Social Security Judges Not Deciding Cases Correctly

Social Security Disability Program Abuses Cited In Senate Committee Report

by London Steverson on Friday, September 14, 2012 at 9:04pm ·

Senator Tom Coburn, (R-Okla.)

A subcommittee headed by ranking minority member Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., reported findings today on improving benefit award decisions for Social Security disability programs.Decisions by ALJs in Social Security disability appeals are riddled with errors and signs of sloppy judgment, according to the report from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee on investigations.
More than a quarter of the decisions reviewed by the committee were based on insufficient and often contradictory evidence, according to the report, a finding that is consistent with the Social Security Administration's own internal reviews.
“In May 2007, Commissioner Michael Astrue told Congress he would end the growing wait time for an ALJ hearing,” Coburn said. “To reduce this wait time the agency encouraged judges, where appropriate, to consider skipping hearings and write decisions ‘on the record.’ 
"I think you could flip a coin for anybody who came before the Social Security commission for disability and get it right just as often as the ALJs (administrative law judges) do," Coburn said.
Coburn said he personally reviewed about 100 of the cases, drawn randomly from counties in Virginia, Alabama and Oklahoma. About 75 percent should not have been approved for benefits, Coburn said. The Oklahoma Republican is a practicing physician.
 “One judge we encountered in our investigation played a big role in this effort,” Coburn said. “Between 2007 and 2009, ALJ Howard O’Bryan, from the Oklahoma City office, single-handedly decided 5,401 cases — almost all of them on the record and without a hearing. His decision rate was nearly four times faster than the average judge’s.  In terms of cost, Judge Howard O’Bryan alone awarded an estimated $1.62 billion in lifetime benefits to claimants in just three years.

 “I was at first astounded that one person could decide 1,800 cases per year – especially since each case is

nearly 500 pages long.  On average, he decided five cases per day, 365 days per year. I soon learned, though, that he could move through them so quickly because the quality of his work left so much to be desired.”

Coburn said the Oklahoma judge cut and pasted electronic images of medical evidence into his findings. There were contradictory opinions and findings in the cases, so much so that the agency asked Judge O’Bryan to improve his decision writing.

“But, instead of reducing his caseload to a manageable level, the agency began shipping him cases from around the nation,” Coburn said. “He told us that at one point he was asked to do 500 cases just from Little Rock, Arkansas — an average judge’s caseload for the an entire year. When he finished those, he was sent cases from Atlanta, Houston, Greenville, Des Moines and Yakima, Washington.
One 87-year-old judge in Oklahoma City, who averaged about 1,800 disability cases per year between 2007 and 2009, approved between 90 and 100 percent of them annually.
Another judge awarded disability benefits after a hearing that lasted only three minutes.
Among the recommendations in the report is that the Social Security Administration have a representative at appeals hearings to ensure evidence indicating a claimant is not disabled is presented.
The subcommittee questioned top ALJs from the Social Security Administration's disability office during a hearing on 13 September 2012.
(Read the full story in http://www.amazon.com/socialNsecurity-Confessions-Social-Security-Judge/dp/1449569757)

The report was prepared by Republicans on the subcommittee. However, its factual findings are supported by subcommittee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who did not sign on because of concerns about some of the recommendations, according to a Levin aide.

FINDINGS OF FACT:
A subcommittee headed by ranking minority member Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., reported findings today on improving benefit award decisions for Social Security disability programs.
Based upon its review of the 300 disability case files, the report finds:
 •Low Quality Decisions.  The investigation’s review of 300 disability case files found more than a quarter of agency decisions failed to properly address insufficient, contradictory, or incomplete evidence.  This corroborates a 2011 internal review.
• Insufficient and Contradictory Medical Evidence.  In many cases, at the initial and appellate levels of review, the state-based Disability Determination Services examiners and SSA Administrative Law Judges  issued decisions approving disability benefits without citing adequate, objective medical evidence to support the finding or at times without explaining contradictory evidence. 
 • Poor Hearing Practices.  There were perfunctory hearings lasting less than 10 minutes, misused testimony provided by vocational or medical experts, and a failure to elicit testimony to resolve conflicting information.
• Late Evidence.   Some case files showed disability applicants submitted medical evidence immediately before or on the day of a hearing or after the hearing’s conclusion. 
• Inconsistent Use of Consultative Examinations.  In many cases, consultative examinations submitted on behalf of either SSA or a claimant were either summarily dismissed or heavily relied upon, with little to no explanation.
 • Misuse of Medical Listings.  In many case files, opinions failed to demonstrate how a claimant met each of the required criteria in the SSA’s Medical Listing of Impairments to qualify under “Step Three” in the application process. Awards at Step Three are determined to be severe enough to qualify an applicant for benefits. 
• Reliance on Medical-Vocational Guidelines.  The majority of disability awards reviewed by the Subcommittee  utilized SSA medical-vocational grid rules.  A recent SSA analysis found that benefit awards were made under these grid rules at a rate of 4 to 1, compared to awards made due to a claimant’s meeting a medical listing.  At times, decisions resulted from a claimant’s representative and the Administrative Law Judge negotiating an award of benefits by changing the disability onset date to the claimant’s 50th or 55th birthday. 
• Outdated Job List.  Some case files showed examiners and ALJs relied on the Department of Labor’s outdated Dictionary of Occupational Titles, to identify jobs open to claimants with limited disabilities.  The last major  revision to the DOT occurred in 1977.

RECOMMENDATIONS:
The report makes the following recommendations: 
• Require Government Representative at Administrative Law Judge Hearings. Including a government representative at the ALJ Level is a recommendation of the Association of Administrative Law Judges and the Social Security Advisory Board. Congress should designate funds for such a program. 
• Strengthen Quality Review Process.  The review process initiated by the Quality Division of the Office of Appellate Operations should be expanded and strengthened by conducting more reviews and developing metrics to measure the quality of disability decisions, and the information made available to Congress.
• Close the Evidentiary Record. To eliminate confusion, inefficiencies, and abuses, the evidentiary record should close one week prior to a hearing, with exceptions allowed only for significant new evidence.
• Strengthen Use of Medical Listings.  Provide additional training to ALJs on the use of SSA Medical Listings, and direct ALJ decisions to identify how a claimant meets each required element of a listing, citing objective medical evidence.
 • Expedite Updated Job List.  Move more quickly to ensure the Occupational Information System can serve as a usable replacement for the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to identify jobs that claimants with limited disabilities can perform in the national economy.  
 • Focused Training for ALJs.  The Office of Appellate Operations, Quality Division, should provide training to all ALJs regarding adequate articulation in opinions of determinations that involve obesity and drug and alcohol abuse.
• Strengthen Consultative Examinations.  Because many disability claimants do not have sufficient funds to obtain detailed medical evidence of their conditions, SSA should determine how to improve the usefulness of agency-funded Consultative Examinations, including requiring an explanation of any significant disparity.
 • Reform the Medical-Vocational Guidelines.  The medical-vocational guidelines should be reviewed to determine if reforms are needed.

Webster Smith's Attorney Could Replace Attorney General Eric Holder

Ronald C. Machen, Appellate Defense Attorney for former Coast Guard Academy Cadet Webster Smith.

Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has never run for public office. Many successful politicians have started careers doing just what he has done. His aggressiveness as U.S. Attorney for the District has ousted two city council members from city hall and has turned up the heat on anyone within reach of the tainted money that floated around Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s successful mayoral campaign in 2010. Rudolf Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney in New York. After he had successfully prosecuted a number of high-profile Mafia cases and cases against Wall Street financiers, he ran for Mayor of New York. He went on to serve two terms.
The career of Attorney Machen could rise or fall with the fortunes of President Obama. Some new presidents retain a batch of U.S. attorneys but the coveted appointments typically are dictated by the winds of national politics.
Voters who decide in November whether to re-elect President Obama or replace him with Republican challenger Mitt Romney also might determine the fate of the most powerful man in D.C. politics.

Former Coast Guard Cadet, Webster Smith, the first USCG cadet ever to be court-martialed.

Machen is no stranger to high profile cases, and he has taken his share to the U.S. Supreme Court. He represented former Coast Guard Academy cadet, Webster Smith in his efforts to overturn his 2006 court-martial conviction.
(https://www.amazon.com/author/cgachall.blogspot.com)
The Webster Smith Story is an American tragedy.  It is not just the story of a Black Coast Guard Academy cadet; it is the story of an American family.
To his classmates, teachers, and coaches at the Coast Guard Academy Webster Smith appeared to be a magnetic, charming and gifted man, who had risen above his circumstances. Yet, in a moment, as if in the twinkling of an eye, a swift series of events diminished his popularity, vilified his name, and assailed his honor. His image was converted by senior Coast Guard officers from a popular athlete and nice guy to that of a sexual predator and public enemy number one at the Coast Guard Academy.
The Webster Smith case was a litmus test for justice in America. Every once in a while a case comes along that puts our humanity as a people on trial. Everything that we profess to stand for as Americans was on trial.
“The expectation is if Gov. Romney becomes President Romney, he’ll replace all the U.S. attorneys. Because that’s what presidents do,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor and former prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Conversely, analysts say, Mr. Machen, whom Mr. Obama tapped to lead the District’s office in December 2009, is on the shortlist of federal prosecutors qualified for a promotion to the upper echelons of the Justice Department if the president wins a second term and reorganizes his top law enforcement offices. Machen could even replace Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. who was sworn in as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States on February 3, 2009 by Vice President Joe Biden.
Mr. Machen, a former partner at the WilmerHale law firm who played football at Stanford University, leads the largest of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices in the nation and its territories. Because of the District’s quasi-federal status, the office has an annual operating budget of about $70 million and roughly 300 assistant attorneys equipped to handle both federal crimes and local prosecutions that normally would fall to a state- or county-level district attorney, office spokesman Matt Jones said.
Mr. Jones, who declined to discuss potential post-election changes, said more than half of the office’s assistant U.S. attorneys are assigned to local prosecutions.
U.S. attorneys are given wide latitude in the types of cases they prosecute, and the dual caseload affords the top D.C. prosecutor a broad spectrum of cases to pursue. During the George W. Bush administration, U.S. Attorney Roscoe C. Howard Jr. said he wanted to “beef up” the District Court side of the District’s office to attract higher-profile cases, including terrorism cases and cases with international effect, in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
During the current administration, Mr. Machen’s office has taken on a range of high-profile matters, such as the unsuccessful prosecution of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens on charges that he lied to Congress and the convictions of five D.C. men involved a series of shootings in 2010 that killed five city youths, including three teenagers on South Capitol Street.
Mr. Machen quickly made local corruption a top priority after a trickle of scandal from city hall tarnished the local government’s reputation and prompted oversight hearings and sweeping reforms. The well-worn path from the John A. Wilson Building to the U.S. District Courthouse may have stained city politics, but Mr. Machen’s crew has rewritten the narrative on how federal prosecutors handle local corruption in the nation’s capital.
“This is not a city in which we’ve had effective and aggressive public-corruption prosecutions in the past,” Mr. Butler said, citing prosecutors’ inability to obtain verdicts on many of the charges that resulted from “mayor for life” Marion Barry’s high-profile drug arrest in 1990.
Although the top prosecutor sets the tone for the office, analysts say, it is unlikely that a new president – a Republican in this instance if Mr. Romney wins – would select a U.S. attorney who wants to quash investigations into majority-Democratic city officials and their associates. It is typically the line assistants – career assistant attorneys who are not political appointees – who do the heavy lifting in each investigation.
“There’s so much momentum from the work being done at the line attorney level,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. “That’s why the politics are not always partisan in that respect. Is it worth exerting yourself to stop the already moving boulder?”
Mr. Machen’s office is eight for eight in securing guilty pleas from city politicians and their associates in the city’s highest-profile corruption cases since the start of the year. After a civil case by D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, the prosecutor’s office charged council member Harry Thomas Jr., Ward 5 Democrat, in January with stealing public funds intended for youth sports programs. Thomas resigned his council seat and is serving a three-year prison term.
Six months later, Mr. Machen’s office took down council Chairman Kwame R. Brown on felony bank fraud and misdemeanor campaign finance charges, but a long-running probe into financial irregularities during the 2010 Gray campaign has yet to reach its zenith.
While many D.C. politicians frequently took a wait-and-see approach to their colleagues’ legal troubles, Mr. Machen and FBI investigators lambasted the ousted leaders’ “sense of entitlement.”

No Jobs For Old People Part II

Richard Eggers is a 68 years old resident of Des Moines, Iowa. He was fired in July 2012 from his job as a customer service representative at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage because of an incident that occurred in 1963, over 50 years ago, according to the Des Moines Register. He put a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine. He admits it was a stupid stunt, but he cannot believe that he was fired because of it 50 years later. Big banks have been firing older low-level employees like Eggers since new federal banking employment guidelines were enacted in May 2011 and new mortgage employment guidelines took hold in February, it was reported in the Des Moines Register.

The tougher standards are meant to clear out older executives and mid-level bank employees and anyone guilty of transactional crimes — such as identity theft and money laundering — but are being applied across the board against older employees.

Wells Fargo confirmed Eggers’ termination. “The expectations that have been placed on us and all financial institutions have never been higher,” said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Angela Kaipust.

Banks have fired thousands of workers nationally, said Natasha Buchanan, an attorney in Santa Ana, Calif., who has helped some of the workers regain their eligibility to be employed.

There is no government or industry data on the number of older bank workers fired due to criminal background checks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. provides a waiver process employees can follow to show they’re still fit to work at a bank despite a past criminal conviction, but it usually takes six months to a year to be approved. There is also a process for automatic waiver that works more quickly but is limited to people who were sentenced to less than year of jail time and never spent a day locked up. Eggers was jailed two days. Sadly, he doesn’t qualify. So he joins the ranks of the older unemployed who may never find another job.

America is fast becoming a land where there are no jobs for old people. Government employees from the Senior Executive Service to the lowliest General Service employee, along with Fortune 500 middle management executives, and super lawyers from multi-national law firms are being shown the door. America has more lawyers per capita than any other country in the world. Americans love to sue each other.

 In the most litigation-happy country in the world, lawyers are being fired. Today’s recession is not like the recession of the 1930′s. Typically when the economy goes down, lawsuit filings go up, according to a former super lawyer who was let go from a prominent law firm. The only kind of legal filings that have gone up in this economy are bankruptcy cases. When the housing bubble bursted, the number of people filing for bankruptcy went through the roof. Lawsuit filings in general have gone down.

President Richard Nixon had his Enemies List. President George Bush had his Wanted List. President Barack Obama has his Kill List; and Linda de Soto has her “Hit List“. Lisa De Soto is the Deputy Commissioner for SSA/ODAR, the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability and Adjudication Review. Deputy Commissioner Linda de Soto and Chief Administrative Law Judge Frank Cristaudo fabricated bogus charges against Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) and forced many into early retirement.

 Former Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue, who took office in 2007, like every Commissioner before him tried his own brand of reform. He made changes to the Social Security Operating System.

Trying to reduce the Backlog, he tinkered with the personnel system. Mostly, he went after the ALJs. He blamed the ALJs for everything. He was a "blame the Judges first" man.

His reforms produced minor and temporary results. The Backlog was reduced for a moment in time. His programs to increase accountability and judicial turnover were a disaster.He removed good experienced ALJs and replaced them with new, inexperienced and easily manipulated ALJ recruits who could be told how to decide cases.

 He had a formula for how many claimants should be granted benefits and how many should be denied. The new ALJs lack proper judicial temperament, and that is what Astrue was after.
He wanted to take away the judicial independence of the judges. It was a numbers game, and a highly volume business.

Along with Linda de Soto he marked every ALJ with 15 to 20 years experience on the job for removal. Experienced and senior male judges were forced to retire so that less experienced militant female judges could be installed as Chief ALJ in the Hearing Offices. This was most prevalent in California, in the SSA's Ninth Region.

Linda DeSoto proudly bragged about the number of judges on her "Hit List" that she had to get rid of. At any one time there were 25 or more judges on her Hit List.

Judges were ordered to retire or resign. Any who refused were brought up on charges. The charges were flimsy and ridiculous; such as, receiving personal mail and magazines at the Office, using the OHA Office address on their official business cards (that were designed, ordered, and printed by the SSA Agency), storing pictures deemed inappropriate on their personal computers (pc), looking at inappropriate web sites during office or after hours, writing letters on obsolete stationary with SSA letterheads, and using their titles (U. S. Administrative Law Judge) when signing personal letters. Judges' offices were searched on weekends when they were not present. Their phones conversations were monitored. Their privacy was invaded. Their computers were seized without notice or warning. Some judges went to lunch and came back to the office to find their computers had been taken by Astrue's henchmen. They were locked out of their personal offices. The locks to the main SSA work place were changed and ALJs were given the new office key. Moreover, if any cases went to NLRB Hearings, the Agency suborned perjury, and disobeyed their own Agency Rules. Astrue's policies were a disaster. He demoralized the ALJ corps, and morale among the judges plummeted. As a result the administrative staff was confused and frustrated. This atmosphere caused efficiency to suffer and increased the Backlog.

 Up until about 1995 every person in America and its Territories and Possessions who filed for Social Security Disability Benefits (SSI and SSID) was granted benefits. All the winos, alcoholics and misfits with the slightest mental impairment were conclusive presumed to be incapable of engaging in Substantial Gainful Activity (SGA) and therefore were entitled to draw Social Security Benefits according to Social Security Regulations.
Those Regulations were contained in the Listings. All SSA Judges were duty bound and required to follow them. Many healthy people who were injured and could not work were denied benefits when the drunks and derelicts of American society were granted benefits. It bordered on a public scandal.
The Regulations they followed were known as the Medical Vocational Grids or simply The Listings. They were not always logical; like a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The Listings were designed by Social Security scholars.
For instance, the bar to benefits approval was and still is lower for someone who doesn’t speak English, on the theory that it is difficult to work in America when you cannot speak English.
These guidelines (in The Listings) also do not give due consideration to actual labor market experience, dictating a looser approval standard for someone with only a high-school degree, even if the person has succeeded in the labor force for decades.
The framework (of The Listings) was developed in the late 1950s, for the previous generation’s workforce, and hasn’t been updated since 1978.

According to a well placed source high in the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Administrative Law Judge, Lisa de Soto had stated that she had a list of 25 ALJs that she intended to get rid of. This was her “Hit List”. She set about her goal in a most vigorous manner.

A federal agency is required to follow its own regulations. This mean very little to Lisa de Soto and Frank Cristaudo. They have violated many SSA regulations concerning the discipline and removal of agency personnel.

 Cristaudo and de Soto have brought charges against judges. Chief Judge Cristaudo has testified at Federal Labor Relations Administrative hearings designed to censure or remove judges. None of the charges against any of the judges have alleged poor performance as a judge, or dereliction of duty. No substantive charges have been brought against any judges. Instead, judges have been charged with, among other things, receiving personal mail at the office, misuse of a government computer, and saving pictures on their computers of persons other than immediate family members.

Frank Cristaudo has made a career of destroying other peoples’ careers. He tried running for public office in New Jersey and could not get elected. Some how he managed to get appointed an administrative law judge at the Social Security Administration. He could not conduct a proper hearing so someone appointed him as the Chief Judge. Who better to appoint chief judge than someone who cannot conduct a hearing? It is better to put such a person in an administrative position. That way he does not have to go near a court room. But in a rat race, the biggest rat always manages to winnow his way to the top.

Linda de Soto’s career had not bottomed out before joining SSA. She was the Social Security Administration’s General Counsel. She is an experienced attorney who has held a number of senior management positions in the private and federal sector. She specialized in procurement, bilateral and multilateral negotiations, conflict resolution and organizational change. Most recently, she was the Country Director for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (AID) Office of Transition Initiatives in Nigeria. Before that, she served as the General Counsel of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and as Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Contract and Commodity Management for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) in Washington, D.C.

Not all judges are paid to judge. One-fifth of SSA’s judges do not hold hearings. That is one out of five judges who do not judge. Twenty percent of the judges on the SSA’s payroll do not conduct hearings. Some judges are allowed to carry a reduced work load. An an example, judges who are union representatives are not counted as full judges. They are counted as one fourth of a judge. If the average full-time judge is required to publish 60 decisions per month, then ALJs who are union representatives are only required to publish 12 to 15 decisions per month. All ALJs earn between $164,000.00 and $169,000.00 per year. That works out to roughly between $14,500.00 and $16,000.00 per month to decide 12 to 15 cases. That translates to loosely $1,250.00 per decision per month.

 Some of these judges, paralegals, and legal secretaries once took their comfortable life-styles for granted, but not anymore. All of that has changed, since Lisa de Soto and Judge Frank Cristaudo started forcing judges into retirement. All of this has occurred at the same time as the American economy has taken a steep downturn. Judges have lost homes and families.

Many judges, lawyers, paralegals, administrative staff workers are finding out what it is like to be without a job. Many for the first time in their lives cannot find any work. To make matters worse, most of them are old people. They are loosing their jobs, homes, cars, cell phones, health insurance, and middle-class life styles never to be regained. At their ages no one will hire them. Summer vacations and having dinner out have become distant memories.

Age makes it more difficult to find a job. People who did everything right professionally have reached old age and find themselves on the verge of destitution. Middle level managers and accountants can not get interviews at McDonald’s for a job as a cashier.

Long years of experience are no longer an asset. The job skills that older workers have acquired are no longer needed in today’s job market. Employers today are looking for younger workers without health problems and who know how to use the many word-processing programs used to produce legal documents and client letters.

You may not feel old, but Social Security Regulations define who is an old person. Because of a vigorous and healthy life style, you might feel much younger than you are. Your chronological age could be 55, and your friends might flatter you by saying 55 today is the new 45. However, government and business managers have regulations that tell them whether you are an old person. According to those regulations, if you are age 55 or older, then you are an old person. You will not be considered approaching retirement age until you are 62.

 Many Americans will not have a job after age 55. The American middle class has suffered a direct hit buy this recession. Social Security retirement benefits have become the number one retirement plan in America. Those under age 62 who are too young to collect retirement benefits are applying for Social Security Disability Benefits in record numbers.

The waiting time for a disability case to be decided may be as long as five years. In that period of time families have lost their homes, small business owners have lost their businesses, and ended up living on the streets using credit cards to buy food. Depression and anxiety are at an epidemic level.

The Obama Administration bailed out Wall Street, but not main street. Bankers and Wall Street traders are feeling no pain. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that he feels the pain of the older aged workers, who represent about 41 percent of the 12.8 million unemployed workers. Many of the chronic unemployed older people have given up and stopped looking for work. Their job skills have atrophied. Their business contacts have dried up. They have lost their homes and cannot afford descent apartments based on their Social Security Benefits and Food Stamp payments. As they struggle to survive on food stamps, credit cards and Social Security, without cars or cell phones, these older unemployed former middle-class workers are losing their dignity and some are even committing suicide.

Jane Durant is a 57 year old legal secretary at a large law firm in Pennsylvania. After spending 10 years at a smaller law firm, she took a job at a larger firm 11 years ago. In 2009 she was laid off when her law firm underwent a large reduction in force (RIF). Today she is still unemployed. She has exhausted her severance package, used up 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, and has been forced to dip into her retirement funds. She has cut back to one meal a day and has applied for food stamps. Her food stamp application was refused because she still had a small savings account. After 60 job interviews and no offers of even part-time work, she believes she is a victim of age discrimination.

 Claude Davis was a California attorney living the good life trading up in real estate, going from a smaller house to a larger one. He was riding the real estate bubble. He bought his last house for over a million dollars with no money down and no interest with an adjustable rate mortgage for the first five years. At the end of five years he would be facing a large balloon payment that would come due. This was not the first time he had purchased a home under these terms. As long as he was working he expected to be able to come up with the cash. He never expected to lose his job. He thought that legal jobs were recession proof. Then the unexpected happened. He was terminated. For a while he managed to get by doing small contracts and by dipping into his retirement funds. When the balloon mortgage payment came due, he was not able to make the payment. He lost his house and his middle class life style. He thinks he will never be able to get another legal job like his last one because he can no longer work the 12 to 14 hour days that are required to get ahead in most law firms. Younger more recent law school graduates are grabbing all the starting legal jobs. Claude Davis is 55 years old and he believes that he also is a victim of age discrimination.

Their misfortune has broader consequences for society as a whole as well as for America’s standing in the world. These former lawyers, administrative law judges, paralegals, corporate executives, and small business owners who are struggling to survive in this hostile economy may be the canaries in the coal mine for America. Their social and economic conditions will have broader and more far-reaching consequences for America and could signal that we are slipping into a welfare society and a less prestigious nation.

In our weakening, job-starved economy what can older unemployed former workers expect in the next 4 years? Does it matter who is elected President?

How would older unemployed Americans answer the question “Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago”?

Governor Martin O’Malley, (D-Md.) an a speaker at the Democratic National Convention said “NO!” He said the country is worse off, and by implication that older Americans are worse off. Gov. O’Malley spoke during a televised interview on CBS Sunday.

What applies to the general population, goes double for the older unemployed American workers. What have the last 4 years brought? Since November 2008, national unemployment has gone from 6.8% to8.3%. Unemployment for old Americans still looking for work is estimated to be above 33% and still climbing. 

Since November 2008 the Poverty Level in the USA has gone from 13% to 15%, and that is also rising at a breath-taking  pace. In the last 4 years the numbers of Food Stamp recipients have increased from 30.9 million to 44.7 million.

That number would be greater if every older American who applied were granted Food Stamps.But, not everyone who applies receives Food Stamps. Take for an example  Jane Durant the 57 year old legal secretary in Pennsylvania who was turned down because had not used up all of her savings account. When she becomes completely destitute, she will qualify for Food Stamps.

That will contribute to a Federal Debt that was $10 Trillion four years ago, but has grown to $16 Trillion today. And the price of a gallon of gas has almost doubled at the pump.

A second wave of mortgage foreclosures has hit nationwide like a giant tsunami. In Maryland alone 20,000 new foreclosures were filed in the 1st Quarter of 2012. More than 37million homes have been lost to foreclosure in the last 4 years. The States with the highest foreclosure rates are CA, FL, NV, OH, PA, and Md..

Since November 2008 the Poverty Level in the USA has gone from 13% to 15%, and that is also rising at a breath-taking  pace. The poorest city in America is Redding, PA where the Poverty Rate is 41.3%. According to the U. S. Census Bureau the Poverty Rate is 33% in Detroit, MI; and 30% in Buffalo, NY; 28% in Cincinnati,OH; 27% in Cleveland,OH; 27% in Miami, FL; 27% in St. Louis, MO; 26% in El Paso, TX; 26% in Milwauki, WI; and 25% in Philadelphia, PA.

Poverty and unemployment, along with escalating high school drop out rates are fueling crime across America. On the first day of school in Baltimore, MD a student was shot in the cafeteria with a shot gun. Police shot 8 innocent people on their way to work in New York City in front of the Empire State Building. There were mass shootings at a movie theater in Denver, CO and at a Sikh Temple in Milwaukee, WI. And Chicago,IL has had a record 31% increase in murders this year.


What is driving the American economy over the cliff? What is turning the American Dream into a real nightmare for older Americans who cannot find work? Who will save America and old unemployed Americans from poverty? These are people who were the “middle class” for the first 50 years of their lives.
Older Americans are looking for a white knight who can save them from spending their senior years in poverty. They want someone who will avoid the fiscal cliff. Will it be a white knight with black stripes, or will it be a black knight with white stripes?

After last weeks blistering appraisal by the Federal Reserve Bank Chairman, Ben Bernake, of the amount of damage the high unemployment has inflicted on our economy and that it will last for many years to come, is there any wonder that old people feel hopeless, betrayed, and mad as hell?

No Jobs For Old People

Richard Eggers is a 68 years old resident of Des Moines, Iowa. He was fired in July 2012 from his job as a customer service representative at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage because of an incident that occurred in 1963, over 50 years ago, according to the Des Moines Register. He put a cardboard cutout of a dime in a washing machine. He admits it was a stupid stunt, but he cannot believe that he was fired because of it 50 years later. Big banks have been firing older low-level employees like Eggers since new federal banking employment guidelines were enacted in May 2011 and new mortgage employment guidelines took hold in February, it was reported in the Des Moines Register. The tougher standards are meant to clear out older executives and mid-level bank employees and anyone guilty of transactional crimes — such as identity theft and money laundering — but are being applied across the board against older employees. Wells Fargo confirmed Eggers' termination. "The expectations that have been placed on us and all financial institutions have never been higher," said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Angela Kaipust. Banks have fired thousands of workers nationally, said Natasha Buchanan, an attorney in Santa Ana, Calif., who has helped some of the workers regain their eligibility to be employed. There is no government or industry data on the number of older bank workers fired due to criminal background checks. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. provides a waiver process employees can follow to show they're still fit to work at a bank despite a past criminal conviction, but it usually takes six months to a year to be approved. There is also a process for automatic waiver that works more quickly but is limited to people who were sentenced to less than year of jail time and never spent a day locked up. Eggers was jailed two days. Sadly, he doesn't qualify. So he joins the ranks of the older unemployed who may never find another job. America is fast becoming a land where there are no jobs for old people. Government employees from the Senior Executive Service to the lowliest General Service employee, along with Fortune 500 middle management executives, and super lawyers from multi-national law firms are being shown the door. America has more lawyers per capita than any other country in the world. Americans love to sue each other. In the most litigation-happy country in the world, lawyers are being fired. Today's recession is not like the recession of the 1930's. Typically when the economy goes down, lawsuit filings go up, according to a former super lawyer who was let go from a prominent law firm. The only kind of legal filings that have gone up in this economy are bankruptcy cases. When the housing bubble bursted, the number of people filing for bankruptcy went through the roof. Lawsuit filings in general have gone down. President Richard Nixon had his Enemies List. President George Bush had his Wanted List. President Barack Obama has his Kill List; and Linda de Soto has her "Hit List". Lisa De Soto is the Deputy Commissioner for SSA/ODAR, the Social Security Administration's Office of Disability and Adjudication Review. Deputy Commissioner Linda de Soto and Chief Administrative Law Judge Frank Cristaudo fabricated bogus charges against Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) and forced many into early retirement. According to a well placed source high in the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Administrative Law Judge, Lisa de Soto has stated that she has a list of 25 ALJs that she intends to get rid of. This is her "Hit List". She has set about her goal in a most vigorous manner. A federal agency is required to follow its own regulations. This mean very little to Lisa de Soto and Frank Cristaudo. They have violated many SSA regulations concerning the discipline and removal of agency personnel. Cristaudo and de Soto have brought charges against judges. Chief Judge Cristaudo has testified at Federal Labor Relations Administrative hearings designed to censure or remove judges. None of the charges against any of the judges have alleged poor performance as a judge, or dereliction of duty. No substantive charges have been brought against any judges. Instead, judges have been charged with, among other things, receiving personal mail at the office, misuse of a government computer, and saving pictures on their computers of persons other than immediate family members. Frank Cristaudo has made a career of destroying other peoples' careers. He tried running for public office in New Jersey and could not get elected. Some how he managed to get appointed an administrative law judge at the Social Security Administration. He could not conduct a proper hearing so someone appointed him as the Chief Judge. Who better to appoint chief judge than someone who cannot conduct a hearing? It is better to put such a person in an administrative position. That way he does not have to go near a court room. But in a rat race, the biggest rat always manages to winnow his way to the top. Linda de Soto's career had not bottomed out before joining SSA. She was the Social Security Administration's General Counsel. She is an experienced attorney who has held a number of senior management positions in the private and federal sector. She specialized in procurement, bilateral and multilateral negotiations, conflict resolution and organizational change. Most recently, she was the Country Director for the U.S. Agency for International Development's (AID) Office of Transition Initiatives in Nigeria. Before that, she served as the General Counsel of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency and as Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Contract and Commodity Management for the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) in Washington, D.C. Not all judges are paid to judge. One-fifth of SSA's judges do not hold hearings. That is one out of five judges who do not judge. Twenty percent of the judges on the SSA's payroll do not conduct hearings. Some judges are allowed to carry a reduced work load. An an example, judges who are union representatives are not counted as full judges. They are counted as one fourth of a judge. If the average full-time judge is required to publish 60 decisions per month, then ALJs who are union representatives are only required to publish 12 to 15 decisions per month. All ALJs earn between $164,000.00 and $169,000.00 per year. That works out to roughly between $14,500.00 and $16,000.00 per month to decide 12 to 15 cases. That translates to loosely $1,250.00 per decision per month. Some of these judges, paralegals, and legal secretaries once took their comfortable life-styles for granted, but not anymore. All of that has changed, since Lisa de Soto and Judge Frank Cristaudo started forcing judges into retirement. All of this has occurred at the same time as the American economy has taken a steep downturn. Judges have lost homes and families. Many judges, lawyers, paralegals, administrative staff workers are finding out what it is like to be without a job. Many for the first time in their lives cannot find any work. To make matters worse, most of them are old people. They are loosing their jobs, homes, cars, cell phones, health insurance, and middle-class life styles never to be regained. At their ages no one will hire them. Summer vacations and having dinner out have become distant memories. Age makes it more difficult to find a job. People who did everything right professionally have reached old age and find themselves on the verge of destitution. Middle level managers and accountants can not get interviews at McDonald's for a job as a cashier. Long years of experience are no longer an asset. The job skills that older workers have acquired are no longer needed in today's job market. Employers today are looking for younger workers without health problems and who know how to use the many word-processing programs used to produce legal documents and client letters. You may not feel old, but Social security Regulations define who is an old person. Because of a vigorous and healthy life style, you might feel much younger than you are. Your chronological age could be 55, and your friends might flatter you by saying 55 today is the new 45. However, government and business managers have regulations that tell them whether you are an old person. According to those regulations, if you are age 55 or older, then you are an old person. You will not be considered approaching retirement age until you are 62. Many Americans will not have a job after age 55. The American middle class has suffered a direct hit buy this recession. Social Security retirement benefits have become the number one retirement plan in America. Those under age 62 who are too young to collect retirement benefits are applying for Social Security Disability Benefits in record numbers. The waiting time for a disability case to be decided may be as long as five years. In that period of time families have lost their homes, small business owners have lost their businesses, and ended up living on the streets using credit cards to buy food. Depression and anxiety are at an epidemic level. The Obama Administration bailed out Wall street, but not main street. Bankers and Wall Street traders are feeling no pain. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that he feels the pain of the older aged workers, who represent about 41 percent of the 12.8 million unemployed workers. Many of the chronic unemployed older people have given up and stopped looking for work. Their job skills have atrophied. Their business contacts have dried up. They have lost their homes and cannot afford descent apartments based on their Social Security Benefits and Food Stamp payments. As they struggle to survive on food stamps, credit cards and Social Security, without cars or cell phones, these older unemployed former middle-class workers are losing their dignity and some are even committing suicide. Jane Durant is a 57 year old legal secretary at a large law firm in Pennsylvania. After spending 10 years at a smaller law firm, she took a job at a larger firm 11 years ago. In 2009 she was laid off when her law firm underwent a large reduction in force (RIF). Today she is still unemployed. She has exhausted her severance package, used up 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, and has been forced to dip into her retirement funds. She has cut back to one meal a day and has applied for food stamps. Her food stamp application was refused because she still had a small savings account. After 60 job interviews and no offers of even part-time work, she believes she is a victim of age discrimination. Claude Davis was a California attorney living the good life trading up in real estate, going from a smaller house to a larger one. He was riding the real estate bubble. He bought his last house for over a million dollars with no money down and no interest with an adjustable rate mortgage for the first five years. At the end of five years he would be facing a large balloon payment that would come due. This was not the first time he had purchased a home under these terms. As long as he was working he expected to be able to come up with the cash. He never expected to lose his job. He thought that legal jobs were recession proof. Then the unexpected happened. He was terminated. For a while he managed to get by doing small contracts and by dipping into his retirement funds. When the balloon mortgage payment came due, he was not able to make the payment. He lost his house and his middle class life style. He thinks he will never be able to get another legal job like his last one because he can no longer work the 12 to 14 hour days that are required to get ahead in most law firms. Younger more recent law school graduates are grabbing all the starting legal jobs. Claude Davis is 55 and he believes that he also is a victim of age discrimination. Their misfortune has broader consequences for society as a whole as well as for America's standing in the world. These former lawyers, administrative law judges, paralegals, corporate executives, and small business owners who are struggling to survive in this hostile economy may be the canaries in the coal mine for America. Their social and economic conditions will have broader and more far-reaching consequences for America and could signal that we are slipping into a welfare society and a less prestigious nation.