Free Republic

An American radical, who dedicated a book to the devil, Saul Alinsky, proposed an operating principle of "rubbing grievances raw" so radical elites can gain power at people's expense. An example is an African-American Hunter College of CCNY music theory professor, Philip Ewell, who criticizes his Dad for liking the music of J.S. Bach. Music professor calls his black dad racist for liking BachMeanwhile, the nation of Brazil happily goes about celebrating with strongly Bach-flavored music, its cultural "Frederick Douglass", an early 20th century Black musical pioneer who fused the Afro-Portuguese culture of Brazil, (strongly Bach-influenced by composer Heitor Villalobos'...

Republican Javier Villalobos flips this seat from Blue to Red in an 85% Hispanic city. Continuing the Republican trend in the RGV of Texas started by Trump

PINAL COUNTY - An illegal immigrant is arrested in Pinal County and it's discovered he had gained access to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. On Thursday, Dec. 26, at 7 p.m., a Pinal County Sheriff's deputy stopped a 2006 Ford Expedition westbound on Interstate 10 near milepost 180 for a traffic violation. The driver of the vehicle identified himself, using an Arizona Identification Card, as 37-year old Armando Villalobos of Phoenix. The deputy did a routine license and warrant check. Villalobos returned with a "No License" status and a felony warrant for his arrest out of Texas. The warrant showed he...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Federal officials on Monday charged the former head of the nation's largest pension fund and one of his business associates with falsifying documents and other charges in a long-running influence peddling and bribery investigation. A grand jury in San Francisco charged Federico Buenrostro Jr. and Alfred Villalobos, and they were booked and released on bond Monday after briefly appearing in court. Buenrostro, 64, served as CEO of the California Public Employees' Retirement System from late 2002 until June 2008. Villalobos, 69, served on the CalPERS board and is a former vice mayor of Los Angeles. The indictment...

* SEC says ex-CEO, ex-board member fabricated documents * Two charged with scheming to defraud a firm of $20 mln (Reuters) - A former chief executive of Calpers, the biggest U.S. public pension fund, and a former board member were charged by federal regulators on Monday with scheming to defraud Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, of more than $20 million in placement fees. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that Federico Buenrostro, a former chief executive of the California Public Employees' Retirement system, and Alfred Villalobos, a friend and former board member who became a placement agent,...

Wounded by the CalPERS bribery scandal and other problems, a New Jersey pharmaceutical-benefits company is being sold. Medco Health Solutions Inc., one of the giants of the drug-benefit industry, on Thursday agreed to a $29.1 billion takeover by rival Express Scripts Inc. Such a deal would have been unthinkable a few months ago, when Medco was flying high. But the New Jersey company ran into a series of problems that began with its entanglement in the CalPERS bribery case. "This year has been a head-spinner for this (Medco) management team, starting out with the CalPERS issues," said investment analyst Arthur...

More shoes may be dropping at the California Public Employees' Retirement System. Forty-nine staff members, including the president and chief investment officer, have been notified they are being investigated by the Fair Political Practices Commission for possible violations of gift reporting requirements. ... some of the potential violations went back five years. The investigation grew, indirectly, out of the scandal involving outside placement agents and their allegedly corrupt links to senior CalPERS executives

The Los Angeles Times breaks some major news this morning: In a scathing report, a former chief executive of the California public employee pension fund was accused of pressuring subordinates to invest billions of dollars of pension money with politically connected firms. A 17-month investigation also found that Federico Buenrostro Jr. — along with former pension fund board members Charles Valdes and Kurato Shimada — strong-armed a benefits firm to pay more than $4 million in fees to consultant Alfred J.R. Villalobos, who later hired Buenrostro. The report, prepared for the California Public Employees' Retirement System by Washington law firm...

In a scathing report, a former chief executive of the California public employee pension fund was accused of pressuring subordinates to invest billions of dollars of pension money with politically connected firms. A 17-month investigation also found that Federico Buenrostro Jr. -- along with former pension fund board members Charles Valdes and Kurato Shimada -- strong-armed a benefits firm to pay more than $4 million in fees to consultant Alfred J.R. Villalobos, who later hired Buenrostro. ... The findings of insider dealings at CalPERS could provide fresh ammunition to Republican lawmakers here who want Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown to convert...

Police Arrest Trio Wanted In Pueblo Break-In; Homeowner Kills Intruder. Lakewood police caught three fugitives from a deadly Pueblo home invasion sleeping and arrested them without incident early Thursday. Members of Lakewood Special Enforcement Team arrested brothers Carlos Manzanares, 41, and Shane Manzanares, 28, along with Natasha Villalobos... The trio was wanted on a warrant for first-degree burglary in a Tuesday morning Pueblo home-invasion robbery. The homeowner, 31-year-old Christopher Maes, shot and killed one of the masked suspects... Pueblo police have not arrested or charged the homeowner in the shooting, saying Maes' 6-year-old daughter and four other family members were...

California has done some really really stupid things (like a tax credit for first time homebuyers), but the NYT did the state and its readers a disservice in going after California's pension fund liabilities. The basic story is that if you assume a 4.14 nominal rate of return on pension fund assets, then the state's pension liabilities look really really bad. The big question that readers should ask is, so what? There have been few people who have been more critical of assuming exaggerated market returns than me, but 4.14 percent nominal? Anyone want to take a bet that California's...

Outside of the Legislature itself, no government body has done more to damage the Golden State than the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. Its successful push in 1999 to change state law to allow public employees to receive huge retroactive increases in their pensions was sold with the absurd argument that such a gift of public funds could be provided at little or no long-term cost. This argument was based on the irresponsible premise that the stock market bubble of the late 1990s would continue indefinitely. Eleven years later, cities, counties and other government agencies up and down the state...

CalPERS says it has lost $475 million on an investment that yielded controversial placement agent and former CalPERS board member Alfred Villalobos his biggest single payday. The loss is based on June 30 figures and appears to have shrunk somewhat in the months since. Because the loss is still on paper, it could rebound some more before CalPERS chooses to sell it. .. The pension fund said its equity investment in New York financial giant Apollo Global Management had fallen to an estimated $124.6 million as of last June, the latest figures available. Cal-PERS paid $600 million for the investment...

The same year California power broker Gerald Parsky hired placement agent Alfred Villalobos to win business deals from CalPERS, Villalobos organized a nonprofit company in Nevada that listed Parsky as its president. But Villalobos – a former CalPERS board member now at the center of an investigation into possible influence peddling – now says Parsky wasn't an officer with the Nevada company. In papers filed with the Nevada secretary of state, Villalobos said Parsky was mistakenly listed as president of the Capital Markets Advisory Council, which was founded in 2005. Its incorporation papers described Capital Markets as a think tank...

Shedding new light on the involvement of former board members in lucrative deals, CalPERS revealed Thursday that marketing middlemen known as placement agents earned more than $125 million in fees from investments by the pension fund. The agents include four ex-CalPERS board members, among them former state Treasurer Matt Fong and former CalPERS President William Crist. Their activities as placement agents were disclosed for the first time in thousands of pages of documents released by the California Public Employees' Retirement System. Crist defended his work when reached by phone at his home in Turlock on Thursday, and Fong couldn't be...

Reporting from Sacramento - With the fortune he has made using his connections with public pension funds, it's hardly a surprise that Alfred J.R. Villalobos owns a sprawling, 9,100-square-foot home overlooking the emerald-blue waters of Lake Tahoe. But the way in which Villalobos financed construction of the $2.7-million mansion is fueling new questions in an investigation by the California Public Employees' Retirement system into the activities of so-called placement agents such as Villalobos. Documents show that the Villalobos home was built with the help of a $1.1-million loan from a partnership set up by CIM Group, a Hollywood-based real estate...

America's largest public-pension fund, Calpers, revealed that a former board member had reaped more than $50 million in fees for arranging investments that could saddle state taxpayers with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The disclosure deepens concerns that alleged conflicts of interest are undermining state retirement funds. The California Public Employees' Retirement System said it is launching a "special review" into payments by money managers