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cassiexbailey · 4 years

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HOLY SHIT IS THAT [ KAT MCNAMARA ]?! Oh, wait it’s just [ CASSIOPEIA “CASSIE” BAILEY ]. Damn, [ SHE/HER ] looks good for [ 22 ], good thing that they’re [ BISEXUAL ], I might have a chance. I hear that they call them the [ NANCY DREW ] of the [ NORTH SIDE ]. I guess that’s because they’re [ INDEPENDENT ] and [ RESOURCEFUL ]. But I don’t think a lot of people know that they’re also [ SECRETIVE ] and [ STUBBORN ].

01. BASICS

Full Name: Cassiopeia Sebine Bailey

Nickname: Cassie, Cas, Teeny

Sex/Gender: Female

Birthday: November 11, 1996

Age: 22

Astrological Sign: Scorpio

Occupation: Private Investigator

Spoken Languages: English, French, Italian

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual; Heteroromantic

Birthplace: Riverdale, MA

Hometown: Port Townsend, WA // Chicago, IL

Relationship status: Single but complicated

02. PHYSICAL TRAITS

Hair Color/Style: Red-orange or blonde, depending on her mood; she was born with bright red hair, but when she was younger she used to dye it dirty blonde so that she’d look more like her mother; since she found out both of her parents were lying to her about who she was, she let her hair go back to it’s natural color. As for style, she doesn’t really style it often, but it’s usually either down, in a ponytail, or put up in a messy clip

Eye Color: Green

Face Claim: Kat McNamara

Height: 5′3″

Weight: 120 pounds

Tattoos: a large phoenix covering part of her back and left hip symbolizing her love for Greek myth but also as a means for covering up an old stab wound; a small ring of laurel leaves with ‘03/19/1980′ on one side and ‘06/12/2019′ on the other on the inside of her right arm, representing her mother { photos coming soon }

Piercings: Both her ears are pierced twice

Unique Attributes: coming soon

Defining Gestures/Movements: running a hand through her hair; bouncing her leg/knee when she’s nervous; cracking her neck and knuckles; drumming her fingers on whatever surface she’s nearby

Posture: Decent posture, but slouches from time to time

03. PERSONALITY TRAITS

Pet Peeves: { she has a lot okay? this isn’t even all of them } ignorance, lairs, cheaters, being chronically late, people who talk loudly on their phones, people chewing loudly or with their mouths open, people who walk slowly in the middle of the sidewalk or stop suddenly, line cutters, people who don’t use their turn signals, bad grammar, passive aggressive behavior (even though she’s guilty of this herself), people who refer to themselves in the third person

Hobbies/Interests: dance, writing, photography, criminal justice, reading, cooking, hiking

Special Skills/Abilities: private investigation, adaptable, researching, staying calm under pressure

Likes: sex, coffee, tattoos, photography, hiking, swimming, astrology, astronomy, nature, traveling

Dislikes: rude people, ignorance, fake people, cigarettes/smoking in general

Insecurities: losing people she cares about, not being good enough for someone { i’ll probably add more later }

Quirks/Eccentricities: coming soon

Strengths: coming soon

Weaknesses: coming soon

Speaking Style: coming soon

Temperament: she can keep a calm head in most situations, but she does have a bad temper

04. FAMILY & HOME

Immediate Family: Edward Bailey (Anderson) { father }; Sebine Smythe { mother }; Athena Bailey { adopted mother, deceased }; Sebastian Smythe { half-brother }, Sebrina Smythe { half-sister, deceased }; Bruce Anderson { uncle }; Blaine Anderson { cousin }; Darius Anderson { cousin }

How do they feel about their family? coming soon

How does their family feel about them? coming soon

Pets: None yet

Where do they live? She lives in a small one bedroom house in the neutral zone

Description of their home: coming soon

Description of their bedroom: coming soon

05. THIS OR THAT

Introvert or Extrovert? A bit of both, depending on the situation and people

Optimist or Pessimist?

Leader or Follower?

Confident or Self-Conscious? A bit of both

Cautious or Careless?

Religious or Secular? Raised Catholic, but doesn’t practice anymore

Passionate or Apathetic?

Book Smarts or Street Smarts? Both

Compliments or Insults? Depends on the person

Pajamas or Lingerie? Neither; she sleeps in a loose-fitting tank top and short shorts

06. FAVORITES

Favorite Color: dark green

Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: coming soon

Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: coming soon

Favorite Movies: coming soon

Favorite Books: coming soon

Favorite Foods/Drinks: coffee

Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: She doesn’t necessarily have a favorite team, but she enjoys watching hockey and football

Favorite Time of Day: early evening

Favorite Weather/Season: tied between fall and winter; she loves the cold

Favorite Animal: wolf

07. MISCELLANEOUS

Fears/Superstitions: not being good enough; people finding out who she really is and blaming her for Sebrina’s death

Political Views: she doesn’t really care to be honest; she doesn’t have a party declared, she votes with who she thinks will be best at the time

Addictions: coffee, sex

Best School Subject: English, History

Worst School Subject: Math

School Clubs/Sports: dance team

How does she get money? she owns her own private investigation business

How is she with technology? very adept; not hacker-level, but she can get by

08. PAST & FUTURE

Fondest Memory: learning to cook with her mother

Deepest, Darkest Secret: coming soon

Dream Vacation: coming soon

Best thing that has ever happened to this character: coming soon

Worst thing that has ever happened to this character: Losing her mother and learning that both she and Edward had been lying to her for her entire life

What do they want to be when they grow up? she is grown up, and she’s doing what she wants to do; that being said, married to someone who loves her for who she is. maybe a few kids.

Perfect Date: she doesn’t really have anything in mind for a perfect date. good food, good company. that’s all she can ask for.

09. BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

triggers: mention of presumed KIA military status, drive-by gun violence, torture, murder, death

Growing up, life for Sebine Laurent had been anything but normal. Her parents had died at a young age, leaving her growing up as an orphan on the South Side. Early in her teen years, she fell in love with a young South Sider named Edward Anderson - the youngest son of the Serpents leader. The two were together for years, but despite this relationship when the Smythes came looking for a wife for their youngest son, Sebine ended things with Edward per her new in-laws demands; they shoved a hefty prenup in her direction demanding she not bring any scandal to the family name via her relationship with the South Side boy she had been involved with for so long, and she had begrudgingly accepted it in search of a better life.

Years passed without any contact between Edward and Sebine. She gave birth to two beautiful twins, Sebastian and Sebrina, and her life seemed perfect; her marriage was far from perfect, but she loved her family regardless. A chance encounter brought Edward and Sebine back into each other's lives, and the spark quickly reignited between the two of them. The Smythes knew what was going on between their daughter-in-law and her old flame, but they let it go. They had their picture-perfect family and their beautiful grandchildren. As far as everyone else was concerned, the Alexander and Sebine Smythe had the perfect family. Problems quickly arose, though, when Sebine fell pregnant, and it was clear that Alexander wasn't the father this time.

The family threatened to leave her completely desolate if she didn't end things with the Serpent once and for all, including giving the baby to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy once Sebine had given birth. They thought they had everything under control until Edward refused to be pushed out of Sebine's life for a second time. He had secret, grand plans to sweep Sebine away from her life in the North Side so they could run away to be together, but her in-laws intercepted. They gave Edward a counter-offer that was almost too hard to refuse. Sebine would never leave with him, but he could still have a piece of her; they offered to give him a substantial amount of money to get out of the gang-life that was expected of him in the South Side as well as to leave Riverdale with the baby and never return.

After trying and failing to convince Sebine to leave with him, Edward refused the Smythe’s offer at first, though instead of leaving town like they had asked, he simply took Cassie and left the North side. He returned to the familiarity of the South Side with his daughter, but instead of pledging his loyalty to the Serpents like he was expected to - like his older brother, Bruce, had done - he joined the Ghoulies alongside his best friend, Luca Gilbert. His brother was furious at this perceived betrayal, especially since Bruce had taken over the Serpents in the wake of their father’s passing in the years before. Knowing how angry Bruce was, Edward and Luca prepared for some sort of retaliation, but after weeks of quiet on the Serpents end it seemed as if it wasn’t going to come. In retrospect, Edward should have known better.

Time passed and a relative peace between the Serpents and the Ghoulies settled in. Weeks turned into months. Months into years. It was just long enough that Edward and Luca began to let their guard down, and that was all the chance that Bruce needed. He knew attacking Edward wouldn’t work - while Bruce was brutal and merciless, his brother was worse, and he knew Bruce’s few weaknesses. Hurting Edward himself wouldn’t work, and even he wouldn’t have touched his newborn niece, though he’d never admit that particular fact to anyone. Instead, Bruce turned his rage towards Luca and Derek Gilbert; Luca was Edward’s best friend, and he’d come to see Derek as a son himself. Hurting Edward by killing his family was the best kind of revenge Bruce could have come up with; he knew it would break his baby brother.

Two years of relative quiet between the gangs on the Southside passed, and then suddenly Luca and Derek went missing. Edward had searched for his family for a few days until he got the word from fellow Ghoulies that they’d found Luca’s body beside the river that runs through Fox Forest. He’d been beaten and clearly tortured to death, but they’d been unable to find Derek; from what they could tell, though, it seemed as if he had suffered the same fate as his father. From what he’d seen of the scene himself, Edward suspected that Bruce had dumped Derek’s body in the river as a means of torturing him even further. There would be no closure without the body, and Bruce knew Edward enough to know how much that would bother him.

Losing both Luca and Derek did exactly what Bruce thought it would have done: it broke Edward. When Bruce threatened to kill Cassie if Edward didn’t leave Riverdale behind him, Edward had no choice but to take his daughter and run. He didn’t stick around long enough to learn that police found Derek wandering through the woods alone days later. Instead, he went back to the Smythes. While they wouldn’t give him as much as they had initially offered, they still gave him a hefty amount of money when he threatened to make his affair with Sebine public knowledge. Taking the hush money that they gave him, Edward changed his last name and left the small town in his rear-view mirror with his daughter in tow. Moving them all the way across the country, Edward set out to put his past in the past and start over.

Cassie spent most of her early life in Port Townsend, Washington, a small maritime town located just north of Seattle, with absolutely no recollection of her early life in Riverdale. Edward wanted to get as far away from Riverdale as possible, and a small town located literally on the other side of the country seemed like the best option to him.

Six months after moving to Port Townsend, Edward met a woman named Athena working as an emergency room resident in the local hospital. He’d been working various protection details for important people around the city and had been stabbed while protecting someone. What started as innocent flirtation between Athena and Edward quickly blossomed into something more. She looked beyond the damaged and rough exterior to the broken man inside, and it was Athena who helped him begin to heal. She knew who he was and what kind of man he had been raised to be, and she loved him anyway. She treated and raised Cassie as her own, and she is the only mother that Cassie has ever known.

Shortly after Cassie’s ninth birthday, Athena took a job at a medical center in the South Side of Chicago, and before she knew it, Cassie’s life was being uprooted and moved back east. Edward took various jobs in an attempt to keep up the semi normal life he’d been living in Port Townsend, but eventually he fell back into the only life he’d ever known, working as an enforcer for a local mob group in the city. It was the only real talent he had, and while Athena didn’t necessarily approve of it she stood by the man’s side regardless as he fell back into the familiar role. As she grew older, Cassie began following in her father’s footsteps, though Edward’s way of life was the last thing either parent wanted for Cassie. With time, though, they came to realize that there was no stopping the young woman. Much like both of her parents, once she set her mind to something there was no way she was going to budge.

Shortly after graduating from high school, Cassie literally ran into the man of her dreams. Anthony had stopped by a local diner for lunch; the same diner that Cassie was working part-time in. She had been in a hurry and not fully paying attention and slammed right into the taller man as he went to take a seat at one of the booths; luckily, his reflexes were amazing, and strong arms caught her before she could stumble backwards. He was only home on leave for a few weeks, but it only took a few short weeks for Cassie to fall head over heels in love with the Marine. Their relationship took off faster than most, but even to those around them it was as if they’d been together for years.

Cassie and Anthony were together for six months before he asked her to marry him. Her parents weren’t exactly thrilled at just how quickly the two had gotten to that point - it was one thing to approve of it, quite another to be okay with your daughter getting engaged after such a short time - but they didn’t object to it. Both Edward and Athena agreed that Anthony and Cassie were good for each other; the fact that he was going to be serving an entire deployment before they actually got married also helped Edward accept their engagement a little easier.

Tragedy struck their small family, though, when a notification party showed up on Cassie’s doorstep one morning to inform her that Anthony had officially been declared as Missing in Action, and Cassie and her family were listed as his only next of kin. Given the fact that he was a member of a Delta Force team, there wasn’t a lot that they could tell her about his disappearance, but they were certain that he had been gone missing during one of their missions. He had been presumed dead, but they hadn’t found a body so they couldn’t officially declare him Killed in Action yet. Cassie was torn apart at this news, but Edward and Athena were there to help her pick up the pieces. Even still, she hasn’t dated anyone since; there’s a part of her that hopes Anthony will show up on her doorstep one day.

Despite helping her father whenever she could, Cassie still had her own life as well. She had her own passions and interests outside of following in her father’s footsteps. Cassie had always been a curious nature, and after spending years of helping people on the South Side (of Chicago) with their own problems she decided to make a career out of it. Cassie enrolled in a local college to study criminal justice, though she dropped out just a few credits shy of graduating when another tragedy struck her family once more.

Throughout his years as an enforcer, Edward had made more than a few enemies. He never worried about it until the day that one of those enemies came after his family. Athena had been waiting outside of a local, family-owned restaurant for Edward and Cassie to meet her there for a family night out - a tradition they had started when she began college - when she was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting; Edward and Cassie had arrived moments later, and Cassie’s world began to come crashing down around her. Athena bled out in Edward’s arms while Cassie watched horrified from the sidelines.

In the months that followed, Cassie’s life was turned upside down. Not only had she lost the only mother she’d ever known, but she uncovered a truth she’d never thought possible. Edward had never hidden the fact that Athena wasn’t Cassie’s biological mother, but he had always told her that the woman who’d given birth to her had died in childbirth. Cassie had always believed him - she’d never had reason to doubt him - until the day she stumbled across letters between Sebine and Edward. She hadn’t thought anything of them at first, many of them were from when they were teenagers and before she was born, but then - as she continued to read - she realized that they continued for nearly a year after she was born. Letters in which Edward spoke about how he still loved her, but he understood her decision to stay with the Smythes, and he would continue to send her photos of Cassie as she grew. Not only had Edward lied about her mother’s death, but he’d kept an entire family from her for years.

In her anger, and after doing months worth of research on her mother and the woman’s family, Cassie left Chicago without a word to her father. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for in Riverdale or from Sebine, but she knew she had to see the woman in person.

10. HEADCANONS

Cassie absolutely loves to dance. She stopped dancing for a while, but now that she’s in Riverdale she’s started going to Jackie’s dance studio more often.

#gdhqintro #{ let me introduce myself | about }#[[ i'll finish this soon but it's mostly done ]]

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majority-leader-mitch-mcconnell · 4 years

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Response to Trump

Transcript of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's response to Impeachment.

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Last night House Democrats finally did what they had decided to do a long time ago they voted to impeach President Trump over the last 12 weeks House Democrats have conducted the most rushed least thorough and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history now they're slapdash process has concluded in the first purely partisan presidential impeachment since the wake of the Civil War the opposition to impeachment was bipartisan only one part of one faction wanted this outcome the houses conduct risks deeply damaging the institutions of American government this particular House of Representatives has let its partisan rage at this particular president create a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future that's what I want to discuss right now the historic degree to which House Democrats have failed to do their duty and what it will mean for the Senate to do ours so let's start at the beginning let's start with the fact that Washington Democrats made up their minds to impeach President Trump just before he was even inaugurated here's a reporter in April of 2016 April of 2016 Donald Trump isn't even the Republican nominee yet but impeachment is already on the lips of pundits newspaper editorials constitutional scholars and even a few members of Congress April 2016 on Inauguration Day 2017 the headline in the Washington Post the campaign to impeach President Trump has begun that was day one in April 2017 three months into the presidency a senior House Democrat said I'm gonna fight every day until he's impeach that was three months into the administration in December 2017 two years ago Congressman Jerry Nadler was openly campaign campaigning to be the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee specifically specifically because he was an expert on impeachment that's the Nadler his campaign to be the top Democrat on judiciary this week wasn't even the first time House Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment it was actually the seventh time they started less than six months after the president was sworn in they tried to impeach President Trump for being impolite to the press for being mean to professional athletes for changing President Obama's policy on transgender people in the military all of these things were high crimes and misdemeanors according to Democrats now this one just a few people scores scores of Democrats voted to move forward with impeachment on three of those prior occasions so let's be clear the houses vote yesterday was not some neutral judgment the Democrats came to with great reluctance it was the predetermined end of a partisan crusade that began before President Trump was even nominated let alone sworn in for the very first time in modern history we've seen a political faction in Congress promised from the moment the moment a president election ended they would find some way to overturn it a few months ago Democrats three-year-long impeachment and search of articles found its way to the subject of Ukraine House Democrats embarked on the most rushed least thorough and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history chairmanships inquiry was poisoned by partisanship from the outset its procedures and parameters were unfair in unprecedented ways Democrats tried to make chairmanship into a de facto special prosecutor notwithstanding the fact that he's a partisan member of Congress who'd already engaged in strange and biased babe he scrapped the precedent to cut the Republican minority out of the process he denied President Trump the same sorts of procedural rights that houses of both parties had provided the past presidents of both parties president Trump's council could not participate in chairmanships hearings present evidence or cross-examine witnesses the House Judiciary Committee's crack at this was even more a historical it was like the speaker called up Chairman Nadler and ordered one impeachment rush delivered please the committee found no facts on its own did nothing to verify the shift report their only witnesses were liberal law professors and congressional staffers no mr. president there's a reason the impeachment inquiry that led to President Nixon's resignation required about 14 months of hearings 14 months in addition to a special prosecutors investigation with President Clinton the independent counsels inquiry had been underway literally four years before the House Judiciary Committee actually dug in mountains of evidence mountains mountains of testimony from firsthand fact witnesses serious legal battles to get what was necessary this time around House Democrats skipped all of that it's been just 12 weeks 12 weeks more than a year of hearings for Nixon multiple years of investigation for Clinton and they've impeached president Trump in 12 weeks 12 weeks so let's talk about what the house actually produced in those 12 weeks House Democrats rushed and rigged inquiry yielded two articles two of impeachment they're fundamentally unlike any articles that any prior house of representatives has ever passed the first article concerns the core events which House Democrats claim or impeachable the timing of aid to Ukraine but it does not even purport to allege any actual crime instead they deploy the vague phrase abuse of power abuse of power to impugn the president's action in a general indeterminate way speaker Pelosi's house just gave in to a temptation that every other house in history has managed to resist they say that again speaker Pelosi's house just gave in to a temptation that every other house in our history has managed to resist they impeach a president whom they do not even allege has committed an actual crime known to our laws they've been peached simply because they disagree with the presidential act and question the motive behind it so let's look at history Andrew Johnson impeachment involved around a clear violation of a criminal statute albey albeit an unconstitutional statute Nixon had obstruction of justice a felony under our laws Clinton had perjury also felony now the Constitution does not say the house can impeach only those presidents who violate a law but history matters history matters and precedent matters and there were important reasons why every previous House of Representatives in American history restrained itself restrained itself from crossing this Rubicon the framers of our Constitution very specifically discussed this issue whether the house should be able to impeach presidents just for quote mal administration just for mal administration in other words because the house simply thought the president had bad judgment always doing a bad job they talked about all this when they wrote the Constitution the written records of our founders debates show they specifically rejected this they realized it would create a total dysfunction to set the bar for impeachment that low that low James Madison himself explained that allowing impeachment on that basis would mean the president serves at the pleasure of the Congress instead of the pleasure of the American people we're making the president a creator a creature a creature of Congress not the head of a separate and equal branch so there were powerful reasons mr. President while Congress after Congress for 230 years 230 years required presidential impeachment to revolve around clear, recognizable crimes even though that was not a strict limitation powerful reasons why for 230 years no house no house opened a Pandora's box of subjective political impeachments that 230 Year traditions died last night now Mr. president House Democrats have tried to say they had to impeach President Trump on this historically thin and subjective basis because the White House challenged their request for more witnesses and that brings us to the second article of impeachment the house titled this one obstruction of Congress what it really does is impeach the president for asserting presidential privilege the concept of executive privilege is another two century-old constitutional tradition president starting with George Washington have invoked it federal courts have repeatedly affirmed it is a legitimate constitutional power House Democrats requested extraordinary amounts of sensitive information from president Trump's White House exactly the kinds of things over which presidents of both parties have asserted privilege in the past predictably and appropriately president Trump did not simply roll over he defended the constitutional authority of his office no surprise there it's not a constitutional crisis for a house to want more information that a president wants to give up that's not a constitutional crisis it's a routine occurrence the separation of powers is messy by design here's what should have happened here's what should have happened either the President and Congress negotiate a settlement or the third branch of government the judiciary addresses the dispute between the other two the Nixon impeachment featured disagreements over presidential privilege so they went to court the Clinton impeachment featured disagreements over presidential privilege so they went to the courts this takes time it's inconvenient that's actually the point due process is not meant to maximize the convenience of the prosecutor it's meant to protect the accused but this time was different remember 14 months of hearings for Richard Nixon years of Investigation for Bill Clinton 12 weeks for Donald Trump Democrats didn't have to rush this but they chose to stick to their political timetable at the expense of pursuing more evidence through proper legal channels nobody made chairmanship do this he chose to the Tuesday before last on live television Adam Schiff explained to the entire country that if House Democrats had let the justice system follow its normal course they might not have gotten to impeach the president in time for the election no goodness in Nixon the courts were allowed to do their work in Clinton the courts were allowed to do their work only these House Democrats decided due process is too much work they'd rather impeach with no proof well mr. president, they tried to cover for their own partisan impatience by pretending that the routine occurrence of a president exerting constitutional privilege is itself itself a second impeachable offense the following is something that Adam Schiff literally said in early October here's what he said any action that forces us to litigate or to have to consider litigation will be considered further evidence of obstruction of justice that's Adam Schiff here's what the Chairman effectively said and what one of his committee members restated just this week if the president asserts his constitutional rights is that much more evidence he's guilty if the president asserts his constitutional rights is that much more evidence he's guilty that kind of bullying is antithetical to American justice so those are House Democrats two articles of impeachment that's all they're rushed and rigged inquiry could generate an act that the House does not even allege is criminal, and a nonsensical claim that exercising a legitimate presidential power is somehow an impeachable offense Mr. president this is by far the thinnest basis for any house-passed presidential impeachment in American history the thinnest and the weakest and nothing else even comes close and candidly I don't think I'm the only person around here who realizes that even before the House voted yesterday Democrats had already started to signal uneasiness uneasiness with its end product before the articles even passed the Senate Democratic leader went on television to demand that this body redo House Democrats homework for them that the Senate should supplement Chairman's shift sloppy work so it is more persuasive than chairmanship himself bothered to make it of course every such demand simply confirms that House Democrats have rushed forward with the case that is much too weak back in June speaker Pelosi promised the House would build an ironclad case never mind that she was basically promising impeachment months months before the Ukraine events but that's a separate matter she promised an ironclad case and in March speaker Pelosi said this impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there is something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan I don't think we should go down that path because it divides the country end quote by the speaker's own standards the standards she said she's failed the country the case is not compelling not overwhelming and as a result not bipartisan the fair was made clear to everyone earlier this week when Senator Schumer began searching for ways the Senate could step out of our proper role and try to fix the House Democrats failures for them and it was made even more clear last night when speaker Pelosi suggested that House Democrats may be too afraid too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate mr. president looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet in front of the entire country and second-guessing whether they even want to go to trial they said impeachment was so urgent that it could not even wait for due process but now they're content to sit on their hands this is really comical Democrats own actions concede that their allegations are unproven the articles aren't just unproven they're also constitutionally incoherent incoherent frankly if either of these articles is blessed by the Senate we could easily see the impeachment of every future president of either party let me say that again if the Senate blesses this historically low bar we will invite the impeachment of every future president the House Democrats allegations as presented are incompatible with our constitutional order they're unlike anything that has ever been seen in 230 years of this Republic House Democrats want to create new rules for this president because they feel uniquely enraged they feel in uniquely enraged but long after the partisan fever of this moment has broken the institutional damage will remain I've described a threat to the presidency this also imperils the Senate itself the House has created an unfair unfinished product that looks nothing nothing like any impeachment inquiry in American history and if the speaker ever gets her House in order that mess will be dumped over here on the Senate's lap if the Senate blesses this slapdash impeachment if we say that from now on this is enough then we invite an endless parade of impeachable trials future houses of either party we'll feel free to toss up a jump ball every time they feel angry free to swamp the Senate with trial after trial no matter how baseless the charges we'd be giving future houses of either party unbelievable new power to paralyze the Senate at their whim more than arguments more incomplete evidence more partisan impeachments in fact mr. president this same House of Representatives has already indicated that they themselves may not be finished impeaching the House Judiciary Committee told a federal court this very week that it will continue its impeachment investigation even after voting on these articles and multiple Democratic members have already called publicly for more if the Senate blesses this if the nation accepts this presidential impeachments may cease being a once-in-a-generation event and become a constant part a constant part of the political background noise this extraordinary tool of last resort may become just another part of the arms race of polarization real statesmen would have recognized no matter their view of this president that trying to remove him on this thin and partisan basis could unsettle the foundations of our republic real statesmen would have recognized no matter how much partisan animosity might be coursing through their veins that cheapening the impeachment process was not the answer historians when regarded this is a great irony of our era that so many who profess such concern for our norms and traditions themselves proved willing to trample our constitutional order to get their way it is long past time for Washington to get a little perspective President Trump is not the first president with a populist streak not the first to make entrenched elites uncomfortable he's certainly not the first president to speak bluntly to mistrust the administrative state or to rankle unelected bureaucrats and heaven knows he's not the first president to assert the constitutional privileges of his office rather than roll over when Congress demands unlimited sensitive information none of these things none of them is unprecedented I'll tell you what would be unprecedented it will be an unprecedented constitutional crisis if the Senate literally hands the House of Representatives a new partisan vote of no-confidence that the founders intentionally withheld destroying the independence of the presidency it will be unprecedented if we agree that any future house that dislikes any future president can rush through an unfair inquiry skip the legal system and paralyze the Senate with the trial house to do that it will under this presser it will be unprecedented if the Senate says second hand and third hand testimony from unelected civil service servants is enough to overturn the people's vote it will be an unprecedented constitutional crisis if the Senate agrees to set the bar this low forever it is clear what this moment requires it requires the Senate to fulfill our founding purpose the framers built the Senate to provide stability to take the long view of our republic to safeguard institutions from the momentary hysteria that sometimes consumes our politics to keep partisan passions from literally boiling over the Senate exists for moments like this that's why this body has the ultimate say in impeachment the framers knew the house would be too vulnerable to transient passions and violent factionalism they needed a body that would consider legal questions about what has been proven and political questions about what the common good of our nation requires Hamilton said explicitly in Federalist 65 that impeachment involves not just legal questions but inherently political judgments about what outcome best serves the nation the house can't do both the courts can't do both this is as grave an assignment as the Constitution gives to any branch of government and the framers knew only the Senate could handle it well the moment the framers feared has arrived a political faction in the Lord chamber have succumb to partisan rage a political faction in the House of Representatives has succumbed to a partisan rage they have fulfilled Hamilton's philosophy that impeachment will quote connect itself with the pre-existing factions in list all their animosities and there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties and by the inte by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt Alexander Hamilton that's what happened in the house last night the vote did not reflect what had been proven it only reflects how they feel about the president the Senate must put this right we must rise to the occasion there's only one outcome that is suited to the paucity of evidence the failed inquiry the slapdash case only one outcome suited to the fact that the accusations themselves are constitutionally incoherent constitutionally incoherent only one outcome will preserve core precedence rather than smash them into bits in a fit of partisan rage because one party still cannot accept the American people's choice in 2016 it could not be clearer which outcome would serve the stabilizing institution preserving fever breaking role for which the United States Senate was created and which outcome would betray it the Senate's Duty is clear the Senate's duty is clear when the time comes we must fulfill it

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thelawtimesjournal-blog · 5 years

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Conciliation and Mediation: An Effective Family Dispute Resolution

Family plays a crucial role in any community or society. A family is an association as well as an institution. Not only economic needs but also, more importantly, the emotional needs of the members are taken care of in the family. Today, divorces and disputes over property inheritance are proliferating like never before. The reasons may vary from economic conditions to professional problems and psychological imbalances. The author of the article made a socio-legal study of the causes of the conflict in the family. It is important for the society to devise means of protecting the family and also preventing and resolving the disputes that could damage and destroy the delicate fabric of the family. The author suggests conciliation and mediation for the resolution of these disputes as these mechanisms offer multifaceted resolution advantages like objectivity, due focus on the issues, neutrality and independence. The author also gives an overview of various statutory frameworks in India supporting ADR mechanisms in family disputes.There is a growing feeling among the legal experts, sociologists and psychiatrists that the use of The IUP Journal of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) methods such as Mediation, Arbitration etc., must be encouraged in the resolution of family disputes. This school advocates the replacement of adversarial court system with a less formal interactive procedure by providing well organized supporting services such as family counselling services, reconciliation services, investigative services, legal aid services and enforcement services. Justice R C Lahoti, the Chief Justice of India, strongly endorsed the view that there are inherent weaknesses in the existing justice delivery systems which call for effective measures for strengthening the institutional processes. He also stressed the importance of the ADR mechanism, because the aim of ADR is to bring about a durable resolution of disputes and not to impose and enforce decisions. According to him, ADR mechanism especially mediation and reconciliation should play a major role in settling disputes, as it would save energy, time and money of the litigants, particularly in family matters.Need for Mediation and Conciliation in family disputes:Litigation does not always lead to a satisfactory result. It is expensive in terms of time and money[1]. Its adversarial nature does not change the mindset of the parties and ends up in bitterness. Alternative dispute resolution systems are not only cost and time effective; they preserve the relationship between the parties by encouraging communication and collaboration.Maintenance of peace and harmony is the paramount consideration in resolving family disputes. Conciliation and mediation are old institutions and indeed they are deeply rooted in the social tradition of many societies, particularly in Asian culture and values. In India, family disputes were resolved by the elders of the family who acted as conciliators or mediators. Even today, elders of the family and in villages, the elder persons of the village have such a role. Panchayats also perform a similar function and are preferred by villagers over courts due to their easy accessibility and prompt dispute resolution[2]. The philosophy behind ADR is amicable dispute resolution and mediation is one such process that provides a space to the parties to sit down and focus on what they really want, rather than think what they need to seek or what the law will let them fight for[3]. Mediation is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “a private, informal dispute resolution process in which a neutral third party, the mediator, helps disputing parties to reach an agreement[4].” Family dispute mediation is a process in which a mediator, an impartial third party, facilitates the resolution of family disputes by promoting the participants’ voluntary agreement. The family mediator assists communication encourages understanding and focuses the participants on their individual and common interests. The family mediator works with the participants to explore options, make decisions, and reach their own agreements[5]. Thus the family mediator assists the participants to gain a better understanding of their own needs and interests and of the needs and interests of others.References to mediation/conciliation in family dispute resolution can be found in the Family Courts Act, 1984, Civil Procedure Code, Hindu Marriage Act and the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 that recognizes and gives a special status to Lok Adalats that have been very effective in mediating family disputes. The Family Courts Act was enacted with a view to promoting conciliation in, and secure speedy settlement of, disputes relating to marriage and family affairs and for matters connected therewith[6]. Conciliation, speedy settlement, non-adversarial approach, multi-disciplinary strategy to deal with family disputes, informal and simple rules of procedures and gender justice are supposed to be the cornerstones of the philosophy of the Family Courts[7]. The whole structure of family courts rests on the twin pillars of counselling and conciliation. The counsellors are required to not only provide counselling but to bring about reconciliation and mutual settlement whenever feasible. Section 9 (1) of the Family Courts Act states that “In every suit or proceeding, endeavour shall be made by Family Court in the first instance, where it is possible to do so consistent with the nature and circumstances of the case, to assist and persuade the parties in arriving at a settlement in respect of the subject-matter of the suit or proceeding and for this purpose a Family Court may, subject to any rules made by the High Court, follow such procedure as it may deem fit.” While Section 9(2) directs the family court to adjourn the proceedings if it appears that there is a reasonable possibility of a settlement between the parties for such period as it thinks fit is necessary for taking the required measures for bringing about the settlement. These provisions, however, do not make mediation/conciliation compulsory.Section 23 (2) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 which contains similar provisions provides that before proceeding to grant any relief under this Act, it shall be the duty of the court in the first instance, in every case where it is possible so to do consistently with the nature and circumstances of the case, to make every endeavour to bring about a reconciliation between the parties provided that nothing contained in this subsection shall apply to any proceeding wherein relief is sought on any of the grounds specified in clause (ii)[8], clause (iii)[9], clause (iv)[10], clause (v)[11], clause (vi)[12] or clause (vii)[13] of sub-section (1) of section 13[14]. It also states that, for the purpose of aiding the court in bringing about such reconciliation, the court may, if the parties so desire or if the court thinks it just and proper so to do, adjourn the proceedings for a reasonable period not exceeding fifteen days and refer the matter to any person named by the parties in this behalf or to any person nominated by the court if the parties fail to name any person, with directions to report to the court as to whether reconciliation can be and has been, affected and the court shall in disposing of the proceeding have due regard to the report. Here again, there is no compulsion to go for mediation before taking recourse to litigation[15].Similarly Section 89 of the Civil Procedure Code (Amendment) Act, 1999[16], directs the courts to identify cases where an amicable settlement is possible, formulate the terms of such a settlement and invite the observations thereon of the parties to the......... read more

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bryanfaganlaw · 6 years

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Managing a Family Law Case in Texas, Part Two

If you have need a best suitable service your Family Law experience, Managing a Family Law Case in Texas, Part Two the great process!

WHO CAN ATTEND YOUR COURT APPEARANCE WITH YOU?

Family Law Attorney Houston: Your hearing is not a closed process where only the parties, their attorneys, and the judge can attend. Any other party with a hearing scheduled on your date will be in the courtroom at the beginning of the day and can be in the courtroom while your hearing is going on. This means that you can bring any adult that you would like to attend the hearing with you and to at least sit in the gallery of people.

A distinction to make is that people that will act as witnesses in your case will typically not be allowed to remain in the courtroom during your hearing and will be asked to sit outside.

This is due to a belief that their testimony could be affected by the testimony of others. On the other hand, if the adult joining you in the hearing is not a witness he or she will be allowed to remain in court throughout the day. Before bringing a person to court make sure that you discuss it first with your attorney.

Children cannot be in the courtroom at any time. The exception to this is if the judge has ordered your child to be present for some purpose- possibly an evaluation of him or her. I have had clients who have not been able to arrange child care for the morning of their hearing. Those folks will bring along a family member to watch the kids outside of court while the proceedings continue on.

A WORD (OR TWO) ON MEDIATION

Houston Divorce Attorney: Let’s take a break from discussing in-court matters and introduce the subject of mediation. You may be under the impression based on our first couple blog posts on this subject that your case will certainly be headed to court to solve any problems that you are presenting to our justice system. That impression would be incorrect and we discuss the circumstances as to why.

Yes, your case can be ultimately determined by a judge in a courtroom. The alternative method of resolving disputes is through a process known as Mediation. Mediation is a method to avoid the costs, time commitment and uncertainties surrounding a visit to court in order to resolve and settle your family law case.

Mediation is a common method to formally settle your case for either temporary orders or final orders. A mediator is a neutral, independent third party (typically a practicing family lawattorney) who is selected by your attorney and opposing counsel to help bring about an agreement between you and the opposing party. All parties and their attorneys will meet at the mediator’s office in separate rooms to hold a mediation session that typically lasts 3-4 hours.

The mediator acts like a ping pong ball, bouncing between you and your opposing party to convey settlement offers, discuss issues and to generally play devil’s advocate on any arguments or theories that you and your attorney have.

The benefit of having an experienced family law attorney to mediate your case is that he or she has likely tried cases in front of your judge and can provide you with feedback on any issues that you are interested in presenting in either a hearing or trial. If you learn ahead of time that an argument you want to make will likely not go over well, then you may focus more intently on settling your case rather than proceeding to court.

Mediators do charge for their services, however, the cost is usually under $500 per party. This is opposed to a one day or multi-day trial or hearing that can cost much, much more in attorney’s fees but also emotional and physical stress.

CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES CASES

Houston Family Lawyer: Unfortunately, you may be in a situation where Child Protective Services (CPS) has become involved with you and your family. The fear of having your child removed from your home for reasons that are largely beyond your control is enough to keep you awake at night.

The second thought of having to deal with these folks in a legal matter is equally fear inducing. Let’s break down what a CPS case is and what its outcomes could mean for you and your family.

CPS is an organization that is headed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. This is a State Agency whose objective is to protect the children of our State. CPS learns of children possibly being in harm’s way by receiving phone calls where allegations of abuse or neglect are made. CPS will investigate the call and make an inquiry about the allegations made.

Typically a CPS case investigator or caseworker will come to your home to interview you, your spouse and any other person they deem as being relevant. The objective would be to find out as much as he or she can about the call that was made about your child and to determine whether or not the actual facts and circumstances exist to substantiate the call. If CPS conducts an investigation and determines that your child’s safety and well being are at risk the decision can be made to remove your child from your home.

CPS will seek a court order to remove your child and will need to get one prior to doing so. Within two weeks of your child’s removal from your custody, a hearing will have to be held in court in order to allow CPS to continue to have temporary conservatorship rights over your child. At this hearing, you and your spouse will have an opportunity to discuss the case with your judge. Your side of the story will be important for the judge in order to make sure that the view he or she is receiving from CPS is not slanted or incorrect.

This hearing is your only opportunity to discuss the issues of your case with the judge. You are not given an opportunity to have time alone with the judge off the record so the courtroom is where all communication will occur. A judge can order you and your spouse to undergo treatment or counseling and can require you to complete certain steps in order to get conservatorship of your child back.

You receive any paperwork filed by CPS against you. Likely a Petition would have been filed naming you as the Respondent … Continue Reading

#divorce #Divorce Attorney #divorce lawyer #Divorce Law Firms #Divorce Lawyers Houston #family #Family Law #fagan #family law attorney houston #bryan fagan #attorney #Divorce Attorney Houston #Divorce Attorney in Houston #Houston #divorce houston #Texas #law #lawyer

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loyallogic · 4 years

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Reasons for Low Success Rate of Arbitration in India

This article is written by Kartikeya Awasthi, pursuing a Certificate Course in Arbitration: Strategy, Procedure and Drafting from Lawsikho.com.

Introduction

Did you know that in many countries the Courts only decide on about 5% of all disputes? That’s quite a surprising statistic, and while it is undoubtedly the case that some disputes are dismissed because they are not serious enough to warrant Court time, the majority of the disputes are legitimate. Given the interests and sums which are often at stake in these disputes, why should the parties in dispute choose not to take the traditional legal route? Perhaps more importantly, where do they go instead and what do they do as an alternative?

The answer to this is that they choose to use Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). Essentially, ADR offers a way to settle disputes without needing to involve the Courts and generally involves bringing in a neutral and impartial third party. In more recent times, the use of ADR has been a notable expansion. In 1990, the US congress enacted the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act,1990 which ‘gave federal agencies additional authority to use ADR in most administrative disputes’ and the Negotiated Rulemaking Act which ‘directed regulatory agencies to use negotiation to develop administrative rules.’

Given its versatility in resolving a wide range of disputes, some have taken to calling ADR as ‘Appropriate Dispute Resolution’, suggesting that ‘in ADR the parties choose to process what they feel is the most appropriate for their needs and interest’. As mentioned earlier, ADR generally involves bringing in a neutral and impartial third party. Overall, there are two principal ways in which the third party participates: the decisional approach and the facilitative approach.

(1) Decisional approach – the third party can impose a solution upon the parties in the dispute e.g.: Arbitration.

(2) Facilitative approach – the third party as a facilitator only, helping the parties to find their own solution e.g.: the mediation.

Various forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution

There are in total 5 different types of ADR followed in India i.e. Ombudsman, Negotiation, Conciliation, Arbitration, Mediation.

Ombudsman Schemes usually take a proactive inquisitorial approach, appreciating that consumers often cannot present their own complaints fully. Staff carrying out investigations typically knows the most common complaints about respondents and can discern patterns of behaviour that an arbitrator would never be able to identify. There is a basic difference in the way in which the private sector and public sector schemes work. The private Ombudsmen resolve complaints brought by consumers or small businesses up to certain maximum Award limits often with the power to make recommendations as to further compensation.

Their decisions bind the respondents only if the complainant accepts and not the other way round. Public sector schemes lack the power to bind the parties. They can only make recommendations which the respondents can ignore although not usually without giving a reason for doing so. ‘Many “non-binding recommendations have led to system changes, official apologies and compensation payments to aggrieved individuals.

Negotiation consists of a sequence of proposals (P) and counter-proposals (CP) that continue until agreement is reached or negotiations breakdown. This mechanism involves an interaction between disputing parties whereby, without compulsion by a third-party adjudicator, they endeavour to come to an independent, joint decision concerning the terms of agreement on the issues between them. In recent years, a considerable body of scientific literature has been developed in an attempt to model the negotiation process. One of the most remarkable methods of negotiation is the so-called principled negotiation or negotiation of merits, which was developed at the Harvard Negotiation Project.

It suggested that, for a negotiation to be successful, the parties must:

(1) Separate the people from the problem.

(2) Focus on interests, not positions.

(3) Generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do.

(4) Insist that the result be based on some objective standard.

Negotiation will ideally produce an outcome which will be better than the best available alternative that could be reached without negotiating. The parties’ Interests should be well-satisfied and joint gains and mutually advantageous trade-offs should be diligently sought, explored and put to use.

Conciliation: The third party suggests a solution, which is non binding on the parties. More formal than mediation, conciliation affords flexibility to the parties as they are entitled to craft their own rules, select the conciliator of their choice, and decide when to abandon the process altogether the result above is not surprising. Conciliation is a non-adversarial mechanism, and it allows the parties to preserve the relationship; a characteristic that has allowed it to be used effectively in international, labour and family disputes. Conciliation is the ADR mechanism where a neutral party meets with the parties both individually and together in an attempt to resolve the dispute. The neutral’s role is to help the parties negotiate with each other and culminates in a settlement proposal which is non-binding on them.

Mediation can be defined as the facilitation, by a third party, of a negotiated agreement in which the mediator does not decide the dispute, but facilitates communication and problem-solving by the parties. A mediator has no decision-making power. Mediation may be performed by international organisations, by states or by individuals, and it has been used with great success to resolve a wide variety of disputes. It has proven popular for a variety of reasons, including the ‘speed of the procedure, the expertise of the mediators, the confidentiality of the procedure and avoidance of procedural obstacles of all sorts.’ Although it can take place at any time in a dispute, it is more likely to be successful later on, after the parties in dispute have experienced the costs of conflict.

Commercial mediation begins with the signing of a confidentiality agreement. This is followed by an outline of the format, given by the mediator, and a confirmation that all of the parties have the authority to settle. The mediator then invites both sides to make an opening statement, which typically includes the facts as they see them and discussion of how they have allegedly been damaged by the opposing side. Once each party has had the opportunity to present its case, the mediator will summarise the information before hosting joint or private meetings with the parties. Each party will then discuss its position with the mediator-describing its view of the core issues and what it ultimately seeks as an outcome.

Arbitration is a process by which parties obtain a resolution to a dispute by getting a decision from a neutral, impartial and independent third party. That decision is final and the parties must abide by it. Unlike mediation, the parties to Arbitration only consent to the process itself, the final decision is imposed upon them rather than being a resolution which they have agreed between themselves. Most commonly, Arbitration is used between two parties that have a pre-existing commercial relationship. The typical situation is where there was a contract for the supply of goods or services, and one party claims that the other failed to meet their obligations under the contract. Arbitration is increasingly being used in non-commercial situations such as some family matters and personal injury matters. In order to go into Arbitration, it is not sufficient to simply have a dispute. Because Arbitration is extra-judicial, both parties must agree to have their own dispute resolved by Arbitration.

In the United Kingdom and India, this means that there must be an Arbitration agreement that is evidenced in writing. If there is an Arbitration clause in the contract, even if one party can invalidate the contract, the Arbitration agreement will be separate and still binding. In cases where two parties had an Informal trading relationship but no contract. They may decide that Arbitration is a more efficient way to resolve their dispute. If they wish to do this, they must still create a binding written Arbitration agreement. This type of agreement is often referred to as a ‘submission agreement’.

As each of these ADR are efficient enough to bring out a resolution. Interestingly these individual types of ADR can be incorporated together for cases which involve more than one issue or for complex commercial relationships.

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Arbitration in India

Process

All the Arbitral proceedings commence by a simple notice initiated by one of the parties to the contract and unless agreed otherwise, the date of commencement of Arbitral proceeding for a particular dispute is said to be the date on which the notice was received by the other party to the contract. Now the only essential requirement for an Arbitral proceeding is the mere presence of a valid Arbitration clause/agreement in the contract irrespective of the parent contract being null or void or void ab-initio or frustrated or terminated. Hence, National Agricultural Coop. Mktg. Federation India Ltd v. Gains Trading Ltd confirmed that Arbitration agreement/clause is independent to the parent contract. ‘Autonomie de la clause compromissoire’.

After the notice being acknowledged by the other party, the second step is the appointment of Arbitrator/s. Arbitrator/s are appointed mutually by the parties to the contract but in deadlock situations, Section 11 of the Arbitration& Conciliation Act,1996 comes to the rescue and gives a detailed procedure for the appointment of Arbitrator/s. No sooner did the appointment of Arbitrator/s be confirmed, “the trial phase” begins i.e. submission of written documents, evidence, arguments and oral hearings and the Arbitral Award or interim relief is binding on the parties.

The Arbitral Award is considered to be a decree from a Court but still the Tribunal does not have the same powers as that of traditional Courts. Therefore, the Tribunal can seek Court assistance. No Court will take Suo moto cognizance over any Arbitral proceeding and only when the Tribunal ask for assistances, the Court can make sure that they are just assisting the Tribunal rather than taking up the matter into their own hand for example – referring to Arbitration, interim relief, generation of documents, execution of an Award etc.

Problems

Lack of awareness

Although India is moving towards modernisation, it is yet a developing country. Which means, most people are ignorant towards Arbitration and still trust Courts more than alternative dispute resolution. The people of India find it very difficult to trust someone other than a judge due to which the Courts are overburdened with cases which are also Arbitral in nature and ADR can provide instant justice.

Arbitrators

Majority of problems associated with Arbitrator/s were addressed and resolved in the 2015 amendment act but still, one of the problems is yet to be addressed. Looking at the DNA strand of Arbitration, one of the traits is to provide a speedy resolution. The documents which are being submitted are less aggressively formal but respectful. Since the majority of Arbitrator/s are either retired judges from Supreme Court of India or High Court of a particular state the Arbitration sometimes tends to follow conventional Court layout for submission of documents, pattern to be followed during proceedings etc which may hinder the efficiency of the Arbitration.

Overlapping effect of different laws

Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise Development Act, 2006 was introduced to protect the supplier from hardship like non-payment of goods or services. The act imposes the obligation on large and government undertakings to pay for the goods within 45 days of the purchase otherwise a compound interest or three times bank rate as specified by the RBI will be levied on the defaulter. Even after that, payment is not made the enterprise can approach Facilitation Council. Section 18 of the MSMED Act gives us a detailed mechanism to be followed. Firstly, there must be due between the supplier and the buyer and one of the parties must refer to the dispute of non-payment due to the Facilitation Council. Secondly, the Council has two levels at which they can resolve the dispute:

(1) Conciliation – if the Conciliation is successful, the settlement agreement will be binding to the parties.

(2) Arbitration – if the Conciliation is not successful, then the matter is referred to Arbitration.

The mandate is to resolve the dispute within 90 days from which the Facilitation Council was notified. Usually, the seat, venue, language are mutually pre-decided by the parties in an Arbitration clause/agreement. Since the council makes them bound to follow Arbitration and the MSMED act is meant to protect the supplier, therefore, the council can act only on those references where the supplier is from its jurisdiction whereas buyer need not be.

Prima facie, any statutory provision will have supremacy over an agreement or a contract but still plethora of High Court judgments related to the Arbitration Agreement and the Council suggests that this question is yet to be answered by the Apex Court. Bombay High Court in case of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd v. Maharashtra Micro and Small Enterprise 2015 SCC OnLine Bom 4145 was of the view that pre-existing Arbitral clause has supremacy over the Statutory provision as the result of the Statutory provision is Arbitration, therefore, allowing the parties to adhere to the contract will not negate the Statutory provision. In case of GE T&D India Ltd v. Reliable Engineering, (2017) 238 DLT 79 the Delhi High Court was of a contrary view than that of Bombay High Court and held that the contractual clause cannot override the Statutory provision. Unless these ambiguities are resolved, the Arbitration cannot work efficiently where one of the parties is micro, small or medium enterprise.

What if one of the parties to the Arbitral Tribunal is insolvent? At the rescue, Section 41 of Arbitration & Conciliation Act, 1996 talks about the course to be taken when one of the parties becomes insolvent. This section goes hand in hand with the provision of Insolvency And Bankruptcy Code (IBC). Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) comes into force when the company turns insolvent. There are certain situations to be considered while one party is insolvent. The Arbitration agreement/clause will lose its binding effect on the receiver once the company is declared insolvent. The irony is that even there the Apex Court in its judgement upheld the principle of ‘Autonomie de la clause Compromissoire’ and Arbitration clause is still void in this situation, yet another reason for the Supreme Court to give correct sanctity to this type of Clause/agreement.

Irrespective of whether the Arbitration agreement is carried out before or after the commencement of the Insolvency process, but before passing Insolvency order; then the resolution to be followed is solely dependent on the receiver handling the Insolvency. If the Arbitration agreement has the jurisdiction to govern the dispute between the parties (the company will be replaced by the receiver handling insolvency) and the receiver agrees to abide by the Arbitration terms of the contract then no permission of the NCLT is required. If the receiver denies abiding by the terms of the contract then the party involved in Arbitration can apply to the NCLT for convincing the receiver to adopt arbitration as a resolution to settle a dispute.

The decision shall be solely in hands of the NCLT, having regards to the circumstances. If the NCLT passes an Order to ignore the Arbitration clause/agreement already in place because of the circumstances of the Insolvent Company, then the other party is left only with one remedy i.e. to file a civil suit to seek relief against the receiver. Regarding the power vested in the hands of the receiver to push the other party which is involved in Arbitration against the wall, the receiver is not bound to consider the status of another party. The question here to be answered is not the powers of the receiver but the worth of an Arbitration clause/agreement.

Lack of legislation

The only parent act which is governing Arbitration in India is The Arbitration and Conciliation Act,1996. The quantum of an arbitral award is the same as that of a decree from a Court but due to the lack of legislative infrastructure, most of the people are still not willing to take risks or a leap of faith regarding matters of large quantum that they may face in business. Rather than just having guidelines from various forums like Indian Arbitration Forum, Indian Council of Arbitration etc. There must be a law to enforce these guidelines.

The most effective amendment of the parent act was witnessed in the year 2015 where many thresholds related to the time were introduced to Arbitral proceedings. The applicability of the Act was solely dependent on one date i.e. 23rd October 2015. The literature of Section 26 of the 2015 Act which deals with the applicability of this act was the most difficult section to interpret because both Arbitral and Court proceedings are different from each other yet connected. The question was whether this section applies to Court proceedings as well.

In case of BCCI V. Kochi cricket, the Apex Court was of the view that it is an undisputed principle i.e. Arbitral and Court proceedings are different from each other. Every Arbitral dispute dragged into Court proceedings are in relation to the Arbitral proceedings. Since the literature of Section 26 of the act is clear that the act shall apply “…….in relation to Arbitral proceedings commenced on and after the date of commencement of this act”. Therefore, the act applies to Court proceedings in relation to Arbitral proceedings if it passes the criteria for the applicability of that act which is 23rd October 2015.

The legislative wing was of a different view that court proceedings are related to arbitral proceedings (primary proceeding) since primary proceedings are barred from taking advantage of the new act, likewise must be followed by Courts (secondary proceedings). If Section 26 is applied to the Court proceedings, it has the potential to apply 2015 act retrospectively over Arbitral proceedings. (for instance: one of the parties involved in Arbitration filed a suit in the High Court having jurisdiction over that dispute for the appointment of the Arbitrator/s. The Court facilitates the request and appoints Arbitrator/s. Now, without novating the agreement mutually by the parties, it is impliedly expressed that the arbitral Award must be given within 12 months (this time limit is a part of 2015 Act).

To overcome this confusion Section 87 was introduced in the 2019 Amendment Act which reversed the judgement of BCCI v. Kochi cricket (2018) 6 SCC 287 but later the Supreme Court struck down Section 87 of 2019 Amendment Act. Because of this havoc, people fear to take up Arbitration to resolve the disputes. There are too many guidelines and rules that one can follow which sometimes may complicate simple Arbitration proceedings.

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Court interference in Arbitral proceedings

In White Industries v. The Republic of India, two issues arise: firstly, the intervention of judiciary, secondly delay in arbitration. So it was well-argued and agreed that the intervention of the judiciary should be minimised to an extent.

To Overcome the Aforesaid Problems

Awareness

Awareness related to Arbitration can be achieved only if we split the awareness program at 3 levels:

SEMINARS: To encourage the people to opt for Arbitration as an “Appropriate dispute resolution” over traditional Courts is by organizing seminars related to Arbitration and it’s efficiency to resolve a dispute. These seminars can be attended by the Students, Businessmen, Advocate and any other person, so interested. The main motive for the seminar must be lowering the burden of Courts by delivering “just” or an overview of mechanism followed in Arbitration. e.g. SAMA.

LAW SCHOOLS: The law schools in India must have a wing or a committee devoted to ADR which will be completely engaged in organizing competitions related to Alternative Dispute Resolution; same like moot courts, publishing any new guidelines or rules or convention that India was a part of, conducting seminars and briefing all the law students in their respective institutes about ADR and its mechanism. The competitions organized by the committee will inculcate a culture amongst all the law aspirants to opt for Arbitration to resolve any commercial dispute over Courts. The students will get first-hand experience on the procedural part of any ADR mechanism including Arbitration. In this way the ambiguity related to procedure will be mitigated eventually.

LAW FIRMS: They can organize workshop cum competitions where the competitors will get a training session over the procedural rules and roles available for every competitor which can range from being an attorney for some client in Arbitration or meditator or Expert determination or private Judging or Summary Trails etc. In this manner the law aspirants as well as the firm can build their own network amongst the future Arbitration lawyers or ADR lawyers. In this matter the competitors will understand other mechanisms of ADR followed outside of India.

Proper Legislative Infrastructure

In order to mitigate the avoidance of taking up Arbitration as an alternative, the legislature must be powerful enough to impose mandatory obligation over the parties on certain types of issues. United Nation Commission On International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) was the pioneer for most of the countries to adopt Arbitration as an alternative to resolve a dispute and many of them made it as a point of reference to make laws over ADR for example in 1990, the US congress enacted the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act, 1990 which ‘gave federal agencies additional authority to use ADR in most administrative disputes’ and the Negotiated Rulemaking Act which ‘directed regulatory agencies to use negotiation to develop administrative rules.’

Likewise, in the United Kingdom Prior to Parliament’s passage of The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996, ‘a number of standard form construction contracts already incorporated a form of adjudication procedure for the temporary resolution of disputes.’ After Sir Michael Latham’s review of the construction industry in 1994, his report Constructing the Team ‘strongly advocated adjudication as a means of dispute resolution. Today, the Act ‘applies not only to contracts for the execution of construction works, but also to contracts for the repair, refurbishment and demolition of buildings. Most companies and individuals operating in the construction industry will be subject to its terms’. This kind of ADR is called Construction Adjudication.

It is not correct to say that India does not have any mandatory provision for ADR. Mediation is a mandate to be followed by the companies to resolve a dispute amongst them under Companies Act. Formation of Facilitation Council for MSME which can be an hindrance for a pre-existing Arbitral clause/agreement but still they resolve the dispute using only ADR as a mechanism. Therefore, the jurisdiction of overriding effect must be looked upon. There must be a pecuniary provision that works as a threshold for all the commercial disputes. For instance, “In absence of Arbitration clause/agreement in the contract and any commercial dispute between the contracting parties occurs, involving pecuniary amount less than Rs.10,00,000 must follow Arbitration to resolve the dispute”. In this way a lot of burden from the courts will be taken away on the shoulders of ADR.

The doctrine of ‘Functus Officio’ must be implemented with more advance framework because immediate ceasing of any Arbitral Tribunal once the Award pronounced or after expiring of the timeline given in Section 33 of Arbitration & Conciliation Act, 1996and later some essential evidence/s is found by the party which has a potential to add an Award to the existing Award cannot appeal for an additional Award in the Tribunal after the Award is pronounced or in the Court because Courts cannot interfere into the proceedings or claims sought by the parties in the Tribunal. This leaves the party with only one remedy i.e. to appeal in the High Court to set aside the Award (which is not a solution) or to invoke Arbitration Clause/agreement all over again and start afresh proceeding which is defeating the purpose of Arbitration i.e. speedy resolution. Therefore, the Tribunal must be allowed to review or revise their own Award by different Arbitrator/s only in this situation so that ends of justice are served.

Conclusion

India is estimated to have 3.53 crore pending cases in total, where 58,669 cases are pending in supreme court, 43,63,260 pending cases across all high courts and a whopping 3.11 crore pending cases only across all District and Subordinate courts in India. Despite these statistics, more and more people are tilted towards the judiciary to resolve their disputes. Alternate dispute resolution methods are very helpful and very crucial for any business firm. It helps them to resolve any disputes internally and with a greater pace than any judicial system can ever do. India ranked 131 out of 189 countries in the 2016 World Bank ranking for ease of doing business. According to 2019 rankings, India has gained 63th rank out of 190 countries. On the other hand, India has a very lower ranking in Enforcement of contracts, that is, 163, while it may have improved in comparison to before. Nonetheless efforts are being made by the legislative and judicial wing to enhance Arbitration in India.

Students of Lawsikho courses regularly produce writing assignments and work on practical exercises as a part of their coursework and develop themselves in real-life practical skill.

LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:

https://t.me/joinchat/J_0YrBa4IBSHdpuTfQO_sA

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mortgagebrokerplanotx · 5 years

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Florida housing market settles into “new normal”

Contents

Max national housing

Servicer ally bank/gmac bank occ

Independent everbank reviews

Insured mortgage market

Full-fledged real estate boom characterized.

Home prices rise for first time in 18 months: RE/MAX (Denver, CO) — For the first time in 18 months, home prices in February rose higher, according to the monthly RE/max national housing Report. With a median price of $171,881, prices in the 53 cities surveyed by the RE/MAX National Housing Report rose by 1.1 percent over February 2011.Monday Morning Cup of Coffee: Fannie, Freddie bonds in high demand? It’s a new newsletter from The Washington Post that will land in your inbox before you reach for that first cup of coffee. It will bring you Washington. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg) – Workers in high.Independent reviews in mortgage servicer consent orders to stay sealed Radian 4Q earnings hit $36.4 million The article Radian Group Earnings: An Early Look originally appeared on Fool.com. Fool contributor Dan Caplinger has no position in any stocks mentioned. You can follow him on Twitter @DanCaplinger .Mortgage servicer ally bank/gmac bank occ and Federal Under consent orders issued reserve Consent Orders by OCC and the Federal Aurora Bank, FSB Reserve, 14 mortgage Bank of America, N.A. servicers are required to Citibank, N.A. retain third-party consultants to conduct independent everbank reviews of foreclosure HSBC Bank, USA, N.A. actions to identify borrowers JPMorgan Chase, N.A..MBA Secondary: Bringing private capital back into the market Banking is comprised of Consumer Banking, Commercial Banking, Global Corporate and Investment Banking and Asset Management. An investment bank offer financial services for clients, such as the trading of derivatives, fixed income, foreign exchange, commodity, and Equities or advisory services for mergers and acquisitions.

Canada’s national housing agency said Wednesday that the 47 per cent decline in the country’s insured mortgage market year-over-year in the third quarter is the ‘new normal level.’

So the housing market is "starkly different than a decade ago," said Alex Villacorta, VP of research and analytics at Clear Capital. "As such, it’s imperative for all market participants to understand the nuances of the New Normal Real Estate Market."

Florida law firms scrutinized in robo-signing scandal Florida law firms scrutinized in robo-signing scandal. This means extending regulatory requirements to transmission and gathering pipelines of eight inches and greater in rural class 1 areas, which could increase time frames and cost to complete projects. It is unclear what action may be taken on this proposal in the new administration.

HousingWire Content on ‘Sunshine State. Florida housing market settles into "new normal". A significant portion of the Bank of America settlement will go toward consumer relief in.

Tenet Healthcare Corp., owner of four Miami-Dade hospitals, paid $5 million in December to settle a South Florida whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that the company paid kickbacks to doctors by allowing.

Florida housing market settles into "new normal". [.] continues to steadily increase, making its ways back to normal trends as it reports rising median prices and increased inventory, the latest Florida Association of Realtors July report said.

It’s amazing how resilient a human being can be. Friday will be two months since I had my stroke, and now I’m settling in to what I call The New Normal. The New Normal means it’s going to take me twice as long and sometimes three times, to do anything. Cooking dinner?

Florida housing market settles into "new normal" After a slow and painful recession period, economic prosperity pushed the market out of recovery mode and into a full-fledged real estate boom characterized. more neutral market even looks like.. Mortgage applications for both purchase and refinance were up last week, just days after the U.S. Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest.

FACEBOOK TWITTER. and customers made their displeasure known. Plus, the company’s CEO stepped down amid a Department of Justice investigation around his business.Florida housing market settles into "new normal" As South Florida’s retail real estate. might settle for less than the rate that they hoped to achieve," Stimming said.

UK Housing Market Settles. May 23, 2017. It would seem that the market has found a ‘new normal’ and has made a natural adjustment following the government’s intervention in terms of taxation on landlords and buy-to-let lending legislation from the PRA.

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lsesu · 5 years

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Unhappy with something at LSE? Let’s do something about it!

Have you ever felt you have been treated unfairly at LSE? If so, then one option might be to submit a complaint. However, submitting a complaint isn’t the only way to make your voice heard.

Running for a student rep position is one of the best ways to have your say on how your Students' Union is run and to play your part in changing LSE for the better. Have you ever considered nominating yourself for a position?

Read on for more information about elections and the complaints process.

Complaints

Before we dive into the full process, it’s worth mentioning that you can access mediation at any point. During mediation, a neutral third party will attempt to help resolve conflict through the use of effective communication. It can often be a great way to resolve issues particularly if you want to avoid any formal processes.

Complaints should first be raised informally with the department in question within twenty working days of the incident taking place. You can find out who you should raise your complaint with by looking at the Student Complaints Procedure. It’s really important that you follow this first step as LSE will expect you to raise things informally before attempting to raise a formal complaint. However they do recognise this isn’t always possible.

The next step is to raise a complaint formally. To do this you must submit a Complaints Form (available as part of the Student Complaints Procedure) to the School Secretary. This must be done either within twenty working days of the outcome of the informal complaint or mediation, or in situations where the informal process was not engaged with, within twenty working days of the incident itself. The Secretary will write to you within five working days to let you know whether they believe it is eligible and if so, how they intend on dealing with it. If the Secretary believes it is not eligible for investigation, they will outline how you can appeal that decision. Many students like to bring a Student Adviser from the LSESU Advice Team to any investigatory meetings.

Once the investigation is complete you will receive the Secretary’s Decision which will outline the reasons behind their decision, any actions they have decided to take and who you should contact should you want to appeal. Whatever stage you are at, the LSESU Advice Team will be there to guide you if you reach out to us.

Elections

Submitting a complaint isn’t the only way to express your dissatisfaction about things going on at LSE. If you’ve ever felt that things need to change, nominating yourself to run for a student rep position is a great way to get people listening. LSESU is a student-led organisation which means students just like you decide on our priorities each year. As a student rep you get to shape our goals, create change at LSE and you’ll gain some incredibly valuable professional experience!

Nominations for the LSESU Elections 2019 opened on Wednesday 27th February at 10am. We have 26 posts up for election for a wide variety of roles so whatever your passion you are bound to find a position to suit you. You can find a list of all positions up for election on our website here.

Although it can be daunting to put yourself forward for an election, the Union needs passionate people just like you to help us make every student’s time at LSE the best possible experience. So what are you waiting for? Head over to the LSESU Elections website to find out more!

Blog written by Sally Hind.

Sally is a Student Adviser in the LSE Students’ Union (LSESU) and a member of the Advice Team.

The LSESU Advice Team is based on the 3rdfloor of the Saw Swee Hock Building and we provide free, independent and confidential advice to all LSE students on academic and housing matters. We also administer a hardship and childcare fund.

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newstfionline · 7 years

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The Syrian Side of the Story You Never Hear

By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, May 2, 2017

Like a badly written series of romance novels, the plot template remains fixed while just the names of the characters and places rotate through the template. The story of Syria that Americans and Canadians ingest from the mainstream media is the same simplistic narrative of good and evil told by Washington about each new enemy. Every action committed by the Syrian government is evil and every reaction by Washington is good. Guilt can be assumed and assigned to Syria without investigation because the antagonist in the story is always guilty and can always be blamed. America is always the innocent observer who is shocked by Syrian brutality and feels compelled to respond to protect the innocent victims and defend the world.

But the story of Syria in not so simple, and history shows that the assignation of guilt should be much more judiciously distributed.

Democracy Versus Dictatorship: It Might Have Been a Democracy. Accounts of Syria’s history always include the 1970 coup because it fits the desired narrative. Air force general Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, led a military coup that overthrew the civilian Ba’ath party dictator, Salah Jadid.

But, though that was to be the last coup in Syria’s history up to now, it was by no means the first. The first coup in modern Syrian history took place eleven years earlier. But the narrative was very different.

Syrians under French colonial rule had long longed for democracy. The Sykes-Picot Agreement had given Syria to France in 1916. But, prior to implementation of Sykes-Picot, Syrians had had a brief taste of democracy. The taste was over, though, by 1920 when Syria was officially given to France in the Treaty of Sevres.

President De Gaulle resisted Syrian demands for independence and democracy, but, by 1943, he yielded to the pressure of the Syrians and the British and permitted Syrian elections. Syrians overwhelmingly elected Shukri al-Quwatli and the National Bloc with their message of independence. Three years later, after an anti-demonstration massacre, the French were out of Syria.

With France out and a democratically elected leader in, the U.S. could have nurtured democracy in Syria. Instead, they took it out. American agents Stephen Meade and Miles Copeland assisted the Syrian military in a coup that would take out al-Quwatli and install the pro-American Colonel Adib Shishakli. But for that US coup, Syria may have grown into a democracy instead of the dictatorship it is today.

That coup led to a confusing series of coups in which the US frequently changed sides. In 1956, as Syria moved closer to Egyptian President Nasser and his vision of a United Arab Republic that would be more neutral in the cold war than America could bear, Eisenhower initiated Project Wakeful, an unsuccessful covert action for another regime change in Syria. It was followed a year later by Operation Wappen in 1957. America feared that Syria’s government was leaning to the left. So, in order to “assure a pro-Western orientation on the part of future Syrian government,” in the words of a State Department internal document, Operation Wappen was initiated. It was intended to return the former right wing dictator Adib Shishakly to power. It was a humiliating failure. The CIA’s Rocky Stone took over as the Damascus station chief and initiated the plan for a coup. Syrian officers with whom Stone was working went to Syrian intelligence and turned in the CIA officers whose side they were supposedly on. The CIA agents were caught in the act, revealed and thrown out of Syria.

In 1963, the Ba’ath party would seize power in another coup. Another coup would follow in 1966 to be followed by the 1970 coup that brought the Assad dynasty to power.

Syria strove to be a democracy. But rather than midwifing the birth of democracy in Syria, America aborted it. That US coup took out the democracy and set in motion a series of coups that led, by a convoluted route, to the dictatorship that America wants to take out of Syria today.

Syria’s Dictator: Ally or Enemy? Even after the Assad dictatorship was entrenched in Syria, history could have proceeded differently. Relations between Hafez al-Assad and the west could have been different. As early as 1994, Assad had met with President Clinton for encouraging talks on a Syrian-Israeli peace. Five years later, in December of 1999, Assad let it be known that he was willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

In a remarkable story told by Patrick Tyler in his book, A World of Trouble, Assad sent his foreign minister to Washington to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton. But when Barak’s plane opened its doors, Barak would not come out: he panicked and told assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, “I can’t do it.” Indyk was stunned that Barak was backing out at the last second before the meeting. Barak had changed his mind, and Assad’s attempt at a peace fell incomplete on the tarmac. The Syria dictator had been willing to attempt a thawing of relations with the west: history might have seen him become an ally, but it took the path of enemy instead.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, says that, when Bashar al-Assad followed his father as Syrian dictator, he asked for a resumption of talks with Israel. It was the Americans and Israelis who turned him down.

Two years later, in 2005, Syria and Israel began to actually draft a peace treaty. When the Israeli-Lebanese war ended, Israel felt the Americans out about continuing down that path. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush said no. Once again, it was the west that blocked Assad from coming over as an ally.

Bashar al-Assad kept trying to initiate cooperation with the States. Zunes says that, because he was anxious to receive international legitimacy, Assad was willing to give security guarantees and full diplomatic relations to Israel in exchange for a peace agreement. In his 2009 article entitled “Syria Calling,” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that then Senator John Kerry, who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and who had just met with Assad, said that Assad “wants to engage with the West . . . . Assad is willing to do the things he needs to do in order to change his relationship with the United States.” Hersh says that Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, told him that “Syria is eager to engage with the West”.

Hersh says that Israel and Syria had at other times engaged in talks. He even says that they had reached “agreements in principle on the normalization of diplomatic relations.” He says that Assad continued informal talks with Washington into the Obama administration. Zunes said in a personal correspondence that blame for the failure of those talks lays not with Assad but with ““[t]he new hard-right Israeli government that consolidated power in 2009”. Nothing could happen, Zunes said, “without the return of the Golan, which Netanyahu refuses to do”.

Syria tried to engage with the west and change its relationship with both America and Israel, but the west repeatedly pushed the Assads back into the position of enemy.

Gas Attacks: War Crime or False Flag? The latest call for regime change in Syria comes as a result of the Trump administration’s judgment that Assad crossed a red line by using chemical weapons on his own people. But, once again in the American constructed narrative, it is possible that guilt has be assumed and assigned to Syria without investigation because the antagonist in the story is always guilty and can always be blamed.

There are several reasons to be skeptical over the guilty verdict handed down to Bashar al-Assad.

The first is that for the first time, in a reversal of policy, the Trump administration had just announced that it was no longer insisting upon the removal of Bashar al-Assad. Secretary of State Tillerson said that the “status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” Also for the first time in the war, Assad’s forces are finally winning. Crossing the one clear US red line by using chemical weapons is the one way Assad could force the US to turn the tides of the war and recommit to removing him from power. Former British ambassador to Syria Peter Ford says that “Assad may be cruel, brutal, but he’s not mad. It defies belief that he would bring this all on his head for no military advantage.” If Assad used chemical weapons right after finally being taken off the American hit list, then Ford is wrong, and Assad is mad.

The second reason is that, despite American and Israeli claims to the contrary, the available evidence says that Syria fulfilled its promise to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile in 2013.

The third is that the US case against Assad is that, though the extremist Syrian rebels do have chemical weapons, they couldn’t have used these chemical weapons because they were dropped from the sky and only the regime forces have airplanes. However, Theodore Postol, MIT professor emeritus of science, technology and national security, a leading analyst on military technology and former scientific advisor at the Department of Defense, says that his analysis of the evidence shows that the chemical weapon was not dropped from an airplane but exploded on the ground. Postol concludes that “. . . there is absolutely no evidence that the crater was created by munitions designed to disperse sarin after it is dropped from an aircraft. . . . The data cited by the White House is more consistent with the possibility that the munition was placed on the ground rather than dropped from a plane. . . . Analysis of the debris as shown in the photograph cited by the White House clearly indicates that the munition was almost certainly placed on the ground. . . .”

The fourth is that Postol has shown that the crater identified by the US as being the one where the sarin gas hit the ground after being dropped from a plane couldn’t be the source of the sarin gas that killed the victims of the gas attack. He says his analysis of photographs of the crater site, the cite where the victims are located and wind and weather data reveal that the location of the victims is inconsistent with the crater cite offered up by the White House. His conclusion is that the version of the gas attack described by the White House that points to Syrian regime culpability--sarin gas dropped from a plane, landing on the ground and making a crater, and killing civilians in a nearby hamlet--never occurred. It had to have occurred in a different way. Supporting evidence comes from a photograph taken only four hours after the sarin gas release that shows a person standing by the crater that is alleged to be the dispersal cite without any protective clothing. If the poisoning happened the way the White House says it happened, the site would, at this time, be highly toxic, and the person, Postol says, “would be subjected to the severe and possibly fatal effects of sarin poisoning.” The conclusion again is that “the nerve agent attack described in the WHR [White House report] did not occur as claimed.” It had to have happened in a way different from the way that points accusingly at Assad.

What is that different way? According to former US intelligence analysts (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), in agreement with the Russian and Syrian version of the story, “Our US Army contacts in the area have told us this is not what happened. There was no Syrian “chemical weapons attack.” Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died.” Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, says that most of his sources--including members of the team that monitors global chemical weapons and people in the U.S. intelligence community--are also telling him that that is what probably happened.

Former CIA and Army Intelligence Officer Philip Giraldi reports that “US monitors, who had been warned by the Russians that an attack was coming, believe they saw from satellite images something close to the Russian account of events, with a bomb hitting the targeted warehouse, which then produced a cloud of gas.” Investigative journalist Gareth Porter reports that a former US official knowledgeable about the chemical weapons event said that Russia informed the US that Syria planned to strike the warehouse 24 hours before the strike. The source, according to Porter, “is in direct contact with a US military intelligence officer with access to information about the US-Russian communications.” Russia also informed the US that the Syrian military thought the warehouse housed chemicals. Furthermore, Porter reveals that “an internal administration paper circulating in Washington . . . clearly refers to ‘a regime airstrike on a terrorist ammunition dump in the eastern suburbs of Khan Sheikhoun.’”

And finally, a white paper written by the White House’s National Security Council--interestingly, it was not written by the US intelligence community but by the White House (investigative journalist Robert Parry reports that a source told him that CIA Director Mike Pompeo personally told Trump that the CIA believed that Assad was likely not responsible for the chemical attack)--claims “that the chemical agent was delivered by regime SU-22 fixed-wing aircraft.” However, reporting on the weapons dropped over Syria from the SU-22 aircraft, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter says that “it is physically impossible for a chemical weapon to produce the impact IR signatures detected by the US and linked to the Khan Shaykhun attack.” Amazingly, Ritter points out that the very evidence used by the White House to prove Syria dropped chemical weapons from a plane, proves instead the Syrian/Russian version of the story that Syria dropped conventional weapons from a plane.

So, the Syrian story is not the simple narrative of good and evil offered up by Washington and the mainstream media. There is another side to the story. But for American meddling, Syria might have been a democracy instead of the dictatorship it is today. But for American indifference and neglect, today’s Syrian dictator could have been an ally. And if intelligence and investigation preceded the assumption and assignation of guilt to the current antagonist of the story, Assad may be found to be not guilty of the chemical attack for which he was recently bombed.

#Syria #Syrian conflict #Bashar al-Assad #Syrian history

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global-news-station · 5 years

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WASHINGTON: A deeply divided Congress formally opened a new, public phase of its investigation into Donald Trump on Thursday as US lawmakers voted for the first time to advance the impeachment process targeting the US president.

“Today the House takes the next step forward as we establish the procedures for open hearings… so that the public can see the facts for themselves,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Washington’s top Democrat.

“What is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.”

The House of Representatives voted along party lines, 232 to 196, to pass a resolution that lays out guidelines for the next stages of the impeachment process.

All Republicans opposed the measure, despite agitating for weeks for such a vote that could end the secretive depositions and bring the process into the open.

Democrats are seeking to learn whether Trump abused his presidential power by pressuring a foreign government to investigate a domestic political rival.

Trump has repeatedly branded the inquiry illegitimate and said it is politically motivated, a theme he returned to in the wake of the vote.

“The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!” he said on Twitter.

The White House accused opposition Democrats of being “fundamentally un-American” in their “unhinged obsession with this illegitimate impeachment.”

“Democrats are choosing every day to waste time on a sham impeachment — a blatantly partisan attempt to destroy the President,” Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in the statement after the vote.

Trump meanwhile called on his fellow Republicans to support him even as he faced the embarrassing likelihood of becoming the third president in history to be impeached and placed on trial for removal in the Senate, over an alleged scheme to extort Ukraine’s help to get him reelected in 2020.

The embattled president retweeted a rallying cry from Fox News host Laura Ingraham that called on Republicans to “stand together and defend the leader of their party against these smears.”

‘False defenses’

Trump is accused of withholding military aid to compel Ukraine to mount a corruption probe against his Democratic election rival Joe Biden — effectively using US foreign policy in an illegal shakedown for his personal political benefit.

Congressional investigators have heard a steady flow of corroborating evidence from government officials testifying behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.

The landmark resolution did not have unanimous Democratic approval. Two Democrats joined all Republicans in opposing the measure, although former Republican Justin Amash, now an independent, supported it — and offered a searing warning to his old party.

“Excusing his misbehavior will forever tarnish your name,” he tweeted to Republicans regarding Trump. “History will not look kindly on disingenuous, frivolous, and false defenses of this man.”

The inquiry now moves into the public eye — giving Americans the chance to hear on live television the evidence against Trump.

The House Intelligence Committee, which has led the inquiry so far, will host open hearings, presenting witnesses and documentary evidence and allowing Republicans to challenge the case against Trump.

The minority can also suggest subpoenas but majority Democrats have final say, a rule that has angered Republicans.

Democrats argue that the vote neutralizes a key Republican talking point that the inquiry has no validity because the full House did not sign on.

If the case against Trump is deemed strong enough, the House Judiciary Committee will draw up formal charges against the president — articles of impeachment — to be voted on by the full House.

It remains unclear how quickly the process can advance. Some say the Democratic-led House could impeach Trump by year end.

He would then be tried in the Senate, controlled by Republicans.

Witness backs allegations

Nearly a dozen witnesses so far have confirmed in House depositions the accusations that, in a concerted effort with top aides and his personal lawyer, Trump pressured Ukraine to help his 2020 re-election effort by producing dirt on Biden, the former vice president.

The allegations focus on a July 25 phone call in which Trump pressed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to open investigations into Biden and Biden’s son, who worked with a Ukraine energy firm.

The White House has released a rough transcript of the call, and Trump said in an interview published Thursday that he hoped to read it on TV to the American people.

“At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it. When you read it, it’s a straight call,” Trump told the Washington Examiner.

In potentially damning testimony Thursday, the White House National Security Council’s top Russia expert, Tim Morrison, confirmed that a diplomat close to Trump told Morrison that military aid would be withheld until Kiev committed to investigating Biden.

The revelation corroborates testimony provided last week by the top US envoy to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, who expressed concern that Morrison informed him of the quid pro quo with Ukraine.

“I can confirm that the substance of his statement, as it relates to conversations he and I had, is accurate,” Morrison, who resigned Wednesday, testified in his opening statement obtained by US media.

Investigators also have summoned Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton to testify.

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#World News

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brassring2020 · 5 years

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AYA Analytica financial health memo June 2019

As of June 2019, this regular podcast is available on our Andy Yeh Alpha fintech network platform.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz proposes the key economic priorities in lieu of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism encompasses lower taxation, deregulation, social welfare minimalism, and less government intervention. This ideology has become the root cause of socioeconomic problems such as wage stagnation, wealth inequality, market power concentration, and environmental degradation. In response, Stiglitz recommends 3 major economic policy prescriptions. First, the benevolent social planner should better balance free markets, civil communities, and state mechanisms. The government better shapes and facilitates markets and communities by investing in basic research, technology, education, health care, and infrastructure. This public investment pays well in terms of more connective communities and market mechanisms. Second, wealth creation arises from scientific inquiry and social organization that collectively allow people to work together for the common good. Free markets still facilitate most social cooperation, but they serve this purpose only if market participants are subject to democratic checks and balances and the rule of law. Third, the government can curb corporate rent protection that may arise from information advantages, hostile takeovers, or other entry barriers. The government has to sever the nexus between market power and political influence. A public investment reform should thus focus on higher education, research, technology, affordable health care, and infrastructure.

Berkeley tax economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez find fresh insights into wealth inequality in America. Their latest estimates show that the top 0.1% of U.S. taxpayers control 20% of American wealth. This result represents the highest share since 1929. The top 1% of U.S. taxpayers control 39% of American wealth, whereas, the bottom 90% of U.S. taxpayers control 26% of American wealth. In contrast, the bottom half of Americans collectively have a negative net worth (i.e. total liabilities exceed total assets). Zucman further finds that multinational corporations move 40% of their $600 billion offshore profits out of high-tax countries into lower-tax jurisdictions. With their empirical results, Saez and Zucman champion bold and aggressive tax policy recommendations. For instance, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes a wealth tax that would bring in $2.8 trillion over the next decade. Warren confers with Saez and Zucman again before she floats a corporate tax on net profits above $100 million. This tax may raise $1 trillion over 10 years. Also, New York congressional rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposes to hike the top marginal tax rate for Americans who earn annual income above $10 million. The Saez-Zucman empirical results lend credence to these bold tax policy proposals.

Investing in stocks is the best way for most people to become self-made millionaires. A recent Gallup poll indicates that only 37% of young Americans below the age of 36 own stocks, whereas, 61% of Americans over the age of 35 own stocks in the same time window from 2017 to 2019. This evidence suggests that most Americans fail to leverage the stock market as a worthy investment vehicle. The magical power of compound interest exponentially contributes to personal wealth accumulation. For instance, if a young investor saves $100 per week to earn an 11% stock market average return each year, he or she can receive more than $1.2 million after 30 years. This financial discipline requires automatic money transfers on a periodic basis. In other words, most people can consistently invest a small amount of money with great discipline to reap exponential cash rewards at retirement age. Moreover, these wise investors can smooth out most extreme stock price gyrations by waiting patiently to accrue compound interest on regular stock investments. As compound interest snowballs into greater dollar amounts of stock bets, both principal and interest payments roll over and become substantial lump sums after a sufficiently long time span.

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 affects many millennials as they now face the major costs of college tuition, residential demand, health care, and childcare. Ages 22 to 39, millennials have less purchasing power than previous generations did at the same age. Although millennials have benefited from a 67% increase in real wages since the 1970s, this wage boost is insufficient for millennials to keep up with price inflation over the past 4 decades. More than half of millennials cannot afford to own residential properties, have less than $5,000 in their bank deposit accounts, and maintain no retirement accounts. Nowadays millennial affordability attracts both public and private solutions. For instance, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes that the government forgives $50,000 in student loan debt for every American whose family makes up to $100,000. Also, Former Vice President Joe Biden supports the new proposal that it should be free for students to complete 4-year bachelor degrees at public universities. Moreover, the venture fund Kairos invests in more than 5 companies with $20 million to design solutions that tackle the inflationary costs of student loan debt, residential demand, childcare, and health insurance. Overall, millennial affordability has hence become a major socioeconomic issue in America.

Amazon and Google face comprehensive antitrust scrutiny. In recent times, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have reached an agreement to conduct independent investigations into these tech titans. Justice Department takes responsibility for Google antitrust matters, whereas, Federal Trade Commission handles Amazon in light of potential consumer harm. This internal agreement presages intense antitrust scrutiny. Google already faces antitrust fines in Europe due to the E.U. charges that the online search algorithms favor Google-driven software products. U.S. antitrust law focuses on the broader notion of consumer protection; however, smart algorithms help constrain Amazon retail price hikes. Federal Trade Commission conveys concern and suspicion that the sheer size and market power of Amazon may induce anti-competitive effects. Limiting the market power of tech titans may be one of the few policy domains where both Republicans and Democrats can find common cause. Democratic presidential candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren call for greater antitrust scrutiny on the campaign trail. Also, President Trump and other Republicans accuse Amazon and Google of political bias. Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission either stimulate greater competition in e-commerce and Internet search, or the regulatory agencies may consider breaking up Amazon and Google.

San Francisco Fed CEO Mary Daly suggests that trade escalation is not the only risk in the global economy. Due to the current Sino-U.S. trade tension, the global economy seems to slow down quite a bit. Several other global economic issues need resolution too. For instance, Halloween Brexit may result in negative consequences for Eurozone trade and financial capital exodus. Daly indicates that the U.S. economy may experience unforeseen challenges if business sentiment and economic data get out of sync. If business sentiment turns out to be negative, this pervasive negativity may become a self-fulfilling prophecy that can lead to significant fluctuations in real economic output. Nevertheless, Daly reiterates that the U.S. economy operates near the long-term efficient level with 3.6%-3.7% unemployment as inflation rises toward the 2% target. In the current macroeconomic scenario, the federal funds rate remains neutral. This outcome accords with the Federal Reserve dual mandate of price stability and maximum sustainable employment. The recent interest rate hikes help dampen extreme asset price gyrations and so contribute to financial market stabilization. At any rate, Daly emphasizes that it is important for the Federal Reserve to remain patient before the FOMC members consider the next interest rate adjustments.

To secure better trade arrangements with the European Union, Jeremy Corbyn encourages Labour legislators to back a second referendum on Brexit. In recent times, Theresa May has indicated her intention to resign as British Prime Minister, and the European election results shine fresh light on a second referendum on Brexit. Nigel Farage, his Brexit Party, and Conservative Brexit supporters are likely to fight hard against Corbyn-led Labour legislators. Labour Party now has a strategic advantage if Corbyn and his fellow MPs pivot in favor of a second referendum on Brexit. As the European Union remains the largest trade bloc to Britain, Britons must reconsider the economic pros and cons of closer trade ties with the Eurozone. The Brexit withdrawal agreement may involve a gross amount of €100 billion. Net of some U.K. assets, the final bill would involve about €65 billion. The withdrawal transfer funds can contribute to better British health care, social welfare, infrastructure, taxation, and other aspects of public finance. However, Britons use the British pound but not the Euro, so the U.K. has never been part of the E.U. monetary union. British millennials prefer to remain in the E.U. for closer trade ties and better economic arrangements.

The Sino-American trade war may slash global GDP by $600 billion. If the Trump administration imposes tariffs on all Chinese imports and China retaliates with countermeasures, the global stock market may decline by 10%. In this worst-case scenario, Bloomberg expects global GDP to fall 0.6% or $600 billion by mid-2021. The same simulation suggests that both U.S. and Chinese economic output may decline by 0.7% to 1%. Several countries such as Canada and Europe rely heavily on Sino-American trade and so may suffer as a result. In terms of better balancing the bilateral trade deficit, this deficit has indeed declined from $91 billion to $80 billion from 2018Q1 to 2019Q1 (as the Trump tariffs come into effect). Also, the current U.S. CPI inflation hovers in the range of 1.6% to 1.9% (still below the 2% target level). This fact defies the Chinese allegation that the Trump tariffs may substantially raise the Chinese import prices with substantial inflationary pressure. U.S. retail sales growth continues to slow down although American consumer confidence rebounds in early-2019 due to higher wages and tight labor market conditions. The recent 8% renminbi devaluation coincides with the 25% Chinese stock market plunge and less foreign direct investment.

The Chinese Xi administration may leverage its state dominance of rare-earth elements to better balance the current Sino-American trade war. In recent times, President Xi visits a Jiangxi hardware factory that spins rare earth elements into permanent magnets in iPhones, electric cars, wind turbines, and military missiles. China monopolizes 80% of the strenuous extraction of 17 vital rare-earth elements for ubiquitous applications from consumer electronic technology to national defense. Although the ores are as common as copper and lead, rare-earth ores oxidize quickly and their extraction can cause severe pollution. With its low labor costs and lax environmental regulations, China has become the dominant force in the rare-earth market since the 1980s. With almost half of global rare-earth deposits, China produces 120,000 metric tons of rare-earth per annum, or about 80% of the global supply. Australia is the second largest supplier of only 20,000 metric tons of rare-earth per year. The Chinese Xi administration has a strategic incentive to reduce the quota of rare-earth elements from 60,000 tons for better environmental protection. The next quota reset is due in June 2019, and this reset can indicate whether China intends to leverage its rare-earth quasi-monopoly to counteract the Trump tariff tactic.

Dallas Federal Reserve President Robert Kaplan expects the U.S. economy to grow at 2.25%-2.5% in 2019-2020 as inflation rises a bit. In an interview with Fox Business Network, Kaplan indicates that it might be too soon to gauge the ripple effects of U.S. tariffs on Chinese and European imports, greenback fluctuations, and inflationary concerns. As the Federal Reserve remains patient on the next monetary policy adjustments, independent and credible central bank communication can help circumvent financial imbalances in the U.S. real economy. Meanwhile, the China-U.S. trade tension intensifies, so many stock market analysts now consider low inflation to be transitory. Federal Reserve balance sheet shrinkage continues, but some stock market analysts expect this balance sheet strategy to halt in light of higher Treasury yields. These higher Treasury yields may inadvertently tighten credit conditions for most mortgage borrowers and corporate debtors. In this negative light, this rationale leads to financial imbalances in the form of exorbitant mortgage and business debt. In turn, these financial imbalances exacerbate the current real estate and business debt dilemma. When push comes to shove, monetary policymakers need to consider the potential ramifications of credit supply shortage before the Federal Reserve steers the next interest rate adjustments.

St Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard indicates that his ideal baseline scenario remains a mutually beneficial China-U.S. trade deal. Bullard indicates that the Chinese Xi administration should accept U.S. demands on trade deficit curtailment and intellectual property protection and enforcement in order to attract more foreign capital investments as the oriental country can reap enormous benefits. In the baseline scenario of a major Sino-U.S. trade deal, the Trump tariffs may linger such that the Federal Reserve has to address the likely U.S. economic growth concerns. Since the U.S. and China cannot conclude their yearlong trade conflict, this economic policy uncertainty stokes fresh worries about the global economy. U.S. FOMC members agree that their current patient monetary policy approach can remain in place for some time. In this positive light, the Federal Reserve halts the next interest rate hikes as Fed governors jawbone their implicit expectations of anchoring both U.S. economic growth and interest rates at 2.25%-2.5%. To the extent that inflation risk remains low or slightly below the 2% target level, the Federal Reserve keeps intact the 2.5% federal funds rate as the U.S. economy operates near full employment (with the 3.6%-3.7% unemployment rate). Patience pays well in time.

The world seeks to reduce medicine prices and other health care costs to better regulate big pharma. The Trump administration now requires pharmaceutical companies to disclose medicine prices in U.S. television ads. Proponents support more transparent disclosures of medicine prices and other health care costs. However, some other industry groups argue that astronomical medicine prices may discourage patients because many specialty medications are not so affordable. In recent times, the World Health Organization (WHO) discusses universal health care, antimicrobial resistance, and the impact of climate change on global health etc. A major topic pertains to the high prices of new specialty medicines. For instance, the immuno-oncology medicine Keytruda costs $13,600 per month for continual cancer treatment. Also, the specialty medicine for cystic fibrosis, Orkambi, costs $23,000 per month. In America, many diabetics die primarily due to the high costs of insulin. The Trump administration encourages multinational big pharma firms to reduce medicine prices in the U.S. with healthy price hikes elsewhere, whereas, high health care costs in general, and astronomical specialty medicine prices in particular, remain a widespread problem worldwide. On balance, the government should enforce medicine price reductions to help enrich the economic lives of patients around the world.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell suggests that the recent surge in U.S. business debt poses moderate risks to the economy. Many corporate treasuries now carry about 40% debt as part of equity market valuation. St Louis Federal Reserve Bank recent data indicate that the corporate-debt-to-EBITDA ratio has risen to the upper range of 2.3x to 3.1x. Powell warns that the current level of business debt can cause financial stress to borrowers if the U.S. economy weakens. However, Powell adds the cautionary caveat that business debt may not present imminent risks to U.S. financial system stability, household consumption, and business growth. As the Federal Reserve continues to assess the potential amplification of business debt deterioration, short-term liquidity risk remains moderate in the U.S. financial system. Meanwhile, the Trump administration seeks to raise fiscal deficits to support ambitious public programs on infrastructure, education, residential estate, health care, and social security. This public debt accumulation may crowd out intertemporal business debt capacity at the margin. If the U.S. total debt capacity remains invariant over time, the government either has to tolerate higher inflation in the form of seigniorage taxes, or needs to consider the ripple effects of incremental corporate debt on the real economy.

The Sino-U.S. trade war may be the Thucydides trap or a clash of Caucasian and non-Caucasian civilizations. The proverbial Thucydides trap refers to the historical fact that the dominant superpowers may experience inevitable economic sanctions or even military confrontations as these countries become more powerful in the world. The current Sino-U.S. trade conflict may lead to the self-fulfilling prophecy that the incumbent superpower fights fears of losing global dominance by precipitating a tit-for-tat trade war against its most plausible challenger. In accordance with what Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington suggests, these dominant superpowers may inadvertently go through the clash of civilizations. In the current Sino-U.S. trade war, China and the U.S. may have fallen into the Thucydides trap or an aggressive clash of Chinese and Caucasian civilizations. The Trump administration advocates *America First* trade protectionism with ubiquitous domestic populist support, whereas, the Chinese Xi administration calls for free markets and open trade flows. U.S. trade regulators should help curtail the imminent Chinese threat to global institutions such as WTO rules and other fair trade practices. The Trump administration must demonstrate that a higher moral purpose motivates U.S. protectionist trade policies if the Trump team intends to garner wider international support.

Top tech firms such as Google, Intel, and Qualcomm suspend their Android hardware and software services to HuaWei as the Trump administration blacklists the Chinese company. HuaWei can no longer license the complete Android operating system with tech services from Google, Intel, and Qualcomm. Stock market analysts suggest that this hurdle hits half of HuaWei smartphone shipments worldwide. Soon after President Trump issues an executive order on blacklisting HuaWei in America, Google suspends Android updates for the second biggest handset manufacturer. U.S. microchip makers Intel and Qualcomm also cut off HuaWei. These strategic moves can cause serious ramifications for the Chinese tech titan because the new ban blocks HuaWei from Android software updates and apps that normally preload on HuaWei mobile devices sold around the world. As the Trump administration blacklists HuaWei, this ban speeds up digital isolation for China amid Sino-U.S. trade war and economic policy uncertainty. If China and the U.S. have begun a technological cold war in recent times, the HuaWei ban can best be viewed as the dawn of a digital iron curtain. The current 90-day reprieve may be a tactical solution for Trump to urge the Chinese Xi administration to affirm a fair trade agreement.

AYA finbuzz podcast June 2019

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tophoustontruckaccidentlawyer · 5 years

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10 Car Crash Tips – Top Houston Car Wreck Lawyers

When I first began practicing law over seven years ago, I was amazed by how many car accidents happen in Houston and the surrounding towns. Often times when these clients called my office they would inform me that they signed a release form with the insurance company consenting to $1,000 to $2,000, but then feeling cared for, they made a decision to call a lawyer. Never talk to another driver’s insurance company without lawyering up. Suffice to say, the perfect way to make the most of your auto incident case would be to hire an attorney. Figuring out how much it can cost. Do not. Our firm doesn’t charge any money upfront and we only get paid if you recover money.

Car accidents result in a huge number of injuries and deaths in Texas each year. A serious auto accident can turn your life upside down. Following an automobile crash, the next step is typically to work together with the insurance provider to file a claim for damages.

Most of these claims are resolved through an auto incident settlement. The process can be lengthy occasionally, depending on the form of injury and the extent of the injuries. Automobile accident cases can be complicated and require sophisticated investigation tools, evidence gathering techniques, and case evaluation. Certain actions that you take immediately after the mishap can help maximize the settlement you get in a car accident case.

1. Request a Police Report from the Authorities Following the accident happens, if you are able to, move your car to safe spot. Particularly if the other driver rear-ended you or t-boned you. If you push the vehicles to a gas station parking lot, it’s he said -she said, and the authorities will need to decide who’s at fault or worse, even if he’s having a lousy day, may decide to not give anybody a ticket. One of the first things the parties ought to do naturally is call the police. Emotions often run high following an automobile accident and with the police there can help to keep the situation in check, particularly if the other driver is emotional or upset. It is also an excellent way to record important evidence. When it comes to make a settlement deal, insurance companies rely heavily on police reports since police officers are considered neutral third-parties who evaluate what happened in the accident.

2. Record the Scene of the Accident

After the police have been called, it’s helpful for the injured party to shoot pictures of the scene of the crash, in addition to the injuries sustained. It is hard to recreate the scene of an accident to tell what happened, and you only really get one opportunity to record everything immediately after the accident happened. Make sure you take pictures of those cars that were involved as they were immediately following the crash happened, and shoot pictures of their surrounding environment, including the weather and street conditions, if it is believed they will play a variable. Look around to see whether any witnesses observed what occurred, and when there were witnesses present, get their names and contact information in case further information is required from them. In the event that you were injured in the crash, take pictures of the injuries, as well. It never hurts to have these images as proof to back up a promise, even if they never end up getting used. Always err on the side of caution if taking photos of the accident scene. Having more images is a far better situation than not having enough. Don’t forget to have a mobile pic of the other drivers information even when you are on the side of US 290, I-45, 288, Beltway 8, 610 Loop, Highway 6, or the Grand Parkway.

3. Document the Property Damage

In addition to taking pictures of this scene of the crash, it’s advised that the injured party take his or her car to a reputable mechanic. Have that individual thoroughly inspect the car and take additional images of the damage, particularly if framework harm is suspected. Even if the injured party took pictures of the car in the accident, a mechanic will know what to look for when it comes to certain kinds of damage. If specific parts fell off the car or had to be replaced, then keep the damaged parts in case they are needed later.

4. Make All Doctor’s Appointments

One red flag the insurance carrier will be looking for is any proof that the injured party isn’t as injured as he or she claims to be or that the accident was caused by something not related to the accident in any way. Among the biggest mistakes someone involved in a car accident may make is not to get checked out by a medical practitioner as soon as the injury occurs. When the medical doctor prescribes the injured party medication or therapy for the injuries, it’s very important that this be followed. Otherwise, the insurance company will have proof to argue that the individual isn’t as injured as has been claimed or is going to have a gap in time to assert that perhaps an additional injury not associated with the incident happened. The best guideline is to receive injuries checked out even if they do not seem too severe on the surface. Be careful what you post on interpersonal networking, insurance researchers are experts in finding evidence that may discredit your injuries.

5. Watch the Proper Medical Professional

Additionally, it helps if the injured party is seen by the suitable medical practitioner for the specified situation. It’s always suggested to go to an emergency room immediately after the accident, however a follow-up together with the injured party’s family physician needs to be made. Make sure the right diagnostic treatment can be used to properly diagnose an injury. An x-ray such as an MRI may be expensive, but it also helps in correctly diagnosing an injury to a bone or other organ. Physical therapy may be necessary for an accident, as well, after first identification is made. Keep all medical bills and bills in the event they are required to be filed later to make a claim.

6. Exercise Caution in Speaking with the Insurance Provider

Be aware that the insurance company is very likely to try and acquire the wounded party to consent to a lower payment, if at all possible. Insurance agents are trained in certain tactics to have parties to agree to a lesser payout. Never consent to give a recorded statement without talking first to a attorney. Do not assume that the insurance broker is there to assist you. They’re there to serve their company and to cover the smallest amount possible to shut the case. Letting down your guard and providing too much information may also damage your situation, as well. Always be careful in what’s said and how much is stated when talking to the insurance brokers involved.

7. Consult with an Auto Accident Attorney

Insurance companies have their own legal departments that handle these types of cases and claims on a regular basis. Among the biggest mistakes somebody involved in a car accident can make would be to walk right into a settlement negotiation independently with no understanding of what rights he or she has. It never hurts to at least bring the facts to an experienced attorney who will advise you about the best way to do before starting negotiations.

8. Be Conscious of Your Insurance Coverage

It is also highly suggested that the parties involved in an accident correctly understand their insurance policies, what they cover and what they do not cover. Check with an experienced auto accident attorney who will review the policy and advise the injured person on what sorts of claims are insured per the details of the coverage. Know what limitations are recorded in the policy, and make certain these limits are known before making a request in a personal injury compensation.

9. Document Your Life Post-Accident

1 big element that needs to be shown in any personal injury case involves the way the mishap and the consequent injury has negatively impacted the person’s life. A pattern of behaviour needs to be revealed and keeping a journal can help the wounded party document what day-to-day life was like since the injury happened. This documentation helps especially when the individual is seeking”pain and suffering damages.” He or she’ll need to demonstrate how the accident has impacted their general quality of life.

10. Do Not Wait

Each state has a statute of limitations, which dictates the amount of time an individual has to file a valid claim because of his or her injuries. In the State of Texas, a party involved in a car accident has two years from the date the accident occurred to file a legal conflict. In the event the party waits too long, then he or she can be completely barred from pursuing the legal claim later.

We understand the pressures about the wake of those accidents and we can help take some of the pressure off you and your loved ones, so you can concentrate on recovery. Our oath for you is managing your case from begin to finish effectively, competently, and aggressively. Allow us the opportunity to provide you with the personal attention you deserve in your case. Please do not hesitate to call our office now at 832.458.1756 for a free legal consultation.

It is best to consult an experienced Houston car accident attorney to get help in seeking the claim. Call Houston car accident attorney RJ Alexander Law, PLLC at (832) 458-1756 to request a free case evaluation.

Houston Car Accident Glove Compartment Guide

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Houston Car Accident Lawyer Road Accident Resources

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Houston Car Accident Resources

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theconservativebrief · 5 years

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On Tuesday, close to 200 climate activists crowded into the Capitol Building offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who will re-assume the position of House speaker when the new Congress is sworn in come January.

The activists called on Pelosi to lead Democrats in developing an ambitious, comprehensive plan to address climate change — a Green New Deal. Halfway through the protest, rising Democratic star and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited to show her support, which drew a torrent of media coverage.

New Dem star protests speaker on first day of freshman orientation! The media loved it.

[embedded content]

I’ll be honest, though. I’ve seen intra-left disputes on climate change reprise themselves over and over again, to no one’s benefit, and when I heard about this protest, I felt a twinge of dread. Why target Pelosi, who has always been a climate champion? And how is she supposed to have a comprehensive climate plan already when she hasn’t even taken the gavel? Aren’t there worse enemies of the climate to protest?

But I talked it out on Twitter, emailed with a few of the organizers, and now have a better handle on what’s going on. And it turns out to be quite a bit richer and more significant than what you might get from the headlines.

As I said in my Monday post on Democratic climate strategy in a polarized era, there are three basic prongs of a unilateral left strategy. The first is using House congressional committees to investigate and slow President Trump’s deregulatory agenda. The second is accelerating policy innovation in states that Democrats control.

And the third is defining a long-term, comprehensive federal climate agenda for when/if Democrats regain the power to implement one. That is why climate activists swarmed Pelosi’s office. The left is making an early bid to set the highest bar possible for the 2020 Democratic climate change agenda.

Here’s how it unfolded and what’s at stake.

AOC thanks climate protesters. Sunrise

Climate hawks received a few disconcerting signals in the wake of the midterm elections (which turned out to be a much bigger victory for Democrats than they appeared early on).

A piece in the Hill reported that House Democrats had no plans to move on climate change, which appeared nowhere in their list of priorities. Meanwhile, Pelosi, who is very much intent on keeping her speakership, started talking the day after the election about a “bipartisan marketplace of ideas,” which is not exactly what you’d call reading the room.

Pelosi had signaled that she planned to revive the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming (2007-2011, RIP), but activists and the incoming class of social democrats wanted something much bolder. They needed something to rally around.

And here it is: AOC plans to introduce a draft resolution that would put parameters around the committee, its work, and its membership. It is … bold, to say the least.

The resolution — supported by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, two youth-led organizations pushing for a Green New Deal — has a number of interesting provisions, but two demands are central: that the committee be given a mandate to develop a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the US economy, and that no members be appointed who accept donations from the fossil fuel industry.

Reinstating the Select Committee is a great decision that I fully support.

These dynamic leaders want to ensure is that the committee: – Has a mandate to draft a Green New Deal for 100% renewable energy – No appointed members that accept funding from the fossil fuel industry

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018

Specifically, the committee “shall have authority to develop a detailed, national, industrial, economic mobilization plan for the transition of the United States economy to become carbon neutral and to significantly draw down and capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.” It would be required to produce a draft plan by January 1, 2020, and draft legislation by March 1, 2020.

In other words, the committee must produce a package of legislation ready to move if Democrats take power in the 2020 elections.

Here are the goals the resolution sets for the Green New Deal:

(1) 100% of national power generation from renewable sources; (2) Building a national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid; (3) Upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety; (4) Decarbonizing the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries; (5) Decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure; (6) Funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases; (7) Making “green” technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international leader in helping other countries transition to completely carbon neutral economies and bringing about a global Green New Deal.

That … pretty much covers it! It’s difficult to imagine how you could get any more ambitious than that.

Of course, every one of those bullet points represents dozens of policies and thousands of implementation challenges. Wonks like me look at this list and we wonder about the details. We wonder so hard, our hair tingles.

But that’s not really the point, at least for now. The point is this represents perhaps the first time in US history that a Democrat has proposed a plan for addressing climate change that actually scales to the problem and has some chance of influencing the party’s agenda.

Pelosi testifies at a House hearing on climate change — way back in 2007. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But there’s more. The resolution is equally ambitious on the subject of equity. It says that the Green New Deal “is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.”

To that end, it instructs the committee to develop a plan that would include a job guarantee, measures to combat income inequality and racial injustice, and maybe a universal basic income (UBI) for good measure.

Here’s the full list of equity provisions:

(i) provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure every person who wants one, a living wage job; (ii) take into account and be responsive to the historical and present-day experiences of low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and urban communities and the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution and other environmental harm; (iii) mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low income, deindustrialized or other marginalized communities); (iv) include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism; and (v) deeply involve national and local labor unions to take a leadership role in the process of job training and worker deployment.

As iv demonstrates, this is about much more than carbon. It doesn’t separate out the climate problem from society’s other ills, as climate wonks have so often advocated. It sees environmental, economic, and social problems as intertwined, with a common set of solutions.

It’s a full-spectrum vision of a sustainable social democracy — a level of progressive ambition that most US citizens have likely never encountered.

As for how to pay for this, all the resolution says is that funding will primarily come from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”

So that’s AOC’s proposal: a committee on steroids, charged with developing the most ambitious national climate plan in history, with equity at its heart.

Political media desperately want the story of this protest, and AOC’s participation in it, to be another chapter of “Dems in Disarray.” But the truth is close to the opposite: This was a case of the Democratic base and leadership working together for mutual benefit. It was one big alley-oop.

Here’s how it went down.

Sunrise and Justice Democrats were planning a protest to push Pelosi on climate. AOC and her staff, who are in close touch with the activist left, suggested that protesters need something concrete to rally around, some specific demands; that’s why they wrote this draft resolution.

So protesters go to Pelosi’s office — where the cameras will be — as a show of force, to demand that Dems stop taking fossil fuel money and start planning for a real climate solution. AOC then comes to visit and support the protest, thus bringing more attention and more cameras.

Together, they help thrust climate change into the news cycle and get the term “Green New Deal” published in most of the nation’s newspapers, a fairly adroit bit of agenda-setting in a hostile media environment.

As for Pelosi? It would not surprise me at all to find out that she knew it was coming — was maybe even in on it. At the very least, she welcomed it and gave it further publicity:

Deeply inspired by the young activists & advocates leading the way on confronting climate change. The climate crisis threatens the futures of communities nationwide, and I strongly support reinstating the select committee to address the crisis. https://t.co/rjVJYSJraf

— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) November 13, 2018

Of course, this falls far short of accepting the protesters’ demands. (There will be much more intra-Dem negotiation before anything like that happens.)

But Pelosi is signaling to Democrats on her right that she is being pressured from the left on climate change, that this is where the energy and enthusiasm is among the party’s most active young supporters, that Dems will get hounded endlessly if they don’t act on this. She and AOC are working together on this, not at odds.

Thank you, @NancyPelosi.

We have 10 years left to plan and implement a Green New Deal before cataclysmic climate disaster.

Reinstating the Select Committee is exactly what we need to do. https://t.co/Uy5BnrLZcR

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018

Now the trick is to build more pressure. “Right after we left Pelosi’s office,” Evan Weber of Sunrise tells me, “we went to the offices of Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal, and Ro Khanna to ask for their support for the resolution.”

So far, freshman Reps. Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Deb Haaland have endorsed the resolution. The movement is pushing for more and believes, according to Weber, “there is actually an opening to have this resolution included in the rules for the new Congress.”

This is how activism is supposed to work. The climate left sent the signal it needed to send — that it is mobilized and fully willing to be a pain in the ass — and Pelosi was happy to amplify it. The political world heard.

It is an inverted mirror image of the Tea Party: Rather than trying to bring out the worst in Republicans, activists are trying to bring out the best in Democrats.

I admit, I have trouble envisioning the resolution passing in anything like its current form — it’s such a quantum leap from where the party currently stands. But I have proven an abysmal political prognosticator in recent years and no longer presume to predict anything. Maybe it will pass!

Regardless, it strikes me as a significant development in US politics that there is finally a constituency for full-scale mobilization on climate change — for making decarbonization a top national priority. At long last, there is an actual climate left! Perhaps that label will no longer be applied to a bunch of hapless wonks and economists.

Just as the Republican House climate caucus is shrinking, the Democratic House climate caucus is growing. And as it grows, its ambitions increase. The Overton window is shifting before our eyes.

In the long term, Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats tells me, the movement will focus on “repeating the success we had in recruiting, training, and helping elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” The idea, he says, is to “build a caucus of like-minded, mission-driven legislators who will fight tirelessly for solutions that match the urgency and scale necessary to tackle the systemic crises in our country.”

From California to New York – @justicedems challenged the status quo by running candidates who truly represent the people – not corporate interests. Candidates who come from all walks of life and fight for voters, not donors. pic.twitter.com/nie8co7dpB

— Middle Seat Digital (@MiddleSeatCo) November 13, 2018

Suffice it to say, that won’t be easy. There are many among the 200-and-some House Democrats who are not going to look with delight on the prospect of supporting a huge, deficit-financed investment plan that includes a job guarantee and possibly a UBI. And that’s to say nothing of how Democratic senators might feel on the subject. Centrist and more conservative Democrats from purple states will not go gentle into this good night.

But now the 78 percent of Americans who say they support a clean energy transition have something to rally around. Now there is an actual left flank on climate change, a coalition of civic groups and elected officials who take the IPCC’s warning — that we have only 12 years left to take transformative action on climate change — seriously.

And like it or not, having a left flank will inevitably mean that Democrats in positions of power come under pressure and suffer criticism.

”Today’s Republican Party is an organized alliance between fossil fuel billionaires and white supremacists. They must be stopped, and we are not confused about this in the least,” says Weber. “Stopping the Republican Party does not mean unconditionally supporting everything that Democrats do; to the contrary, it means fighting for the party to lead vocally and unapologetically on issues that matter to the majority of Americans.”

Original Source -> Climate activists to Nancy Pelosi: go big or we won’t go home

via The Conservative Brief

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mikemortgage · 6 years

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Here’s how to properly conduct an employee workplace investigation

Perhaps the biggest boondoggle in legal services in 2018 is the workplace investigation industry. There is a solution, but you will have to read further for that.

Calling for an investigation has become the de facto position for a company to avoid the responsibility, let alone the time, of making an executive decision. It is also used as a strategy to delay providing a substantive response when faced with threatened litigation.

Outside investigators, and investigations generally, used to be reserved for only the most intractable, complex situations involving only the company’s highest officers that internal staff could not objectively investigate. Besides those, investigations were the preserve of human resources staff who, unlike outsiders, did not require educating on the company’s policies, procedures and the idiosyncrasies of its personnel. Now, deferring to external investigators has become the default. As well, although full investigations previously only occurred over allegations of the most egregious variety — generally fraud or sexual harassment — increasingly, any employee making a complaint about almost anything leads to outside investigators being summoned.

The law seldom requires full investigations. Almost invariably, speaking to the complainant, any witnesses, putting the complaint to the accused and hearing their version of events will legally suffice. Even that is more elaborate than is required in most cases.

Let's say Trudeau, Morneau and Freeland were corporate execs and we wanted to fire them

Suspending employee before cause is proved requires utmost care

Don't mess around with your company's settlement offer. It might just get revoked

Regardless of whether it is legally required, in every case of misconduct, an accused employee should be advised of the allegations against them and provided a chance to respond. Doing so concretizes the employee’s position and prevents their inventing a better version of events after speaking to counsel. It also prevents the employer making the decision without the necessary information. If the employee lies or refuses to answer, that can provide the cause for discharge the company requires.

The two circumstances calling for an outside investigator are: to uncover systemic problems in the organization to ensure there is no broader pattern of misconduct, and when the person accused is so senior that no one internally has the objectivity to investigate.

But let there be no confusion. You are not necessarily obtaining objectivity by delegating the task to outsiders. They are equally dependent on the organization’s goodwill. They are motivated to please the members of the organization retaining them and to come to conclusions that will ensure they are hired again.

Although the law is simple, most investigations are unduly expensive. I have seen too many cases in which an investigator, called in to determine whether there was cause to discharge an employee, charges a multiple of what it would have cost to simply terminate without cause. If it is found that there is not cause for discharge, and the employer decides the relationships are too fractured to continue with the employee, it still must pay full severance in addition to the cost of the investigator. The company could be worse off, insofar as the employee can now claim they were discharged despite being cleared and that the investigation created a stigma, all creating a risk of additional punitive or aggravated damages. If the investigator finds that there is cause for discharge, the company is little further ahead because the investigator’s findings do not bind a court, which will come to its own independent position. Indeed, the investigator’s findings are hearsay and not even admissible in court. If the investigator is the company’s legal counsel, that counsel and his or her firm will then be conflicted out if there is a lawsuit, creating additional costs for the employer given that new counsel must be hired and acquainted with the facts.

Do not believe that any investigation is neutral. The fact of someone being investigated, by itself creates such a stigma that the employee’s position often becomes untenable. I have known few cases in which an employee is suspended pending investigation and is ultimately recalled to work, regardless of the ultimate findings.

In addition to costs, practical problems in using a lawyer as an investigator include that it entitles the employee, and each witness, to have their own lawyer present during the investigation, further lengthening the process, creating undue structural rigidity and having the employee’s lawyer potentially take the position that they need not answer questions. If the investigator is not outside legal counsel, employees cannot bring a lawyer and failure to answer a question or to answer honestly is itself cause for discharge.Therefore, there are major advantages to not using legal counsel.

But if a lawyer is not to conduct the investigation, who should? Many of the issues respecting employee misconduct are those of employment law and a non-lawyer lacks that expertise and can therefore write a less credible report. So, if lawyers are unsuitable for investigation and non-lawyers are, for different reasons, similarly unsuitable, who should be conducting those investigations that are necessary?

The answer is so obvious that it is almost shocking that this group is so seldom used. Who is expert at fact-finding? Not lawyers, whose jobs are prosecutorial or defence oriented. Not human resource managers, who do not know the law.

The go-to group for workplace investigations should always be retired judges. They know the law. They have the credibility and they spend their careers hearing evidence and making findings of fact. With many judges having left the bench and gone into private mediation/arbitration practices, there is a legion of judges, many of whom have both criminal and civil backgrounds, with considerable employment-law knowledge. Ironically, their fee structure is also generally lower than counsel’s and, at the end of the day, if your case goes to court and the judge or arbitrator hearing the case knows that one of their brethren/sisters made certain findings, they cannot but be influenced by it.

It is not just what happens at trial. If a company is speaking to its stakeholders, whether they be its employee base, other executives, their board or third parties, who is going to question the company’s conduct in following the recommendation of a judge?

None that I can think of.

• Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers. He practises employment law in eight provinces. The most recent of his six books is War Stories from the Workplace: Columns by Howard Levitt.

Twitter.com/HowardLevittLaw

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soffleur · 6 years

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