Check It Out for Wednesday, March 4th
From The Brad Blog comes an article comes the news that Diebold, yes that fraudulent electronic voting company operating under a new name, allowed undetectable audit log deletion, another saga that Congress keeps making worse, not better, in the ongoing private voting machine companies committing vote fraud with their proprietary software that was and continues to be completely unsecure.
"California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has released a remarkable 13-page report [PDF] of her office's investigation into how the Diebold/Premier GEMS software silently dropped all votes contained on 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California's November 2008 general election.
"The report shows that this version of GEMS not only deleted a batch of ballots without any request by --- or alert to --- the elections staff, but also failed to note the deletion in the system's audit log. The report also points to other startling deficiencies with Diebold/Premier's software: "Key audit trail logs in GEMS version 1.18.19 do not record important operator interventions such as deletion of decks of ballots, assign inaccurate date and time stamps to events that are recorded, and can be deleted by the operator."
"That's right. The Diebold/Premier vote tabulation system in question, not only fails to record all events accurately, and sometimes at all, it also allows for anyone with access to the system, to completely delete audit logs, covering the tracks of any tampering that may have occurred, at any time, on the system.
"Any of these flaws, the report concludes, "appears to violate the 1990 Voting System Standards to an extent that would have warranted failure of the GEMS version 1.18.19 system had they been detected and reported by the [federal] Independent Testing Authority [ITA] that tested the system."...
David Evans at Bloomberg News writes about the public pension fund fiasco that may force another bailout.
"Public pension funds across the U.S. are hiding the size of a crisis that’s been looming for years. Retirement plans play accounting games with numbers, giving the illusion that the funds are healthy.
"The paper alchemy gives governors and legislators the easy choice to contribute too little or nothing to the funds, year after year.
"The misleading numbers posted by retirement fund administrators help mask this reality: Public pensions in the U.S. had total liabilities of $2.9 trillion as of Dec. 16, according to theCenter for Retirement Research at Boston College. Their total assets are about 30 percent less than that, at $2 trillion.
"With stock market losses this year, public pensions in the U.S. are now underfunded by more than $1 trillion.
"That lack of funds explains why dozens of retirement plans in the U.S. have issued more than $50 billion in pension obligation bonds during the past 25 years -- more than half of them since 1997 -- public records show.
"The quick fix for pension funds becomes a future albatross for taxpayers."
From Corporate Crime Reporter via Democratic Underground comes news that single payer Medicare for All advocates are being frozen out of the health care reform summit:
"President Obama’s White House made crystal clear this week: a Canadian-style, Medicare-for-all, single payer health insurance system is off the table.
"Obama doesn't even want to discuss it.
"Take the case of Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan).
"Conyers is the leading advocate for single payer health insurance in Congress.
"Last week, Conyers attended a Congressional Black Caucus meeting with President Obama at the White House.
"During the meeting, Congressman Conyers, sponsor of the single payer bill in the House (HR 676), asked President Obama for an invite to the President’s Marchy 5 health care summit at the White House.
"Conyers said he would bring along with him two doctors – Dr. Marcia Angell and Dr. Quentin Young – to represent the majority of physicians in the United States who favor single payer.
"Obama would have none of it.
"This week, by e-mail, Conyers heard back from the White House – no invite..
"Himmelstein’s take – Obama is caving to the insurance industry.
“ 'The President once acknowledged that single payer reform was the best option, but now he's caving in to corporate healthcare interests and completely shutting out advocates of single payer reform,” Himmelstein said. “The majority of Americans favor single payer, and it’s the most popular reform option among doctors and health economists, but no single payer supporter has been invited to participate in the administration's health care summit.. Meanwhile, he's appointed as his health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, a woman who has made her living advising health care investors and sits on the board of many for-profit firms that have made billions from Medicare. Her appointment – and the invitation list to the healthcare summit – is a clear signal that the administration plans to propose a corporate-friendly health reform that has no chance of actually solving our health care crisis.' ”
Lucy Komisar at In These Times writes about how food service providers bilk millions from taxpayers.
"At the end of the 2006 school year, children’s nutrition advocate Dorothy Brayley had a disturbing conversation with a local dairy representative. He had come to her office to discuss participation in the summer trade show of food providers she runs as director of Kids First Rhode Island.
"At the time, the state’s schools were buying 100,000 containers of milk each week. The salesman for Garelick Farms, New England’s largest dairy, told Brayley that Sodexo—a food and facility management corporation that managed most of the state’s school lunch programs—was paying Garelick more than competitors in order to get a bigger rebate.
"State Education Department records, which are required to chart milk prices, showed that Sodexo passed on the price hike, billing schools 24 cents to 27 cents a half-pint, while milk was available from Aramark, a competing company, for 18 cents to 21 cents a half-pint — a loss to schools and families of more than $100,000 a year.
"That’s just a taste of the hundreds of millions of dollars of “rebates”—or kickbacks from suppliers—that Sodexo, a $20 billion-a-year global leader in the food and facility management industry, has taken while operating cafeterias and other facilities for schools, hospitals, universities, government agencies, the military and private companies across the country, according to evidence provided by whistleblowers and internal company documents.
"In some cases, such rebates violate the contracting policies of federal agencies. In others, undisclosed rebates may constitute fraud."
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