Major bid-rigging scandal in Rochester:
ROCHESTER – Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli today announced the indictment of four individuals for an elaborate scheme to rig the bidding process for several multimillion-dollar contracts. Nelson Rivera and Robert Wiesner – both former Monroe County public officials – along with John Maggio and Daniel Lynch – two local business executives – have been charged with a total of 43 felony counts, including Money Laundering, Conspiracy, Falsifying Business Records, Offering a False Instrument for Filing, and Combination in Restraint of Trade and Competition.
The indictment alleges that the four men colluded to steer the process for awarding Monroe County contracts, funneling money to preferred vendors. Lynch and Maggio conspired to launder roughly $2 million through payments from Navitech Services Corporation to Treadstone Development Corporation. Separately, Lynch laundered more than $100,000 in stolen proceeds from contracts between Catalog & Commerce Solutions and both Siemens Building Technologies and Upstate Telecommunications Corporation (UTC). In both cases, the defendants engineered their schemes by creating fake contracts, inflating subcontracts, and submitting false invoices. […]
Robert Wiesner is the husband of County Executive Maggie Brooks. Brooks lost to Louise Slaughter in the NY-25 race in 2012, and this little bit of news means there will be no rematch.
This scandal is based on an adventure in outsourced outsourcing.The Republicans in charge of the County used entities called “Local Development Corporations” (LDCs) to act as middlemen between county government and contractors. Instead of the county engaging the contractors directly for major projects, the county used these LDCs to do all the work of hiring contractors. The LDCs are technically non-profit, but pushing that power into the hands of a private entity, which was probably initially set up to be just a benefit for some friends of the Republicans in charge, opened the door for some good old-fashioned larceny. On the plus side, there were no lazy government employees feeding at the taxpayer’s trough handling those contracts — they were all independent contractors or contractors of independent contractors, makers not takers.
NotMax
ShopGraft local.rikyrah
How black women save Democrats
Progressive black women have often been essential for putting Democratic candidates over the top.
http://on.msnbc.com/HKyPnp
call_me_ishmael
Jason Bourne is not amused.
Comrade Dread
I think it’s been proven quite often that privatization is nothing more than a way for the connected to loot the government without providing much benefit at all to the taxpayers.
So dog bites man.
Frankly, I’m just surprised that they are facing jail time. They must have gotten pretty blatant with the fraud.
c u n d gulag
GOP POV:
Clearly, this process calls for LESS regulation!
Then, maybe we won’t get caught.
Bill E Pilgrim
Now listen here, when Paul Ryan and Rand Paul and Ted Cruz said that most of what the government does should be privatized because “private enterprise knows how to make money”, they never said “legally”.
Oh fine, you want legally, you might as well just have Communism. Just hand it over to Uncle Joe.
Oh I’m too good for you, I must have it legally. Ew, ew mater, I’m off to play the grahnd piahno, legally!
negative 1
@call_me_ishmael: They know we were joking when we said Blackwater was going to rename itself COBRA, right?
Suffern ACE
If Schiederman cleans up the LDCs, I will really crawl over glass to vote for him after crawling through burning coal. I’m surprised that the state AG is involved, since the LDCs end up involving state legislators. In Ramapo, the township where Suffern ACE lives, the town powers that be used an LDC to build a baseball stadium to get around a failed stadium bond financing referendum. The only reason I can think of that the town powers that be were so adament that they needed a stadium despite the fact that the voters said “no, we don’t want one” is that those powers are involved with the company building the stadium. The FBI seems to share those suspicious, although they have only raided the town hall and haven’t indicted anyone yet.
Not surprisingly, the stadium is losing money and the taxpayers are going to need to make up its deficit. Yay!
Like fake “charitable” non-profits that are funded by the legislature because they conveniently hire the spouses of state assemblymen, many LDCs seem to be welfare for the contractors and lawyers who run my state and local government.
Feudalism Now!
How are LDCs still being utilized? The Syracuse area had a similar scandal 6 years ago with a former Democrat turned land developer steering canal property to like minded developers. You look at any municipality that has utilized these privatized middle- men and find a trail of graft, corruption and extortion.
craigie
Gambling, shocked, etc.
Pen
@call_me_ishmael: oh good, I’m not the only person who thought that. That’s nearly as bad as the robotics company named Skynet.
Eric U.
when people talk about government waste, they probably aren’t thinking about outsourcing, but the math is inescapable. Like the way that Obamacare “cut” medicare, when it was just getting rid of inefficient payments to insurance companies
aimai
The same basic thing, IIRC, was responsible for the horrible problems with Boston’s Big Dig. Someone thought it was a good idea to remove the inside/outside auditors because they “cost too much” (this was also called the “belt and suspenders” method of auditing, accounting and letting contracts) and the end result was too many people, too much privatization, too much unregulated capitalism. But we “saved”some money and only killed a few people.
BruinKid
BTW, now that Rand Paul’s been let go by the Washington Times, if you wondered who’d publish his op-eds anymore, it turns out it’s Breitbart. So now you know where they fall on the wingnut credibility pecking order. But here was the best line.
I think the irony-meter just broke.
catclub
@aimai: I am not sure who among the Yglesias, Ezra Klein or Atrios crowd has brought up that infrastructure projects (HSR?) in the US are becoming horribly expensive compared to … Europe. I do not know how it will be changed – or if it is even an actual problem.
Botsplainer
Well, shit. Just found out that one of my best friends from high school just suffered a stroke, is immobilized, speech abilities undone, and is looking at a lengthy recovery.
Like me, he’s 51 and self-employed.
handsmile
@catclub:
Kevin Drum, perhaps?
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/how-much-bang-do-we-get-our-infrastructure-buck
The links within Drum’s article provide substantive detail.
negative 1
@catclub: It is not an actual problem. The reason that we undertake so little has nothing to do with the cost, it’s because all local/municipal governments have so little money that all of them cost too much. It doesn’t matter if fixing the bridge costs $2 million or $20 million if your repair budget is 10 grand. That won’t stop the article you’re citing from being a rallying cry that unions are the problem, though (via Davis Bacon).
Ironically because we’ve defunded the industry for so long there are only very large contractors left, meaning that more and more public projects go to the same companies in every state. They have only each other to compete with, meaning there is little of the competition that the market loves so much. IMHO, it’s not an issue because what few projects we entertain pay well, that money enters the local economy effectively, and we still get the multiplier effect on the projects we undertake. If that were to change it would be a problem.
sparrow
@rikyrah: Holy crap 91%! That is a pretty remarkable difference. Also, the fact that AA voted in 2013 at the same rate as in 2012 is *very* interesting — is that something we can hope to see in the next off-election?
maya
@Botsplainer: Have had several friends who also have had strokes at a relatively early age. Way worse than a heart attack and sometimes the damage can never be completely restored. One former HS classmate lives on pain pills and a cane. His situation will never improve. It’s enough to scare the bejesus out of a person and rightly so.
Better take that 1/4 aspirin (80mg) per day, fish oil caps (2000mg), and check blood pressure. Often. Oh, yeah, who needs salt?
Steeplejack
Is FYWP still blocking me?
ETA: DPM, what the hell is b-j.rottenchester [dot] com? It churns endlessly on every page load and correlates suspiciously with FYWP blocking my comments since last night, particularly ones mentioning it by its full name.
JPL
@BruinKid: How many times does Breitbart have to die to kill that site?
srv
Non-profits are, in general, a means of enriching board members and their families/lackeys.
Comrade Mary
@Steeplejack: I’m running NoScript, which usually shows me every single call on the page, but I see no such domain listed.
Malware on your machine?
mai naem
@rikyrah: I was watching Chris Hayes last night and thought of your posts. Just wondering -would AA black males be there in the same numbers except that they are disenfranchised more. This is a total guess on my part but I am wondering if they do voter roll purges, do they kick off more males because more males go to prison than females and, again, I am guessing that more AA black males are kicked off because of the similar names issue. I vaguely remember this in Fla when Katherine Harris did the voter roll purges and they seemed to pick names that would be AA and have other people with the same name(something like Johhny Williams.)
Another Holocene Human
hahahahahahahah
oh, excuse me
hahahahahahaha
whew, whoa
hahahahahaha
mai naem
@BruinKid: I saw this on Tbogg yesterday and initially I thought it was one of Tbogg’s satirical pieces. The guy is a fucking idiot. Seriously, Breitbart???
BTW, I did not know that Ron Paul had introduced the Personhood bill in Congress. Ron Paul’s all for freedumb unless it’s for wimmen. Anti semitic racist misogynistic Asshole.
Another Holocene Human
@Comrade Dread:
They wanted cash money kickbacks. Who do they think they are–religious leaders? lol
Another Holocene Human
@mai naem: I know I wasn’t the one asked, but as I live in Florida:
So, the figures I’ve seen shows maybe at most a 10 point spread between AA male and female voting patterns, although it can depend on the candidate. I think it was up to 10 points in the NYC primary with some Black males electing to vote for the Black male candidate while the rest of the AA community had thrown their weight behind DeBlasio. And there’s always that hard rind that votes GOP, although I know that some of my local GOPers voted for Barack anyway. I doubt a white male Democrat would get their vote (depends on how much the Republican was racist/sucked, I would hazard to guess).
However, the spread is not large.
As for the felons losing their civil rights issue, BIG issue in Florida and some of the other former slave states. Rick Scott reversed Crist as soon as he came in office to make the process nigh-impossible. I have a (white) coworker who committed a felony two decades ago, paid his debt to society, and hasn’t reoffended. He even works in municipal government now. He’s a lean D, dunno if the board knows that, and he wants to be able to own a hunting rifle again, which was the main impetus for getting his rights restored. So far the drama has been ongoing the entire time Rick Scott has been in office with no real progress.
However in some states restoration of civil rights is automatic when you get out.
Plus you have to figure in the racist criminal justice system. So, Florida actually will mark up more stuff as felonies and is extremely blatant about its unequal justice.
I don’t know if anyone has studied it but I would expect a much higher percentage of Black males in Florida to have lost their civil rights and still be in limbo about getting them restored than in, say Massachusetts.
Now add to that these ridiculous voter purges kicking people off for false positives.
Yeah, I think it has a real impact. It’s not working any more, though. Commit all these sins and still fail? Tch.
Another Holocene Human
@Suffern ACE: Ramapo?
Omg.
I’m so sorry.
I’m guessing you don’t have kids in school because I’ve never heard you talk about that. What’s happening to the public schools there is _criminal.
Another Holocene Human
@Eric U.: Here’s a good one: MBTA (Boston’s transit, also most of Eastern Mass) at one point in the 70s was such a patronage hire bonanza that they hired an entire “engineering” department that did not contain any of these critturs known as “professional engineers”. As a result, every engineering problem that did come down the pike (and for a while there, management, which drove to work every day, fa fa, was more interested in cutting transit service than expanding the system) had to be outsourced to one of the ready, willing, and able contractors that orbited the T, such as Cambridge Systematics.
When engineers were finally hired I don’t think there was any real resistance but imagine if there were–the press writes itself–claim the public sector is hiring do-nothings, that they earn too much for gov’t jobs–all the claims that were made to outsource vital functions FROM OUR MILITARY and give them to contractors.
All checks are somehow anointed in holy oil when they pass to the hands of the private sector.
In Boston it’s probably some weird kind of classism. In Florida I know it’s racism. I’m pretty sure my town outsourced garbage pickup because them ****** blackity blacks who pick up municipal garbage in Da Souf were unionizing, in defiance of “You can’t unionize, say we, we mean it!” laws.
Another Holocene Human
@aimai: Is that what happened? Holy smokes.
Another Holocene Human
@catclub: HSR has other problems.
For one thing, some countries, like France, just have different laws with respect to taking property. And they don’t have as much suburbanization, certainly not as much when they got cracking on their HSR.
As for the costs of the trainsets, etc, the US is trying to reform their regs because the regs have been a major hurdle due to a really old school mentality by the last generation of FRA regulators.
The change in regs should allow them to buy off the shelf instead of bespoke trainsets, which should really reduce costs.
As for the whole signalling thing, our signal systems are better and safer. Everything else is whining.
Just remember in railroading: if there’s a rule or a safety reg, IT’S BECAUSE SOMEONE DIED.
Steeplejack
@Comrade Mary:
No, I checked my machine, and it’s clean. I haven’t seen it show up in the page loads in the last couple of hours.
rikyrah
@mai naem:
they get Black males not because of voter purge..
but because of the states that are refusing to restore voting rights EVEN AFTER SOMEONE HAS FULFILLED THEIR OBLIGATION TO THE STATE.
ex-felon disenfranchisement is a big thing.
Look at Florida.
Charlie Crist restored ex-felon voting rights.
Voldemort took them away.
That’s HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of voters who were once voting and became re-disenfranchised.
there’s a large group of Black men that can’t even get to the point of being voter purged, because they are denied the right to be voters in the first place
Suffern ACE
@Another Holocene Human: So far North Ramapo schools where I would send my kids to school if I had any are holding up fine. East Ramapo is where the school district death spiral is taking place. I don’t comment on it because we tend to cover national issues here and it is very difficult to get facts. But I look at that school district and worry that we’re probably next in line if we’re not careful.
catclub
@Another Holocene Human: “Just remember in railroading: if there’s a rule or a safety reg, IT’S BECAUSE SOMEONE DIED.” Yep.
The next rule to come out will be: “Don’t park a train packed with fuel oil on a hill, and leave it, especially if you are uphill from a city where the tracks curve.”
You would think no explicit rule on this would be needed.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Why couldn’t this have come out before that bitch was re-elected? At least Louise kicked her ass soundly in the congressional election.
fuckwit
@Comrade Dread:
That’s it, really. It’s looting of the commons by the 1%, pure and simple.
Yatsuno
@Steeplejack: @Comrade Mary: Several folks have been getting that hang, myself included. It seems to only show up on a page refresh and it never resolves no matter how long you wait. I’m not sure if this is a FYWP thing or not.
Another Holocene Human
@catclub: This is one case where Canada needs to catch up to the US. The offender was a US based company (Maine based, I think), a shortline probably although I’m not familiar with Canadian terminology. (In the US the size of the railroad has a lot to do with legal/regulatory status.)
Canadian rail infrastructure is in crappy state and their passenger rail system is collapsing. They totally passed on doing anything about it during their economic boom (although CN did buy the IC, and acted like total assholes for the first few years).
Freight carloads are up big in the last decade and a half in the US plus we had a friendly administration and a secular rise in public ground transportation patronage. It’s a beautiful thing. Canada’s had right-wing PMs and their head in the sand about the state of their freight system. Meh.
Botsplainer
@maya:
Scared the holy hell out of me, as I’m currently carrying excess weight, love my red meat and consider salt to be one of the basic food groups along with steak, bacon, dairy, eggs fried in bacon grease and french fries. My only saving graces are that I do like my salads with lemon based dressing, quit smoking years ago, and have cut way back on alcohol. Plus, I do engage in a fair amount of aerobic activity including long hikes, dog-walking, time on a cross-trainer and scubadiving.
After telling my wife, I fully expect her to call my secretary (a vegan who subsists on kale chips and cigarettes) for advice on a diet to make me shed pounds rapidly.
Another Holocene Human
@Suffern ACE: Ah. Have you ever been to FailedMessiah? There’s a lot of coverage there, including a certain amount of inside information of what’s going on in the private schools they’ve been obligated to fund in our new neo-liberal voucher paradise.
MikeJ
@Yatsuno: Seems to be a site that mirrors all the b-j content. Oddly, when I open the firebug network tab (or the chrome dev tools) I never see any attempt to load anything from it. Yet I still get hanging after everything is loaded, only on stuff from google.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: As I understand it, Crist had set up to make the process more efficient and transparent, but those people are now in bureaucratic hell because Scott made the system take forever and very much NOT transparent. So if you’ve previously had your rights restored, you’re fine. It’s people who’ve been fighting for years to get their rights restored who are stuck.
Remember, Pam Bondi is the AG. She is a GOP hack sorority alum idiot. This is the risk of a Republican sweep. All kinds of crap is going on with that branch of gov’t and I’m sure we’ll never know the entire truth.
Btw, speaking of crooks, turns out the EX Lt Gov was a big one; no thanks to Bondi… nope, it was an interstate investigation and Scott forced her to resign when her ties to a bunch of indicted crooks got too outrageous to ignore. Lol.
Steeplejack
@Yatsuno:
It didn’t stop the page from loading for me, but it remained active in the status bar at the bottom and kept the “page loading” icon spinning. I could mash the “stop loading” button easily enough, but it piqued my interest because I had never seen it before and because of the Balloon Juice and Rochester (home of DPM and DougJ) angles. I can sort of grudgingly see why google-analytics keeps jumping in, but this seems like some weird blog- or front-pager-specific thing. Still would be nice to know what the hell it is.
fuckwit
Speaking of privatization, this article stunned me:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/05/a-hunger-expert-explains-what-happens-now-that-food-stamps-are-cut/
Wow. Absolutely true… and even I who am something of a political junkie TOTALLY FORGOT THAT, and I have never heard that from anyone else either… until just now.
That is how poisoned our national media propaganda machine has become. That’s how completely the Overton WIndow has moved to the right. That’s how the right-wing noise machine has so totally taken over this country.
SNAP, which the wingnuts and teabaggers are trying to kill, IS A FUCKING PRIVATIZED FREE MARKET SUBSIDY FOR BUSINESS.
This is exactly the same schtick with ACA. It’s a right-wing program, being attacked by the right wing as too socialist.
We need more actual Socialists. Because no matter how “moderate” you are, no matter how far you sell out to the right wing, it’s pointless, it’s a fool’s game, you’re still a socialist anyway, and nothing will ever stop you from being called that.
Another Holocene Human
More on the felon rights restoration crisis in Florida:
http://www.restorerights.org/
fuckwit
@Steeplejack: That site looks like a clone/copy of Balloon Juice, suspiciously possibly connected to DougJ or mistermix, who IIRC lives in “Ro(tten)chester” NY.
My guess is it is a staging site for the development/testing of new BJ WP functionality.
Another Holocene Human
@fuckwit: Yup, so is Section 8.
God forbid we should have canteens like Britain did during WWII, which–at least according to Supersizers–had better food than you could get through ration cards for your household–or public fucking housing.
Mnemosyne
@fuckwit:
They are also making SNAP vouchers redeemable at farmer’s markets now, which means they’re putting money directly into the hands of farmers who actually grow food and supporting small businesses. Soshulizm!
Another Holocene Human
With no script, I would suggest if you are having problems to shut off all scripts on this page, just delete your permissions, then only allow balloon-juice. That will shut off google ads/trackers but for all we know they could be the problem, they could be ‘sploited.
BJ works just find with just B-J enabled. If you enable other scripts (only five others showing at this time) they will in turn call OTHER scripts. This rochester server is being called by (or being called by something called by)
blogads
sitemeter
nmcdn.us
addtoany
It’s possible that one of these is harmless most of the time but infected now.
If that doesn’t work you might need to trash your cache and start over.
ETA: oops, I forgot I have ghostery running and it is BLOCKING the following:
Doubleclick
Google Analytics
I don’t recall why I blocked these in Ghostery but it was probably very being very, very naughty.
Others have mentioned Google Analytics. I would just block that shit. It certainly doesn’t affect the operation of any website for the user.
IDK why blog owners run it either because if you have access to your own server you can get all the “analytics” you need. Without a sploit funnel spewing all over your end-users.
fuckwit
@Mnemosyne: That would be good news, except for the Rethugs trying to kill it.
I swear, this stuff makes me so angry I could explode. The Rethug theme song is, and must be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgpa7wEAz7I
I take all this as a personal attack. It makes me feel a paculiarly horrible emotion, a kind of self-hate, an almost suicidal desire to just have them kill me already and get it over with, since that is obviously what they’re trying to do slowly. No medical care, no housing, no FOOD, just die already, you fucking hippie scum. And I’m one of the lucky ones– white straight educated suburban-raised third-generation male. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to look at this shit from the perspective of being African American: but it’d bet it’d sure look like genocide to me.
I simply cannot look at what the right wing is doing– indeed what capitalism fundamentally is– as anything other than eugenics, when taken to the extreme. One would argue that, well, nobody is trying to take it to that extreme, but that’s false: they ARE trying to take it to that extreme, bit by bit, pushing that Overton Window farther and farther each time, until we really are all just lined up against the wall and shot.
Higgs Boson's Mate (Crystal Set)
@fuckwit:
Absolutely. You’ll pry the cons’ memes from their cold, dead fingers. They will forever categorize any government program that helps the not-rich as “Socialism leading to the Inevitable Decline and Fall of the American Way.”
fuckwit
@Another Holocene Human: My god, you’re right. Even our housing assistance in this country is privatized, a voucher program. I never realized that. The whole “safety net” in this country has already been privatized for the profit of the rich: landowners, property managers, business owners, supermarkets, Wall Street banks and brokerages (401k’s!), insurance companies, corporations of all kinds. It’s over, game is over, they won long ago. And yet those programs are still under seige anyway. I simply do not know how to process that.
ericblair
@fuckwit:
My prayer to the Great God of Irony is that the goopers spend so much time and ink condemning feeding poor kids as soshulizm, making sure that people don’t go bankrupt because they broke a hip as soshulizm, that the usual targets of this figure that hey, if soshulizm is wrong I don’t wanna be right. The rhetoric is getting loopy enough that this might happen, although I’m not holding my breath.
Villago Delenda Est
Unless you put the grifters in jail, with no communications to the outside world, they will continue to grift. They’re just doing what they’re doing.
Villago Delenda Est
@fuckwit:
This, right here, is the thing.
Whenever some teatard douchnozzle tells me that Obama is a socialist, my only response is “I wish he actually were.”
Because these people are absolute fucking cretins, making Wallace Shawn’s Vizzini look like Albert Einstein. They keep using that word, but they do not have the slightest fucking clue as to what it means.
Gene108
@Another Holocene Human:
We had public housing. It did not end up well.
Jay C
@catclub: @Another Holocene Human:
High-speed rail systems, whether upgrades of existing track, or new-from-the-get-go construction IS hideously expensive: the big difference between foreign countries and the US is that in most other places, (especially Europe, IIRC), rail development projects are usually conceived and managed, as are the rail systems in general, by a (usually government-owned) monopoly: who make the development decisions without having much to take “profitability” into account – rail – as in passenger rail – is seen as a species of public utility in most civilized countries, and purely economic considerations are often secondary. But AHH is right: right-of-way and property issues are dealt with quite differently “over there”…
Denali
Anyone else notice that these indictments were made public only after the election? I realize that a jar of mustard can be indicted, but still – another local Republican scandal should wake up the voters a little. Now they have 12 months to slowly drift back to sleep.
RobertB
@Botsplainer: I’m sorry to hear about your friend. I had a stroke about 18 months ago at age 50, and the experience was…not good, to put it mildly. I’ve been very, very lucky in how my recovery has worked out, and I hope your friend will do the same.
Having said that, the #1 thing to do to reduce your risk of stroke is to check your blood pressure situation, and correct that if it’s not normal. I was a salt food group kind of guy, and Mother Nature let me know that eating like that and not addressing my blood pressure was a Real Bad Idea. If you’ve taken care of your blood pressure, great! If not, do so.