Legalized Loan Sharks : Usury With Fangs

"Shark Attack," pen and ink illustration by Tom Grady / Pulse.
The spoils of credit card 'reform':
Unregulated interest rates skyrocket

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / December 21, 2009

According to the Oxford American Desk Dictionary, the definition of a "loan shark" is a person who lends money at exorbitant rates of interest. Earlier in our history, most loan sharks were underworld figures making illegal loans. If you weren't able to pay the loan back, you ran the risk of some broken bones. It was a very lucrative business for the mob.

But that was before the financial institutions realized just how much money they were missing out on by not engaging in loan sharking. Today, the mob has been replaced by so-called "legal" financial institutions.

For many years, this was kept somewhat in check by state laws that limited yearly interest rates to 35-42%. That still sounds like loan sharking to me, but at least there was a limit. However, in 1980 the United States Congress proved their fealty to corporate financial interests by passing the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act.

This law exempted federally chartered savings banks, installment plan sellers and chartered loan companies from having to obey state usury laws and limits. And since there is no federal usury limit, that meant there was no longer a limit on what interest rates could be charged.

Since then then interest rates have steadily crept up. This is especially true of the credit card companies (many of whom are also based in states that have eliminated interest rate limits). I guess it was only a matter of time before one or more of them began to throw caution to the wind and go above their normal 30-40% interest rates. Now one of them has done it, and I'm sure more will follow.

First Premier Bank has been offering credit cards with a credit line of $250. Of course that offer comes with first year fees of $256. That is an obvious rip-off to get a credit card where the entire credit limit is taken up with fees owed to the issuer. Congress tried to fix this kind of problem by passing a new law regarding credit card fairness. The new law caps fees like this at 25% of the credit limit.

Well, that should keep First Premier Bank from ripping off its customers, shouldn't it? Wrong! Congress only half did the job of trying to rein in the credit card companies. They refused to put any limit on the amount of interest a card company can charge.

First Premier Bank was quick to take advantage of the loophole left by Congress. They upped their credit limit to $300 and lowered their fees to $75 (the maximum 25%). Then they took the rather shocking move of raising the annual interest rate for the card to 79.9%.

They try to justify the outrageous new interest rate by saying the cards are offered to people who have credit problems. To me, that excuse just doesn't fly. To take people who are already having money problems in the middle of a recession and slap an 80% interest rate on them is not just wrong -- it's immoral, unethical and should be illegal.

This is nothing more than legal loan sharking. While these companies may not break any limbs for failure to pay on time, they can certainly ruin the credit rating of a person struggling to repair his/her credit and keep their head above water -- and that might be worse. With rates like this, how is a person supposed to get ahead?

Now that First Premier Bank has set an 80% interest rate, how long will it be before other credit card companies follow suit? Most may not instantly go to 80%, but I could see them raising a rate even for good customers to 50% or 60% and continue to creep toward that 80%. Why wouldn't they? They have already shown they care little for consumers by past actions. If First Premier Bank can get away with it, why shouldn't the others follow suit?

I wish we could count on Congress to protect consumers, but it doesn't look like we can. They have "reformed" both credit cards and health care, and consumers are worse off than ever. I don't think we can afford any more help from our pathetic corporate-owned Congress.

Each year our economy moves closer to exclusive use of electronic funds and credit and away from cash. How much time is left before we are all credit-slaves to the corporations?

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

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Financial Meltdown : The 12 Corrupt Deals That Caused it

Graphic from The Energy Source.

$5 billion in lobbying for 12 corrupt deals caused the multi-trillion dollar financial meltdown. It got the finance industry lucrative legislative favors that paved the way for Wall Street's devastating collapse.

By Robert Weissman / March 9, 2009

What can $5 billion buy in Washington?

Quite a lot.

Over the 1998-2008 period, the financial sector spent more than $5 billion on U.S. federal campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

This extraordinary investment paid off fabulously. Congress and executive agencies rolled back long-standing regulatory restraints, refused to impose new regulations on rapidly evolving and mushrooming areas of finance, and shunned calls to enforce rules still in place.

"Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America," a report released by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation (and which I co-authored), details a dozen crucial deregulatory moves over the last decade -- each a direct response to heavy lobbying from Wall Street and the broader financial sector, as the report details. (The report is available here.) Combined, these deregulatory moves helped pave the way for the current financial meltdown.

Here are 12 deregulatory steps to financial meltdown:

1. The repeal of Glass-Steagall

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 formally repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and related rules, which prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, and insurance services. In 1998, Citibank and Travelers Group merged on the expectation that Glass-Steagall would be repealed. Then they set out, successfully, to make it so. The subsequent result was the infusion of the investment bank speculative culture into the world of commercial banking. The 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall helped create the conditions in which banks invested monies from checking and savings accounts into creative financial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps, investment gambles that led many of the banks to ruin and rocked the financial markets in 2008.

2. Off-the-books accounting for banks

Holding assets off the balance sheet generally allows companies to avoid disclosing “toxic” or money-losing assets to investors in order to make the company appear more valuable than it is. Accounting rules -- lobbied for by big banks -- permitted the accounting fictions that continue to obscure banks' actual condition.

3. CFTC blocked from regulating derivatives

Financial derivatives are unregulated. By all accounts this has been a disaster, as Warren Buffett's warning that they represent "weapons of mass financial destruction" has proven prescient -- they have amplified the financial crisis far beyond the unavoidable troubles connected to the popping of the housing bubble. During the Clinton administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sought to exert regulatory control over financial derivatives, but the agency was quashed by opposition from Robert Rubin and Fed Chair Alan Greenspan.

4. Formal financial derivative deregulation: the Commodities Futures Modernization Act

The deregulation -- or non-regulation -- of financial derivatives was sealed in 2000, with the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. Its passage orchestrated by the industry-friendly Senator Phil Gramm, the Act prohibits the CFTC from regulating financial derivatives.

5. SEC removes capital limits on investment banks and the voluntary regulation regime

In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) promulgated a rule requiring investment banks to maintain a debt to-net capital ratio of less than 15 to 1. In simpler terms, this limited the amount of borrowed money the investment banks could use. In 2004, however, the SEC succumbed to a push from the big investment banks -- led by Goldman Sachs, and its then-chair, Henry Paulson -- and authorized investment banks to develop net capital requirements based on their own risk assessment models. With this new freedom, investment banks pushed ratios to as high as 40 to 1. This super-leverage not only made the investment banks more vulnerable when the housing bubble popped, it enabled the banks to create a more tangled mess of derivative investments -- so that their individual failures, or the potential of failure, became systemic crises.

6. Basel II weakening of capital reserve requirements for banks

Rules adopted by global bank regulators -- known as Basel II, and heavily influenced by the banks themselves -- would let commercial banks rely on their own internal risk-assessment models (exactly the same approach as the SEC took for investment banks). Luckily, technical challenges and intra-industry disputes about Basel II have delayed implementation -- hopefully permanently -- of the regulatory scheme.

7. No predatory lending enforcement

Even in a deregulated environment, the banking regulators retained authority to crack down on predatory lending abuses. Such enforcement activity would have protected homeowners, and lessened though not prevented the current financial crisis. But the regulators sat on their hands. The Federal Reserve took three formal actions against subprime lenders from 2002 to 2007. The Office of Comptroller of the Currency, which has authority over almost 1,800 banks, took three consumer-protection enforcement actions from 2004 to 2006.

8. Federal preemption of state enforcement against predatory lending

When the states sought to fill the vacuum created by federal non-enforcement of consumer protection laws against predatory lenders, the Feds -- responding to commercial bank petitions -- jumped to attention to stop them. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision each prohibited states from enforcing consumer protection rules against nationally chartered banks.

9. Blocking the courthouse doors: Assignee Liability Escape

Under the doctrine of “assignee liability,” anyone profiting from predatory lending practices should be held financially accountable, including Wall Street investors who bought bundles of mortgages (even if the investors had no role in abuses committed by mortgage originators). With some limited exceptions, however, assignee liability does not apply to mortgage loans, however. Representative Bob Ney -- a great friend of financial interests, and who subsequently went to prison in connection with the Abramoff scandal -- worked hard, and successfully, to ensure this effective immunity was maintained.

10. Fannie and Freddie enter subprime

At the peak of the housing boom, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were dominant purchasers in the subprime secondary market. The Government-Sponsored Enterprises were followers, not leaders, but they did end up taking on substantial subprime assets -- at least $57 billion. The purchase of subprime assets was a break from prior practice, justified by theories of expanded access to homeownership for low-income families and rationalized by mathematical models allegedly able to identify and assess risk to newer levels of precision. In fact, the motivation was the for-profit nature of the institutions and their particular executive incentive schemes. Massive lobbying -- including especially but not only of Democratic friends of the institutions -- enabled them to divert from their traditional exclusive focus on prime loans.

Fannie and Freddie are not responsible for the financial crisis. They are responsible for their own demise, and the resultant massive taxpayer liability.

11. Merger mania

The effective abandonment of antitrust and related regulatory principles over the last two decades has enabled a remarkable concentration in the banking sector, even in advance of recent moves to combine firms as a means to preserve the functioning of the financial system. The megabanks achieved too-big-to-fail status. While this should have meant they be treated as public utilities requiring heightened regulation and risk control, other deregulatory maneuvers (including repeal of Glass-Steagall) enabled them to combine size, explicit and implicit federal guarantees, and reckless high-risk investments.

12. Credit rating agency failure

With Wall Street packaging mortgage loans into pools of securitized assets and then slicing them into tranches, the resultant financial instruments were attractive to many buyers because they promised high returns. But pension funds and other investors could only enter the game if the securities were highly rated.

The credit rating agencies enabled these investors to enter the game, by attaching high ratings to securities that actually were high risk -- as subsequent events have revealed. The credit rating agencies have a bias to offering favorable ratings to new instruments because of their complex relationships with issuers, and their desire to maintain and obtain other business dealings with issuers.

This institutional failure and conflict of interest might and should have been forestalled by the SEC, but the Credit Rating Agencies Reform Act of 2006 gave the SEC insufficient oversight authority. In fact, the SEC must give an approval rating to credit ratings agencies if they are adhering to their own standards -- even if the SEC knows those standards to be flawed.

From a financial regulatory standpoint, what should be done going forward? The first step is certainly to undo what Wall Street has wrought. More in future columns on an affirmative agenda to restrain the financial sector.

None of this will be easy, however. Wall Street may be disgraced, but it is not prostrate. Financial sector lobbyists continue to roam the halls of Congress, former Wall Street executives have high positions in the Obama administration, and financial sector propagandists continue to warn of the dangers of interfering with "financial innovation."

Source / Multinational Monitor / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Bush's Exit Strategy : A Deregulation Frenzy

Dubya: The legacy.
The Legacy Grows: 'Every rule in every agency is under attack.'
By Thomas Cleaver / The Rag Blog / October 31, 2008

See 'A Last Push To Deregulate: White House to Ease Many Rules' by R. Jeffrey Smith, Below.

In the past three months, the Bush Administration has begun announcing significant rule changes, and they will all be in place before they leave office.

The administrative rules they are revising are an obscure body of law known as the Federal Administrative Regulations. These are the rules drawn up by every federal agency to detail the administration of the laws they are responsible for enforcing. The original reason was to insure justice, that there would be similar decisions in similar circumstances, so the law was clear to all. What they are doing now is the reverse of that.

These rules have the force of law with federal agencies, and it is very time-consuming the revise them. The Bushies have been working on these for at least the past two years. Even if the Democrats win a 60-seat Senate and a veto-proof House, with Obama in the White House, and they set to work on January 21, 2009, to change all these back, it would take a minimum of two years to accomplish.

Allow me to give an example of how bad this is: in August, the Interior Department announced they were revising the FARs for the Endangered Species Act. Specifically, they were revising the Independent Review Rule to allow the relevant agency to have the power to make the review independently themselves. What this rule is (it has been responsible for saving the majority of endangered species for the past 34 years) is that when a federal agency is making any decision that could impact an endangered species, they have to get an independent review from the Fish and Wildlife Service. It if is reasonably foreseeable that they will harm a species, they have to stop and revise the decision, revise the plan, so it does no harm.

Their change would allow the agency making the decision to review itself, to determine if it is reasonably certain they would harm a species, and determine what level of harm was acceptable, and make its own determination of what should be done. With no right of appeal or judicial review of that decision. As Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said when he announced it, "this will keep the environmentalists from stopping our projects." The proposed rule change was given a 30-day public comment period (these have heretofore traditionally been 120-day reviews, with revisions as a result of comments), which was up on Sept. 15. They will be announcing the rule implementation probably any Monday after the election.

How would this rule wreck things? Here's an example: last March, the Interior Department announced they were de-listing the Yellowstone Wolves from the Endangered Species List on the grounds there were now 1500 wolves, and would turn over administration of the wolves to the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho -- which had already announced their decision that there only needed to be 300 wolves in the area. When Interior was sued to have the independent review process, they went ahead and de-listed the wolves. During the 60 days the wolves were de-listed, 60 were killed. When the NWF and Environmental Defense Fund got into court, they got an immediate injunction that stopped the killing, and then proved in court that Interior had disregarded its own rules, with the court putting the wolves back under protection in September. Were the new rule in effect then, we'd be burying 1200 wolves.

What has to be done is to go into court, get an injunction against implementation of the rule, and then to prove in court that the agency violated the law in revising the rule. This can be done. The EPA was successfully sued over an attempt to do this to the Clean Water Act, with the Second Court of Appeal telling them in August that they couldn't implement their revision. IT TOOK FOUR YEARS TO DO THIS.

Regardless of who gets into office next week, these fights will have to be made. They are revising the mining rules to get rid of the requirement that a coal company clean up the mess after blowing the top off a mountain for strip-mining, to get rid of the rules requiring maintenance of water and access for salmon runs, etc., etc. EVERY RULE IN EVERY AGENCY IS UNDER ATTACK.

We are all going to need to support those organizations, like Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, NRDC, EDF, etc., that will be making these fights. Whatever interest you have, it is under attack.

All that money you were giving every month to Obama? Figure out what organization making these fights you support and make a monthly sustainer to them, so they can make the fight.

This is the Bush Administration's real legacy.

So, while we've all been distracted by the campaign...

A Last Push To Deregulate:
White House to Ease Many Rules
By R. Jeffrey Smith / October 31, 2008

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo.

Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

Once such rules take effect, they typically can be undone only through a laborious new regulatory proceeding, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis.

"They want these rules to continue to have an impact long after they leave office," said Matthew Madia, a regulatory expert at OMB Watch, a nonprofit group critical of what it calls the Bush administration's penchant for deregulating in areas where industry wants more freedom. He called the coming deluge "a last-minute assault on the public . . . happening on multiple fronts."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "This administration has taken extraordinary measures to avoid rushing regulations at the end of the term. And yes, we'd prefer our regulations stand for a very long time -- they're well reasoned and are being considered with the best interests of the nation in mind."

As many as 90 new regulations are in the works, and at least nine of them are considered "economically significant" because they impose costs or promote societal benefits that exceed $100 million annually. They include new rules governing employees who take family- and medical-related leaves, new standards for preventing or containing oil spills, and a simplified process for settling real estate transactions.

While it remains unclear how much the administration will be able to accomplish in the coming weeks, the last-minute rush appears to involve fewer regulations than Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, approved at the end of his tenure.

In some cases, Bush's regulations reflect new interpretations of language in federal laws. In other cases, such as several new counterterrorism initiatives, they reflect new executive branch decisions in areas where Congress -- now out of session and focused on the elections -- left the president considerable discretion.

The burst of activity has made this a busy period for lobbyists who fear that industry views will hold less sway after the elections. The doors at the New Executive Office Building have been whirling with corporate officials and advisers pleading for relief or, in many cases, for hastened decision making.

According to the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory calendar, the commercial scallop-fishing industry came in two weeks ago to urge that proposed catch limits be eased, nearly bumping into National Mining Association officials making the case for easing rules meant to keep coal slurry waste out of Appalachian streams. A few days earlier, lawyers for kidney dialysis and biotechnology companies registered their complaints at the OMB about new Medicare reimbursement rules. Lobbyists for customs brokers complained about proposed counterterrorism rules that require the advance reporting of shipping data.

Bush's aides are acutely aware of the political risks of completing their regulatory work too late. On the afternoon of Bush's inauguration, Jan. 20, 2001, his chief of staff issued a government-wide memo that blocked the completion or implementation of regulations drafted in the waning days of the Clinton administration that had not yet taken legal effect.

"Through the end of the Clinton administration, we were working like crazy to get as many regulations out as possible," said Donald R. Arbuckle, who retired in 2006 after 25 years as an OMB official. "Then on Sunday, the day after the inauguration, OMB Director Mitch Daniels called me in and said, 'Let's pull back as many of these as we can.' "

Clinton's appointees wound up paying a heavy price for procrastination. Bush's team was able to withdraw 254 regulations that covered such matters as drug and airline safety, immigration and indoor air pollutants. After further review, many of the proposals were modified to reflect Republican policy ideals or scrapped altogether.

Seeking to avoid falling victim to such partisan tactics, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten in May imposed a Nov. 1 government-wide deadline to finish major new regulations, "except in extraordinary circumstances."

That gives officials just a few more weeks to meet an effective Nov. 20 deadline for the publication of economically significant rules, which take legal effect only after a 60-day congressional comment period. Less important rules take effect after a 30-day period, creating a second deadline of Dec. 20.

OMB spokeswoman Jane Lee said that Bolten's memo was meant to emphasize the importance of "due diligence" in ensuring that late-term regulations are sound. "We will continue to embrace the thorough and high standards of the regulatory review process," she said.

As the deadlines near, the administration has begun to issue regulations of great interest to industry, including, in recent days, a rule that allows natural gas pipelines to operate at higher pressures and new Homeland Security rules that shift passenger security screening responsibilities from airlines to the federal government.

The OMB also approved a new limit on airborne emissions of lead this month, acting under a court-imposed deadline.

Many of the rules that could be issued over the next few weeks would ease environmental regulations, according to sources familiar with administration deliberations.

A rule put forward by the National Marine Fisheries Service and now under final review by the OMB would lift a requirement that environmental impact statements be prepared for certain fisheries-management decisions and would give review authority to regional councils dominated by commercial and recreational fishing interests.
An Alaska commercial fishing source, granted anonymity so he could speak candidly about private conversations, said that senior administration officials promised to "get the rule done by the end of this month" and that the outcome would be a big improvement.

Lee Crockett of the Pew Charitable Trusts' Environment Group said the administration has received 194,000 public comments on the rule and protests from 80 members of Congress as well as 160 conservation groups. "This thing is fatally flawed" as well as "wildly unpopular," Crockett said.

Two other rules nearing completion would ease limits on pollution from power plants, a major energy industry goal for the past eight years that is strenuously opposed by Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.

One rule, being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

A related regulation would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks.

A third rule would allow increased emissions from oil refineries, chemical factories and other industrial plants with complex manufacturing operations.

These rules "will force Americans to choke on dirtier air for years to come, unless Congress or the new administration reverses these eleventh-hour abuses," said lawyer John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But Scott H. Segal, a Washington lawyer and chief spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, said that "bringing common sense to the Clean Air Act is the best way to enhance energy efficiency and pollution control." He said he is optimistic that the new rule will help keep citizens' lawsuits from obstructing new technologies.

Jonathan Shradar, an EPA spokesman, said that he could not discuss specifics but added that "we strive to protect human health and the environment." Any rule the agency completes, he said, "is more stringent than the previous one.”

Source / Wahington Post (Subscription)

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The Country is a Deregulated Mess

'It has become obvious that UNregulated business activity gravitates to the dark side'
By Randy H. / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2008

I admit that I've vacillated back and forth between Democrat and Republican over the last 40 years. I've arrived at a few personal conclusions about our country's current state. These are merely my own opinions.

I remain a strong advocate of allowing business unfettered access to its markets. However, it has become obvious that UNregulated business activity gravitates to the dark side.

I only offer several examples ...

1) Telephone deregulation. An acquaintance who lives in France once asked me, "Are you people crazy?" when the major telephone companies were broken up and deregulated. Of course we briefly have enjoyed proliferation of numerous local and long distance telephone companies and lower rates. However, once the reality became "Oh, I'm sorry sir. That line is not part of our service," guess what is now happening? Witness today's re-conglomeration of powerhouses Verizon and AT&T. Nickel-and-dime fee structures, service rules and restrictions, and the telecomm companies' indifference to customer issues have become the norm. Does this sound like anything with which you're familiar?

2) Airline deregulation. Give me a break! Even though Southwest and upstart JetBlue survive as prodigies of deregulation, just count the number of personnel laid off and route-miles that have collapsed over the last 20 years. Fuel costs aside, the airline industry is the victim of a nearly complete lack of regulatory constraint and a wholly indifferent federal government. Why should it take the FAA twenty more years to implement a new computer/satellite-based air traffic control system??

3) A Medicare Drug Program (Part D) that is an outright lie. Estimates originally provided to congressional representatives are now shown to have been hugely and falsely understated. Originally estimated at $375 billion for the mandated ten-year horizon, this program is now calculated to cost $2.3 trillion over the next ten years! Oh, and by the way, don't overlook a provision in the law which prohibits the federal government from negotiating the cost of the drugs for which it is paying. Guess which lobbying group drafted that part of the law.

4) A federal income tax system that is so complex and laden with special-interest provisions that it costs the average taxpayer $37.43 and 12 days to complete and file the federal tax return. The shameful business practices of "refund anticipation loans," and more recently "rebate anticipation loans," have cost unwitting taxpayers billions of dollars in needless fees to get their money back from the federal government a few days earlier. The Internal Revenue Service is dead at the switch about simplifying the process for transacting the ordinary individual taxpayer's tax returns and refunds. A computer system hailed as the "answer to all our problems" went down in flames after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars in outsourced contracts. It remains in limbo to this day.

5) Pathetic lack of regulation of (and even awareness of) the financial services industry's dubious practices. Lending practices over the last five years became a sham. Surely you're aware of the shameful lending practices thrust on less sophisticated and lower income people by unscrupulous mortgage brokers, banks, and investment companies. The consolidation of falsely-rated mortgage packages for sale as "investments" on the world market was a practice akin to the old fashioned snake oil salesman.

6) The U.S. dollar's value has fallen 40% against the value of the Euro and other major currencies in the last six years. While a weak dollar means our exports are less expensive to those who buy them, imports have become more expensive for us. It means that our dollars now buy nearly 40% LESS of goods and services than they did six years ago. Imports of cheap and low quality Chinese goods to Wal-Mart and other retailers will not offset the horrendous decline in our dollar. Our manufacturing sector has lost 3.2 million jobs over the last six years, offset by a lesser increase of 1.2 million jobs in the food service and retailing industries. What a tradeoff, eh?

7) Outsourcing instead of federal oversight. It's the old budget game that outsourced contracts are separate from onboard personnel in the federal government's budget and are therefore immune from oversight by Congress. The presumption that outsourced work "saves" money in the long run is provably false. The quasi-governmental Postal Service is a notable exception, because it has a source of revenue to offset the majority of its operational costs.

8) Relations with Mexico and other countries. Mexican truckers are now allowed for a new "extended test period" of three more years to freely traffic on our highways. The U.S. is giving nuclear technology to India in exchange for tariff-free imports of mangos to our country. Nukes for fruit. That one ought to scare you.

9) A dead-at-the-switch Consumer Product Safety Commission. "We're not allowed to test for toxic substances unless we have evidence of human danger." Yikes ... that's comforting, huh?

10) An FDA that is so hopelessly under staffed and under funded that it is simply incapable of fulfilling its mission. Explosive growth in our importation of foods, and significant lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, has rendered that agency nearly useless.

11) Federal preparedness. Wasn't the Katrina debacle enough to show that federal nepotism and cronyism yields an under funded, under talented, and under prepared government? Over 20,000 trailers purchased and unused are now scheduled for destruction. Truckloads of ice were sent to New England during the emergency in New Orleans.

12) Wars being conducted on two fronts, based on blatantly false assumptions and "truths" fabricated to scare the people of our country. Iraq accumulates budget surpluses while the American people continue to fund up to $1 trillion for those unpopular wars, for that country's "reconstruction," and digging our country further and further into unsustainable debt. Afghanistan continues as the primary source of opium/heroin in the world and as a sanctuary for the bad guys.

13) Our country is in serious economic trouble. Our public debt (as distinguished from the elusive 'intragovernmental' debt) has grown 500% in merely the last five years. We are forever reliant on oil as our primary energy source and feed stock, on the willingness of foreign countries and investors to continue to prop up our unsustainable spending, and the illusion that 'growth' will be our salvation. It is time to come back to reality. Taxes will inevitably go up, spending needs to be seriously curtailed, and we need new leadership that will not tell us that everything is okay.

Do you really want to elect a candidate who promises more of the same? I don't think so.

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