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“Insurance salesman accused of preying on seniors for profit”
Greenfield Recorder, State & Region Briefs, December 18, 2019
Boston — Authorities say an insurance salesman illegally made millions of dollars by persuading seniors to withdraw from their savings so they could buy insurance policies through his company.
Ryan Skinner has been charged with acting as an unregistered investment adviser, according to a Wednesday announcement from Secretary of State William Galvin.
Skinner, who is president of Summit Financial Partners in Woburn, Massachusetts, denies the allegations. An attorney representing him says Skinner stands by his work.
“Once the facts come to light, it will be clear that Ryan has worked in the best interests of his clients, and has helped his clients achieve proper insurance planning under stringent ethical standards,” attorney Andrea Nuciforo said in a statement.
Authorities say Skinner advertised himself as a “retirement specialist” and promised to provide personalized financial advice and planning services. Instead, he sold dozens of clients the same fixed annuity policy and took a 7% commission, according to a complaint filed by Galvin’s office.
Skinner and his company are accused of making more than $4 million through the scheme. The complaint says he offered seniors free lunches where he advised them to draw from their savings so he could help maximize their retirement plans. In some cases, Skinner advised clients to invest their entire life savings in his company, investigators found.
Investors complained that they had to pay costs that had not been disclosed by Skinner’s company, and that he stopped answering calls when they asked about it. He’s accused of selling the same annuity to 128 clients.
Galvin’s office is asking Skinner to give up all profits from the scheme and to provide restitution for investors’ losses.
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December 20, 2019
Dear Sec. Bill Galvin,
I read the news article, [above]. I hope you win your case and the insurance salesman who allegedly scammed seniors out of their savings, who is represented by Nuciforo, pays back the seniors he allegedly scammed.
Please jail Nuciforo! He has been linked to Boston area Insurance companies since 1999 - for over 20 years now.
I have documented Nuciforo's political and legal dealings with Boston area Insurance companies on my blog page:
https://jonathanmelleonpolitics.blogspot.com/2008/01/andrea-nuciforos-corruption-insurance.html
Happy Holidays!
Jonathan A. Melle
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May 22, 2023
I wish to explain the why behind the fictional Massachusetts State Representative Sellout Shakedown's real public record on Beacon Hill. The reason why the Massachusetts Legislature operates in corrupt secrecy and all of the power is in the hands of a few leaders while the rest of the legislature rubber stamps every bill is because of the Almighty Dollar.
Beacon Hill lawmakers giveaway tens of billions of dollars in state tax breaks during every two-year state legislative session. They do so by design. They use every corrupt method in the (cooked) book(s) to enrich themselves and their wealthy financial and corporate campaign donors at the public trough. The worst method is the multibillion-dollar state lottery SCAM, which is nothing more than (voluntary) regressive taxation on the mostly financially illiterate HAVE NOTS to giveaway a percentage of the lottery revenues to the elites in the Boston area, while the rest of the state is being mocked by the rich snobs.
How do I understand this? The answer lies in the city I grew up in: Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When I studied Public Administration at UMass Amherst decades ago, I found out about an economics term called "Perverse Incentives", which means that a firm profits off of producing deleterious societal impacts on a region.
Pittsfield politics operates via Perverse Incentives. For many decades - over 50 years - Pittsfield has been in a downward spiral of losses in population, living wage jobs, middle-class families, and so on. They mostly blame the late GE CEO Jack Welch, who lived in Pittsfield 50 to 60 years ago, for pulling GE out of Pittsfield in the late-1980s, but that is only a diversion from what really happened in Pittsfield politics.
Pittsfield's downtown is sarcastically called "Social Services Alley" because its post-WW2 bustling business district has become a sea of social services agencies (and 15 empty storefronts). Pittsfield's public schools are rated Level 5 by the state, which is the worst possible rating. The people and businesses in Pittsfield are excessively taxed in return for rock bottom results. When a resident raises concerns that the only growth in Pittsfield is in its underclass population, they are met with retribution by the ruling elites because the elites only want their tax revenues.
Similar to Beacon Hill lawmakers, Pittsfield politics uses Perverse Incentives for the Almighty Dollar. Pittsfield politics social services agencies and Level 5 public schools bring in tens of millions of dollars from the federal and state government. If Pittsfield had business growth instead of its huge underclass, the city would receive millions of dollars less in federal and state revenue.
When I lived in Pittsfield, I felt like the political system wanted me - Jon Melle - to fall into their huge underclass population because my misery would add to the revenue sources for the city. I felt like I - Jon Melle - had better odds of winning the state lottery jackpot than finding a living wage job in Pittsfield. Instead of Pittsfield investing in people like me, I felt that Pittsfield was profiting off of people like me.
Pittsfield is one of the most economically unequal metro areas in the state and nation. The ruling, corporate and financial elites all made 6-figure salaries, but the middle-class has become a fairy tale in Pittsfield. One was either doing really well, or one was in or at-risk of falling into the underclass in Pittsfield.
How could this go on for so many decades in Pittsfield? The answer is similar to how Beacon Hill lawmakers have been reduced to being a bunch of sellouts and shakedown artists. It is because the only thing that matters to the elites in the Almighty Dollar. To be clear, the people don't matter to them. What is worse is that the people falling into the underclass means that the elites get to profit off of them as public revenue sources that the elites use a percentage of to enrich themselves at the public trough.
When I lived in Pittsfield as a young man decades ago, I expressed my views about Pittsfield politics and Beacon Hill lawmakers to various people, and the response that I usually received was that "it is the same everywhere you go". Nobody cared about the increasing economic inequality and deleterious societal impacts on the people and community by the state and local government, while the same corrupt career politicians kept being reelected with more and more money and power as the years went on.
When I studied Public Administration all of those many years ago, I learned that the state and local government was supposed to invest in people so that the people would have social mobility to achieve a middle-class family and then they would in turn invest in the community and state that they lived in. I did NOT learn that the state and local government would see people falling into the underclass as a means to gain more and more money and power at their expense.
In closing, I believe that Beacon Hill lawmakers only do DISSERVICES to the people and taxpayers of Massachusetts (and beyond). They use closed door, corruption and secrecy, along with the state lottery and similar SCAMS, to make a mockery of the people and taxpayers. They are only all about the Almighty Dollar, and their public record of giving away a little less than 40 percent of state revenues via state tax breaks to their wealthy campaign donors allows them to enrich the elites and themselves at the public trough.
Jonathan A. Melle
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"Massachusetts Legislature needs more real, public debate on legislation"
By The Boston Globe Editorial Board, May 22, 2023
It’s been years since legislative democracy truly flourished at the State House — and that’s a big loss for the voters of Massachusetts.
But instead of seeking to change that, House and Senate leaders last week were fighting with one another over the arcane rules governing joint committees — an insider dispute if there ever was one.
Several decades ago the chambers of the House and Senate were regularly the centers of passionate, sometimes even raucous, debates about education, the environment, gun safety, juvenile justice, special education, and human services.
It was an era where the sometimes earnest, other times ardent voices of state senators and representatives regularly drew interested observers to the House and Senate visitors’ galleries. And when outcomes were far less predictable. For example, after property-tax-limiting Proposition 2½ passed in 1980, leaving cities and towns starved for revenue, they turned to Beacon Hill. When the next House budget failed to adequately address the municipal revenue shortfall, there was a revolt on the House floor by a coalition of suburban Democratic reformers and Republicans, forcing the spending plan to be withdrawn and reworked.
On the House side, much of 1984 was consumed with a challenge to heavy-handed Speaker Thomas McGee by former majority leader George Keverian, who ran promising rules reform — and who ousted McGee from the speaker’s office in early 1985. Then Senate president William Bulger, a McGee-like but more skilled legislative martinet, faced a similar challenge a decade later. Although Bulger weathered that revolt, he felt compelled to appoint a rules-reform panel, ostensibly to explore ways to open up Senate procedures.
In those days, committee hearings were important policy-development events and sometimes front-page news, as empowered chairmen and chairwomen explored new ideas and approaches. An energetic and knowledgeable committee leader could develop legislation, bring it the floor, push it to passage, and see it signed into law.
A legislative environment that rewarded talent and initiative led to nation-leading laws.
Today, however, all that has faded. The usual State House acoustic is the sound of silence — and that silence is deafening. Where reporters, advocates, and lobbyists once mingled in the hallways during the afternoons and evenings — and sometimes late into the night — as legislators debated, the marble halls are now empty.
These days, virtually everything by way of policy comes from the top down. Power is essentially vested in four offices: that of the Senate president, House speaker, and the two Ways and Means Committee chairmen or chairwomen, who essentially function as the political and policy enforcers in each chamber. Committee leaders get the table scraps, which is what House and Senate members of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy were fighting over last week.
Today, there are three archetypal modes for members of the Legislature: the hard-chargers, the hangers-on, and the perpetually patient understudies. The first get elected, discover that a junior member has very little power or prerogative, and therefore depart for something else after a few frustrating years.
The hangers-on, content to work part-time hours for full-time pay but aware that garnering perks depends on staying in the good graces of leadership, bank their limited ambitions, mute their voices, and concentrate on currying favor.
If a representative or senator is willing to go along to get along, he or she can be assured of a regular allotment of district goodies, delivered in the budget. But make oneself a burr under the saddle and district desires die aborning.
The aspiring understudies try to carve out a meaningful role, but that’s only obtainable by serving long years of unswerving loyalty to leadership. That means always voting the way the two top leaders want and refraining from candid comments about objectionable leadership tactics or actions. As for the partisan opposition, Republicans have been co-opted with comfortable salaries and office perks.
One category of legislator that played a significant role in the past is now much diminished: Reformers, and more specifically, process and rules reformers.
With outspokenness not just frowned upon but punished, there is little pushback on anything. Thus it is that House leadership can announce a major tax cut on Tuesday and pass it on Thursday, with no strenuous objection that that isn’t nearly enough time for members to analyze the effects, let alone get their constituents’ input on the package.
What little debate there is, on budgets or other issues, is largely performative. Any real disagreement takes place in the respective Democratic caucuses, which is to say, behind closed doors.
Why should the public care about any of this? Because as power has flowed upward and rank-and-file legislators have lost any real policy role, constituents have had less opportunity to influence the process. That’s especially true when it comes to individual interactions with lawmakers, but it’s a reality that also obtains when it comes to grass-roots efforts to bring pressure to bear on all legislators. Conversely, lobbyists who have cultivated close ties with the handful of lawmakers who matter have seen their influence increase.
The question, then, is this: How do citizens and rank-and-file lawmakers remedy the current situation? That is, is there a way back to the future?
Yes, but it requires both voters and lawmakers to demand more. Legislative bodies, after all, set their own formal rules and establish or accede to their own norms. At present, both rules and norms surrender too much power to the leaders of the legislative chambers. But what’s been given could and should be taken back — if lawmakers make that, and not internal turf battles, their goal.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.
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June 4, 2023
Hello blogger Dan Valenti, news media, and the people:
Charles Ivar Kronick posted:
Answer is: class is an indistinct stratification marker. It does not convey permanence such as caste or aristocracy, the distinction from one to another is imprecise (upper middle class vs lower versus rich has no real boundary), it is not necessarily tied to wealth (land rich – cash poor Appalachia), behavior (lottery winners versus old money), or opportunity.
The definition for class, Wikipedia notwithstanding, being the playground of academic laziness, eludes the field of sociology and even the Marxist departments anywhere have yet to define it. It is a useful term for stirring up emotional states and bad legislation such as the ‘Millionaires Tax.’
There are broad models for social stratification, good luck making use of them. Economic analysis tends to be of greater value.
My response: Economics is a study in tradeoffs. When I say this, economists say that they are about ethics, equity and efficiency. But at the end of the day, economics is about ratios whereby one side gets marginally more of a good and/or service and the other side gets marginally less of a good and/or service. Harry Truman famously used to say that he wished he had a one-handed economist to advise him because economic analysis always led to a tradeoff.
Finance and economics are fused together. The problem is that the supply side always wins, while the demand side either treads water or loses. During the 2008 financial crisis, Congress bailed out Wall Street, as well as foreign banks in Europe and Asia, with trillions of U.S. Dollars. No matter what happens, the supply side wins. Over the past 50 years, the common workers' income increased by only $5 per week. Over the past 50 years, the top 1 percent of wealthy households' wealth increased by many billions of dollars.
Sociology tries to make sense of people in society, which includes the underclass who are the millions - billions around the world - of people living in poverty, the working class who are making a whole $5 more in income per week than their grandparents did 50 years ago, the middle class who are our police officer, firefighters, teachers, social workers, and so on, the upper middle class who are our managerial geniuses, and the upper class who are our multimillionaires and billionaires.
My own story is being a man who writes, communicates, post on blogs, and studies the financial, corporate and ruling elites in our current society. Some of the career politicians always block my political emails. Other career politicians never respond to my political emails. Most news media blackout - censors - my writings. Very rarely, my writings are published, except by blogger Dan Valenti. All I - Jon Melle - can do is try to speak out to the elites, but they only want the Almighty Dollar and Power for themselves.
Best wishes,
Jonathan A. Melle
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June 4, 2023
Hello blogger Dan Valenti,
Pittsfield politics’ Ward 2 City Councilor posted on your blog, Planet Valenti, the following information:
It happens here too in Pittsfield. Massachusetts allows towns to seize your property for any tax debt – even debts that you are actually paying off – and they are not required to compensate the owner for the difference in equity.
They take you to court, you rack up court expenses. Then, they agree to drop the case in exchange for your property. You are completely shot and you lose everything. You may watch a lucky buyer come in and get a bargain.
My response: Would Charles Ivar Kronick please back up his claims of the city’s predatory practices of taking a citizen’s home and property to collect a tax debt and a citizen losing everything in the process?
How many citizens has the city done this to? How long has this been taking place in Pittsfield? If this is the case, then Pittsfield’s municipal government is acting in a predatory financial way.
What is Charles Ivar Kronick doing to reform this practice? Is he just complaining about it, or is he trying to remediate the situation?
I believe that Beacon Hill lawmakers are predatory, too, when it comes to all of their (voluntary) regressive taxation schemes that assaults the citizens they serve. They boast about the multibillion-dollar per year state lottery SCAM operation, excise “sin” taxes on alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, all of the fees for government services, casino gambling, underfunded state aid, tens of billions of dollars in state tax breaks every two years for their wealthy campaign donors that don’t exist in most regions of Massachusetts, and so on.
When the government is acting in a predatory way, then the corrupt career politicians are only doing DISSERVICES to the people and taxpayers they supposedly serve. If I were a politician, I would publicly advocate to use public funds to invest in the people, communities, and small businesses instead of voting for secretive and corrupt leaders who are always enriching themselves and their wealthy campaign donors at the public trough.
Best wishes,
Jonathan A. Melle
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