American Credit Scores Crash To New Lows

“Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers — nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders. It’s unlikely they will be able to get credit cards, auto loans or mortgages under the tighter lending standards banks now use,” according to the AP. Historically, just 15 percent of the 170 million consumers with active credit accounts, or 25.5 million people, fell below 599, according to data posted on Myfico.com.The recession, tight lending practices by banks, and unemployment have caught up to the consumer credit market, and the trend is likely to worsen.

Banks, particularly regional and community financial firms, are struggling with defaults on both residential and commercial mortgages. To stay out of the clutches of the FDIC, they have become remarkably cautious about lending, even to people with good credit scores.

The number of people who have been unemployed for over six months is now in the millions and nearly 25 million Americans are out of work. This population is not likely to see their credit scores repaired for years.

The young, for years targets for credit card companies, are unemployed at higher rates than people over 25. That means that this “feeder” population for credit cards is falling and some of these people noe have no credit scores at all.

Another trend that has hurt credit scores immensely is the disappearance of home equity loans which were once taken out by huge numbers of Americans who had houses worth more than their mortgages. Now, more than 11 million mortgages in the US are underwater. People are abandoning homes that are being foreclosed upon. Either of those actions severely damages credit ratings.

One of the long-term effects of low credit scores is a likely long-term drop in consumer spending. People often cannot afford to buy things by paying cash. And austerity is the rule of the day.

Douglas A. McIntyre

80,000+ still need to pay income taxes

The Indiana Department of Revenue is sending out more than 80,000 tax bills to those who still owe income tax money. Bills issued this month are reported to total nearly $60 million.

The Indiana Department of Revenue is sending out more than 80,000 tax bills to those who still owe income tax money. Bills issued this month are reported to total nearly $60 million. If you don't pay your bill by the due date, the bill could become a tax warrant which will then be turned over to your county sheriff or to professional tax agencies. (WXIN-TV FOX59 / July 12, 2010)

Indianapolis - The state is sending a warning to delinquent taxpayers, in the form of overdue tax bills.

The Indiana Department of Revenue is sending out more than 80,000 tax bills to those who still owe income tax money. Bills issued this month are reported to total nearly $60 million.

If you don't pay your bill by the due date, the bill could become a tax warrant which will then be turned over to your county sheriff or to professional tax agencies.

North Korea, US to Hold Warship Talks

Photo: AP
South Korean Internet-savvy citizens, such as bloggers, Twitter users and online media reporters visit the wreckage of the Cheonan warship that the government claims was sunk by a North Korean torpedo in March, 8 July 2010.

Senior officers from the U.S.-led United Nations Command and North Korea are expected to meet Tuesday to discuss the recent sinking of a South Korean warship. The United Nations Command said Monday the meeting will be at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone.

North Korea had initially rejected the U.N. Command's request to discuss possible violations of the 1953 truce that ended the Korean War.However, Pyongyang changed its stance after Seoul rejected its proposal to send a military team to inspect the Cheonan, which sank after an explosion in March.

An international investigation blamed a North Korean torpedo for sinking the South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors. North Korea denies responsibility.

Pyongyang is likely to maintain that position Tuesday's meeting Tuesday, said Baek Seung-joo with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses. He said he expects the North's delegation to criticize the conclusion of the investigation holding North Korea responsible, calling into question the scientific evidence. However, the meeting could clear the way for higher-level talks between the two sides, he added.

The U.N. Security Council has condemned the attack on the Cheonan, but did not directly blame North Korea. Pyongyang hailed the U.N. statement as a "great diplomatic victory."

Seoul expressed satisfaction with the Security Council statement but also reiterated its call for North Korea to apologize and demonstrate its willingness to give up its nuclear weapons programs.

The sinking of the Cheonan significantly raised tensions on the peninsula.

The delegates at Tuesday talks will be colonels, who are expected to prepare for a meeting of generals. The last talks between generals were in March 2009. The talks have been held 16 times since they were instituted in 1998 as a confidence-building measure.

In response to the Cheonan sinking, the South Korean and U.S. navies plan joint maneuvers, although they have not announced the date and location of the exercise.

Will we lose mortgage deductions, Medicare?

BOSTON — The chairmen of President Obama's national debt commission painted a gloomy picture Sunday as the United States struggles to control its spending.

Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered — including curtailing popular tax breaks, such as the home-mortgage deduction, and instituting a financial trigger mechanism for gaining Medicare coverage.

The nation's total federal debt next year is expected to exceed $14 trillion — about $47,000 for every U.S. resident.

"This debt is like a cancer," Bowles said in a sober presentation lightened by humorous asides between him and Simpson. "It is truly going to destroy the country from within."

Simpson said the entirety of the nation's current discretionary spending is consumed by the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs.

"The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans, the whole rest of the discretionary budget, is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said. China alone holds $920 billion in IOUs from the U.S. government.

If the United States makes no changes, Bowles said, the nation will be spending $2 trillion by 2020 just for interest on the national debt.

"Just think about that: All that money, going somewhere else, to create jobs and opportunity somewhere else," he said.

Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, and Bowles, a former White House chief of staff under President Clinton, head an 18-member commission. The panel is charged with coming up with a plan by Dec. 1 to reduce the government's annual deficits to 3 percent of the national economy by 2015.

Bowles led successful 1997 talks with Republicans on a balanced-budget bill that produced government surpluses the last three years Clinton was in office and the first year of Republican George W. Bush's presidency. Simpson, as the Senate's GOP whip in 1990, helped round up votes for a budget bill in which President George H.W. Bush broke his "read my lips" pledge not to raise taxes.

Despite their backgrounds, both Simpson and Bowles said they were not 100 percent confident of success this time.

Simpson labeled the commission members "good people of deep, deep difference, knowing the possibility of the odds of success are rather harrowing to say the least."

Bowles also said Congress had to be ready to accept the commission's findings.

"What we do is not so hard to figure out; it's the political consequences of doing it that makes it really tough," he said.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, was one of those leaders who sat in rapt attention during the presentation, one of the first in public by the commission leaders.

"I don't know that I ever heard a gloomier picture painted that created more hope for me," Beebe said.

VOTE FRAUD AND THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE UNITED STATES

Michael Rivero

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Note: This article first appeared as a post written by myself at Free Republic in late 2000. I was surprised to learn that it was copied re-posted at dozens of sites around the world. So, it seems only fitting that the article should re-appear here on my own web site.

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In recent months, I have posted a series of article on the deplorable and quite frankly hopeless financial situation the government of the United States is presently in due to reckless and outright irresponsible fiscal policy.

In summary, the combined state and federal debt of the United States now stands at an estimated $65 trillion. The United States, the world's largest creditor nation when Ronald Reagan took office, is now the world's largest debtor nation. The federal debt has doubled in the last 8 years, during what is reported to the American people as being a record setting economic boom. During this same supposed economic boom, the federal government looted your social security trust fund for another 3/4 of a trillion dollars to balance the books.

A serious doubt exists as to whether this huge debt and its crushing interest payments ($60,000 per taxpayer since 1960) are really the responsibility of the taxpayers. Considering that the law under which this debt was incurred was voted into law before most of us were born, it's clear that the taxpayers have never really had a choice in the matter. Certainly the young people of today, not yet old enough to vote, have had no choice regarding the continuing payment of interest charges for a debt not of their making. To hand such a huge debt to our children and order them to pay it is indentured servitude at best, outright slavery at worst. No valid argument exists as to why children not yet old enough to vote are obliged to pay the debts of reckless government officials who held office before these children were born. The government decides that children shall be slaves to the debt, so slaves they shall be (until some courageous parents decide to put a stop to it).

Virtually every argument coming from those who would convince us to go on parting with our hard-earned money to pay this massive and impossible debt amounts to a claim that we always have the choice to vote for politicians who will somehow change things, and that the election of a particular candidate amounts to approval of his or her policies. Put simply, the fact that the public voted for Bill Clinton amounts to permission by the public for him to run the federal government deeper into debt and loot our retirement money, or so goes the theory.

One can easily challenge the logic behind such a claim. If, after all, the only candidates on the ballot intend to borrow more money, does that mean the voters approve of the eventual loans? Does the fact that Hitler won his election prove that all Germans approved of the concentration camps?

But beyond that simple fallacy lies a greater issue, one that until now has never been fully and properly examined. And that is whether the public really voted for those who are in power at all. Are our elections truly fair, or are they simply an illusion that the public approves of whatever despot has cheated his or her way to power.

Cuba is a good example. It's now generally acknowledged by historians that the elections which kept Batista in power were rigged. The CIA is known to have rigged elections in numerous countries around the world, to put in governments friendly to American interest, often detrimental to the people of those nations (often leading to revolution). A search through the news reports of elections around the world shows that a truly fair and honest election is indeed a rarity. It is therefore naive (not to mention racist) to start out assuming American elections are honest simply because we are Americans.

Are the elections in the United States fair and honest? A review of the facts is far less than reassuring.

Since 1964, right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, vote tabulation for national elections has been handled not by the government, but by a private company lacking any official oversight at all. This company, which changes its name on a regular basis, is currently called "Voters News Service" and is located in New York City. This company is owned by a consortium of TV networks and wire services, which are in turn controlled by the CIA through its Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The TV networks will make a great show of being "first with the election results", but in reality all of them rely on the numbers sent to them by VNS, while seldom acknowledging its existence during the election coverage.

This is the voting process most in use in America today. A voter punches a card in the voting booth. That card is run through a computer at the local voting center, then that computer contacts computers at Voters News Service, or the precinct official telephones the numbers the computer shows him to Voters News Service, which then announces the results via the networks. Poll watchers are allowed to watch the voting booths, to guard against polling place electioneering, but in most precincts, the actual counting of the ballots is concealed from the public, and nobody is allowed to see inside the voting machines, or review the computer software that counts the ballots. 70% of all votes in America are counted by machine, and nobody, not private citizen, not local election official, nobody, is allowed to examine how it all works. The accuracy tests conducted on the voting machines before and after the actual election are utterly worthless, as they cannot detect fraud designed to fool the accuracy test itself. In 1988, when voting machines in Illinois were tested with tens of thousands of ballots instead of the few dozen normally used for the accuracy test, over 1/4 of the machines which had passed the standard accuracy test were found to have mistabulated the larger test vote results!

While researching the book, "VOTESCAM", the Collier brothers actually managed to videotape members of the League of Women voters forging ballots, and found hard evidence that Shouptronics and Printomatic vote machines were rigged in the Dade County Elections. In the Shouptronics, the wheels of the mechanical counters were shaved to cause miscounts. In the Printomatic machines, a malfunction revealed that the paper tape with the voting results had been pre-printed before the voting even started! The Colliers, along with attorney Ellis Rubin, handed the evidence to the assistant State Attorney for Florida. Sadly, that assistant State Attorney was Janet Reno, who in a pattern we have all become too familier with, killed the investigation. 60 Minutes taped a segment on the Dade County Vote Fraud, but never aired it.

Mandatory voter registration laws, such as "Motor voter" have been a boon to election fraud, generating registered voters who don't vote and whose names may be used to obtain absentee ballots. In the California election that unseated Bob Dornan following his efforts to investigate the Clinton White House, canvassers discovered that nearly half of the names registered to vote in the GOP election from 7 precincts simply did not exist. The California Attorney General's office was informed by the precinct worker, but again nothing was done. In 1998, almost 20,000 fraudulent voter registrations were discovered on the voting rolls, but were allowed to remain on the excuse that their removal in time for the election would cost too much!

The evidence for massive vote fraud in the United States uncovered by the Voting Integrity Project and organizations like it are ignored by the government, which has obviously been the beneficiary of such chicanery, and by the media, which is complicit in the fraud. When vote fraud was suspected in the 1996 Arizona Primary (the one that ended Pat Buchanon's winning streak after New Hampshire), the Arizona legislature passed a special law forbidding a recount for that one primary election only! When the Miami Magazine ran a story on the Dade County Vote Fraud, the magazine was purchased just one month later by the editor of the Miami News, Sylvan Meyer, who ordered that no further stories on vote fraud be published. When precinct workers in the 1974 Dade County elections discovered that the voting machines they were using were rigged, they walked off the job and refused to certify the election process. Police and fire fighters took over the polling duties. The next day, the Miami Herald reported the walk out, but not the reason. When the precinct workers went to the media to report the election rigging, the media ignored them. So did the local attorney general. So did the FBI. Citizens who tried to observe the next election were arrested.

Typical of the horror stories associated with the media-owned Voters News Service is what happened in Dubuque County Iowa during the 1996 Caucuses. The county's 41 precincts met in 41 classrooms at two high schools and voted on old fashioned paper ballots, which were then counted in full view of all present (including representatives of the candidates), and the results posted for all to see and verify. The vote totals were then phoned directly into Voters News Service by the county chairman, again in full view of all participants that night. Buchanon won the county by a wide margin, garnering 870 votes. By next morning, Voters News Service had dropped Buchanon's vote total for that county down to 757 votes, a 13% drop. Buchanon lost Iowa by a much smaller margin than 13%.

The Iowa state GOP claimed it could do nothing about the problem; they were "in VNS' hands". VNS, despite the paper ballots proving Buchanon's 870 votes, refused to admit error and refused to change the results for the county. Needless to say, the question of whether Buchanon had had 13% of his votes shaved off in other Iowa counties, ones in which computerized vote machines meant there was no audit trail to check, was ignored. The fact that an obviously fraudulent vote had made it all the way through the system to be reported on national television was also ignored by the media. (Iowa is the state, it should be noted, where a columnist for Salon magazine was charged with vote fraud.)

The complicity by the law enforcement machinery of this nation is astounding. In one election in Boston, a judge declared 968 ballots which had been declared "blank" due to multiple punches to be valid, arbitrarily assigning most of the disputed votes to the incumbent candidate, thereby reversing his defeat. In a computer vote fraud case in West Virginia, an expert witness testifying for the plaintiff sat down at a CES voting machine provided by the defendants, studied it for a while, then with a single ballot card added 10,000 votes to one of the fictional candidates. The judge refused to allow the jury to see the demonstration and the charges were eventually dropped.

Only three states, California, Florida, and Michigan, have laws requiring that the voting machine source code be placed in escrow should it need to be examined after an election. None of those states have any means to verify that the source code placed in escrow is in fact the origin of the compiled code running on the machines election night, and in Michigan, the escrow is simply handled by the voting machine company itself with no overview by a state agency or public interest group.

All the voting machines used in the United States come from just three companies. The Presidents of two of them have been convicted of vote fraud and yet all state governments continue to do business (at very steep fees) with just these three companies. The largest of the three companies has direct access to 50% of the nation's votes. Nobody is allowed to inspect the machines, or watch as the vote totals are accumulated and counted, and there is no audit trail anywhere along the path from the voting machine to Voter's News Service, the private media-owned company that without any official oversight, tells us all what the election results are.

Most states have now passed laws requiring a challenge to election results to be filed within a few weeks of the election, far too short a time for anyone to properly determine if such a challenge is warranted.

Despite such an obvious inhibition, a Democrat who lost a legislative seat in the 1998 Hawaiian election did file a challenge, claiming there was vote fraud. A quick audit showed that vote fraud involving absentee ballots had indeed occurred, but mostly by the Democrat; who had cheated, but not enough to win. This scandal triggered public questions about several races, including that of the Democratic Governor, Ben Cayutano, who had been trailing his Republican challenger all during the election night, only to have a sudden surge of votes at the last second push him over the top. The governor offered to over-ride the state's two week filing deadline for election challenges and allow a full recount, then back-pedaled and made a full recount contingent on a "pre-audit". The "pre-audit" was assigned to the company which had run the election, along with a warning that if it turned out the election was flawed, their final payment would be withheld by the State of Hawaii. Needless to say the pre-audit found no errors in the election, and despite the urging of the Voter Integrity Project (which was conducting its own investigation) the full recount was canceled. The voting company, ES&S was again been awarded the voting contract for the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections, without any open bidding.

Who chooses what government we live under? Those who cast the votes, or as Stalin observed, those who count them? Do We The People pick those who govern us, or does a private company, owned by the CIA controlled media, and operating without any public oversight? Have We The People consented by vote to bear the $65 trillion burden of a government's reckless fiscal policy, or was that consent and that vote fraudulently obtained?

Just think about all it really means if the elections are being rigged on a massive scale.

It means that the contract between ruler and ruled is broken. The government does not govern with the consent of the governed, it rules by treachery and deception. The crown it wears is a stolen one, usurped from the people by three voting machine companies and one media owned results-announcer totally beyond review and reproach.

So, now we come back to the issue of government debt and who is really responsible for it. If, as appears to be the case, our elections are routinely being rigged, then it cannot be argued that We The People either chose, or approved of, those officials who borrowed trillions of dollars without our permission and sought to enslave us to that debt.

In an atmosphere of doubt about the validity of the voting process, it cannot be assumed that the American people have actually voted for or approved of any of the government's actions and policies for the last 35 years. That includes a couple of wars and some $65 trillion in debt, and the $60,000 in interest payments alone each taxpayer has had to fork over since the 1960s.

In light of the numerous incidents of vote fraud uncovered through the years and the quite obvious stonewall on the subject by the officials who benefit from rigged elections and the media that at least helps in the rigging, it is dangerous to assume that American elections are honest. The burden of proof must lie with VNS and the voting machine companies to prove their honesty.

In an atmosphere of doubt about the validity of the voting process, it appears that the entire voting process is a sham, a trick to fool the American people into accepting whatever is done to them by creating the illusion that the people somehow voted for and approved of whatever is being done. That's how Batista fooled the Cuban people. That's how the USSR fooled the Soviet citizens. And that's how the American government fools us.

Do We The People owe that $65 trillion? No, we do not. It was borrowed without our permission. No citizen agreed to repay that money.

Those government officials who borrowed that money and intend that We The People should be forced to repay it can no longer do so on the assumption that they rule with the consent of those who vote.

The best that can be said is that they rule with the consent of those who count the vote.

Obama's debt commission warns of fiscal 'cancer'

BOSTON -- The co-chairmen of President Obama's debt and deficit commission offered an ominous assessment of the nation's fiscal future here Sunday, calling current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.

The two leaders -- former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton -- sought to build support for the work of the commission, whose recommendations due later this year are likely to spark a fierce debate in Congress.

"There are many who hope we fail," Simpson said at the closing session of the National Governors Association annual meeting. He called the 18-member commission "good people with deep, deep differences" who know the odds of success "are rather harrowing."

(Graphic: President Obama's proposed 2011 budget explained)

Bowles said that unlike the current economic crisis, which was largely unforeseen before it hit in fall 2008, the coming fiscal calamity is staring the country in the face. "This one is as clear as a bell," he said. "This debt is like a cancer."

The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said.

"We can't grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can't tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

Bowles pointed to steps taken recently by the new coalition government in Britain, which also faces an acute budgetary problem, as a guide to what the commission might use in its recommendations. That would mean about three-quarters of the deficit reduction would be accomplished through spending cuts, and the remainder with additional revenue.

Most Republicans in Congress are opposed to any tax increases, which has made the work of the commission far more difficult. Bowles and Simpson appealed for support to the governors, who have been forced by their states' constitutions to balance their budgets with deep spending cuts and, in many cases, tax increases.

Bowles and Simpson said the commission would have had a stronger hand politically had it been created by Congress, rather than through an executive order. Simpson was pointed in his criticism of seven Republicans who once co-sponsored such a measure but who helped block it in the Senate.

"As far as I can discern, it was to stick it to the president," Simpson said. "That's where we are in Washington." He later added that all seven "have now come to us to say, 'We're ready to help.' "

The presentation by Simpson and Bowles, which included repeated statements of determination to produce a bipartisan set of recommendations, drew praise from the governors.

"I don't know that I've every heard a gloomier picture painted that created more hope for me," said Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe (D).

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire (D) said that many governors fear that the commission's recommendations will result in more demands on the states.

Bowles, who noted that the 1997 balanced-budget agreement between the Clinton White House and the Republican-controlled Congress included many provisions that put more burdens on the states, said that wasn't likely.

"I don't think you're going to see a lot of devolution coming from us because the states are all broke," he said.

Simpson also warned that the November elections could add another wild card to the work of the commission. "I have no idea what's going to happen on Election Day but it's going to be disruptive . . .," he said. "It's going to be a big wake-up call around the whole United States. I have no idea where it's going, but thank heaven we have a month then to work through the wreckage."

Critics say loan modification law isn't working

A year ago, Nevada's new foreclosure-mediation law was touted as a savior that would keep an estimated 17,700 Silver State families in their homes and prevent communities from becoming ghost towns in a state that led the nation in home foreclosures.

Under the law, borrowers who believe they can avoid foreclosure if the terms of their mortgages are modified can ask for mediation, and lenders must attend the mediation meeting. The mediation mandate kicks in once foreclosure proceedings begin. Borrowers have 30 days to request the mediation meeting.

Lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the law is working but needs to be more consistent. Banking representatives say they are pleased with the mediation procedure and that just showing up or calling in at a mediation meeting is enough "good faith" to satisfy the requirements of the statute.

But critics argue the mediation law is a toothless sham because the program isn't following the law. Homeowners and their advocates argue that although lenders' representatives are taking part in meetings, they aren't negotiating. They charge that many lenders would rather throw homeowners out than consider loan modifications.

They argue that loan servicing firms and lenders often make more money from a foreclosed home than from a modified loan agreement and, therefore, go through the motions of a meeting without putting any offers on the table.

"Last July, we were happy because there was a new law in town, and banks were going to have to face consequences for their actions," said Kristy Sinsara, a Las Vegas-based consumer advocate. "But the sheriff, or in this case the courts, isn't enforcing the law, isn't utilizing it."

She said lenders have been standing fast on "even the worst predatory loans" and claim that just because they have a representative at the mediation, often via telephone, they have satisfied the law and don't have to put anything on the table.

"District courts are not imposing sanctions on loan modifications even though they have that power," Sinsara said. "These aren't kinks to be worked out. It's a fundamental flaw.

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