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Police accuse bank robbery suspect of gobbling up note (with dashcam video)
Dad accused of forcing son into field, killing him
Man found dead in North Akron home is identified
Victim of beating in Kent last week is declared dead at Akron hospital
Coventry man killed in crash at I-77 ramp
Browns' roster nearly devoid of consistent players
College student mistaken for deer, shot to death
NFL star Chris Spielman's wife loses cancer battle
Blogs:
Pets:
Cat-loving chihuahua suckles seven abandoned kittens
The Heldenfiles:
Friday Night Notebook
Patrick McManamon:
For your Saturday entertainment …
Akron Zips:
Hitchens leads Zips in second-half comeback
Tribe Matters:
Seven players added to Tribe’s 40-man roster
Cleveland Browns:
Holmgren expresses interest in Browns position
Kent State Sports:
Kent State blown out in second half, loses to Temple 47-13
Cleveland Cavaliers:
Gameblog: Cavs vs. Philadelphia 76ers
Buckeye Blogging:
OSU – Michigan college football rivals meet in Baghdad
Varsity Letters:
Four area football teams play tonight
All Da King's Men:
Headed For Disaster
Blog of Mass Destruction:
Will Health Care Reform Pass?
Akron Law Café:
Health Care Financing Reform: (69) The Brookings Institute Study on "Bending the Curve" – Four General Strategies
See Jane Style:
Vintage Chic
Car Chase:
TIME TO GET YOUR COLLECTOR CARS WINTERIZED
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Silverdome Potentially SOLD!
Ohio Travels with Betty:
George is looking for a Thanksgiving buffet in Akron.
Sound Check:
Steely Dan Plays "The Royal Scam" at E.J. Thomas Hall
HRLite House:
Colloquium at University of Akron
Akron Gamer:
Nintendo's Mario endures even as games come and go
Published on Wednesday, Nov 05, 2008
Sheriff acts as negative force
The recent attempt in the Beacon Journal's Voice of the People column (''Defense of the deputies,'' Oct. 17) by Sheriff Drew Alexander's assistant, Chief Steven Finical, to soften the image of the Summit County Sheriff's Office does not ring true to us.
Why hasn't the sheriff, like some other sheriffs in the country, put a temporary moratorium on serving eviction notices to distressed homeowners facing foreclosure?
Evictions do no one any good. Certainly not the distressed homeowner, such as Addie Polk, the 90-year-old on Lacroix Avenue in Akron who shot herself while the sheriff's deputies were knocking at her door; not the neighbors, who inherit an abandoned building on their street that drags down the whole neighborhood; not even the mortgage lender, who has more foreclosed properties than can be resold in these depressed and depressing times.
The plain fact of the matter is this: The sheriff's office is too often a negative force in poor black and white communities in the cities of Summit County. The department should be arresting fraudulent mortgage lenders and usurious loan sharks who prey upon elderly poor victims such as Addie Polk.
Instead, they are raiding businesses and individuals and frightening the residents of our poor communities who are afraid they may be the next victims of the sheriff's SWAT teams or the brutal extraction teams in the county jail.
We beg to differ with Finical that sheriff's deputies are well-trained and always polite and caring. So often, they forget that we elected the sheriff and Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh to serve and protect all of us, whether we are poor or rich, white or black.
It is time for an independent civilian review board to protect us from our protectors when they lose their way and become our persecutors and torturers and even our executioners.
Herman Oden
Chairman, Coalition for a Safe Community
Akron
Scare tactics about natural gas
Recently, while watching the news, I saw three different commercials advertising the benefits of using natural gas as a source of energy.
One commercial said natural gas is abundant off our shores and ready to be drilled to fuel our needs.
Another said natural gas can fuel 60 million cars and 60 million homes for the next 600 years.
The third stated that natural gas is clean, affordable energy, efficient and cheap.
So, can anyone help me understand why the gas companies use scare tactics to make us believe that natural gas is scarce and not sufficient to meet demand?
Why do they make us believe that only by raising prices will they be able to stay in business?
Is this another scam brewing, like the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae situation?
Today, we are bailing out the investment institutions with $750 billion of taxpayers' money. Tomorrow, we will be bailing out the energy companies with taxpayers' money. At what price?
All of a sudden, government regulation of prices for natural gas sounds like a very good idea.
A June 3, 2003, article in the Beacon Journal (''High gas bills traced to price fixing'') stated that in 1998 the Kansas City Star published a series of articles about the causes of the previous winter's high gas bills. Flaws in the index contributed to the price spikes, according to the articles.
Among the problems was how the indexes were compiled, including accepting prices that were not verified.
The Star's articles warned that energy traders exploit the system by providing false prices to the index.
Five years later, federal regulators concluded that is exactly what happened. Do we want history to be repeated again?
Anthony Prosperi
Akron
FairTax: A game-changer
The commercials and debates of the presidential campaign gave me even more reason to believe that the FairTax proposal currently before Congress (Senate Bill 1025 and House Resolution 25) is our best hope for returning sanity and, yes, fairness, to our federal tax system.
Briefly, the FairTax bills will do the following (for more information, go to www.fairtax.org):
• Eliminate federal income, payroll (Social Security and Medicare), estate and corporate income taxes.
• Replace these taxes with a national sales tax on all new retail goods and services (a rate of about 23 percent would generate the same revenue as the eliminated taxes).
• Maintain our progressive tax heritage by giving all households a monthly rebate to ensure no American pays federal taxes on spending up to the poverty level.
Among the benefits of this system:
• Politicians would lose the ability to manipulate voters and solicit favors from corporations through the tax code.
• Savings would increase, because earnings are not taxed.
• Individuals would gain the ability to control how much tax they pay through their lifestyle choices (buying used cars, existing houses, etc.).
• Corporations would no longer have reason to leave the country due to taxes, and foreign companies would open businesses in America, leading to fuller employment.
Everyone who buys retail goods and services in the U.S. will pay the tax. This includes groups that previously were able to avoid income or payroll taxes, such as trust fund beneficiaries, illegal immigrants, foreign visitors and criminal enterprises.
We will regain the time and privacy currently lost in having to deliver virtually every detail of our financial lives to the government.
A national sales tax is a dramatic shift from our current income-tax system (67,000 pages), but I believe that it is a game-changing idea that is needed to help Americans regain control of our finances and government and to allow America to continue to have a dynamic and growing economy.
I encourage everyone to investigate the FairTax idea further.
Carl Peterson
Clinton
Firestone — just a name
After reading David Giffels' article about Firestone (''Firestone name won't be erased,'' Oct. 21), I am wondering — would he rather have the Firestone name remain in Akron or the Bridgestone jobs?
Bridgestone has been, and will continue to be, an asset to the city of Akron. Why don't you leave well enough alone?
Kim Kozy
Tallmadge
Don't foreclose. Renegotiate mortgages
I think it would serve the taxpayer and the borrower if the lenders would renegotiate the mortgages that are about to go into foreclosure or are currently in foreclosure.
This could be done in the following way: Renegotiate the mortgage at the current balance, even if the balance exceeds the current market value.
The bank should not have to take the write-down on the mortgage and, obviously, the borrower thought the home was worth the amount he or she borrowed originally and committed to by signing a contract.
The fact that the market value of the home is lower now is not the bank's fault, nor did the mortgage state the bank would lower the principal if the housing market changed.
Renegotiate at the current interest rate. The mortgage will be at a fixed rate. Determine an affordable monthly mortgage payment for the borrower using a set percentage of gross income figure, say, 30 percent.
Determine the length of the mortgage by figuring how many payments it will take to pay off the mortgage using the monthly payment determined above.
Obviously, mortgages would be for extended periods of time. The borrower would be allowed to pay additional money to reduce the principal earlier without penalty and thereby retire the mortgage earlier if he or she chooses.
This arrangement would allow the borrower to live up to his financial obligations and remain in his home.
Eventually, equity would build up because of the payments being made and because the value of the home will increase. That beats being forced to rent for the foreseeable future and having a borrower's credit ruined.
It would be to the taxpayer's benefit because the banks would not have to take write-downs on the mortgages and need tax money to bail them out.
Gloria Murphy
Uniontown
Make Wall Street pay
I implore our government representatives not to burden families and working Americans with the responsibility for the financial debacle.
Place this expense on the backs of those corrupt individuals whose greed caused this unimaginable weight on our economy. Impose a security transaction excise tax so Wall Street pays for its own bailout.
Deborah Dockery
Akron
Sheriff acts as negative force
Get the full article here.
Comments
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Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with it, ..
Posted 02:31 AM, 11/05/2008
Good Morning Right Wing Editors/Publishers from the Akron Beacon Journal and the Las Vegas Review Journal and all Kool-Aid drinking subscribers. Barack Obama is now your new Democrat President of the United States of America. I know you're sad and angry. I know to you it's totally unfathomable and unamerican that an African-American has ascended to the Executive Branch. But, look back at my comments for the past several months on this ludicrous site: The Pope warned what was to come. The Pope identified all you Kool-Aid drinking "Kooks" as rats going down on a sinking ship. The Pope was prophetic that your party was going down, your ideology was going down, your "Rovian" politics were going down, your sick, divisive social issues were going down, and, even more poignantly, your backwards 17th Century mentality drag on the country was going down. So, in the words of Bob Dylan: "Please get out of the way, if you can't lend a hand. For the Times They Are A Changin." And for all you racist bigots, young and old, dead or alive, may you rot or be rotting in Hell. Sincerely, The Pope..........
Posted 06:14 AM, 11/05/2008
Okay Pope, time to share your wealth with me. Hand it over.
Dalton Ave, Henderson, NV
Posted 06:28 AM, 11/05/2008
@Herman Oden - Seriously? You feel bad for people who knowingly took out loans they were not able to pay? Get real.
- Uncle Ed
Dalton Ave, Henderson, NV
Posted 06:36 AM, 11/05/2008
@Carl Peterson - The fair tax is not fair. It taxes the lower income earners at a higher rate on their overall income. Essentailly, the more of your income you have to spend to live, the more you are taxed. The more you can save, the less you are taxed. And you claim this is fair?
Let's do one example. Hypothetically, the line where you get no tax refund is $1,000 per month (the numbers are to try and keep the math simple). That earner needs to spend $750 per month to live, and therefore is taxed 25% on their monthly earnings.
Another person makes $4,000 per month, 4 times as much. This person spends $2,225 per month, 3 times as much, and can put the rest in savings. This person pays (25% * 2225) $562.5 in taxes. Thus this person is paying only 14.0625% in taxes on their monthly income.
Please explain how this is fair?!
- Uncle Ed
Dalton Ave, Henderson, NV
Posted 06:45 AM, 11/05/2008
@Gloria Murphy - In theory, this is a great idea. Unfortunately, what the mortgage industry has done with mortgages makes this impossible.
Let me explain. A bank takes a group of mortages (1,000 for example) and bundles them all together to be sold. Before they are sold, that big mass of mortgages are partitioned out in AAA, AA, A, B, ... bond rating tranches. When you purchase one of these tranches, you are paid on default of the mortgage based on that rating. So a AAA package gets theirs first, AA second, and so on.
So what this all means is that your mortgage was bundled and then cut up. So the guy holding the AAA piece wants no change because he is getting his money and a change means he is getting less money. The guy holding the C piece wants change desperately. He knows that if you default on the loan and the house is sold at a loss, he is not going to get his money. On top of this dichotomy, these things have all been sliced, put together, and sliced again to such an extent it is very difficult to know who owns what piece of your particular mortgage.
Finally, the rights to manage your payments has also been sold to the XYZ mortgage company you write a check to... just to make things a little more complicated.
I hope this helps explain things.
- Uncle Ed
Dalton Ave, Henderson, NV
Posted 06:47 AM, 11/05/2008
@Deborah Dockery - do you do your own research or just listen to what the news tells you? I would guess the latter because if you read and understood the bailout, you would know that all of the money that the government cannot recoup via buying and selling assets will be repaid by the companies who no longer have to carry said assets on their books.
- Uncle Ed
Akron, Oh
Posted 08:18 AM, 11/05/2008
Herman Oden, I can't believe your drivel was published. Law enforcement did not cause this woman to take her life. Thousands of people are visited by deputies every day to be evicted and they don't kill themselves. You don't know what you're talking about. The woman took her life because she had obvious mental health problems.
Dade City, Fl
Posted 12:59 PM, 11/05/2008
I will consider a Fair Tax when the working class and the poor receive a fair wage and not this slave labor that we have in place now that most of you call the workforce. If they can;t get cheap slave labor here they take it overseas and call it the global economy. We all know that it is slavery yet many think it is okay as long as prices are cheaper for products. Fair Tax when governments and corporations learn what fair is. Seems government and corporations are the ones that think they decide what fair is. Excuse me, the higher power decides that.
Vatican , It
Posted 04:16 PM, 11/05/2008
Hey, George N from South Carolina, who used to comment here when the format was Topix, here's some drilling news for you that refutes all the bunk you used to write:
WASHINGTON – The government isn't doing enough to expedite drilling in federal waters and on public lands, according to a report issued Tuesday by congressional investigators.
In a review of the 55,000 federal oil and gas leases issued to energy companies by the Interior Department from 1987 to 1996, the General Accountability Office found that the vast majority expired without being drilled, and an even smaller amount actually produced oil and natural gas.
"We do not agree that Interior is pursuing expedited development of oil and gas leases," the report reads.
Energy companies currently hold leases but are not producing on about 68 million acres of federal land — property that has the potential to double domestic oil production. About a third of the oil produced in the U.S. in 2007 came from public lands.
House Democrats and Democratic President-elect Barack Obama have said companies should "use it or lose it" — meaning they must drill on lands they currently rent or release them before being awarded new leases.
