It doesn't matter because Grossman is your next governor.
"Martha Coakley offers conflicting words on DCF" by Frank Phillips and Michael Levenson | Globe staff, January 31, 2014
As a candidate for governor, Martha Coakley has strongly criticized the troubled Department of Children and Families, saying it overloads its social workers and is unable to properly protect children from abuse.
“During my career, I have seen, day in and day out, how the current structure of DCF puts children at risk and overburdens social workers,’’ Coakley said in a statement released by her gubernatorial campaign. She vowed that, as governor, she would put in place crucial changes needed to protect children.
But that criticism stands in sharp contrast to the strong defense that Coakley, in her role as the state’s attorney general, has provided to the agency in a lawsuit brought by a child welfare advocacy group. The suit, currently before a federal appeals court, seeks to force the agency to tighten up its monitoring of children and boost standards of care and safety.
Since the April 2010 filing of the suit, Coakley has repeatedly insisted in court documents that the Patrick administration has already taken strong steps to meet the standards that Children’s Rights, a New York-based watchdog group, is demanding.
“In fact, DCF has developed a thorough system with the requisite flexibility needed to successfully provide services to meet the vast of array of needs presented by its eclectic client base,’’ Coakley and her staff argued in one Dec. 3, 2012, brief.
That's deplorable!
She presented that statement a year before news broke that the agency had lost track of Jeremiah Oliver, a 5-year-old Fitchburg boy who has been missing since September and is feared dead. The state has determined that a Department of Children and Families social worker had not properly monitored his case.
Coakley’s conflicting statements on the state agency’s performance highlight the hazards of her dual roles as an attorney general charged with vigorously defending the state in court and as a candidate for governor who is now criticizing a state agency’s practices and promising to improve its performance standards.
Because the case is still pending, Coakley declined to be interviewed. But through a campaign spokesman, she insisted that there is no conflict between her defense of the agency in the lawsuit and her criticism of it as a candidate.
“Martha believes that defending in court the important work DCF does every day does not mean we should ever stop trying to improve the way we protect children under their care,’’ said campaign aide Kyle Sullivan. “Her work as attorney general in this case is completely consistent with her past work as head of the child abuse unit in the DA’s office and her plan for improving DCF as governor.”
Children’s Rights says that Coakley and the Patrick administration were particularly aggressive in trying to repel the changes that the children’s advocacy group is seeking, which the group says would address the sort of breakdowns in the Oliver case.
“We made it very clear that we were interested in settlement discussions . . . but the state would not engage in settlement discussions,’’ said Marcia Lowry, Children’s Rights executive director.
You are not a bank or corporation, that's why.
Children’s Rights has filed at least 20 similar lawsuits against child welfare agencies across the country and has settled at least 15. Coakley and the governor are among the few who have chosen to wage a prolonged battle.
As far as I can tell, the only thing liberal about this state is same-sex marriage. Other than that, it is a sucky piece of shit.
“State officials, through the attorney general, aggressively fought the suit, rather than agreeing to fix the disturbing and well known systemic failings,’’ Sara Bartosz, lead counsel for Children Rights, said. “Sadly, we find ourselves in 2014 discussing the very same problems.”
But Alec Loftus, spokesman for the Patrick administration’s human services agencies, rejected Lowry’s and Bartosz’s statements. He said the state has been in conversations with the group about its proposals before and during the lawsuit, but felt its demands for change were excessive.
Can we hire them to manage the department, because you guys suck.
“The Commonwealth believes that the Children’s Rights lawsuit was overreaching and would have not improved the quality of care for children,’’ Loftus said. “We were unable to reach an agreement that we thought was in the best interest of the children of Massachusetts, and ultimately a judge decided the case in the Commonwealth’s favor.”
Like I believe this looting, lying government cares about kids. They serve wealth and that's it.
Children’s Rights, which is appealing a US District Court decision, has been seeking to force the Department of Children and Families to address several of its operational breakdowns, including the failure of some of its social workers to make monthly visits to children it monitors. That issue is at the center of the Oliver case.
As the Oliver case continued to dominate much of the headlines for the last five weeks, Coakley’s gubernatorial campaign called for creation of a separate Child Protection Division within the agency that would investigate allegations of neglect and abuse of the children that the agency serves.
Oh, yeah, forgot all about the campaign for a minute there.
In a Jan. 7 press release, candidate Coakley complained that the agency has no dedicated division focused on children’s safety.
“As governor, I will be committed to implementing the crucial changes needed to help ensure that no child is the victim of preventable sexual, physical, or serious emotional abuse,’’ she said.
She lamented that the department is currently split between its duty to preserve families while trying to protect children from harm.
“The inherent conflict between DCF’s responsibility to children and their focus on strengthening families increases the risk that a child will be left in an abusive or neglectful environment for too long,” Coakley said in her campaign statement.
But in the lawsuit, Coakley painted a much rosier picture of the agency. “In contrast to plaintiff’s sweeping allegations, the evidence will show that the defendants consistently and proactively exercise professional judgment and adequately respond to the needs of the children in DCF custody,” she stated in one brief seeking to dismiss the case.
Time for me to dismiss this post with her candidacy.
US District Court Judge William G. Young ruled against the plaintiffs in November, although he issued a scathing opinion in which he acknowledged that Children’s Rights had documented a “laundry list of problems plaguing DCF.” He attributed the failures to the Legislature’s decision to underfund the agency.
“DCF has failed not only to comport with national standards of care and state and federal requirements, but also to comply with its own internal policies,’’ Young wrote.
But he said that case law requires “substantial deviance” from those norms and “the most wanton abandonment of caretaking” for the court to force DCF to make the changes the Children’s Rights sought. He said it was not clear that DCF’s “behavior has sunk to a level warranting injunctive relief.”
Children’s Rights has appealed the ruling.
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UPDATE: On DCF, it’s Martha Coakley vs. Martha Coakley
Looks like she has other problems anyway:
"Staff changes made to boost oversight of federal, state coffers" by Frank Phillips | Globe Staff, December 31, 2013
As questions linger over her campaign finance records, Attorney General Martha Coakley is trying to clean up the troubled political accounts by replacing her sister as treasurer, retaining a Washington lawyer, and bringing onto her team a Democratic expert on state election finances.
Kind of disqualifies her from overseeing a state budget, doesn't it?
On Monday, Coakley’s political aides filed a series of amended campaign finance reports for her federal account, a move she hopes will help take a potentially damaging issue off the table as she seeks the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts. Her federal campaign committee has also filed papers to dissolve.
Nope.
Coakley’s poor oversight of her political accounts, along with her reliance on her sister to oversee both her state and federal funds, is at the heart of the controversy facing the attorney general as she tries to convince Democrats that she will not repeat the political ineptness that helped cost the party a US Senate seat in 2010.
Mishandling of the Senate account since her loss to Republican Scott Brown has stirred concerns within the party’s ranks.
Public records show that Coakley has now replaced her sister, Anne Gentile, as treasurer of her state political committee. That move came following a Globe article this fall that reported that the federal committee’s accounts were in financial disarray. It also showed that Coakley, who enforces campaign finance statutes as attorney general, had used a small portion of those funds for state political activities, a violation of state law.
What do you do when the leading law enforcement officer of the state is a lawbreaker?
In place of Gentile, Coakley has turned to Paul Brountas Jr., a political protege of Governor Deval Patrick, who has overseen accounts of the state Democratic Party.
By bringing him onto her political team, she has turned to someone who party insiders say is a Democratic operative with deep knowledge of financial compliance issues....
As if covering up the corruption is going to save her campaign.
While Coakley attempts to dampen the controversy, however, a new issue has emerged: In the final days of the 2010 Senate election, Gentile used $15,000 of her own money to pay for campaign-related services including the rental of Election Day vans and meals for staff. The committee later reimbursed her.
The law states that such payments should generally be considered loans to the committee, but the financial reports at the time do not list any loans.
Federal campaign finance law also considers loans as contributions. The limit at that time on the amount an individual could contribute to a federal candidate was $2,400 per election. That meant Gentile would not have been allowed to lend the campaign more than $2,400.
Coakley’s federal campaign finance records indicated that Gentile had paid $11,088 from her personal funds for the vans, $3,354 for meals, and $586 for other food.
Coakley’s problems came to light after the Globe reported that she had used some surplus funds from the US Senate race to promote her state political activities....
Coakley spokesman Kyle Sullivan “acknowledged that mistakes were made.’’
Looks like a guilty plea to me.
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Coakley faces further questions over the $35,000 her federal committee has spent for a Washington-based software company to maintain a donor database, despite the fact that she has not run for federal office since 2010 and the committee has been mostly inactive. It would be a violation of state campaign finance law if the database was used for state political activities.
Sullivan said the database was used only to file quarterly federal election reports and has never been used for state political operations.
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Maybe this will help her image:
"Martha Coakley targets nonprofit CEO pay" by Todd Wallack | Globe Staff, December 19, 2013
Attorney General Martha Coakley vowed Thursday to order Massachusetts nonprofits to disclose more information about their executive compensation after her office determined that some of the state’s most prominent nonprofits offered their chiefs generous salaries and perks unavailable to most workers.
A survey of 25 large health insurers, universities, and other Massachusetts charitable organizations, released Thursday by Coakley’s office, found that all of them paid their leaders between $487,000 and $8.8 million a year in total compensation each year between 2009 and 2011.
In addition to salaries, many of the organizations offered executives an assortment of other benefits, including bonuses, deferred compensation, auto allowances, financial planning, life insurance, and other considerations that are more commonly associated with corporate leaders and boosted their total pay.
Related: "nonprofits provide new ways for corporations and individuals to influence"
Now it all makes $ense.
In 2011, that brought total compensation of Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun to $3.1 million. In the same year, Partners HealthCare chief executive Gary L. Gottlieb received $2.2 million, Tufts Health Plan head James Roosevelt Jr. took in $2.1 million, and ISO New England chief Gordon van Welie received $1.6 million.
Even when executives retire, the 92-page report found, they often leave with hefty severance or consulting deals that allow them to earn millions more.
“At first glance, the salaries for many of the CEOs [are] very high,” Coakley said. “Boards should be looking more closely at these compensation packages.”
Coakley said she hoped the agency can prod Massachusetts nonprofit boards into taking a harder look at whether the pay packages are justified by requiring them to fill out a new form disclosing information about the pay packages more clearly and promptly.
It currently can take nearly two years for executive pay to show up on nonprofits’ federal tax returns.
She also noted the issue is particularly important for Massachusetts because the state is home to so many tax-exempt hospitals and colleges.
But at least one nonprofit leader bristled at the idea of having to fill out yet another government form, arguing that charities already report abundant data.
“As a sector, we are comfortable with the level of transparency we already provide,’’ said Rick Jakious, chief executive of the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network, which represents 500 nonprofits in the state. “Frankly the amount of information that is available is the envy of any other sector.”
Coakley’s office launched the inquiry after revelations that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s largest nonprofit health plan, gave two former chief executives multimillion-dollar payouts after they stepped down. William C. Van Faasen received $16.4 million in lump-sum retirement benefit in 2006, and Cleve Killingsworth received $11 million after he left in 2010, including more than $4.2 million in severance.
Related: Blue Cross Turns Green For Killingsworth
Also see: On the Board at Blue Cro$$
Blue Cross later agreed to refund the severance amount to customers after Coakley challenged the payment.
Blue Cross spokeswoman Sharon Torgerson said the insurer has dramatically scaled back the pay for its current top executive, Andrew Dreyfus, including the severance provisions in his contract.
University pay has also been a lightning rod. As the Globe reported last month, many local universities give their former presidents large exit packages or keep them on the payroll even after they quit. For instance, Tufts University president Lawrence Bacow received $1.7 million in “end of service compensation” after he retired in 2011 and Brandeis University president Jehuda Reinharz has received at least $1.2 million for part-time advisory work since he stepped down three years ago. Tufts said Bacow earned the payment over many years. Brandeis said Reinharz is providing valuable assistance to his successor.
Now you know why a ma$ter's degree is so expensive.
Related: Reinharz Received $5 Million From Brandeis
A$$i$tance was that valuable?
Also see: Reaching an inflection point with college presidential pay?
Let me reflect on that.
In addition to asking organizations for greater disclosure of executive pay, Coakley’s office urged nonprofit directors to consider how compensation compares to other workers’ salaries and take into account the amount of money they save by not paying taxes.
Coakley also strongly urged boards to reconsider their severance policies.
The report suggested the severance clauses in employment contracts can handcuff boards by discouraging them from firing floundering executives and hurt the organization financially by forcing them to pay departing executives money they cannot afford.
The report said it hoped such severance deals will become less common after the uproar over Killingsworth’s golden parachute.
Still, the report did not single out any organizations for criticism.
On the whole, the report said, it found that organizations took “care and attention” to make sure the executive pay levels complied with federal rules. Most of the organizations hired outside compensation consultants or analyzed pay for leaders at comparable organizations.
Still, critics have long complained about executive compensation at some large nonprofits, arguing that it diverts money that could be better spent on the organization’s core charitable mission.
“It is a very serious concern,” said Joshua Humphreys, a fellow at Tellus Institute who has studied pay at large universities in Massachusetts and found large gaps between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. “You can attract people without paying so much money.”
Humphreys, also president of the Croatan Institute, applauded Coakley’s effort to speed up the reporting of executive compensation, noting that many of the controversial pay packages are not fully reported until years after the executive has left the organization.
“We do need much more timely information about this to hold people accountable,” he said.
I'm holding Marty accountable here.
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