Former Governor Jim Douglas goes to John!

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John Kasich’s presidential campaign that is.  Former Governor Jim Douglas has officially endorsed John Kasich and joined his Vermont Leadership Team. Douglas joins Vermont State senators Peg Flory (R-Rutland), Kevin Mullin (R-Rutland), and Rich Westman (R-Lamoille) who signed on to the Ohio Governor’s campaign earlier.

In his statement Douglas said: “Among the candidates left standing, only John Kasich demonstrates the leadership ability needed in the Oval Office. From balancing the budget in Washington to turning Ohio’s economy around, he knows how to solve problems and he knows how to bring people together.”

Before becoming governor Kasich was a Newt Gingrich Republican in Congress for nineteen years, with a brief spell prior to becoming governor earning big bucks  at Lehman Brothers (before they went belly-up). kasichthewall

Curiously Kasich says if elected president he would try to reunite Pink Floyd for a concert.

(What is it with Republicans and walls?)

 

And how about that record the Ohio Governor has that Douglas admires? In brief here are four items thinkprogress.com singled out from his time as Governor.

~ Enacted sweeping tax cuts that devastated Ohio’s poor.

~ Signed a budget that included restrictive anti-choice measures.

~ Dealt a blow to labor by supporting pro-business legislation.

~ Pushed through charter school reform while ignoring failing schools.

And Progress Ohio Executive Director Sandy Theis says bluntly:

“John Kasich is nowhere near as likable or as moderate as he makes out, and I think it won’t take long for that to become apparent in this campaign. He’s a flash in the pan,”

Sounds as if Jim Douglas has lot in common with Governor Kasich — except the Pink Floyd thing.

But who’s gonna tell Donald Trump and Ted Cruz they lost Governor Douglas’ and Vermont State Sen. Peg Flory’s coveted endorsement?

Scott to visit community affected by toxic chemicals

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Republican gubernatorial candidate Phil Scott will attend, according to his published schedule the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation community meeting for residents of Bennington, North Bennington, and Shaftsbury.

When the PFOA well contamination first came to light, Lt. Gov. Scott initially referred to the contamination as a “spill” and did not mention monitoring private or public wells and only suggested “We should start by helping municipalities upgrade systems to prevent spills of raw sewage and untreated wastewater.”

I’d be surprised if Scott has any legislative recommendations to propose that might help prevent a disaster like this happening to Vermont families. That is because the Lt. Gov. had a chance in 2015 to improve regulation of toxic chemicals and chose not to.Philscottphilscott

Scott cast a tie breaking vote last session in the legislature that killed a bill designed to expanded existing rules governing chemicals allowed in children’s toys. The lieutenant governor said he sided with the business community, which opposed the changes, so as not to create uncertainty for them.

No small irony then that he is on the road today to campaign …err I mean to visit a community suffering from toxic chemical exposure. I wonder if Scott would go back and change his veto on chemicals in children’s toys -or maybe he just hopes voters won’t look back too far at his record on chemical regulation.

Q-Resorts fallout: revisionist photoshopping we might see

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Reports are, as you might expect, that Vermont pols are working hard to put a little sunlight between themselves and alleged EB-5 ponzi artists Bill Stenger and Ariel Quiros. It will prove a little harder for some than others.

Early on in the EB-5 saga, in October 2009 Governor Jim Douglas went on a junket to South Korea with Stenger and Quiros . While there, according to a press release at the time,  he facilitated the first EB-5 investor seminar for the now-failed AnC Bio as part of his economic development mission to Asia.

Will former Governor Douglas try to blur it away even though he had a front row center seat?douglas ancbio 2

Vermont.gov press release: “On behalf of the people of Vermont, I want to welcome AnC Bio VT to Vermont,” Douglas said while at the AnC plant in Seoul. “This is an exciting opportunity that can bring hundreds of high-tech, good paying jobs to our state.” — Gov. Douglas 2009 [vermont.gov noted that pictures were available for the press]

Starting in 2004 EB-5 was Led by Jim Douglas

The following is from Bill Stenger’s 2011 written testimony to US House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and it couldn’t be clearer:

It was not until late 2004, because of improved C.I.S. [U.S.C.I.S.] efforts and the renewed commitment by our state officials led by Governor Jim Douglas, that the program became truly functional from our perspective in Vermont.

To be there or not to be there?

This was Bill Stenger’s birthday celebration on September 27 2012, Newport’s Lake Memphremagog.

getmerewrite
#1 Left to right: Congressman Peter Welch, Bill Stenger, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Gov. Peter Shumlin, Ariel Quiros and William Kelly. #2 Left to right: Bill Stenger, Ariel Quiros and William Kelly

No one is exactly trying this, because you can’t just photoshop yourself out of the recent past, but a few Vermont politicians may try to blur the lines and change the focus, with or without technical wizardry.

 

Stenger, Quiros, meet The Backstreet Boys – sort of

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Yesterday, Miami lawyer Michael Goldberg was appointed by the SEC as the receiver to oversee and administer the assets of Q-Resorts’ EB-5 projects, now under a cloud of federal and state fraud charges.

The choices and arrangements made by Attorney Goldberg on behalf of the SEC as receiver will have big impacts on Vermont’s NEK. And after a ton of  litigation wallows its way through the courts, and depending on the outcome of those legal proceedings, the receiver is tasked to recover and protect funds and other assets the defendants have obtained in connection with the fraud and to distribute those assets to injured investors if a determination of liability is made.

And Michael Goldberg, Q-Resort’s SEC appointed receiver, has managed some of the largest Ponzi scheme liquidation recoveries in U.S. history, according to his bio.

A notable one he manged was as Trustee of the Louis J. Pearlman and Transcontinental Records estates  also known as Lou Pearlman’s twenty-year Ponzi scheme.

BSBoysPearlman, aka the “Svengali behind the ’90s boy-band craze,” created and managed the Backstreet Boys, and NSYNC. Pearlman was convicted of defrauding investors to the tune of $300 million by creating an airline and airline service company which did not exist. He tried to flee, but was caught on the run in Indonesia and brought to court.

Now, thanks to a simple twist of fate, the SEC (and indirectly to Carlo “Charles” Ponzi), Bill Stenger and Ariel Quiros share more with NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake than ever dreamed possible.

Better Late Than Never?

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Smart move by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy who pivoted nimbly to advocate for reform of the EB-5 program, just in time to make the same news cycle as the raid on Q-Burke.

As you can read in the story below, EB-5 is the particular briar patch into which the developers of Q-Burke dove headfirst, only to later find themselves hopelessly ensnared.

From its inception, we on GMD have questioned the value of this program to the public and couldn’t help wondering whether it would evolve into a government sanctioned ponzi scheme.

Senator Leahy was a big supporter of the EB-5 program for Vermont, as was Governor Shumlin.  Job one for governors and senators is to promote economic growth, so their initial enthusiasm is not surprising; but even the earliest news stories about Mr. Stenger’s and Mr. Quiros’s scheme should have set off a few alarm bells.

As I recall, the original pitch promised a hotel, conference center, airport, high-tech window manufactory and a state of the art bio-tech plant; and that was to be just the start. There were big plans to see EB5 investments plumping local economies all over the state.

In a corner of the state where winters are long and opportunities are few, such a drastic transformation might initially mean construction and service jobs for the locals; but it seemed likely that low wage locals would soon find themselves priced out of the housing market in a burgeoning resort town.

With things having gotten so far out of hand in the finance department that the SEC has blown the whistle, it now looks like the jig may be up.

So announcement of Senator Leahy’s reform efforts couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment.

Sadly, it is may be too late to save Vermont’s credibility for international investors.

Q-Burke and EB-5, cue the lawyers

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Well, well, well, here we have  Bill Stenger and Ariel Quiros’ EB-5 NEK Empire  suffering a full SEC body slam.Qdownside

The SEC and the state of Vermont allege misuse of $200 million of investor funds by Jay Peak Inc. owners Stenger and Quiros.

‘‘The alleged fraud ran the gamut from false statements to deceptive financial transactions to outright theft,’’ said Andrew Ceresney, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.

In Miami, a federal judge granted the SEC’s request to temporarily freeze Quiros’ assets and prohibit Quiros and Stenger from participating in projects associated the EB-5 program while the litigation is pending. A receiver has been appointed to oversee the Jay Peak and Q Burke resorts.

The allegations specifically suggest what many Vermonters have suspected for quite some time, that the massive NEK EB-5 developments were being  run as a “Ponzi” like scheme.

VtDigger.com has the best rundown of yesterday’s seizure and today’s news about SEC: that charges were laid out in a federal court case in Miami, where Quiros lives. Digger has had an eye on this story and one reporter was asked to leave a meeting on Q-Burke property a couple weeks ago before the SEC charges.

It seems that nothing as complex or exotic as credit default swap contracts or complicated derivatives trading took place here in Vermont – just an old fashioned Ponzi scam. Pay the first investors off with money from the next batch of investors – just rinse and repeat as needed. It is kind of a quaint old scam really, except that it played so heavily on the hopes of NEK residents for jobs, decent development and an improving economic outlook for the historically depressed area.

One of the projects, AnCBio, was a proposed medical device business, and, according to the SEC, it has from the beginning been “rampant with fraud” and is now years behind schedule. AnC Bio started life as Ariel Quiros’ company called The Sports Seoul 21 Company Ltd.

Among one of the interesting charges in terms of convergence is that Ariel Quiros allegedly bought one of Donald Trump’s condos at Trump Place in Manhattan with funds from foreign investors. Trump himself has an approved EB-5 luxury hotel development in Jersey City, just a few miles from Quiros’ condo at Trump Place – maybe he can see it from his balcony.

Oh and Q-Burke won an award this week too!

Business Facilities, an online trade magazine, just named Q-Burke one the three most successful business achievers in cluster developments in the US for 2016. They got it half right, clusterwise: – it is likely to become known as one of the state’s award winning financial cluster-f#*ks.

How NOT to win friends and influence voters.

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Does this sound familiar to you? You’re quietly reading news articles and blogposts when suddenly, very loudly, an ad blares from your computer. You look all over the screen to try and find the sneaky link that you have inadvertently triggered, but fail to see one.

So you sit there fuming for the duration…not listening, just fuming. At the close of the seemingly endless interruption, you hear “…Paid for by Bruce Lisman for Governor, blah, blah, blah…”

That’s right: like the ubiquitous “Kilroy” in WWII, Lisman was here.

Bad idea, Mr. Lisman. No one likes those annoying pop-ups, and fewer than no one can tolerate their audio counterpart.

Whoever sold you this bill of goods must be working for the other side.

Whatever it said (and I honestly didn’t hear a word as I furiously looked for the ‘off’ button), the message it unmistakably carried was that Mr. Lisman has more dollars than sense, as my dad used to say.

Why would anyone support a man for governor who can’t respect their online privacy?

Is Judd Gregg really blind to socialism or just a fool in The Hill?

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New Hampshire’s former senator and governor Judd Gregg is menaced by socialism and worried, very worried about growing support for Bernie Sanders’ bid for president. I wonder what trigger threshold, visible only to financial industry lobbyists and certain Democratic pundits Bernie just reached.

In an opinion piece in The Hill titled: Sanders fans are blind to reality of socialism Gregg wonders where “a significant percentage of the Democratic ‘base’ is headed.”

chartdemos
Charts documenting Denmark’s socialist “hell”. [not from Gregg’s opinion piece]

Says Gregg in The Hill: Now large segments of the Democratic Party are embracing with gusto the socialist creed as carried forth by Sanders — and at a less dramatic level by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Gregg suggests Sanders’ support comes from naive college age voters, schooled in the dark arts of socialism by professors who fail, he says to teach of “the horrors of socialism.”

They might start with the experience of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Notice the name. Or the National Socialist movement called Nazism. Notice the name again. Or Maoist China, a socialist state again in name. Millions of people died under these banners of socialism and millions more were impoverished.

Notice this name: The Securities Industry & Financial Marketers Association.  I imagine they wouldn’t welcome any extra scrutiny from Sen. Warren or a President Sanders and for years they paid Gregg millions to help avoid that possibility. Juddsifma

It is no secret but The Hill doesn’t bother to mention in his bio that most recently Gregg was not senator or governor but the CEO of the Securities Industry & Financial Marketers Association, an industry lobby group. SIFMA in 2014 spent $7,430,000 on lobbying, and made political contributions totaling $833,175.

Thankfully Gregg (or his ghostwriters; could he actually write this stuff?) doesn’t belabor the fascist/red baiting theme for more than a beat before trying a different angle. He evokes American exceptionlism and chants the holy names of the American hyper rich: Zuckerberg, Musk, Schultz, and Gates.

They all give America a unique economic edge in a competitive world. And they are all products of America, and our market economy.

Try to find such opportunity or such prosperity in a socialist nation.

Well Gregg might be shocked — shocked! — to learn that socialist Denmark has a rapidly rising number of dollar millionaires [individuals whose net wealth exceeds one million US dollars]. This in part is due to Danish stock prices increasing more rapidly than those in other European countries, according to a 2015 report on worldwide wealth patterns by the Royal Bank of Canada.  That’s a kicker — a growing number of millionaires and a thriving equities market in a nation where socialism has been allowed to run rampant!

 Some 69,000 Danes can proudly call themselves millionaires when measured in US dollars, reveals RBC’s annual World Wealth Report.

“[…] the Danish dollar-millionaire club is growing significantly faster than in most European countries. In 2011, there were only 45,600 Danes that fell into this category – a figure that has since risen by 51 percent.

“The number of dollar millionaires is rapidly rising,” Jacob Graven, chief economist at Sydbank, told Ekstra Bladet.

So Judd, who is going to tell all the Danes and their recent millionaires they are living and thriving in a socialist hell? Or maybe if he closes his eyes real tight, he can keep pretending they just don’t exist.

Campbell, Mazza, and Scott three-spot rules

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Lt. Gov. Phil Scott (R), Senator Dick Mazza (faux D) and Senate president pro tem John Campbell (D) are the powerful Senate Committee on Committees. The C of C’s is the three member Senate group charged with choosing senate committee assignments, chairs of committees and “personnel,” as Campbell says.

But the band is breaking up. John Campbell announced he will not seek re-election but will take a job as executive director with the legislatively created Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs. One duty of the executive director is to  represent the group’s views to the legislature. cofcsLt. Gov. Phil Scott will be moving out and/or up depending on the results of his run for governor. And who knows what “king maker” Dick Mazza may have in store for the next session.

On occasion in the past their collective wisdom has been questioned. The chairman they put in place as the head of the Senate Natural Resources Committee several years ago was what you might politely call unsure about climate change.

However, due to some end-of-session senate resignations that opened up committee seats last week, the gang of three was able to raise some eyebrows and hackles yet again with their unilateral decision making — maybe for the last time.

After a brief consultation with each other, Campbell, Scott and Mazza elevated Sen. Dustin Degree, (R-Franklin) from Senate Education to the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Then they named Degree’s Committee replacement without consulting or notifying Ed. Committee Chair Sen. Ann Cummings of their choice of “personnel.”

The Committee on Committees is in charge of “personnel,” as Campbell describes it, and does not hold public meetings. Decisions are often made unilaterally by the close-knit group of three men.

And in this instance, there actually was no meeting to vote on the matter — the decision was made in casual conversation before the Friday Senate session.

Campbell happened to be talking to Scott in front of Senate Transportation where Mazza is the chair and the subject came up. Scott then talked with Mazza and the deed was done.

“We made these appointments through individual conversations with each other over the past few days,” Scott said in a written statement. “It’s difficult to find a time when all three of us can meet, so we talk in pairs until we come to an agreement. No formal committee vote is needed, simply an agreement on the appointment between the three of us.”

Just more of that olde time, good ol’ boys’ we-know-what’s-best-for-Vermont style that comes so naturally to these three. So good they don’t even bother with a smoke-filled room!

Phil Scott opened his run for governor by declaring: “I saw a need for a leader who could bring people together.”  His history with Mazza and Campbell on the Committee on Committees says otherwise.

Unlike stocks, in Scott’s case, past performance may well predict future behavior: if elected governor, he will likely prefer to make his important decisions behind closed doors, just as he’s done here.

Cozy Committee Assignment Goes to Degree

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Well, isn’t this nice? The boys on the Committee of Committees, all three of them, had a huddle and decided to put Dustin Degree onto the Finance Committee. That’s gubernatorial candidate Phil Scott, resigning Senate Pro-Tem, John Campbell and reliable blue-dog, Dick Mazza.

Don’t ask to see a record of the deliberations. There isn’t one. Just three good ol’ boys making it work…for them.

Guess whose going out stumping for Phil Scott, other than Dick Mazza whose allegiance is already a matter of public record?

Look for a dutiful DD to hit the election trail with Scott…and maybe even a surprise appearance from good-buddy Campbell.

We, in Franklin County have some serious doubts about Dustin Degree’s judgment, following the Norm McAllister debacle; and they will no doubt be raised in the heat of the election campaign. McAllister and Degree campaigned in tandem in the last two election cycles, often appearing joined at the hip.

If we are to believe he had no idea of McAllister’s penchant for predatory sex, even after his teenaged ‘intern’ repeatedly accompanied McAllister on his overnights in Montpelier, it is difficult to understand how Degree’s powers of observation and simple judgment should not be suspect, too.

So when a vacancy opened on one of the most desirable committees in the statehouse, how is it that Degree sprang so quickly to mind for the gang of three?

Surely there is someone in the senate who has a more impressive record of good judgment than has McAllister’s sidekick.

How’s that ethics committee coming along, Boys?  Is it going to be seated in a similar manner?