution cases in 2003, perhaps the more notorious criminal to be put to death was Timothy McVeigh in 2001, for killing 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing, and further recent death row cases awaiting execution include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2015 for the Boston Marathon bombing, and white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2017 for the Charleston church shooting.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30XfTLv Tyler Durden
A Pennsylvania school district took the old cliché about bullies stealing lunch money and amped it up. If parents don’t settle their unpaid lunch debts, the district said, it might steal their kids.
Wyoming Valley West School District sent letters to parents with at least $10 in unpaid lunch costs threatening to place their children in foster care if the bills weren’t paid. The district tried to justify the threats by pointing out that it was trying to collect more than $22,000 in unpaid lunch costs—a fraction of its $80 million annual budget—and that some families owed as much as $450.
Sending children to school without lunch or money to buy lunch, the letter informed parents, counted as “a failure to provide your child with proper nutrition.”
“You can be sent to Dependency Court for neglecting your child’s right to food,” the letter read. “If you are taken to Dependency Court, the result may be your child being removed from your home and placed in foster care.”
The letter sparked widespread outrage and condemnation in local and eventually national media—as well as condemnations from Luzerne County officials who pointed out, correctly, that the foster care system should not be used “as a punitive agency or weaponized to terrorize children and families.”
And, at the risk of stating the obvious, no parent should be threatened with the prospect of losing their children to the state over a $10 debt.
No child should have to imagine the horror of being ripped away from their parents because their family is struggling economically. These letters were callous and should never have happened. https://t.co/TVbsh2XIRy
The school district’s stance only got more absurd when it initially rejected a Philadelphia businessman’s offer to settle the full $22,000 debt on behalf of Wyoming Valley West parents.
Todd Carmichael, the CEO of La Colombe Coffee, published an op-ed in the Wilkes-Barre Citizens Voice on Tuesday detailing his attempts to settle the debts.
“As a child, I received free meals at school when my mother struggled to make ends meet. I know what it means to be hungry. I know what it means to feel shame for not being able to afford food,” Carmichael wrote. After reaching out to Joseph Mazur, president of the Wyoming Valley West school board, Carmichael wrote that he was shocked by the response.
“Mr. Mazur turned us down,” Carmichael wrote. “I can’t explain or justify his actions. Let me be clear: we offered over $22,000 with no strings attached. And he said ‘No.'”
On Wednesday evening, Mazur changed course and agreed to accept the money. In a statement, the school board president also apologized for having sent the letters in the first place.
Obviously, parents should pay for their kids’ lunches or otherwise make sure their children are being fed. That’s a basic responsibility that comes with having offspring.
But the school district’s actions—at least until the reversal on Wednesday evening—are indefensible. If district officials were motivated purely by the need to settle the debts, then the district should have accepted the donation when it was offered the first time. If it wasn’t about the money—if it was about “getting their attention,” as the district’s lawyer explained to a local TV station—then threatening parents with the loss of their children is hardly an appropriate way to collect a debt.
Instead of teaching a lesson about the importance of paying your bills, the school district ended up teaching both parents and kids a lesson about the arbitrary and terrifying power of government.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/30TRTJc
via IFTTT
Google has placed a whistleblower on administrative leave hours after Project Veritas published software engineer Greg Coppola admitting that Silicon Valley big tech has been biased against conservatives since the 2016 US election, according to NewsBusters.
Coppola believes we are “at a really important point in human history,” where “we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people.”
“It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?” asks Coppola.
“the vast majority of people think that if something is higher rated on Google Search than another story, that it would be more important and more correct. And you know, we haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda. I mean, it’s something that we’re only starting to talk about now.”
Google’s punishment of Coppola isn’t the first time the company has retaliated against employees with divergent opinions.
Google has chastised those employees who have gone against its agenda. In 2017, Google fired engineer James Damore after he wrote a memo about the company’s “ideological echo chamber.” In 2019, Republican engineer Mike Wacker was fired after he complained about the hostile attitude in the corporate culture toward conservatives. –NewsBusters
In, May Google made clear that they would punish employees who access internal information without permission, according to BuzzFeed.
With employees organizing sit-ins over retaliation and continuing to agitate for change, Google is locking down internal communications. Google’s top legal executive, Kent Walker, sent an all-staff email Thursday informing employees that accessing documents classified as “need to know” without permission could result in termination, sources inside the company tell BuzzFeed News.
In the past, Google has had a reputation for openness, allowing employees wide access to documents and source code regardless of their job assignment. Now, following leaks about products in China and partnerships with the US military, as well as employee efforts to change the company’s policies on forced arbitration, workplace sexual misconduct, and benefits for contract workers, Google is tightening the reins. –BuzzFeed
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yl814B Tyler Durden
