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HR 3311: Vehicle Tracking Devices and Road Taxes

HR 3311: Vehicle Tracking Devices and Road Taxes

Noworldsystem.com
September 21, 2009

This is just one of many bills that is evidence that America is falling into an Orwellian police state, the eye of big government, tax slavery and despotism is becoming even more clear as the republic fades into the night.

Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer has introduced HR 3311, if passed the Senate would use $154 million of taxpayer money to fund the development of vehicle tracking devices and roadside RFID scanning devices that would record your everyday driving habits for the sake of creating a new taxation scheme and quite possibly help law enforcement penalize every mistake you make on the road. The money would also be used to research and study how to enforce this on a nationwide scale and how to present this scheme to the public as something necessary to fund failing infrastructures.

The bill will allow the US Treasury Department to establish this program which is called the “Road User Free Pilot Project” that was developed by Oregon legislators to impose a gas tax on Oregon motorists, the pilot program now studies the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax instead, to better track and tax motorists. Within eighteen months of the HR 3311 passing the US Treasury would file an initial report outlining the best methods of adopting this new tax scheme on a nationwide scale.

Here’s what the bill’s sponsor, Congressman Blumenauer had to say about this insidious track and tax plan: “Oregon has successfully tested a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee, and it is time to expand and test the VMT program across the country,”!

Just imagine all vehicles in the United States fitted with this federal tracking device, why don’t they just shackle us all and tax every footstep we make while they are at it!?! This is completely un-constitutional and threatens the 4th amendment of the United States constitution, I doubt that anyone would actually accept something this Orwellian to be used against them.. but of course I’m sure if this bill passes all new vehicles would be secretly fitted with these devices without anyone knowing about it.

Here is what we know the device is capable of recording:

1. The device can calculate miles driven based on GPS data
2. The device can store the number of miles driven
3. The device can determine when the vehicle has left certain states
4. The device can store the states the vehicle entered
5. The device can determine what time a vehicle was being driven
6. The device can store the times the vehicle was driven
7. The device can produce all data stored since its last reading

This device must be receiving precise positional data as an input from its GPS unit. It must also have a clock set to the real time and date as an input. This means that the device is getting data on the exact position of the vehicle at any moment, and that the control software is only storing certain data-points based on this. This is an adequate privacy safeguard, right? Probably not.

Considering this is a tax device, it will very likely need to be updated to reflect changes in the tax law. The need for this capability is clear. One year, the zone around Portland might incur a tax at any time of day, the next year only during rush hour. Oregon’s program might spread to other states, so now the control software in the device has to start recording miles driven in those states as well. If this is the case, then the control software could one day be updated in nearly any way, including complete tracking of movement and speed.

The other thing to consider is that the readers for these devices will be readily available, since every gas station in the state will need one. Even if the software stays the same, there’s nothing stopping a rogue police department from getting its hands on a reader and using it to gather info on people. More likely, though, if these devices became pervasive, law enforcement would push to have readers of their own.

Imagine this scenario: You’re driving a car with one of these GPS devices at the leisurely clip of 60 MPH on the highway leading into Klamath Falls. Like all highways in Oregon, the limit is still 55 MPH. A cop catches you going over the limit and pulls you over. You go through the normal rigmarole with him, except this time he checks your GPS devices and finds out that you’ve exceeded 55 MPH in the state of Oregon 22 times since the device was last read. You leave this encounter with 22 speeding tickets instead of one.

That scenario is possible with the hardware described in the device and minimal changes in the software. Only the good will of the Oregon state government is keeping it from being so. Should Oregonians really rely on that alone to protect their privacy? [Source]

Federal Proposal Would Spend $154 Million on Vehicle Tracking Tax

H.R. 3311 is an oxymoron

HR 3311: The Vehicle Tracking Bill

London drivers may face “pay as you drive” road taxes

 



Cities Debate Privatizing Public Infrastructure

Cities Debate Privatizing Public Infrastructure

NY Times
August 29, 2008

Cleaning up road kill and maintaining runways may not sound like cutting-edge investments. But banks and funds with big money seem to think so.

Reeling from more exotic investments that imploded during the credit crisis, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Carlyle Group, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse are among the investors who have amassed an estimated $250 billion war chest — much of it raised in the last two years — to finance a tidal wave of infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas.

Their strategy is gaining steam in the United States as federal, state and local governments previously wary of private funds struggle under mounting deficits that have curbed their ability to improve crumbling roads, bridges and even airports with taxpayer money.

With politicians like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California warning of a national infrastructure crisis, public resistance to private financing may start to ease.

“Budget gaps are starting to increase the viability of public-private partnerships,” said Norman Y. Mineta, a former secretary of transportation who was recently hired by Credit Suisse as a senior adviser to such deals.

This fall, Midway Airport of Chicago could become the first to pass into the hands of private investors. Just outside the nation’s capital, a $1.9 billion public-private partnership will finance new high-occupancy toll lanes around Washington. This week, Florida gave the green light to six groups that included JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers and the Carlyle Group to bid for a 50- to 75 -year lease on Alligator Alley, a toll road known for sightings of sleeping alligators that stretches 78 miles down I-75 in South Florida.

Until recently, the use of private funds to build and manage large-scale American infrastructure assets was slow to take root. States and towns could raise taxes and user fees or turn to the municipal bond market.

Americans have also been wary of foreign investors, who were among the first to this market, taking over their prized roads and bridges. When Macquarie of Australia and Cintra of Spain, two foreign funds with large portfolios of international investments, snapped up leases to the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road, “people said ‘hold it, we don’t want our infrastructure owned by foreigners,’ ” Mr. Mineta said.

And then there is the odd romance between Americans and their roads: they do not want anyone other than the government owning them. The specter of investors reaping huge fees by financing assets like the Pennsylvania Turnpike also touches a raw nerve among taxpayers, who already feel they are paying top dollar for the government to maintain roads and bridges.

And with good reason: Private investors recoup their money by maximizing revenue — either making the infrastructure better to allow for more cars, for example, or by raising tolls. (Concession agreements dictate everything from toll increases to the amount of time dead animals can remain on the road before being cleared.)

Politicians have often supported the civic outcry: in the spring of 2007, James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, chairman of the House Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure, warned that his panel would “work to undo” any public-private partnership deals that failed to protect the public interest.

And labor unions have been quick to point out that investment funds stand to reap handsome fees from the crisis in infrastructure. “Our concern is that some sources of financing see this as a quick opportunity to make money,” Stephen Abrecht, director of the Capital Stewardship Program at the Service Employees International Union, said.

But in a world in which governments view infrastructure as a way to manage growth and raise productivity through the efficient movement of goods and people, an eroding economy has forced politicians to take another look.

“There’s a huge opportunity that the U.S. public sector is in danger of losing,” says Markus J. Pressdee, head of infrastructure investment banking at Credit Suisse. “It thinks there is a boatload of capital and when it is politically convenient it will be able to take advantage of it. But the capital is going into infrastructure assets available today around the world, and not waiting for projects the U.S., the public sector, may sponsor in the future.”

Traditionally, the federal government played a major role in developing the nation’s transportation backbone: Thomas Jefferson built canals and roads in the 1800s, Theodore Roosevelt expanded power generation in the early 1900s. In the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the building of the interstate highway system.

But since the early 1990s, the United States has had no comprehensive transportation development, and responsibilities were pushed off to states, municipalities and metropolitan planning organizations. “Look at the physical neglect — crumbling bridges, the issue of energy security, environmental concerns,” said Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution. “It’s more relevant than ever and we have no vision.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States needs to invest at least $1.6 trillion over the next five years to maintain and expand its infrastructure. Last year, the Federal Highway Administration deemed 72,000 bridges, or more than 12 percent of the country’s total, “structurally deficient.” But the funds to fix them are shrinking: by the end of this year, the Highway Trust Fund will have a several billion dollar deficit.

“We are facing an infrastructure crisis in this country that threatens our status as an economic superpower, and threatens the health and safety of the people we serve,” New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told Congress this year. In January he joined forces with Mr. Schwarzenegger and Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania to start a nonprofit group to raise awareness about the problem.

Some American pension funds see an investment opportunity. “Our infrastructure is crumbling, from bridges in Minnesota to our airports and freeways,” said Christopher Ailman, the head of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. His board recently authorized up to about $800 million to invest in infrastructure projects. Nearby, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, with coffers totaling $234 billion, has earmarked $7 billion for infrastructure investments through 2010. The Washington State Investment Board has allocated 5 percent of its fund to such investments.

Some foreign pension funds that jumped into the game early have already reaped rewards: The $52 billion Ontario Municipal Employee Retirement System saw a 12.4 percent return last year on a $5 billion infrastructure investment pool, above the benchmark 9.9 percent though down from 14 percent in 2006.

“People are creating a new asset class,” said Anne Valentine Andrews, head of portfolio strategy at Morgan Stanley Infrastructure. “You can see and understand the businesses involved — for example, ships come into the port, unload containers, reload containers and leave,” she said. “There’s no black box.”

The prospect of steady returns has drawn high-flying investors like Kohlberg Kravis and Morgan Stanley to the table. “Ten to 20 years from now infrastructure could be larger than real estate,” said Mark Weisdorf, head of infrastructure investments at JPMorgan. In 2006 and 2007, more than $500 billion worth of commercial real estate deals were done.

The pace of recent work is encouraging, says Robert Poole, director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, pointing to projects like the high-occupancy toll, or HOT, lanes outside Washington. “The fact that the private sector raised $1.4 billion for the Beltway project shows that even projects like HOT lanes that are considered high risk can be developed and financed privately and that has huge implications for other large metro areas,” he said .

Yet if the flow of money is fast, the return on these investments can be a waiting game. Washington’s HOT lanes project took six years to build after Fluor Enterprises, one of the two private companies financing part of the project, made an unsolicited bid in 2002. The privatization of Chicago’s Midway Airport was part of a pilot program adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1996 to allow five domestic airports to be privatized. Twelve years later only one airport has met that goal — Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, N.Y. — and it was sold back to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

For many politicians, privatization also remains a painful process. Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, faced a severe backlash when he collected $3.8 billion for a 75- year lease of the Indiana Toll Road. A popular bumper sticker in Indiana reads “Keep the toll road, lease Mitch.”

Joe Dear, executive director of the Washington State Investment Board, still wonders how quickly governments will move. “Will all public agencies think it’s worth the extra return private capital will demand?” he asked. “That’s unclear.”

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U.S. Roads, Airports Being Sold To Private Investors

U.S. Roads, Airports Being Sold To Private Investors

Reuters
August 4, 2008

Cash-strapped U.S. state and city governments are likely to sell or lease more highways, bridges, airports and other assets to investors desperate for stable returns after being frazzled by the credit crisis.

The trend is set to pick up speed given worsening budget deficits in state capitals and city halls nationwide.

It will also be welcomed by Wall Street bankers hoping to help create and market so-called “infrastructure” transactions at a time many debt markets remain paralyzed, and after major U.S. stock indexes fell into bear market territory.

“When you are nervous about everything else, you put your money in a toll road,” said John Schmidt, a partner at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP in Chicago. “That’s the logic of infrastructure. Returns are stable and predictable. You won’t get fabulously rich, but you’ll get stable cash flow.”

The latest enthusiasm for at least partially privatizing infrastructure assets came on July 30 from New York Gov. David Paterson, who is trying to plug a budget deficit caused in part by lower tax revenue as Wall Street retrenches.

“We’re just looking at ways to be more efficient and that’s why I used the term public-private partnerships — trying to find some creative solutions,” Paterson said. “The reason I’m avoiding taxes is because I think taxes are addictive.”

Bankers and others in the industry say there is pent-up demand from dedicated infrastructure funds and public pension funds to invest in hard assets — perhaps $75 billion to $150 billion of equity capital — but not enough supply.

Read Full Article Here

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Bush: “Wall Street got drunk”

Bush: “Wall Street got drunk”

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Dems Prep Another Stimulus Package, Bush May Veto

Dems Prep Another Stimulus Package, Bush May Veto

Reuters
July 1, 2008

Democrats in the U.S. Congress are gearing up to pass a second election-year economic stimulus package, but unlike the $152 billion measure that passed in February, they are not counting on getting the support of President George W. Bush.

Leaders in the House of Representatives and Senate are discussing with key committee chairmen the shape of another emergency spending bill that would again aim to spur the economy and help those hurt by the economic slowdown, several congressional aides said on Tuesday.

This comes on the heels of this week’s enactment of increased jobless benefits, another Democratic priority.

Infrastructure projects — road and bridge building and other government-funded construction — top the list, according to those aides. At least $8 billion in funds could be sought just for these projects, although aides said there were no firm cost estimates yet for any portion of the legislation.

Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, is hoping such a bill also would help deal with some problems related to the unfolding home mortgage crisis, especially if Bush vetoes a broader bill moving through Congress.

“The second stimulus package should include money to the states and cities to buy foreclosed properties,” Frank told Reuters in a telephone interview.

If a second economic stimulus bill advances and it follows the formula of emergency measures enacted this year, the new stimulus would add to already steep deficits that worry fiscal conservatives.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters, “I think that we’re going to come back at a later time and do other things that are extremely important.” He singled out the need for more money for disaster relief, law enforcement and a program that helps low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills.

Reid’s spokesman, Jim Manley, said Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California have held several conversations on possible legislation.

“July might be a little quick to pull it off. September seems more likely” following a month-long August recess, said one House aide, who asked not to be identified.

Last January and February, the White House and congressional Republicans displayed rare bipartisanship when they worked to enact a $152 billion plan, mostly tax rebates, to stimulate the economy by trying to boost consumer spending.

In crafting that package, Democrats gave up, at least temporarily, on a series of initiatives they wanted, from more food stamps for the poor to expanded unemployment benefits and government-funded construction projects.

Bush opposed those add-ons, citing cost concerns.

Read Full Article Here

 



Obama Supports Global Tax on Americans

Obama’s Global Tax Up For Senate Vote

GOP USA
February 14, 2008

Fbiiraqisbein_mn

A nice-sounding bill called the “Global Poverty Act,” sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends.

The bill, which is item number four on the committee’s business meeting agenda, passed the House by a voice vote last year because most members didn’t realize what was in it. Congressional sponsors have been careful not to calculate the amount of foreign aid spending that it would require. According to the website of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, no hearings have been held on the Obama bill in that body.

A release from the Obama Senate office about the bill declares, “In 2000, the U.S. joined more than 180 countries at the United Nations Millennium Summit and vowed to reduce global poverty by 2015. We are halfway towards this deadline, and it is time the United States makes it a priority of our foreign policy to meet this goal and help those who are struggling day to day.”

The legislation itself requires the President “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).

The U.N. says that “The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion – or about 0.25% of their collective GNP.”

In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.”

Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the U.N.’s “Millennium Project,” says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.’s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the “Millennium Development Goals,” this amounts to $845 billion. And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs has written, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Obama’s bill has only six co-sponsors. They are Senators Maria Cantwell, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Lugar, Richard Durbin, Chuck Hagel and Robert Menendez. But it appears that Biden and Obama see passage of this bill as a way to highlight Democratic Party priorities in the Senate.

The House version (H.R. 1302), sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), had only 84 co-sponsors before it was suddenly brought up on the House floor last September 25 and was passed by voice vote. House Republicans were caught off-guard, unaware that the pro-U.N. measure committed the U.S. to spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

It appears the Senate version is being pushed not only by Biden and Obama, a member of the committee, but Lugar, the ranking Republican member. Lugar has worked with Obama in the past to promote more foreign aid for Russia, supposedly to stem nuclear proliferation, and has become Obama’s mentor. Like Biden, Lugar is a globalist. They have both promoted passage of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, for example.

The so-called “Lugar-Obama initiative” was modeled after the Nunn-Lugar program, also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, which was designed to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. But one defense analyst, Rich Kelly, noted evidence that “CTR funds have eased the Russian military’s budgetary woes, freeing resources for such initiatives as the war in Chechnya and defense modernization.” He recommended that Congress “eliminate CTR funding so that it does not finance additional, perhaps more threatening, programs in the former Soviet Union.” However, over $6 billion has already been spent on the program.

Another program modeled on Nunn-Lugar, the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP), was recently exposed as having funded nuclear projects in Iran through Russia.

More foreign aid through passage of the Global Poverty Act was identified as one of the strategic goals of InterAction, the alliance of U.S-based international non-governmental organizations that lobbies for more foreign aid. The group is heavily financed by the U.S. Government, having received $1.4 million from taxpayers in fiscal year 2005 and $1.7 million in 2006. However, InterAction recently issued a report accusing the United States of “falling short on its commitment to rid the world of dire poverty by 2015 under the U.N. Millennium Development Goals…”

It’s not clear what President Bush would do if the bill passes the Senate. The bill itself quotes Bush as declaring that “We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right to human dignity.” Bush’s former top aide, Michael J. Gerson, writes in his new book, Heroic Conservatism, that Bush should be remembered as the President who “sponsored the largest percentage increases in foreign assistance since the Marshall Plan…”

Even these increases, however, will not be enough to satisfy the requirements of the Obama bill. A global tax will clearly be necessary to force American taxpayers to provide the money.

– Americans who would like their senators to know what they are voting on can contact them through information offered by GOPUSA.

 

Barak Obama Fronts Wall Street’s Infrastructure

Bruce Marshall
Information Clearing House
February 17, 2008

Do not be fooled! Barak Obama’s call for National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank (NIRB) does not signal the return of the Democratic Party to the values of FDR and a revival of the Constitutional prerogative to ‘promote the general welfare’, but would rather provide more welfare for Wall Street and worse. Obama’s plan is nothing more than the direct means of instituting the Rohatyn-Rudman National Investment Corporation (NIC) plan called for in 2005, which in essence is a revival of Mussolini’s methods of corporatist control of the state in a politically correct post modern fashion..

When Senator Obama states that his National Investment Reinvestment Bank will magically turn $60 billion into trillions of dollars as he did in his Feb 13th Jamesville, WI speech, one can easily realize that the only way that this can happen is through the perverse magic of Wall Street. What would happen is that bonds floated by the NIRB will be bought on the open market, to then be speculated upon, securitized as derivatives, traded and ultimately used as collateral on the newly built infrastructure. What we will see is the emergence of an infrastructure bubble to replace the mortgage bubble, propped up by initial government expenditures towards infrastructure. This is just the start as Obama will fund the feel good ‘carbon credit’ swap to be the next blast of hot air to make Wall Street giddy. This is a key insight to a true understanding of what is going on. Bailout the financial powers with a clever plan that will raise money to then buy up hard assets, in other words the remaining wealth of our nation, as the meltdown crisis of over a quadrillion in derivatives losses grows and grows..

Besides artificially propping up the markets, Obama’s NIRB, as an initiation of the Rohatyn/Rudman infrastructure investment model, opens the door to the privatization of public assets. International predators and asset-strippers want to buy up public highways and impose cutthroat tolls, as they are already doing in many states. Then they run the turnpikes into the ground as cash cows while they mercilessly bilk the users. Privatization is a key goal of the Anglo-American financiers behind this scheme. Both the NIC and NIRB rely on the new darling of the markets, PPPs, known as public private partnerships. PPPs are the means by which market forces will dictate, and that is the word, the implementation of these projects. The argument is that the PPP will keep costs down, but in reality only because the private corporations, now controlling the public sector, will own the assets of what is being constructed. The PPP model is none other than the model implemented by Mussolini in his fascist corporate state. The creation of NIRB funds hark back to Hjalmar Schact’s ‘MEFO’ bills that created the speculative bubble of money so that the National Socialists could rearm Germany and fight World War II..

Read Full Article Here

 

6 Different Women Faint For Obama

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zy1O8RCh6PI

Obama Advisor Brzezinski is Uber-Globalist
http://rattube.com/blog1/2008/01/..uber-globalist/

 



Bernanke Clears Way For Fed Rate Cut

Bernanke Clears Way For Fed Rate Cut

Financial Times
November 30, 2007

Ben Bernanke put the Federal Reserve on a path towards a December rate cut in a speech on Thursday night in which he said the relapse in financial markets had resulted in a “tightening in financial conditions” that had the potential to harm the real economy.

The Fed chairman also said recent data on household spending had been “on the soft side” and warned that the combination of higher petrol prices, the weak housing market, tighter credit conditions and declines in stock prices seem likely to create some headwinds for the consumer in the months ahead.

 

Paulson’s Plan to Punish the Public

The Motley Fool
November 30, 2007

If you don’t learn from the past …
If the mortgage crisis and housing bubble have taught us one thing, it should be to watch out for the unintended consequences of greed. Unfortunately, our nation’s legislators and political appointees haven’t learned that lesson. Recent plans for housing and mortgage bailouts generally run from dumb to dumber. Today, The Wall Street Journal reported on yet another scheme, reportedly being spearheaded by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It’s an idea so naively populist and antimarket that you would think it came from Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if not for its cringe-inducing, Beltway-wonk moniker: the Hope Now Alliance.

In short, bankers and loan-servicing outfits are going to lower interest rates on strapped borrowers so they don’t lose their houses. How much, how long, and who qualifies are all still up in the air. No doubt, this will sound good to those folks who signed on for mortgages they can’t actually afford. It will also look good to politicians angling to score points before the next election, and to bleeding hearts everywhere. It will also look good to select mortgage-industry players — like Countrywide Financial (NYSE: CFC) and Citigroup (NYSE: C), which could really use a government-led bailout.

Unfortunately, this ill-conceived salve will ultimately punish the silent majority of Americans, people who didn’t go out and make boneheaded financial decisions over the past half-decade. Let’s take a look at why.

Read Full Article Here

Related News:

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Shadow Mortgage Bailout Already in Progress
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New Home Prices: Worst Drop In 37 Years
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More than 50,000 Lost Their Homes in October
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