“It should shake us up that on our continent, Christians are not safe.” - EP President Martin Schulz

BREITBART

EuroParliament Prez: Christians ‘Not Safe In Our Continent’

 

Reuters

by Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.3 Dec 20151,044

In a high-level meeting on religious persecution in Brussels, the President of the European Parliament (EP) said that Europe cannot afford to continue ignoring the fate of Christians, who are “clearly the most persecuted group” in the world.

In Wednesday’s meeting, EP President Martin Schulz said that the persecution of Christians is “undervalued” and does not receive enough attention, which has also meant that it “hasn’t been properly addressed.”

Schulz’s concerns were echoed by EP Vice President Antonio Tajani, who warned that Europe sometimes “falls into the temptation of thinking we can ignore this task,” referring to the protection Christians throughout the world who suffer persecution.

Speakers cited the work of Open Doors, a human rights organization that monitors the persecution of Christians, noting that 150 million Christians worldwide suffer torture, rape and arbitrary imprisonment. Christians in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Nigeria are among those hardest hit.

The Open Doors report for 2015 found that “Islamic extremism is by far the most significant persecution engine” of Christians in the world today and that “40 of the 50 countries on the World Watch List are affected by this kind of persecution.”

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Sheriff: School officer fired after tossing student in class

 

msn

© AP Photo This three image combo made from video taken by a Spring Valley High School student on Monday, Oct, 26, 2015, shows Senior Deputy Ben Fields trying to forcibly remove a student f…   COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A deputy who flipped a disruptive student out of her desk and tossed her across her math class floor was fired on Wednesday. The sheriff called his actions "unacceptable," and said videos recorded by her classmates show the girl posed no danger to anyone. "What he should not have done is throw the student," Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said. "Police officers make mistakes too. They're human and they need to be held accountable, and that's what we've done with Deputy Ben Fields." Civil rights groups immediately praised the firing of Fields, a veteran school resource officer and football coach at Spring Valley High School. Calls for swift action rose almost immediately after the videos of Monday's arrest appeared on the Internet, and the sheriff suspended the deputy without pay before firing him altogether. Lott praised the FBI for agreeing to investigate whether civil rights were violated, and school district officials for promising to review how police are used for discipline.     Read More Here     ...................................................................................................................  

Officer drags Girl from desk Slams student on floor Video School Cop Slams Girl video

MetroNews

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msn

Officer drags Girl from desk Slams student on floor Video School Cop Slams Girl video

MetroNews

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BkZwHCBPzM]


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Who Is Ben Fields, the Police Officer Filmed Flipping a Spring Valley High School Student?

 

Newsweek

Polly Mosendz

 

 

© Richland County Sheriff's Department/Reuters Richland County Sheriff's Department Officer Senior Deputy Ben Fields is pictured with Karen Beaman, principal of Lonnie B. Nelson Elementary School after…

 

 The police officer filmed flipping over and dragging a black female student at a South Carolina high school this week has a history of being sued after violent encounters, and as of Tuesday, he is facing an investigation by the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice over the videotaped incident after it went viral online.

Ben Fields, the Richland County sheriff’s senior deputy who was caught on video during the incident at Spring Valley High School, joined the sheriff's department in 2004 and became a school resource officer in 2008, assigned to two schools in Richland School District Two.

A year prior, Carlos and Tashiana Martin had filed a suit against Fields, another deputy and the county’s sheriff over an October 2005 incident. According to the suit, Carlos Martin claimed Fields questioned him in an apartment parking lot as to whether he was the “cause of excessive noise complained of by a resident” in Martin’s neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. Martin said he was not, as he had been driving home from work. In their interaction, Martin referred to Fields as “dude,” agitating the officer, the lawsuit states.

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Boehner gives incoming speaker parting gift with budget deal

msn

The Washington Post

Kelsey Snell

 

© Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) (R) speaks as House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) (2nd L) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) (L)…
[Congressional leaders and White House are closing in on a budget deal]

 

Outgoing House Speaker John Boehner presented his newly forged budget deal to his Republican colleagues at a private meeting this morning, outlining his plan to avert another government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling as a parting gift to his successor.

The deal would increase federal spending by $80 billion over two years and raise the federal borrowing limit through 2017. The 144-page bill, which was released Monday shortly before midnight, was welcomed by Democrats who have been pushing for budget negotiations all year.
“We have a budget agreement,” said outgoing House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) after the meeting of House Republicans where the outlines of the deal were presented.

Boehner (R-Ohio), who will step down on Oct. 30, added that the alternative was a clean debt ceiling suspension with no extra funding for troops. “This is a good deal.”



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Obamacare customers are facing an average 7.5 percent price increase for a key benchmark health plan next year; But the average rate hikes will vary dramatically from state to state

 POLITICO

Roughly 80 percent of Obamacare customers received subsidies. | Getty

Obamacare rates to rise 7.5 percent next year

But the figures will vary widely from state to state.

By Paul Demko

10/26/15 06:18 PM EDT

Obamacare customers are facing an average 7.5 percent price increase for a key benchmark health plan next year, according to limited data the Obama administration released just days before the start of a challenging enrollment season.

But the average rate hikes will vary dramatically from state to state — skyrocketing more than 30 percent in Alaska, Montana and Oklahoma while dropping 12.6 percent in Indiana.

The administration's analysis looks at the second-cheapest "silver" plan available to customers when open enrollment begins on Nov. 1. Those benchmark plans, which are among the most popular sold on the law's health insurance exchanges, are important because they're used to calculate how much federal support low- and middle-income exchange customers will receive toward their monthly premiums.

More than 70 percent of exchange customers chose silver plans this year, which cover about 70 percent of medical costs. Roughly 80 percent of Obamacare customers received subsidies, worth an average monthly credit of $270.

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As Debt Limit Approaches, Cracks Appear in Nation’s Finances

 

 

Emily Flake

 

 

By Rob Garver

 

October 23, 2015

 

 

With no obvious solution on the way from Congress, the U.S. is approaching a fiscal crisis, and it’s impossible to say when it will begin to adversely affect the economy. Unless lawmakers allow his department to borrow more money, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has warned that as of about November 3, the U.S. government will begin operating on a cash basis – something that could lead to a first-in-history default on the financial obligations of the United States.

The November 3 date, however, suggests that everything will be just fine so long as something happens by 11:59 on November 2. An announcement by the Treasury Department on Thursday, though, showed why that is manifestly not the case.


Related: What’s Really Driving the Stock Market’s Big Rebound Rally?

 
The Treasury sells billions of dollars in government-backed securities every week, from short-term bills to medium term notes, up to the 30-year “long bond.” Sometimes this is done to take on more debt, other times it is done as a management tool, allowing the Department to distribute the government’s obligations over different maturities as cost and need require.

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Goodbye Middle Class: 51 Percent Of All American Workers Make Less Than 30,000 Dollars A Year

End Of The American Dream

The American Dream Is Becoming A Nightmare And Life As We Know It Is About To Change

By Michael Snyder, on October 20th, 2015

We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying.  According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year.  Let that number sink in for a moment.  You can’t support a middle class family in America today on just $2,500 a month – especially after taxes are taken out.  And yet more than half of all workers in this country make less than that each month.  In order to have a thriving middle class, you have got to have an economy that produces lots of middle class jobs, and that simply is not happening in America today.

You can find the report that the Social Security Administration just released right here.  The following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…

-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year.
-62 percent of all American workers made less than $40,000 last year.
-71 percent of all American workers made less than $50,000 last year.

That first number is truly staggering.  The federal poverty level for a family of five is $28,410, and yet almost 40 percent of all American workers do not even bring in $20,000 a year.

If you worked a full-time job at $10 an hour all year long with two weeks off, you would make approximately $20,000.  This should tell you something about the quality of the jobs that our economy is producing at this point.

And of course the numbers above are only for those that are actually working.  As I discussed just recently, there are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

So many people that I know are barely scraping by right now.  Many families have to fight tooth and nail just to make it from month to month, and there are lots of Americans that find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into debt.

If you can believe it, about a quarter of the country actually has a negative net worth right now.
What that means is that if you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of the entire country.  The following comes from a recent piece by Simon Black…

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Congress has 410 different caucuses, covering everything from algae to wine. Is it any wonder that nothing ever gets accomplished ?

The Freedom Caucus Makes News, but What About the Chicken Caucus?

Congress has 410 different caucuses, covering everything from algae to wine.

Wikimedia Commons
By Eric Pianin
October 23, 2015

When members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus meet in private, they typically discuss ways to thwart or topple their more moderate House Republican leaders or alter the rules to give rank and file members more legislative clout.

Not so for the House Chicken Caucus, which was formed this year by two lawmakers, a Democrat and a Republican, from poultry regions in California and Arkansas. Members of the caucus view their mandate as educating their colleagues and the public “about the history, contributions and issues of importance to U.S. chicken producers.”

SLIDESHOW: From Babies to Bourbon: 33 Surprising Congressional Caucuses
 
While just a few high profile factions within the 435-member House get much attention these days — most notably the roughly 40-member Freedom Caucus as well as the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — a myriad of other mostly obscure cliques are focused on pet policies and issues important to their constituents back home.

Those issues range from Irish affairs, cement production, cut flowers and shellfish to “financial and economic literacy,” hockey, songwriters and rock ‘n’ roll. There are caucuses for rodeos and toys, submarines and small brewers, motorcycles and sugar — and admirers of Ronald Reagan. There are groups built around regional or national issues — from the Hong Kong Caucus to the Albanian Issues Group to the Friends of Liechtenstein — and ones devoted to almost every major disease or meOR: dical disorder, from blood cancers to malaria to arthritis.

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), a founding member of the House Bourbon Caucus, is ever ready to sing the praises of Kentucky’s Jim Beam and Early Times bourbon whiskey and promote the distillery industry. Reps. Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Dan Benishek (R-MI) of the Invasive Species Caucus are beating the drum to raise awareness of the dangers of the Asian Carp and other alien fish that are invading the nation’s lakes and streams.



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How Rising Rents Are About to Crush American Spending Power

 

 

 Alex Lozupone

  Rent Is Too Damn High Party car

Wikipedia.org

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By Chris Herbert, The Conversation

 

 

 

October 23, 2015

We just learned America’s rental affordability crisis is as bad as it’s ever been. Unfortunately, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

The American Community Survey for 2014, released a few weeks ago, found that the number of renters paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing – the standard benchmark for what’s considered affordable – reached a new record high of 20.7 million households, up nearly a half-million from the year before. Despite the improving economy, the increase was nearly five times bigger than last year’s gain.

That means about half of all renters live in housing considered unaffordable. And the latest increase comes on top of substantial growth since 2000 that has seen this number climb by roughly six million households over the period, an increase of about 41 percent.

Related: More Americans Struggling to Pay the Rent
 

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FBI Agents Accused Of Torturing U.S. Citizen Abroad Can't Be Sued

Wikipedia.org

msn

Federal agents who illegally detain, interrogate and torture American citizens abroad can't be held accountable for violating the Constitution.

A divided federal appeals court on Friday tossed the lawsuit of a U.S. citizen who claimed the FBI trampled his rights for four months across three African countries while he was traveling overseas.
In so many words, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the man, Amir Meshal, couldn't sue the federal government for such violations, and punted the issue to someone else.

"If people like Meshal are to have recourse to damages for alleged constitutional violations committed during a terrorism investigation occurring abroad, either Congress or the Supreme Court must specify the scope of the remedy," Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote for the 2-to-1 court.
Meshal's case had drawn support from a number of law professors, along with present and former United Nations special rapporteurs on torture, who had hoped the court would help clarify when the U.S. can be made to answer for abuses abroad.

At issue in the case was a 1971 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bivens v. Six Unknown Unnamed Agents, which found for the first time that the Constitution allows citizens to hold liable federal officials who violate their rights -- even if Congress hadn't expressly passed a law to that effect.

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As Congress Fails to Act, 1 in 3 Seniors Facing Big Hike in Medicare Premiums

 

Wikimedia Commons

 

 

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By Eric Pianin

 

 

 

 

October 22, 2015

 

Hopes are dimming that Congress will intervene to block a huge Medicare premium increase of over 50 percent for nearly a third of the 50 million elderly Americans who receive their physician care and other health services through Medicare Part D.

Republicans and Democrats are deadlocked over how to come up with roughly $10.5 billion to prevent Medicare premiums from skyrocketing for millions of seniors beginning next January. The looming increase is the result of a quirk in the law that drives up premiums for wealthier Americans and poor people with chronic medical problems in years when the Social Security Administration doesn’t approve a cost-of-living adjustment for beneficiaries.

Related: Millions Face a 50 % Medicare Premium Hike If Obama and Congress Don’t Act
 
While both parties are interested in doing something to reduce or avert the premium hikes, Republicans are demanding that the cost of any bailout be offset by cuts in other areas of the Medicare program, while Democrats are resisting that approach. Moreover, there is a division between House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) – a major champion of a bailout – and some Senate Democratic leaders who are less enthusiastic about the effort and how to pay for it.

“It’s a big mess,” said one Washington health care expert who is following the negotiations closely.
Negotiations may pick up later this month once the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services formally releases its official 2016 premium rates, according to a report on Thursday by the Morning Consult.



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Congress has never seen anything quite like the House Freedom Caucus. At least since the Civil War, there hasn’t been a faction fighting both parties at the same time.

POLITICO

History Dept.

The Freedom Caucus’ Unprecedented Insurgency

At least since the Civil War, there hasn’t been a faction fighting both parties at the same time.

By Alan Greenblatt

October 18, 2015

AP Photo

Congress has never seen anything quite like the House Freedom Caucus. There’s always someone unhappy on Capitol Hill and it’s not unusual for malcontents to band together. A rebellion made up of members who refuse to work with either party, however, is something that hasn’t happened in living memory.

“This is an unusual and indeed unprecedented development in the history of the party,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, a research consultant to the Main Street Partnership, a centrist GOP group.

 

 

Parties—particularly those with large majorities—almost inevitably split into factions. And congressional history is replete with examples of groups that balked at party leadership. But the insurgents we remember—the ones who weren’t quickly and completely marginalized—managed by and large to find common cause with members of the other party. Southern Democrats, for instance, forged a “conservative coalition” with Republicans that dominated Congress for much of the 20th century.

There hasn’t been a bloc like the Freedom Caucus for at least a century, one that refuses to work with its own party leadership while being steadfastly unwilling to reach across the aisle. “There have been groups that often broke from the party, but in doing so, they didn’t stand as a third force,” says former GOP Rep. Mickey Edwards. “This group is very different.”

The Freedom Caucus, rather than breaking from Republican ranks, has forced Republican leaders to break from them. It’s a perverse sort of political jujitsu. One of outgoing Speaker John Boehner’s supposed crimes was that he went begging Democrats for help passing legislation when he couldn’t find the votes within his own caucus. Some rank-and-file Republicans, meanwhile, have made a separate peace with Democrats on reviving the Export-Import Bank. Normally the opposite would happen and it would be the insurgents reaching across the aisle. But that presupposes an interest in governing.

“I can think of a number of major examples throughout history where a party has had divisions of consequence,” says Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Government Affairs Institute. “It’s rare that those divisions would represent a position on the fringe of the political system, where they’re not working with either party.”

Both the tactics and the playing field have changed for today’s dissenters. In the past, some members would squawk at autocratic leadership or the stated policies of their own party and look for ways to disrupt proceedings, but they had some kind of endgame in mind. Once they deposed a leader or got their way on a key vote, they took some quiet satisfaction.

What is distinctive about the current crop of congressional rebels is their willingness to use any lever they can find to cause trouble—debt-ceiling fights, funding fights, leadership succession struggles. “The thing that (today’s) conservatives are very good at—because they don’t care about precedent or the party’s history—is trying out different things,” says Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin, a history of the decline of moderate Republicans.

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An obscure Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program grants millions of dollars every year, but a government official won’t say how the money actually combats poverty.

 A store damaged from riots after the death of Freddie Gray is seen in Baltimore, Maryland, May 13, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Silent But Expensive: An Anti-Poverty Program’s Mysterious Achievements

Ethan Barton

An obscure Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program grants millions of dollars every year to only three eligible organizations, but a government official won’t say how the money actually combats poverty.

More than $429 million has been granted through Section 4 of the HUD Demonstration Act of 1993 to help local organizations – called community development corporations – combat poverty through “capacity building” – a vague phrase that essentially means building their size and expertise, according to a HUD document.

“Capacity building develops core skills that strengthen the ability of local community based organizations to implement HUD programs, raise capital for community development and affordable housing, coordinate on cross-programmatic place-based approaches and facilitate knowledge sharing,” the agency’s 2015 request for funding says.

The funds pass through one of three eligible groups, known as intermediaries, which then either redistribute Section 4 funds to local groups or provides them with direct assistance through trained staff. Those three groups defined by law are Enterprise Community Partners, Habitat for Humanity International and Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

According to HUD’s 2015 funding request, $20 million will “result in: approximately 5,000 housing units newly constructed renovated, or preserved; 600 training opportunities; and an estimate of more than $200 million in total development costs channeled to low-income communities in more than 250 communities nationwide.”

But HUD officials won’t say how indirectly backing local groups after funds pass through an intermediary will achieve those claims, and the intermediaries can still receive grant dollars without providing evidence of successful urban renewal.

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Despite review, State Dept. objects to Clinton documents on Benghazi release. Claiming 'not appropriate for public release.'

From top to bottom, and left to right: the President and Vice President being updated on the situation in the Middle East and North Africa night of September 11, 2012; President Obama, with Secretary of State Clinton, delivering a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House, Sept. 12, 2012, regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate; two photographs released through a FOIA request showing post-attack burned automobile and spray paint graffiti of militant Islamist slogans on ransacked consulate building; Secretary Clinton testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2013; portion of "wanted" poster from FBI seeking information on the attacks in Benghazi.

Wikipedia.org
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POLITICO

State Department objects to email release by Benghazi panel

Despite review, agency calls messages 'not appropriate for public release.'

By Josh Gerstein

10/20/15 02:30 PM EDT

 

The State Department is objecting to the House Benghazi Committee’s plan to release more than 200 documents in connection with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much-anticipated testimony to the panel Thursday, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.

While State is opposing the public email disclosure by the House panel, the agency also conducted a “sensitivity review” of the records in response to committee Chairman Trey Gowdy’s plan to make the records public.

 

“We do not agree to these documents being released to the public outside of the Freedom of Information Act process……It is the Department’s position that these documents are not appropriate for public release,” State said in an unsigned memo to the panel Saturday.

“However, in recognition of the Committee’s stated intent to publically [sic] release them, this production reflects our best efforts—within the limited timeframe allowed by the Committee, to redact any sensitive information that could damage national security, subject any people or US facilities to harm or damage, interfere with any law enforcement activities, or result in an unwarranted intrusion of personal privacy,” the memo said.

2016

Inside Clinton's Benghazi hearing game plan

By Annie Karni

State’s memo said the review was driven by Gowdy’s indication that he planned to release a set of emails Clinton exchanged with outside adviser Sid Blumenthal without redactions if State failed to propose deletions from the records.

A State spokesman declined to comment on the memo Tuesday.



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Many Low-Income Workers Say ‘No’ to Health Insurance

MSN News

Many Low-Income Workers Say ‘No’ to Health Insurance

The New York Times

By STACY COWLEY 6 hrs ago

 

© Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times An employee at Golden Corral taking clean cups from the kitchen. Some Golden Corral restaurants began offering health insurance to employees, but few have…

 

 JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — When Billy Sewell began offering health insurance this year to 600 service workers at the Golden Corral restaurants that he owns, he wondered nervously how many would buy it. Adding hundreds of employees to his plan would cost him more than $1 million — a hit he wasn’t sure his low-margin business could afford.
His actual costs, though, turned out to be far smaller than he had feared. So far, only two people have signed up.

“We offered, and they didn’t take it,” he said.

Evidence is growing that his experience is not unusual. The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, which requires employers with more than 50 full-time workers to offer most of their employees insurance or face financial penalties, was one of the law’s most controversial provisions. Business owners and industry groups fiercely protested the change, and some companies cut workers’ hours to reduce the number of employees who would be eligible.

But 10 months after the first phase of the mandate took effect, covering companies with 100 or more workers, many business owners say they are finding very few employees willing to buy the health insurance that they are now compelled to offer. The trend is especially pronounced among smaller and midsize businesses in fields filled with low-wage hourly workers, like restaurants, retailing and hospitality. (Companies with 50 to 99 workers are not required to comply with the mandate until next year.)

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Feds keeping us in the dark : 11 co-ops “are either on a corrective action plan or enhanced oversight. More than $900 million of the original $2 billion in loans has been lost.

Feds Hide Secret List Of 11 Staggering Obamacare Insurers

 

 A man looks over the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) signup page on the HealthCare.gov website in New York in this Oct. 2, 2013 photo illustration. (REUTERS/Mike Segar)

Richard Pollock

Federal officials have a secret list of 11 Obamacare health insurance co-ops they fear are on the verge of failure, but they refuse to disclose them to the public or to Congress, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has learned.

Just in the last three weeks, five of the original 24 Obamacare co-ops announced plans to close, bringing the total of failures to eight barely two years after their launch with $2 billion in start-up capital from the taxpayers under the Affordable Care Act.

All 24 received 15-year loans in varying amounts to offer health insurance to poor and low income customers and provide publicly funded competition to private, for-profit insurers. The eight co-ops to announce closings served populations in ten states: Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Tennessee, Vermont, New York and Colorado.

Nearly half a million failing co-op customers will have to find new coverage in 2016. More than $900 million of the original $2 billion in loans has been lost.

 

The 11 unidentified co-ops appear to be still operating but are now on “enhanced oversight” by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the Obamacare program. The 11 received letters from CMS demanding that they take urgent actions to avoid closing.

Aaron Albright, chief CMS spokesman, said 11 co-ops “are either on a corrective action plan or enhanced oversight. We have not released the letters or names.” He gave no grounds for withholding the information from either the public or Congress.

CMS officials have stonewalled multiple congressional inquiries into the co-op financial problems. The latest congressional inquiry came in a September 30 letter to CMS acting administrator Andy Slavitt demanding transparency over the troubled program.

“We have long been concerned about the financial solvency of CO-OPs,” three House Ways and Means committee members wrote to Slavitt. “Which plans have received these warnings or have been placed on corrective plans,” the congressmen asked. To date, they have received no reply.
Insurance commissioners in Vermont were the first to refuse to license the federally approved co-op there in 2013 because they feared those financial plans were unrealistic. But then the dominoes began to fall this year, resulting in at least eight co-op failures. And if CMS officials are to be believed, more failures may be on the way.

Sen. Charles Grassley , a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee who has been an outspoken critic of the troubled co-op program, said transparency should be a top priority for the faltering program.

“Since the public’s business generally ought to be public, CMS should have a good reason for not disclosing which co-ops are troubled,” he said.



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