News Day – January 14

R.T. runs again Mayor R.T. Rybak announced yesterday that he will run for a third term. He did not rule out a run for governor in 2010. The DFL endorsing convention is scheduled for May 16, after March 3 precinct caucuses. Rybak has run, and won, twice without DFL endorsement. Bob Miller, director of the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, announced his candidacy earlier in the year. Numerous candidates for city council have also announced, so the March 3 caucuses should be lively.

Lenders beware St. Paul and Baltimore will head up a new initiative to share information, coordinate legal strategies, and pressure lenders to be “part of the solution” to foreclosed and vacant housing, says St. Paul City Attorney John Choi. The Strib reports:

St. Paul has seen the number of foreclosures increase from 503 in 2005 to 1,819 in 2007 to 2,289 in 2009. The number of vacant buildings rose above a record 2,000 last year, as well.

Big Stone or no Big Stone? The fate of the Big Stone II coal plant in South Dakota comes before the Minnesota Public Utility Commission (PUC) tomorrow (January 15), notes the Minnesota Independent. More than a year ago, MN Senator Ellen Anderson denounced the Big Stone II proposal in the Twin Cities Daily Planet:

Big Stone II would operate alongside the old Big Stone coal plant, and greatly expand its capacity. More burning coal will mean more carbon dioxide emissions.

Minnesota’s 2007 energy bill sets clear goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to a level 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2015, to a level at least 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and to a level at least 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.

You don’t meet goals like that by building expensive new 50-year coal plants.

United to save? Minnesota and Wisconsin governors signed an agreement to share unidentified services in order to help with budget deficits, reports the PiPress. They said that joining in bulk purchases of items such as road salt, bulldozers and food for prisons could save millions. No specific commitments were made, but both governors directed agency heads to look for savings. Minnesota’s budget deficit for the biennium is estimated at $4.8 billion and Wisconsin’s at $5.4 billion.

Politicizing Justice The Department of Justice was so politicized under King George II that Bradley Schlozman, a senior official and acting head of the Civil Rights Division, lauded new hires who were members of the rightwing Federalist Society as “the team” and “ideological comrades,” and sought to hire RTAs — “right-thinking Americans.” He also said he liked his coffee “Mary Frances Berry style – black and bitter.” Berry, an African American, chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1993-2004.

All this and more in the Department of Justice report TPM Muckraker, which has followed the case closely, reports that Schlozman will not be prosecuted for either his violations of law in politicizing DOJ hiring or for his perjury when testifying about his practices.

Attention deficit? “How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $34,000 worth of federal taxes ($43,200, including interest), or forget to check on the immigration status of a house cleaner — the same sort of upstairs-downstairs slip-up that has tripped up other top-drawer prospects on their way to top jobs here?” asks Maureen Dowd. And how did the Obama vetting process miss these red flags?

The Washington Post explains that “Geithner told the committee that he had failed to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes because he mistakenly believed that his employer at the time, the International Monetary Fund, was deducting those taxes from his paycheck” and that the housekeeper was a legal resident of the United States, even though Geithner did not have proper documentation of that fact.

MN Job WatchAs St. Paul faces budget cuts, the city will ask workers to take voluntary retirements, leaves of absence and reduced hours, hoping to avoid at least some layoffs, reports the Strib. The city already has a hiring freeze in place, as well as a salary freeze for its 70 non-union workers.

ING, the Dutch financial services firm, will lay off 100 Minnesota workers by the end of the quarter, reports the PiPress, part of a 750-person U.S. cutback. ING will have about 1200 Minnesota employees after the cuts. Marshall-based Schwan Food has cut 52 more jobs, for a total of 130 in the last four months, reports AP. Almost 190,000 Minnesotans are currently unemployed, reports MPR, and that is an increased burden for the state’s Dislocated Worker Program, which expects to enroll nearly 19,000 people during this fiscal year, a 20 percent increase over last year. New applications for unemployment benefits exceeded 33,000 in December, and the state’s unemployment comp fund is running dry.

Health insurance fraud by … health insurer? UnitedHealth Group has run a scam on doctors and patients by setting “usual and customary” payment rates to out-of-network providers too low by “anywhere from 10 percent to 28 percent for certain claims in New York state,” according to an AP report on the settlement that will have UnitedHealth paying $50 million to set up an independent “usual and customary payment” database run by a yet-to-be-identified nonprofit organization.

[New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo] said the databases were riddled with conflicts of interest. He noted that many health plans across the country use Ingenix data to determine usual and customary rates.

Ingenix, in turn, received its data from those insurers. He called that system a “closed loop” that left out consumers.

UnitedHealth regrets that conflicts of interest “were inherent” in the databases, said Mitch Zamoff, general counsel for its subsidiary UnitedHealthcare. …

The new database will include a Web site that allows consumers to learn in advance how much they may be reimbursed for common out-of-network services in their area.

A court case last summer resulted in agreement by California-based Health Net Inc. to pay $215 million to patients who received low reimbursement for out-of-network care. Health Net also used UnitedHealth’s Ingenix database.

Local hero Matthew Little With Martin Luther King Day approaching, the Twin Cities Daily Planet talks with Matthew Little, Minnesota civil rights veteran and columnist for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. At 87, Little saw the entire sweep of the civil rights movement and led a Minnesota delegation to the March on Washington in 1963.

Liberian adoptions suspended The Strib reports that a Minnesota Liberian adoption agency has been suspended by the Liberian government. The West African Children Support Network (WACSN), founded by Liberian-born Maria Luyken of Eden Prairie, has handled more than a hundred adoptions. Canada halted all Liberian adoptions last year because of concerns about fraud, and

According to the Strib, WACSN does not have a Minnesota adoption agency license, and has not filed required charitable agency reports or tax returns.

WACSN charges $8,000 for a Liberian adoption and works exclusively with “devout Born Again Christian Families,” according to its website, http://www.wacsn.org. It says Luyken immigrated to Minnesota in 1979, and began charitable work in Liberia in 1995, and adoptions in 2003.

This morning, the WACSN website displayed only an “under construction” message. A November BBC report focused on fraudulent Liberian adoptions and children being taken by agencies and given for adoption abroad without the consent of their parents or other relatives, including one baby girl adopted through WACSN.

Gaza thread In Common Dreams, Uri Avnery writes:

Nearly seventy years ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

BBC reports that fighting in Gaza intensified with more than 60 Israeli airstrikes overnight, and that the total number of deaths is 13 Israelis and nearly 1000 Palestinians. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon joined Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in seeking a way to negotiate for peace.