Drake & Steinmetz given $100 million discretionary, unaccountable "blank check" investing authority in first months on the job
Ohio State donor JPMorgan and federal judges collude to feed innovation to cronies
Yesterday, Dr. Lakshmi Arunachalam filed a reply to JPMorgan in the Federal Circuit Court in Washington D.C. (the sole patent appeals court). She chronicles a sordid history of collusion between JPMorgan and the court's judges. She exposes the "legalized judicial piracy" underway in America by hiding judicial holdings in deep-pocketed infringers under mutual funds euphamistically named "safe harbor" blankets. JPMorgan's misconduct figures prominently in all three cases covered by this blog: (1) Leader Technologies' patents, (2) Dr. Arunachalam's patents and (3) the OSU Marching Band abuse. Given the kid-glove $13b treatment that JPMorgan just received from U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder for the bank's central role in the 2008 banking collapse, JPMorgan appears to run the U.S. justice system— rewarding hip-pocket judges with insider stock tips. Click here to read Dr. Arunachalam's filing (18.5 MB w/ Exhibits).
(Oct. 28, 2014)—On Aug. 29, 2014, four weeks after firing OSU Marching Band director Jon Waters on a Title IX pretext, the Ohio State trustees approved sweeping changes to OSU investment policy.
According to the 440 pages of meeting minutes (originally 50 MB; we compressed to 16 MB), the OSU trustees voted to give newly-installed President Michael V. Drake and newly-installed Provost Joseph A. Steinmetz broad authority to invest up to $100 million per investment. They also placed newly-installed trustee, Alex R. Fischer, on the finance committee along with trustee president Jeffrey Wadsworth, Fischer's boss from Battelle Memorial Institute.
Buried on page 436, the trustees approved investing in three indexes: 60% in Morgan Stanley’s MSCI index, 30% in Barclays’ U.S. Aggregate Bond index and 10% in the Consumer Price Index.
New, Oct. 29, 2014—AFI investigators reached out today to an experienced certified public accountant for an evaluation of the page 228 investing authority in Fig. 2 above. Click here for the CPA Opinion Letter.
Ironically, despite their concurrent lack of ethics in the Jon Waters affair, they got religion and promised “no conflicts of interest or perceptions of conflicts of interest when making investment decisions” (p. 229). They violated this pledge the moment they voiced it.
What is a conflict of interest?
A public official has a conflict if he could benefit personally by decisions favorable to one side or the other in the matter. In such circumstances, the right thing to do is to disclose the conflict and disqualify himself from that decision. This helps insure that the decision benefits those he serves, and not himself, his friends, family or close relationships.
Trustees approved investments in Wadsworth's McBee Strategic clients who are also OSU contractors
The OSU Trustees try to avoid telling the public about their crony investments by hiding behind “indexes.” Perhaps the biggest lie of the century is the notion that a public official can invest in a mutual fund that contains the stock he is interested in, and then avoid disclosing that holding when the company he is invested in comes before him in a public matter. If this were true, then the only conflicts that would have to be disclosed would be matters directly involving mutual funds. It is a silly notion that lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats have used to line their pockets with insider tips to grow rich while they are in office.
Closer analysis of the fund indexes reveals that the trustees approved all of McBee Strategic’s clients who are Ohio State contractors for investing. McBee Strategic is Jeffrey Wadsworth’s lobbying firm at Battelle Memorial Institute.
Any trustee who holds stock in any of the indexes funds approved had a duty to disclose that conflict and recuse himself from a decision in favor of that index.
The trustees conflicts of interest in selecting the Morgan Stanley and Barclay's indexes are many.
Wadsworth takes his orders from JPMorgan, Citigroup & Facebook
Chief among Wadsworth's cronies are JPMorgan, Citigroup and Facebook. These two banks are currently embroiled in a patent infringement battle with Internet pioneer, Dr. Lakshmi Arunachalam. Dr. Arunachalam is former director of network architecture for Sun Microsystems, and is a true pioneer of how web transactions work. She holds over a dozen patents, and yet she is experiencing massive collusion among JPMorgan, the judges in her case, and the Patent Office who, like Wadsworth, are "chummy" with JPMorgan and Facebook. Stay tune for more developments in this case of deep-pocketed bullying of true inventors.
JPMorgan was also one of Facebook's underwriters who funded mutual funds like Fidelity Contrafund who helped facilitate the theft of Michael McKibben and Leader Technologies' invention of social networking as well.
A financial interest is a financial interest, no matter how many mutual fund blankets you throw over the body
The OSU trustees approved investments in the following McBee Strategic / Wadsworth clients: Facebook, Google, Alcoa, Boeing, Eastman Chemical, Fedex, Duke Energy, General Dynamics, General Electric, Honeywell, JPMorgan, Oracle, Praxair, Time Warner and WellPoint. However, from a conflict of interest perspective, Wadsworth had an affirmative duty to recuse himself from these decisions. Instead, he led the way.
WellPoint, Inc., a donor to Betty Montgomery's 2006 campaign, and Woodrow A. Myers' company (a Michael V. Drake crony from Stanford), is the 5th largest investment in one of the funds (SPDR Barclays Aggregate Bond ETF). Drake had a duty to disclose this conflict and recuse himself. There is no record he did. Neither did Drake disqualify Betty Montgomery from being involved with the ongoing investigations/fishing expeditions involving the band.
The trustees also approved investments in Smuckers, even though Smuckers' CEO, Timothy P. Smucker, serves as a trustee. At a minimum, Smucker should have recused himself from any decisions involving the two key indexes in which his stock is listed. There is no record that he disclosed the conflict.
The trustees approved a TIAA-CREF fund chaired by Howell E. Jackson. Jackson is a former Harvard Law vice dean, former consultant to the IMF and World Bank, and long-time colleague of Lawrence "Larry" Summers, President Obama's 2008 bailout director who fed over $33 billion to his Facebook underwriter cronies, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Summers was also the former Harvard president when Mark Zuckerberg attended and was fed the Michael McKibben/Leader Technologies' programming code needed to start Facebook. (Michael McKibben's son, Max, also attended Harvard and is now a surgeon at UNC.) Summers is also a former Treasury Secretary who recently was overwhelmingly opposed by his economist colleagues to head the Federal Reserve.
Witches' Brew of Mutual Funds
Tellingly, almost no Yale Law and no Ohio State Law graduates are involved in the Facebook Cartel. The Cartel is overwhelmingly comprised of unscrupulous Harvard Law graduates who are colluding with Wall Street in the formation of these witches' brew mutual funds.
Wadsworth's crony colleges and medical centers to get OSU investments
The trustees also approved investments in Stanford University, University of California, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, George Washington University, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic—all known members of the Facebook Cartel. Those OSU trustees and officers who have worked at any of these schools should have disqualified themselves because their friends and colleagues would benefit personally from decisions favorable to any of their cronies.
The trustees also approved investments in approximately 30 companies with known direct affiliations with the Facebook Cartel, not counting the mainstream media, where they approved investments in CBS, NBC, ABC, Comcast, Walt Disney and Fox. Any trustee who has personal holdings in any of these companies had a duty to disclose and recuse, but there is no record they did.
Wadsworth and cronies are lining their pockets with insider OSU deals
Jeffrey Wadsworth took two bites at the conflicts of interest apple. (1) He arranged OSU contracts for his McBee Strategic lobbyist, and then (2) he arranged for these same cronies to be approved to receive Ohio State investing dollars—up to $100 million, at practically the sole discretion of Michael V. Drake and Joseph A. Steinmetz, whom he had maneuvered into place following the Waters firing.
The OSU Trustees are running a racket to benefit their cronies, not the people of Ohio
Conflict #1: Michael V. Drake—Newly-installed president Michael V. Drake failed to disclose his financial holdings in his Sep. 29, 2004 financial disclosure filed with the Ohio Ethics Commission. He gave his broker’s name instead. In so doing, Drake has seriously violated Ohio ethics laws and has thwarted the ability of the public to hold him accountable for his financial decisions.
Drake did not submit this disclosure until AFTER the Aug. 29, 2014 trustee vote. The devil will be in the details of his undisclosed investments. Inquiries into this lack of disclosure should be made to the Ohio Ethics Commission. Knowledge of Drakes's financial holdings are especially critical since he was give co-signing authority with provost Joseph A. Steinmetz up to $100 million of OSU public funds
Conflict #2: Joseph A. Steinmetz—Newly-installed provost Joseph A. Steinmetz does not make his financial holdings public, but given the conflicts discovered among his cronies, we can surmise that his conflicts are legion too. Steinmetz also failed to disclose his close association with M.O.O.C. (Massive Open Online Course) vendors, including Google and Oracle, whom he has been promoting.
Also, Steinmetz was given co-signing authority with Michael V. Drake over up to $100 million in university investments (public funds), yet has failed to disclose his personal financial holdings for public scrutiny.
Conflict #3: Alex R. Fischer—Newly-installed trustee Alex R. Fischer failed to disclose his holdings of McBee Strategic’s clients, failed to recuse himself from the MSCI and Barclays decisions given his holdings in many of those companies, while he simultaneously approved for OSU to invest in companies in which he holds numerous interests. See previous post.
Fischer and his wife, Ohio civil rights commissioner, Lori Barreras, disclosed that they are invested in numerous companies that the trustees just approved for OSU investing. Therefore, any decision to invest funds in those companies will benefit Fischer and Barreras personally.
OSU has given sweeping powers to these schemers
OSU football coach Urban Meyer does not just hand the reins of his football team to a new quarterback and expect him to perform well. Leadership takes time and trust from one's teammates and coaches. By contrast, these newly-installed OSU "leaders" are fumbling and stumbling, or so it seems.
They are either very stupid, or very sneaky. We don't think it is the former. We believe they have one goal: to get OSU's digital pipelines plugged in to their Silicon Valley and Wall Street cronies in order to gather Ohio voter data, and suck OSU ideas out to their favored companies (just look at the list). OSU generates a a plethora of ideas in healthcare, research and student interaction.
A global progressive agenda is afoot. It'll be good for you, Did you get the memo?
In our opinion, Wadsworth, Drake and Steinmetz only care about their personal finances and achieving control of Ohio State's digital infrastructure in student interaction and research as good foot soldiers for the Cartel. They don't care about Ohio State's storied traditions. The band is expendable. Propriety is old fashion. Decency is passe. Nothing matters except achieving their goal by the time the Obama Administration is out of power. With control of those pipelines, they'll be in control forever.
Prudence left the building at Ohio State. Since when is it OK for trustees and officers, much less newbies, to be given sole authority to spend $100 million per investment on their signature? Experience with the Obama energy stimulus handouts has already shown where these funds will go: to political hacks.
OSU's current trustee who are trying to seize control of OSU's cash, are the same people who fired one of OSU's more successful employees—OSU Marching Band Director Jon Waters.
In Waters' lawsuit, these are the same trustees who dug out a lampooning student calendars from Waters' desk drawer and are misrepresenting it in salacious terms. At the same time, they are performing back flips to make a flimsy case for “at will” employment technicalities—after that is, they cashed the $30 million check that Waters generated for the university in the Apple i-Pad commercial. Unprecedented funds for a university music program.
No, the OSU trustee dog doesn’t hunt.
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Read more about the storied history and tradition of the OSU Marching Band on Wikipedia.
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