Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway gets year in prison for bank fraud
Former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Marie Hathaway, center, in an October 25, 2012 MLive file photo. Hathaway pleaded guilty in January to hiding assets in order to convince ING Bank to agree to the short sale of her Grosse Pointe Park home, which allowed her to shed some $600,000 in underwater mortgage debt.
O'Meara appeared pained as he handed out the sentence, issuing it after a long pause and after extended praise of the arguments presented by both the defense and prosecution.
"This is hard," he said. "We're talking about a defendant that has accomplished a great deal in her lifetime and has done well and who I hope will be able to accomplish more... after all this is over."
Hathaway addressed the court in a shaky voice before O'Meara named the sentence, saying she has been ashamed, humiliated and disgraced over the crime.
"I stand before you a broken person," she said. "...I take full responsibility for my actions."
Hathaway was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $90,000, estimated to be the amount ING Bank lost in the scheme.
Her lawyer Steven Fishman in trying to convince O'Meara not to order prison time said Hathaway intended to pay the entire amount today.
"You'll be done with this and you'll be out being a valuable and successful citizen of this country very soon," O'Meara said.
This 1 Chart Should Shame The U.S. Into Solving Its Hunger Crisis
Only in America.
The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and yet nearly one-quarter of the nation’s residents recently said they had trouble putting food on the table over the past year, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. That's a unique position among wealthy countries, and more in line with countries like Indonesia and Greece, the latter of which is currently battling rampant unemployment.
By contrast, only about 10 percent of people in countries like Canada and Germany said they had trouble putting food on the table in the last 12 months.
(Scroll down to see a chart of the survey's findings from Pew)
Income inequality has become a familiar part of American life over the last half-century. The bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by just $59 between 1966 and 2011, according to an analysis from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston. Over that same period same period, the average income for the top 10 percent of Americans rose by $116,071 on average.
Such slow income growth has helped drive up food insecurity. Indeed, there were 46.2 million Americans living below the poverty line last year, the most in half a century, according to the Census Bureau. And the situation could get worse before it gets better. A House panel voted for cuts in the food stamp program as part of a farm subsidy bill earlier this month, which could put more Americans at risk of hunger.
Only three developed nations -- Chile, Mexico and Turkey -- have higher levels of income inequality than the U.S., according to a report from earlier this year by GlobalPost, an international news service.
If you look at the Pew Research Center's chart, you'll see that the U.S. has a bigger hunger problem than many other less-wealthy countries:
US farm bill proposals include huge cuts to food assistance
On May 15, the House Agricultural Committee passed its 2013 farm bill
called the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013.
The bill includes almost $21 billion in cuts to the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program over the next ten years.
Close to two million low-income people will be cut off altogether from
the food assistance program formerly known as food stamps. An estimated
$39.7 billion would be cut from the entire farm bill. Over half of those
cuts come from SNAP. This will mean a loss of an average of $25 of
monthly SNAP benefits for a family of four.
The SNAP program, upon which 48 million people depended last year for their survival, half of them children, is the principal remaining assistance offered to the poorest in America.
Over the past 50 years farm bills have been re-argued, reconfigured and renamed approximately every five years. The last farm bill, called the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, expired September 30, 2012 without a new farm bill being negotiated through Congress. A nine-month extension was cobbled together in January 2013, leaving mostly intact the farm subsidies, while cutting $110 million from SNAP education programs and programs promoting local food production and organic farm practices.
The farm bill covers a vast array of programs: farm subsidies, income protection insurance for farm owners, research and development in agriculture, rejuvenation and conservation of fragile and significant country and wetlands, support for local and regional food production and distribution, research into organic food production, and trials of healthy school lunch and snack programs.
Both houses of the US Congress are working on farm bills in an effort to pass legislation in the next few months that will make the biggest cuts to welfare since Bill Clinton’s 1996, “end of welfare as we know it” legislation that dismantled Aid to Families with Dependant Children.
With record numbers of people on food stamps due to the economic crisis, the discussion between the Republicans and Democrats is purely on the level of how much will be cut. The fact that tens of millions of Americans routinely go hungry is simply not an issue. The Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) offers the “kinder-gentler” position of a $400 million annual cut from food stamps, but the final vote will not take place until next week. Welfare recipients are vilified in the media and by politicians as dependent, fraudsters, lazy and from minority backgrounds, spending taxpayers’ money on sugary carbonated beverages and other junk food on the one hand or exotic gourmet food on the other. By some bizarre reasoning, food stamps become the cause of obesity. These accusations are then used to demand cuts that will deprive people of their only source of sustenance; rather than address the underlying causes of unemployment, under-employment and low wages as well as the growing incidence of food deserts—neighborhoods that only have markets selling junk food and fast food outlets.
The truth is that the majority of households receiving SNAP benefits have a worker in the home. The largest single group receiving it is white. African Americans and Hispanics are the second and third largest groups. “Households typically include a child, an elderly person or a disabled person, and a gross income of $744 a month,” according to thefoodjournal.com.
The use of food stamps occurs all across the US, but there are areas of higher concentration. Washington DC is one of the highest with 23 percent of the population on food stamps last year. About 1,000 active members of the US military also rely on food stamps.
Since 2008 there has been exponential growth in the need for SNAP—over 15 million people were added in one year. Even so, the social safety net in the US is meager, to say the least. A family of 3 must have less than $23,800 per year to qualify for a $4.50 per day benefit.
Either version of the farm bill cuts will be achieved by many more hundreds of thousands going hungry—half of them children. And it is not only the Republican right that claim food stamps are too expensive and the US must take food from its poorest citizens. In fiscal year 2012, the US allocated $74.6 billion to SNAP to reduce the suffering of the most oppressed Americans. The US military spent that amount every 9 days or so through 2012.
Along with the cuts, provisions are proposed that will monitor what people are buying with food stamps and where—in the name of fighting obesity and fraud. These proposals have proponents from diverse groups from the far right to anti-hunger campaigners. The issues are complex. SNAP is distributed by plastic card similar to a credit card. It can only be used in stores which can process this card. This means that the big retailers like Walmart get a huge benefit from food stamps while farmers markets get none.
Information on where food stamps are spent and what is purchased with them will only be used to make further spending cuts or other attacks on the working class. US farm subsidy programs originated from the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal to aid struggling farmers through tough times, whether made tough by over-production and low prices or by dust bowl weather conditions. In 1933 the federal government bought excess grain from struggling farmers and distributed it to charities to feed the hungry—a pragmatic solution to a crisis of over-production of agricultural commodities. This is why welfare and farm subsidies are historically linked in legislation. Because they are in the same bill and SNAP is by far the largest component, some sense of proportionality is claimed in the present debate to make it necessary to cut food stamps, pitting nutrition against production. In the House bill nearly half the proposed cuts come from nutrition.
Over the course of the 2008 farm bill, $314 billion went to SNAP, that is over 70 percent of the whole $412 billion, five-year expenditure. $60 billion went to farm subsidies and insurance schemes. $22 billion on conservation programs and the rest, $15 billion, was divided among many other programs, agricultural research, rural infrastructure and economic development, specialty crop development (i.e., vegetables, fruits, nuts—whatever is not one of the commodity grains covered by farm subsidies), overseas food aid, WTO obligations, forestry, livestock, dairy, organic food production, the school lunch and snack programs, to name a few.
The second largest component, the farm subsidy and income protection insurance scheme, is also the target of cuts in this farm bill. Many struggling farmers survive because of the farm subsidy and insurance programs; however, not surprisingly, the vast majority of farm support goes to the big end of town.
The urban areas of Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington DC and San Francisco are where the USDA pays the majority of the farm subsidy and insurance, i.e., not to farmers but to the owners of large agricultural operations.
Five commodity crops: corn, wheat, soybean, rice and cotton receive about 75 percent of the benefits of farm subsidies. (Tobacco got almost $200 million in 2011.) Vegetables, fruit and nuts are called “specialty” crops and do not get subsidized. This is the principal mechanism by which 62 percent of US farmers get no USDA support (they may get insurance and apply for disaster relief) and the richest 10 percent of farm owners get 74 percent of the subsidies.
According to The Environmental Working Group, “The top 20 percent of subsidy recipients collected almost 80 percent of all insurance funding. By contrast, the bottom 80 percent of premium subsidy recipients [389,494 operations], collected, on average, about $5,000.”
Direct payment subsidy to farmers, about $5 billion a year, is cut out of both House and Senate farm bills, although the House version phases it out over some years for the cotton growers. New insurance schemes are being proposed in both bills that will give back much of what is lost in direct payments, especially for corn, soybean, rice and peanut farmers.
$600 million a year is the proposed cut to vital conservation programs that moderate the effects of agricultural sources of water pollution, protect top soil from erosion (avoiding another dust bowl) and preserve endangered flora and fauna by protecting their habitat.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the farm bill in 2013, one can have every confidence that the interests of big business will be well taken care of, while the most vulnerable in society will be made to suffer even more loss. There has been some fanfare around adding a food for needy kids program, but shamefully, funding for the new program comes by reducing by 10 percent per person other SNAP benefits.
The SNAP program, upon which 48 million people depended last year for their survival, half of them children, is the principal remaining assistance offered to the poorest in America.
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The
farm bill is the generic name for the large bundle of legislation that
governs the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and food and
fiber production and distribution in the US. Because the scope of the
USDA is wide-ranging, covering farming, agriculture, forestry and food,
it is hotly debated by big business, and many powerful interests invest
millions to lobby for favorable provisions.Donate
Over the past 50 years farm bills have been re-argued, reconfigured and renamed approximately every five years. The last farm bill, called the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008, expired September 30, 2012 without a new farm bill being negotiated through Congress. A nine-month extension was cobbled together in January 2013, leaving mostly intact the farm subsidies, while cutting $110 million from SNAP education programs and programs promoting local food production and organic farm practices.
The farm bill covers a vast array of programs: farm subsidies, income protection insurance for farm owners, research and development in agriculture, rejuvenation and conservation of fragile and significant country and wetlands, support for local and regional food production and distribution, research into organic food production, and trials of healthy school lunch and snack programs.
Both houses of the US Congress are working on farm bills in an effort to pass legislation in the next few months that will make the biggest cuts to welfare since Bill Clinton’s 1996, “end of welfare as we know it” legislation that dismantled Aid to Families with Dependant Children.
With record numbers of people on food stamps due to the economic crisis, the discussion between the Republicans and Democrats is purely on the level of how much will be cut. The fact that tens of millions of Americans routinely go hungry is simply not an issue. The Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) offers the “kinder-gentler” position of a $400 million annual cut from food stamps, but the final vote will not take place until next week. Welfare recipients are vilified in the media and by politicians as dependent, fraudsters, lazy and from minority backgrounds, spending taxpayers’ money on sugary carbonated beverages and other junk food on the one hand or exotic gourmet food on the other. By some bizarre reasoning, food stamps become the cause of obesity. These accusations are then used to demand cuts that will deprive people of their only source of sustenance; rather than address the underlying causes of unemployment, under-employment and low wages as well as the growing incidence of food deserts—neighborhoods that only have markets selling junk food and fast food outlets.
The truth is that the majority of households receiving SNAP benefits have a worker in the home. The largest single group receiving it is white. African Americans and Hispanics are the second and third largest groups. “Households typically include a child, an elderly person or a disabled person, and a gross income of $744 a month,” according to thefoodjournal.com.
The use of food stamps occurs all across the US, but there are areas of higher concentration. Washington DC is one of the highest with 23 percent of the population on food stamps last year. About 1,000 active members of the US military also rely on food stamps.
Since 2008 there has been exponential growth in the need for SNAP—over 15 million people were added in one year. Even so, the social safety net in the US is meager, to say the least. A family of 3 must have less than $23,800 per year to qualify for a $4.50 per day benefit.
Either version of the farm bill cuts will be achieved by many more hundreds of thousands going hungry—half of them children. And it is not only the Republican right that claim food stamps are too expensive and the US must take food from its poorest citizens. In fiscal year 2012, the US allocated $74.6 billion to SNAP to reduce the suffering of the most oppressed Americans. The US military spent that amount every 9 days or so through 2012.
Along with the cuts, provisions are proposed that will monitor what people are buying with food stamps and where—in the name of fighting obesity and fraud. These proposals have proponents from diverse groups from the far right to anti-hunger campaigners. The issues are complex. SNAP is distributed by plastic card similar to a credit card. It can only be used in stores which can process this card. This means that the big retailers like Walmart get a huge benefit from food stamps while farmers markets get none.
Information on where food stamps are spent and what is purchased with them will only be used to make further spending cuts or other attacks on the working class. US farm subsidy programs originated from the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal to aid struggling farmers through tough times, whether made tough by over-production and low prices or by dust bowl weather conditions. In 1933 the federal government bought excess grain from struggling farmers and distributed it to charities to feed the hungry—a pragmatic solution to a crisis of over-production of agricultural commodities. This is why welfare and farm subsidies are historically linked in legislation. Because they are in the same bill and SNAP is by far the largest component, some sense of proportionality is claimed in the present debate to make it necessary to cut food stamps, pitting nutrition against production. In the House bill nearly half the proposed cuts come from nutrition.
Over the course of the 2008 farm bill, $314 billion went to SNAP, that is over 70 percent of the whole $412 billion, five-year expenditure. $60 billion went to farm subsidies and insurance schemes. $22 billion on conservation programs and the rest, $15 billion, was divided among many other programs, agricultural research, rural infrastructure and economic development, specialty crop development (i.e., vegetables, fruits, nuts—whatever is not one of the commodity grains covered by farm subsidies), overseas food aid, WTO obligations, forestry, livestock, dairy, organic food production, the school lunch and snack programs, to name a few.
The second largest component, the farm subsidy and income protection insurance scheme, is also the target of cuts in this farm bill. Many struggling farmers survive because of the farm subsidy and insurance programs; however, not surprisingly, the vast majority of farm support goes to the big end of town.
The urban areas of Manhattan, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Washington DC and San Francisco are where the USDA pays the majority of the farm subsidy and insurance, i.e., not to farmers but to the owners of large agricultural operations.
Five commodity crops: corn, wheat, soybean, rice and cotton receive about 75 percent of the benefits of farm subsidies. (Tobacco got almost $200 million in 2011.) Vegetables, fruit and nuts are called “specialty” crops and do not get subsidized. This is the principal mechanism by which 62 percent of US farmers get no USDA support (they may get insurance and apply for disaster relief) and the richest 10 percent of farm owners get 74 percent of the subsidies.
According to The Environmental Working Group, “The top 20 percent of subsidy recipients collected almost 80 percent of all insurance funding. By contrast, the bottom 80 percent of premium subsidy recipients [389,494 operations], collected, on average, about $5,000.”
Direct payment subsidy to farmers, about $5 billion a year, is cut out of both House and Senate farm bills, although the House version phases it out over some years for the cotton growers. New insurance schemes are being proposed in both bills that will give back much of what is lost in direct payments, especially for corn, soybean, rice and peanut farmers.
$600 million a year is the proposed cut to vital conservation programs that moderate the effects of agricultural sources of water pollution, protect top soil from erosion (avoiding another dust bowl) and preserve endangered flora and fauna by protecting their habitat.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the farm bill in 2013, one can have every confidence that the interests of big business will be well taken care of, while the most vulnerable in society will be made to suffer even more loss. There has been some fanfare around adding a food for needy kids program, but shamefully, funding for the new program comes by reducing by 10 percent per person other SNAP benefits.
Washington launches four different investigations into IRS scandal
Capitol Hill aides spent their Memorial Day weekend scanning hundreds of pages of documents related to the IRS scandal in order to prepare their bosses for what will inevitably be a frantic month of June involving multiple simultaneous investigations into government wrongdoing. By the time lawmakers return to session next week, at least four different investigations will be underway.
As The Daily Caller has reported, at least five different IRS offices including Cincinnati, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois and El Monte and Laguna Niguel, California improperly targeted conservative nonprofit groups for extra scrutiny between 2010 and 2012.
The IRS’ shenanigans, chronicled in a damning report by Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George, started when a “team of [IRS] specialists” came together in April 2010 to process the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups that might be “potential political operations” (page 13 of the IG report). The IRS added “additional specialists” to this effort in December 2011.
The IRS also launched audits of existing conservative nonprofit groups including the Virginia-based Leadership Institute, demanding to see training materials and personal information about the organization’s 2008 college interns.
So for those of you keeping score at home (this reporter is still waiting for Ken Starr to send in his bracket picks) The Daily Caller presents a list of some of our favorite investigations into potential IRS wrongdoing. Which one will come up with the “Alexander Butterfield” quote?
1. The House Ways and Means Committee – Oversight Subcommittee
As head of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee, Republican Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany has conducted the toughest probe into the IRS scandal so far. Boustany managed to acquire “all communications containing the word ‘tea party,’ ‘patriot,’ or ‘conservative,’” from recently-resigned IRS acting director Steven T. Miller. He also got the names of everyone involved with the improper targeting.
Republican Ways and Means chairman Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan also raised awareness of the issue by reaching out to the public, asking Americans to write in with their own stories of IRS harassment.
“Your story is critical to moving the investigation forward,” according to a form created on the Ways and Means’ Committee’s website asking for users’ stories, which also includes a two-year timeline of the scandal beginning in August 2010.
Boustany was in prime position to jump on the IRS scandal. Back in September, long before the current scandal, his subcommittee grilled Steven T. Miller with concerns about the IRS’ implementation of Obamacare.
2. The House Oversight Committee
Respected Republican Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa of California recently smacked down Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s call for the appointment of a special prosecutor into the IRS scandal, declaring, “When I can’t do my job because I lack the authority or cooperation, I’ll seek additional remedies.”
Issa has been competitive about investigating the IRS scandal. He has said that he is working on the IRS scandal full-time, and he refuses to dismiss the possibility of Treasury Department or even White House involvement.
As the scandal works its way up from the Steven T. Millers of the world, watch for Issa to take the investigative lead.
3. Senate Finance Committee
Democratic Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus is leading that committee’s investigation into the improper targeting. Baucus called the IRS’ conduct “intolerable” and “a clear breach of the public’s trust” and demanded a full investigation, and in so doing he has become the most visible leader of the investigation to the mainstream media.
Unfortunately, Baucus has substantial baggage. As The Daily Caller reported, Baucus sent a letter to then-IRS commissioner Donald Shulman in September 2010 urging the IRS to scrutinize the tax-exempt status of nonprofit conservative groups like Americans For Job Security.
4. The IRS!
New IRS commissioner Danny Werfel has pledged to conduct a full investigation into the IRS scandal “to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Werfel, who was described as the Obama administration’s “point man” on sequestration prior to taking over the IRS job, is of no relation to former University of Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel
GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher On A Mission From God-Starve The Poor While Personally Pocketing Millions In Farm Subsidies
“Forbes” – Tennessee GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher, swept into office in the Tea Party wave of 2010, is on a mission from God.
Armed with an array of proverbs and quotes from the Holy Bible,
Congressman Fincher is pressing his fight to dramatically curtail the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—better known to most
Americans as food stamps—relied upon by 47 million Americans for some or
all of their daily sustenance.Why?
Because the Bible tells him so.
Appearing this past weekend at a gathering at a Memphis Holiday Inn, Fincher explained his position on food stamps by stating, “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity is to take care of each other, but not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.”
The Congressman’s remarks come on the heels of his taking the biblical route when responding to Representative Juan Vargas’ (D-Calif.) somewhat different take on the teachings of Jesus. During a recent House Agriculture Committee debate over the Farm Bill (which contains the food stamp budget), Vargas, citing the Book of Matthew, noted, “[Jesus] says how you treat the least among us, the least of our brothers, that’s how you treat him.”
Vargas also noted that Jesus directly mentions the importance of feeding the hungry.
Not to be outdone by a Godless Democrat, Congressman Fincher responded with his own Bible quote taken from the Book of Thessalonians—“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
Nicely played, Congressman.
While the biblical back-and-forth is interesting, I wonder if Congressman Fincher would be good enough to refer me to the part of the Bible revealing to us how providing adequate food stamp assistance to those in need violates the teachings of Christianity but venerates accepting government hand-outs in the guise of farm subsidies?
Maybe the Congressman can instruct heathens such as I on how pocketing huge sums of taxpayer money in the guise of farm subsidies is a righteous act, while accepting government subsidies to feed one’s family is an act of—to use Fincher’s own words—stealing from those in the country to give to others in the country?
I don’t ask these questions of Congressman Fincher indiscriminately. I ask them because of Fincher’s unique qualification to provide us with the appropriate proverb intended to instruct.
You see, Representative Fincher happens to be the second largest recipient
of farm subsidies in the United States Congress—which might explain why
Mr. Fincher would like to decimate the food stamp budget in order to do
the Lord’s work when “supporting a proposal to expand crop insurance by $9 billion over the next 10 years.”
How much money are the taxpayers forking over to Congressman Fincher via farm subsidies?
While
Fincher may only come in second amongst his congressional peers when it
comes to pocketing huge sums of taxpayer money, he has the distinction
of being one of the largest recipients of subsidies in the history of the great State of Tennessee.
As reported by Environmental Working Group,
USDA data collected in EWG’s (Environmental Working Group) 2013 farm subsidy database update — going live tomorrow –shows that Fincher collected a staggering $3.48 million in “our” money from 1999 to 2012. In 2012 alone, the congressman was cut a government check for a $70,000 direct payment. Direct payments are issued automatically, regardless of need, and go predominantly to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country.Fincher’s $70,000 farm subsidy haul in 2012 dwarfs the average 2012 SNAP benefit in Tennessee of $1,586.40, and it is nearly double of Tennessee’s median household income. After voting to cut SNAP by more than $20 billion, Fincher joined his colleagues to support a proposal to expand crop insurance subsidies by $9 billion over the next 10 years.”EWG additionally points out that while food stamp benefits are restricted to families below specified income levels, there are no such limits on crop insurance subsidies. While SNAP benefits are restricted to families whose income is below specified limits, crop insurance subsidies have no such limitations. As a result, there are farmers in this country who receive a check each and every year for more than $1 million government subsidies while some 10,000 earn more than $100,00 courtesy of the taxpayers.
Not bad.
But
I’m sure that Congressman Fincher would gladly offer up the appropriate
homily to support the lining his own pockets with taxpayer money while
spitting fire and brimstone in the direction of those Americans (earning
less than $30,000 a year) getting a little help from the taxpayer when
it comes to feeding their families.
After all, it’s in the Bible…right Congressman FIncher?
Tennessee GOP Congressman Stephen Fincher, swept into office in the Tea Party wave of 2010, is on a mission from God.
Rick Ungar
Payday loan firms 'are out of control': They exploit the mentally ill, under-18s and even drunks, finds damning report by Citizens Advice
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