Category Archives: Treasury

Secret White House Meetings on Cuba, Shooting From the Hip

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To date, agenda items are in place for normalizing relations with Cuba, while the larger needs list to have business and economic conditions and interactions are far from successful or  advancing mostly due to distrust in the banking industry.

In part from the Miami Herald:

During a White House briefing last week with business people, academics and others who have been supportive of the normalization process, briefers said that a revision and clarification of some banking and travel rules would come out shortly. They also asked business executives to keep the feedback coming on the evolving rules.

Pompano-based Stonegate is the first U.S. bank to engage with Cuba under the regulations that came out in January.

But banks in general are very nervous about Cuba, said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Part of it is the banking culture is very conservative, but the banks also have seen that they can be heavily penalized if they don’t abide by the letter of the law.”

 

Meanwhile, as U.S. business pioneers try to strike deals, they must also contend with a Cuban system that doesn’t necessarily mesh with U.S. business practices, limited Internet service, and a Cuban bureaucracy that often seems more interested in going slow than expediting business.

Beyond the sluggish bureaucracy, the government also is testing the shifting currents with caution.

Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat, points out there are reasons the government wants to go slow and not risk losing political control by allowing too swift an economic transformation or rapprochement with the United States.

Secretive White House meeting reveals Obama’s plan to visit Cuba in 2016

Washington Examiner: A secretive White House meeting on Cuba last week revealed that President Obama is mulling a visit the island nation next year, and also discussed the controversial idea of the Cuban government opening consular offices in Miami.

After hailing embassy openings in Washington and Havana last week, the White House held an off-schedule, private meeting on Wednesday with U.S. officials involved in the administration’s Cuba policy. Nearly 80 activist members of the Cuban-American community from Florida and across the United States — mostly Democrats — were also there.

Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers, was on hand, along with White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of State for the western hemisphere.

The White House Monday at first declined to talk about the meeting, and referred questions about it to the State Department. A State Department spokesman then referred the same questions to the Cuban embassy, which was already closed for the day.

On Tuesday, a White House official told the Washington Examiner that the briefing took place as part of the administration’s ongoing efforts to reach out and engage the Cuban-American community on the president’s efforts to normalize relations with the island nation.

“The president has been very clear that he supports measures to improve travel and commerce and further increase people-to-people contact, support civil society in Cuba, support the growth of Cuba’s nascent private sector and enhance the free flow of information to, from, and among the Cuban people,” the White House official said. “The president has also called on Congress to begin the work of ending the embargo.”

On Obama’s plans to travel to Cuba, the official said there are no announcements.

But according to sources familiar with the meeting, Rhodes told the group that President Obama is considering visiting the island nation next year, and will make an assessment early next year depending on progress in U.S.-Cuba relations.

While that historic visit would likely help Obama cement his legacy as the president who started to open up bilateral relations, it could be marred by or even delayed by Cuba’s arrest of dissidents. Those arrests have continued despite Obama’s gestures to Cuba, and could put Obama at risk of appearing to be too friendly with a country that often arrests members of political or religious groups dozens at a time.

Eduardo Jose Padron, the current president of Miami-Dade College who came to the U.S. as a refugee at the age of 15, used the White House meeting to ask about the state of human rights in Cuba, and State Department officials acknowledged that it is a dangerous time for dissidents on the island, one participant told the Examiner.

Andy Gomez, a retired assistant provost and dean of the University of Miami’s School of International Studies, said that so far, the Castro regime doesn’t appear to be changing its ways. Gomez previously served on the Brookings Institution’s Cuba Task Force from 2008 to 2010, and told the Washington Examiner Cuba needs to demonstrate a stronger commitment to human rights before Obama travels there or the U.S. agrees to allow it to open a consulate in Florida.

“Up until now, the Cuban government hasn’t even brought Cuban coffee to the table … I don’t see any signs of the Cuban government loosening up their control,” he said.

Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba, scheduled for later in September, he said, would be a good time for the Cuban government to release more political prisoners and demonstrate a true commitment to improving relations.

The idea of a consular office of the Cuban government in Florida is one that is already stirring debate among Cuban-Americans. During a question-and-answer session in the White House meeting, one participant asked about the chances for opening a Cuban consulate in Miami, according to a source who was there.

The White House responded that it was up to the Cuban government to decide when and where it would open the consulate.

But that response has only spurred more questions and concerns since the meeting, some of which deal with how it might hurt Hillary Clinton’s White House bid. The opening of an outpost in the heavily anti-Castro area of Miami could further anger Florida’s politically powerful Cuban-American community and create a backlash for Democrats that could hurt Clinton’s Florida presidential campaign operations.

“The consulate in Miami would create a bittersweet taste in the Cuban-American community, including those supporting these [normalization] changes,” said Gomez. “It would also hurt any chances of Hillary Clinton making inroads and gaining support among Miami’s Cuban-Americans.”

“I don’t think President Obama would do that to Hillary Clinton,” he added, noting that he believes a better place for the consulate would be in Tampa or Key West.

Ever since Obama’s December announcement to try to normalize relations with Cuba, South Florida’s major cities have fiercely debated the opening of a consulate, which would provide passport and visas services and emergency aide to visiting Cuban citizens, as well as other resources.

Officials have strongly objected to such an outpost in Miami-Dade County, home to nearly a million Cubans, the largest concentration in the world next to Havana.

But city leadership in Tampa, which has roughly 80,000 Cuban-Americans, is embracing the idea, viewing it as an economic opportunity for the city.

While recent polls have documented a generational shift in Cuban-American feelings about the Obama’s administration’s decision to re-engage with the Castro government, the political leadership in Miami is still heavily anti-Castro, dominated by descendants of those who fled the 1959 communist revolution regime, and some who had their property taken by Castro.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who vehemently opposes Obama’s decision to restore ties, is strongly against a consulate in Miami. Two other Florida GOP congressmen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Curbelo, also are opposed, along with Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado.

Ros-Lehtinen said opening a consulate in Miami is another Obama administration effort to “legitimize an illegitimate regime.”

“Placing a Cuban consulate in Miami is nothing but an insult to so many who have been arrested, imprisoned, maimed, and tortured by the Castros and their ruthless thugs,” she told the Examiner. “This administration has done nothing but give dictators concession after concession yet what do we have to show for it? More arrests of pro-democracy activists in Cuba, a continued harboring of fugitives from American justice, and total disrespect for the suffering of victims of autocratic despots.”

Ros-Lehtinen also argues that any Cuban consulate would serve as a headquarters for espionage.

But others argue that South Florida Cuban-Americans are in real need of consular services and don’t view the opening as a serious problem.

“I would hope that it would make things easier for those traveling back home, about 400,000 are traveling back to Cuba a year,” said Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “Right now, it’s very expensive and cumbersome to apply for a visa and make all kinds of travel arrangements.”

IRS, that Operates on DOS, yes DOS is Still Targeting Americans

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Then there was instant messaging at the IRS that few talk about.

The letter, the testimony, the documentation is found here along with the signatures from Congress.

From Americans for Tax Reform: The IRS used a “wholly separate” instant messaging system that automatically deleted office communications, according to documentation released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday. The system appears to have been purposefully used by agency officials responsible for the targeting of conservative non-profits, in order to evade public scrutiny.

The system, known as “Office Communication Server” or OCS was used by IRS officials, including many in the Exempt Organizations (EO) Unit, which was headed by Lois Lerner.

As the Oversight Committee report states, the instant messaging system did not archive any communications, so it is not possible to know what employees of the EO unit discussed on it.

However, in an email uncovered by the Committee Lerner warns her colleagues about evading Congressional oversight:

“I was cautioning folks about email and how we have had several occasions where Congress has asked for emails and there has been an electronic search for responsive emails – so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.”

Lerner then asks whether OCS is automatically archived. When informed it was not, Lerner responded “Perfect.”

While it is possible to set the instant messaging system to automatically archive messages, the IRS chose not to do so, according to one employee interviewed by the Committee. The fact that the agency chose not to archive messages raises questions about the true purpose of OCS and what discussions took place.

Needless to say, the apparent use of OCS to evade Congressional oversight once again shows that the IRS does not want the American people to learn the truth about the Lois Lerner targeting scandal.

 

 

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-27-JC-to-Obama-WH-Koskinen-Resignation.pdf

 

Toggling Internet Speed and Broken Rural Installations

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Barack Obama made a pledge to get internet and broadband services to rural parts of the country. Billions were allocated and it has been a long yet failed pledge, resulting in more fleecing of our taxpayer dollars.

President Obama pitches $18 billion wireless broadband plan

Wired to fail

Politico:

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities.

In September 2011, as the U.S. economy continued to sputter in the shadow of the Great Recession, Jonathan Adelstein offered a bold promise on behalf of a tiny federal agency that had long strived to improve the lives of rural Americans.

The administrator of the little-known Rural Utilities Service had just finished announcing $3.5 billion in aid to expand high-speed Internet access to the hardest-to-reach areas of the country. The awards, part of the federal stimulus passed by Congress two years earlier, had been crucial to President Barack Obama’s blueprint for a recovery that would ensure farmers and remote businesses could compete in an increasingly global economy.

“These investments in broadband will connect nearly 7 million rural Americans,” Adelstein pledged in a report to Congress, “along with more than 360,000 businesses and more than 30,000 critical community institutions like schools, health care facilities and public safety agencies, to new or improved service.”

Judged against the agency’s 80-year track record, those numbers didn’t seem unrealistically ambitious. During the Great Depression, after all, RUS had loaned out millions of dollars to string electric lines to distant farms and small towns in parts of the country that private companies refused to serve — a bold and calculated risk that had transformed America in a single generation.

But more recently, the performance of RUS has been much less than stellar. Even the agency’s staunchest defenders in Congress had learned firsthand: When it came to funding broadband projects, RUS never found its footing in the digital age.

Sometimes, RUS ignored its rural mission by funding high-speed Internet in well-wired population centers. Sometimes, it chose not to make any loans at all. Sometimes, RUS broadband projects stumbled, or failed for want of proper management; loans went delinquent and some borrowers defaulted. Yet despite years of costly missteps that left millions of Americans stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, a stable of friendly lawmakers swallowed their doubts about RUS and made sure the politically protected agency wasn’t cut out of the historic stimulus effort.

It should come as little surprise, then, that four years and four directors later, RUS has failed to deliver on Adelstein’s promise.

A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects that RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed. More than 40 of the projects that RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place.

But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they altogether may squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can’t be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities.

And either way, scores of rural residents who should have benefited from better Internet access — a utility that many consider as essential as electricity — might continue to lack access to the sort of reliable, high-speed service that is common in America’s cities. Even RUS admits it’s not going to provide better service to the 7 million residents it once touted; instead, the number in the hundreds of thousands.

The checkered performance of RUS offers an all-too-familiar story of an obscure federal agency that has grown despite documented failures, thanks in large part to its political patrons in Congress. The massive infusion of stimulus money, which required RUS to disperse record sums faster than it ever had, further exposed its weaknesses — troubles that, in many ways, remain unaddressed, despite repeated warnings — even as RUS continues lending.

“We are left with a program that spent $3 billion,” Mark Goldstein, an investigator at the Government Accountability Office, told POLITICO, “and we really don’t know what became of it.”

* * *

It took a bigger economic crisis, more than eight decades earlier, to bring RUS into existence. The agency, known then as the Rural Electrification Administration, had been a centerpiece in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic New Deal. But the effort was controversial from the start. Private companies derided the government’s investments in rural energy as “Bolshevik” and “un-American,” but within several years, hundreds of public utilities were operating, and within 20 years, almost all U.S. farms had electricity. The model was so successful that REA shifted shortly after World War II to providing low-interest loans for rural telephone cooperatives.

Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House, vowing to abolish the REA, which he derided as “creeping socialism.” Within two years, however, even he was extolling the agency’s performance, praising its “great advances for rural America.” The program grew under Kennedy and Johnson, who in 1937, had led the formation of an electricity cooperative in the Texas Hill country. Richard Nixon again tried to kill it, arguing that the program had outgrown its usefulness and at that time only served “country clubs and dilettantes.” But an outraged farm bloc in Congress, led by senators such as George McGovern of South Dakota and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, forced Nixon to back down.

By the end of the 20th century, REA’s original electricity mission was more or less accomplished. And in 1994, REA and another agriculture program that had backed water and sewer projects were combined to form the Rural Utilities Service. Yet it was late in the Clinton administration that the agency’s portfolio expanded in a way that would be as dramatic — and ultimately, as controversial — as when it began.

Nations like Japan and South Korea had quickly achieved nearly universal and affordable broadband coverage, but the United States was lagging. “Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access,” President Bill Clinton said in April 2000. That year, Clinton’s budget included $102 million for a pilot broadband program to be administered by RUS, building on its previous telecom work.

Bolstered by a 2001 Brookings Institution study that estimated widespread adoption of basic broadband could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy, Congress approved permanent funding for the program. In the eyes of allies like Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, robust, widespread Internet access “would be as important to the national destiny as the railroads in the 19th century. … Universal broadband should be the national priority … (the) same way as putting a man on the moon was.” And low-interest federal loans, he believed, were the best way to do it. “The RUS telecom program has never issued a bad loan in over 50 years,” Burns said. “The government has actually made money off of those loans.”

In 2004, President George W. Bush proposed that broadband coverage should be universally available within three years. His support touched a nerve with Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin, a powerful Democrat who knew that one of the government’s primary mechanisms for meeting that goal was not up to the task. At a confirmation hearing for James Andrew, who eventually would take over RUS under Bush, Harkin recalled an encounter with the president in which he confided that universal broadband would never happen if RUS didn’t start spending money.

“We put in $2 billion (to the farm bill) to do that,” the senator grumbled to Bush, “but the Department of Agriculture has been dragging its feet.” By making onerous demands on its applicants and keeping them waiting months for approval, Harkin said RUS had managed to leave $1.6 billion on the table.

“I don’t want to sound too cynical,” Harkin told Andrew, “but it almost sounds like the cable companies and the big phone companies have gotten to somebody and said, ‘We don’t want this program to work.’”

Harkin then delivered to Andrew a brief sermon on the mission of RUS: “We were not risk averse when we put telephone lines out to farmsteads and our small towns in America. We knew there was risk in doing that, but we managed it. RUS manages risk. And that is what I am asking in broadband, manage risk. Don’t be so risk averse that you say, ‘We cannot give a loan out there because we want to make 100 percent certain that the company we give it to will not default and will not fail. Some of them will …”   Read more here.

 

Read more:

Immigrants Globally a Boon to Mafia and Gangs

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Given civil wars, drug cartels, failed states, lawlessness and financial crises, refugees, asylum seekers and those fleeing their home countries for countless reasons are falling prey to gangs and organized crime operations like the Mafia.

This is a building phenomenon not only globally but here in the United States. Consider Libya, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico are noted to be failed states.

Every action has a reaction and the Obama administration is not facing any conditions or consequences here at home.

Italy’s Mafia is Profiting From the Immigration Crisis
The Mafia in Italy have demonstrated devious ingenuity in everything from drug trafficking to counterfeiting. Now they’re exploiting the immigration crisis.

The care and feeding of such migrants may end up costing the Italian government as much as €800m per year, with it offering private individuals, companies and non-profit organisations up to €35 a day per person to host them. That includes a daily pocket money allowance of €2.50 that hosts are supposed to pay directly to the refugees.

Those funds have proven irresistible to the Mafia, according to Italian prosecutors and watchdog groups, who say criminal groups have succeeded at rigging the awarding of the contracts for the management of migrant reception centres in several high-profile cases.

Then here at home, let us look no farther than Long Island.

Gangs on LI trying to recruit newly arrived Central American children

Latino street gangs led by MS-13 have tried to lure Long Island’s newest child immigrants into their ranks, police said, causing concern among local investigators as well as immigrant advocacy groups.

The violent, drug-dealing gangs have been vying for new members among the more than 3,000 children younger than 18 who resettled in Nassau and Suffolk counties between September 2013 and September 2014.

MS-13 has gone international as their syndicate is appearing in Australia.

FreeBeacon: Vice President of the National Border Patrol Council Shawn Moran told Fox News that the violent MS-13 gang is exploiting the chaos on the U.S. border to recruit new juvenile members.

“We know the cartels were exploiting this and continue to exploit this crisis in south Texas, it makes sense that MS-13 and other gangs would do the same,” said Moran.

According to Moran, the gang has been using a Red Cross phone bank on the border, originally intended for unaccompanied minors to use to contact relatives: “These phones are being utilized by gang members to recruit, to enlist, to pressure people, other juveniles into joining the MS-13 gang.”

And, Moran explained, border security is unable to isolate these gang members because they are juveniles, and they are required to treat all juveniles a certain way. “We’re being told we have to look the other way. If we see gang tattoos, we’re not allowed to treat them any differently than anybody else applying to be allowed to stay here or to apply for asylum.”

“It’s a security issue that we feel could really snowball out of control and it would put agents at risk. It puts the other detainees at risk,” Moran said.

Moran described MS-13 as “one of the biggest threats we face on our southern border. They do not hesitate to use extreme violence if necessary. They are considered one of the top threats to border patrol agents.”

The Senate Circus and Donald Trump Advances

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It was tantamount that Republicans took control of the Senate to get rid of Harry Reid

..check…we made that happen.

It was imperative that we get rid of the Export-Import Bank

…check we did that too.

Given the recent investigative videos on Planned Parenthood, we were well on the way to do that too….until….Mitch McConnell and several other republican senators voted for their own elitist’s agenda and dismissed ours.

Trump is advancing because he is saying what we need to have said without using measured words. So, is anyone in the Senate or any other republican candidates scratching their heads yet on this ‘in-your-face- Trump-phenomenon? Simply put, Americans cannot tolerate cheating and lying much less obstruction. Below, Daniel Horowitz spells it out.

Yesterday’s Circus in the Senate is Exactly Why Trump is Surging

By: Daniel Horowitz | July 27th, 2015

When Donald Trump uttered the words “I like people who weren’t captured” in response to a question about Sen. John McCain’s service in Vietnam, there was a universal sentiment among both admirers and detractors that he would sink like a rock in the polls.  His meteoric rise was destined for a swift collapse.  Except – that collapse never occurred.  Why not?

Trump Maintains his Lead in the Polls

According to a new CNN-ORC International poll, which was conducted a week after Trump’s major gaffe, Trump is leading the field nationally with 18% of the vote, followed by Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.  As Breitbart observes, Cruz is now beginning to surpass Rubio for 4th place.   In addition, a new NBC News/Marist poll shows Trump with a commanding lead in New Hampshire, leading his closest rival 21%-14%.

When was the last time a Republican survived such a widely circulated career-ending gaffe?

In order to understand this unprecedented stubbornness of the GOP base in coalescing around a protest vote like Trump, look no further than the circus on display in the GOP-led Senate this past Sunday.

The Sunday Massacre in the Senate     

What was the emergency impetus for this rare Sunday session in middle of the summer?  Were the senators meeting to overturn Obama’s Iran alliance? Were they preparing a package of bills to “comprehensively” address the imminent problem of criminal illegal aliens?  Were they holding a crisis session over the Supreme Court’s coup against our Constitution and the impending disaster of anti-religious bigotry unfolding in a number of states?  Were they concocting a response to the growing homegrown Islamic terror attacks on our soil?  Did they finally decide that our military bases, which have become prime targets for terror attacks, should be populated by armed soldiers instead of unarmed soldiers?

Nope – none of the above.  They met on Sunday to renew the corporate welfare Export-Import Bank, the one government agency conservatives have successfully closed down for the first time in years.  They met to rush through a massive $300 billion highway bill, in which McConnell blocked all amendments addressing some of the aforementioned issues so that the amendment process can be reserved for the crony Export-Import Bank.

The Senate voted 67-26 to reauthorize the Ex-Im Bank and attach it to the “must-pass” highway bill.  This amendment was supported by 24 Republicans.  Accordingly, McConnell has now followed through with his private commitment to attach Ex-Im to the highway bill, in contravention to what he told GOP members privately.  Yet, instead of exhibiting outrage over McConnell’s lie, Sens. Hatch, Alexander, and Cornyn – three allies of McConnell – took to the Senate floor to condemn Cruz for calling him a liar.  If only they cared as much about our Constitution and the existential national security and sovereignty threats as they did “Senate decorum.”

Yes to Corporate Welfare, No to Conservative Priorities  

Next, Cruz attempted to force a vote on an amendment prohibiting the lifting of sanctions on Iran until they recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and release the four U.S. hostages.  Although his amendment was ruled out of order, any senator can force a vote overruling the decision of the chair if 10 other senators (for a total of one-fifth of the 51 quorum) join to “second” the request for a vote.  Yet, for the first time in recent memory, GOP senators refused to second the motion, thereby saving Democrats, once again, from having to vote on Iran and Israel.  McConnell and Corker had already blocked such amendments in May when they originally passed the unconstitutional Corker-Cardin Iran bill.

John Cornyn had the nerve to argue Sunday that the Corker-Cardin process has already granted the Senate sufficient oversight over the Iran deal and that there was no need for Cruz’s amendment.  Evidently, he’s not up on the news that Obama has already abrogated that process.

Finally, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) attempted to offer an amendment to defund Planned Parenthood.  Once again, he was rebuffed by the chair and he could not muster even 10 colleagues to force a vote on defunding Planned Parenthood.

Hence, corporate welfare is in; fighting Iran and Planned Parenthood is out.  Is this what the American people thought they were getting when they voted for a GOP Senate last November?

The American people, and the GOP base in particular, are tired of liars.  They are tired of Obama fundamentally transforming every value, principle, and tradition of this country before their very eyes while the Republican majority they elected stands by idly and focuses on liberal, petty, or trivial priorities – or downright helps Obama implement his policies.

This is exactly why the polls are continuing to show strong support for Trump.  He is a protest vote through which voters are declaring their independence from the failed and corrupt Republican Party.

Over the weekend, Ted Cruz has shown a willingness to fight this corrupt political cartel like nobody else in recent history.  Obviously, Trump’s persona as a pop culture figure has overshadowed Cruz’s work in the Senate, especially given the “inside baseball” nature of this fight.  But if he continues to bring this sort of fighting spirit to the campaign trail, he will be well positioned to reap the windfall from the wave Trump has created if and when The Donald implodes.  Unfortunately, that cannot be said of most of the other contenders running in the field.