This is up there with Sandusky
Comments »YOUS GUYS SEPARATE THE TRASH OVA HEAH: Organized Crime Gets Into Recycling
Mobsters have a long history of making a killing in the garbage-hauling business, but a New Jersey commission says they have gone green by infiltrating the commercial recycling business.
The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation reported Tuesday that organized crime continues to find and exploit holes in a regulatory system that hasn’t been updated in decades. A law adopted in 1983 that was designed to keep criminals out of the solid waste business isn’t properly enforced and commercial recyclers remain largely unregulated.
“The integrity of this industry remains in peril,” the commission wrote. “The industry today remains open to manipulation and abuse by criminal elements.”
Organized crime’s ties to garbage hauling reach back at least half a century.
The New Jersey commission first uncovered significant criminal intrusion into solid waste disposal in 1969. The infiltration was most prominent in the 1980s, when organized crime had a stranglehold on the industry, forcing out legitimate operators through extortion. A string of prosecutions and new regulations , licensing requirements and background checks , helped weed out underground operators.
The commission found that the aging regulations, funding and staffing shortages and inter-agency communication problems “aren’t working as well as intended to keep criminal elements out of the industry,” said commission spokesman Lee Seglem.
The commission said it was particularly bothered by evidence of organized crime’s infiltration into commercial recycling, which has become lucrative in the 25 years since New Jersey adopted a mandatory garbage separation and recycling law.
New Jersey requires background checks for “key employees” involved in solid waste hauling. New York’s tougher licensing laws , it requires checks for consultants and sales associates in solid waste and for recyclers , encourage organized crime to set up shop across the Hudson River in New Jersey, investigators say.
One example cited in the report is Joseph Lemmo Jr., whom the commission called a “poster boy” for gaps in the state’s solid waste licensing law.
Despite multiple criminal convictions and ties to the Genovese crime family, Lemmo made more than $1 million a year operating within plain sight for more than a decade, the commission said. Though his criminal convictions should have barred him from the industry in New Jersey, he found a back way in through a truck-rental company that supplied trailers to a waste-hauling company owned by his cousin, the report said.
Lemmo did not reply to a notice from the commission inviting a written response. A phone message left with his former company, which he sold two years ago, was not immediately returned.
People also have gotten around the law through front companies or by having relatives with clean criminal records obtain licenses, the commission found.
The commission recommended several changes, including stronger laws and more money and manpower for enforcement. It said the state’s solid waste and disposal licensing requirements should be extended to recycling. Recognizing that government budgets are being stretched thin by the recession, the commission also suggested charging licensing fees to haulers to generate money for enforcement.
Additional concerns were raised concern about potential environmental consequences of a waste-hauling industry running amok, including midnight dumping, the mixing of hazardous and solid-waste material and the resale of junked computer components.
The governor’s office said it was reviewing the report. Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie, said the governor is confident in his administration’s ability to manage available resources to properly regulate the solid waste and recycling industries and enforce criminal laws.
The three-member commission said similar recommendations have been made before.
“In 1969, the commission revealed that organized crime rooted in New York was spreading into commercial garbage collection in New Jersey and warned that the industry was at dire risk of becoming rife with bribery, extortion, price-fixing, collusive bidding and other forms of corruption,” the commissioners wrote.
It issued additional warnings after the 1983 legislation required garbage haulers to be licensed, saying the new law was being improperly enforced.
“That the commission today, more than 20 years later, must repeat some of the same general findings and recommendations is a testament to the price of warnings ignored, opportunities lost and legislative intent undermined,” the most recent report states. “The ability of mob-affiliated entrepreneurs to continue profiting from the system even after they have been unmasked reflects a fundamental flaw.”
Read more: http://trade.cc/ojx
Watch sports videos you won’t find anywhere else
Comments »The U.S. Economy is on Track to Outperform
Hopefully we will outperform as sales in every category have beaten expectations. Hopefully the U.S. can decouple from the European nightmare.
Comments »Consumers Finally Get It; Cash is King While Plastic is Usury
Mortgage Applications Rose Last Week
Bernanke Blasts Bloomberg for Egregious Errors on Emergency Loans Program
“There have been a series of recent articles–one just last week–concerning the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities during the financial crisis. These articles have largely repeated the same information in different formats, and have contained a variety of egregious errors and mistakes.”
Bernanke, who said the media is wrong by calling the Fed’s lending activities “secretive,” also corrected Bloomberg Market’s math.
“Second, one article asserted that the Federal Reserve lent or guaranteed $7.7 trillion during the financial crisis. Others have estimated the amounts to be $16 trillion or even $24 trillion. All of these numbers are wildly inaccurate…”
Full article
State of the Nation: Over Half of All Adult Americans Have Little ot No Money for Their Golden Years
Prominent Mortgage Investor Puts Litigation Costs to Settle Mortgage Crisis at $100 Billion +
The Unvarnished Truth About #OWS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJD8pZiRIzs&feature=youtu.be
Comments »Strip Clubs Find Female Dance Professor to Stave Off Government
Judith Hanna, a 75-year-old grandmother and anthropology professor, spent an afternoon in 2005 on a beach in Jacksonville, Florida, photographing women’s swimsuited backsides.
Hanna, who has spent almost 50 years studying the cultural expression of dance, called the fieldwork “interesting.” Her pictures, meant to demonstrate local enthusiasm for exposed flesh, became evidence in a nightclub’s fight against an ordinance requiring strippers to better cover their derrieres. Since 1995, Hanna, a University ofMaryland researcher, has helped clubs repel efforts to tax, regulate or close them, arguing more than 100 times that striptease is just as much an art as ballet.
Next year, her lap-dances-are-art argument will be part of an appeal before New York’s highest court. A stripper in heels is like a ballerina en pointe, she says, and her communication of feeling is no different than that of the New York City Ballet — and no less protected by the First Amendment.
“Patrons of gentleman’s clubs aren’t just there to look at nude bodies,” Hanna, who lives in Bethesda, said in a telephone interview. “They want to read into it. It’s not just the eroticism, it’s the beauty of the body, and the fantasy they create.”
Hanna says she has observed at least 1,500 ecdysiastic performances in her defense of the $12 billion U.S. exotic-dance industry, which comprises about 4,000 clubs. When a city or state passes a law to kick the clubs out of town, owners turn to Hanna. She sends clients an average bill of about $3,000, and estimated that she has 45 wins to 21 losses.
Voice of the Industry
Hanna “plays a really important role in letting people see our side,” said Eric Langan, chief executive officer of Houston-based Rick’s Cabaret International Inc. (RICK), which operates adult websites and clubs in Texas and Minnesota.
Opponents say her sophistry defends the indefensible.
“You can’t just trump the law by saying a naked dancer’s erotic message is protected by free speech,” said Scott Bergthold, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, attorney who helps municipalities craft and defend adult-business regulations. “We’re dealing with cases where cities are outlawing touching between naked dancers and customers that involve prostitution acts and she’s coming in with these opinions. It’s ridiculous.”
Hanna’s prominence has grown with the spread of stripping, Bergthold said in a telephone interview.
“The industry has exploded, and they’re now in towns and cities that 20 years ago didn’t have strip clubs,” he said.
‘Secondary Effects’
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed crime rates around clubs to be used as cause for regulation. This year, the Missouri Supreme Court and a federal appeals court in Ohio upheld laws against touching customers. The Texas Supreme Court upheld a $5 per customer tax on nude clubs that serve alcohol. The so-called secondary effects doctrine, which allows laws restricting activities regarded as protected expression so long as they are aimed at deleterious side effects such as crime, was applied in all three.
At trial, Hanna’s testimony is often accompanied by that of sociologists who dispute crime data as the industry recasts itself as classy entertainment.
“Sex, drugs and heavy drinking have been replaced by good- looking women, $300 chairs and bright lights,” said Langan whose company has a market capitalization of about $77.6 million and whose stock has outperformed the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index by almost 1 percentage point this year.
And there is nothing new under the bustier, Hanna said.
“Exotic dance has nudity and is marginalized and stigmatized for it,” Hanna said. “It’s really old hat. It’s in musicals, operas, and theater.”
Grace and Violence
The New Testament tells of Salome, who “danced and pleased” her stepfather Herod, the ruler of Galilee, and then asked for John the Baptist’s head. Herod sent an executioner.
Vaslav Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” ballet sparked a riot when its depiction of fertility rituals debuted in Paris in 1913.
“Exotic dance shares with virtually all dance genres the fact that it is a purposeful, intentionally rhythmical, culturally patterned, nonverbal, body movement communication in time and space,” Hanna writes in “Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right,” to be released next year. It “conveys meaning by the use of space, touch, proximity to an observer, nudity, stillness and specific body movements.”
Preparing Temptation
Stripping can transcend the carnal, said Toni Bentley, an author who danced for choreographerGeorge Balanchine’s New York City Ballet before a hip injury ended her career.
“It’s hard to make the argument that just thrusting your pelvis is art,” Bentley said in a telephone interview. “You have a much better chance at doing something beautiful with work and preparation.”
The key to eroticism is careful planning, said Jennifer McCumber, 28, a retired stripper who runs a website from her Houston home where she teaches business concepts to dancers.
“To make a lap dance work, I had to combine concepts from gymnastics, things I learned from pole dancing, belly dancing I learned in college and even martial arts,” McCumber said in a telephone interview. “You have to have physical and mental agility to perform, while also making it seductive and alluring.”
Choreography is at the heart of the case in New York, where a club in Latham, near Albany, is arguing that most of its sales should be tax-free because of the state’s exemption for entrance fees to “dramatic or musical art performances.”
‘Stunningly Sweeping’
Andrew McCullough, a lawyer for Nite Moves, gave the court videos that dancers use to “adapt new techniques into their choreography.” And he hired Hanna to “get the message across” to the Tax Appeals Tribunal, he said.
It didn’t get there.
“To accept Dr. Hanna’s stunningly sweeping interpretation of what constitutes choreographed performance, all one needs to do is move in an aesthetically pleasing way to music,” tribunal Commissioners Carroll Jenkins and Charles Nesbitt wrote in their April 2010 ruling against the club.
The case is headed to the New York Court of Appeals, which said in October it will hear arguments next year.
In 2002, Bentley, the former ballet dancer, published “Sisters of Salome,” a study on early 20th Century strippers. As research, Bentley did a striptease of her own at a New York City club.
“There’s no definition to art and it’s eternally debated,” Bentley said. “Like the Supreme Court with obscenity, I know it when I see it. And from going to all kinds of strip clubs, some of it is and some of it is not.”
Comments »Three Cheers for Motorists: U.S. Awash in Gasoline
Prices have been moving down recently and now gasoline is expected to be a major export.
Comments »Hope in Europe Lifts U.S. Futures
Top Analyst in Housing Says Brace for a Another Dismal Year
The Week Ahead (video)
An Interview With Former President Bill Clinton On A Free Lunch (video)
A Look at Job Creation in America (video)
A great piece into the minds of small business and their role as job creators;
Comments »FLASH: HERMAN CAIN SUSPENDS HIS CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT
NYC Janitor’s Union Threatens Strike
REALITY TV: Trump to Moderate Republican Debate
It’s officially a reality television Republican primary now.
Donald Trump is pairing up with Newsmax, the conservative magazine and news Web site, to moderate a presidential debate in Des Moines on Dec. 27.
“Our readers and the grass roots really love Trump,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media. “They may not agree with
him on everything, but they don’t see him as owned by the Washington establishment, the media establishment.”
Mr. Trump’s role in the debate, which will be broadcast on the cable network Ion Television, is sure to be one of the more memorable moments in a primary season that has already delivered its fair share of circus-like spectacle.
Mr. Trump’s own flirtation with running for president this year seems almost quaint (whose birth certificate was he all worked up about?) compared with more recent distractions – like allegations of adultery and sexual harassment, gaffes that seemed scripted from a late-night comedy show, and a six-figure line of credit at Tiffany & Co.
But despite being derided by liberals – President Obama likened Mr. Trump to a “carnival barker” for his repeated assertions that the president was actually foreign-born – the real estate mogul is seriously influential in manyRepublican Party circles. And that sway seems especially deep with the party’s conservative base, which will be a decisive factor in the early primaries that are likely to determine the nominee. The debate, which unlike many recent ones will not be limited to a specific topic like national security or the economy, is set to happen just a week before the Iowa caucuses.
Newsmax sent candidates the invitation on Friday afternoon. It began, “We are pleased to cordially invite you to “The Newsmax Ion Television 2012 Presidential Debate,” moderated by a truly great American, Mr. Donald J. Trump.” Spokesmen for several candidates did not immediately respond to questions from The New York Times about whether they would accept.
Though presidential candidates may initially balk at the idea of appearing in a debate where Mr. Trump – with his bombast and The Hair – is the one posing the questions, they may ultimately see it as an invitation they can’t refuse. In fact many of the candidates have already met with him, some more publicly than others. Representative Michele Bachmann has sat down with Mr. Trump several times this year. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had dinner with him at Jean Georges, the posh Manhattan restaurant. And Mitt Romney paid a visit but carefully avoided being photographed.
And Newsmax is a powerful player itself. It has a broad reach into the conservative base, with monthly Web traffic second only to Fox News among sites with conservative-leaning audiences.
Mr. Trump has been a popular attraction at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering in Washington. He was such a successful presence in the eyes of Fox News executives that they added a special weekly segment to their morning show “Fox and Friends” for him called “Mondays With Trump.”
Whether his professed presidential ambitions are genuine or merely a publicity stunt seems not to matter in terms of the news media attention Mr. Trump can command. His highly publicized flirtation with running this year coincided with a Trump-branded product that stood to benefit from all the attention – a new season of his highly rated NBC show “Celebrity Apprentice.”
The arc of his noncampaign was similar in 1987 and 1999 – when Mr. Trump also said that he was considering running for president, episodes that are often forgotten.
His book ”Trump: The Art of the Deal” was published in November 1987 and reached The New York Times best-seller list by December. But by the time theRepublican National Convention rolled around in August 1988, he had opted out.
”Everybody wants me to do it,” he declared then. ”But I have no interest in doing it.”
And in late 1999, just before his book ”The America We Deserve” went on sale, he began courting support as a candidate on the Reform Party ticket. He even toured the country with his girlfriend, Melania Knauss, now his wife. The outcome? You guessed it.
Comments »CAIN DROPPING OUT? Campaign Says to Announce “Major Decision” Tomorrow
Herman Cain campaign says they will be making a “major announcement” in Georgia tomorrow. #Decision2012
SOURCE: NBC NEWS TWITTER FEED
Comments »
