Friday, July 27, 2012 11:49:16 AM
Mitt Romney's Bankster Ball
John Nichols on July 26, 2012 - 12:05 AM ET
Mitt Romney will show his true colors tonight, when he slips behind closed doors in a foreign capital [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/168975/romney-goes-gold-londons-Libor-village ] to collect money from international bankers who are mired in scandal.
The presidential contender is officially in London to cheer on the US team in the Olympics. But Romney doesn’t always cheer for Team USA. When it comes to global economics, Romney remains very much the “vulture capitalist [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2012/01/12/romneys-vulture-capitalist-problem/ ]” his Republican primary foes decried. And tonight, he’ll be swooping into central London to party with masters of the universe who know no country—and, it would appear, no ethical bounds.
London is abuzz over the Libor (London InterBank Offered Rate) scandal [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/l/london_interbank_offered_rate_Libor/index.html ], which saw some of the biggest banks in the world report false interest rates in order to fool investors and game the international economy. Bob Diamond, the top man in Barclays Bank, had to resign from his position after that bank paid almost $500 million in fines.
Diamond also resigned [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9360144/US-election-2012-Mitt-Romney-to-attend-London-fundraising-dinner-hosted-by-Barclays-boss-Bob-Diamond.html ] as the co-chair of Mitt Romney’s $75,000-a-person fundraising event in London tonight [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/168975/romney-goes-gold-londons-Libor-village ].
Not to worry. Another Barclay’s insider (chief lobbyist Patrick Durkin) took Diamond’s place as a co-chair for the Romney event, along with officials of Bank of Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Wells Fargo Securities—and, of course, Bain Capital Europe [id.].
As the investigation of banks implicated in Libor rate-fixing expands, Romney’s decision to go ahead with the London fundraising events [id.] is an act either of boldness or recklessness. The presumptive Republican nominee for president seems to think he can get away with raising as much as $2 million [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9427481/US-election-Mitt-Romney-aims-to-leapfrog-Barack-Obama-with-expat-fundraising.html ] at a series of fund-raising events held on foreign soil. The cheapest of Romney’s “lavish” London events has a $2,500-per-person entry fee, while the evening gathering where the most scandal-plagued of international bankers will mingle with their favorite American charges from $25,000-per-person to $75,000 a head [ http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/romney-fundraise-london-bankers-implicated-Libor-scandal-160410445.html ].
That’s the kind of event that candidates like to keep secret.
But grassroots activists in the United States are upping the ante by demanding that Romney immediately reveal the names of the bankers and financial insiders attending his London fundraising events. In particularly, they are pushing for the release of any and all information relating to Romney’s interactions with donors associated with Barclays and any other institutions that have been linked to the Libor scandal [id.].
The Center for Responsive Politics identifies Barclays as the largest source of campaign donations to Romney, and a Maine state legislator who has been in the forefront of campaign finance reform and corporate watchdog fights wants to know more about the relationship between Romney and the Barclays donors.
“Americans have a right to know who Romney’s donors are so they can understand what policy agendas are in line with those donations,” says Maine State Representative Diane Russell [ http://www.maine.gov/legis/house/hsebios/russdm.htm ], D-Portland. “We all have the right to donate to political campaigns, and the responsibility to own up to those donations. It’s part of the democratic process.”
Russell has launched a national petition drive [ http://signon.org/sign/mitt-romney-whos-attending ] demanding that Romney come clean about the Barclays ties and the London fundraising event.
The “Mitt Romney: Reveal Your Secret Donors” petition reads [id.]:
It’s time we return to government of, by and for the people—not government of, bought, and paid for by special interests. The job of a Wall Street banker is to get a good return on their investment, and unfortunately, they’ve taken those skills to Washington—and now the presidency.
Mitt Romney is attending an elite London fundraiser—$25,000 to $75,000 per plate—hosted by the CEOs at the center of the Libor scandal threatening our already fragile economy. Executives of at least three other banks under investigation are co-chairs of the fundraiser, according to invitations obtained by The Washington Post.
At the same time, too many Americans are falling out of the middle class when they are working hard to climb the ladder into it. In fact, middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40%.
We believe politicians should work for us, not their corporate sponsors. It is time for Mitt Romney to fully disclose his donors—and how much they are giving to his campaign.
Russell set out to collect 10,000 signatures.
She’ll get them. And a lot more.
Mitt Romney’s connection to Barclays [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/romney_fundraises_with_Libor_fixers/ ] and the Libor scandal is a big deal. Americans have a right to be angry that a man who wants to be president of the United States jets off to London to collect checks from international banksters. And the more they learn about Romney, Barclays and Libor, the angrier they’ll get.
Copyright © 2012 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169095/mitt-romneys-bankster-ball [with comments]
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Will Wall Street turn on its own over Libor?
(Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing/Jason Reed)
With Wall St. crooks unlikely to go to jail, our best hope is that the big banks sue each other into humiliation
By Alex Pareene
Monday, Jul 23, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
What’s easy to miss in the story of Barclays’ attempted manipulation of the Libor — see here for what the Libor is and why its manipulation is a Big Deal [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/03/hard_libor/singleton/ ] — is that Barclays itself highlighted its malfeasance by coming clean and settling with regulators. Thus, they’ve borne the brunt of the furious response from legislators and citizens in two nations, even though it’s been known for some time that … everyone was doing it. Or, at least, a bunch of other banks did the same thing — we don’t yet know for sure which ones and to what extent because no other bank has agreed, as Barclays did, to admit involvement.
The other banks still under investigation have, according to a Reuters report [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/20/us-banking-libor-settlment-idUSBRE86J00H20120720 ], strongly considered all jumping into the pool at the same time and trying for a group settlement with regulators. The regulators like the idea because it will involve a great big number and a big list of names. The banks are warming to the idea because the big list of names means no one firm gets the Barclays treatment for a week or three. In other words, settle quick and hope no one digs too much into how much criminal activity each member of the family is responsible for.
Here’s where, maybe, Goldman Sachs comes into the picture. Because according to a Bloomberg report, Goldman — uninvolved in setting the Libor — is considering taking the law into its own hands and taking care of this Libor business with suits against the firms responsible. Like a fictional comic book metropolis, the financial industry is dreadfully underpoliced, and many of the cops are themselves on the take, so, logically, what Wall Street needs is a morally dubious but incredibly wealthy figure to operate outside the law to achieve order by any means necessary. That’s right: Goldman Sachs is going to become the Green Arrow. (Or the other one, I guess, with the movie.) Except still basically pretty evil.
And they even have a Speedy [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_%28comics%29 ] (or Robin, FINE) in Morgan Stanley. From Bloomberg:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) are among financial firms that may bring lawsuits against their biggest rivals as regulators on three continents examine whether other banks manipulated the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor, said Bradley Hintz, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Even if Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley forgo claims on their own behalf, they oversee money-market funds that may be required to pursue restitution for injured clients, he said.
Because Libor is based on submissions from only some of the world’s largest banks, the probes threaten to pit firms uninvolved in setting the rate against any implicated in its manipulation, Hintz said. Libor serves as a benchmark for at least $360 trillion in securities.
“This will be a feeding frenzy of sharks,” said Hintz, who has served as treasurer of Morgan Stanley and chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “We’re going to have Wall Street suing Wall Street.”
That sounds … too incredibly wonderful to be true, doesn’t it? Apparently Goldman said last month that it would consider itself an “aggrieved market participant” if it turns out that its Libor-setting rivals were screwing with the numbers — which they were.
In the absence of effective regulation, with the unhappy likelihood that no one (or at least no one important) will actually go to jail over widespread fraud and conspiracy, the best we can hope for is that the bastards will sue themselves into submission and humiliation (though most likely not bankruptcy). If the banks involved in Libor manipulation — supposedly dozens, including Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase — end up reaching a joint settlement with Britain’s Financial Services Authority and America’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission, they will all hand over a chunk of cash that they will barely miss and probably give a couple of scapegoats an early retirement, but their settlement will essentially make top executives immune to actual prosecution. The Justice Department considers the settlement — and not a full, public airing of the extent of the misdeeds and the identities of those responsible for them — the end goal. Megabanks would confirm that they can get away with murder if they pay the equivalent of a parking ticket. (You know how it is: Moral hazard is only a thing we have to worry about with poor people!)
So in that scenario (and the group settlement is far from a done deal: If some banks [*cough cough* CITIGROUP *cough cough*] behaved much worse than others, it might be in everyone else’s interest to let them hang alone and not hang together), a big screw-you lawsuit from Goldman might end up being our best bet to learn the truth and see the perpetrators punished. On the other hand, Goldman might elect to respect financial industry Omerta and keep the whole thing quiet [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/feeding-frenzy-seen-if-wall-street-sues-itself-over-libor.html ]:
Banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would prefer to settle quietly out of court and may forgo claims altogether unless additional firms are fined like Barclays, said James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
As a Morgan Stanley analyst says, they wouldn’t want to “exacerbate negative headlines for the overall industry” by suing their rivals. Because it’s of the utmost importance that the reputation of an industry that exists to rip us off and periodically blow up the world economy be salvaged. Can you imagine the disaster it’d be if people lost their faith in the financial sector?
If jail time for everyone is out of the question, and Goldman won’t play vigilante, my other suggestion is some sort of hand-to-hand combat scenario, possibly involving a cage or some sort of “Thunderdome,” in which Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, ex-Barclays head Bob Diamond, and whatever goober is in charge of Morgan Stanley enter, and only one bloated useless plutocrat leaves!
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/will_wall_street_turn_on_its_own_over_libor/ [with comments]
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Romney Defended By...Romney Policy Aide Who Worked for Bain
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
By David Corn | Wed Jul. 25, 2012 9:45 AM PDT
Over at National Review Online, Avik Roy takes issue [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312010/fact-checking-latest-bain-hysteria-avik-roy ] with my scoop [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/bain-capital-mitt-romney-outsourcing-china-global-tech ] on Romney's investment in a Chinese appliance-manufacturing firm that sought to profit from US outsourcing. Roy says he used to work at Brookside Capital, the Bain-affiliated entity that made this investment, but he doesn't indicate whether he was around (or in a senior position) at the time of this particular deal in 1998. (On his Google+ page [ https://plus.google.com/116480200106410527318/about ], by the way, Roy notes he was at Bain Capital, not Brookside. Yeah, I suppose, this stuff can be confusing.) Moreover, Roy now serves on Romney's health care policy advisory group. Thus, he has a stake in this venture.
His argument is basically this: Romney did not make the decisions regarding Brookside's investments, and, consequently, cannot be held accountable for these deals.
If Roy was not an eyewitness to internal Bain/Brookside deliberations in the late 1990s, his testimony is less than compelling. Can he say that Romney took no interest in how Brookside was being managed? Had no discussions with those Bain colleagues who were in charge of these decisions?
All that aside, Roy is promoting a classic corporate dodge. He writes:
Which of Bain Capital’s investments is it fair to hold Mitt Romney accountable for?
The answer: He is accountable for the investments in which he actually made the decisions. If I have my 401(k) invested in the Fidelity Select Health Care Fund, am I responsible for every decision made by the portfolio manager at Fidelity? Obviously not. The same goes for Mitt Romney.
This was hardly equivalent to a retirement fund investment. Romney "wholly owned" Brookside, according to a SEC filing [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1056547/0000927016-99-002035.txt ]. He created this entity. No doubt, he had a say regarding who was managing it. It was part of the Bain world he oversaw. He bears a degree of responsibility—perhaps Romney can calculate the precise percentage—for this venture.
Imagine this scenario: Romney owned a coal mining company. He decided to open a particular mine. He placed that project in the hands of other executives. Would he hold no responsibility if the mine generated profits because the execs he put in charge operated it well—or if the mine became the site of a horrendous accident because those same execs purposefully overlooked safety rules?
Did Romney literally have nothing to do with Brookside—a $559 million venture by early 1999—though he owned it? Did he never look at its lists of investments? Never have a chat with the guys running it? Or did he just let them run free and not pay attention to the direction of their investments—which in itself would be significant?
The Romney camp keeps insisting on a narrative that allows Romney to take credit for the positive aspects of his Bain days (thousands of low-wage Staples jobs!) and to sidestep all else (outsourcing, bankruptcies, politically-inconvenient investments). But in the world of high-and-complicated finance, it's not that simple.
Copyright ©2012 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/mitt-romney-bain-brookside-avik-roy [with comments]
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Bain Capital Created 'Demoralizing' Culture of Layoffs At Florida Plant
by Jason Cherkis and Laura Bassett
Posted: 07/23/2012 5:51 pm Updated: 07/24/2012 10:03 am
WASHINGTON -- When Dade Behring started cutting employees under Bain Capital's management in the late '90s, Cindy Hewitt was on the front lines. As a human resources manager for the Dade East plant in Miami, Hewitt had to decide which employees had needed skills and whose jobs were expendable.
News of the latest layoffs trickled down to the Dade company cafeteria. The room could seat more than 1,000, and it had been enough of a draw that it even offered breakfast.
But as the layoffs hit, the mood in the cafeteria could be as somber as a funeral, Hewitt recalled. Multiple members of the same family might be gathered to commiserate over being laid off one by one by one. Some of them had worked for the medical diagnostics company for more than a decade.
Hewitt saw her colleagues crying on a daily basis and loudly celebrating on the rare occasion that someone found a comparable new job. "There was a tremendous sense of loss and this kind of outpouring of grief and mourning as every day they waited for the announcement of who was going next," she said. "People were on pins and needles. Who's going next? They're worried for themselves, worried for their co-workers, worried for their families. They'd talk about how they were going to send their kids to college. It was an incredibly depressing and demoralizing environment."
Since the Republican presidential primary, Dade Behring, which made blood-testing machines and conducted animal tests at its Miami plant, has become something of a focus. Bain Capital, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's firm, had bought Dade and shuttered its factory in Puerto Rico in 1998. The closings continued under Bain's management.
It's become a familiar tale about Romney and Bain's business dealings. The New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/politics/after-mitt-romney-deal-company-showed-profits-and-then-layoffs.html?pagewanted=all ] that Bain pushed the profitable company into bankruptcy. The Miami Herald followed with its own chronicle [ http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/16/2801276_p2/as-mitt-romney-hits-florida-democrats.html ] of the mass layoffs and mass profits for Romney and company. The Tampa Bay Times reported [ http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/under-romneys-bain-capital-dade-behring-received-millions-tax-breaks-it-laid-hundreds ] that Dade had received millions in tax breaks to promote job creation in Puerto Rico one year before it closed the factory there.
Bain, of course, walked away with a huge profit. In 1999, the private equity firm grabbed $242 million after it pressured Dade to borrow more millions to buy up Bain's shares in the company.
So many Dade workers lost their jobs -- 1,700 in the United States, 850 in Miami alone -- that the Bain-Dade dealings have become a symbol of corporate bloodletting and a painful memory to those who witnessed the layoffs.
Fred Gregory, an information technology consultant, said he was brought in to assist the plant closing in Miami. The cafeteria scene also stuck with him. At a certain point, he told HuffPost, he stopped eating lunch there. "I didn't want to see the women crying," he explained.
"You could walk in there and hear a pin drop," Gregory said. "You could see the emptiness. It was just huddled-up sheep. It was pathetic. It was heartbreaking, heartwrenching. You just want to hug them."
The layoffs continued for months and months. Gregory saw people fired and workers running out of the Dade offices in tears. "These people were scared to death," he said. "This was their livelihood. Some people couldn't bear it. It was a horrible place to work." Some would get an hour's notice before being shown the door.
The plant added higher fencing and concertina wire, Gregory said. Each day, a pair of security guards would check his back seat and trunk on the way out to make sure he wasn't stealing any office supplies. "It was all so well orchestrated," he said. "And so evil."
The Romney campaign, Bain Capital, and Siemens, which bought Dade Behring's operations in 2007, did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael Rumbin had been a Dade vice president. "No one ever came up to me to ask if we could create more jobs," he told HuffPost. "There was very little in the way of job creation. It was a business undertaking in which the Bain Capital people created a tremendous amount of wealth for themselves and their investors."
Hewitt has an idea of what the corporate bigwigs were doing at the time. One incident still sticks with her.
In the summer of 1998, amid mass layoffs and mandatory overtime at the Dade East plant, she saw workers crowded around a glass executive suite. Some shook their heads and walked away, and others just stood there staring, she recalled. She walked over to check out what was going on and found several department heads putting golf balls in the office.
"Here are these people whose lives are upside down, doing mandatory overtime, and the executives are playing golf where all the employees can see," Hewitt said. "I was so upset that I walked in and picked up a golf ball and said, 'Get out and go to the golf course if you don't have anything to do.' It was the most callous, insensitive thing I had ever witnessed. I was completely dumbfounded."
Hewitt said the golf putting incident was so traumatizing for her that she quit her job the following month and began a career in animal advocacy. She never took another job in human resources again, despite having a master's degree in the field.
"There's a part of me that tries very, very hard to not think about that experience," she said. "I felt I had been a part of treating people very poorly, and I could not in good conscience put myself in that kind of position again."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/bain-capital-layoffs-dade-behring_n_1695960.html [with comments]
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Matt Taibbi Blasts David Brooks: 'Do You Know How Private Equity Works?'
Matt Taibbi slammed David Brooks on Twitter on Thursday for his defense of Mitt Romney's career in private equity.
By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 07/24/2012 3:55 pm Updated: 07/24/2012 4:58 pm
New York Times columnist David Brooks is wrong about Mitt Romney, according to Matt Taibbi.
"I have a serious question for David Brooks, who is hailing Romney's Bain record. Do you know how private equity works?" Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, wrote about New York Times columnist David Brooks [ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/227817755078967296 ] on Twitter on Tuesday. He continued [ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/227817944275615744 ]: "I bet he doesn't have the faintest clue what companies like Bain actually do."
Romney's record at Bain has been a flashpoint during the presidential race. The presumptive Republican nominee has come under fire for shipping jobs overseas [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/22/mitt-romney-bain-overseas-jobs_n_1618240.html ], laying off workers [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/bain-capital-layoffs-dade-behring_n_1695960.html (just above)] and squeezing profits [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/us/politics/companies-ills-did-not-harm-romneys-firm.html?pagewanted=all ] out of companies that sometimes failed as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital.
Many critics argue that private equity firms extract wealth [ http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wp31.pdf ( http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/private-equity-and-the-culture-of-value-extraction-1 )] from companies -- sometimes causing their collapse [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/09/400404/romney-bain-bankrupts-billions/ ] -- rather than creating new value. But in a column this month, Brooks dismissed the costs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/opinion/brooks-more-capitalism-please.html ] of Romney's brand of private equity as simply part of capitalism.
In that column referenced by Taibbi, Brooks wrote [id.] that President Barack Obama represents "big government," and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney represents "capitalism." Romney's task, he wrote, is to "define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues."
"It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape," Brooks wrote [id.] of Romney. "That's his selling point: rigor and productivity."
Taibbi has become best known for his scathing criticisms of big business [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 ]. In 2010, he dubbed Goldman Sachs [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 ] "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money": a description that haunts Goldman to this day. Also in 2010, Taibbi wrote [ http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/ ] that Brooks works "as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/matt-taibbi-david-brooks-bain-capital_n_1699059.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Ignores His Own Corporate Welfare Bum History
By: Rmuse
July 25th, 2012
A person pretending to have virtues, moral beliefs, principles, and ethics that one does not actually have is a hypocrite, and when they use hypocrisy to deceive others they are, in fact, also a liar. As character traits, lying and hypocrisy inform low moral fiber bordering on vice, and should be the death knell for a politician’s career and yet they are a mainstay of Republican politics. The presumptive Republican nominee for president, Willard Romney, has amassed quite a record as a pathological liar, and now there is substantial proof that besides lying as a matter of course, he is a rank hypocrite. Romney made an issue over an out of context quote by the President regarding his comments about the necessity of government for services such as infrastructure in the success of business.
The President said, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help…Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Romney accused President Obama of telling business owners they did not create their businesses by taking the “you didn’t build that” remark out of context to imply the President is anti-business and pushing the idea that government creates success, not individual enterprise and hard work. Willard goes around the country preaching that “government does not create prosperity,” and touts his own record as proof that individuals are solely responsible for their success. In one speech in Chicago, Romney decried the “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society,” and assailed government “intrusion in the workings of the free marketplace itself” regardless that his company benefitted from government, banking, and private investments going back to the origins of Bain Capital.
In 1984 when Romney founded Bain Capital, he and his partners raised more than a third of their investment fund from wealthy foreign corporations registered in Panama because of tax advantages and questionable banking secrecy. There were questions at the time that some funding was from right-wing death squads in El Salvador, but no evidence of wrongdoing was ever proven. The point is that Romney had significant help (from foreigners) to launch his lucrative investment firm. He, as the President alluded, benefitted because “somebody along the line gave him some help.” In fact, Bain Capital, and Romney, was not reluctant to accept help from the government on the way to earning millions. For example, in 1994, a Connecticut state fund made a $500,000 investment in a Bain company, and the previous year gave Bain a separate $500,000 that would be repaid with royalties from software products. More help for Romney and Bain, but from taxpayers and not private foreign investors, and more rank hypocrisy from Willard.
Fast forward to this past week and a Romney campaign ad [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLZpMFbxyxU (below)]
Romney has made a staple of assailing the President for “attacking free enterprise” and decrying what he calls “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” that he has directly profited from. Going back to January, Romney attacked the President regularly with comments such as, “Capitalism, free enterprise works. Crony capitalism does not [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57353012-503544/romney-blasts-obama-as-crony-capitalist/ ]. This president has engaged and is engaging in crony capitalism.” It turns out, that Romney’s predisposition to lying is as deeply rooted in his character as his hypocrisy and his arrogance precludes him from comprehending that at some point the public record will expose him for what he really is; a man of the lowest moral character who is devoid of ethics necessary for a small-town dogcatcher, much less a presidential candidate.
Romney’s business record [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/13/403825/romney-ad-steel-mill-tax-benefits/ ] is rife with government subsidies [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 ] and grants [id.] that enabled him to reap huge profits he hides in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, and all the while he attacks the President for saying “if you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help” to make the point that every American, business owner or otherwise, benefits from the sweat, toil, and taxpayer dollars that built roads, bridges, and in many cases, private businesses that drive the economy. Republicans, and Romney in particular, promote [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-06/romney-critical-of-government-aid-that-helped-bain-profit.html ] laissez faire principles that government has no place in a successful economy and it is their attempt at eliminating regulations that protect every person in America in one form or another.
President Obama is right; America was not built by any one individual or group and regardless the projects, wars, or crowning technological advancements this country has achieved, they were concerted efforts of the entire nation involving labor, tax dollars, and government largesse. Besides hypocrisy, Romney is promoting divisiveness pitting government against free enterprise and individualism that are the bane of a productive society which seems to be the goal of conservatives in general, and Romney in particular. He touts American exceptionalism on a daily basis, but he has no concept of the communal effort involved in making America exceptional, and without government-funded infrastructure, business-friendly tax breaks, and rewards for innovation and development, America would still be using the Pony Express for communication and wagon trains for transporting goods and services from coast to coast.
It is no secret that Willard Romney is the king of liars, and that is quite a feat among Republicans, but he is also a supreme hypocrite. His lack of moral character and ethical standards epitomize a deceitful human being whose primary trait, besides lying and hypocrisy, is pandering for political expediency and monetary enrichment that preclude him from serving as anything other than a vulture capitalist reaping wealth off the misery of other Americans. However, Romney did not even earn his dirty money on his own and he has the audacity to refuse to release his tax returns because as his wife says, “we’ve given all you people need to know about our financial situation and about how we live our life.” Well, the American people are learning about all they need to know about Willard Romney, and it is that he is a pathological liar, filthy hypocrite, and a morally vacant human being who has less integrity than the vilest criminal and whether it is endemic to his cult, his profession as a vulture capitalist, or a product of arrogance, he represents the bane of decent society and that is a very generous portrayal.
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©2012, PoliticusUSA.com
http://www.politicususa.com/mitt-romney-ignores-corporate-welfare-bum-history.html [with comments]
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Stephanie Cutter: President Obama's Fight for Small Businesses
Facebook it: http://OFA.BO/fyhXvk
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Stephanie Cutter shares how Mitt Romney's new TV ad blatantly twists President Obama's words on small business owners and entrepreneurs. Mitt Romney is not telling the truth about what the President said, and he is taking the President's words out of context.
President Obama has consistently fought for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The President knows that hard working people turning ideas into successful businesses built the American middle class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSaJpEa_BCA
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Did Mitt Romney get a ‘bailout’ for Bain & Company?
07/25/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-mitt-romney-get-a-bailout-for-bain-and-company/2012/07/24/gJQAvzSh7W_blog.html [with comments]
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Romney’s Bain case crumbles a bit more
07/25/2012
The Associated Press reports this morning [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/fact-check-romney-bain-contacts-outlasted-exit-16850240 ( http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ROMNEY_BAIN_FACT_CHECK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT )] that Mitt Romney “stayed in regular contact” with his partners at Bain in the months after the 1999 date that he has given as the time he left the company. The story also claims he “continued to oversee his partnership stakes even as he disengaged from the firm, personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001.”
[...]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-bain-case-crumbles-a-bit-more/2012/07/25/gJQA5nvP9W_blog.html [with comments]
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Private-Equity Exec Luke Johnson: Romney's Candidacy 'Lacks All Credibility'
Risk Capital Partners chair Luke Johnson writes that in private equity, "[a]ttention is not directed towards the common wealth, but enriching the management."
07/25/2012
Just because Mitt Romney ran a private equity firm doesn't mean he's qualified to be president. That's what guys like Vice President Joe Biden [ http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11814951-biden-romney-no-more-qualified-to-be-president-than-a-plumber ] and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57459505/l.a-mayor-romneys-business-record-no-qualification-for-president/ ] have said.
And fine, you'd expect that since they're politicians and Democrats. But it's a little more significant when a fellow private equity man says the same thing.
In a column for the Financial Times [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/467567ce-d4dd-11e1-9444-00144feabdc0.html#axzz21ZSy5VZm ] this Tuesday, Luke Johnson, chairman of the private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, rips the idea that Romney's experience as the head of Bain Capital might have done anything to prepare him for public service.
You really ought to read the whole thing, but here are a few choice bits: Johnson argues that private equity firms are "run to maximise profits for the owners, rather than for the creation of jobs"; that people who succeed in the industry "need to be ferociously interested in accumulating money"; and that generally speaking, private companies "are not democracies -- they are quasi-dictatorships."
And then the clincher: "I'm no fan of Barack Obama but to me, Mr Romney's candidacy simply lacks all credibility."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/romney-private-equity_n_1701675.html [with comments]
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Dark side of a Bain success
Clockwise from top left: Brendan Blum, Sergey Blashchishen, Matthew Meyer and Lindsey Poteet. Aspen Education already faced a wrongful death lawsuit over Meyer when Bain and CRC Health Group bought the company in 2006. Six deaths since the takeover, including Blum, Blashchishen and Poteet, have generated either lawsuits or complaints of neglect.
A for-profit health company bought by Bain -- that Romney profits from -- has exploded in size and tales of neglect
By Art Levine
Wednesday, Jul 18, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
It seemed a world away from the executive suites of Bain Capital when Dana Blum, a recent widow living in Portland, Ore., made the fateful decision to send her son Brendan to Youth Care, a residential program for troubled teens located in the suburbs of Salt Lake City.
Brendan, a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, had been extremely aggressive for years; he was even arrested a few times after attacking members of his family. Local therapists hadn’t helped, and six months after her husband died, Dana was frantically casting about for solutions. A consultation with UCLA’s neuropsychiatric unit convinced her that Youth Care’s therapeutic and educational program would finally make a difference.
Four months into his stay there, Brendan had earned a reputation as a temper-prone student who tried to shirk his obligations. So on the afternoon of June 27, when he complained to medical staff that he felt very sick, as if something were “crawling around” in his stomach, his concerns were dismissed. After 11 p.m., he woke up, complaining of stomach pain, and defecated in his pants. The on-duty monitors took him to the Purple Room, a makeshift isolation room used to segregate misbehaving students. There, he suffered a long night of agony, howling in pain and repeatedly vomiting and soiling himself. According to court transcripts and police reports, the two poorly paid monitors on duty did little more than offer him water, Sprite and Pepto-Bismol [ http://www.spencelawyers.com/2011/10/12/wrongful-death-case-settled-against-youth-treatment-center/ ]. They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do — Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves.
“They didn’t trust our judgment in emergency situations,” explains Josh Randall, a former Youth Care residential monitor, who wasn’t on duty that night. “If you’re working for $9.50 an hour on the graveyard shift, you don’t want to buck the system.” At any rate, the monitors had little expertise in how to respond — it was an entry-level job requiring only a GED, plus a CPR and safety course overseen by Youth Care itself.
When the morning staff arrived at 7 a.m., they discovered Brendan facedown on the floor of the Purple Room, his body already stiff with rigor mortis. The state’s chief medical examiner [ http://health.utah.gov/ome/gen.html ] later determined that Blum had died of a twisted-bowel infarction, which requires emergency surgical intervention.
“It made me very angry that they couldn’t provide better emergency services for my son,” Dana Blum told the online magazine Momlogic [ http://www.momlogic.com/2009/12/saving_troubled_teens_a_greedy_industry.php ]. “I feel like he was murdered” — although, in fact, no court has ever found Aspen or its staffers guilty of murder. Blum, who, with the help of insurance and school district aid, paid Youth Care $15,000 a month to care for her son, made those remarks in 2009; she can no longer speak publicly about Brendan’s death, according to the terms of a settlement she reached last year in a wrongful death lawsuit [ http://www.spencelawyers.com/2011/10/12/wrongful-death-case-settled-against-youth-treatment-center/ ] against Youth Care and its parent company, Aspen Education.
The failure at Youth Care was not due simply to the carelessness of a few workers — a point underscored when a Utah court found that the threshold needed to pursue criminal negligence charges against the two monitors in 2008 wasn’t met and the charges were dismissed. And it wasn’t the only example of alleged negligence or abuse at treatment centers for adult addicts and “troubled teens” that are owned by Aspen’s parent company, CRC Health Group, according to a Salon investigation based on government reports, court filings and official complaints by parents and employees, along with interviews with former clients and staff.
Our investigation found previously unreported allegations of abuse and neglect in at least 10 CRC residential drug and teen care facilities across the country, including three I visited undercover in Utah and California. With rare exceptions, such incidents have largely escaped notice because the programs are, thanks to lax state regulations, largely unaccountable.
Court documents and ex-staffers also allege that such incidents reflect, in part, a broader corporate culture at Aspen’s owner, CRC Health Group, a leading national chain of treatment centers. Lawsuits and critics have claimed that CRC prizes profits, and the avoidance of outside scrutiny, over the health and safety of its clients. (We sent specific questions on these basic allegations to CRC and owner Bain Capital. CRC would answer only general questions; Bain did not reply.)
And CRC’s corporate culture, in turn, reflects the attitudes and financial imperatives of Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney. (The Romney campaign also did not reply to written questions.) Bain is known for its relentless obsession with maximizing shareholder value and revenues. Indeed, this has become a talking point of late [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-latest-romney-claim-about-bain-capital/2012/05/29/gJQA9RPK0U_blog.html ] on the Romney campaign trail; he bragged to Fox in late May that “80 percent of them [Bain investments] grew their revenues.” CRC, a fast-growing company then in the lucrative field of drug treatment, was perhaps a natural fit when Bain acquired it for $720 million in 2006. In conversations with staff and patients who spent time at CRC facilities since the takeover, there are suggestions that the Bain approach has had its effects. “If you look at their daily profit numbers compared to what they charge,” Dana Blum said of CRC’s Aspen division in 2009, “it’s obscene.” That point, ironically enough, was underscored by the glowing reports [ http://www.levinassociates.com/612mamhead2 ] in the trade press [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/133-in-another-mega-deal-crc-acquires-aspen-education.html ] about its profitability [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/special-reports/66-special-report-adolescent-addiction-treatment.html ].
The purchase of CRC came seven years after Romney publicly announced his retirement [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/mitt%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9Cretroactive_escape/ ] as CEO of Bain Capital, where he had been in charge [ http://nymag.com/news/politics/mitt-romney-2011-10/index3.html ] since its founding in 1984. But at the time of his departure, Romney worked out an arrangement to continue to share in Bain’s profits [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/politics/retirement-deal-keeps-bain-money-flowing-to-romney.html?pagewanted=all ] as a limited partner in the firm. Today, he is still an investor in 48 Bain accounts. Though he has refused to disclose their underlying assets, some information about them can be gleaned. For example, he has reported at least $300,000 to $1.2 million, if not more, in fluctuating annual earnings [ http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/Romney%20financial%20disclosure%20from%20Boston%20Globe.pdf ] from Bain Capital VIII [ http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHtmlSection1?SectionID=8191830-713549-729690&SessionID=KBRPFWfPE63E1l7 ], the convoluted $3.5 billion array of related funds [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/romney-as-multimillionaire-gets-break-for-taxes.html ] that owns both name-brand companies such as Dunkin’ Donuts and the lesser-known CRC Health Group. Most of these funds were made more attractive to privileged investors by being registered [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/05/9999999997-05-001839 ] in the Cayman [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/05/9999999997-05-001839 ] Islands [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/04/9999999997-04-028768 ] tax haven [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/romney-as-multimillionaire-gets-break-for-taxes.html ]. And Romney’s connections to CRC run even deeper: Of the three Bain managing partners who sit on CRC’s board, two, John Connaughton and Steven Barnes (with his wife), gave a total of half a million dollars to Restore Our Future [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/news/la-pn-romney-super-pac-fec-filing-20120131 ], the super PAC supporting Romney. They also each donated [ http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&oldest=1&lname=Connaughton&fname=First+Name&search=Search+Names ] the $2,500 maximum directly to his campaign.
Bain takes over
When Bain purchased CRC, it looked like an investment masterstroke. The company, founded in the mid-’90s with a single California treatment facility, the Camp Recovery Center, had quickly grown into the largest chain of for-profit drug and alcohol treatment services in the country, with $230 million in annual revenue. Under Bain’s guidance, its revenue has nearly doubled, to more than $450 million. CRC now serves 30,000 clients daily — mostly opiate addicts — at 140 facilities [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/26/news/companies/bain-crc-rehab.fortune/index.htm ] across 25 states. In the first five years after its acquisition, Bain had already extracted nearly $20 million in management-related fees from the chain, although Bain investors haven’t cashed in yet through dividends or an IPO. Bain’s purchase, a leveraged buyout [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-private-equity-firms-like-bain-really-are-the-worst-of-capitalism-20120523 ], also saddled CRC with massive debt of well over $600 million.
According to company executives and independent analysts, hands-on oversight of subsidiary companies is a hallmark of both Bain and CRC. Romney’s campaign literature boasts about Bain taking exactly this sort of direct role in helping to turn around failing companies [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/06/obamas-false-attacks ]. “Over the life of an investment, they have a strong management team willing to participate,” Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst with CRT Capital, a leading institutional brokerage [ http://www.crtllc.com/ ] firm, says of Bain.
The CRC acquisition immediately made Bain owner of the largest collection [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/69-crc-on-the-sell-side.html ] of addiction treatment facilities in the nation. Unlike some Bain Capital acquisitions, which led to massive layoffs [ http://thinkprogress.org/progress-report/romney-job-killer/ ], the company’s approach with CRC was to boost revenues by gobbling up other treatment centers, raising fees, and expanding its client base through slick, aggressive marketing, while keeping staffing and other costs relatively low. But that rapid pace of acquisition couldn’t be sustained in the mostly small-scale drug treatment industry alone. So Bain Capital and CRC set their sights on an entirely new treatment arena: the multibillion-dollar “troubled teen” industry [ http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/troubledteensindustry.html ], a burgeoning [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/133-in-another-mega-deal-crc-acquires-aspen-education.html ] field of mostly locally owned residential schools and wilderness programs then serving, nationwide, about 100,000 kids facing addiction or emotional or behavioral problems [ http://www.astartforteens.org/is-my-teen-out-of-control ].
One of CRC’s first acquisitions under Bain ownership was the Aspen Education Group. Founded in 1998 with about six schools, Aspen Education had expanded to 30 troubled-teen and weight-loss programs by 2006, including Youth Care of Utah. With Bain’s backing, CRC purchased Aspen for nearly $300 million in the fall of 2006.
Less than a year later, Brendan Blum was dead.
At the time of the CRC acquisition, Aspen already had a history of abuse allegations, including at least three lawsuits, and two known patient deaths, one by suicide. Featured on “Dr. Phil [ https://www.google.com/search?ix=aca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3AAspeneducation.com+Dr.+Phil ],” it grew out of schools inspired by the “tough-love” behavior-modification approach [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/cult-spawned-tough-love-teen-industry ] of the discredited Synanon program, which was eventually exposed as a cult [ http://www.rickross.com/reference/synanon/synanon5.html ]. By 2006, Aspen was facing a wrongful death lawsuit, later settled [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUX3QVevB54 ], over an incident in 2004 in which a 14-year-old boy, Matthew Meyer, perished from heat stroke just eight days into his stay at its Lone Star Expeditions wilderness camp [ http://www.momlogic.com/2009/06/can_wilderness_camps_kill_your.php ] in Texas. Nevertheless, less than a year after Meyer died, NBC’s “Dateline” extolled Lone Star as part of a puff piece on Aspen’s success with overweight teens [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/05/19/ST2008051901576.html?sid=ST2008051901576 ]. As an Aspen press release [ http://www.aspeneducation.com/news-datelinenbc.html ] boasted, the show told how a rebellious student who did a stint at Lone Star “returned a month later with a new outlook on life.”
In October 2006, just nine months before Brendan Blum died and as Bain’s deal to purchase Aspen Education was being finalized, CRC received a far less upbeat assessment of Aspen’s services. Following some phone conversations, family therapist Elisabeth Feldman walked into CRC’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters to see Dr. Thomas Brady, a psychiatrist then serving as CRC’s chief medical officer, in order to confront him about a host of issues at Youth Care. She had stumbled upon the problems while trying to help her son’s former girlfriend, a teenage girl who had suffered what Feldman called “gross mistreatment” at Youth Care. Of particular concern to Feldman was a three-month delay before Youth Care hired a psychiatrist to assess the young woman’s deep depression and a failure to treat her Lyme disease. Feldman’s ultimately unsuccessful crusade to get the woman released had led her to seek the services of a Salt Lake City lawyer, Thomas Burton, who had settled two lawsuits against Aspen Education for fraud, neglect and abuse.
Feldman had been part of Brady’s professional referral network for years, but this visit wasn’t congenial. Feldman presented Brady with a 100-page sheaf of legal and corporate documents — including her affidavit describing “brutish punishment and isolation” at Youth Care — about Aspen Education programs in order to help support her charges of abusive treatment and neglect. These claims included reportedly covering up the alleged sexual assault of a female student by an Aspen employee at Turn-About Ranch in Utah; the girl was later duct-taped and restrained by staff [ http://www.fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=7205&start=15 ], a former employee, Toni Thayer, told Feldman, after writing complaints about abusive staff conduct to management, state regulators and the Garfield County sheriff in 2004 — but no sanctions followed. (Subsequently, a lawsuit [ http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/47850.htm ] filed in June 2012 charged that staffers at the ranch engaged in the “torture” of a 15-year-old girl in 2005.) According to Feldman, Brady said he wasn’t aware of any problems at Youth Care or Aspen Education and sought to mollify her about Bain’s pending purchase of Aspen: “I have to trust that Bain did their due diligence,” she recalls him saying. Dr. Brady confirmed, by email, that he spoke on the phone and met with Feldman, but said he has “no recollection” of making those remarks. And he insists that the documents she brought didn’t support her claims of mistreatment. Even so, he says he took her concerns seriously and that CRC and Aspen conducted a thorough review. “I came to the conclusion,” he said, “there was no merit to the accusations.” He remained as CRC’s medical director until May 2009 and said that although he encountered a few “untoward event” cases at Aspen during his time there, he saw no “pattern” of unsafe care.
At any rate, Bain’s purchase of Aspen Education went ahead smoothly. When, months later, Feldman learned about Blum’s death, she was horrified to realize her warnings had had no effect. “For Bain and the big guys, nobody cared,” she says. “It was all about the money.”
Questionable deaths
When he died, Brendan Blum’s was the first publicly reported death due to apparent neglect in CRC’s 12-year history. But in the six years since Bain Capital acquired the company, there have been at least five more seemingly preventable deaths of patients at CRC’s residential programs. Since the Bain takeover, critics and former employees charge that corporate attitudes have too often emphasized cutting costs and limiting public scrutiny at the expense of safety and quality of care. These tendencies appear to have produced risky, potentially life-threatening practices — only a handful of which have drawn public attention.
Several lawsuits have been filed against CRC over mistreatment of its clients, but the company has never acknowledged any wrongdoing and has kept confidential any damage payments arising from legal settlements. CRC is a significant player in the scandal-prone [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08146t.pdf ], decentralized field of residential teen treatment that has more than 1,000 scattered facilities; the firm has nearly 36 therapeutic schools, wilderness sites and weight-loss programs catering to youth.
The latest lawsuit [ http://azstarnet.com/news/science/health-med-fit/rehab-center-sued-over-patient-who-strayed-off-died/article_6976f6ce-74e9-52e5-8740-b5a2edbb5b55.html ] over CRC’s current practices was filed in January against CRC’s prestigious $40,000-a-month Sierra Tucson drug treatment center [ http://sierratucson.crchealth.com/ ] in Arizona, for the allegedly poor monitoring and treatment of what the lawsuit says was an obviously suicidal 71-year-old patient, Dr. Edward Litwack; the center’s own staff had assessed him as a “high” risk for suicide, requiring one-on-one supervision. He was reported missing last August, but it took two weeks for the staff to find his corpse on the grounds. Last October, after an investigation by Arizona regulators following Litwack’s disappearance found 42 major violations, the center was put on one-year probation. The regulators found that ill-trained monitors spent too much time patrolling on golf carts rather than actually interacting with patients. CRC had purchased Sierra Tucson in 2005 for $130 million as its “crown jewel [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/newswires/special-reports/78-on-a-rollup.html ]” shortly before plans to sell CRC [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/69-crc-on-the-sell-side.html ] to Bain were announced. “Then the business side started controlling admissions,” says a former employee, who worked at Sierra Tucson before and after the CRC acquisition. “It doesn’t take a brain scientist to realize that if you reduce staff [in key programs] and add sicker patients, there’s going to be trouble.” With the addition of a new 44-bed lodge in 2007 [ http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/10/prweb564588.htm ], staff at Sierra Tucson was stretched thin, former staffers say; by 2009, a state licensing office fined the facility [ http://hsapps.azdhs.gov/ls/sod/Facility.aspx?FacId=MED1576 ] for having insufficient staff to prevent high-risk patients [ http://hsapps.azdhs.gov/ls/sod/Facility.aspx?FacId=MED1576 ] from wandering off [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/102030001 ].
Other incidents suggest a corporate culture that often downplayed safety and quality of care. In 2010, at least two drug treatment patients died at the overcrowded New Life Lodge in Burns, Tenn., according to wrongful death lawsuits and an investigative series [ http://www.tennessean.com/section/projects23 ] in the Tennessean [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110717/NEWS/305240001/Sudden-death-mom-raises-questions-about-rehab-center ]. According to an account in the Tennessean, based on public records and interviews with people at New Life Lodge, one of the patients, a 29-year-old mother named Lindsey Poteet, had come down with pneumonia and was drifting into unconsciousness when she was driven in a private van to a Nashville hospital 30 miles away. The journey was undertaken on orders of the facility’s medical director, although another hospital lay just eight miles down the road. Poteet stopped breathing en route and died the next day in Nashville. The other, Patrick Bryant, died on his 20th birthday [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110915/NEWS/309140138/New-Life-Lodge-sued-over-second-patient-s-death ] just four days after being admitted to New Life; his mother alleges that he’d been misprescribed several medications and had been unresponsive for hours before being discovered by staff.
A third patient, 18-year-old Savon Kinney, died last October [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111027/NEWS01/310270037/Death-prompts-new-probe-New-Life-Lodge ] just days after leaving New Life in a state of disorientation, his sister told the newspaper; his death sparked a state investigation.
After the Tennessean series [ http://www.tennessean.com/section/projects23 ] appeared last summer and fall, the state’s Department of Mental Health froze all new admissions to the facility. (It was finally allowed to admit a smaller number of new patients in early April.) One former patient, Malea Fox, who had befriended Poteet at New Life, told me that she called state Medicaid (also known as TennCare), the facility’s primary funder, to complain that the facility was far too overcrowded for personalized care. “All they [New Life] care about is making money,” she said.
In 2009, the state of Oregon forced the closing of two teen programs run by Aspen Education. State investigators [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/mount%20bachelor%20academy-settlement%20agreement.pdf ] found nine cases of abuse and neglect at Mount Bachelor Academy in central Oregon, including incidents of “sexualized role play,” in which young patients were allegedly forced to do lap dances [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/school-using-lap-dances-treat-add-closed-your-tax-involved-will-it-re-open ] during therapy sessions. After Mount Bachelor and its director threatened costly lawsuits, the state’s Department of Human Services softened the language [ http://cafety.org/solutions-and-successes/902-astart-closure-in-the-mount-bachelor-academy-case-dec-2010 ] of the report; CRC claims the allegations were false (while also fighting $37 million in abuse lawsuits over the school’s pre-CRC practices [ http://astartforteens.org/23 ]). Even so, DHS “stands by our findings,” a spokesman says of the 2009 report. That same year, at SageWalk Wilderness School in Hampton, Ore., 16-year-old Sergey Blashchishen died of heatstroke on his very first school hike, in an incident eerily reminiscent of Matthew Meyer’s 2004 death in Texas. One morning in August, Blashchishen suited up in an 80-pound backpack; by afternoon, the heat had topped 80 degrees, and he was soon staggering, drifting off the trail [ http://www.momlogic.com/2010/04/troubled_teens_death_possible_homicide_charges.php ], and complaining of dizziness and exhaustion [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/documents/Sagewalk-investigation-public-record.pdf ]. Staffers contended he was faking his symptoms and failed to call 911 [ http://www.cafety.org/privately-funded-programs/834-abuse-investigation-a-protective-services-report-death-of-sb-or-sagewalk ] until his pulse had stopped; that death is the focus of a negligent homicide investigation [ http://www.cafety.org/privately-funded-programs/794-media-release-sheriff-recommends-death-by-homicide-at-sagewalk-or-sagewalk ].
To CRC officials, the lawsuits, criminal investigations and state sanctions all come in response to isolated events, aren’t “systemic [ http://www.crchealth.com/press-release/crc-health-group-issues-statement-on-tennessean-article-largely-ignoring-overwhelming-successes-in-difficult-addiction-cases-and-compromised-population/ ],” and shouldn’t reflect on the dedication and quality [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/102030001 ] of a large company serving 30,000 trouble-prone teens and substance abusers each day. The company declined to respond to a memo outlining allegations made by alumni, parents and former employees about questionable practices at specific programs, citing a legal requirement [ http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/index.html ] to protect patient confidentiality. But a public relations consultant [ http://www.weinerpublic.com/CRC_Links.html ], Robert Weiner, who works closely with CRC and its most prominent board member, Gen. Barry McCaffrey [ http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/?page_id=14 ], President Bill Clinton’s drug czar, did respond in general terms in a phone interview: “The people you cited can whine all they want, but that’s just a bunch of specifics we can’t talk about compared to 30,000 people a day we’re making better lives for.”
“In a human-run company there will be human errors in some cases,” he added. “But in other cases, it’s garbage.”
In a December 2011 press release in response to the Tennessean series, CRC vice president Jonathan Ciampi disputed [ http://www.crchealth.com/press-release/crc-health-group-issues-statement-on-tennessean-article-largely-ignoring-overwhelming-successes-in-difficult-addiction-cases-and-compromised-population/ ] criticism of CRC over the reported deaths, citing positive surveys of parents and clients, and certification by government regulators and accrediting agencies. “Safety and quality are our highest priorities.” And in a conference call last fall for investors, CRC’s new CEO, Andrew Eckert, discounted the developments in Tennessee as merely “unwelcomed bumps in the road.” In fact, later in the call he claimed that “CRC is in the process of staking its ground as the definitive leader in clinical excellence.”
Camp recovery: More patients, more revenue
Such claims of excellence do not seem to have pierced the canopy of the Santa Cruz redwoods, home to Camp Recovery, the first drug treatment facility CRC purchased in the mid-’90s. Nestled on 25 hilly acres in Scotts Valley, Calif., Camp Recovery is an idyllic setting for recovery for as many as 70 adults and teens at a time. Yet after Bain purchased CRC in 2006, according to former employees, safety and quality eroded, while state agencies periodically reported increasingly more troublesome findings after 2006 regarding conditions at the camp. “It got progressively worse,” says Tom Corral, a counselor who was employed there before CRC bought Camp Recovery and worked there on occasion after the Bain takeover. Meanwhile, prices were steadily jacked up from about $6,000 a month to as high as $18,000. Under Bain ownership, Corral says, “they’ve been under a lot of pressure to cut costs, and they’ve been squeezed for profit.”
What most alarmed Corral and other former employees was that ever sicker and more mentally disturbed patients kept being admitted. The governing view, Corral recalls, was, “You’ve got to keep them at all costs.”
Camp Recovery is registered with the state as a nonmedical facility [ http://www.adp.ca.gov/ADPLTRS/PDF/ADP_Bulletin_11-18.pdf ], and so patients needing intensive medical or psychiatric care should be referred elsewhere. But such restrictions soon collapsed, say former staffers, in a drive for profits. “Certified nurses were reprimanded when we complained to the intake office,” says one former nurse. “When I didn’t want to admit a person who was falling down drunk, they wrote me up.” Former staffers say that Camp Recovery’s business staff even began to pressure nurses to knowingly admit patients with potentially deadly MRSA infections [ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007261.htm ], which, the CDC warns [ http://www.cdc.gov/mrsa/index.html ], may require treatment by an infectious disease specialist. Shawn Bottoroff, a former clinical technician who left Camp Recovery last year, said that when she started in 2007, nurses were primarily responsible for determining who was stable enough for admission. But they were soon overridden by camp administrators seeking to rope in more clients, Bottoroff and other former workers say.
To Denise Murphy, a former director of the camp’s adolescent unit, the decline became especially noticeable in 2008, when a new executive director took over, Bobby Stearns, hand-picked by CRC, who was determined, according to complaints to the NLRB, to crush a unionization drive [ http://www.seiu.org/a/members/if-employee-free-choice-were-law-theo-jackson-would-still-have-a-job.php ] and keep down costs. “It was so dangerous there, they’re lucky they didn’t get sued,” Murphy says. According to complaints made by staff at the time to the now-reorganized California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, CRC cut back on everything from drug-testing kits to staffing levels. In a 2009 interview, Stearns said any staff cuts were due to declining patient numbers. But eventually, the Department of Social Services, which has oversight over the facility’s 17-bed adolescent unit, confirmed that caseloads had soared and kids ran wild at night. The agency demanded corrective actions [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Camp%20Recovery%20Investigation%20Report.pdf ] — improvements that former employees say were in large part ultimately abandoned.
Equally troubling, former staffers report a pattern that echoes the events surrounding the deaths of Brendan Blum and Lindsey Poteet at other CRC facilities: When patients face a medical crisis, ambulances are usually not summoned. Instead, “techs,” whose emergency training, the former employees say, is generally limited to a two-hour CPR course, are ordered by supervisors to use a van lacking medical equipment to drive patients to the emergency room in nearby Santa Cruz. The tactic, say former employees, helps prevent the facility from being flagged in the 911 system, risking unwelcome attention from state or local officials.
The administrative resistance to calling 911 was so pronounced that when one overmedicated, mentally disturbed patient fled the facility in hysterics one summer day in 2008, she was left to lie on the road outside the gate, screaming for help before collapsing into convulsions. One camp executive told staff on duty at the time, “Leave her alone. We don’t want to make a scene,” according to Bottoroff and other former staffers. It was left to neighbors to call 911. Nevertheless, the camp still makes more emergency calls than any comparable facility in the Santa Cruz area, according to addiction and ER doctors who reviewed 911 log data we obtained — perhaps a measure of just how ill many of the patients are at this nonmedical facility. That log showed 158 calls between January 2008 and August 2011 [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Camp%20Recovery-911calls.pdf ]. “That’s a lot of calls,” a local government official says. “It ought to be investigated.” Logged 911 calls represent only a small portion of total ER visits, the official observes, because it doesn’t account for people who arrive by other means.
Camp Recovery’s drive for secrecy was especially pronounced when it came to potential instances of sexual misconduct, violence or drug use among the adolescents in treatment, former staffers say. “There were several situations in which we were told by the director of the adolescent unit, per [current executive director] James Bailey, not to call 911,” says Bottoroff. Former staffers speak of wild nighttime teen assaults on weaker youth or even staff, and recount hushed-up incidents of underage girls having sex with adult male patients at their cabins. “They were trading favors for cigarettes and alcohol,” Bottoroff says of one such incident she encountered. In almost all such cases of on-site crime, according to an employee complaint to state regulators, the orders handed down from Stearns, the former executive director, in 2009 were clear: “We don’t contact the police.”
State investigators were rarely able confirm the most serious employee allegations on the few occasions when they bothered to investigate, a review of state reports shows. But this could be due to efforts by managers to cover their tracks. Trevor Bottoroff, a former Camp Recovery counselor and Shawn’s husband, says that sometimes managers would rewrite log sheets to make them seem more benign. At other times, supervisors would simply remove them. Murphy, the camp’s former adolescent director, came to see CRC as “the slumlords of treatment.” Other evasions are commonplace at Camp Recovery. The camp openly advertises that it offers prescription-based medical detox [ http://www.camprecovery.com/adult-services/detoxification-programs/ ], though it is not licensed as a medical facility to do so.
A failure of oversight
But such complaints against CRC have rarely led to consequences for either their drug treatment or youth programs. The troubled teen industry in particular is a regulatory Wild West, with some states lacking any licensing system at all for these residential programs [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08346.pdf ]. Even some states that do license, such as Utah, appear unable to guarantee patient safety: about 10 young people are known to have died since 1990 while attending Utah residential and wilderness programs. Regulators often shield the teen care industry from genuine scrutiny [ http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go/position-statements/44 ], according to investigations [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08346.pdf ] by the GAO [ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-146T ], congressional hearings in 2007 [ http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/10-10-07congressionalhearing.html ] and 2008 [ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg41839/pdf/CHRG-110hhrg41839.pdf ], and reports by such mental health advocates as the Bazelon Center [ http://bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=D5NL7igV_CA%3D&tabid=247 ] and Mental Health America [ http://www.nmha.org/go/position-statements/44 ].
In California, regulation of drug treatment facilities appears especially ineffective. California’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, for example, has never investigated the deaths of nearly 200 patients over five years at CRC’s 12 outpatient methadone clinics [ http://www.crcotp.com/clinics/California ]. Mostly likely, addiction experts say, the clients’ rampant substance abuse is the culprit, not sloppy practices at CRC, but that supposition has not been rigorously tested. In fact, Pennsylvania regulators cited two of CRC’s methadone clinics [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/312180064/New-Life-Lodge-owner-s-troubles-aren-t-confined-TN ] for failing to properly screen patients [ http://app2.health.state.pa.us/commonpoc/Content/PublicWeb/DASurveyDetails.aspx?facid=X4WU6601&exit_date=08/31/2011&eventid=H4JL12 ] for drugs or narcotic use, a potentially deadly [ http://kap.samhsa.gov/products/manuals/advisory/pdfs/Methadone-Advisory.pdf ] oversight. Weiner, the CRC spokesperson, said that CRC itself would doubtless look into any client deaths: “At least somebody’s going to wonder why they didn’t come in for their treatment the next day.”
“The programs have experienced the reality that there are no consequences if anyone dies [ http://www.fox5sandiego.com/news/kswb-fmr-bay-recovery-employee-witnessed-patients-being-overmedicated-20120629,0,7799279.story ],” says a knowledgeable ex-government official about California’s drug programs, including CRC’s methadone clinics, which have become the chain’s cash cow. With nearly 27,000 daily clients nationwide at 54 outpatient [ http://ir.10kwizard.com/filing.php?ipage=8170590&DSEQ=1&SEQ=6&SQDESC=SECTION_PAGE&exp=&source=1616 ] clinics [ http://www.crchealth.com/find-a-treatment-center/comprehensive-outpatient-opiate-treatment-clinics/help ], CRC founder Barry Karlin was dubbed by Treatment magazine “America’s Methadone King [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/special-reports/115-americas-methadone-king.html ].”
Loose oversight seems to have been critical in enabling CRC to flourish. It’s hard to imagine, in particular, that without the scandalously weak [ http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/press-release/miller-harkin-reintroduce-legislation-prevent-child-abuse-teen-residential-programs ] monitoring of the teen treatment industry CRC’s Aspen division would be able to continue its harshly regimented, unproven behavior-modification methods and dicey emergency protocols. “Without regulations and enforcement, this profitable industry will continue to have actors that present unacceptable risks to the children they serve,” U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said last year when introducing a federal oversight bill [ http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/press-release/miller-harkin-reintroduce-legislation-prevent-child-abuse-teen-residential-programs ].
A culture of abuse and neglect?
This apparent lack of oversight in the teen industry, combined with a widespread view by providers that their charges are manipulative troublemakers, has allowed a toxic culture of psychological abuse and medical neglect to prevail [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/CAFETY_AEG_FACTSHEET.pdf ], according to parents, alumni and federal officials. As Greg Kutz, a GAO investigator, said in testimony about the industry in general before Congress, “It seemed that the only way program managers would believe they [the students] were not faking it is if they stopped breathing or did not have a pulse.” That culture is visible even at Aspen’s most upscale residential programs, such as Island View in suburban Syracuse, Utah. One former student there, Colleen Davidson, now 20, who graduated from the program in 2009, recalls her alarm when she coughed up blood one morning as she stood at the bathroom sink. She says she was never allowed to see a doctor because by the time the nurse wandered by a few hours later, another student had rinsed the blood from the sink. “They assume you’re lying,” she says.
For months, CRC denied me press access to any of its facilities, so I visited Island View last August posing as a father of a troubled girl. During that visit, director Laura Burt confirmed this skeptical stance toward potential medical emergencies. She said the nursing staff would see my daughter immediately in case of a medical crisis but would monitor her if they suspected fakery: “We’re not going to rush her to the hospital if she’s just saying that and there is nothing that says it.”
In March 2008, Duane Bernard rescued his son Matthew, then 16, from another Aspen program, Adirondack Leadership Expedition [ http://www.heal-online.org/ale.htm ] in Saranac Lake, N.Y., after gleaning from one of his son’s monitored letters the brutal conditions he was enduring. Matthew, who was sent to Adirondack by his mother during a custody dispute, later told his father of food deprivation, neglect of serious medical complaints, and cruel taunting by instructors, including an incident when field staff pressured one kid to lick clean a urine-soaked cup. Medical neglect, Duane Bernard says, was ingrained in Adirondack’s get-tough “wilderness therapy [ http://astartforteens.org/dangers-of-teen-wilderness-programs ].” Father and son say that during Matthew’s monthlong stay, he was required to go camping in subfreezing weather with too-thin clothing and sleeping gear, and he soon developed severe numbness and frostbite in his right foot. But he wasn’t taken to an urgent care facility until shortly before his release and required eight months of medical treatment afterward.
Duane Bernard wrote [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Duane-bernard-letter.pdf ] in April 2008 to state officials alleging child abuse, enclosing Matthew’s written descriptions of his alleged maltreatment [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Matthew%20Bernard-2008statement-senttostateregulators.pdf ], but the state’s child protection agency said it had no jurisdiction over Adirondack [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Child%20Welfare%20Services%20Reply%20to%20Bernard.pdf ]. “They blew us off,” Bernard says.
I heard Matthew’s experience echoed in conversation after conversation with Aspen alums, many of whom suffer nightmares and PTSD-like symptoms. Hannah Sangillo of Bethesda, Md., now 19, ended up at SUWS of the Carolinas [ http://suwscarolinas.crchealth.com/ ], Aspen’s showcase wilderness program in North Carolina’s breathtaking Pisgah National Forest, in 2010. She now considers her 49-day summer stay “child abuse.” She recounts one of several instances of heat exhaustion she experienced during hours-long hikes designed to promote self-reliance and personal growth. Even on scorching, humid days, when temperatures soared into the mid-90s, groups of girls were saddled with 60-pound-plus packs, exceeding Girl Scout safety guidelines. “I was not able to walk straight,” she says of one incident. “I was stumbling and sweating profusely. I kept telling people I needed to stop and they said: ‘No, we can’t stop yet.’” She temporarily blacked out, only to be dragged to her feet by fellow campers and prodded along the trail at the urging of what SUWS calls its “highly trained [ http://suwscarolinas.crchealth.com/safety-first-how-wilderness-camps-keep-teens-safe/ ]” field instructors. By the end of the summer ordeal, nearly half of her small team of girls had collapsed during hikes, she says, without receiving any medical attention.
Throughout their time there, neither Sangillo nor Hannah Spungen, a 2007 SUWS graduate, ever saw a single staffer actually help young residents with medical problems. These included everything from heroin withdrawal to all-night vomiting caused by drinking from fecal-contaminated [ http://www.doh.wa.gov/YouandYourFamily/IllnessandDisease/Giardia.aspx ] streams during their daily hikes.
Before I interviewed the two alumni, I met with Shawn Farrell, executive director of SUWS of the Carolinas, who insisted to me that emergency care is a top priority. (Subsequently, CRC declined to answer any questions about allegations of medical neglect at this SUWS program. Shawn Farrell, the executive director of SUWS of the Carolinas, insisted to me that emergency care is a top priority. He says field staff are instructed to radio in symptoms of any injuries or illness immediately to the base camp’s field medic and, if needed, arrange transport to a hospital only eight miles away. “We want the doctors to do the diagnosis,” not the outdoors staff, he says. But this policy appears to falls apart in the execution. In Spungen’s experience, “There’s no protocol in place to make sure it’s safe for you.”
These incidents seem to illuminate an institutional culture that allowed Sergey Blashchishen to die in 2009 before ever receiving emergency medical aid. As one government investigator told me about the field instructors at SageWalk, where Blashchishen died, “They were highly trained, but the culture overrode that.” The SageWalk Field Instructor Manual — like other Aspen manuals, vetted by CRC, according to a former CRC official — requires staff to go through a rigid “chain of command” before emergency help can be summoned. “There are inherent delays in a system like this,” the investigator observed. CRC spokesman Weiner defended those procedures: “If there’s a [medical] issue they should go to the top supervisors,” he said. “I don’t see how that’s wrong to make sure you’re doing the right thing. That’s why they’re not the boss.”
Yet Weiner also insisted that CRC is “aware of complaints and problems at Aspen and wants to make sure it has the best practices possible.” To that end, he pointed to a recent initiative by CRC to ensure that all its teen programs are certified by two leading accrediting agencies, CARF (the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities) and a body known as the Joint Commission, a 60-year-old industry-funded [ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aspen-education-group-announces-full-program-accreditation-128667768.html ] nonprofit [ http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/18/behavioral_health_care_accreditation.pdf ] that accredits thousands of health care programs in the United States. This is perhaps of scant comfort, given that members of Congress harshly criticized the Joint Commission in the wake of revelations of medical negligence at Walter Reed and other Joint Commission–accredited hospitals. Moreover, many facilities in one of the most notorious chains in the teen treatment field, Straight Inc. [ http://www.rickross.com/groups/straightinc.html ], were approved by accrediting agencies, including the Joint Commission, until they shut down [ http://www.thestraights.com/legal/matrix-civil-criminal.htm ] in the wake of lawsuits and state action. Some maintained their high ratings even after Straight Inc. and several of its spinoffs were hit by state investigations and at least 90 lawsuits alleging abuse.
No turnaround from the turnaround experts
Despite the accumulating lawsuits, state investigations and even criminal inquiries, Bain Capital has yet to force a major shake-up in the culture or leadership of CRC. Aspen co-founder Elliot Sainer and CRC CEO Barry Karlin [ http://www.strugglingteens.com/artman/publish/CRCHealthGroupBN_100628.shtml ] remained in their executive posts until they retired [ http://www.strugglingteens.com/artman/publish/printer_SainerRetireAspenPR_070911.shtml ] in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Both now serve on the CRC board of directors. Trina Packard [ http://www.parentcheckin.com/parent/viewstaffbio.aspx?staff=aae4d71e-c2f5-42f8-84ef-552d977d2c2c ], the executive in charge at Youth Care when Brendan Blum died, remains in her post to this day.
Rather than instituting reforms, CRC seems to have responded to the series of lawsuits, in part, by requiring parents to sign elaborate contracts that feature sweeping “hold harmless [ http://www.heal-online.org/aspenranchcontract.pdf ]” clauses even in the case of death. “This is a business-driven model: caveat emptor,” one Utah Education Department official conceded on background. The contracts leave parents like Julie Scheule, a Wisconsin mom, with little recourse [ http://statecasefiles.justia.com/documents/delaware/superior-court/149470-0.pdf ] when they suspect deception or abuse. In 2007, she sent her daughter, then 15, to an Aspen facility in Utah, since closed, called Aspen Ranch [ http://www.heal-online.org/aspenrch.htm ]. Aspen, she now charges, “abused parental trust, abused our bank account, and abused the kids in their care.” She had a change of heart when she realized she was being hit with thousands of dollars in extra costs and flew to the ranch to remove her daughter. She recalls her daughter hugging her, trembling, and saying, “Please mama, take me out of here.”
Aspen uses what the teen treatment industry calls a “levels” model that grants more privileges and freedoms as students follow the rules, but imposes sanctions of varying severity on those who slip up or disobey.
Punishments were more often psychological than physical. According to former students, emotionally brutal isolation punishments and peer-driven encounter “therapies” were commonly employed to break down resistance, especially at Island View. For Colleen Davidson, the former student there who coughed up blood, the worst part was when students were prodded to confront each other about real or fabricated transgressions in harsh encounter sessions. (In fact, she says, they were very similar to the group therapies cited in the June “torture” lawsuit against Turn-About Ranch.) The sessions were so terrifying that girls resorted to desperate measures to avoid attending, according to Davidson. She recalls that some girls choked themselves to induce fainting; one rubbed feces in her own eyes to cause an infection.
“They break you down, but they don’t really build you back up,” she says of the Island View approach. “I have nightmares from it, and the memories are really awful.”
The no-data zone
CRC declined to address any program-specific allegations. A company spokesperson, Kristen Hayes, instead summed up the company’s approach in a written statement: “Our mission is to bring best practices to our industry in clinical excellence and quality patient care,” she wrote by email. “Our comprehensive risk and compliance protocols help to ensure the delivery of the safest, proven treatment processes.”
CRC has said that its teen care programs are based on recognized and evidence-based programs, including one called contingency management. But critics suggest that the approach as actually applied by Aspen is inconsistent with contingency management — which emphasizes primarily positive reinforcement — while alumni and lawsuits filed over the years by parents of former teen patients describe instead a distorted atmosphere of terror and punishment [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/CAFETY_AEG_FACTSHEET.pdf ] that undercuts their possible utility.
But there are virtually no independent, well-designed, peer-reviewed studies showing that any residential programs for troubled teens actually work [ http://bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=D5NL7igV_CA%3D&tabid=247 ] — and none at all for the behavior-modification approaches employed by Aspen. Research [ https://www.earlyadolescence.org/juvenile_justice_system ] funded by the Department of Justice and a literature review by the NIH [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/politics/17violence.html ] both found, in the context of youth violence and crime prevention, that get-tough, discipline-based approaches [ http://cjjr.georgetown.edu/pdfs/ebp/ebppaper.pdf ] generally do more harm than good.
Shy of evidence, CRC’s PR machine offers up testimonials from pleased parents and CRC-funded surveys [ http://www.aspeneducation.com/Outcome_Study_One_Year_Later.pdf ] of parents and students that report positive outcomes. Hayes put me in touch with one of these parents, the mother of a self-destructive, drug-abusing 15-year-old son whom she sent to Island View, the Aspen program Colleen Davidson attended, after other treatments had failed. “I didn’t want to stand around and wait for my child to die,” she says bluntly. Enrolling him in Aspen, she says, was the turning point. “I wish all kids were as lucky as my son,” she says.
And what can’t be washed away by good PR can always be described as an unavoidable tragedy. At Youth Care of Utah, admissions counselor Claire Roberts offered up this sort of soft-focus gloss when she told me about the death of Brendan Blum. “It was very traumatizing for us,” she said. Then she added philosophically, “These things happen.”
No plausible deniability
Mitt Romney may not know the details of Brendan Blum’s death, but it is difficult to imagine he wouldn’t be aware of the troubles [ http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens ] facing CRC and the residential teen-treatment industry [ http://wwaspdiaries.com/2012/04/14/mitt-romney-a-voice-of-freedom-and-hope-not-for-americas-so-called-troubled-youth/ ] as a whole. Not only are two of his major campaign donors, Connaughton and Barnes, on CRC’s board, but two of his key advisors, Robert Lichfield and Mel Sembler, faced firestorms after allegations of abuse emerged regarding their own residential treatment chains [ http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens ].
Meanwhile, Ann Romney has said that she would make helping troubled teens [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/ann-romney-says-shell-work-with-troubled-teens-as-first-lady-3/ ] a top priority as first lady. And CRC is roaring ahead with an expanded sales force; Eckert, the CEO, told investors in May, “We now have [sales] coverage in every major metropolitan area in the United States.”
The Romney campaign did not respond to queries about his investment in CRC. But candidate Romney has been outspoken about his belief that for-profit health care companies can flourish only without onerous regulations. “I had the occasion of actually acquiring and trying to build health care businesses,” he said during a primary debate last year. “I know something about it, and I believe markets work. And what’s wrong with our health care system in America is that government is playing too heavy a role.”
Crystal Manganaro [ http://astartforteens.org/assets/files/Parent-Crystal-Manganaro-Story-2009.pdf ] likely has a different view. She is the mother of Matthew Meyer, the 14-year-old who died at Aspen’s Lone Star program in 2004, and has forcefully advocated for a federal crackdown on teen residential programs, including those run by Aspen. “For those of you who have not lived through losing a child due to negligence, you just cannot imagine what it feels like unless you have walked through it and deal with it every day of your life,” she said in 2009. “My son is dead and there is nothing I can do about that, but I’ll be damned if my son died in vain.”
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with generous additional support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/18/dark_side_of_a_bain_success/ [with comments]
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Abuse of Brain Injured Americans Scandalizes U.S.
Peter Price is a resident patient at a facility in Bradenton, Florida. He and his family have been instrumental in exposing the problems at his previous facility Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida.
William S. Speer/Bloomberg
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Janet Clark and Kenneth Aulph, former patients at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation, talk with Bloomberg's David Armstrong about the alleged abuse of patients by staff at the facility. About 150 patients live on the FINR campus in Wauchula, Florida, making it one of the largest rehabilitation centers for brain injuries in the country.
(Source: Bloomberg)
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- A staff member at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida, is allegedly caught on tape abusing a patient. A ceiling surveillance camera shows employee McKinkley "Jerome" Scott on Dec. 4, 2011, grabbing the patient, standing him up, then kicking his feet out from under him and pushing him to the ground, according to the State Attorney's Office. Scott faces a pending charge of abusing a disabled person. He has pled not guilty.
(Source: Bloomberg via State Attorney's Office)
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Danny Silva, a patient at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida, is allegedly abused by staff members Landrey Johnson and LaKevin Johnson on Sept. 14, 2011. A FINR employee secretly filmed the event. Landrey Johnson and LaKevin Johnson were arrested and charged with abuse of a disabled adult. They are currently awaiting trial and have pled not guilty.
(Source: Bloomberg via State Attorney's Office.)
The grounds of The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR) in Wauchula on April 27, 2010.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
The grounds of The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR) in Wauchula on April 27, 2010.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
Reginald Hicks, right, was taken to the cafeteria by a FINR employee and given solid food that lodged in his lungs and killed him last December, according to his daughter, Heather Hicks. Her father, a former mortgage worker injured in a car accident, had a care plan that called for tube feeding because he couldn’t swallow, she said. Autopsy findings cited aspiration of food and pneumonia as causes of death.
Suzonne Shivers via Bloomberg
Kenneth Aulph, a former lumberjack who was hit by a car while walking across a highway 12 years ago, said he received little psychological therapy, was assigned useless tasks, and saw patient beatings.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
Defendants LaKevin Johnson, left, Landrey Johnson, center, and McKinley Scott are accused of abusing patients at The Florida Institute of Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR). All three have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Hardee County Sheriff's Office via Bloomberg
The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation is seen in this screenshot taken on July 20, 2012 from Google Earth. The 25-building compound is located on Vandolah Road in Wauchula, Florida.
Google Earth via Bloomberg
Janet Clark said, “One time they had me down and one of the staff kicked me in the eye with a boot."
Janet Clark via Bloomberg
Some patients of the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation say staffers didn't always restrain them in the proper way, kicking them and punching them in some instances. BARR restraint on an adult is supposed to be administered by three people on a 2 inch thick foam mat.
By David Armstrong - Jul 24, 2012 2:15 PM CT
Soon after Peter Price arrived at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation [ http://www.finr.net/ ] to recover from a brain injury, he pleaded for a rescue.
“Jess, they beat me up,” Price told his sister, Jessica Alopaeus, in May 2009. “You have to get me out of here.”
Staffers at his new home held him down and punched him in the face and groin, Price said. When Alopaeus’s efforts to transfer him stalled, Price said his desperation led him to a step aimed at speeding his release.
He swallowed five fish hooks and 22 AA batteries he’d picked up during a patient outing at Wal-Mart. After emergency surgery to remove the objects, he was allowed to transfer to another facility.
Residents at the Florida Institute have often been abused, neglected and confined, according to 20 current and former patients and their family members, criminal charges, civil complaints and advocates for the disabled.
These sources and over 2,000 pages of court and medical records, police reports, state investigations and autopsies contain an untold history of violence and death at the secluded institute known as FINR, which is located amid cattle ranches and citrus groves in Hardee County [ http://www.hardeecounty.net/ ], 50 miles southeast of Tampa.
Patients’ families or state agencies have alleged abuse or care lapses in at least five residents’ deaths since 1998, two of them in the last 18 months. Three former employees face criminal charges of abusing FINR patients -- one of whom was allegedly hit repeatedly for two hours in a TV room last September.
Sparse Care
The complaints underscore the problems that 5.3 million brain-injured Americans are having finding adequate care. Their numbers are growing, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [ http://www.cdc.gov/TraumaticBrainInjury/ ], as better emergency medicine and vehicle safety mean that fewer die from traffic accidents, bullet wounds and other causes of traumatic brain injuries.
The long-term ills range from memory loss and physical handicaps to the inability to control violent anger or sexual aggression. Yet because insurance benefits for rehabilitation are scarce, less than half of those who need it receive it, according to the Brain Injury Association of America [ http://www.biausa.org/ ].
Organized as a company and operated for profit since 1992, FINR has become one of the largest brain-injury centers in the country, with 196 beds. Three rival providers say they know of no place bigger. Multi-site operator NeuroRestorative [ http://www.neurorestorative.com/ ], owned by a holding of buyout firm Vestar Capital Partners, handles more patients.
FINR hasn’t grown by opening its doors to anyone who needs rehabilitation, customers say. Rather, its marketing is focused on the relative few who can pay bills that reach $1,850 a day.
Michigan Mandate
That includes those injured on jobs with generous worker’s compensation benefits, and car-crash victims in Michigan --which mandates unlimited lifetime benefits [ http://www.michigancatastrophic.com/ ] for automobile injury coverage.
Those who have clashed with the company over the treatment of patients say its efforts to keep costs down and extend the duration of stays take priority over care and rehabilitation.
“All people are to them is a monetary gain,” said Jana Thorpe, a professional guardian who removed one of her wards from the company’s care in 2008. “They don’t care if they do anything for them.”
Steven Siporin, another guardian, says he has placed patients at FINR when no one else would take them, and doesn’t expect to send more.
“Is this the best society can do? No,” he says of FINR. “Is this the best under current options? Yes.”
Difficult Clients
Florida’s Department of Children and Families [ http://www.myflfamilies.com/ ] has received 477 allegations of abuse or neglect at FINR since 2005, including 36 that were “verified” by its investigations, according to records released by the agency. The 36 verified claims and others were referred to law enforcement, according to Erin Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the agency, who said she didn’t know what became of the referrals.
FINR executives declined to comment for this story and turned down a request to visit its Wauchula, Florida [ http://www.cityofwauchula.com/ ], facility. Owner Joseph Brennick said he “preferred to stay out of the news” before ending a short phone conversation and directing questions to a lawyer, who said he would not answer them.
On its website, the company calls itself a leader in brain- injury rehabilitation. In past statements it has said it vends “extremely high quality care to very difficult clients” aimed at returning them to their homes, doesn’t use seclusion and has “zero tolerance” for resident abuse.
Elbow Shots
Hardee County prosecutors have charged two FINR staffers with abusing Danny Silva, a 21-year-old autistic patient. Video of the alleged crime shows two large men flanking a smaller figure on a sofa as they punch, elbow and slap him at least 30 times. The blows often come after moans from the man in the middle, which appear to be making it hard for his assailants to hear the TV.
“Shut up, man,” they say in the video, taped by a FINR staffer, according to police. “You are getting on my damn nerves,” one of the hitters tells the smaller man between two elbow shots. A woman in nurse’s clothes shows up in the video to give the alleged victim his medicine.
Defendants LaKevin Johnson [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=lakevin&lname=johnson&fpartial=True ], 30, and Landrey Johnson [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=landrey&lname=johnson&fpartial=True ], 39, of Fort Meade, Florida, have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Their lawyer didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Employee McKinley Scott [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=mckinley&lname=scott&fpartial=True ] pulled autistic patient Gabriel Allen up from his seat and threw him to the ground last December in a second case, prosecutors say. A video in the case shows a man identified as Scott pushing Allen away from him on a couch, standing him up, kicking his legs out from under him and leaving him curled up on the floor next to a blinking Christmas tree. Scott, 48, has pleaded not guilty to an abuse charge. His lawyer didn’t return calls.
’Positional Asphyxia’
In an earlier incident, Michael Lieux, a brain-injured ex- Marine from Louisiana, suffocated when four FINR employees pinned him face down until he couldn’t breathe, according to a negligence lawsuit that won his family a $5 million jury verdict in 2005.
It was homicide by “positional asphyxia,” according to the medical examiner for Hardee County. The company denied it was negligent and lost its appeal in the case [ http://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-district-court-of-appeal/1160705.html ].
Two resident deaths at FINR that same year led to confidential settlements of lawsuits alleging negligence and care lapses that the company denied. In 2009, a FINR staffer pleaded guilty to battery charges after punching out a resident who had scratched him during a restraint.
Fiery Fist
More recently, Reginald Hicks was taken to the cafeteria by a FINR employee and given solid food that lodged in his lungs and killed him last December, according to his daughter, Heather Hicks. Her father, a former mortgage-workout specialist injured in a car accident, had a care plan that called for tube feeding because he couldn’t swallow, she said. Autopsy findings cited aspiration of food and pneumonia as causes of death.
FINR’s marketing appears aimed at acquiring tough behavioral cases, including aggressive patients. Its website features an ad [ http://www.finr.net/files/fist_ad.pdf ] dominated by a clenched, fiery-colored fist -- “One of the Subtle Signs That It’s Time for Neurological Rehabilitation,” according to the headline.
The road to the company’s 900-acre spread in Wauchula passes fields of grazing cattle and trees draped in Spanish Moss. It houses 152 beds, with 44 more in nearby apartments and group homes. The “secluded, pastoral” locale keeps residents from trying to run away, the company has said. Other deterrents, current and former patients say, are the alligators and snakes roaming the property.
Family History
The facility was once part of New Medico Inc., a chain founded by Charles Brennick, the father of FINR owner Joseph Brennick. A 1992 Congressional investigation highlighted allegations that New Medico staff abused patients and prolonged stays to boost revenues.
Joseph Brennick, then a senior New Medico employee, promised to block discharges to keep clients, the final Congressional report said. If one wanted to leave, staffers should “all jump all over him as a team until he stays,” the report quoted a Brennick memo as saying.
Around this time, some of the facilities were transferred to the elder Brennick’s sons, according to corporate and real estate records. Joseph, who wound up with Wauchula, has prospered as its owner, according to former staffers.
In 1995, he bought South Watch, a gated estate on 62 acres near Sarasota that has a 9,000-square-foot home and is valued at $1.7 million for tax purposes. Brennick bought 311 acres nearby for $6.4 million in 2007. He owns four cars, one a 2004 Maybach 62 luxury sedan valued at $300,000. FINR’s main campus is valued for taxes at $11.2 million.
’Taken Down’
Ex-residents of FINR said they were frequently “taken down” or knocked to the floor and restrained by staff, in a routine often accompanied by beatings. They say the take-downs were described by the company as a form of restraint called BARR -- for Brief Assisted Required Relaxation. Blue mats sometimes used for the purpose are ubiquitous at FINR, according to patients and visitors.
“I was taken down at least once a week,” said Janet Clark, who stayed at FINR from 2006 to 2007 after she was injured in a car crash. Clark keeps a photo from her Wauchula days in which she is expressionless and sports a black eye that she said came from staffers.
“One time they had me down and one of the staff kicked me in the eye with a boot,” said Clark, a former prison guard who now lives on her own in Hillsborough, North Carolina. “They were saying shut up, screaming at me. I was hurting so much I couldn’t stop. It was terrifying.”
$310,000 Bill
Clark, 55, had behavioral issues while she was recovering, including times when she needed to be restrained, she said, but not with the force or frequency that FINR used. She received no psychological therapy there for her aggression problem although she was paying the company $310,000 a year from a personal injury settlement, she said.
“Immediate and consistent psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment” were “clearly indicated” for Clark, according to an outside evaluation she obtained from Sally Kolitz Russell, a Miami psychologist, nine months into her FINR stay.
The company relies on a network of guardians, case workers, doctors and lawyers to find patients. It has exhibited at the annual National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference and the National Guardianship Association conference.
FINR also cosponsors events for the brain-injured in Michigan, home of the lifetime auto-injury benefit. There were 20 Michiganders at the facility at one point last year, according to court records -- one for every 10 beds at the facility.
Country Club
Placements at FINR are often made by guardians in Michigan and elsewhere who control the finances and treatment of patients who have been ruled incompetent by courts.
“It’s human trafficking,” said Kenneth Aulph, a former lumberjack who was hit by a car while walking across a highway 12 years ago.
Aulph said he received little psychological therapy, was assigned useless tasks, and saw patient beatings after he was sent to FINR by Siporin, his court-appointed Michigan guardian, whose practice handles about 120 wards.
“I wanted to stay in Michigan where my friends and family are,” Aulph said.
A Siporin aide showed him a company brochure that “made you think you were going to a country club,” highlighting the lakes, swimming pool and library on the Wauchula grounds, Aulph said. Siporin praised FINR’s brain-injury program and added a threat, according to Aulph: If he didn’t go to Florida, Siporin would get a court order to put him in a mental institution.
Sandpaper Alphabet
Siporin promised in June 2009 that Aulph would be back in Michigan by Christmas, according to Cathy Kemper, his sister. Instead he stayed two years. Siporin denied threatening Aulph and said he made no promise about length of stay. Aulph went willingly to Wauchula, Siporin said.
After breakfast at FINR, Aulph said would spend three hours weeding in the greenhouse, followed by lunch, then a routine in which he sanded down wooden letters of the alphabet that staff tossed into the trash afterward. Aulph said he was capable of more -- including the intricately carved birdhouses on display in his Michigan apartment.
Patients Restricted
Patients were mostly restricted to the areas near their cabins in the evenings and weekends, recreation was rare and the swimming pool pictured in the brochure was filled with cement, Aulph said. Patients say they were rarely allowed near the lakes.
Kemper said she pressed Siporin almost as soon as her brother arrived in Florida to get him out and wanted to know why he wasn’t getting something better for the $900 a day his insurer was paying.
“Ken was a cash cow,” she said.
Calls to Siporin’s office often went unreturned, and when she did make contact, he assured her that Aulph was doing well, she said. He stopped resisting a move only after she demanded to know the name of the judge in Aulph’s case, Kemper said. Her brother is now in a rehabilitation center in Ann Arbor.
Siporin said he worked to return Aulph to Michigan, and was unaware of any Kemper query about the judge.
FINR’s bills have also been paid by state governments and the District of Columbia. They’ve sent patients to Wauchula as wards or when they qualify for state assistance.
21 Recalls
Over the last four years, D.C. has recalled 21 patients from the facility. The pullout followed a 2008 investigation [ http://www.uls-dc.org/finr.pdf ] by the district’s designated disabilities advocate that found FINR violated patients’ human rights and D.C. policies by improperly secluding them in their rooms or using drugs as a form of restraint.
The company denied those allegations in a letter to the D.C. attorney general. It said patients weren’t restricted to their rooms, only to their cabins.
In September 2010, the state of Connecticut placed Melinda Jakobowski, 24, in the company’s care. Not brain injured, she had been abused as a child and was one of seven mentally ill or disabled patients the state had placed at Wauchula.
By February, Jakobowski was dead. Three resulting state- level inquiries in Florida and Connecticut raised questions about the quality of her care, injuries she received at FINR before her death, Florida’s oversight of the company and the accuracy of her autopsy.
FINR used BARR on Jakobowski 29 times during her five-month stay -- compared to just five restraints in the prior five months in a hospital in her home state, according to a report last month by the Connecticut Fatality Review Board for Persons with Disabilities [ http://www.ct.gov/opapd/cwp/view.asp?a=1746&q=277604 ].
Busted Lip
Jakobowski complained that staffers were hitting her and calling her names, the board said. She had a “busted lip” and “what appeared to be bruising under her left eye” about a month before she died, according to a sheriff’s office report on a mistreatment allegation it had received. The officers concluded she had not been abused.
Although she had a history of self-harm, Jakobowski wasn’t showing suicidal tendencies at the end of her stay in Connecticut, the fatality board said. She tried at least six times to harm herself between September and January at FINR, including attempts to hang herself with a phone cord and to wrap a t-shirt and a bedsheet around her neck.
Not Breathing
The company’s plan of care for her required two staff members to be watching her and within arm’s length at all times, according to an investigation by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, or AHCA.
On Feb. 10, 2011, arriving morning shift employees found Jakobowski in her bed just after 8 a.m., not breathing, with her hair wrapped around her neck. She was later pronounced dead at a Tampa hospital.
One of the employees tasked with watching her was asleep on a couch, according to the Florida investigations. The other was awake, but not observing Jakobowski for at least 15 minutes, the Florida Department of Children and Families determined. Both staffers were fired, the agency said.
A month before she died, Jakobowski told her caregivers it would be easy for her to quickly kill herself because overnight staffers slept, according to an internal FINR document cited by Connecticut investigators. “It will only take like 3 minutes and by the time they even know it, I’ll be dead and happy,” the report quoted her as saying.
’Obvious Flaws’
The medical examiner in Tampa ruled her death “Sudden Ventricular Arrhythmia due to Schizophrenia.” The sheriff’s office closed its investigation based on that finding, saying Jakobowski died of natural causes.
The Connecticut report said there is no record of a schizophrenia diagnosis for Jakobowski. FINR records indicate she had bipolar disorder.
“There are obvious flaws in the investigations conducted by Florida agencies and there appear to be weaknesses in the system of oversight and monitoring of the FINR facility and its program,” the report said.
Mary Mainland, the Tampa medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, said she doesn’t remember how she determined Jakobowski was schizophrenic. “It doesn’t really change the essence of the diagnosis” because sudden cardiac death has been seen in other mental illnesses, she said.
Florida’s AHCA found no violations of its regulations and referred the case to the state Department of Health for further review. The health department was unaware of the referral for more than a year until Bloomberg News recently asked about it.
Wrong License
“We are working with AHCA to resolve this issue,” said Victor Johnson, director of the department’s unit that includes its Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Program [ http://www.doh.state.fl.us/demo/brainsc/index.html ]. FINR’s license doesn’t allow it to treat mentally ill patients like Jakobowski who are not brain injured, said Thom DeLilla, the program’s chief.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services considers “FINR to be a safe and effective placement,” according to James Siemianowski, a spokesman for the agency. He said the treatment of patients is monitored monthly and that clients must agree to be placed there.
Allegations that FINR limits residents’ contact with the outside world have surfaced in court cases in which they sought to oust Siporin as their guardian so they could leave the facility.
Three Cases
In three such cases since 2010, patients were allegedly blocked from traveling to Michigan for hearings after the company or Siporin told the court they couldn’t be safely transported, or that it would require too many staff members.
When patient Gabriealle Weakley’s lawyer called her at the facility days before the hearing in her case, FINR imposed a one-minute limit on their conversation, according to notes from company employees that are part of the court record.
The notes indicate that privacy and liberties were limited in other ways. A supervisor confiscated printouts of e-mails Weakley received from outside because Siporin didn’t allow communication with the man who sent them, the FINR notes say. The man was a boyfriend who brought Weakley items she wasn’t allowed, such as cameras and cellphones, according to Siporin, who prevailed in court.
The notes include detailed quotes from patient conversations with relatives, and discuss residents who were prohibited by the company from making and receiving phone calls. Several patients say they were blocked from sending mail from the FINR, and that emails were barred or limited.
Prison Preferable
“You have more freedom in prison and at least there you know when you are getting out,” says Elmer Cerano, executive director of Michigan Protection and Advocacy Service Inc. [ http://www.mpas.org/HomePage.asp ], that state’s advocate for the disabled.
Michigan Protection represented Lori Johnson, a patient who wanted to remove Siporin as her guardian and leave Wauchula. She lost in court, where Siporin cited his years of experience with the brain-injured and said FINR was the best place for her.
Price, 24 years old and brain-injured since a bicycle accident at the age of eight, said he wanted to leave FINR after he was punched in the face and groin there in May 2009. Alopaeus, his sister and legal guardian, supported the move. Siporin, who was co-guardian, opposed it.
FINR’s treatment of Price was “inhumane,” said Alopaeus. Price had a “busted lip” and bruises that could have come from BARR restraints, according to a sheriff’s deputy report dated May 8 of that year. Price had been trying to fight with staffers when they stopped him from leaving his cabin four days earlier, the report said.
‘Body Sheet’
FINR recorded his injuries in a “Body Sheet” diagram Alopaeus said the company gave her. Under “location of bruises, scrapes, scars, rashes etc.,” the diagram notes blue discoloration around his left eye, one testicle larger than the other, and other discoloration on his arms and chest. The sheriff’s office concluded there was no evidence of abuse, and said Price changed his story several times about which staffers were involved in the incident.
Price was taken down more than 20 times and confined to his cabin at FINR for weeks at a time, he said in an interview. Residents are kept in as part of “Therapeutic Cabin Based Programming,” used to protect them from hurting themselves or others, the company has said.
Price had kind words for staff members who brought playing cards and music to his room. Others were malevolent, including one who allegedly placed a clipboard over his chest, punched him repeatedly, and told him the method would not leave bruises, Price said.
Fish Hooks
After one period of seclusion, he said he was allowed to go to Wal-Mart, where he bought the batteries and fish hooks that he later swallowed. Price also cut his belly and stuffed two of the batteries and eight hooks into the wound.
“I planned this” as a way to get out of FINR, Price said. “My plan wasn’t to die.”
It was a month before he recovered from the surgery to remove the objects. He never returned to FINR, and Siporin agreed to give up his guardianship. Price now lives in an apartment run by a different center in Florida, where he is monitored, but able to leave his apartment most days.
He said he goes on fishing trips, eats out, sees movies, and has never been taken down at his new home.
To contact the reporter responsible for this story: David Armstrong in Boston at darmstrong16@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. (emphasis added)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-24/brain-injured-abuse-at-for-profit-center-scandalizes-u-s-.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning
Mitt Romney has earned a lot of income overseas.
07/24/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/mitt-romney-foreign-income_n_1695806.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Romney May Have Paid No Federal Income Tax From 1999 to 2001
07/24/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-talbott/romney-taxes_b_1695715.html [with comments]
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When Will Romney Reveal His Returns?
July 23, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/when-will-romney-reveal-his-returns/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney’s $100M IRA: Gaming the System at Bain
Image: msnbc.com
Mitt Romney will pimp your portfolio. Well, not yours but...
Steve Klingaman
JULY 26, 2012 8:27AM
I might have titled this piece “How to Build a $100 Million Dollar IRA, Just Like Mitt Romney” but it would have been an unfair tease. The problem is, even if you know how to do it, you need to run a firm like Bain Capital to pull it off. If you work for Bain Capital, that’ll do. But you have to have a boss with a very particular mindset, a boss like Mitt Romney.
The way you do it is astonishingly arcane. You rip the fiscal guts out of a company you’ve acquired and refashion them just so. You split the shares into two classes, type A shares and others we'll call type B. Type A shares are riskier, but if the acquired company turns around, their value grows exponentially. The other shares, Type B, are more like standard shares that you would see on the market. They go in your regular portfolio.
When the owner and employees of a takeover firm like Bain work on a project they might receive part of their compensation in the two varieties of shares. Or they may co-invest in the acquisition. Type A shares, with their potential for extreme growth, go into tax-deferred retirement accounts, where all that growth grows untaxed until retirement. In this manner, all of the income restrictions on how much can be contributed annually to an SEP-IRA are circumvented and the owners of these accounts can build a lifetime of retirement savings in just a few short, lucky, years.
What we are talking about here is the very meaning of the words unfair advantage.
The Wall Street Journal, much to its credit, did the initial digging into how Mitt built his $100 million retirement account in a story that appeared in March. It should be noted that the true value of Mitt’s SEP-IRA is unknown because he refuses to share the details—“Let them eat cake,” as his lovely wife Ann was paraphrased on the topic of open access. Ironically, this disclosure is a practice initiated by Mitt’s father George during his own run for the Big Office. In fact, the value of Mitt’s IRA could be as low as $20 million, which I imagine will make you feel a lot better, because a 401k or IRA valued at that level might make you feel like Mitt’s unfair advantage is a little less, well, unfair, right?
Anyway, back to the Wall Street Journal article, “Bain Gave Staff Way to Swell IRAs by Investing in Deals [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204062704577223682180407266.html ],” by Mark Maremont. It is a gem, recommended reading to be sure. A short excerpt goes a long way toward explaining how the deals work:
Bain in the Romney era had what's known as a SEP-IRA—a plan somewhat akin to a 401(k) but involving only employer contributions—which had contribution limits before 2001 of $30,000 a year. Putting in low-price A shares, said former employees, gave them a shot at building substantial tax-deferred accounts despite the contribution limits.
A deal for Sealy Corp. shows how this could work if all went well. Bain led a group that took over the mattress maker in 1997. One junior Bain employee invested about $30,000 in Sealy, documents reviewed by the Journal show, putting a few thousand dollars of IRA money into the risky, low-price A shares. Ninety percent of the employee's investment went into the safer shares, which were placed in a taxable account.
In 2004, after Sealy's value had been sharply raised by Bain and its partners, they sold most of Sealy for a large gain. The employee's approximately $30,000 investment grew to about $160,000.
To put this in context, this Bain employee was able to amass an amount--$160,000—that is approximately three times what the average American has in their entire IRA or 401k through the rapid growth of an initial investment of $30,000 of what the company said was junk stock. And that’s an important point. Because only Bain knows the parameters of the deal, it’s chances for success and the potential upsides involved. Let’s say it plainly: the classification and pricing of shares is purely arbitrary. Their potential for rapid growth is directly based on the degree to which they can be undervalued at the outset. This is what I mean by gaming the system.
And it is by gaming the system in this manner that Mitt was able to build his $100 million nest egg. If he had undervalued one class of shares and then stuck them in his Cayman island or Swiss bank account that could work, too, but that might raise the specter of tax evasion, which is a crime. Mitt is too smart for that. He is a tax avoider, not a tax evader, as far as we know, because of course he won’t disclose his offshore holdings, and presumably he had his Swiss bank accounts vacated when the federal government cracked down on tax evasion via Swiss accounts.
Mitt was so clever that his plan verged on, well, actually, well beyond, overkill. No one really wants to have $100 million in an IRA, because it will be taxed at the level of income when the money is withdrawn and it is taxed at a brutally high rate if it goes into one’s estate. However, if the plan was to fund one’s religious tithing with those tax-deferred dollars; that would be a really cheap way to fund the tithe with tax-privileged, false cost basis, taxpayer-subsidized dollars. And that is a hard-core benefit no matter how you cut it. It is almost as if the government is covering the bill.
And this scenario is in no way mere serendipity. Tax planners talk with wealthy donors all the time about the benefits of using a tax-deferred retirement account to fund charitable giving. But most high rollers don’t get to fund their plans with the stock market equivalent of funny money; they have to use real dollars.
Is this the ethos of government service that you want to see in your president? Is this “Ask not what your country…?” No, let me answer. It is not. This is, “How can I game the system to extract the last drop of income out of the tax code and make that tax structure work for me in ways that the other 99.99 of my fellow Americans cannot?”
Some would argue that you want a guy this smart running the country. I would beg to differ. First of all, Bain’s accounting department or one of its consultants came up with the original scheme, not Romney himself. Second, a genius for tax avoidance is not the same genius it takes to actually run a company or a country. I would rather have a gifted legal mind driving the bus, rather than a flat-out schemer. No, I take that back. I would take a little of the schemer if it could be the Lyndon Johnson variety, someone who can twist an arm to get a law passed. Romney, stiff as a shirt-board, couldn’t glad-handle his way out of a paper bag. Not to say President Obama is a whole lot better, though he sure can sing better, and that counts for something on Congressional Karaoke night.
If I had been a minion at the table back at Bain Capital, I would have posed the question: Is it possible to put too much money into a SEP-IRA or 401k? I mean, shouldn’t we go for a tax-deferred retirement account that hits the top .0001 percent, say, $4 million, and call it a day?
At some point all these machinations just begin to look like connivance. And in that respect you can call Mitt a bit of an overachiever. In a way, it’s just stupid to have a $100 million IRA. As to the tithing, charitable gifts are laudable, but Mitt gamed the system in such a way that the lost revenue to the government was more than substantial, and in a manner that is entirely unavailable to the rest of us. So, being as charitable to Mitt as circumstances allow, it’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ gain, U.S. Treasury Department’s loss. I would prefer as president a guy who would bust a nut working for the welfare of all Americans, not just some at the expense of others. What he did doesn’t have to be illegal for me to think of him as a tax cheat.
© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman/2012/07/25/romneys_100m_ira_gaming_the_system_at_bain [with comments]
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Mitt's Speculative Financial Fiction
The Strip | By Brian McFadden
July 22, 2012
© 2012 The New York Times Company
[currently at] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html#1
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Mitt Romney Registered As Lobbyist For Salt Lake City Olympics
Posted: 07/26/2012 7:33 am Updated: 07/26/2012 8:52 am
WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney loves to talk about his role salvaging the 2002 scandal-tarnished Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It's one of the only items on his resume that he will discuss without hesitation. He's so proud of the accomplishment, he wrote a book about it called "Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, And The Olympic Games."
His Olympics success was pivotal in his winning run for Massachusetts governor in 2002, and it may turn out to be just as important in his current campaign for the presidency. It's why he plans on cheering from the good seats [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/summer-2012-travels-with-mitt-romney/ ] when the opening ceremonies commence for the summer games in London this week.
But when it comes to the retelling of his Olympics story, Romney never mentions the L word. Lobbyist.
Romney wasn't just the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Romney was also a registered lobbyist for the organization, Utah state records show.
Romney last worked as a lobbyist on Dec. 31, 2000, according to a spokesman for the state lieutenant governor, who oversees the registry.
As a lobbyist and president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, Romney didn't just stabilize the balance sheet. He brought in a record $1.3 billion in federal dollars [ http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.com/_news/2012/07/21/12877714-mitt-romney-and-federal-money-for-the-olympics ] for Salt Lake City's games and more from Utah. In 1996, the Atlanta Summer Olympics cost U.S. taxpayers $609 million [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95650 ]. The Salt Lake Tribune wrote in March 2000: "If charming state lawmakers were an Olympic event, Mitt Romney would be draped in a flag about now, singing the national anthem."
After winning support from Utah's Legislature for Olympics projects, Romney told reporters that "hosting the world is obviously bigger than SLOC can do alone. The Legislature recognizes they are a critical partner. I am very pleased they have confidence in us and confidence in our plans."
The Romney campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Romney's Olympics role as a registered lobbyist.
While Romney has since ignored his lobbyist history, he attacked his primary opponents for lobbying. He assailed challenger Newt Gingrich for working a Washington lobbyist. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington," Romney told [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/romney_attacks_newt_as_lobbyist/ ] a crowd in Florida during the primary. The Romney campaign leveled similar charges against Sen. Rick Santorum, questioning his role [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/09/us-usa-campaign-idUSTRE8230GE20120309 ] as a lobbyist in Pennsylvania.
Former Salt Lake City Olympics organizers give Romney high marks on his lobbying skills.
Robert Garff, former chairman of the board of the SLOC, told The Huffington Post that Romney was instrumental in winning federal money. "He was able to acquire funding to remodel some of the infrastructure -- the roads," Garff explained. "That helped immensely to reduce the traffic strain. He was also able to help [with] security."
The games ended up becoming a boondoggle for pet projects. Sydney Fonnesbeck, a former Salt Lake City Council member who worked on various Olympics-related committees, insisted the federal funds went for legitimate purposes. Still, she added, "For those of us who live here, if the Olympics is the excuse we need to get it done, we said, 'Let's do it.'"
The Democratic National Committee is already running ads quoting Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) complaints at the time. He slammed the federal spending on the Salt Lake games as an "incredible pork-barrel project [ http://thehill.com/video/campaign/211355-new-dnc-ad-hits-romney-over-olympics-leadership ]" and a "rip-off of the taxpayers." McCain went further [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95650 ] calling the spending a "disgrace" and pushed for a federal investigation.
The federal spending was lavish. And much of it benefited private interests. In its definitive December 2001 investigation [ http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1024516/index.htm ], Sports Illustrated documented shady spending and taxpayer-funded bridges-to-nowhere, including a millionaire developer receiving federal cash to build a road, and a billionaire ski resort owner gobbling up public land with federal assistance. Taxpayers spent $12 million on two temporary parking lots. Romney's committee spent $3 million in federal money building a fence and adding security around a medical center to protect patients from Olympics crowds. Another $1 million was spent on a weather forecasting system.
"With all the skill, grace and precision of a hockey team on a power play, Utah's five-member congressional delegation has used the Olympics to drain money from an unprecedented number of federal departments, agencies and offices -- some three dozen in all, from the Office of National Drug Control Policy to the Agriculture Department," wrote famed investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in Sports Illustrated.
Just as he was beginning his run for Massachusetts governor in 2002, Romney testified under oath [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/mitt-romney-bain-departure_n_1669006.html ] before a Massachusetts commission over a residency dispute. According to a transcript obtained by HuffPost, he told the commission: "I spent a great deal of time meeting with the federal government" while working on the Olympics.
The Salt Lake Tribune suggested Romney held onto his lobbying registration longer than state records reflect. His lobbying days ended when controversy began brewing over a second bribery-style Olympics scandal.
"Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Mitt Romney and his top lieutenants have suddenly canceled their state lobbyist licenses," the newspaper reported in January 2002. "The withdrawal of lobbying registrations for six SLOC officials was requested in late December, just weeks before the opening of the Utah Legislature and at the same time rumors abound of lawmakers being offered free Olympic event tickets. State law says businesses with registered lobbyists must report gifts to lawmakers, while it is unclear about other organizations that donate freebies to legislators."
During Romney's campaign for Massachusetts governor following the games, he boasted of his lobbying abilities [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUiViadw0dg (below)].
Of course, Romney made no mention of the L word.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/mitt-romney-olympics_n_1704261.html [with comments]
===
Romney’s ’02 Olympics short on transparency
Despite pledge, records destroyed
By Christopher Rowland and Callum Borchers
July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney promised “complete transparency” when he took charge of the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Olympics, a pledge that included access to his own correspondence and plans for an extensive public archive of documents related to the Games.
But some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staffer shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts.
“Transparency? There was none with [the Salt Lake Organizing Committee] when he was there,” said Kenneth Bullock, a committee member who represented the Utah League of Cities and Towns. “Their transparency became a black hole. It was nonexistent.”
According to Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, “Mitt Romney resigned from SLOC in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”
Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no legal obligation to preserve their records or make them public, even though the state paid $59 million, and the federal government spent $342 million on the Games and contributed roughly $1 billion more in indirect aid for transportation projects and other capital improvements in the Salt Lake region.
Like other Olympics, the 2002 Winter Games were managed not by a public entity but by a private, nonprofit corporation that was exempt from public records laws.
Earlier Olympic organizing committees, too, had destroyed internal documents. Organizers of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, burned records of their bid to host the Olympics — a move widely believed to have covered up bribery.
But Romney vowed that he and his committee would operate out in the open. Dubbed a “franchise player” by Utah’s Governor Mike Leavitt, Romney was charged with leading the comeback from a scandal in which some on the Salt Lake bid committee had quietly doled out cash payments to International Olympic Committee members during the host city selection process.
“Any time there has been a breach of trust by people at the top, that organization is going to be placed under a microscope, and that is appropriate,” Romney said at a news conference on Feb. 11, 1999, the day he was named chief executive of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. “We will be viewed much more carefully than any other organizing committee, perhaps in the history of the Olympics, and we deserve to be so viewed. I believe we will come through with flying colors.”
There were two major prongs on Romney’s transparency promise: One was “the most open documents policy of any enterprise.”
“All of the documents inside our organization are available to the public,” Romney said in a speech to the National Press Club in 2000. “Simply submit a form saying which documents you want. For instance: ‘I want to see all the letters written by Mr. Romney to [then-IOC President Juan Antonio] Samaranch.’ You’ll get ’em all.”
But letters between journalists and the organizing committee obtained by the Globe show reporters were sometimes denied access to records they believed were covered by the committee’s open documents policy. Only a week after Romney spoke to the National Press Club, the Utah chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists wrote a complaint to the committee.
“There were some difficulties and some reporters felt they were treated differently than others,” recalled Paul Murphy, the Utah chapter president at the time.
The committee charged news outlets $25 per hour to research records requests, even if the requests were eventually denied.
Even within the organizing committee, access to information was sometimes restricted, according to Bullock, the committee member.
“Everything should have been accessible to the board, but it wasn’t because that’s not what Mitt wanted,” he said.
The other prong was the public archive, billed as an unvarnished documentary of the Salt Lake City Olympics — from bid scandal to closing ceremony.
A decade later, the Games’ official records, housed at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, still have not been made available to the public. ABC News reported Monday on the unpublished archive and the destruction of documents.
When the collection is finally unveiled next month, the public should not expect any major insights into the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s leadership of the Games, archivists say. Instead of executive office memoranda, budgets, and correspondence, the 1,100 cartons of records contain only previously published brochures, manuals, and some general guidance on how to run an Olympics.
“It’s not about the inner workings of anything,’’ said Elizabeth Rogers, the library’s curator of manuscripts. “I haven’t seen anything particular to Mitt Romney.”
Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials confirmed to the Globe that most administrative records were destroyed in the months after the Games concluded.
Romney did not oversee the destruction of organizing committee documents. That task fell to Fraser Bullock (no relation to Kenneth Bullock), the committee’s chief operating officer and a former Romney colleague at Bain Capital, who took over as the Games’ chief executive when Romney left to run for governor of Massachusetts.
“Mitt didn’t have anything to do with any of those decisions,” Fraser Bullock said. “He was long gone, and it was really left up to the poeple left behind to decide what to keep and what not to keep.”
Fraser Bullock said the goal was to save materials that future organizing committees might find useful.
“What we instructed our people to keep were things that were relative to putting on the Olympics, for future groups who would want to understand how operations worked,” Fraser Bullock said.
But that was not the original purpose of the archive, according to an agreement between the organizing committee and the University of Utah.
“Our intention was we were documenting the Salt Lake Olympics, and it sounds like they were just thinking about someone using that for future planning,” said Jeffery O. Johnson, Utah’s state archivist until 2002 and a member of the ad hoc committee that helped form the archive agreement. “Certainly that was not our intention.’’
The agreement was the product of years of collaboration by the organizing committee, university, state, Utah State Historical Society, and other interested parties. Signed Oct. 30, 2001, it outlined the “probable scope” of records to be archived in the Marriott Library, including written records of SLOC management and departments, Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee records, and “other administrative records that document the planning and staging of the Olympic Winter Games.”
But the agreement contained a clause that gave Olympic organizers the authority to withhold any records for any reason.
Publicly, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee suggested the archive would be a hallmark of the 2002 Winter Games, according to media accounts of the time. But internally, archiving was not a high priority, according to committee archivist Mark Jensen.
“People were encouraged to select documents about the planning and staging of the Games, but it was voluntary,” Jensen said.
“I didn’t interact with Mr. Romney to any degree, except for a couple of occasions,” he added. “But my impression is that his philosophy on the archive mirrored that of [Fraser] Bullock.”
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2012/07/24/after_romney_pledged_transparent_olympics_key_documents_were_destroyed/ [with comments]
===
Ticket broker tied to Romney, 2002 scandal apologizes for new Olympic woes
By Mark Hosenball
Wed Jul 25, 2012 5:31am IST
LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) - A longtime Olympics ticket broker is apologizing for delays in distributing tickets to the London Summer Games that have forced some fans to spend up to six hours in sweltering heat this week waiting for their orders.
The ticket agency CoSport - whose owner was a figure in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics scandal and is a prominent backer of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney - said in a statement Tuesday that it understood the frustration of customers, many of whom have arrived in London from the United States and Canada.
CoSport also said it was "very sorry" that some customers had not been given the bloc seating arrangements they requested.
The episode has drawn attention to the cozy relationship CoSport and its affiliates enjoy with the Olympics, for which the companies have provided travel packages since 1984.
And in a twist of circumstance, the ticket problems also are a reminder of the agency owner's role in a scandal surrounding the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City just as the leader of those Games, Romney, is scheduled to visit here for the opening of the London Games.
CoSport - described on its website as having the "exclusive right to market and sell Olympic" hospitality and ticket packages in the United States, Canada and a few European nations - is owned by Sead Dizdarevic, who with his wife, Margaret, is a major supporter of Romney.
Reports filed with the U.S. Federal Election Commission indicate the Dizdarevics and their company have contributed $200,000 to Restore Our Future, a political action committee, or PAC, that supports Romney's bid to oust President Barack Obama in the election on Nov. 6.
There is no indication Romney had anything to do with CoSport's work on the London Olympics or any problems the ticket agency has had.
A CONTROVERSIAL PAST
Sead Dizdarevic has a long and controversial history as an Olympics tickets distributor.
A native of Yugoslavia who began arranging Olympic travel packages for the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, Dizdarevic's companies have arranged VIP travel and ticket packages for every Olympiad since.
In Salt Lake City, Dizdarevic was embroiled in a scandal that shook the Olympic movement and led to Romney, then a private-equity executive at Bain Capital in Boston, being enlisted to steer the 2002 Games out of trouble.
The scandal focused on allegations that Salt Lake officials bidding to lure the Olympics there had spent millions of dollars on gifts, cash payments and other benefits for IOC members involved in deciding whether to award the Games to Salt Lake City.
It also involved payments that prospective vendors made to Salt Lake Olympics officials. An indictment accused two officials of receiving $130,000 from Jet Set Sports, of which CoSport is a part.
The charges eventually were tossed out by a federal judge, but not before Dizdarevic testified against the suspects after receiving immunity from prosecution.
Despite the cash payments controversy, Romney recruited Jet Set as a sponsor after he took over as chief of the Salt Lake Games, according to Mark Lewis, who worked on the Games as a close aide to Romney.
In the years that followed, Dizdarevic and his companies maintained and expanded their involvement with the Olympics.
Lewis and Fraser Bullock, another of Romney's top deputies in Salt Lake, became involved with Dizdarevic and Jet Set Sports. Lewis, a fundraiser Romney hired away from the International Olympic Committee to raise funds for the Salt Lake Games, joined Jet Set as its president in 2005. Last December, Romney's campaign announced that Lewis was one of its state finance co-chairmen in Montana.
Lewis left Jet Set last April to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association. At the time he also resigned from his unpaid position with Romney's campaign.
FRUSTRATION IN LONDON
Romney's trip to Europe this week will include stops in London, Israel and Poland, as the former Massachusetts governor seeks to establish himself on an international stage.
Neither Romney's campaign nor Jet Set Sports would comment on whether the broker had a role in arranging Romney's trip.
A person who answered the phone at Jet Set Sports' New Jersey office said Dizdarevic was in London. He did not respond to messages left by e-mail, telephone and personal visit.
At the community college campus near London's Paddington train station that is the London ticket pickup center for CoSports customers, some fans in line on Tuesday said they had tried to collect their tickets on Monday but found waiting times on an unusually sunny London day running up to six hours.
On Tuesday, customers said, the lines seemed to be moving somewhat faster. The ticket agency handed out bottles of water and erected canopies to shade customers from the sun.
But Dave Sirrell, a customer from Canada waiting for his tickets, said he found the situation "...pathetic. ... They should have had this (office) open last week." (Editing by David Lindsey and Philip Barbara)
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/25/oly-usa-tickets-romney-idINL2E8IO2OF20120725
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Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman Jr. and 2002 Olympics
July 25, 2012
Mitt Romney often speaks of his successful role in leading the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. He doesn’t talk much about the fact that he wasn’t the first choice for the job. And he doesn’t talk at all about the fact that one of his potential rivals for the gig was Jon Huntsman Jr., who competed against him in the Republican presidential primary.
Mr. Romney was chosen as chief of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in 1999; he was hired to right the ship after members of the bid committee created a scandal by giving lavish gifts to members of the International Olympic Committee in hopes of gaining favor.
In today’s Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443295404577547363394704358.html ( http://on.wsj.com/PglfZ5 )], Robert Garff, who chaired the Salt Lake committee at the time, said Mr. Romney ranked about sixth on a list of a dozen potential candidates for the job. With the integrity of the entire effort at stake, Mr. Garff worked with then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to find someone to take the helm. Mr. Leavitt is now a top adviser on the Romney presidential campaign.
[...]
Mr. Leavitt had watched Mr. Romney wage an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate against incumbent Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. He recalls thinking, “This guy’s got his public service gene lit up, and maybe I could exploit it.”
In “Turnaround,” Mr. Romney’s book about his Olympics experience, he doesn’t go into details about the search. “Somehow my name had come up,” he wrote.
[...]
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/07/25/mitt-romney-jon-huntsman-jr-and-the-2002-olympics/ [with comments]
===
Olympic ad by pro-Obama super PAC removed over copyright issues
July 26, 2012
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/olympic-ad-pro-obama-super-pac-removed-copyright/story?id=16862932 [with comments]
===
Watch Mitt Romney's Full Speech at Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nevada, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney outlined how he believes his foreign policy vision clashes with President Obama's.
The former Massachusetts governor spent the majority of his remarks sharply criticizing the Obama administration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqpwin8SPVw
*
Did Romney Call Obama ‘Corrupt?’ – Quote Confusion Sparks Questions
July 24, 2012
http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2012-07-24/did-romney-call-obama-corrupt-quote-confusion-sparks-questions/ [with comments]
===
Watch President Obama's Full Speech at VFW Convention
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nevada, President Barack Obama claimed a lack of foreign policy experience from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and talked against America being in a decline under his administration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ2jJBHwv3I
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Hiding in Plain Sight
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON
If I closed my eyes, and added a creepy monotone, I could have been listening to Dick Cheney.
The Republican speaker at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nev., was slashing the president with jingoistic jingles: Obama is ashamed of America, an apologist sapping the greatness of a country that is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, a weakling marring the American Century by gutting the military and the economy. And, on top of that, the Obama White House doesn’t know how to keep stuff secret.
Prodded by conservatives to attack the president more aggressively, the ever malleable Mitt Romney obliged Tuesday at the V.F.W., spouting chest-thumping clichés about putting “resolve in our might.” That resolve evidently doesn’t include Mitt, who passed on Vietnam, or his five strapping sons, none of whom have volunteered for the volunteer military.
It was at the V.F.W. convention in 2002 when Cheney, who got five deferments from Vietnam, set the gold standard for mindless belligerence, pushing pre-emptive action in Iraq. “Simply stated,” he said, “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The Arab street, he knew, would erupt in joy when we invaded.
In his speech, Romney demanded that any Obama administration leakers of classified information be found and punished because “the time for stonewalling is over,” “Americans are entitled to know” and Americans deserve “a full and prompt accounting of the facts.”
After the speech, Eric Edelman, a Romney campaign adviser, chimed in on ferreting out Obama leakers in a press release; unfortunately, BuzzFeed soon pointed out that Edelman “was implicated in the country’s last major national security leak investigation — the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame” when he served under former Cheney aide Scooter Libby in W.’s administration.
Romney is so secretive that he’s beginning to make the über-clandestine Cheney look like The Bachelorette.
The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that although Romney promised “complete transparency” when he stepped in to save the Salt Lake City Olympics, he became a black hole: “Some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staffer shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts.” (Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just burn the records in the flame?)
The public still can’t see the records, stored at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott library, named for the same man as Willard Mitt Romney.
Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said that Mitt resigned from the Olympics job in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and “was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”
Who was responsible for the final disposition? A former colleague at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, who succeeded Romney in the Olympic post. Ah, the old Bain handoff.
Romney spent $100,000 in state funds to replace office computers at the end of his term as governor and on the cusp of his 2008 presidential race, “as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret,” reported Mark Hosenball of Reuters. Eleven Romney aides “bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves,” Hosenball wrote. “Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had e-mails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from the state servers, state officials say. Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor.”
It seems antithetical to Mormonism, since the Mormon Church loves to save documents, keeping 35 billion images of genealogical information and records on church history in the Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City.
Doesn’t Mitt have space in that split-level, four-car garage elevator in La Jolla for a little deep-storage?
As Maggie Haberman observed in Politico, Romney has made a calculated decision to hide three major elements of his background: his Mormonism, his record at Bain and his time as governor. This creates, she wrote, “a kind of self-imposed paralysis on biographical messaging that some observers, including Republicans, say may wound his campaign in an era in which voters want to achieve a kind of unprecedented intimacy with their candidates.”
Former rival Newt Gingrich told Politico Tuesday that Romney needs to relax and let people see who he is, noting that, except for family, “there’s a place where Mitt clearly doesn’t let people get.”
So far, Mitt’s casting a shadowy silhouette, hiding his fortune in foreign tax havens, hiding tax returns, destroying and hiding records as head of the Olympics and as governor, hiding a specific sense of where he would take the country.
Americans don’t want to play hide-and-seek with their presidential candidates. Romney should listen to himself: The time for stonewalling is over.
*
Related
President Criticizes Romney Over Foreign Policy (July 24, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/us/politics/president-criticizes-romney-over-foreign-policy.html
Related in Opinion
Editorial: The Candidates Talk Foreign Policy (July 25, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/opinion/the-candidates-talk-foreign-policy.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/opinion/dowd-hiding-in-plain-sight.html [with comments]
===
Don't Criticize Obama for Being Too Rational About Israel
The president is coming under fire for an attitude toward an ally that ought to be standard fare in statecraft.
Jul 26 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/criticizing-obama-for-being-too-rational-about-israel/260344/ [with comments]
===
Anglo-Saxon Heritage, Multicultural Future
By CHARLES M. BLOW
July 25, 2012, 10:56 pm
On Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph, a leading conservative newspaper in Britain, quoted an anonymous adviser [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9424524/Mitt-Romney-would-restore-Anglo-Saxon-relations-between-Britain-and-America.html ] to Mitt Romney commenting on the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States:
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr. Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
The paper pointed out that the comments “may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity,” and they did.
The reporter who wrote the story said later on Twitter that the anonymous adviser “was a member of the foreign policy advisory team.”
The Romney campaign sought to distance itself [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-campaign-disputes-anglo-saxon-heritage-remark-20120725 ] from the remarks. As Talking Points Memo reported [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/anglo-saxon-mitt-romney-daily-telegraph-adviser-joe-biden.php ] on Wednesday:
“It’s not true,” Romney spokesperson Amanda Henneberg said in quotes confirmed by T.P.M. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Gov. Romney or anyone inside the campaign.”
Vice President Joe Biden, in a statement about the Telegraph article [ http://bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2012/07/25/british-newspaper-reports-racially-charged-comment-mitt-romney-adviser/EjmCTGhLb0tqc7x5X16lEJ/story.html ], said in part:
Not surprisingly, this is just another feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points at the expense of this critical partnership. This assertion is beneath a presidential campaign.
Rebutting the vice president’s attack, Ryan Williams, another spokesperson for Romney, said that Biden had “used an anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper to prop up their flailing campaign.”
Whew, that’s quite a bit of back and forth, and yet it remains unclear, to me at least, what the Romney campaign is saying. If it is accusing the newspaper of misquoting someone or fabricating quotes, it should demand a retraction.
But according to T.P.M.:
The Telegraph, which stands by the piece, told T.P.M. that the paper has not received a request from the Romney campaign to retract or correct the story.
If Romney’s team is suggesting that someone in the campaign could have said it without Romney’s knowledge or blessing, then the campaign should seek to identify the adviser and dismiss him or her from any role in promoting Romney’s candidacy.
But as is often the case with this campaign and with the modern Republican Party, Romney’s team stopped short of issuing a complete repudiation and demanding a total cleansing of these poisonous ideas from their ranks.
The phrases “if anyone said,” and “weren’t reflecting the views” are weak and amorphous and don’t go far enough towards condemnation.
The reason is simple: the Republican Party benefits from this bitterness. Not all Republicans are intolerant, but the intolerant seem to have found a home under their tent. And instead of chasing the intolerant out, the party turns a blind eye — or worse, gives a full embrace — and counts up their votes.
Take Romney’s relationship with Donald Trump. Trump, one of America’s most prominent and vocal birthers, is also a Romney surrogate and major fundraiser. Just last week, after Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. held a press conference to announce that he believed that the birth certificate that the president supplied is fake, Trump went on a radio show [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/trump-doubles-down-on-demand-for-obama-records/?cat_orig=politics ] hosted by Fox’s Sean Hannity to say: “The fact is Sheriff Arpaio is, in my opinion, correct.”
The problem with courting or even countenancing the fringe is that it’s an incredibly short-sighted strategy. With every new gaffe the gulf between the Republican Party and our ever-diversifying nation grows.
As The Atlantic’s Max Fisher pointed out [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/sorry-romney-neither-america-nor-the-uk-are-anglo-saxon-countries/260309/ ], assuming that the term Anglo-Saxon is a “colloquialism for the English people”:
In the 2000 U.S. census, only 8.7 percent of Americans identify their ancestry as English, which is ranked fourth behind German, Irish, and African-American.
The bipartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund projects that in November [ http://www.naleo.org/latinovote.html ] the Latino vote will be almost 26 percent higher than it was in 2008. That would be a staggering increase.
No amount of corporate money and voter suppression can hold back the demographic tide washing over this country. As each of these gaffes further reaffirms the Republican Party’s hostility to minorities, the shorter the party’s lifespan becomes.
I for one don’t believe that this is a coordinated effort. It’s the seepage from a hateful few slipping in like water through a compromised dam. But it will not be enough for the Republicans to plug the holes. They must drain the reservoir.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/anglo-saxon-heritage-multicultural-future/ [with comments]
===
The Divine Miss M
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: July 23, 2012
What I find most fascinating about Michele Bachmann — and there are many, many more where she came from — is that she presents herself as a godly woman, humbly devoted to her Christian faith. I’d like to meet that god, and I’d like to understand that Christianity.
Does it call for smearing people on the basis of flimsy conspiracy theories? That’s what Bachmann just did to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by essentially suggesting she might be a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Does it endorse scaring young women away from immunizations that could spare them serious illness? Bachmann did that during her memorable presidential campaign, when she blithely drew an unsubstantiated link [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/health/20hpv.html?pagewanted=all ] between a vaccine for the human papillomavirus and mental retardation.
Does it encourage gratuitously divisive condemnations [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14684.html ] of Barack Obama as “anti-American,” one of many incendiary phrases in her attacks against him in 2008? And does it compel a war against homosexuality waged with the language and illogic she uses?
She has said that gay men and lesbians are dysfunctional products of abuse and agents of “sexual anarchy,” and when the singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge was battling breast cancer years ago, Bachmann helpfully chimed in [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/michele-bachmanns-craziest-moments-20110616/cancer-ridden-lesbian-singer-should-reflect-on-her-lifestyle-0546167 ]: “This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”
Bachmann’s concept of Christian love brims with hate, and she has a deep satchel of stones to throw. From what kind of messiah did she learn that?
Over recent days she has drawn attention for the letter that she and four other Republican lawmakers sent to federal intelligence and security agencies last month. It expressed fears that the Muslim Brotherhood might be infiltrating the government, and it mentioned Abedin [ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/weiner-speaks-about-scandal-and-dismisses-reports-of-campaign/ ]. She’s Muslim, after all.
My aim here isn’t to re-litigate Bachmann’s crimes against reason and decency, all widely documented.
It’s to wonder why we accept her descriptions of herself, and in turn describe her, as a deeply religious woman. That grants too much credence to her particular, peculiar and highly selective definition of piety. And it offends the many admirable people of faith whose understanding and practice of religion aren’t, like hers, confrontational and small-minded.
Bachmann is an evangelical, and has spoken rhapsodically about the experience of being born again. After that moment, she said, “I absolutely understood sin, and I wanted no part of it.” She plunged into politics nonetheless.
We routinely place her in the “religious right,” a phrase that frustrates me, tidily linking a certain set of political beliefs with profound devotion. We talk much less frequently of any “religious left,” and that disparity implies that a seriously faithful person is most likely to land on just one end of the political spectrum.
Tell that to the Nuns on the Bus [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-nuns-on-the-bus-tour-promotes-social-justice--and-turns-a-deaf-ear-to-the-vatican/2012/06/27/gJQAA4yj7V_story.html ], who rolled across the country last month focusing on social welfare and expressing alarm about the impact that cuts in federal spending might have on struggling Americans. Their politics line up more neatly with liberal than conservative policies, but the nuns reflect a Catholicism no less true or widespread than that of the bishops carrying on about gay marriage and birth control.
Speaking of gay marriage, both the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism in this country have embraced it, and the Episcopal Church in the United States has developed a special blessing [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=156584940 ] for same-sex couples. Leaders of these denominations would tell you not that they’re flouting Judeo-Christian tradition but that they’re doing full justice to their faiths, which hinge on more than reflexive fidelity to chosen passages from ancient writings. They hinge on the human intellect and its ability to filter timeless values through modern understanding.
Because he’s a social liberal, Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, is seldom mentioned in terms of religion, but it turns out that he’s made a study of the Bible, as well as other sacred texts, and given considerable thought to faith. On his Facebook page [ http://www.facebook.com/corybooker/posts/10150851126622228 ] a few months ago, he mused thusly:
“Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children.”
I know many progressive, big-hearted Christians who rise to that challenge, and it’s wrong for a single Christian label — without asterisk or annotation — to be attached both to them and to the likes of Bachmann.
So maybe it’s time for annotations. Most of us distinguish, rightly, between Muslim extremists and other followers of Islam. Perhaps we should start noting the difference between Christians of real compassion and those of exclusionary spite.
Bachmann’s on to something: dangerous fundamentalists have indeed set up camp deep inside the capital. She can find one in her office. She need only look in the mirror.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/opinion/bruni-the-divine-miss-m.html [with comments]
===
Wes Harris, Arizona Tea Party Leader, Seeks To Recall John McCain Over Huma Abedin Defense
07/25/2012
[...]
“Go to hell, Senator, it’s time for you to take your final dirt nap,” Harris concludes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/wes-harris-arizona-tea-party_n_1697793.html [with embedded video of McCain's remarks on the floor of the Senate, and comments]
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Obama losing a majority ... who think he's a Christian
July 27, 2012
President Obama is struggling to get to 50% — not just of voters in November -- but of Americans, at any time, who will recognize that he is a Christian.
The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey [ http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/2012-romney-mormonism-obamas-religion.aspx ] Thursday showing that just 49% of Americans described the president as a Christian, while 17% said they believed he was Muslim. Just before the 2008 election, a majority, 55%, described then-candidate Obama’s faith as Christian, while just 12% said he was Muslim.
[...]
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-losing-a-majority-who-think-hes-a-christian-20120726,0,6779472.story [with comments]
===
Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll apologizes for anti-gay remark
Jennifer Carroll
Joe Burbank / AP
By Mary Ellen Klas
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau
Posted on Thursday, 07.26.12
TALLAHASSEE -- After an online petition drive garnered hundreds of signatures demanding her apology, Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Carroll ] on Thursday apologized to the head of an advocacy group saying that her anti-gay comment two weeks ago was "wrong and inexcusable."
Equality Florida, a civil rights group that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Floridians, launched the online petition campaign this week after Carroll told a Tampa television station on July 14 that "usually black women that look like me don’t engage in relationships like that."
Carroll was responding to allegations from former aide Carletha Cole, who, in court documents as part of a criminal case, said she caught Carroll and her travel aide in a "compromising position.”
Cole, 51, was charged last October with giving an illegally taped conversation to a newspaper reporter and had been fired her job as a senior program analyst for “conduct unbecoming.”
"It is wrong and inexcusable to make a comment that hurts people, and that was not my intention,’’ Carroll wrote in a letter to Equality Florida director Nadine Smith. "As a Christian, my faith guides me to love and respect all people. The false charges that have been lodged against me are no excuse for what I have said that may have been hurtful to members of your organization and to other Floridians.
"Please know that I am committed to treating every person with the utmost courtesy, respect and dignity and I hope you will accept my heartfelt apology,’’ she wrote.
Smith said she spoke to Carroll after receiving a fax of the letter and thanked Carroll "for taking responsibility for her words."
"Lt. Governor Carroll expressed her appreciation for the opportunity to communicate her commitment to treating everyone with respect and dignity,’’ Smith said in a statement. "She invited Equality Florida to reach out to her office if she could be of assistance and I offered our organization as a resource as well."
Smith commended Carroll for her response. "Apologies by elected leaders for public mistakes are rare and it is to the Lt. Governor’s credit that she has taken this step.
"In Florida, which has no statewide legal protections from discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents, the words of our elected leaders matter a great deal,’’ she said.
Smith had written a biting opinion piece on TheGrio.com, an NBC News-affiliated website covering the nation’s African-American community. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and various gay rights activists also criticized Carroll’s statements.
“As a black lesbian from Florida, I personally felt the sting of Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll’s words,’’ Smith wrote. "Instead of simply denying the claims, she stereotyped black lesbians in order to deflect her own. With that one quick statement, Lt. Governor Carroll appealed to racial and homophobic stereotypes that do real harm.”
Copyright 2012 Miami Herald Media Co.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/26/2914867/lt-gov-jennifer-carroll-apologizes.html [with comments]
===
This Conspiracy-Toting Conservative Blogger Could Be Headed to Congress
Wes Riddle's campaign says President Obama gave seven islands to Russia, and he's written that slavery was a net positive for blacks. Could he make it to Washington?
Jul. 24, 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/wes-riddle-congress-republican-texas-ron-paul [with comments]
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“Slave genes” myth must die
Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science
Jul 24, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/michael_johnsons_gold_medal_in_ignorance/ [with comments]
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Tanner Colby, 'Some Of My Best Friends Are Black' Author, Explores Racial Integration Across The U.S.
07/25/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/tanner-colby-some-of-my-best-friends-are-black_n_1696145.html [with comments]
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Florida puppeteer accused in child porn case
Ronald William Brown, 57, is facing federal charges of conspiring to kidnap a child and possessing child pornography in Florida.
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 9:13 AM EDT, Thu July 26, 2012
(CNN) -- On his website, Ronald William Brown posed with puppets, boasted about birthday party performances and offered workshops for school groups.
Now the 57-year-old Florida man is behind bars, facing federal charges of conspiring to kidnap a child and possessing child pornography.
Authorities accuse the puppeteer of having graphic discussions online about abusing, kidnapping, killing and eating children, according to court documents.
He was arrested in Largo, Florida, last week and appeared in federal court Tuesday.
A 29-page criminal complaint filed in federal court includes transcripts of several online chats and details of what investigators found when they searched Brown's home.
A CD found in his bedroom dresser's sock drawer included child pornography, images of what appear to be deceased children and a missing-child flier, according to the complaint.
Brown told investigators he had discussed kidnapping, killing and eating a boy from his church but said "it was just a fantasy and he could never and would never hurt anyone," the complaint said.
Brown maintains he is innocent, attorney Eric Kuske told reporters Tuesday.
"It's his contention right now that he didn't do this, he's not involved with this. That there's been some presumptions and assumptions made on what transpired. ... He wouldn't do something like this. He's got no criminal record," Kuske said, according to CNN affiliate WFLA [ http://www.wfla.com/ ].
During a 1998 traffic stop, a sheriff's deputy spotted boys' underwear between front seats in the vehicle Brown was driving, according to records from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Brown told the deputy he used the boys' underwear for puppet shows, "dressing puppets in underwear," an incident report said.
Brown told investigators that he helps out in the children's area of his church, and that a group of children from his neighborhood come to his house every Wednesday for pizza before he gives them a ride in a church van, the complaint said.
Brown "would never associate or speak to any adults" in the mobile home park where he lived, resident Laura Jane Schate told CNN affiliate Bay News 9 [ http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/news/article.html/content/news/articles/bn9/2012/7/25/jailed_puppeteer_kno.html ].
But children were eager to talk with Brown, neighbors said.
"They'd come with their bikes and their skateboards, and they'd hang out, waiting for him to come home," neighbor Stacy Gaughan told CNN affiliate WFTS [ http://www.abcactionnews.com/ ].
Many in the neighborhood, disgusted by reports of what investigators allegedly uncovered, are "wondering whether he did this here," she told CNN affiliate Bay News 9.
A Facebook page that appears to belong to Brown says he "usually (performs) weekly in schools, malls, civic clubs, birthday parties, and museums."
One post talks of mentoring a young boy. Another describes work on a Christian television puppet show.
Brown's arrest Friday was the latest step in a federal investigation connected with other child pornography arrests, including the May arrest of a Kansas City man accused of producing child pornography, authorities said.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/25/justice/florida-puppeteer-porn/index.html [with comments]
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Pa. man gets 5 years for pilgrimage trip scam
Updated 07:13 a.m., Thursday, July 26, 2012
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A suburban Philadelphia man is heading to federal prison for bilking devout customers out of more than $400,000 by promising holy land trips that never happened.
A federal judge ordered 74-year-old John Baird to spend five years in prison for ripping off mostly elderly victims who thought they were buying trips to Christian pilgrimage sites.
Prosecutors say the Elkins Park man ran the scheme from 2004 to 2007 as operator of Christian Pilgrim Tours. He promised trips and even an audience with the Pope only to cancel the tours after getting paid in advance.
Baird blamed legal advisers for his business problems but U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson rejected that excuse, saying Baird preyed on the vulnerable.
Baird was also ordered to repay his victims about $410,000.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/news/article/Pa-man-gets-5-years-for-pilgrimage-trip-scam-3736981.php
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Five arrested, accused of terrorizing Jewish camp in Pennsylvania
From left: Tyler Cole Spencer, Mark Trail and Cassandra Robertson are accused of terrorizing a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania.
By Julia Greenberg, CNN
updated 5:38 PM EDT, Thu July 26, 2012
Editor's note: Note offensive language.
(CNN) -- Three adults and two juveniles were arrested Wednesday for allegedly terrorizing a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania.
Authorities say Tyler Cole Spencer, 18, Mark Trail, 21, Cassandra Robertson, 18, and two juveniles intimidated Jewish campers and staff at Camp Bonim on three separate occasions on July 14 and 15.
Spencer allegedly drove a white Ford pickup truck "recklessly" through the camp, "narrowly missing several campers and staff" and damaging fields, yards, buildings and fences, the police criminal complaint said.
The group also allegedly used paintball guns to shoot Jewish campers and staff, hitting one 18-year-old camper leaving a synagogue, according to the complaint.
Authorities allege members of the group also shouted anti-Semitic slurs at campers and staff, such as "I'm gonna kill you, you f***ing Jews."
"Go back to where the f*** you came from you god**** Jews. We don't want you here," Trail allegedly shouted, according to the complaint.
Several campers told police they "were scared for their lives" when the pickup truck sped through the camp, the complaint said.
"The vicious, cruel and obscene nature of the language hurled at the campers is unspeakable," Wayne County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Janine Edwards said in a statement. "Luckily none of the children suffered any serious physical injury; however, the emotional damage done is immeasurable. This is outrageous conduct and will not be tolerated."
Spencer, Trail and Robertson have been charged with several felonies and misdemeanors, including ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats, recklessly endangering another person and institutional vandalism.
Spencer, of Linden, Tennessee, was charged previously with aggravated assault in a hit-and-run case. He allegedly hit a camp counselor with his pickup truck before fleeing on July 16.
Spencer's bail has been set at $200,000. Bail for Trail and Robertson, who are from Wayne County, has been set at $20,000 each.
Juvenile petitions were also filed against the two alleged accomplices, a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old.
It is unclear if the defendants are represented at this time, and listed numbers to the defendants' families could not be found.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/26/justice/pennsylvania-camp-terror/index.html [with comments]
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Tonya Reaves’ death: Right-wing abortion exploitation
A woman's death in Chicago is a new flashpoint in the abortion wars. But the right is once again ignoring the facts
Jul 26, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/26/tonya_reaves_death_right_wing_abortion_exploitation/ [with comments]
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(linked in):
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John Nichols on July 26, 2012 - 12:05 AM ET
Mitt Romney will show his true colors tonight, when he slips behind closed doors in a foreign capital [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/168975/romney-goes-gold-londons-Libor-village ] to collect money from international bankers who are mired in scandal.
The presidential contender is officially in London to cheer on the US team in the Olympics. But Romney doesn’t always cheer for Team USA. When it comes to global economics, Romney remains very much the “vulture capitalist [ http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2012/01/12/romneys-vulture-capitalist-problem/ ]” his Republican primary foes decried. And tonight, he’ll be swooping into central London to party with masters of the universe who know no country—and, it would appear, no ethical bounds.
London is abuzz over the Libor (London InterBank Offered Rate) scandal [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/l/london_interbank_offered_rate_Libor/index.html ], which saw some of the biggest banks in the world report false interest rates in order to fool investors and game the international economy. Bob Diamond, the top man in Barclays Bank, had to resign from his position after that bank paid almost $500 million in fines.
Diamond also resigned [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9360144/US-election-2012-Mitt-Romney-to-attend-London-fundraising-dinner-hosted-by-Barclays-boss-Bob-Diamond.html ] as the co-chair of Mitt Romney’s $75,000-a-person fundraising event in London tonight [ http://www.thenation.com/blog/168975/romney-goes-gold-londons-Libor-village ].
Not to worry. Another Barclay’s insider (chief lobbyist Patrick Durkin) took Diamond’s place as a co-chair for the Romney event, along with officials of Bank of Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Wells Fargo Securities—and, of course, Bain Capital Europe [id.].
As the investigation of banks implicated in Libor rate-fixing expands, Romney’s decision to go ahead with the London fundraising events [id.] is an act either of boldness or recklessness. The presumptive Republican nominee for president seems to think he can get away with raising as much as $2 million [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9427481/US-election-Mitt-Romney-aims-to-leapfrog-Barack-Obama-with-expat-fundraising.html ] at a series of fund-raising events held on foreign soil. The cheapest of Romney’s “lavish” London events has a $2,500-per-person entry fee, while the evening gathering where the most scandal-plagued of international bankers will mingle with their favorite American charges from $25,000-per-person to $75,000 a head [ http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/romney-fundraise-london-bankers-implicated-Libor-scandal-160410445.html ].
That’s the kind of event that candidates like to keep secret.
But grassroots activists in the United States are upping the ante by demanding that Romney immediately reveal the names of the bankers and financial insiders attending his London fundraising events. In particularly, they are pushing for the release of any and all information relating to Romney’s interactions with donors associated with Barclays and any other institutions that have been linked to the Libor scandal [id.].
The Center for Responsive Politics identifies Barclays as the largest source of campaign donations to Romney, and a Maine state legislator who has been in the forefront of campaign finance reform and corporate watchdog fights wants to know more about the relationship between Romney and the Barclays donors.
“Americans have a right to know who Romney’s donors are so they can understand what policy agendas are in line with those donations,” says Maine State Representative Diane Russell [ http://www.maine.gov/legis/house/hsebios/russdm.htm ], D-Portland. “We all have the right to donate to political campaigns, and the responsibility to own up to those donations. It’s part of the democratic process.”
Russell has launched a national petition drive [ http://signon.org/sign/mitt-romney-whos-attending ] demanding that Romney come clean about the Barclays ties and the London fundraising event.
The “Mitt Romney: Reveal Your Secret Donors” petition reads [id.]:
It’s time we return to government of, by and for the people—not government of, bought, and paid for by special interests. The job of a Wall Street banker is to get a good return on their investment, and unfortunately, they’ve taken those skills to Washington—and now the presidency.
Mitt Romney is attending an elite London fundraiser—$25,000 to $75,000 per plate—hosted by the CEOs at the center of the Libor scandal threatening our already fragile economy. Executives of at least three other banks under investigation are co-chairs of the fundraiser, according to invitations obtained by The Washington Post.
At the same time, too many Americans are falling out of the middle class when they are working hard to climb the ladder into it. In fact, middle-class workers have seen their incomes drop by nearly 8 percent in three years and their wealth disappear by a staggering 40%.
We believe politicians should work for us, not their corporate sponsors. It is time for Mitt Romney to fully disclose his donors—and how much they are giving to his campaign.
Russell set out to collect 10,000 signatures.
She’ll get them. And a lot more.
Mitt Romney’s connection to Barclays [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/romney_fundraises_with_Libor_fixers/ ] and the Libor scandal is a big deal. Americans have a right to be angry that a man who wants to be president of the United States jets off to London to collect checks from international banksters. And the more they learn about Romney, Barclays and Libor, the angrier they’ll get.
Copyright © 2012 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/blog/169095/mitt-romneys-bankster-ball [with comments]
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Will Wall Street turn on its own over Libor?
(Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing/Jason Reed)
With Wall St. crooks unlikely to go to jail, our best hope is that the big banks sue each other into humiliation
By Alex Pareene
Monday, Jul 23, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
What’s easy to miss in the story of Barclays’ attempted manipulation of the Libor — see here for what the Libor is and why its manipulation is a Big Deal [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/03/hard_libor/singleton/ ] — is that Barclays itself highlighted its malfeasance by coming clean and settling with regulators. Thus, they’ve borne the brunt of the furious response from legislators and citizens in two nations, even though it’s been known for some time that … everyone was doing it. Or, at least, a bunch of other banks did the same thing — we don’t yet know for sure which ones and to what extent because no other bank has agreed, as Barclays did, to admit involvement.
The other banks still under investigation have, according to a Reuters report [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/20/us-banking-libor-settlment-idUSBRE86J00H20120720 ], strongly considered all jumping into the pool at the same time and trying for a group settlement with regulators. The regulators like the idea because it will involve a great big number and a big list of names. The banks are warming to the idea because the big list of names means no one firm gets the Barclays treatment for a week or three. In other words, settle quick and hope no one digs too much into how much criminal activity each member of the family is responsible for.
Here’s where, maybe, Goldman Sachs comes into the picture. Because according to a Bloomberg report, Goldman — uninvolved in setting the Libor — is considering taking the law into its own hands and taking care of this Libor business with suits against the firms responsible. Like a fictional comic book metropolis, the financial industry is dreadfully underpoliced, and many of the cops are themselves on the take, so, logically, what Wall Street needs is a morally dubious but incredibly wealthy figure to operate outside the law to achieve order by any means necessary. That’s right: Goldman Sachs is going to become the Green Arrow. (Or the other one, I guess, with the movie.) Except still basically pretty evil.
And they even have a Speedy [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_%28comics%29 ] (or Robin, FINE) in Morgan Stanley. From Bloomberg:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley (MS) are among financial firms that may bring lawsuits against their biggest rivals as regulators on three continents examine whether other banks manipulated the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor, said Bradley Hintz, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Even if Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley forgo claims on their own behalf, they oversee money-market funds that may be required to pursue restitution for injured clients, he said.
Because Libor is based on submissions from only some of the world’s largest banks, the probes threaten to pit firms uninvolved in setting the rate against any implicated in its manipulation, Hintz said. Libor serves as a benchmark for at least $360 trillion in securities.
“This will be a feeding frenzy of sharks,” said Hintz, who has served as treasurer of Morgan Stanley and chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “We’re going to have Wall Street suing Wall Street.”
That sounds … too incredibly wonderful to be true, doesn’t it? Apparently Goldman said last month that it would consider itself an “aggrieved market participant” if it turns out that its Libor-setting rivals were screwing with the numbers — which they were.
In the absence of effective regulation, with the unhappy likelihood that no one (or at least no one important) will actually go to jail over widespread fraud and conspiracy, the best we can hope for is that the bastards will sue themselves into submission and humiliation (though most likely not bankruptcy). If the banks involved in Libor manipulation — supposedly dozens, including Citigroup, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase — end up reaching a joint settlement with Britain’s Financial Services Authority and America’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission, they will all hand over a chunk of cash that they will barely miss and probably give a couple of scapegoats an early retirement, but their settlement will essentially make top executives immune to actual prosecution. The Justice Department considers the settlement — and not a full, public airing of the extent of the misdeeds and the identities of those responsible for them — the end goal. Megabanks would confirm that they can get away with murder if they pay the equivalent of a parking ticket. (You know how it is: Moral hazard is only a thing we have to worry about with poor people!)
So in that scenario (and the group settlement is far from a done deal: If some banks [*cough cough* CITIGROUP *cough cough*] behaved much worse than others, it might be in everyone else’s interest to let them hang alone and not hang together), a big screw-you lawsuit from Goldman might end up being our best bet to learn the truth and see the perpetrators punished. On the other hand, Goldman might elect to respect financial industry Omerta and keep the whole thing quiet [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-19/feeding-frenzy-seen-if-wall-street-sues-itself-over-libor.html ]:
Banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would prefer to settle quietly out of court and may forgo claims altogether unless additional firms are fined like Barclays, said James Cox, a securities law professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
As a Morgan Stanley analyst says, they wouldn’t want to “exacerbate negative headlines for the overall industry” by suing their rivals. Because it’s of the utmost importance that the reputation of an industry that exists to rip us off and periodically blow up the world economy be salvaged. Can you imagine the disaster it’d be if people lost their faith in the financial sector?
If jail time for everyone is out of the question, and Goldman won’t play vigilante, my other suggestion is some sort of hand-to-hand combat scenario, possibly involving a cage or some sort of “Thunderdome,” in which Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, ex-Barclays head Bob Diamond, and whatever goober is in charge of Morgan Stanley enter, and only one bloated useless plutocrat leaves!
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/23/will_wall_street_turn_on_its_own_over_libor/ [with comments]
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Romney Defended By...Romney Policy Aide Who Worked for Bain
Gage Skidmore/Flickr
By David Corn | Wed Jul. 25, 2012 9:45 AM PDT
Over at National Review Online, Avik Roy takes issue [ http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312010/fact-checking-latest-bain-hysteria-avik-roy ] with my scoop [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/bain-capital-mitt-romney-outsourcing-china-global-tech ] on Romney's investment in a Chinese appliance-manufacturing firm that sought to profit from US outsourcing. Roy says he used to work at Brookside Capital, the Bain-affiliated entity that made this investment, but he doesn't indicate whether he was around (or in a senior position) at the time of this particular deal in 1998. (On his Google+ page [ https://plus.google.com/116480200106410527318/about ], by the way, Roy notes he was at Bain Capital, not Brookside. Yeah, I suppose, this stuff can be confusing.) Moreover, Roy now serves on Romney's health care policy advisory group. Thus, he has a stake in this venture.
His argument is basically this: Romney did not make the decisions regarding Brookside's investments, and, consequently, cannot be held accountable for these deals.
If Roy was not an eyewitness to internal Bain/Brookside deliberations in the late 1990s, his testimony is less than compelling. Can he say that Romney took no interest in how Brookside was being managed? Had no discussions with those Bain colleagues who were in charge of these decisions?
All that aside, Roy is promoting a classic corporate dodge. He writes:
Which of Bain Capital’s investments is it fair to hold Mitt Romney accountable for?
The answer: He is accountable for the investments in which he actually made the decisions. If I have my 401(k) invested in the Fidelity Select Health Care Fund, am I responsible for every decision made by the portfolio manager at Fidelity? Obviously not. The same goes for Mitt Romney.
This was hardly equivalent to a retirement fund investment. Romney "wholly owned" Brookside, according to a SEC filing [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1056547/0000927016-99-002035.txt ]. He created this entity. No doubt, he had a say regarding who was managing it. It was part of the Bain world he oversaw. He bears a degree of responsibility—perhaps Romney can calculate the precise percentage—for this venture.
Imagine this scenario: Romney owned a coal mining company. He decided to open a particular mine. He placed that project in the hands of other executives. Would he hold no responsibility if the mine generated profits because the execs he put in charge operated it well—or if the mine became the site of a horrendous accident because those same execs purposefully overlooked safety rules?
Did Romney literally have nothing to do with Brookside—a $559 million venture by early 1999—though he owned it? Did he never look at its lists of investments? Never have a chat with the guys running it? Or did he just let them run free and not pay attention to the direction of their investments—which in itself would be significant?
The Romney camp keeps insisting on a narrative that allows Romney to take credit for the positive aspects of his Bain days (thousands of low-wage Staples jobs!) and to sidestep all else (outsourcing, bankruptcies, politically-inconvenient investments). But in the world of high-and-complicated finance, it's not that simple.
Copyright ©2012 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/mitt-romney-bain-brookside-avik-roy [with comments]
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Bain Capital Created 'Demoralizing' Culture of Layoffs At Florida Plant
by Jason Cherkis and Laura Bassett
Posted: 07/23/2012 5:51 pm Updated: 07/24/2012 10:03 am
WASHINGTON -- When Dade Behring started cutting employees under Bain Capital's management in the late '90s, Cindy Hewitt was on the front lines. As a human resources manager for the Dade East plant in Miami, Hewitt had to decide which employees had needed skills and whose jobs were expendable.
News of the latest layoffs trickled down to the Dade company cafeteria. The room could seat more than 1,000, and it had been enough of a draw that it even offered breakfast.
But as the layoffs hit, the mood in the cafeteria could be as somber as a funeral, Hewitt recalled. Multiple members of the same family might be gathered to commiserate over being laid off one by one by one. Some of them had worked for the medical diagnostics company for more than a decade.
Hewitt saw her colleagues crying on a daily basis and loudly celebrating on the rare occasion that someone found a comparable new job. "There was a tremendous sense of loss and this kind of outpouring of grief and mourning as every day they waited for the announcement of who was going next," she said. "People were on pins and needles. Who's going next? They're worried for themselves, worried for their co-workers, worried for their families. They'd talk about how they were going to send their kids to college. It was an incredibly depressing and demoralizing environment."
Since the Republican presidential primary, Dade Behring, which made blood-testing machines and conducted animal tests at its Miami plant, has become something of a focus. Bain Capital, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's firm, had bought Dade and shuttered its factory in Puerto Rico in 1998. The closings continued under Bain's management.
It's become a familiar tale about Romney and Bain's business dealings. The New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/politics/after-mitt-romney-deal-company-showed-profits-and-then-layoffs.html?pagewanted=all ] that Bain pushed the profitable company into bankruptcy. The Miami Herald followed with its own chronicle [ http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/16/2801276_p2/as-mitt-romney-hits-florida-democrats.html ] of the mass layoffs and mass profits for Romney and company. The Tampa Bay Times reported [ http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/content/under-romneys-bain-capital-dade-behring-received-millions-tax-breaks-it-laid-hundreds ] that Dade had received millions in tax breaks to promote job creation in Puerto Rico one year before it closed the factory there.
Bain, of course, walked away with a huge profit. In 1999, the private equity firm grabbed $242 million after it pressured Dade to borrow more millions to buy up Bain's shares in the company.
So many Dade workers lost their jobs -- 1,700 in the United States, 850 in Miami alone -- that the Bain-Dade dealings have become a symbol of corporate bloodletting and a painful memory to those who witnessed the layoffs.
Fred Gregory, an information technology consultant, said he was brought in to assist the plant closing in Miami. The cafeteria scene also stuck with him. At a certain point, he told HuffPost, he stopped eating lunch there. "I didn't want to see the women crying," he explained.
"You could walk in there and hear a pin drop," Gregory said. "You could see the emptiness. It was just huddled-up sheep. It was pathetic. It was heartbreaking, heartwrenching. You just want to hug them."
The layoffs continued for months and months. Gregory saw people fired and workers running out of the Dade offices in tears. "These people were scared to death," he said. "This was their livelihood. Some people couldn't bear it. It was a horrible place to work." Some would get an hour's notice before being shown the door.
The plant added higher fencing and concertina wire, Gregory said. Each day, a pair of security guards would check his back seat and trunk on the way out to make sure he wasn't stealing any office supplies. "It was all so well orchestrated," he said. "And so evil."
The Romney campaign, Bain Capital, and Siemens, which bought Dade Behring's operations in 2007, did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael Rumbin had been a Dade vice president. "No one ever came up to me to ask if we could create more jobs," he told HuffPost. "There was very little in the way of job creation. It was a business undertaking in which the Bain Capital people created a tremendous amount of wealth for themselves and their investors."
Hewitt has an idea of what the corporate bigwigs were doing at the time. One incident still sticks with her.
In the summer of 1998, amid mass layoffs and mandatory overtime at the Dade East plant, she saw workers crowded around a glass executive suite. Some shook their heads and walked away, and others just stood there staring, she recalled. She walked over to check out what was going on and found several department heads putting golf balls in the office.
"Here are these people whose lives are upside down, doing mandatory overtime, and the executives are playing golf where all the employees can see," Hewitt said. "I was so upset that I walked in and picked up a golf ball and said, 'Get out and go to the golf course if you don't have anything to do.' It was the most callous, insensitive thing I had ever witnessed. I was completely dumbfounded."
Hewitt said the golf putting incident was so traumatizing for her that she quit her job the following month and began a career in animal advocacy. She never took another job in human resources again, despite having a master's degree in the field.
"There's a part of me that tries very, very hard to not think about that experience," she said. "I felt I had been a part of treating people very poorly, and I could not in good conscience put myself in that kind of position again."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/bain-capital-layoffs-dade-behring_n_1695960.html [with comments]
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Matt Taibbi Blasts David Brooks: 'Do You Know How Private Equity Works?'
Matt Taibbi slammed David Brooks on Twitter on Thursday for his defense of Mitt Romney's career in private equity.
By Bonnie Kavoussi
Posted: 07/24/2012 3:55 pm Updated: 07/24/2012 4:58 pm
New York Times columnist David Brooks is wrong about Mitt Romney, according to Matt Taibbi.
"I have a serious question for David Brooks, who is hailing Romney's Bain record. Do you know how private equity works?" Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, wrote about New York Times columnist David Brooks [ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/227817755078967296 ] on Twitter on Tuesday. He continued [ https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/227817944275615744 ]: "I bet he doesn't have the faintest clue what companies like Bain actually do."
Romney's record at Bain has been a flashpoint during the presidential race. The presumptive Republican nominee has come under fire for shipping jobs overseas [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/22/mitt-romney-bain-overseas-jobs_n_1618240.html ], laying off workers [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/bain-capital-layoffs-dade-behring_n_1695960.html (just above)] and squeezing profits [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/us/politics/companies-ills-did-not-harm-romneys-firm.html?pagewanted=all ] out of companies that sometimes failed as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital.
Many critics argue that private equity firms extract wealth [ http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wp31.pdf ( http://www.cresc.ac.uk/publications/private-equity-and-the-culture-of-value-extraction-1 )] from companies -- sometimes causing their collapse [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/09/400404/romney-bain-bankrupts-billions/ ] -- rather than creating new value. But in a column this month, Brooks dismissed the costs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/opinion/brooks-more-capitalism-please.html ] of Romney's brand of private equity as simply part of capitalism.
In that column referenced by Taibbi, Brooks wrote [id.] that President Barack Obama represents "big government," and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney represents "capitalism." Romney's task, he wrote, is to "define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues."
"It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape," Brooks wrote [id.] of Romney. "That's his selling point: rigor and productivity."
Taibbi has become best known for his scathing criticisms of big business [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 ]. In 2010, he dubbed Goldman Sachs [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405 ] "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money": a description that haunts Goldman to this day. Also in 2010, Taibbi wrote [ http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/ ] that Brooks works "as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are."
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/matt-taibbi-david-brooks-bain-capital_n_1699059.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Ignores His Own Corporate Welfare Bum History
By: Rmuse
July 25th, 2012
A person pretending to have virtues, moral beliefs, principles, and ethics that one does not actually have is a hypocrite, and when they use hypocrisy to deceive others they are, in fact, also a liar. As character traits, lying and hypocrisy inform low moral fiber bordering on vice, and should be the death knell for a politician’s career and yet they are a mainstay of Republican politics. The presumptive Republican nominee for president, Willard Romney, has amassed quite a record as a pathological liar, and now there is substantial proof that besides lying as a matter of course, he is a rank hypocrite. Romney made an issue over an out of context quote by the President regarding his comments about the necessity of government for services such as infrastructure in the success of business.
The President said, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help…Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Romney accused President Obama of telling business owners they did not create their businesses by taking the “you didn’t build that” remark out of context to imply the President is anti-business and pushing the idea that government creates success, not individual enterprise and hard work. Willard goes around the country preaching that “government does not create prosperity,” and touts his own record as proof that individuals are solely responsible for their success. In one speech in Chicago, Romney decried the “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society,” and assailed government “intrusion in the workings of the free marketplace itself” regardless that his company benefitted from government, banking, and private investments going back to the origins of Bain Capital.
In 1984 when Romney founded Bain Capital, he and his partners raised more than a third of their investment fund from wealthy foreign corporations registered in Panama because of tax advantages and questionable banking secrecy. There were questions at the time that some funding was from right-wing death squads in El Salvador, but no evidence of wrongdoing was ever proven. The point is that Romney had significant help (from foreigners) to launch his lucrative investment firm. He, as the President alluded, benefitted because “somebody along the line gave him some help.” In fact, Bain Capital, and Romney, was not reluctant to accept help from the government on the way to earning millions. For example, in 1994, a Connecticut state fund made a $500,000 investment in a Bain company, and the previous year gave Bain a separate $500,000 that would be repaid with royalties from software products. More help for Romney and Bain, but from taxpayers and not private foreign investors, and more rank hypocrisy from Willard.
Fast forward to this past week and a Romney campaign ad [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLZpMFbxyxU (below)]
featuring an offended New Hampshire businessman indignantly claiming, “My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company?” Well, short answer; not without significant government assistance you didn’t. The company, Gilchrest Metal, received $800,000 in tax-exempt revenue bonds from the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority to purchase equipment, and in the 1980s received a $500,000 U.S. Small Business Administration loan as well as matching funds from the federally-funded New England Trade Adjustment Assistance Center. The point is not that the businessman accepted government assistance, it is that he, like Romney, is a hypocrite and a liar for claiming they built their businesses without help from government which was President Obama’s point that “somebody along the line gave you some help.”
Romney has made a staple of assailing the President for “attacking free enterprise” and decrying what he calls “corporate welfare” and “crony capitalism” that he has directly profited from. Going back to January, Romney attacked the President regularly with comments such as, “Capitalism, free enterprise works. Crony capitalism does not [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57353012-503544/romney-blasts-obama-as-crony-capitalist/ ]. This president has engaged and is engaging in crony capitalism.” It turns out, that Romney’s predisposition to lying is as deeply rooted in his character as his hypocrisy and his arrogance precludes him from comprehending that at some point the public record will expose him for what he really is; a man of the lowest moral character who is devoid of ethics necessary for a small-town dogcatcher, much less a presidential candidate.
Romney’s business record [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/13/403825/romney-ad-steel-mill-tax-benefits/ ] is rife with government subsidies [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/12/nation/la-na-bain-subsidies-20120113 ] and grants [id.] that enabled him to reap huge profits he hides in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, and all the while he attacks the President for saying “if you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help” to make the point that every American, business owner or otherwise, benefits from the sweat, toil, and taxpayer dollars that built roads, bridges, and in many cases, private businesses that drive the economy. Republicans, and Romney in particular, promote [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-06/romney-critical-of-government-aid-that-helped-bain-profit.html ] laissez faire principles that government has no place in a successful economy and it is their attempt at eliminating regulations that protect every person in America in one form or another.
President Obama is right; America was not built by any one individual or group and regardless the projects, wars, or crowning technological advancements this country has achieved, they were concerted efforts of the entire nation involving labor, tax dollars, and government largesse. Besides hypocrisy, Romney is promoting divisiveness pitting government against free enterprise and individualism that are the bane of a productive society which seems to be the goal of conservatives in general, and Romney in particular. He touts American exceptionalism on a daily basis, but he has no concept of the communal effort involved in making America exceptional, and without government-funded infrastructure, business-friendly tax breaks, and rewards for innovation and development, America would still be using the Pony Express for communication and wagon trains for transporting goods and services from coast to coast.
It is no secret that Willard Romney is the king of liars, and that is quite a feat among Republicans, but he is also a supreme hypocrite. His lack of moral character and ethical standards epitomize a deceitful human being whose primary trait, besides lying and hypocrisy, is pandering for political expediency and monetary enrichment that preclude him from serving as anything other than a vulture capitalist reaping wealth off the misery of other Americans. However, Romney did not even earn his dirty money on his own and he has the audacity to refuse to release his tax returns because as his wife says, “we’ve given all you people need to know about our financial situation and about how we live our life.” Well, the American people are learning about all they need to know about Willard Romney, and it is that he is a pathological liar, filthy hypocrite, and a morally vacant human being who has less integrity than the vilest criminal and whether it is endemic to his cult, his profession as a vulture capitalist, or a product of arrogance, he represents the bane of decent society and that is a very generous portrayal.
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Related Posts
Jon Stewart Destroys Romney’s You Didn’t Build That Attack on Obama
http://www.politicususa.com/jon-stewart-slays-romneys-build-attack.html
President Obama Maintains His Dignity When Faced With Racist and Bigoted Attacks
http://www.politicususa.com/president-obama-maintains-dignity-faced-racist-bigoted-attacks.html
When It Comes to War Mitt Romney is George W. Bush With Magic Underwear
http://www.politicususa.com/romney-bush-war.html
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©2012, PoliticusUSA.com
http://www.politicususa.com/mitt-romney-ignores-corporate-welfare-bum-history.html [with comments]
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Stephanie Cutter: President Obama's Fight for Small Businesses
Published on Jul 24, 2012 by BarackObamadotcom
Facebook it: http://OFA.BO/fyhXvk
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Stephanie Cutter shares how Mitt Romney's new TV ad blatantly twists President Obama's words on small business owners and entrepreneurs. Mitt Romney is not telling the truth about what the President said, and he is taking the President's words out of context.
President Obama has consistently fought for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The President knows that hard working people turning ideas into successful businesses built the American middle class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSaJpEa_BCA
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Did Mitt Romney get a ‘bailout’ for Bain & Company?
07/25/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-mitt-romney-get-a-bailout-for-bain-and-company/2012/07/24/gJQAvzSh7W_blog.html [with comments]
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Romney’s Bain case crumbles a bit more
07/25/2012
The Associated Press reports this morning [ http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/fact-check-romney-bain-contacts-outlasted-exit-16850240 ( http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ROMNEY_BAIN_FACT_CHECK?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT )] that Mitt Romney “stayed in regular contact” with his partners at Bain in the months after the 1999 date that he has given as the time he left the company. The story also claims he “continued to oversee his partnership stakes even as he disengaged from the firm, personally signing or approving a series of corporate and legal documents through the spring of 2001.”
[...]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-bain-case-crumbles-a-bit-more/2012/07/25/gJQA5nvP9W_blog.html [with comments]
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Private-Equity Exec Luke Johnson: Romney's Candidacy 'Lacks All Credibility'
Risk Capital Partners chair Luke Johnson writes that in private equity, "[a]ttention is not directed towards the common wealth, but enriching the management."
07/25/2012
Just because Mitt Romney ran a private equity firm doesn't mean he's qualified to be president. That's what guys like Vice President Joe Biden [ http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/22/11814951-biden-romney-no-more-qualified-to-be-president-than-a-plumber ] and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57459505/l.a-mayor-romneys-business-record-no-qualification-for-president/ ] have said.
And fine, you'd expect that since they're politicians and Democrats. But it's a little more significant when a fellow private equity man says the same thing.
In a column for the Financial Times [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/467567ce-d4dd-11e1-9444-00144feabdc0.html#axzz21ZSy5VZm ] this Tuesday, Luke Johnson, chairman of the private equity firm Risk Capital Partners, rips the idea that Romney's experience as the head of Bain Capital might have done anything to prepare him for public service.
You really ought to read the whole thing, but here are a few choice bits: Johnson argues that private equity firms are "run to maximise profits for the owners, rather than for the creation of jobs"; that people who succeed in the industry "need to be ferociously interested in accumulating money"; and that generally speaking, private companies "are not democracies -- they are quasi-dictatorships."
And then the clincher: "I'm no fan of Barack Obama but to me, Mr Romney's candidacy simply lacks all credibility."
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/romney-private-equity_n_1701675.html [with comments]
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Dark side of a Bain success
Clockwise from top left: Brendan Blum, Sergey Blashchishen, Matthew Meyer and Lindsey Poteet. Aspen Education already faced a wrongful death lawsuit over Meyer when Bain and CRC Health Group bought the company in 2006. Six deaths since the takeover, including Blum, Blashchishen and Poteet, have generated either lawsuits or complaints of neglect.
A for-profit health company bought by Bain -- that Romney profits from -- has exploded in size and tales of neglect
By Art Levine
Wednesday, Jul 18, 2012 06:45 AM CDT
It seemed a world away from the executive suites of Bain Capital when Dana Blum, a recent widow living in Portland, Ore., made the fateful decision to send her son Brendan to Youth Care, a residential program for troubled teens located in the suburbs of Salt Lake City.
Brendan, a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s syndrome, had been extremely aggressive for years; he was even arrested a few times after attacking members of his family. Local therapists hadn’t helped, and six months after her husband died, Dana was frantically casting about for solutions. A consultation with UCLA’s neuropsychiatric unit convinced her that Youth Care’s therapeutic and educational program would finally make a difference.
Four months into his stay there, Brendan had earned a reputation as a temper-prone student who tried to shirk his obligations. So on the afternoon of June 27, when he complained to medical staff that he felt very sick, as if something were “crawling around” in his stomach, his concerns were dismissed. After 11 p.m., he woke up, complaining of stomach pain, and defecated in his pants. The on-duty monitors took him to the Purple Room, a makeshift isolation room used to segregate misbehaving students. There, he suffered a long night of agony, howling in pain and repeatedly vomiting and soiling himself. According to court transcripts and police reports, the two poorly paid monitors on duty did little more than offer him water, Sprite and Pepto-Bismol [ http://www.spencelawyers.com/2011/10/12/wrongful-death-case-settled-against-youth-treatment-center/ ]. They never telephoned the on-call nurse and waited until nearly 2 a.m. to contact the on-call supervisor, only to leave a voicemail. There was little else they felt they could do — Youth Care’s protocol on emergency services meant they were too low on the totem pole to call 911 themselves.
“They didn’t trust our judgment in emergency situations,” explains Josh Randall, a former Youth Care residential monitor, who wasn’t on duty that night. “If you’re working for $9.50 an hour on the graveyard shift, you don’t want to buck the system.” At any rate, the monitors had little expertise in how to respond — it was an entry-level job requiring only a GED, plus a CPR and safety course overseen by Youth Care itself.
When the morning staff arrived at 7 a.m., they discovered Brendan facedown on the floor of the Purple Room, his body already stiff with rigor mortis. The state’s chief medical examiner [ http://health.utah.gov/ome/gen.html ] later determined that Blum had died of a twisted-bowel infarction, which requires emergency surgical intervention.
“It made me very angry that they couldn’t provide better emergency services for my son,” Dana Blum told the online magazine Momlogic [ http://www.momlogic.com/2009/12/saving_troubled_teens_a_greedy_industry.php ]. “I feel like he was murdered” — although, in fact, no court has ever found Aspen or its staffers guilty of murder. Blum, who, with the help of insurance and school district aid, paid Youth Care $15,000 a month to care for her son, made those remarks in 2009; she can no longer speak publicly about Brendan’s death, according to the terms of a settlement she reached last year in a wrongful death lawsuit [ http://www.spencelawyers.com/2011/10/12/wrongful-death-case-settled-against-youth-treatment-center/ ] against Youth Care and its parent company, Aspen Education.
The failure at Youth Care was not due simply to the carelessness of a few workers — a point underscored when a Utah court found that the threshold needed to pursue criminal negligence charges against the two monitors in 2008 wasn’t met and the charges were dismissed. And it wasn’t the only example of alleged negligence or abuse at treatment centers for adult addicts and “troubled teens” that are owned by Aspen’s parent company, CRC Health Group, according to a Salon investigation based on government reports, court filings and official complaints by parents and employees, along with interviews with former clients and staff.
Our investigation found previously unreported allegations of abuse and neglect in at least 10 CRC residential drug and teen care facilities across the country, including three I visited undercover in Utah and California. With rare exceptions, such incidents have largely escaped notice because the programs are, thanks to lax state regulations, largely unaccountable.
Court documents and ex-staffers also allege that such incidents reflect, in part, a broader corporate culture at Aspen’s owner, CRC Health Group, a leading national chain of treatment centers. Lawsuits and critics have claimed that CRC prizes profits, and the avoidance of outside scrutiny, over the health and safety of its clients. (We sent specific questions on these basic allegations to CRC and owner Bain Capital. CRC would answer only general questions; Bain did not reply.)
And CRC’s corporate culture, in turn, reflects the attitudes and financial imperatives of Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney. (The Romney campaign also did not reply to written questions.) Bain is known for its relentless obsession with maximizing shareholder value and revenues. Indeed, this has become a talking point of late [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-latest-romney-claim-about-bain-capital/2012/05/29/gJQA9RPK0U_blog.html ] on the Romney campaign trail; he bragged to Fox in late May that “80 percent of them [Bain investments] grew their revenues.” CRC, a fast-growing company then in the lucrative field of drug treatment, was perhaps a natural fit when Bain acquired it for $720 million in 2006. In conversations with staff and patients who spent time at CRC facilities since the takeover, there are suggestions that the Bain approach has had its effects. “If you look at their daily profit numbers compared to what they charge,” Dana Blum said of CRC’s Aspen division in 2009, “it’s obscene.” That point, ironically enough, was underscored by the glowing reports [ http://www.levinassociates.com/612mamhead2 ] in the trade press [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/133-in-another-mega-deal-crc-acquires-aspen-education.html ] about its profitability [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/special-reports/66-special-report-adolescent-addiction-treatment.html ].
The purchase of CRC came seven years after Romney publicly announced his retirement [ http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/mitt%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9Cretroactive_escape/ ] as CEO of Bain Capital, where he had been in charge [ http://nymag.com/news/politics/mitt-romney-2011-10/index3.html ] since its founding in 1984. But at the time of his departure, Romney worked out an arrangement to continue to share in Bain’s profits [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/us/politics/retirement-deal-keeps-bain-money-flowing-to-romney.html?pagewanted=all ] as a limited partner in the firm. Today, he is still an investor in 48 Bain accounts. Though he has refused to disclose their underlying assets, some information about them can be gleaned. For example, he has reported at least $300,000 to $1.2 million, if not more, in fluctuating annual earnings [ http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/Romney%20financial%20disclosure%20from%20Boston%20Globe.pdf ] from Bain Capital VIII [ http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHtmlSection1?SectionID=8191830-713549-729690&SessionID=KBRPFWfPE63E1l7 ], the convoluted $3.5 billion array of related funds [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/romney-as-multimillionaire-gets-break-for-taxes.html ] that owns both name-brand companies such as Dunkin’ Donuts and the lesser-known CRC Health Group. Most of these funds were made more attractive to privileged investors by being registered [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/05/9999999997-05-001839 ] in the Cayman [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/05/9999999997-05-001839 ] Islands [ http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/04/9999999997-04-028768 ] tax haven [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-18/romney-as-multimillionaire-gets-break-for-taxes.html ]. And Romney’s connections to CRC run even deeper: Of the three Bain managing partners who sit on CRC’s board, two, John Connaughton and Steven Barnes (with his wife), gave a total of half a million dollars to Restore Our Future [ http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/news/la-pn-romney-super-pac-fec-filing-20120131 ], the super PAC supporting Romney. They also each donated [ http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&oldest=1&lname=Connaughton&fname=First+Name&search=Search+Names ] the $2,500 maximum directly to his campaign.
Bain takes over
When Bain purchased CRC, it looked like an investment masterstroke. The company, founded in the mid-’90s with a single California treatment facility, the Camp Recovery Center, had quickly grown into the largest chain of for-profit drug and alcohol treatment services in the country, with $230 million in annual revenue. Under Bain’s guidance, its revenue has nearly doubled, to more than $450 million. CRC now serves 30,000 clients daily — mostly opiate addicts — at 140 facilities [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/26/news/companies/bain-crc-rehab.fortune/index.htm ] across 25 states. In the first five years after its acquisition, Bain had already extracted nearly $20 million in management-related fees from the chain, although Bain investors haven’t cashed in yet through dividends or an IPO. Bain’s purchase, a leveraged buyout [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/why-private-equity-firms-like-bain-really-are-the-worst-of-capitalism-20120523 ], also saddled CRC with massive debt of well over $600 million.
According to company executives and independent analysts, hands-on oversight of subsidiary companies is a hallmark of both Bain and CRC. Romney’s campaign literature boasts about Bain taking exactly this sort of direct role in helping to turn around failing companies [ http://www.mittromney.com/blogs/mitts-view/2012/06/obamas-false-attacks ]. “Over the life of an investment, they have a strong management team willing to participate,” Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst with CRT Capital, a leading institutional brokerage [ http://www.crtllc.com/ ] firm, says of Bain.
The CRC acquisition immediately made Bain owner of the largest collection [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/69-crc-on-the-sell-side.html ] of addiction treatment facilities in the nation. Unlike some Bain Capital acquisitions, which led to massive layoffs [ http://thinkprogress.org/progress-report/romney-job-killer/ ], the company’s approach with CRC was to boost revenues by gobbling up other treatment centers, raising fees, and expanding its client base through slick, aggressive marketing, while keeping staffing and other costs relatively low. But that rapid pace of acquisition couldn’t be sustained in the mostly small-scale drug treatment industry alone. So Bain Capital and CRC set their sights on an entirely new treatment arena: the multibillion-dollar “troubled teen” industry [ http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/troubledteensindustry.html ], a burgeoning [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/133-in-another-mega-deal-crc-acquires-aspen-education.html ] field of mostly locally owned residential schools and wilderness programs then serving, nationwide, about 100,000 kids facing addiction or emotional or behavioral problems [ http://www.astartforteens.org/is-my-teen-out-of-control ].
One of CRC’s first acquisitions under Bain ownership was the Aspen Education Group. Founded in 1998 with about six schools, Aspen Education had expanded to 30 troubled-teen and weight-loss programs by 2006, including Youth Care of Utah. With Bain’s backing, CRC purchased Aspen for nearly $300 million in the fall of 2006.
Less than a year later, Brendan Blum was dead.
At the time of the CRC acquisition, Aspen already had a history of abuse allegations, including at least three lawsuits, and two known patient deaths, one by suicide. Featured on “Dr. Phil [ https://www.google.com/search?ix=aca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3AAspeneducation.com+Dr.+Phil ],” it grew out of schools inspired by the “tough-love” behavior-modification approach [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/cult-spawned-tough-love-teen-industry ] of the discredited Synanon program, which was eventually exposed as a cult [ http://www.rickross.com/reference/synanon/synanon5.html ]. By 2006, Aspen was facing a wrongful death lawsuit, later settled [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUX3QVevB54 ], over an incident in 2004 in which a 14-year-old boy, Matthew Meyer, perished from heat stroke just eight days into his stay at its Lone Star Expeditions wilderness camp [ http://www.momlogic.com/2009/06/can_wilderness_camps_kill_your.php ] in Texas. Nevertheless, less than a year after Meyer died, NBC’s “Dateline” extolled Lone Star as part of a puff piece on Aspen’s success with overweight teens [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/05/19/ST2008051901576.html?sid=ST2008051901576 ]. As an Aspen press release [ http://www.aspeneducation.com/news-datelinenbc.html ] boasted, the show told how a rebellious student who did a stint at Lone Star “returned a month later with a new outlook on life.”
In October 2006, just nine months before Brendan Blum died and as Bain’s deal to purchase Aspen Education was being finalized, CRC received a far less upbeat assessment of Aspen’s services. Following some phone conversations, family therapist Elisabeth Feldman walked into CRC’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters to see Dr. Thomas Brady, a psychiatrist then serving as CRC’s chief medical officer, in order to confront him about a host of issues at Youth Care. She had stumbled upon the problems while trying to help her son’s former girlfriend, a teenage girl who had suffered what Feldman called “gross mistreatment” at Youth Care. Of particular concern to Feldman was a three-month delay before Youth Care hired a psychiatrist to assess the young woman’s deep depression and a failure to treat her Lyme disease. Feldman’s ultimately unsuccessful crusade to get the woman released had led her to seek the services of a Salt Lake City lawyer, Thomas Burton, who had settled two lawsuits against Aspen Education for fraud, neglect and abuse.
Feldman had been part of Brady’s professional referral network for years, but this visit wasn’t congenial. Feldman presented Brady with a 100-page sheaf of legal and corporate documents — including her affidavit describing “brutish punishment and isolation” at Youth Care — about Aspen Education programs in order to help support her charges of abusive treatment and neglect. These claims included reportedly covering up the alleged sexual assault of a female student by an Aspen employee at Turn-About Ranch in Utah; the girl was later duct-taped and restrained by staff [ http://www.fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=7205&start=15 ], a former employee, Toni Thayer, told Feldman, after writing complaints about abusive staff conduct to management, state regulators and the Garfield County sheriff in 2004 — but no sanctions followed. (Subsequently, a lawsuit [ http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/47850.htm ] filed in June 2012 charged that staffers at the ranch engaged in the “torture” of a 15-year-old girl in 2005.) According to Feldman, Brady said he wasn’t aware of any problems at Youth Care or Aspen Education and sought to mollify her about Bain’s pending purchase of Aspen: “I have to trust that Bain did their due diligence,” she recalls him saying. Dr. Brady confirmed, by email, that he spoke on the phone and met with Feldman, but said he has “no recollection” of making those remarks. And he insists that the documents she brought didn’t support her claims of mistreatment. Even so, he says he took her concerns seriously and that CRC and Aspen conducted a thorough review. “I came to the conclusion,” he said, “there was no merit to the accusations.” He remained as CRC’s medical director until May 2009 and said that although he encountered a few “untoward event” cases at Aspen during his time there, he saw no “pattern” of unsafe care.
At any rate, Bain’s purchase of Aspen Education went ahead smoothly. When, months later, Feldman learned about Blum’s death, she was horrified to realize her warnings had had no effect. “For Bain and the big guys, nobody cared,” she says. “It was all about the money.”
Questionable deaths
When he died, Brendan Blum’s was the first publicly reported death due to apparent neglect in CRC’s 12-year history. But in the six years since Bain Capital acquired the company, there have been at least five more seemingly preventable deaths of patients at CRC’s residential programs. Since the Bain takeover, critics and former employees charge that corporate attitudes have too often emphasized cutting costs and limiting public scrutiny at the expense of safety and quality of care. These tendencies appear to have produced risky, potentially life-threatening practices — only a handful of which have drawn public attention.
Several lawsuits have been filed against CRC over mistreatment of its clients, but the company has never acknowledged any wrongdoing and has kept confidential any damage payments arising from legal settlements. CRC is a significant player in the scandal-prone [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08146t.pdf ], decentralized field of residential teen treatment that has more than 1,000 scattered facilities; the firm has nearly 36 therapeutic schools, wilderness sites and weight-loss programs catering to youth.
The latest lawsuit [ http://azstarnet.com/news/science/health-med-fit/rehab-center-sued-over-patient-who-strayed-off-died/article_6976f6ce-74e9-52e5-8740-b5a2edbb5b55.html ] over CRC’s current practices was filed in January against CRC’s prestigious $40,000-a-month Sierra Tucson drug treatment center [ http://sierratucson.crchealth.com/ ] in Arizona, for the allegedly poor monitoring and treatment of what the lawsuit says was an obviously suicidal 71-year-old patient, Dr. Edward Litwack; the center’s own staff had assessed him as a “high” risk for suicide, requiring one-on-one supervision. He was reported missing last August, but it took two weeks for the staff to find his corpse on the grounds. Last October, after an investigation by Arizona regulators following Litwack’s disappearance found 42 major violations, the center was put on one-year probation. The regulators found that ill-trained monitors spent too much time patrolling on golf carts rather than actually interacting with patients. CRC had purchased Sierra Tucson in 2005 for $130 million as its “crown jewel [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/newswires/special-reports/78-on-a-rollup.html ]” shortly before plans to sell CRC [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/feature/69-crc-on-the-sell-side.html ] to Bain were announced. “Then the business side started controlling admissions,” says a former employee, who worked at Sierra Tucson before and after the CRC acquisition. “It doesn’t take a brain scientist to realize that if you reduce staff [in key programs] and add sicker patients, there’s going to be trouble.” With the addition of a new 44-bed lodge in 2007 [ http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/10/prweb564588.htm ], staff at Sierra Tucson was stretched thin, former staffers say; by 2009, a state licensing office fined the facility [ http://hsapps.azdhs.gov/ls/sod/Facility.aspx?FacId=MED1576 ] for having insufficient staff to prevent high-risk patients [ http://hsapps.azdhs.gov/ls/sod/Facility.aspx?FacId=MED1576 ] from wandering off [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/102030001 ].
Other incidents suggest a corporate culture that often downplayed safety and quality of care. In 2010, at least two drug treatment patients died at the overcrowded New Life Lodge in Burns, Tenn., according to wrongful death lawsuits and an investigative series [ http://www.tennessean.com/section/projects23 ] in the Tennessean [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110717/NEWS/305240001/Sudden-death-mom-raises-questions-about-rehab-center ]. According to an account in the Tennessean, based on public records and interviews with people at New Life Lodge, one of the patients, a 29-year-old mother named Lindsey Poteet, had come down with pneumonia and was drifting into unconsciousness when she was driven in a private van to a Nashville hospital 30 miles away. The journey was undertaken on orders of the facility’s medical director, although another hospital lay just eight miles down the road. Poteet stopped breathing en route and died the next day in Nashville. The other, Patrick Bryant, died on his 20th birthday [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20110915/NEWS/309140138/New-Life-Lodge-sued-over-second-patient-s-death ] just four days after being admitted to New Life; his mother alleges that he’d been misprescribed several medications and had been unresponsive for hours before being discovered by staff.
A third patient, 18-year-old Savon Kinney, died last October [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111027/NEWS01/310270037/Death-prompts-new-probe-New-Life-Lodge ] just days after leaving New Life in a state of disorientation, his sister told the newspaper; his death sparked a state investigation.
After the Tennessean series [ http://www.tennessean.com/section/projects23 ] appeared last summer and fall, the state’s Department of Mental Health froze all new admissions to the facility. (It was finally allowed to admit a smaller number of new patients in early April.) One former patient, Malea Fox, who had befriended Poteet at New Life, told me that she called state Medicaid (also known as TennCare), the facility’s primary funder, to complain that the facility was far too overcrowded for personalized care. “All they [New Life] care about is making money,” she said.
In 2009, the state of Oregon forced the closing of two teen programs run by Aspen Education. State investigators [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/mount%20bachelor%20academy-settlement%20agreement.pdf ] found nine cases of abuse and neglect at Mount Bachelor Academy in central Oregon, including incidents of “sexualized role play,” in which young patients were allegedly forced to do lap dances [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/school-using-lap-dances-treat-add-closed-your-tax-involved-will-it-re-open ] during therapy sessions. After Mount Bachelor and its director threatened costly lawsuits, the state’s Department of Human Services softened the language [ http://cafety.org/solutions-and-successes/902-astart-closure-in-the-mount-bachelor-academy-case-dec-2010 ] of the report; CRC claims the allegations were false (while also fighting $37 million in abuse lawsuits over the school’s pre-CRC practices [ http://astartforteens.org/23 ]). Even so, DHS “stands by our findings,” a spokesman says of the 2009 report. That same year, at SageWalk Wilderness School in Hampton, Ore., 16-year-old Sergey Blashchishen died of heatstroke on his very first school hike, in an incident eerily reminiscent of Matthew Meyer’s 2004 death in Texas. One morning in August, Blashchishen suited up in an 80-pound backpack; by afternoon, the heat had topped 80 degrees, and he was soon staggering, drifting off the trail [ http://www.momlogic.com/2010/04/troubled_teens_death_possible_homicide_charges.php ], and complaining of dizziness and exhaustion [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/documents/Sagewalk-investigation-public-record.pdf ]. Staffers contended he was faking his symptoms and failed to call 911 [ http://www.cafety.org/privately-funded-programs/834-abuse-investigation-a-protective-services-report-death-of-sb-or-sagewalk ] until his pulse had stopped; that death is the focus of a negligent homicide investigation [ http://www.cafety.org/privately-funded-programs/794-media-release-sheriff-recommends-death-by-homicide-at-sagewalk-or-sagewalk ].
To CRC officials, the lawsuits, criminal investigations and state sanctions all come in response to isolated events, aren’t “systemic [ http://www.crchealth.com/press-release/crc-health-group-issues-statement-on-tennessean-article-largely-ignoring-overwhelming-successes-in-difficult-addiction-cases-and-compromised-population/ ],” and shouldn’t reflect on the dedication and quality [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/102030001 ] of a large company serving 30,000 trouble-prone teens and substance abusers each day. The company declined to respond to a memo outlining allegations made by alumni, parents and former employees about questionable practices at specific programs, citing a legal requirement [ http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/index.html ] to protect patient confidentiality. But a public relations consultant [ http://www.weinerpublic.com/CRC_Links.html ], Robert Weiner, who works closely with CRC and its most prominent board member, Gen. Barry McCaffrey [ http://www.mccaffreyassociates.com/?page_id=14 ], President Bill Clinton’s drug czar, did respond in general terms in a phone interview: “The people you cited can whine all they want, but that’s just a bunch of specifics we can’t talk about compared to 30,000 people a day we’re making better lives for.”
“In a human-run company there will be human errors in some cases,” he added. “But in other cases, it’s garbage.”
In a December 2011 press release in response to the Tennessean series, CRC vice president Jonathan Ciampi disputed [ http://www.crchealth.com/press-release/crc-health-group-issues-statement-on-tennessean-article-largely-ignoring-overwhelming-successes-in-difficult-addiction-cases-and-compromised-population/ ] criticism of CRC over the reported deaths, citing positive surveys of parents and clients, and certification by government regulators and accrediting agencies. “Safety and quality are our highest priorities.” And in a conference call last fall for investors, CRC’s new CEO, Andrew Eckert, discounted the developments in Tennessee as merely “unwelcomed bumps in the road.” In fact, later in the call he claimed that “CRC is in the process of staking its ground as the definitive leader in clinical excellence.”
Camp recovery: More patients, more revenue
Such claims of excellence do not seem to have pierced the canopy of the Santa Cruz redwoods, home to Camp Recovery, the first drug treatment facility CRC purchased in the mid-’90s. Nestled on 25 hilly acres in Scotts Valley, Calif., Camp Recovery is an idyllic setting for recovery for as many as 70 adults and teens at a time. Yet after Bain purchased CRC in 2006, according to former employees, safety and quality eroded, while state agencies periodically reported increasingly more troublesome findings after 2006 regarding conditions at the camp. “It got progressively worse,” says Tom Corral, a counselor who was employed there before CRC bought Camp Recovery and worked there on occasion after the Bain takeover. Meanwhile, prices were steadily jacked up from about $6,000 a month to as high as $18,000. Under Bain ownership, Corral says, “they’ve been under a lot of pressure to cut costs, and they’ve been squeezed for profit.”
What most alarmed Corral and other former employees was that ever sicker and more mentally disturbed patients kept being admitted. The governing view, Corral recalls, was, “You’ve got to keep them at all costs.”
Camp Recovery is registered with the state as a nonmedical facility [ http://www.adp.ca.gov/ADPLTRS/PDF/ADP_Bulletin_11-18.pdf ], and so patients needing intensive medical or psychiatric care should be referred elsewhere. But such restrictions soon collapsed, say former staffers, in a drive for profits. “Certified nurses were reprimanded when we complained to the intake office,” says one former nurse. “When I didn’t want to admit a person who was falling down drunk, they wrote me up.” Former staffers say that Camp Recovery’s business staff even began to pressure nurses to knowingly admit patients with potentially deadly MRSA infections [ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007261.htm ], which, the CDC warns [ http://www.cdc.gov/mrsa/index.html ], may require treatment by an infectious disease specialist. Shawn Bottoroff, a former clinical technician who left Camp Recovery last year, said that when she started in 2007, nurses were primarily responsible for determining who was stable enough for admission. But they were soon overridden by camp administrators seeking to rope in more clients, Bottoroff and other former workers say.
To Denise Murphy, a former director of the camp’s adolescent unit, the decline became especially noticeable in 2008, when a new executive director took over, Bobby Stearns, hand-picked by CRC, who was determined, according to complaints to the NLRB, to crush a unionization drive [ http://www.seiu.org/a/members/if-employee-free-choice-were-law-theo-jackson-would-still-have-a-job.php ] and keep down costs. “It was so dangerous there, they’re lucky they didn’t get sued,” Murphy says. According to complaints made by staff at the time to the now-reorganized California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, CRC cut back on everything from drug-testing kits to staffing levels. In a 2009 interview, Stearns said any staff cuts were due to declining patient numbers. But eventually, the Department of Social Services, which has oversight over the facility’s 17-bed adolescent unit, confirmed that caseloads had soared and kids ran wild at night. The agency demanded corrective actions [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Camp%20Recovery%20Investigation%20Report.pdf ] — improvements that former employees say were in large part ultimately abandoned.
Equally troubling, former staffers report a pattern that echoes the events surrounding the deaths of Brendan Blum and Lindsey Poteet at other CRC facilities: When patients face a medical crisis, ambulances are usually not summoned. Instead, “techs,” whose emergency training, the former employees say, is generally limited to a two-hour CPR course, are ordered by supervisors to use a van lacking medical equipment to drive patients to the emergency room in nearby Santa Cruz. The tactic, say former employees, helps prevent the facility from being flagged in the 911 system, risking unwelcome attention from state or local officials.
The administrative resistance to calling 911 was so pronounced that when one overmedicated, mentally disturbed patient fled the facility in hysterics one summer day in 2008, she was left to lie on the road outside the gate, screaming for help before collapsing into convulsions. One camp executive told staff on duty at the time, “Leave her alone. We don’t want to make a scene,” according to Bottoroff and other former staffers. It was left to neighbors to call 911. Nevertheless, the camp still makes more emergency calls than any comparable facility in the Santa Cruz area, according to addiction and ER doctors who reviewed 911 log data we obtained — perhaps a measure of just how ill many of the patients are at this nonmedical facility. That log showed 158 calls between January 2008 and August 2011 [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Camp%20Recovery-911calls.pdf ]. “That’s a lot of calls,” a local government official says. “It ought to be investigated.” Logged 911 calls represent only a small portion of total ER visits, the official observes, because it doesn’t account for people who arrive by other means.
Camp Recovery’s drive for secrecy was especially pronounced when it came to potential instances of sexual misconduct, violence or drug use among the adolescents in treatment, former staffers say. “There were several situations in which we were told by the director of the adolescent unit, per [current executive director] James Bailey, not to call 911,” says Bottoroff. Former staffers speak of wild nighttime teen assaults on weaker youth or even staff, and recount hushed-up incidents of underage girls having sex with adult male patients at their cabins. “They were trading favors for cigarettes and alcohol,” Bottoroff says of one such incident she encountered. In almost all such cases of on-site crime, according to an employee complaint to state regulators, the orders handed down from Stearns, the former executive director, in 2009 were clear: “We don’t contact the police.”
State investigators were rarely able confirm the most serious employee allegations on the few occasions when they bothered to investigate, a review of state reports shows. But this could be due to efforts by managers to cover their tracks. Trevor Bottoroff, a former Camp Recovery counselor and Shawn’s husband, says that sometimes managers would rewrite log sheets to make them seem more benign. At other times, supervisors would simply remove them. Murphy, the camp’s former adolescent director, came to see CRC as “the slumlords of treatment.” Other evasions are commonplace at Camp Recovery. The camp openly advertises that it offers prescription-based medical detox [ http://www.camprecovery.com/adult-services/detoxification-programs/ ], though it is not licensed as a medical facility to do so.
A failure of oversight
But such complaints against CRC have rarely led to consequences for either their drug treatment or youth programs. The troubled teen industry in particular is a regulatory Wild West, with some states lacking any licensing system at all for these residential programs [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08346.pdf ]. Even some states that do license, such as Utah, appear unable to guarantee patient safety: about 10 young people are known to have died since 1990 while attending Utah residential and wilderness programs. Regulators often shield the teen care industry from genuine scrutiny [ http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go/position-statements/44 ], according to investigations [ http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08346.pdf ] by the GAO [ http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-146T ], congressional hearings in 2007 [ http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/10-10-07congressionalhearing.html ] and 2008 [ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg41839/pdf/CHRG-110hhrg41839.pdf ], and reports by such mental health advocates as the Bazelon Center [ http://bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=D5NL7igV_CA%3D&tabid=247 ] and Mental Health America [ http://www.nmha.org/go/position-statements/44 ].
In California, regulation of drug treatment facilities appears especially ineffective. California’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, for example, has never investigated the deaths of nearly 200 patients over five years at CRC’s 12 outpatient methadone clinics [ http://www.crcotp.com/clinics/California ]. Mostly likely, addiction experts say, the clients’ rampant substance abuse is the culprit, not sloppy practices at CRC, but that supposition has not been rigorously tested. In fact, Pennsylvania regulators cited two of CRC’s methadone clinics [ http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/312180064/New-Life-Lodge-owner-s-troubles-aren-t-confined-TN ] for failing to properly screen patients [ http://app2.health.state.pa.us/commonpoc/Content/PublicWeb/DASurveyDetails.aspx?facid=X4WU6601&exit_date=08/31/2011&eventid=H4JL12 ] for drugs or narcotic use, a potentially deadly [ http://kap.samhsa.gov/products/manuals/advisory/pdfs/Methadone-Advisory.pdf ] oversight. Weiner, the CRC spokesperson, said that CRC itself would doubtless look into any client deaths: “At least somebody’s going to wonder why they didn’t come in for their treatment the next day.”
“The programs have experienced the reality that there are no consequences if anyone dies [ http://www.fox5sandiego.com/news/kswb-fmr-bay-recovery-employee-witnessed-patients-being-overmedicated-20120629,0,7799279.story ],” says a knowledgeable ex-government official about California’s drug programs, including CRC’s methadone clinics, which have become the chain’s cash cow. With nearly 27,000 daily clients nationwide at 54 outpatient [ http://ir.10kwizard.com/filing.php?ipage=8170590&DSEQ=1&SEQ=6&SQDESC=SECTION_PAGE&exp=&source=1616 ] clinics [ http://www.crchealth.com/find-a-treatment-center/comprehensive-outpatient-opiate-treatment-clinics/help ], CRC founder Barry Karlin was dubbed by Treatment magazine “America’s Methadone King [ http://www.treatmentmagazine.com/special-reports/115-americas-methadone-king.html ].”
Loose oversight seems to have been critical in enabling CRC to flourish. It’s hard to imagine, in particular, that without the scandalously weak [ http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/press-release/miller-harkin-reintroduce-legislation-prevent-child-abuse-teen-residential-programs ] monitoring of the teen treatment industry CRC’s Aspen division would be able to continue its harshly regimented, unproven behavior-modification methods and dicey emergency protocols. “Without regulations and enforcement, this profitable industry will continue to have actors that present unacceptable risks to the children they serve,” U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said last year when introducing a federal oversight bill [ http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/press-release/miller-harkin-reintroduce-legislation-prevent-child-abuse-teen-residential-programs ].
A culture of abuse and neglect?
This apparent lack of oversight in the teen industry, combined with a widespread view by providers that their charges are manipulative troublemakers, has allowed a toxic culture of psychological abuse and medical neglect to prevail [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/CAFETY_AEG_FACTSHEET.pdf ], according to parents, alumni and federal officials. As Greg Kutz, a GAO investigator, said in testimony about the industry in general before Congress, “It seemed that the only way program managers would believe they [the students] were not faking it is if they stopped breathing or did not have a pulse.” That culture is visible even at Aspen’s most upscale residential programs, such as Island View in suburban Syracuse, Utah. One former student there, Colleen Davidson, now 20, who graduated from the program in 2009, recalls her alarm when she coughed up blood one morning as she stood at the bathroom sink. She says she was never allowed to see a doctor because by the time the nurse wandered by a few hours later, another student had rinsed the blood from the sink. “They assume you’re lying,” she says.
For months, CRC denied me press access to any of its facilities, so I visited Island View last August posing as a father of a troubled girl. During that visit, director Laura Burt confirmed this skeptical stance toward potential medical emergencies. She said the nursing staff would see my daughter immediately in case of a medical crisis but would monitor her if they suspected fakery: “We’re not going to rush her to the hospital if she’s just saying that and there is nothing that says it.”
In March 2008, Duane Bernard rescued his son Matthew, then 16, from another Aspen program, Adirondack Leadership Expedition [ http://www.heal-online.org/ale.htm ] in Saranac Lake, N.Y., after gleaning from one of his son’s monitored letters the brutal conditions he was enduring. Matthew, who was sent to Adirondack by his mother during a custody dispute, later told his father of food deprivation, neglect of serious medical complaints, and cruel taunting by instructors, including an incident when field staff pressured one kid to lick clean a urine-soaked cup. Medical neglect, Duane Bernard says, was ingrained in Adirondack’s get-tough “wilderness therapy [ http://astartforteens.org/dangers-of-teen-wilderness-programs ].” Father and son say that during Matthew’s monthlong stay, he was required to go camping in subfreezing weather with too-thin clothing and sleeping gear, and he soon developed severe numbness and frostbite in his right foot. But he wasn’t taken to an urgent care facility until shortly before his release and required eight months of medical treatment afterward.
Duane Bernard wrote [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Duane-bernard-letter.pdf ] in April 2008 to state officials alleging child abuse, enclosing Matthew’s written descriptions of his alleged maltreatment [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Matthew%20Bernard-2008statement-senttostateregulators.pdf ], but the state’s child protection agency said it had no jurisdiction over Adirondack [ http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/files/managed/Child%20Welfare%20Services%20Reply%20to%20Bernard.pdf ]. “They blew us off,” Bernard says.
I heard Matthew’s experience echoed in conversation after conversation with Aspen alums, many of whom suffer nightmares and PTSD-like symptoms. Hannah Sangillo of Bethesda, Md., now 19, ended up at SUWS of the Carolinas [ http://suwscarolinas.crchealth.com/ ], Aspen’s showcase wilderness program in North Carolina’s breathtaking Pisgah National Forest, in 2010. She now considers her 49-day summer stay “child abuse.” She recounts one of several instances of heat exhaustion she experienced during hours-long hikes designed to promote self-reliance and personal growth. Even on scorching, humid days, when temperatures soared into the mid-90s, groups of girls were saddled with 60-pound-plus packs, exceeding Girl Scout safety guidelines. “I was not able to walk straight,” she says of one incident. “I was stumbling and sweating profusely. I kept telling people I needed to stop and they said: ‘No, we can’t stop yet.’” She temporarily blacked out, only to be dragged to her feet by fellow campers and prodded along the trail at the urging of what SUWS calls its “highly trained [ http://suwscarolinas.crchealth.com/safety-first-how-wilderness-camps-keep-teens-safe/ ]” field instructors. By the end of the summer ordeal, nearly half of her small team of girls had collapsed during hikes, she says, without receiving any medical attention.
Throughout their time there, neither Sangillo nor Hannah Spungen, a 2007 SUWS graduate, ever saw a single staffer actually help young residents with medical problems. These included everything from heroin withdrawal to all-night vomiting caused by drinking from fecal-contaminated [ http://www.doh.wa.gov/YouandYourFamily/IllnessandDisease/Giardia.aspx ] streams during their daily hikes.
Before I interviewed the two alumni, I met with Shawn Farrell, executive director of SUWS of the Carolinas, who insisted to me that emergency care is a top priority. (Subsequently, CRC declined to answer any questions about allegations of medical neglect at this SUWS program. Shawn Farrell, the executive director of SUWS of the Carolinas, insisted to me that emergency care is a top priority. He says field staff are instructed to radio in symptoms of any injuries or illness immediately to the base camp’s field medic and, if needed, arrange transport to a hospital only eight miles away. “We want the doctors to do the diagnosis,” not the outdoors staff, he says. But this policy appears to falls apart in the execution. In Spungen’s experience, “There’s no protocol in place to make sure it’s safe for you.”
These incidents seem to illuminate an institutional culture that allowed Sergey Blashchishen to die in 2009 before ever receiving emergency medical aid. As one government investigator told me about the field instructors at SageWalk, where Blashchishen died, “They were highly trained, but the culture overrode that.” The SageWalk Field Instructor Manual — like other Aspen manuals, vetted by CRC, according to a former CRC official — requires staff to go through a rigid “chain of command” before emergency help can be summoned. “There are inherent delays in a system like this,” the investigator observed. CRC spokesman Weiner defended those procedures: “If there’s a [medical] issue they should go to the top supervisors,” he said. “I don’t see how that’s wrong to make sure you’re doing the right thing. That’s why they’re not the boss.”
Yet Weiner also insisted that CRC is “aware of complaints and problems at Aspen and wants to make sure it has the best practices possible.” To that end, he pointed to a recent initiative by CRC to ensure that all its teen programs are certified by two leading accrediting agencies, CARF (the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities) and a body known as the Joint Commission, a 60-year-old industry-funded [ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aspen-education-group-announces-full-program-accreditation-128667768.html ] nonprofit [ http://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/18/behavioral_health_care_accreditation.pdf ] that accredits thousands of health care programs in the United States. This is perhaps of scant comfort, given that members of Congress harshly criticized the Joint Commission in the wake of revelations of medical negligence at Walter Reed and other Joint Commission–accredited hospitals. Moreover, many facilities in one of the most notorious chains in the teen treatment field, Straight Inc. [ http://www.rickross.com/groups/straightinc.html ], were approved by accrediting agencies, including the Joint Commission, until they shut down [ http://www.thestraights.com/legal/matrix-civil-criminal.htm ] in the wake of lawsuits and state action. Some maintained their high ratings even after Straight Inc. and several of its spinoffs were hit by state investigations and at least 90 lawsuits alleging abuse.
No turnaround from the turnaround experts
Despite the accumulating lawsuits, state investigations and even criminal inquiries, Bain Capital has yet to force a major shake-up in the culture or leadership of CRC. Aspen co-founder Elliot Sainer and CRC CEO Barry Karlin [ http://www.strugglingteens.com/artman/publish/CRCHealthGroupBN_100628.shtml ] remained in their executive posts until they retired [ http://www.strugglingteens.com/artman/publish/printer_SainerRetireAspenPR_070911.shtml ] in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Both now serve on the CRC board of directors. Trina Packard [ http://www.parentcheckin.com/parent/viewstaffbio.aspx?staff=aae4d71e-c2f5-42f8-84ef-552d977d2c2c ], the executive in charge at Youth Care when Brendan Blum died, remains in her post to this day.
Rather than instituting reforms, CRC seems to have responded to the series of lawsuits, in part, by requiring parents to sign elaborate contracts that feature sweeping “hold harmless [ http://www.heal-online.org/aspenranchcontract.pdf ]” clauses even in the case of death. “This is a business-driven model: caveat emptor,” one Utah Education Department official conceded on background. The contracts leave parents like Julie Scheule, a Wisconsin mom, with little recourse [ http://statecasefiles.justia.com/documents/delaware/superior-court/149470-0.pdf ] when they suspect deception or abuse. In 2007, she sent her daughter, then 15, to an Aspen facility in Utah, since closed, called Aspen Ranch [ http://www.heal-online.org/aspenrch.htm ]. Aspen, she now charges, “abused parental trust, abused our bank account, and abused the kids in their care.” She had a change of heart when she realized she was being hit with thousands of dollars in extra costs and flew to the ranch to remove her daughter. She recalls her daughter hugging her, trembling, and saying, “Please mama, take me out of here.”
Aspen uses what the teen treatment industry calls a “levels” model that grants more privileges and freedoms as students follow the rules, but imposes sanctions of varying severity on those who slip up or disobey.
Punishments were more often psychological than physical. According to former students, emotionally brutal isolation punishments and peer-driven encounter “therapies” were commonly employed to break down resistance, especially at Island View. For Colleen Davidson, the former student there who coughed up blood, the worst part was when students were prodded to confront each other about real or fabricated transgressions in harsh encounter sessions. (In fact, she says, they were very similar to the group therapies cited in the June “torture” lawsuit against Turn-About Ranch.) The sessions were so terrifying that girls resorted to desperate measures to avoid attending, according to Davidson. She recalls that some girls choked themselves to induce fainting; one rubbed feces in her own eyes to cause an infection.
“They break you down, but they don’t really build you back up,” she says of the Island View approach. “I have nightmares from it, and the memories are really awful.”
The no-data zone
CRC declined to address any program-specific allegations. A company spokesperson, Kristen Hayes, instead summed up the company’s approach in a written statement: “Our mission is to bring best practices to our industry in clinical excellence and quality patient care,” she wrote by email. “Our comprehensive risk and compliance protocols help to ensure the delivery of the safest, proven treatment processes.”
CRC has said that its teen care programs are based on recognized and evidence-based programs, including one called contingency management. But critics suggest that the approach as actually applied by Aspen is inconsistent with contingency management — which emphasizes primarily positive reinforcement — while alumni and lawsuits filed over the years by parents of former teen patients describe instead a distorted atmosphere of terror and punishment [ http://www.cafety.org/images/stories/CAFETY_AEG_FACTSHEET.pdf ] that undercuts their possible utility.
But there are virtually no independent, well-designed, peer-reviewed studies showing that any residential programs for troubled teens actually work [ http://bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=D5NL7igV_CA%3D&tabid=247 ] — and none at all for the behavior-modification approaches employed by Aspen. Research [ https://www.earlyadolescence.org/juvenile_justice_system ] funded by the Department of Justice and a literature review by the NIH [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/politics/17violence.html ] both found, in the context of youth violence and crime prevention, that get-tough, discipline-based approaches [ http://cjjr.georgetown.edu/pdfs/ebp/ebppaper.pdf ] generally do more harm than good.
Shy of evidence, CRC’s PR machine offers up testimonials from pleased parents and CRC-funded surveys [ http://www.aspeneducation.com/Outcome_Study_One_Year_Later.pdf ] of parents and students that report positive outcomes. Hayes put me in touch with one of these parents, the mother of a self-destructive, drug-abusing 15-year-old son whom she sent to Island View, the Aspen program Colleen Davidson attended, after other treatments had failed. “I didn’t want to stand around and wait for my child to die,” she says bluntly. Enrolling him in Aspen, she says, was the turning point. “I wish all kids were as lucky as my son,” she says.
And what can’t be washed away by good PR can always be described as an unavoidable tragedy. At Youth Care of Utah, admissions counselor Claire Roberts offered up this sort of soft-focus gloss when she told me about the death of Brendan Blum. “It was very traumatizing for us,” she said. Then she added philosophically, “These things happen.”
No plausible deniability
Mitt Romney may not know the details of Brendan Blum’s death, but it is difficult to imagine he wouldn’t be aware of the troubles [ http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens ] facing CRC and the residential teen-treatment industry [ http://wwaspdiaries.com/2012/04/14/mitt-romney-a-voice-of-freedom-and-hope-not-for-americas-so-called-troubled-youth/ ] as a whole. Not only are two of his major campaign donors, Connaughton and Barnes, on CRC’s board, but two of his key advisors, Robert Lichfield and Mel Sembler, faced firestorms after allegations of abuse emerged regarding their own residential treatment chains [ http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens ].
Meanwhile, Ann Romney has said that she would make helping troubled teens [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/ann-romney-says-shell-work-with-troubled-teens-as-first-lady-3/ ] a top priority as first lady. And CRC is roaring ahead with an expanded sales force; Eckert, the CEO, told investors in May, “We now have [sales] coverage in every major metropolitan area in the United States.”
The Romney campaign did not respond to queries about his investment in CRC. But candidate Romney has been outspoken about his belief that for-profit health care companies can flourish only without onerous regulations. “I had the occasion of actually acquiring and trying to build health care businesses,” he said during a primary debate last year. “I know something about it, and I believe markets work. And what’s wrong with our health care system in America is that government is playing too heavy a role.”
Crystal Manganaro [ http://astartforteens.org/assets/files/Parent-Crystal-Manganaro-Story-2009.pdf ] likely has a different view. She is the mother of Matthew Meyer, the 14-year-old who died at Aspen’s Lone Star program in 2004, and has forcefully advocated for a federal crackdown on teen residential programs, including those run by Aspen. “For those of you who have not lived through losing a child due to negligence, you just cannot imagine what it feels like unless you have walked through it and deal with it every day of your life,” she said in 2009. “My son is dead and there is nothing I can do about that, but I’ll be damned if my son died in vain.”
This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with generous additional support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/18/dark_side_of_a_bain_success/ [with comments]
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Abuse of Brain Injured Americans Scandalizes U.S.
Peter Price is a resident patient at a facility in Bradenton, Florida. He and his family have been instrumental in exposing the problems at his previous facility Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida.
William S. Speer/Bloomberg
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Janet Clark and Kenneth Aulph, former patients at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation, talk with Bloomberg's David Armstrong about the alleged abuse of patients by staff at the facility. About 150 patients live on the FINR campus in Wauchula, Florida, making it one of the largest rehabilitation centers for brain injuries in the country.
(Source: Bloomberg)
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- A staff member at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida, is allegedly caught on tape abusing a patient. A ceiling surveillance camera shows employee McKinkley "Jerome" Scott on Dec. 4, 2011, grabbing the patient, standing him up, then kicking his feet out from under him and pushing him to the ground, according to the State Attorney's Office. Scott faces a pending charge of abusing a disabled person. He has pled not guilty.
(Source: Bloomberg via State Attorney's Office)
Video [embedded]
July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Danny Silva, a patient at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Florida, is allegedly abused by staff members Landrey Johnson and LaKevin Johnson on Sept. 14, 2011. A FINR employee secretly filmed the event. Landrey Johnson and LaKevin Johnson were arrested and charged with abuse of a disabled adult. They are currently awaiting trial and have pled not guilty.
(Source: Bloomberg via State Attorney's Office.)
The grounds of The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR) in Wauchula on April 27, 2010.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
The grounds of The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR) in Wauchula on April 27, 2010.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
Reginald Hicks, right, was taken to the cafeteria by a FINR employee and given solid food that lodged in his lungs and killed him last December, according to his daughter, Heather Hicks. Her father, a former mortgage worker injured in a car accident, had a care plan that called for tube feeding because he couldn’t swallow, she said. Autopsy findings cited aspiration of food and pneumonia as causes of death.
Suzonne Shivers via Bloomberg
Kenneth Aulph, a former lumberjack who was hit by a car while walking across a highway 12 years ago, said he received little psychological therapy, was assigned useless tasks, and saw patient beatings.
Cathy Kemper via Bloomberg
Defendants LaKevin Johnson, left, Landrey Johnson, center, and McKinley Scott are accused of abusing patients at The Florida Institute of Neurologic Rehabilitation (FINR). All three have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Hardee County Sheriff's Office via Bloomberg
The Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation is seen in this screenshot taken on July 20, 2012 from Google Earth. The 25-building compound is located on Vandolah Road in Wauchula, Florida.
Google Earth via Bloomberg
Janet Clark said, “One time they had me down and one of the staff kicked me in the eye with a boot."
Janet Clark via Bloomberg
Some patients of the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation say staffers didn't always restrain them in the proper way, kicking them and punching them in some instances. BARR restraint on an adult is supposed to be administered by three people on a 2 inch thick foam mat.
By David Armstrong - Jul 24, 2012 2:15 PM CT
Soon after Peter Price arrived at the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation [ http://www.finr.net/ ] to recover from a brain injury, he pleaded for a rescue.
“Jess, they beat me up,” Price told his sister, Jessica Alopaeus, in May 2009. “You have to get me out of here.”
Staffers at his new home held him down and punched him in the face and groin, Price said. When Alopaeus’s efforts to transfer him stalled, Price said his desperation led him to a step aimed at speeding his release.
He swallowed five fish hooks and 22 AA batteries he’d picked up during a patient outing at Wal-Mart. After emergency surgery to remove the objects, he was allowed to transfer to another facility.
Residents at the Florida Institute have often been abused, neglected and confined, according to 20 current and former patients and their family members, criminal charges, civil complaints and advocates for the disabled.
These sources and over 2,000 pages of court and medical records, police reports, state investigations and autopsies contain an untold history of violence and death at the secluded institute known as FINR, which is located amid cattle ranches and citrus groves in Hardee County [ http://www.hardeecounty.net/ ], 50 miles southeast of Tampa.
Patients’ families or state agencies have alleged abuse or care lapses in at least five residents’ deaths since 1998, two of them in the last 18 months. Three former employees face criminal charges of abusing FINR patients -- one of whom was allegedly hit repeatedly for two hours in a TV room last September.
Sparse Care
The complaints underscore the problems that 5.3 million brain-injured Americans are having finding adequate care. Their numbers are growing, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [ http://www.cdc.gov/TraumaticBrainInjury/ ], as better emergency medicine and vehicle safety mean that fewer die from traffic accidents, bullet wounds and other causes of traumatic brain injuries.
The long-term ills range from memory loss and physical handicaps to the inability to control violent anger or sexual aggression. Yet because insurance benefits for rehabilitation are scarce, less than half of those who need it receive it, according to the Brain Injury Association of America [ http://www.biausa.org/ ].
Organized as a company and operated for profit since 1992, FINR has become one of the largest brain-injury centers in the country, with 196 beds. Three rival providers say they know of no place bigger. Multi-site operator NeuroRestorative [ http://www.neurorestorative.com/ ], owned by a holding of buyout firm Vestar Capital Partners, handles more patients.
FINR hasn’t grown by opening its doors to anyone who needs rehabilitation, customers say. Rather, its marketing is focused on the relative few who can pay bills that reach $1,850 a day.
Michigan Mandate
That includes those injured on jobs with generous worker’s compensation benefits, and car-crash victims in Michigan --which mandates unlimited lifetime benefits [ http://www.michigancatastrophic.com/ ] for automobile injury coverage.
Those who have clashed with the company over the treatment of patients say its efforts to keep costs down and extend the duration of stays take priority over care and rehabilitation.
“All people are to them is a monetary gain,” said Jana Thorpe, a professional guardian who removed one of her wards from the company’s care in 2008. “They don’t care if they do anything for them.”
Steven Siporin, another guardian, says he has placed patients at FINR when no one else would take them, and doesn’t expect to send more.
“Is this the best society can do? No,” he says of FINR. “Is this the best under current options? Yes.”
Difficult Clients
Florida’s Department of Children and Families [ http://www.myflfamilies.com/ ] has received 477 allegations of abuse or neglect at FINR since 2005, including 36 that were “verified” by its investigations, according to records released by the agency. The 36 verified claims and others were referred to law enforcement, according to Erin Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the agency, who said she didn’t know what became of the referrals.
FINR executives declined to comment for this story and turned down a request to visit its Wauchula, Florida [ http://www.cityofwauchula.com/ ], facility. Owner Joseph Brennick said he “preferred to stay out of the news” before ending a short phone conversation and directing questions to a lawyer, who said he would not answer them.
On its website, the company calls itself a leader in brain- injury rehabilitation. In past statements it has said it vends “extremely high quality care to very difficult clients” aimed at returning them to their homes, doesn’t use seclusion and has “zero tolerance” for resident abuse.
Elbow Shots
Hardee County prosecutors have charged two FINR staffers with abusing Danny Silva, a 21-year-old autistic patient. Video of the alleged crime shows two large men flanking a smaller figure on a sofa as they punch, elbow and slap him at least 30 times. The blows often come after moans from the man in the middle, which appear to be making it hard for his assailants to hear the TV.
“Shut up, man,” they say in the video, taped by a FINR staffer, according to police. “You are getting on my damn nerves,” one of the hitters tells the smaller man between two elbow shots. A woman in nurse’s clothes shows up in the video to give the alleged victim his medicine.
Defendants LaKevin Johnson [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=lakevin&lname=johnson&fpartial=True ], 30, and Landrey Johnson [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=landrey&lname=johnson&fpartial=True ], 39, of Fort Meade, Florida, have pleaded not guilty to the charges. Their lawyer didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Employee McKinley Scott [ http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=mckinley&lname=scott&fpartial=True ] pulled autistic patient Gabriel Allen up from his seat and threw him to the ground last December in a second case, prosecutors say. A video in the case shows a man identified as Scott pushing Allen away from him on a couch, standing him up, kicking his legs out from under him and leaving him curled up on the floor next to a blinking Christmas tree. Scott, 48, has pleaded not guilty to an abuse charge. His lawyer didn’t return calls.
’Positional Asphyxia’
In an earlier incident, Michael Lieux, a brain-injured ex- Marine from Louisiana, suffocated when four FINR employees pinned him face down until he couldn’t breathe, according to a negligence lawsuit that won his family a $5 million jury verdict in 2005.
It was homicide by “positional asphyxia,” according to the medical examiner for Hardee County. The company denied it was negligent and lost its appeal in the case [ http://caselaw.findlaw.com/fl-district-court-of-appeal/1160705.html ].
Two resident deaths at FINR that same year led to confidential settlements of lawsuits alleging negligence and care lapses that the company denied. In 2009, a FINR staffer pleaded guilty to battery charges after punching out a resident who had scratched him during a restraint.
Fiery Fist
More recently, Reginald Hicks was taken to the cafeteria by a FINR employee and given solid food that lodged in his lungs and killed him last December, according to his daughter, Heather Hicks. Her father, a former mortgage-workout specialist injured in a car accident, had a care plan that called for tube feeding because he couldn’t swallow, she said. Autopsy findings cited aspiration of food and pneumonia as causes of death.
FINR’s marketing appears aimed at acquiring tough behavioral cases, including aggressive patients. Its website features an ad [ http://www.finr.net/files/fist_ad.pdf ] dominated by a clenched, fiery-colored fist -- “One of the Subtle Signs That It’s Time for Neurological Rehabilitation,” according to the headline.
The road to the company’s 900-acre spread in Wauchula passes fields of grazing cattle and trees draped in Spanish Moss. It houses 152 beds, with 44 more in nearby apartments and group homes. The “secluded, pastoral” locale keeps residents from trying to run away, the company has said. Other deterrents, current and former patients say, are the alligators and snakes roaming the property.
Family History
The facility was once part of New Medico Inc., a chain founded by Charles Brennick, the father of FINR owner Joseph Brennick. A 1992 Congressional investigation highlighted allegations that New Medico staff abused patients and prolonged stays to boost revenues.
Joseph Brennick, then a senior New Medico employee, promised to block discharges to keep clients, the final Congressional report said. If one wanted to leave, staffers should “all jump all over him as a team until he stays,” the report quoted a Brennick memo as saying.
Around this time, some of the facilities were transferred to the elder Brennick’s sons, according to corporate and real estate records. Joseph, who wound up with Wauchula, has prospered as its owner, according to former staffers.
In 1995, he bought South Watch, a gated estate on 62 acres near Sarasota that has a 9,000-square-foot home and is valued at $1.7 million for tax purposes. Brennick bought 311 acres nearby for $6.4 million in 2007. He owns four cars, one a 2004 Maybach 62 luxury sedan valued at $300,000. FINR’s main campus is valued for taxes at $11.2 million.
’Taken Down’
Ex-residents of FINR said they were frequently “taken down” or knocked to the floor and restrained by staff, in a routine often accompanied by beatings. They say the take-downs were described by the company as a form of restraint called BARR -- for Brief Assisted Required Relaxation. Blue mats sometimes used for the purpose are ubiquitous at FINR, according to patients and visitors.
“I was taken down at least once a week,” said Janet Clark, who stayed at FINR from 2006 to 2007 after she was injured in a car crash. Clark keeps a photo from her Wauchula days in which she is expressionless and sports a black eye that she said came from staffers.
“One time they had me down and one of the staff kicked me in the eye with a boot,” said Clark, a former prison guard who now lives on her own in Hillsborough, North Carolina. “They were saying shut up, screaming at me. I was hurting so much I couldn’t stop. It was terrifying.”
$310,000 Bill
Clark, 55, had behavioral issues while she was recovering, including times when she needed to be restrained, she said, but not with the force or frequency that FINR used. She received no psychological therapy there for her aggression problem although she was paying the company $310,000 a year from a personal injury settlement, she said.
“Immediate and consistent psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment” were “clearly indicated” for Clark, according to an outside evaluation she obtained from Sally Kolitz Russell, a Miami psychologist, nine months into her FINR stay.
The company relies on a network of guardians, case workers, doctors and lawyers to find patients. It has exhibited at the annual National Workers’ Compensation and Disability Conference and the National Guardianship Association conference.
FINR also cosponsors events for the brain-injured in Michigan, home of the lifetime auto-injury benefit. There were 20 Michiganders at the facility at one point last year, according to court records -- one for every 10 beds at the facility.
Country Club
Placements at FINR are often made by guardians in Michigan and elsewhere who control the finances and treatment of patients who have been ruled incompetent by courts.
“It’s human trafficking,” said Kenneth Aulph, a former lumberjack who was hit by a car while walking across a highway 12 years ago.
Aulph said he received little psychological therapy, was assigned useless tasks, and saw patient beatings after he was sent to FINR by Siporin, his court-appointed Michigan guardian, whose practice handles about 120 wards.
“I wanted to stay in Michigan where my friends and family are,” Aulph said.
A Siporin aide showed him a company brochure that “made you think you were going to a country club,” highlighting the lakes, swimming pool and library on the Wauchula grounds, Aulph said. Siporin praised FINR’s brain-injury program and added a threat, according to Aulph: If he didn’t go to Florida, Siporin would get a court order to put him in a mental institution.
Sandpaper Alphabet
Siporin promised in June 2009 that Aulph would be back in Michigan by Christmas, according to Cathy Kemper, his sister. Instead he stayed two years. Siporin denied threatening Aulph and said he made no promise about length of stay. Aulph went willingly to Wauchula, Siporin said.
After breakfast at FINR, Aulph said would spend three hours weeding in the greenhouse, followed by lunch, then a routine in which he sanded down wooden letters of the alphabet that staff tossed into the trash afterward. Aulph said he was capable of more -- including the intricately carved birdhouses on display in his Michigan apartment.
Patients Restricted
Patients were mostly restricted to the areas near their cabins in the evenings and weekends, recreation was rare and the swimming pool pictured in the brochure was filled with cement, Aulph said. Patients say they were rarely allowed near the lakes.
Kemper said she pressed Siporin almost as soon as her brother arrived in Florida to get him out and wanted to know why he wasn’t getting something better for the $900 a day his insurer was paying.
“Ken was a cash cow,” she said.
Calls to Siporin’s office often went unreturned, and when she did make contact, he assured her that Aulph was doing well, she said. He stopped resisting a move only after she demanded to know the name of the judge in Aulph’s case, Kemper said. Her brother is now in a rehabilitation center in Ann Arbor.
Siporin said he worked to return Aulph to Michigan, and was unaware of any Kemper query about the judge.
FINR’s bills have also been paid by state governments and the District of Columbia. They’ve sent patients to Wauchula as wards or when they qualify for state assistance.
21 Recalls
Over the last four years, D.C. has recalled 21 patients from the facility. The pullout followed a 2008 investigation [ http://www.uls-dc.org/finr.pdf ] by the district’s designated disabilities advocate that found FINR violated patients’ human rights and D.C. policies by improperly secluding them in their rooms or using drugs as a form of restraint.
The company denied those allegations in a letter to the D.C. attorney general. It said patients weren’t restricted to their rooms, only to their cabins.
In September 2010, the state of Connecticut placed Melinda Jakobowski, 24, in the company’s care. Not brain injured, she had been abused as a child and was one of seven mentally ill or disabled patients the state had placed at Wauchula.
By February, Jakobowski was dead. Three resulting state- level inquiries in Florida and Connecticut raised questions about the quality of her care, injuries she received at FINR before her death, Florida’s oversight of the company and the accuracy of her autopsy.
FINR used BARR on Jakobowski 29 times during her five-month stay -- compared to just five restraints in the prior five months in a hospital in her home state, according to a report last month by the Connecticut Fatality Review Board for Persons with Disabilities [ http://www.ct.gov/opapd/cwp/view.asp?a=1746&q=277604 ].
Busted Lip
Jakobowski complained that staffers were hitting her and calling her names, the board said. She had a “busted lip” and “what appeared to be bruising under her left eye” about a month before she died, according to a sheriff’s office report on a mistreatment allegation it had received. The officers concluded she had not been abused.
Although she had a history of self-harm, Jakobowski wasn’t showing suicidal tendencies at the end of her stay in Connecticut, the fatality board said. She tried at least six times to harm herself between September and January at FINR, including attempts to hang herself with a phone cord and to wrap a t-shirt and a bedsheet around her neck.
Not Breathing
The company’s plan of care for her required two staff members to be watching her and within arm’s length at all times, according to an investigation by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, or AHCA.
On Feb. 10, 2011, arriving morning shift employees found Jakobowski in her bed just after 8 a.m., not breathing, with her hair wrapped around her neck. She was later pronounced dead at a Tampa hospital.
One of the employees tasked with watching her was asleep on a couch, according to the Florida investigations. The other was awake, but not observing Jakobowski for at least 15 minutes, the Florida Department of Children and Families determined. Both staffers were fired, the agency said.
A month before she died, Jakobowski told her caregivers it would be easy for her to quickly kill herself because overnight staffers slept, according to an internal FINR document cited by Connecticut investigators. “It will only take like 3 minutes and by the time they even know it, I’ll be dead and happy,” the report quoted her as saying.
’Obvious Flaws’
The medical examiner in Tampa ruled her death “Sudden Ventricular Arrhythmia due to Schizophrenia.” The sheriff’s office closed its investigation based on that finding, saying Jakobowski died of natural causes.
The Connecticut report said there is no record of a schizophrenia diagnosis for Jakobowski. FINR records indicate she had bipolar disorder.
“There are obvious flaws in the investigations conducted by Florida agencies and there appear to be weaknesses in the system of oversight and monitoring of the FINR facility and its program,” the report said.
Mary Mainland, the Tampa medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, said she doesn’t remember how she determined Jakobowski was schizophrenic. “It doesn’t really change the essence of the diagnosis” because sudden cardiac death has been seen in other mental illnesses, she said.
Florida’s AHCA found no violations of its regulations and referred the case to the state Department of Health for further review. The health department was unaware of the referral for more than a year until Bloomberg News recently asked about it.
Wrong License
“We are working with AHCA to resolve this issue,” said Victor Johnson, director of the department’s unit that includes its Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Program [ http://www.doh.state.fl.us/demo/brainsc/index.html ]. FINR’s license doesn’t allow it to treat mentally ill patients like Jakobowski who are not brain injured, said Thom DeLilla, the program’s chief.
Meanwhile, Connecticut’s Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services considers “FINR to be a safe and effective placement,” according to James Siemianowski, a spokesman for the agency. He said the treatment of patients is monitored monthly and that clients must agree to be placed there.
Allegations that FINR limits residents’ contact with the outside world have surfaced in court cases in which they sought to oust Siporin as their guardian so they could leave the facility.
Three Cases
In three such cases since 2010, patients were allegedly blocked from traveling to Michigan for hearings after the company or Siporin told the court they couldn’t be safely transported, or that it would require too many staff members.
When patient Gabriealle Weakley’s lawyer called her at the facility days before the hearing in her case, FINR imposed a one-minute limit on their conversation, according to notes from company employees that are part of the court record.
The notes indicate that privacy and liberties were limited in other ways. A supervisor confiscated printouts of e-mails Weakley received from outside because Siporin didn’t allow communication with the man who sent them, the FINR notes say. The man was a boyfriend who brought Weakley items she wasn’t allowed, such as cameras and cellphones, according to Siporin, who prevailed in court.
The notes include detailed quotes from patient conversations with relatives, and discuss residents who were prohibited by the company from making and receiving phone calls. Several patients say they were blocked from sending mail from the FINR, and that emails were barred or limited.
Prison Preferable
“You have more freedom in prison and at least there you know when you are getting out,” says Elmer Cerano, executive director of Michigan Protection and Advocacy Service Inc. [ http://www.mpas.org/HomePage.asp ], that state’s advocate for the disabled.
Michigan Protection represented Lori Johnson, a patient who wanted to remove Siporin as her guardian and leave Wauchula. She lost in court, where Siporin cited his years of experience with the brain-injured and said FINR was the best place for her.
Price, 24 years old and brain-injured since a bicycle accident at the age of eight, said he wanted to leave FINR after he was punched in the face and groin there in May 2009. Alopaeus, his sister and legal guardian, supported the move. Siporin, who was co-guardian, opposed it.
FINR’s treatment of Price was “inhumane,” said Alopaeus. Price had a “busted lip” and bruises that could have come from BARR restraints, according to a sheriff’s deputy report dated May 8 of that year. Price had been trying to fight with staffers when they stopped him from leaving his cabin four days earlier, the report said.
‘Body Sheet’
FINR recorded his injuries in a “Body Sheet” diagram Alopaeus said the company gave her. Under “location of bruises, scrapes, scars, rashes etc.,” the diagram notes blue discoloration around his left eye, one testicle larger than the other, and other discoloration on his arms and chest. The sheriff’s office concluded there was no evidence of abuse, and said Price changed his story several times about which staffers were involved in the incident.
Price was taken down more than 20 times and confined to his cabin at FINR for weeks at a time, he said in an interview. Residents are kept in as part of “Therapeutic Cabin Based Programming,” used to protect them from hurting themselves or others, the company has said.
Price had kind words for staff members who brought playing cards and music to his room. Others were malevolent, including one who allegedly placed a clipboard over his chest, punched him repeatedly, and told him the method would not leave bruises, Price said.
Fish Hooks
After one period of seclusion, he said he was allowed to go to Wal-Mart, where he bought the batteries and fish hooks that he later swallowed. Price also cut his belly and stuffed two of the batteries and eight hooks into the wound.
“I planned this” as a way to get out of FINR, Price said. “My plan wasn’t to die.”
It was a month before he recovered from the surgery to remove the objects. He never returned to FINR, and Siporin agreed to give up his guardianship. Price now lives in an apartment run by a different center in Florida, where he is monitored, but able to leave his apartment most days.
He said he goes on fishing trips, eats out, sees movies, and has never been taken down at his new home.
To contact the reporter responsible for this story: David Armstrong in Boston at darmstrong16@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P. (emphasis added)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-24/brain-injured-abuse-at-for-profit-center-scandalizes-u-s-.html [with comments]
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Mitt Romney Made Over $25 Million In Foreign Income While Governing, Campaigning
Mitt Romney has earned a lot of income overseas.
07/24/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/mitt-romney-foreign-income_n_1695806.html [with embedded video report, and comments]
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Romney May Have Paid No Federal Income Tax From 1999 to 2001
07/24/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r-talbott/romney-taxes_b_1695715.html [with comments]
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When Will Romney Reveal His Returns?
July 23, 2012
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/when-will-romney-reveal-his-returns/ [with comments]
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Mitt Romney’s $100M IRA: Gaming the System at Bain
Image: msnbc.com
Mitt Romney will pimp your portfolio. Well, not yours but...
Steve Klingaman
JULY 26, 2012 8:27AM
I might have titled this piece “How to Build a $100 Million Dollar IRA, Just Like Mitt Romney” but it would have been an unfair tease. The problem is, even if you know how to do it, you need to run a firm like Bain Capital to pull it off. If you work for Bain Capital, that’ll do. But you have to have a boss with a very particular mindset, a boss like Mitt Romney.
The way you do it is astonishingly arcane. You rip the fiscal guts out of a company you’ve acquired and refashion them just so. You split the shares into two classes, type A shares and others we'll call type B. Type A shares are riskier, but if the acquired company turns around, their value grows exponentially. The other shares, Type B, are more like standard shares that you would see on the market. They go in your regular portfolio.
When the owner and employees of a takeover firm like Bain work on a project they might receive part of their compensation in the two varieties of shares. Or they may co-invest in the acquisition. Type A shares, with their potential for extreme growth, go into tax-deferred retirement accounts, where all that growth grows untaxed until retirement. In this manner, all of the income restrictions on how much can be contributed annually to an SEP-IRA are circumvented and the owners of these accounts can build a lifetime of retirement savings in just a few short, lucky, years.
What we are talking about here is the very meaning of the words unfair advantage.
The Wall Street Journal, much to its credit, did the initial digging into how Mitt built his $100 million retirement account in a story that appeared in March. It should be noted that the true value of Mitt’s SEP-IRA is unknown because he refuses to share the details—“Let them eat cake,” as his lovely wife Ann was paraphrased on the topic of open access. Ironically, this disclosure is a practice initiated by Mitt’s father George during his own run for the Big Office. In fact, the value of Mitt’s IRA could be as low as $20 million, which I imagine will make you feel a lot better, because a 401k or IRA valued at that level might make you feel like Mitt’s unfair advantage is a little less, well, unfair, right?
Anyway, back to the Wall Street Journal article, “Bain Gave Staff Way to Swell IRAs by Investing in Deals [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204062704577223682180407266.html ],” by Mark Maremont. It is a gem, recommended reading to be sure. A short excerpt goes a long way toward explaining how the deals work:
Bain in the Romney era had what's known as a SEP-IRA—a plan somewhat akin to a 401(k) but involving only employer contributions—which had contribution limits before 2001 of $30,000 a year. Putting in low-price A shares, said former employees, gave them a shot at building substantial tax-deferred accounts despite the contribution limits.
A deal for Sealy Corp. shows how this could work if all went well. Bain led a group that took over the mattress maker in 1997. One junior Bain employee invested about $30,000 in Sealy, documents reviewed by the Journal show, putting a few thousand dollars of IRA money into the risky, low-price A shares. Ninety percent of the employee's investment went into the safer shares, which were placed in a taxable account.
In 2004, after Sealy's value had been sharply raised by Bain and its partners, they sold most of Sealy for a large gain. The employee's approximately $30,000 investment grew to about $160,000.
To put this in context, this Bain employee was able to amass an amount--$160,000—that is approximately three times what the average American has in their entire IRA or 401k through the rapid growth of an initial investment of $30,000 of what the company said was junk stock. And that’s an important point. Because only Bain knows the parameters of the deal, it’s chances for success and the potential upsides involved. Let’s say it plainly: the classification and pricing of shares is purely arbitrary. Their potential for rapid growth is directly based on the degree to which they can be undervalued at the outset. This is what I mean by gaming the system.
And it is by gaming the system in this manner that Mitt was able to build his $100 million nest egg. If he had undervalued one class of shares and then stuck them in his Cayman island or Swiss bank account that could work, too, but that might raise the specter of tax evasion, which is a crime. Mitt is too smart for that. He is a tax avoider, not a tax evader, as far as we know, because of course he won’t disclose his offshore holdings, and presumably he had his Swiss bank accounts vacated when the federal government cracked down on tax evasion via Swiss accounts.
Mitt was so clever that his plan verged on, well, actually, well beyond, overkill. No one really wants to have $100 million in an IRA, because it will be taxed at the level of income when the money is withdrawn and it is taxed at a brutally high rate if it goes into one’s estate. However, if the plan was to fund one’s religious tithing with those tax-deferred dollars; that would be a really cheap way to fund the tithe with tax-privileged, false cost basis, taxpayer-subsidized dollars. And that is a hard-core benefit no matter how you cut it. It is almost as if the government is covering the bill.
And this scenario is in no way mere serendipity. Tax planners talk with wealthy donors all the time about the benefits of using a tax-deferred retirement account to fund charitable giving. But most high rollers don’t get to fund their plans with the stock market equivalent of funny money; they have to use real dollars.
Is this the ethos of government service that you want to see in your president? Is this “Ask not what your country…?” No, let me answer. It is not. This is, “How can I game the system to extract the last drop of income out of the tax code and make that tax structure work for me in ways that the other 99.99 of my fellow Americans cannot?”
Some would argue that you want a guy this smart running the country. I would beg to differ. First of all, Bain’s accounting department or one of its consultants came up with the original scheme, not Romney himself. Second, a genius for tax avoidance is not the same genius it takes to actually run a company or a country. I would rather have a gifted legal mind driving the bus, rather than a flat-out schemer. No, I take that back. I would take a little of the schemer if it could be the Lyndon Johnson variety, someone who can twist an arm to get a law passed. Romney, stiff as a shirt-board, couldn’t glad-handle his way out of a paper bag. Not to say President Obama is a whole lot better, though he sure can sing better, and that counts for something on Congressional Karaoke night.
If I had been a minion at the table back at Bain Capital, I would have posed the question: Is it possible to put too much money into a SEP-IRA or 401k? I mean, shouldn’t we go for a tax-deferred retirement account that hits the top .0001 percent, say, $4 million, and call it a day?
At some point all these machinations just begin to look like connivance. And in that respect you can call Mitt a bit of an overachiever. In a way, it’s just stupid to have a $100 million IRA. As to the tithing, charitable gifts are laudable, but Mitt gamed the system in such a way that the lost revenue to the government was more than substantial, and in a manner that is entirely unavailable to the rest of us. So, being as charitable to Mitt as circumstances allow, it’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ gain, U.S. Treasury Department’s loss. I would prefer as president a guy who would bust a nut working for the welfare of all Americans, not just some at the expense of others. What he did doesn’t have to be illegal for me to think of him as a tax cheat.
© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://open.salon.com/blog/steve_klingaman/2012/07/25/romneys_100m_ira_gaming_the_system_at_bain [with comments]
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Mitt's Speculative Financial Fiction
The Strip | By Brian McFadden
July 22, 2012
© 2012 The New York Times Company
[currently at] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/the-strip.html#1
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Mitt Romney Registered As Lobbyist For Salt Lake City Olympics
Posted: 07/26/2012 7:33 am Updated: 07/26/2012 8:52 am
WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney loves to talk about his role salvaging the 2002 scandal-tarnished Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. It's one of the only items on his resume that he will discuss without hesitation. He's so proud of the accomplishment, he wrote a book about it called "Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, And The Olympic Games."
His Olympics success was pivotal in his winning run for Massachusetts governor in 2002, and it may turn out to be just as important in his current campaign for the presidency. It's why he plans on cheering from the good seats [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/summer-2012-travels-with-mitt-romney/ ] when the opening ceremonies commence for the summer games in London this week.
But when it comes to the retelling of his Olympics story, Romney never mentions the L word. Lobbyist.
Romney wasn't just the head of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Romney was also a registered lobbyist for the organization, Utah state records show.
Romney last worked as a lobbyist on Dec. 31, 2000, according to a spokesman for the state lieutenant governor, who oversees the registry.
As a lobbyist and president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, Romney didn't just stabilize the balance sheet. He brought in a record $1.3 billion in federal dollars [ http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.com/_news/2012/07/21/12877714-mitt-romney-and-federal-money-for-the-olympics ] for Salt Lake City's games and more from Utah. In 1996, the Atlanta Summer Olympics cost U.S. taxpayers $609 million [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95650 ]. The Salt Lake Tribune wrote in March 2000: "If charming state lawmakers were an Olympic event, Mitt Romney would be draped in a flag about now, singing the national anthem."
After winning support from Utah's Legislature for Olympics projects, Romney told reporters that "hosting the world is obviously bigger than SLOC can do alone. The Legislature recognizes they are a critical partner. I am very pleased they have confidence in us and confidence in our plans."
The Romney campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Romney's Olympics role as a registered lobbyist.
While Romney has since ignored his lobbyist history, he attacked his primary opponents for lobbying. He assailed challenger Newt Gingrich for working a Washington lobbyist. “Well, what’s he been doing for 15 years? He’s been working as a lobbyist, yeah, he’s been working as a lobbyist and selling influence around Washington," Romney told [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/24/romney_attacks_newt_as_lobbyist/ ] a crowd in Florida during the primary. The Romney campaign leveled similar charges against Sen. Rick Santorum, questioning his role [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/09/us-usa-campaign-idUSTRE8230GE20120309 ] as a lobbyist in Pennsylvania.
Former Salt Lake City Olympics organizers give Romney high marks on his lobbying skills.
Robert Garff, former chairman of the board of the SLOC, told The Huffington Post that Romney was instrumental in winning federal money. "He was able to acquire funding to remodel some of the infrastructure -- the roads," Garff explained. "That helped immensely to reduce the traffic strain. He was also able to help [with] security."
The games ended up becoming a boondoggle for pet projects. Sydney Fonnesbeck, a former Salt Lake City Council member who worked on various Olympics-related committees, insisted the federal funds went for legitimate purposes. Still, she added, "For those of us who live here, if the Olympics is the excuse we need to get it done, we said, 'Let's do it.'"
The Democratic National Committee is already running ads quoting Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) complaints at the time. He slammed the federal spending on the Salt Lake games as an "incredible pork-barrel project [ http://thehill.com/video/campaign/211355-new-dnc-ad-hits-romney-over-olympics-leadership ]" and a "rip-off of the taxpayers." McCain went further [ http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95650 ] calling the spending a "disgrace" and pushed for a federal investigation.
The federal spending was lavish. And much of it benefited private interests. In its definitive December 2001 investigation [ http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1024516/index.htm ], Sports Illustrated documented shady spending and taxpayer-funded bridges-to-nowhere, including a millionaire developer receiving federal cash to build a road, and a billionaire ski resort owner gobbling up public land with federal assistance. Taxpayers spent $12 million on two temporary parking lots. Romney's committee spent $3 million in federal money building a fence and adding security around a medical center to protect patients from Olympics crowds. Another $1 million was spent on a weather forecasting system.
"With all the skill, grace and precision of a hockey team on a power play, Utah's five-member congressional delegation has used the Olympics to drain money from an unprecedented number of federal departments, agencies and offices -- some three dozen in all, from the Office of National Drug Control Policy to the Agriculture Department," wrote famed investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in Sports Illustrated.
Just as he was beginning his run for Massachusetts governor in 2002, Romney testified under oath [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/mitt-romney-bain-departure_n_1669006.html ] before a Massachusetts commission over a residency dispute. According to a transcript obtained by HuffPost, he told the commission: "I spent a great deal of time meeting with the federal government" while working on the Olympics.
The Salt Lake Tribune suggested Romney held onto his lobbying registration longer than state records reflect. His lobbying days ended when controversy began brewing over a second bribery-style Olympics scandal.
"Salt Lake Organizing Committee President Mitt Romney and his top lieutenants have suddenly canceled their state lobbyist licenses," the newspaper reported in January 2002. "The withdrawal of lobbying registrations for six SLOC officials was requested in late December, just weeks before the opening of the Utah Legislature and at the same time rumors abound of lawmakers being offered free Olympic event tickets. State law says businesses with registered lobbyists must report gifts to lawmakers, while it is unclear about other organizations that donate freebies to legislators."
During Romney's campaign for Massachusetts governor following the games, he boasted of his lobbying abilities [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUiViadw0dg (below)].
"I'm in favor of getting more money from the federal government. ... We need to do a better job getting money from Washington," he said. "And I'm going to go after the transportation department and get more money there if at all possible. I was successful in doing that in organizing the Olympics -- got record funds from the federal government. I'll do that here."
Of course, Romney made no mention of the L word.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/mitt-romney-olympics_n_1704261.html [with comments]
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Romney’s ’02 Olympics short on transparency
Despite pledge, records destroyed
By Christopher Rowland and Callum Borchers
July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney promised “complete transparency” when he took charge of the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Olympics, a pledge that included access to his own correspondence and plans for an extensive public archive of documents related to the Games.
But some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staffer shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts.
“Transparency? There was none with [the Salt Lake Organizing Committee] when he was there,” said Kenneth Bullock, a committee member who represented the Utah League of Cities and Towns. “Their transparency became a black hole. It was nonexistent.”
According to Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul, “Mitt Romney resigned from SLOC in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”
Romney and the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had no legal obligation to preserve their records or make them public, even though the state paid $59 million, and the federal government spent $342 million on the Games and contributed roughly $1 billion more in indirect aid for transportation projects and other capital improvements in the Salt Lake region.
Like other Olympics, the 2002 Winter Games were managed not by a public entity but by a private, nonprofit corporation that was exempt from public records laws.
Earlier Olympic organizing committees, too, had destroyed internal documents. Organizers of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, burned records of their bid to host the Olympics — a move widely believed to have covered up bribery.
But Romney vowed that he and his committee would operate out in the open. Dubbed a “franchise player” by Utah’s Governor Mike Leavitt, Romney was charged with leading the comeback from a scandal in which some on the Salt Lake bid committee had quietly doled out cash payments to International Olympic Committee members during the host city selection process.
“Any time there has been a breach of trust by people at the top, that organization is going to be placed under a microscope, and that is appropriate,” Romney said at a news conference on Feb. 11, 1999, the day he was named chief executive of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. “We will be viewed much more carefully than any other organizing committee, perhaps in the history of the Olympics, and we deserve to be so viewed. I believe we will come through with flying colors.”
There were two major prongs on Romney’s transparency promise: One was “the most open documents policy of any enterprise.”
“All of the documents inside our organization are available to the public,” Romney said in a speech to the National Press Club in 2000. “Simply submit a form saying which documents you want. For instance: ‘I want to see all the letters written by Mr. Romney to [then-IOC President Juan Antonio] Samaranch.’ You’ll get ’em all.”
But letters between journalists and the organizing committee obtained by the Globe show reporters were sometimes denied access to records they believed were covered by the committee’s open documents policy. Only a week after Romney spoke to the National Press Club, the Utah chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists wrote a complaint to the committee.
“There were some difficulties and some reporters felt they were treated differently than others,” recalled Paul Murphy, the Utah chapter president at the time.
The committee charged news outlets $25 per hour to research records requests, even if the requests were eventually denied.
Even within the organizing committee, access to information was sometimes restricted, according to Bullock, the committee member.
“Everything should have been accessible to the board, but it wasn’t because that’s not what Mitt wanted,” he said.
The other prong was the public archive, billed as an unvarnished documentary of the Salt Lake City Olympics — from bid scandal to closing ceremony.
A decade later, the Games’ official records, housed at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library, still have not been made available to the public. ABC News reported Monday on the unpublished archive and the destruction of documents.
When the collection is finally unveiled next month, the public should not expect any major insights into the presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s leadership of the Games, archivists say. Instead of executive office memoranda, budgets, and correspondence, the 1,100 cartons of records contain only previously published brochures, manuals, and some general guidance on how to run an Olympics.
“It’s not about the inner workings of anything,’’ said Elizabeth Rogers, the library’s curator of manuscripts. “I haven’t seen anything particular to Mitt Romney.”
Salt Lake Organizing Committee officials confirmed to the Globe that most administrative records were destroyed in the months after the Games concluded.
Romney did not oversee the destruction of organizing committee documents. That task fell to Fraser Bullock (no relation to Kenneth Bullock), the committee’s chief operating officer and a former Romney colleague at Bain Capital, who took over as the Games’ chief executive when Romney left to run for governor of Massachusetts.
“Mitt didn’t have anything to do with any of those decisions,” Fraser Bullock said. “He was long gone, and it was really left up to the poeple left behind to decide what to keep and what not to keep.”
Fraser Bullock said the goal was to save materials that future organizing committees might find useful.
“What we instructed our people to keep were things that were relative to putting on the Olympics, for future groups who would want to understand how operations worked,” Fraser Bullock said.
But that was not the original purpose of the archive, according to an agreement between the organizing committee and the University of Utah.
“Our intention was we were documenting the Salt Lake Olympics, and it sounds like they were just thinking about someone using that for future planning,” said Jeffery O. Johnson, Utah’s state archivist until 2002 and a member of the ad hoc committee that helped form the archive agreement. “Certainly that was not our intention.’’
The agreement was the product of years of collaboration by the organizing committee, university, state, Utah State Historical Society, and other interested parties. Signed Oct. 30, 2001, it outlined the “probable scope” of records to be archived in the Marriott Library, including written records of SLOC management and departments, Salt Lake Olympic Bid Committee records, and “other administrative records that document the planning and staging of the Olympic Winter Games.”
But the agreement contained a clause that gave Olympic organizers the authority to withhold any records for any reason.
Publicly, the Salt Lake Organizing Committee suggested the archive would be a hallmark of the 2002 Winter Games, according to media accounts of the time. But internally, archiving was not a high priority, according to committee archivist Mark Jensen.
“People were encouraged to select documents about the planning and staging of the Games, but it was voluntary,” Jensen said.
“I didn’t interact with Mr. Romney to any degree, except for a couple of occasions,” he added. “But my impression is that his philosophy on the archive mirrored that of [Fraser] Bullock.”
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2012/07/24/after_romney_pledged_transparent_olympics_key_documents_were_destroyed/ [with comments]
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Ticket broker tied to Romney, 2002 scandal apologizes for new Olympic woes
By Mark Hosenball
Wed Jul 25, 2012 5:31am IST
LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) - A longtime Olympics ticket broker is apologizing for delays in distributing tickets to the London Summer Games that have forced some fans to spend up to six hours in sweltering heat this week waiting for their orders.
The ticket agency CoSport - whose owner was a figure in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics scandal and is a prominent backer of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney - said in a statement Tuesday that it understood the frustration of customers, many of whom have arrived in London from the United States and Canada.
CoSport also said it was "very sorry" that some customers had not been given the bloc seating arrangements they requested.
The episode has drawn attention to the cozy relationship CoSport and its affiliates enjoy with the Olympics, for which the companies have provided travel packages since 1984.
And in a twist of circumstance, the ticket problems also are a reminder of the agency owner's role in a scandal surrounding the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City just as the leader of those Games, Romney, is scheduled to visit here for the opening of the London Games.
CoSport - described on its website as having the "exclusive right to market and sell Olympic" hospitality and ticket packages in the United States, Canada and a few European nations - is owned by Sead Dizdarevic, who with his wife, Margaret, is a major supporter of Romney.
Reports filed with the U.S. Federal Election Commission indicate the Dizdarevics and their company have contributed $200,000 to Restore Our Future, a political action committee, or PAC, that supports Romney's bid to oust President Barack Obama in the election on Nov. 6.
There is no indication Romney had anything to do with CoSport's work on the London Olympics or any problems the ticket agency has had.
A CONTROVERSIAL PAST
Sead Dizdarevic has a long and controversial history as an Olympics tickets distributor.
A native of Yugoslavia who began arranging Olympic travel packages for the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, Dizdarevic's companies have arranged VIP travel and ticket packages for every Olympiad since.
In Salt Lake City, Dizdarevic was embroiled in a scandal that shook the Olympic movement and led to Romney, then a private-equity executive at Bain Capital in Boston, being enlisted to steer the 2002 Games out of trouble.
The scandal focused on allegations that Salt Lake officials bidding to lure the Olympics there had spent millions of dollars on gifts, cash payments and other benefits for IOC members involved in deciding whether to award the Games to Salt Lake City.
It also involved payments that prospective vendors made to Salt Lake Olympics officials. An indictment accused two officials of receiving $130,000 from Jet Set Sports, of which CoSport is a part.
The charges eventually were tossed out by a federal judge, but not before Dizdarevic testified against the suspects after receiving immunity from prosecution.
Despite the cash payments controversy, Romney recruited Jet Set as a sponsor after he took over as chief of the Salt Lake Games, according to Mark Lewis, who worked on the Games as a close aide to Romney.
In the years that followed, Dizdarevic and his companies maintained and expanded their involvement with the Olympics.
Lewis and Fraser Bullock, another of Romney's top deputies in Salt Lake, became involved with Dizdarevic and Jet Set Sports. Lewis, a fundraiser Romney hired away from the International Olympic Committee to raise funds for the Salt Lake Games, joined Jet Set as its president in 2005. Last December, Romney's campaign announced that Lewis was one of its state finance co-chairmen in Montana.
Lewis left Jet Set last April to join the National Collegiate Athletic Association. At the time he also resigned from his unpaid position with Romney's campaign.
FRUSTRATION IN LONDON
Romney's trip to Europe this week will include stops in London, Israel and Poland, as the former Massachusetts governor seeks to establish himself on an international stage.
Neither Romney's campaign nor Jet Set Sports would comment on whether the broker had a role in arranging Romney's trip.
A person who answered the phone at Jet Set Sports' New Jersey office said Dizdarevic was in London. He did not respond to messages left by e-mail, telephone and personal visit.
At the community college campus near London's Paddington train station that is the London ticket pickup center for CoSports customers, some fans in line on Tuesday said they had tried to collect their tickets on Monday but found waiting times on an unusually sunny London day running up to six hours.
On Tuesday, customers said, the lines seemed to be moving somewhat faster. The ticket agency handed out bottles of water and erected canopies to shade customers from the sun.
But Dave Sirrell, a customer from Canada waiting for his tickets, said he found the situation "...pathetic. ... They should have had this (office) open last week." (Editing by David Lindsey and Philip Barbara)
Copyright 2012 Reuters
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/25/oly-usa-tickets-romney-idINL2E8IO2OF20120725
===
Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman Jr. and 2002 Olympics
July 25, 2012
Mitt Romney often speaks of his successful role in leading the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. He doesn’t talk much about the fact that he wasn’t the first choice for the job. And he doesn’t talk at all about the fact that one of his potential rivals for the gig was Jon Huntsman Jr., who competed against him in the Republican presidential primary.
Mr. Romney was chosen as chief of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in 1999; he was hired to right the ship after members of the bid committee created a scandal by giving lavish gifts to members of the International Olympic Committee in hopes of gaining favor.
In today’s Wall Street Journal [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443295404577547363394704358.html ( http://on.wsj.com/PglfZ5 )], Robert Garff, who chaired the Salt Lake committee at the time, said Mr. Romney ranked about sixth on a list of a dozen potential candidates for the job. With the integrity of the entire effort at stake, Mr. Garff worked with then-Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to find someone to take the helm. Mr. Leavitt is now a top adviser on the Romney presidential campaign.
[...]
Mr. Leavitt had watched Mr. Romney wage an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate against incumbent Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. He recalls thinking, “This guy’s got his public service gene lit up, and maybe I could exploit it.”
In “Turnaround,” Mr. Romney’s book about his Olympics experience, he doesn’t go into details about the search. “Somehow my name had come up,” he wrote.
[...]
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/07/25/mitt-romney-jon-huntsman-jr-and-the-2002-olympics/ [with comments]
===
Olympic ad by pro-Obama super PAC removed over copyright issues
July 26, 2012
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/olympic-ad-pro-obama-super-pac-removed-copyright/story?id=16862932 [with comments]
===
Watch Mitt Romney's Full Speech at Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention
Published on Jul 24, 2012 by PBSNewsHour
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nevada, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney outlined how he believes his foreign policy vision clashes with President Obama's.
The former Massachusetts governor spent the majority of his remarks sharply criticizing the Obama administration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqpwin8SPVw
*
Did Romney Call Obama ‘Corrupt?’ – Quote Confusion Sparks Questions
July 24, 2012
http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2012-07-24/did-romney-call-obama-corrupt-quote-confusion-sparks-questions/ [with comments]
===
Watch President Obama's Full Speech at VFW Convention
Published on Jul 24, 2012 by PBSNewsHour
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nevada, President Barack Obama claimed a lack of foreign policy experience from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and talked against America being in a decline under his administration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ2jJBHwv3I
===
Hiding in Plain Sight
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON
If I closed my eyes, and added a creepy monotone, I could have been listening to Dick Cheney.
The Republican speaker at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nev., was slashing the president with jingoistic jingles: Obama is ashamed of America, an apologist sapping the greatness of a country that is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, a weakling marring the American Century by gutting the military and the economy. And, on top of that, the Obama White House doesn’t know how to keep stuff secret.
Prodded by conservatives to attack the president more aggressively, the ever malleable Mitt Romney obliged Tuesday at the V.F.W., spouting chest-thumping clichés about putting “resolve in our might.” That resolve evidently doesn’t include Mitt, who passed on Vietnam, or his five strapping sons, none of whom have volunteered for the volunteer military.
It was at the V.F.W. convention in 2002 when Cheney, who got five deferments from Vietnam, set the gold standard for mindless belligerence, pushing pre-emptive action in Iraq. “Simply stated,” he said, “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The Arab street, he knew, would erupt in joy when we invaded.
In his speech, Romney demanded that any Obama administration leakers of classified information be found and punished because “the time for stonewalling is over,” “Americans are entitled to know” and Americans deserve “a full and prompt accounting of the facts.”
After the speech, Eric Edelman, a Romney campaign adviser, chimed in on ferreting out Obama leakers in a press release; unfortunately, BuzzFeed soon pointed out that Edelman “was implicated in the country’s last major national security leak investigation — the outing of C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame” when he served under former Cheney aide Scooter Libby in W.’s administration.
Romney is so secretive that he’s beginning to make the über-clandestine Cheney look like The Bachelorette.
The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that although Romney promised “complete transparency” when he stepped in to save the Salt Lake City Olympics, he became a black hole: “Some who worked with Romney describe a close-to-the-vest chief executive unwilling to share so much as a budget with a state board responsible for spending oversight. Archivists now say most key records about the Games’ internal workings were destroyed under the supervision of a staffer shortly after the flame was extinguished at Olympic Cauldron Park, after Romney had returned to Massachusetts.” (Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just burn the records in the flame?)
The public still can’t see the records, stored at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott library, named for the same man as Willard Mitt Romney.
Andrea Saul, a Romney spokeswoman, said that Mitt resigned from the Olympics job in early 2002 to run for governor of Massachusetts and “was not involved in the decision-making regarding the final disposition of records.”
Who was responsible for the final disposition? A former colleague at Bain Capital, Fraser Bullock, who succeeded Romney in the Olympic post. Ah, the old Bain handoff.
Romney spent $100,000 in state funds to replace office computers at the end of his term as governor and on the cusp of his 2008 presidential race, “as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret,” reported Mark Hosenball of Reuters. Eleven Romney aides “bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves,” Hosenball wrote. “Also before he left office, the governor’s staff had e-mails and other electronic communications by Romney’s administration wiped from the state servers, state officials say. Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney’s four-year tenure as governor.”
It seems antithetical to Mormonism, since the Mormon Church loves to save documents, keeping 35 billion images of genealogical information and records on church history in the Granite Mountain Records Vault near Salt Lake City.
Doesn’t Mitt have space in that split-level, four-car garage elevator in La Jolla for a little deep-storage?
As Maggie Haberman observed in Politico, Romney has made a calculated decision to hide three major elements of his background: his Mormonism, his record at Bain and his time as governor. This creates, she wrote, “a kind of self-imposed paralysis on biographical messaging that some observers, including Republicans, say may wound his campaign in an era in which voters want to achieve a kind of unprecedented intimacy with their candidates.”
Former rival Newt Gingrich told Politico Tuesday that Romney needs to relax and let people see who he is, noting that, except for family, “there’s a place where Mitt clearly doesn’t let people get.”
So far, Mitt’s casting a shadowy silhouette, hiding his fortune in foreign tax havens, hiding tax returns, destroying and hiding records as head of the Olympics and as governor, hiding a specific sense of where he would take the country.
Americans don’t want to play hide-and-seek with their presidential candidates. Romney should listen to himself: The time for stonewalling is over.
*
Related
President Criticizes Romney Over Foreign Policy (July 24, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/us/politics/president-criticizes-romney-over-foreign-policy.html
Related in Opinion
Editorial: The Candidates Talk Foreign Policy (July 25, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/opinion/the-candidates-talk-foreign-policy.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/opinion/dowd-hiding-in-plain-sight.html [with comments]
===
Don't Criticize Obama for Being Too Rational About Israel
The president is coming under fire for an attitude toward an ally that ought to be standard fare in statecraft.
Jul 26 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/criticizing-obama-for-being-too-rational-about-israel/260344/ [with comments]
===
Anglo-Saxon Heritage, Multicultural Future
By CHARLES M. BLOW
July 25, 2012, 10:56 pm
On Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph, a leading conservative newspaper in Britain, quoted an anonymous adviser [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/mitt-romney/9424524/Mitt-Romney-would-restore-Anglo-Saxon-relations-between-Britain-and-America.html ] to Mitt Romney commenting on the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States:
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr. Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
The paper pointed out that the comments “may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity,” and they did.
The reporter who wrote the story said later on Twitter that the anonymous adviser “was a member of the foreign policy advisory team.”
The Romney campaign sought to distance itself [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-campaign-disputes-anglo-saxon-heritage-remark-20120725 ] from the remarks. As Talking Points Memo reported [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/anglo-saxon-mitt-romney-daily-telegraph-adviser-joe-biden.php ] on Wednesday:
“It’s not true,” Romney spokesperson Amanda Henneberg said in quotes confirmed by T.P.M. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Gov. Romney or anyone inside the campaign.”
Vice President Joe Biden, in a statement about the Telegraph article [ http://bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2012/07/25/british-newspaper-reports-racially-charged-comment-mitt-romney-adviser/EjmCTGhLb0tqc7x5X16lEJ/story.html ], said in part:
Not surprisingly, this is just another feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points at the expense of this critical partnership. This assertion is beneath a presidential campaign.
Rebutting the vice president’s attack, Ryan Williams, another spokesperson for Romney, said that Biden had “used an anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper to prop up their flailing campaign.”
Whew, that’s quite a bit of back and forth, and yet it remains unclear, to me at least, what the Romney campaign is saying. If it is accusing the newspaper of misquoting someone or fabricating quotes, it should demand a retraction.
But according to T.P.M.:
The Telegraph, which stands by the piece, told T.P.M. that the paper has not received a request from the Romney campaign to retract or correct the story.
If Romney’s team is suggesting that someone in the campaign could have said it without Romney’s knowledge or blessing, then the campaign should seek to identify the adviser and dismiss him or her from any role in promoting Romney’s candidacy.
But as is often the case with this campaign and with the modern Republican Party, Romney’s team stopped short of issuing a complete repudiation and demanding a total cleansing of these poisonous ideas from their ranks.
The phrases “if anyone said,” and “weren’t reflecting the views” are weak and amorphous and don’t go far enough towards condemnation.
The reason is simple: the Republican Party benefits from this bitterness. Not all Republicans are intolerant, but the intolerant seem to have found a home under their tent. And instead of chasing the intolerant out, the party turns a blind eye — or worse, gives a full embrace — and counts up their votes.
Take Romney’s relationship with Donald Trump. Trump, one of America’s most prominent and vocal birthers, is also a Romney surrogate and major fundraiser. Just last week, after Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. held a press conference to announce that he believed that the birth certificate that the president supplied is fake, Trump went on a radio show [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/trump-doubles-down-on-demand-for-obama-records/?cat_orig=politics ] hosted by Fox’s Sean Hannity to say: “The fact is Sheriff Arpaio is, in my opinion, correct.”
The problem with courting or even countenancing the fringe is that it’s an incredibly short-sighted strategy. With every new gaffe the gulf between the Republican Party and our ever-diversifying nation grows.
As The Atlantic’s Max Fisher pointed out [ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/sorry-romney-neither-america-nor-the-uk-are-anglo-saxon-countries/260309/ ], assuming that the term Anglo-Saxon is a “colloquialism for the English people”:
In the 2000 U.S. census, only 8.7 percent of Americans identify their ancestry as English, which is ranked fourth behind German, Irish, and African-American.
The bipartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund projects that in November [ http://www.naleo.org/latinovote.html ] the Latino vote will be almost 26 percent higher than it was in 2008. That would be a staggering increase.
No amount of corporate money and voter suppression can hold back the demographic tide washing over this country. As each of these gaffes further reaffirms the Republican Party’s hostility to minorities, the shorter the party’s lifespan becomes.
I for one don’t believe that this is a coordinated effort. It’s the seepage from a hateful few slipping in like water through a compromised dam. But it will not be enough for the Republicans to plug the holes. They must drain the reservoir.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/anglo-saxon-heritage-multicultural-future/ [with comments]
===
The Divine Miss M
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: July 23, 2012
What I find most fascinating about Michele Bachmann — and there are many, many more where she came from — is that she presents herself as a godly woman, humbly devoted to her Christian faith. I’d like to meet that god, and I’d like to understand that Christianity.
Does it call for smearing people on the basis of flimsy conspiracy theories? That’s what Bachmann just did to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by essentially suggesting she might be a mole for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Does it endorse scaring young women away from immunizations that could spare them serious illness? Bachmann did that during her memorable presidential campaign, when she blithely drew an unsubstantiated link [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/health/20hpv.html?pagewanted=all ] between a vaccine for the human papillomavirus and mental retardation.
Does it encourage gratuitously divisive condemnations [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14684.html ] of Barack Obama as “anti-American,” one of many incendiary phrases in her attacks against him in 2008? And does it compel a war against homosexuality waged with the language and illogic she uses?
She has said that gay men and lesbians are dysfunctional products of abuse and agents of “sexual anarchy,” and when the singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge was battling breast cancer years ago, Bachmann helpfully chimed in [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pictures/michele-bachmanns-craziest-moments-20110616/cancer-ridden-lesbian-singer-should-reflect-on-her-lifestyle-0546167 ]: “This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”
Bachmann’s concept of Christian love brims with hate, and she has a deep satchel of stones to throw. From what kind of messiah did she learn that?
Over recent days she has drawn attention for the letter that she and four other Republican lawmakers sent to federal intelligence and security agencies last month. It expressed fears that the Muslim Brotherhood might be infiltrating the government, and it mentioned Abedin [ http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/weiner-speaks-about-scandal-and-dismisses-reports-of-campaign/ ]. She’s Muslim, after all.
My aim here isn’t to re-litigate Bachmann’s crimes against reason and decency, all widely documented.
It’s to wonder why we accept her descriptions of herself, and in turn describe her, as a deeply religious woman. That grants too much credence to her particular, peculiar and highly selective definition of piety. And it offends the many admirable people of faith whose understanding and practice of religion aren’t, like hers, confrontational and small-minded.
Bachmann is an evangelical, and has spoken rhapsodically about the experience of being born again. After that moment, she said, “I absolutely understood sin, and I wanted no part of it.” She plunged into politics nonetheless.
We routinely place her in the “religious right,” a phrase that frustrates me, tidily linking a certain set of political beliefs with profound devotion. We talk much less frequently of any “religious left,” and that disparity implies that a seriously faithful person is most likely to land on just one end of the political spectrum.
Tell that to the Nuns on the Bus [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-nuns-on-the-bus-tour-promotes-social-justice--and-turns-a-deaf-ear-to-the-vatican/2012/06/27/gJQAA4yj7V_story.html ], who rolled across the country last month focusing on social welfare and expressing alarm about the impact that cuts in federal spending might have on struggling Americans. Their politics line up more neatly with liberal than conservative policies, but the nuns reflect a Catholicism no less true or widespread than that of the bishops carrying on about gay marriage and birth control.
Speaking of gay marriage, both the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism in this country have embraced it, and the Episcopal Church in the United States has developed a special blessing [ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=156584940 ] for same-sex couples. Leaders of these denominations would tell you not that they’re flouting Judeo-Christian tradition but that they’re doing full justice to their faiths, which hinge on more than reflexive fidelity to chosen passages from ancient writings. They hinge on the human intellect and its ability to filter timeless values through modern understanding.
Because he’s a social liberal, Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, is seldom mentioned in terms of religion, but it turns out that he’s made a study of the Bible, as well as other sacred texts, and given considerable thought to faith. On his Facebook page [ http://www.facebook.com/corybooker/posts/10150851126622228 ] a few months ago, he mused thusly:
“Before you speak to me about your religion, first show it to me in how you treat other people. Before you tell me how much you love your God, show me in how much you love all His children.”
I know many progressive, big-hearted Christians who rise to that challenge, and it’s wrong for a single Christian label — without asterisk or annotation — to be attached both to them and to the likes of Bachmann.
So maybe it’s time for annotations. Most of us distinguish, rightly, between Muslim extremists and other followers of Islam. Perhaps we should start noting the difference between Christians of real compassion and those of exclusionary spite.
Bachmann’s on to something: dangerous fundamentalists have indeed set up camp deep inside the capital. She can find one in her office. She need only look in the mirror.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/opinion/bruni-the-divine-miss-m.html [with comments]
===
Wes Harris, Arizona Tea Party Leader, Seeks To Recall John McCain Over Huma Abedin Defense
07/25/2012
[...]
“Go to hell, Senator, it’s time for you to take your final dirt nap,” Harris concludes.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/wes-harris-arizona-tea-party_n_1697793.html [with embedded video of McCain's remarks on the floor of the Senate, and comments]
===
Obama losing a majority ... who think he's a Christian
July 27, 2012
President Obama is struggling to get to 50% — not just of voters in November -- but of Americans, at any time, who will recognize that he is a Christian.
The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life released a survey [ http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/2012-romney-mormonism-obamas-religion.aspx ] Thursday showing that just 49% of Americans described the president as a Christian, while 17% said they believed he was Muslim. Just before the 2008 election, a majority, 55%, described then-candidate Obama’s faith as Christian, while just 12% said he was Muslim.
[...]
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-losing-a-majority-who-think-hes-a-christian-20120726,0,6779472.story [with comments]
===
Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll apologizes for anti-gay remark
Jennifer Carroll
Joe Burbank / AP
By Mary Ellen Klas
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau
Posted on Thursday, 07.26.12
TALLAHASSEE -- After an online petition drive garnered hundreds of signatures demanding her apology, Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Carroll ] on Thursday apologized to the head of an advocacy group saying that her anti-gay comment two weeks ago was "wrong and inexcusable."
Equality Florida, a civil rights group that advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Floridians, launched the online petition campaign this week after Carroll told a Tampa television station on July 14 that "usually black women that look like me don’t engage in relationships like that."
Carroll was responding to allegations from former aide Carletha Cole, who, in court documents as part of a criminal case, said she caught Carroll and her travel aide in a "compromising position.”
Cole, 51, was charged last October with giving an illegally taped conversation to a newspaper reporter and had been fired her job as a senior program analyst for “conduct unbecoming.”
"It is wrong and inexcusable to make a comment that hurts people, and that was not my intention,’’ Carroll wrote in a letter to Equality Florida director Nadine Smith. "As a Christian, my faith guides me to love and respect all people. The false charges that have been lodged against me are no excuse for what I have said that may have been hurtful to members of your organization and to other Floridians.
"Please know that I am committed to treating every person with the utmost courtesy, respect and dignity and I hope you will accept my heartfelt apology,’’ she wrote.
Smith said she spoke to Carroll after receiving a fax of the letter and thanked Carroll "for taking responsibility for her words."
"Lt. Governor Carroll expressed her appreciation for the opportunity to communicate her commitment to treating everyone with respect and dignity,’’ Smith said in a statement. "She invited Equality Florida to reach out to her office if she could be of assistance and I offered our organization as a resource as well."
Smith commended Carroll for her response. "Apologies by elected leaders for public mistakes are rare and it is to the Lt. Governor’s credit that she has taken this step.
"In Florida, which has no statewide legal protections from discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents, the words of our elected leaders matter a great deal,’’ she said.
Smith had written a biting opinion piece on TheGrio.com, an NBC News-affiliated website covering the nation’s African-American community. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and various gay rights activists also criticized Carroll’s statements.
“As a black lesbian from Florida, I personally felt the sting of Florida Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll’s words,’’ Smith wrote. "Instead of simply denying the claims, she stereotyped black lesbians in order to deflect her own. With that one quick statement, Lt. Governor Carroll appealed to racial and homophobic stereotypes that do real harm.”
Copyright 2012 Miami Herald Media Co.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/26/2914867/lt-gov-jennifer-carroll-apologizes.html [with comments]
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This Conspiracy-Toting Conservative Blogger Could Be Headed to Congress
Wes Riddle's campaign says President Obama gave seven islands to Russia, and he's written that slavery was a net positive for blacks. Could he make it to Washington?
Jul. 24, 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/wes-riddle-congress-republican-texas-ron-paul [with comments]
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“Slave genes” myth must die
Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science
Jul 24, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/michael_johnsons_gold_medal_in_ignorance/ [with comments]
===
Tanner Colby, 'Some Of My Best Friends Are Black' Author, Explores Racial Integration Across The U.S.
07/25/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/tanner-colby-some-of-my-best-friends-are-black_n_1696145.html [with comments]
===
Florida puppeteer accused in child porn case
Ronald William Brown, 57, is facing federal charges of conspiring to kidnap a child and possessing child pornography in Florida.
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 9:13 AM EDT, Thu July 26, 2012
(CNN) -- On his website, Ronald William Brown posed with puppets, boasted about birthday party performances and offered workshops for school groups.
Now the 57-year-old Florida man is behind bars, facing federal charges of conspiring to kidnap a child and possessing child pornography.
Authorities accuse the puppeteer of having graphic discussions online about abusing, kidnapping, killing and eating children, according to court documents.
He was arrested in Largo, Florida, last week and appeared in federal court Tuesday.
A 29-page criminal complaint filed in federal court includes transcripts of several online chats and details of what investigators found when they searched Brown's home.
A CD found in his bedroom dresser's sock drawer included child pornography, images of what appear to be deceased children and a missing-child flier, according to the complaint.
Brown told investigators he had discussed kidnapping, killing and eating a boy from his church but said "it was just a fantasy and he could never and would never hurt anyone," the complaint said.
Brown maintains he is innocent, attorney Eric Kuske told reporters Tuesday.
"It's his contention right now that he didn't do this, he's not involved with this. That there's been some presumptions and assumptions made on what transpired. ... He wouldn't do something like this. He's got no criminal record," Kuske said, according to CNN affiliate WFLA [ http://www.wfla.com/ ].
During a 1998 traffic stop, a sheriff's deputy spotted boys' underwear between front seats in the vehicle Brown was driving, according to records from the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Brown told the deputy he used the boys' underwear for puppet shows, "dressing puppets in underwear," an incident report said.
Brown told investigators that he helps out in the children's area of his church, and that a group of children from his neighborhood come to his house every Wednesday for pizza before he gives them a ride in a church van, the complaint said.
Brown "would never associate or speak to any adults" in the mobile home park where he lived, resident Laura Jane Schate told CNN affiliate Bay News 9 [ http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/news/article.html/content/news/articles/bn9/2012/7/25/jailed_puppeteer_kno.html ].
But children were eager to talk with Brown, neighbors said.
"They'd come with their bikes and their skateboards, and they'd hang out, waiting for him to come home," neighbor Stacy Gaughan told CNN affiliate WFTS [ http://www.abcactionnews.com/ ].
Many in the neighborhood, disgusted by reports of what investigators allegedly uncovered, are "wondering whether he did this here," she told CNN affiliate Bay News 9.
A Facebook page that appears to belong to Brown says he "usually (performs) weekly in schools, malls, civic clubs, birthday parties, and museums."
One post talks of mentoring a young boy. Another describes work on a Christian television puppet show.
Brown's arrest Friday was the latest step in a federal investigation connected with other child pornography arrests, including the May arrest of a Kansas City man accused of producing child pornography, authorities said.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/25/justice/florida-puppeteer-porn/index.html [with comments]
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Pa. man gets 5 years for pilgrimage trip scam
Updated 07:13 a.m., Thursday, July 26, 2012
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A suburban Philadelphia man is heading to federal prison for bilking devout customers out of more than $400,000 by promising holy land trips that never happened.
A federal judge ordered 74-year-old John Baird to spend five years in prison for ripping off mostly elderly victims who thought they were buying trips to Christian pilgrimage sites.
Prosecutors say the Elkins Park man ran the scheme from 2004 to 2007 as operator of Christian Pilgrim Tours. He promised trips and even an audience with the Pope only to cancel the tours after getting paid in advance.
Baird blamed legal advisers for his business problems but U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson rejected that excuse, saying Baird preyed on the vulnerable.
Baird was also ordered to repay his victims about $410,000.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/news/article/Pa-man-gets-5-years-for-pilgrimage-trip-scam-3736981.php
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Five arrested, accused of terrorizing Jewish camp in Pennsylvania
From left: Tyler Cole Spencer, Mark Trail and Cassandra Robertson are accused of terrorizing a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania.
By Julia Greenberg, CNN
updated 5:38 PM EDT, Thu July 26, 2012
Editor's note: Note offensive language.
(CNN) -- Three adults and two juveniles were arrested Wednesday for allegedly terrorizing a Jewish camp in Pennsylvania.
Authorities say Tyler Cole Spencer, 18, Mark Trail, 21, Cassandra Robertson, 18, and two juveniles intimidated Jewish campers and staff at Camp Bonim on three separate occasions on July 14 and 15.
Spencer allegedly drove a white Ford pickup truck "recklessly" through the camp, "narrowly missing several campers and staff" and damaging fields, yards, buildings and fences, the police criminal complaint said.
The group also allegedly used paintball guns to shoot Jewish campers and staff, hitting one 18-year-old camper leaving a synagogue, according to the complaint.
Authorities allege members of the group also shouted anti-Semitic slurs at campers and staff, such as "I'm gonna kill you, you f***ing Jews."
"Go back to where the f*** you came from you god**** Jews. We don't want you here," Trail allegedly shouted, according to the complaint.
Several campers told police they "were scared for their lives" when the pickup truck sped through the camp, the complaint said.
"The vicious, cruel and obscene nature of the language hurled at the campers is unspeakable," Wayne County, Pennsylvania, District Attorney Janine Edwards said in a statement. "Luckily none of the children suffered any serious physical injury; however, the emotional damage done is immeasurable. This is outrageous conduct and will not be tolerated."
Spencer, Trail and Robertson have been charged with several felonies and misdemeanors, including ethnic intimidation, terroristic threats, recklessly endangering another person and institutional vandalism.
Spencer, of Linden, Tennessee, was charged previously with aggravated assault in a hit-and-run case. He allegedly hit a camp counselor with his pickup truck before fleeing on July 16.
Spencer's bail has been set at $200,000. Bail for Trail and Robertson, who are from Wayne County, has been set at $20,000 each.
Juvenile petitions were also filed against the two alleged accomplices, a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old.
It is unclear if the defendants are represented at this time, and listed numbers to the defendants' families could not be found.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/26/justice/pennsylvania-camp-terror/index.html [with comments]
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Tonya Reaves’ death: Right-wing abortion exploitation
A woman's death in Chicago is a new flashpoint in the abortion wars. But the right is once again ignoring the facts
Jul 26, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/26/tonya_reaves_death_right_wing_abortion_exploitation/ [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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