A New York woman who lives in a 34-room, 30,000-square-foot mansion is facing a federal criminal charge related to her employment of an illegal alien who allegedly served as a domestic servant in a “forced labor situation” that included her working 17-hour days, seven days a week, and sleeping in a walk-in closet. Acting on a tip received by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, federal immigration agents last year removed the servant from the 12-acre estate (pictured below) on the Mohawk River in Rexford, a hamlet 20 miles north of Albany.
A subsequent criminal investigation determined that the woman—who barely spoke English and came from the Kerala state in India—was paid about 85 cents an hour during the 67 months she worked for Annie George and her husband (who died in a plane crash in mid-2009).
The servant, identified only as “V.M.” in a court filing, cooked for the George family, cleaned the sprawling mansion, and cared for the couple’s five children.
The George estate has a helicopter pad, an indoor swimming pool, 15 fireplaces, Scandinavian marble flooring, a four-story solarium, 24-karat gold gilded ceilings, a glass elevator, and an array of other features. Before his death, George’s husband listed the residence for sale at $30 million.
According to a criminal complaint filed Monday against Annie George, 39, the servant entered the U.S. on a non immigrant visa in 1998 to work for the family of a United Nations employee. She began working for the Georges in late-2005 after being offered about $1000 per month, a substantial pay increase.
In reality, “V.M” received sporadic minimal payments from the Georges. A U.S. District Court complaint estimates that the servant received about $29,000 over the five-and-a-half years she worked for the family. A U.S. Department of Labor investigation determined that the woman was “lawfully entitled” to a minimum of “approximately $206,000 for the entire approximate six years of V.M.’s work.”
The servant told federal agents that she received no personal or sick time while employed by the Georges, nor was she afforded any dental or medical treatment. She had to sleep in a closet in a bedroom shared by the family’s three daughters, the complaint alleges, because “Annie George required that V.M. be near the children at night.”
Investigators charge that after “V.M.” was removed last year from the mansion (which can be seen in this aerial photo), George spoke three times with the woman’s son in India. During one telephone call, George suggested that the “son tell his mother to tell authorities that she was a relative of George’s family and was only staying at George’s house as a guest.”
During the conversation, which the son recorded, George warned, “if she says anything about working, it would become a big crime. They’ll start adding up all the taxes and everything, for all the time.”
Charged with encouraging and inducing an illegal alien to reside in the U.S., George appeared yesterday afternoon before a federal magistrate, who released her without bond.
Well, fuck this.
Private companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighbourhoods and even detaining suspects under a radical privatisation plan being put forward by two of the largest police forces in the country.
West Midlands and Surrey have invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police.
The contract is the largest on police privatisation so far, with a potential value of £1.5bn over seven years, rising to a possible £3.5bn depending on how many other forces get involved.
This scale dwarfs the recent £200m contract between Lincolnshire police and G4S, under which half the force’s civilian staff are to join the private security company, which will also build and run a police station for the first time.
The home secretary, Theresa May, who has imposed a 20% cut in Whitehall grants on forces, has said frontline policing can be protected by using the private sector to transform services provided to the public, but this is the first clear indication of what that will mean in practice. May said on Thursday that she hoped the “business partnership” programme would be in place next spring.
A 26-page “commercial in confidence” contract note seen by the Guardian has been sent to potential bidders to run all services that “can be legally delegated to the private sector”. They do not include those that involve the power of arrest and the other duties of a sworn constable.
Companies who have applied through the Bluelight emergency services e-tendering website have been invited to a “bidders’ conference” on 14 March, with an anticipated contract start date of next February.
The timetable for the programme means it will be subject to final sign-off by the first police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands after their election in November. The existing police authority only gave the go-ahead for the tendering stage last month after a “robust and forthright discussion” which ended with a rare 11-5 split vote.
The joint West Midlands/Surrey “transformation” programme, which has strong backing from the Home Office, looks set to completely redraw the accepted boundaries between public and private and the definition of frontline and back-office policing.
The programme has the potential to become the main vehicle for outsourcing police services in England and Wales. It has been pioneered by the West Midlands chief constable, Chris Sims, and Mark Rowley, who has just moved to the Metropolitan police from the post of Surrey chief constable. The pair lead on these matters for the Association of Chief Police Officers.
The breathtaking list of policing activities up for grabs includes investigating crimes, detaining suspects, developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public, as well as more traditional back-office functions, such as managing forensics, providing legal services, managing the vehicle fleet, finance and human resources.
A West Midlands police authority spokesman said: “Combining with the business sector is aimed at totally transforming the way the force currently does business – improving the service provided to the public.
“The areas of service listed in this notice are deliberately broad to allow the force to explore the skills, expertise and solutions a partnership could bring.” He said not all the activities listed would necessarily be included in the final scope of the contract, but if the force added other activities later a “new and costly procurement exercise” would be needed.
The contract notice does state that “bidders should note that not all these activities will necessarily be included in the final scope, and that each police force will select some activities from these areas where they see the best opportunities for transformation”. But the police clearly want to test whether it is possible for new areas of policing to be provided by private companies.
The contract is being offered in two lots, one covering custody services and the second all other services. It envisages that only one company will be awarded the main contract, although a second may run custody services separately.
The West Midlands police are already planning to cut 2,764 police jobs over the next three years and this privatisation programme is not designed to meet the immediate budget gaps. The savings are expected to show after 2014.
Ben Priestley, Unison’s national office for police and justice, which covers many police civilian staff, said it was alarmed by the programme: “Bringing the private sector into policing is a dangerous experiment with local safety and taxpayers’ money,” he said. “We are urging police authorities not to fall into the trap of thinking the private sector is the answer to the coalition’s cuts. The fact that the Home Office is refusing to publish its business case – even under FOI [the Freedom of Information Act] – speaks for itself.
“Privatisation means that the police will be less accountable to the public. And people will no longer be able to go to the Independent Police Complaints Commission if they have a problem. When a critical incident happens, a force’s ability to respond will be severely compromised. The only winners are private companies and shareholders who make profits at the expense of local services.”
A number of other forces, including Cleveland, Avon and Somerset, and Cheshire, have been exploring the services that might be offered to the private sector, albeit on a smaller scale.
Cleveland police have a 10-year contract with IT firm Steria to provide call handling, front desk staffing, and aspects of the criminal justice system on top of computer services, finance and training. Reliance security runs Cleveland’s custody suites.
Avon and Somerset had a contract with IBM, called South West One, which suffered problems in its first three years. Some services are to be taken back in-house. Cheshire has a more traditional contract with Capgemini to provide finance, facilities and fleet management.
There is not expected to be any shortage of bidders. When Lincolnshire put its then groundbreaking contract out to tender last March, 12 companies responded with submissions.
And so the inevitable capitalist juggernaut seeking out new markets takes another casualty, with this one bringing us one step closer to terrible cyberpunk action films. All joking aside, this is incredibly worrying and will no doubt open new avenues for police abuse of their powers, as seen with the private seurity companies in the US.
A Sky News investigation has revealed claims that thousands of government workers are being promised payment to fraudulently cast multiple votes for Vladimir Putin in Russia’s presidential election.
Russia is only two days away from deciding who will become the country’s next president, with Mr Putin set to win in a vote that his critics say will be massively rigged.
‘Vadim’ asked Sky News to hide his identity because he fears the consequences of speaking out over what he claims is vote-rigging on a mass scale.
He said that orders came from above to get 25% of Moscow’s 200,000 utility sector workers to falsely obtain five votes per person.
In return they would receive 200 each. The end result would be quarter of a million fraudulent votes for Mr Putin.
‘Since every polling station in Moscow will have several observers, it has become clear to the authorities that old schemes like bussing people around won’t work any more,’ he said.
‘This new scheme involves a bigger number of people than before, split into small teams of five.’
He showed Sky News a list of names and numbers of those who are signed up to the fraudulent scheme.
Each worker on it was told to register at five different polling stations using absentee forms, he said.
Legitimately they are designed for re-registering people who, for work reasons, cannot vote in their home polling station - of which, Vadim said, in his company there are none.
He said a climate of fear means people are generally accepting this order: ‘People are driven by general fear and worry for their jobs. They are put under pressure.
‘Some, of course, are just happy to take the money but in my unit, of 30 people who signed up, only two would have actually voted for Putin.’
Opposition group Solidarity claims to have secretly filmed a woman attempting to buy absentee forms which they say have become hot property because they allow people to cast more than one vote.
Mr Putin has pre-empted such opposition claims of vote-rigging, saying: ‘Our opponents are getting ready to use certain mechanisms that would prove that the election has been falsified. They will stuff the ballot boxes themselves, observe this and then report on it.’
Outwardly, it has been a very low-profile campaign for Mr Putin. Billboards in central Moscow do not even show his face.
But there is a broad sense among his critics that while things are muted on the surface, underneath there is a hidden campaign that has never been more aggressive.
Independent monitoring website Golos has already recorded hundreds of reports of corrupt vote schemes, similar to the one Vadim alleges, from across Russia.
Some analysts argue that this election will be fraudulent on an unprecedented scale.
‘Everybody says among the civic centres, pollsters, among the analysts that this election will be much more rigged than the previous one,’ said political analyst Lilia Shevtsova.
‘This election means the destiny, the future for Putin so they will do everything - they will use all the gimmicks, all the tricks, all the pressure - all the administrative resource, bribery and corruption in order to get through the first round.’
Twenty thousand volunteers have been drafted and trained by the opposition to curb what is widely seen as inevitable fraud.
Scrutiny of this vote will be more intense than ever before.
lol bourgeois democracy.
pow pow POOOOWWWWWW
seriously
When people are like “Wealthy people EARNED their money!” I’m just like “Do you really think a CEO works 100 times harder than their janitor?” If hard work made you rich, everyone working three part-time jobs would be doing GREAT. But they’re not. Capitalism fail. -Jess
One of the world’s largest ever strikes began at midnight on Monday 27th Feb and will end at midnight tonight. Up to 100,000,000 Indian workers from different sectors and industries are calling for a national minimum wage, permanent jobs, and much more.
a-dream-deferred-goes-to-harlem:
because it does nothing but irritate the hell out of me. Not his speeches, mind you, but the way history has set him up against MLK as if they were two men working for different ends.
I hate what history has done to MLK, taking the fire out of him, reducing him to a single speech, a single sappy story of a man who never grew angry (false), never lost his temper (fucking false), a paragon of “give me my right’s y’all, please?” virtue. Something that is just, disgusting in that it’s drawing a picture of the man as if it were a whole, when it’s only parts of that whole. MLK, from the books I’ve read, rarely let his anger show in public…but to look into his eyes, in his mugshot, and believe he wasn’t furious, is borderline absurd.
Then, Malcolm X. I cannot stand to hear the majority of white people talk about him. They speak as if he’s evil, as if he were a man who would slit their throats in their sleep, and I’m always sitting there, glowering seconds before I lay into them, wondering, “Have any of you ever read his speeches? Have you ever read the multiple biographies written on him? Alex Haley has a damned good one. Have you ever investigated beyond what you’ve been told?”
And the answer is always a thunderous silence.
It’s no accident that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X have been set up as dueling dichotomies, because if MLK scared white people, if he got other Blacks to shame whites into admitting, “okay, maybe we were kinda sorta wrong”, then Malcolm X was terrifying. Here he was saying, “I’m going to give you a chance to do this Martin’s way. I’m going to give you a chance to do what you know is right, but know that we are not asking to be removed from second-tier citizenship, we are demanding it. We are demanding equal treatment. We are demanding that we be given all the rights promised to everyone in this country, and if you do not comply, well, essentially, we’re gonna set this motherfucking place on fire.”
And I cannot fault him for that.
It always kills me, that when I hear white people talk about Malcolm, they think he should have come bearing doves, waving white flags, with a peace symbol pinned to his lapel. But why? It is the height of fucking arrogance to think that a people who have been beaten, shamed, degraded, enslaved, given vastly fewer opportunities, hanged from trees, prevented from voting, and told that this was the lot of their race, should ask for rights. Should come timidly to beseech those in power for just treatment.
So, they set MLK up as the standard to which all blacks should set their eyes upon, and cast Malcolm X to the wolves. It’s amazing the difference in opinion when white people are asked about Malcolm X, and when black people are asked. Malcolm X is still a threat. He was a man, who went from the prisons, to being one of the spoke persons of a people. He was a man who was self-educated, and he would make, and does make, one hell of a role model. If you can point to black youth and say, “look, it’s not the end of your life. People make mistakes, and they turn it all around,” and then point to Malcolm X? That’s terrifying.
He recognized the injustices of the system the more he taught himself, and if too many black people begin to see how the system is working against them, no, the vast majority of us know how the system is set up to make us fail, but if they can begin to see how, and not that it just is, then it becomes something that can be dismantled, and the more that we begin to learn, the angrier we become.
And angry people don’t ask, they say, “You can give it to me now, or I can come and take it.” I’m sorry, but I’m with Malcolm. I’m not going to let you humiliate me, and beat me, and then kindly ask you, while you are steady raining blows down upon my head, to “please, stop hitting me.” Yeah. No.
If you hit me, I’m knocking you ass clean out.
