Reinke Faces Life

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080918/ap_on_re_us/ike_beach_houses

Some Ike victims may not be allowed to rebuild
By MICHAEL GRACZYK and CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writers Thu Sep 18, 6:46 PM ET

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GALVESTON, Texas – Hundreds of people whose beachfront homes were wrecked by Hurricane Ike may be barred from rebuilding under a little-noticed Texas law. And even those whose houses were spared could end up seeing them condemned by the state.

Now here’s the saltwater in the wound: It could be a year before the state tells these homeowners what they may or may not do.

Worse, if these homeowners do lose their beachfront property, they may get nothing in compensation from the state.

The reason: A 1959 law known as the Texas Open Beaches Act. Under the law, the strip of beach between the average high-tide line and the average low-tide line is considered public property, and it is illegal to build anything there.

Over the years, the state has repeatedly invoked the law to seize houses in cases where a storm eroded a beach so badly that a home was suddenly sitting on public property. The aftermath of Ike could see the biggest such use of the law in Texas history.

“I don’t like it one bit,” said Phillip Curtis, 58, a Dallas contractor who owns two homes — a $350,000 vacation home and a $200,000 rental — on Galveston Island’s Jamaica Beach. “I think the state should allow us to try to save the houses. I don’t appreciate the state telling people, `Now it belongs to us.’ It breaks your heart.”

The former state senator who wrote the law had little sympathy.

“We’re talking about damn fools that have built houses on the edge of the sea for as long as man could remember and against every advice anyone has given,” A.R. “Babe” Schwartz said.

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Ahh, yes, those “damn fools” who thought THEY owned their property. Still person, the Almighty State owns everything. Just wait, soon everything will be owned by the Gooferment. They hold 50% of all the mortgage market now. Property taxes will soon condemn the rest.

The Supreme Court nuked your Fifth Amendment rights against property seizure in the Kelo decision.

So, you citizen have a tshirt. You know been there, done that, and got the tshirt to show for it.

Sheeple!

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http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2008/09/does-this-make-me-liberal-or.html

Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight…

James McGovern is an industry thought leader whose focus is on the human aspects of technology around open source, SOA, software security, enterprise architecture and agile software development.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Does this make me a liberal or conservative?

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Today’s blog is slightly offtopic but I feel compelled to comment on the absurdity of making a profit from healthcare. I believe that the principles of open source when applied to this problem could make things better…

One of my cousin’s is a recent graduate of a nursing program and has started to learn first hand how people suffer and die because of HMO’s, big insurance (Aetna, Cigna, United Healthcare, etc) and Pharmaceuticals (Pfizer, Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb, etc) and their decision making process. They are, by law, beholden to their stockholders and the bottom line, and therefore have an ethical conundrum in that at times they have an incentive to deny needed care in the name of profit.

I am not for government healthcare because it suffers from much of the same problem as the current system. The government also is beholden to many of the same financial burdens. Imagine if the principles of open source were applied to healthcare where HMO’s had to make their business rules publicly available in a well-formed XML format that could be inspected by others? Imagine the ability for a consumer to use an open source rules engine such as JBoss Drools and could proactively tell whether a claim is going to be approved or denied. The current model requires consumers to expose themselves to financial risks as they don’t have a clue upfront as to their own liability.

{Extraneous Deleted}

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I’d say it makes you a Libertarian.

You’re rightly suspicious of the gooferment in your healthcare. I’d suggest that the gooferment get the boot and we begin to unwind the mess we are in. Step One imho is to disconnect employment from health insurance and equalize the tax-deduct-ability of it.

The gooferment should be the insurer of last report; not, like in Medicare, or the VA, the provider, insurer, and the regulator.

If health insurance was like life insurance, there’d be very little regulation (i.e., only what was needed to prevent fraud) and it would be cheap and easy.

Oh, and let’s not kid anyone, that all the gooferment in health care, does ANYTHING but make it expensive and oppressive. And, people die unnecessarily!

When we allow liberty and the free market place to work, it will do wonders. It took “us” a hundred years to screw things up, hopefully we’re smart enough to fix them a lot faster. But give the attitude that “gooferment will save us” I’m not so sure we’re up to the task!

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http://www.intuitive.com/blog/should_fed_federal_reserve_bailout_failing_corporations_aig.html

The Business Blog at Intuitive.com
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues.
Should the Fed bailout failing corporations like AIG?

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As an investor and citizen, I have been following with increasing concern the shenanigans in the financial market. First it was the huge problem with greedy banks and an overextended Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) that had underwritten loans to more and more risky borrowers, gambling that the upside of high-interest-rate loans would offset the tremendous risk of default.

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Which is why I find it so interesting that when I read the WSJ headline that Feds Plan $85 Billion Rescue Deal for AIG [sub required] or the Bloomberg report that the government is considering an AIG conservatorship plan, I dislike the notion and feel that if we really were a free market capitalist economy, we’d let the companies fail, knowing that new ones will spring up to replace them, stronger, smarter companies that will avoid these poor management decisions.

Fannie Mae – fanniemae – logoFannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out by the government. So was Chrysler, years ago, in a quite hotly debated rescue from mismanagement, Lee Iacocca’s hubris, and poor strategic planning. But Enron wasn’t bailed out and the Enron investors were left to their own personal financial nightmares.

The rule seems to be that if it’s a big enough company or enough people are adversely impacted then the never-empty wallet of the Federal government opens up and billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated to alleviate the impending crisis.

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Since then both Clinton and Bush aggressively promoted home ownership, even for homeowners who couldn’t afford it. The magic solution? adjustable rate mortgages that had a low interest rate when the prime rate was low, but could rapidly grow to create unmanageable mortgage payments as the rate went up. Now those high risk subprime loans back almost 40% of private-sector mortgage bonds and that’s the root of the financial problem we now face.

Back to the central dilemma, though: should we bail out AIG or not? Should our hard earned dollars paid to the government as taxes be used to prevent these massive corporations from facing the dire consequences of their stupid, myopic actions?

I have to say that, yes, I think that we should. Or at least, we should have some sort of program that helps out those most affected by the demise of these companies. When mortgage holders find that their adjustable rate mortgages prove a nightmare because the rates have gone up, that’s one issue, but when a large corporation actively and aggressively markets to these subprime borrowers without fear of consequence, that’s very, very bad for the market.

The consequences are what we’re feeling today, with a dramatic drop in the financial market, the bankruptcy of Lehman, Federal bailout of AIG, and more to come as the ripples affect other markets and industries. Bailout because too many regular Joes are affected by these failures, but for goodness sake, tighten regulations and fix things so that we can prevent this happening again in the future!

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Interesting.

The politicians get to pick winners and losers. Lehman loses; AIG gets bailed out. Freddie and Fannie shareholders get wiped out and the CEOs walk away with taxpayer-paid golden chutes.

The taxpayers get 80% of AIG; in bankruptcy, the common stockholders would get zero and the taxpayers would get 100%. Who died and left the Fed as the bankruptcy court?

IMHO we need to let biz be biz and the chips fall where they may. Nuke the Fed! Return to honest money.

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http://kentmcmanigal.blogspot.com/2008/09/building-libertys-gallows.html

Saturday, September 13, 2008
Building Liberty’s Gallows

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Are you supplying rope, nails, assistance, or knowledge to those who are building the gallows they plan to hang you on?

If you support ANY government agency, program, branch, or function, you are.

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Bottom line: You can’t support any gooferment program. There’s NOTHING that they can do right. BECAUSE they start from the immorality of theft, continue on using force, and wind up giving you a benefit that isn’t something that is good for you. Everything is broken, underfunctional, or costs too much!

No, thanks, nothing from the gooferment for me.

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080908/D932GH280.html

US government takes on big role in mortgage market

Sep 8, 7:08 AM (ET)
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER and ALAN ZIBEL

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Uncle Sam has just become the 800 pound gorilla in the U.S. mortgage market. The Bush administration’s announced Sunday it was seizing troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) in a bid to help reverse a prolonged housing and credit crisis.

But private analysts worried that it may not be enough to stabilize the slumping housing market given the glut of vacant homes for sale, rising foreclosures, rising unemployment and weak consumer confidence.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com predicted that 30-year mortgage rates, currently averaging 6.35 percent nationwide, could dip to close to 5.5 percent. That’s because investors will be more willing to buy the debt issued by Fannie and Freddie – and at lower rates – since the federal government is now explicitly standing behind that debt.

“Effectively, the federal government has now become the nation’s mortgage lender,” he said. “This takes a major financial threat off the table.”

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Another step towards socialism. What about all the big bonuses that were paid out to the bozo management? Can anyone in DC spell ‘moral hazard’? Aggh!

Taxpayers should be outraged. Where does the 200B$ come from? Yup, you sheeple.

We better demand that they get out of the mortgage business immediately.

Where are the legislators that created this “public private partnership”? Yeah, retired drawing big fat gooferment pensions. And we are left holding the bag!

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> but not the powerful capitalists who corrupt the government,
> buy politicians and abuse the law to prey on poorer folks.

These “capitalists” are creations of the gooferment that gives them life. In a
Libertarian society, there would be NO SUCH THING as a limited liability company created by the gooferment. Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, and all the others would still do business but gooferment wouldn’t insulate them from marketplace discipline.

>How do you not blame the rich predatory capitalists who engineer these
>eminent domain frauds.

It STARTS with the guns of gooferment. I can LUST over Herb’s stately Kalet’s manor, but it’s the gooferment that allows me to take it from him by force. Legally.

>It would be even worse under a libertarian government which is no government
> at all, no rules , no regulations.

Sorry but the fifth Amendment that we used to have before the Socialist Supreme Court gave us Kilo came from the DOWG’s liberty loving ideals.

>Just survival of the fittest, that’s the libertarian way.

NO! It’s just that NO ONE will be FORCED to do ANYTHING. That’s survival of
the fittest. Charity will bloom because people will get to keep their earnings instead of giving it to heartless bureaucrats to dole out. With a tremendous handling fee.
Americans have always been very charitable. But they insist on EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT charity. Not just hand outs; hand ups. Everyone will be stronger as a voluntary society.

>Rich athletic teams use tax money to build their stadiums and use eminent
> domain to confiscate land from unsuspecting home owners.

That is a function of YOUR system; not mine.

>As bad as it is now,

Finally we agree on something!

>it would be even worse under libertarian rule

It couldn’t possibly worse. Let’s try it. Visualize the prosperity of the 1880 to 1913 before the big gooferment really started to manipulate us. Visualize the peaceful society prior to Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression. Visualize the effect of honest money on the whole size of gooferment, the ability to grow unrestrained by fiscal discipline, and it’s ability to fund welfare / warfare by theft from the hated central bank that Jefferson and Jackson warned about.

And, don’t get me started on Social Security!

Don’t blame the Libertarians for proposing something different. What you advocate CAN NOT work. Force never serves as a basis for a peaceful honest society.

Insanity is doing more of the same and expecting different results. More force aka more gooferment will NOT yIeld different results.

And, you say Libertarians are insane?

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