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Lakemore police say man killed his wife in standoff
Suspect in Lakemore standoff expected to recover
Police raid Akron gaming parlor
Storm could bring heavy snow tonight, Saturday; Parking bans in effect
Palin says she's been exploited by Couric and Fey
Suspected meth lab busted in Cuyahoga Falls
Browns' Mangini brings experience
Skeptics urging check of home program
Blogs:
Akron Law Café:
College Football is Un-American
The Heldenfiles:
Cheryl Holdridge, R.I.P.
Tribe Matters:
Shapiro puts Indians in position to win
Patrick McManamon:
ESPN clears up a key to tonight's game
Browns Bulletin:
Browns may interview ex-Broncos GM
Cleveland Browns:
Mangini takes command
Cleveland Cavaliers:
Gameblog: Cavs vs. Celtics
CavsHQ: A Fan's View:
The Countdown Begins - Cavs v. Celtics
Akron Zips:
Five things you should know about Miami
Varsity Letters:
Ignatius’ Kyle has busy offseason
Kent State Sports:
Volleyball players earn All-Academic honors
Car Chase:
January is auction time
See Jane Style:
Chicago Chic?
All Da King's Men:
Obama's Economic News Conference
Blog of Mass Destruction:
Why Israeli Leaders Terrorize Palestinians
HRLite House:
The Psychology Channel, Interesting Videos, Jobs in I-O, and Happy Birthday Elvis
Akron Gamer:
Games in '09: Resident Evil 5
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Does Ohio have an Andy Warhol Museum?
Sound Check:
Axl Rose speaks on Guns & Rose(s)
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007 Extended
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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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.