DarkStar Spouts Off

They Must Get Government Money

For a group to do something THIS stupid and THIS desperate, they must get government funding based on how many people are in their program.

A Northeast Baltimore clinic that once pitched on-demand methadone to desperate addicts during the late-night hours is focusing on a new idea — paying addicts to come in for treatment.

"We are targeting a non-traditional population of addicts that isn't so interested in treatment," said the Rev. Milton Williams, who runs Turning Point Clinic, housed in his New Life Evangelical Baptist Church. "This will be an incentive."

The state has yet to approve the original on-demand, or "open access" idea, citing federal rules that require, for example, a lengthy examination of anyone getting methadone, a Schedule 2 narcotic. The incentive, $20 supplied by a private foundation or other group yet to be named, is a "Plan B," one Williams believes doesn't need any special approvals because the program would be run as a traditional clinic, just at night with no appointments.

Yes, I'm sure they get money from the government. Regardless, it's a dumb idea. First off, methadone "treatment" isn't treatment at all, it's just substituting one drug for another. Next, PAYING addicts to come in off the street and do methadone treatments? When the "treatment" requires recurring doses?

Is there ANY common sense with ANYONE who works in that program?

The U.S. Should Have Let Chrysler Fail and Saved $1.3 Billion

According to this, the U.S. lost $1.3 billion in the Chyrsler bailout.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- U.S. taxpayers likely lost $1.3 billion in the government bailout of Chrysler, the Treasury Department announced Thursday.

The government recently sold its remaining 6% stake in the company to Italian automaker Fiat, wrapping up the 2009 auto bailouts that were part of TARP.

Let me repeat, the U.S. TAXPAYERS GAVE AWAY $1.3 billion to a failing company!

For those of you who say the U.S. should get out of the wars we are in because other things can be done with the money, what about this?

Financial Tidbits

• Yesterday, Legg Mason, based in Baltimore, announced they were laying off a lot of people. This is a few weeks after moving people into a new complex in downtown Baltimore. The kicker is the work will be taken over by people across the country AND across the globe. So, in other words, they are out sourcing financial data to Dubai.
• The U.S. is giving a hellluvalot of money to Greece to bail them out. That makes no sense. If the Euro countries can't handle it, so be it.

Closing Schools

The KC school closings have to be done from all of the reading I've done about it. It's the future of all cities and, as demonstrated in Baltimore earlier this week, it is already happening in Catholic school. Now is also the perfect time to address the structural problems of urban public schools that the schools CAN address.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5itXI7J7kJ7Eka6sEx9IofeKycRqgD9ECGDNG0

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City School Superintendent John Covington says the decision to close almost half the district's schools was difficult and painful but "unquestionably the right thing to do."

The Kansas City school board voted 5-4 Wednesday night to close 29 of the district's 61 schools in an effort to stave off bankruptcy. The schools will close at the end of the school year.

During a news conference Thursday, Covington thanked the board for its vote. He said the district was spreading itself too thin by educating less than 18,000 students in 61 schools.

Despite the close vote, Covington says he's confident the board and district administration could work together to complete the massive restructuring, which includes laying off 700 employees, including
about 285 teachers.

More later.

[ UPDATE ]

If schools are barely filled, you can't continue to keep the school open without shifting school children around. If the children get shifted around, then it seems some people are going to have to be shifted around and/or fired. The administration HAS to be reduced.

It's a good opportunity to remove non-functioning teachers, but I bet the oldest teachers will be the ones who are let go, because the oldest teachers are the most expensive.

"Wealth" Question

If you are not invested in gold and precious metals, and by invested I mean you actually have the gold or precious metal, and not in the form of jewelry, do you really have any wealth?

The U.S. dollar is fiat money.

So, do you have faith in the existence of your 401(K), 403(B) when you need it?

What Would You Do?

You've been playing organized football ever since you were 8 years old.

You played in high school and you played in college. You think you can play on the professional level so you make yourself eligible for the draft.

You're good.

You know you're going first round.

You're Black.

You don't like Rush Limbaugh.

You get selected in the first round by the St. Lewis Rams, who is partially owned by Rush Limbaugh.

Their first offer is a multi-year contract with a multi-million dollar signing bonus.

What would you do?

What do you expect NON-ESTABLISHED, players to do?

Ray Dee Oh, Part 1

The Music Bizinis

"Everyone" knows that the record company is set up in a way that they make most of the money from record/CD sales and even if a record sells one million copies, the recording artist may get 10s of thousands of dollars, vs. hundreds of thousands or millions from the direct record sales.

Remembering what "Left Eye" said on the MTV show that discussed the behind the scenes actions of TLC, when they signed the deal, they signed to about 4 points a unit, meaning 4 cents on every CD sold. Money "given" to them by the record company was front money for production and studio time. It was loan. The record company ALWAYS get's "their" money first. When the artists finally get some money, they still have to pay agents, band members, and other people who work for them. AND they have to pay taxes.

When the artist goes on the road to tour, EVERYTHING the record company pays for, they get back, plus interest. The tour bus and driver, the hotel rooms, the clothes, ALL of it. And because the money goes to the record company FIRST, the artist see little of anything.

So in the current "save Black radio" campaign, why is the cheating of artists by the record companies not being mentioned much?

More to come.

Micky D's and the Media Okie Doke

Look at the following situation. A woman wanted the merchandise she ordered and when the store worker told her they were out of stock, she requested her money back and the worker refused to return her money to her. She then called 9-1-1 to get her money back.

What's wrong with what she did?

Now, put it in the context of McDonald's with the merchandise being a McNugget, and the woman gets clowned.

McDonald's workers refused to return her money to her when they said they didn't have what she wanted. If she had eaten the food and then wanted her money back, it would be silly. But, effectively, they stole that woman's money.

Suppose you took something and refused to pay for it. They would call 9-1-1 in a heartbeat and you would be charged with theft or theft of services.

When I was younger, I got into such a similar dispute with a store and they would not return my money, I told THEM to call 911, and they did.

After the situation was explained to the policeman who responded, I was let go WITH my money.

People who are clowning this woman have been played. In my opinion, their actually the ones being clowned.

Catching Up On Economic Articles

A few links to articles in the past week about the current economic mess that I found interesting:

A Program to Keep the Roof Over Your Head -- but It Will Cost You in the Long Run

The Federal Housing Administration will insure up to $300 billion of these new loans. As many as 400,000 homeowners could avoid foreclosure through H4H over the next three years.

This program provides a last hope for homeowners by bringing in the federal government as their investment partner for as long as they own their homes.

I know people are desperate to keep their homes, but they need to understand that H4H is an expensive rescue program. There is a great benefit upfront -- you get to keep your home.

But there is a significant cost to homeowners at the back end. If you take this deal, you have to split the initial equity created by the write-down of the mortgage with the FHA. The government also gets a 50 percent cut of any appreciated value for as long as you own the home -- even after you pay off the mortgage.

"It's outrageous," says John E. Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

For example, let's say your home has a current appraised value of $200,000. The lender would have to give you a 30-year, fixed-rate loan for $180,000, which is 90 percent of the appraised value.

So at the start of the H4H loan, you have $20,000 in equity. If you sell the home in the first year after receiving the loan or you refinance, FHA gets 100 percent of that $20,000. If you sell after two years, FHA would get 90 percent of the equity, or $18,000. Each year up to year five, the share that FHA gets is decreased by 10 percent. After year five, you have to share 50 percent of the equity created with the new loan.

In addition to this upfront equity-sharing, if your home increases in value between the time you receive your H4H mortgage and the time you sell the property, you will share the amount of this increase with the FHA minus any closing costs and a portion of any improvements you have made. This is a 50/50 split that does not change over time.

So, staying with the previous example, if you sell your home for $250,000 in a few years, FHA would collect $25,000 (half of the appreciated value of $50,000).

There are other rules worth noting. H4H participants are also barred from taking out second mortgages unless the money borrowed is used to maintain the property.

Other costs include a 3 percent upfront mortgage insurance premium and a 1.5 percent annual premium based on the mortgage amount. Typically, FHA-backed loans carry a half-percentage point annual premium.

I don't like the idea of a mortgage bail out at all, but I don't find much to disagree with in this approach. Those "needing" the money shouldn't be able to profit from it.

Then, there are the workers of Moody's and Standard & Poors who doubted mortgage backed securities;

Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Employees at Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's privately questioned the value of some mortgage-backed securities that were given creditworthy ratings, saying they created a ``monster,'' according to e-mails released by a U.S. House panel.

``Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,'' one e-mail from an S&P employee said.

So, what role did poor Blacks play in that?

I Know It's Friday And I Should Post Something Happy

I know I should be posting something mindless and not post something that if you think about it, it could mess up your weekend, but it is not a good idea that Saudi Arabia and China are bailing out our major financial companies.

I wish I could remember the person and the exact quote, but a famous communist once stated they didn't have to do anything to make capitalism fall, because capitalism will sell and buy the rope to hang itself with.

Paying By The Byte

For 4 summers, I worked for AT&T before the break up. The first summer I was a clerk in a telephone office that serviced a government agency. One day the manager came in and said the telephone world was going to change. AT&T was pushing for a break up of itself to allow it to get into the long distance game. In short, AT&T got what they thought they wanted.

When I first got an Internet connection, I had dial-up. I got a second line so I wouldn't miss calls while I was on-line. Then, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), wanted to charge me a business rate for the second line because I told them the line was for the Internet. The person I argued with told me they really want the ability to charge by the minute because the telephone network was designed to handle calls that lasted, on average, for about 10 minutes.

Later, before cable Internet was available, I looked into getting an ISDN line. I decided not to do it because they charged by the amount of data transferred and, at the time, my consulting business was new I and wasn't sure if I could recoup the cost. But I remembered the discussion with the telephone person saying they wanted to charge Internet use by the minute.

Now, comes this and I think it is inevitable. Home users being charged by the amount of data transferred is going to happen:

Time Warner Cable Will Do Trial on Setting High-Speed Internet Charges
Based on Usage

NEW YORK (AP) -- Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

Here it comes but the cable company is going to be the first to really try it. When it sticks, watch Internet innovation come to a crawl.

Investing: Behind The Stats

Ariel and Schwab released their annual study on investing habits of Blacks, and there seems to be some bad news:

According to this year's just-released Ariel-Schwab Black Investor Survey of 500 Blacks and 500 Whites earning more than $50,000 annually, the median amount of money saved by Blacks surveyed is less than half of their White counterparts ($48,000 versus $100,000). On a monthly basis, median savings is $182 for Blacks versus $261 for Whites.

The survey was first conducted by the two companies in 1998, when 57% of Blacks and 81% of Whites said they owned individual stocks or stock mutual funds. A decade later, still just 57% of Blacks are stock investors, compared to 76% of Whites. During the past ten years, the number of Blacks who own stocks or mutual funds rose as high as 74% (in 2002) only to fall again, while White participation has consistently hovered within a few percentage points of 80%.

However, Michelle Singletary gives her readers some more information as well as opinion:

Lost in the headlines is this fact gleaned from the survey: A larger percentage of middle-class blacks than whites work for employers such as the government that tend to provide traditional pensions plans.

In last year's investor survey, three times as many African Americans as whites (29 percent compared with 10 percent) said they planned to start a business after they retire. Wouldn't that provide them with needed retirement income?

A higher percentage of blacks than whites own real estate other than their home (42 percent compared with 33 percent), and of these, a greater share of blacks (58 percent compared with 48 percent) say they expect these investments to help fund retirement.

When we look at these surveys, we have to ask who is paying for them. Ariel and Schwab are investment companies. Of course they want to see more people invest. That translates into more business for them.

Still, I believe the overall message from the two companies is valid. Investing is important and should be a key component of a diversified retirement portfolio. It is for me.

What concerns me is the portrayal of blacks as culturally inept at understanding the importance of building wealth for retirement. But as Ariel and Schwab write in the report, "While whites have saved considerably more than blacks, the harsh reality is they, too, are underinvested and ill-prepared for retirement."

I think her comments deserve some thought and consideration.

Financial Thought

I wonder how much of the market boom is do the the fact that people are putting money into their 401(K)s and the investment companies HAVE to buy stocks with the money so there is no where for the overall market to go but up.

Now, what happens when the baby boomers start to redeem money to live on?

Honestly, that worries me more than the Social Security disaster that is about to happen. I'm already of the mind that I'll never receive the benefits even though I'll live long enough to get them.

My Financial Future

I don't worry too much about the future of social security. My assumption is that I won't get it and neither will my children, but we will have to put money into it because they will continue to confiscate funds to fund it.

I worry more about people who start to withdraw funds from their 401(K), 403(B), and IRAs for their living expenses. Seeing that is where I expect to have my funds for living, I wonder what happens to the stock market when stocks have to be sold and the buyers are not there. That's devaluation, right?

What got me thinking about this was this article about the first Baby Boomer who is going to file for Social Security benefits and this article about the government retirement savings program.

Reality Scam: Flip This House

Wow.
Just. WOW.

One Saturday, I was in the kitchen getting dinner ready for the family when "Flip This House" came on. Mrs. D.S. was previously watching a home improvement show. After about 20 minutes, I was HOOKED! It was a show that featured a brother, his wife, and his employees and contractors going through the process of flipping a house. At the end of the 1 hour show, I was impressed. My wife said she was impressed as well but wondered about the focus on the bottom line. She even said she wouldn't buy a home from someone like that, while I said I wouldn't mind. Additionally, the amount of money made on the flip was impressive.

This morning, after I made a run to the hardware store, I came in the house and my wife just hugged me and said, "Come up stairs, I have something to show you."

I thought she was going to show me a blue stick!

Instead, she showed me this link:

ATLANTA (FOX 5) -- What if you found out an American Idol contestant was lip-synching? What if the Bachelor was really married? How real is reality TV? The FOX 5 I-Team answers that question with one of America's favorite reality shows: Flip This House. Senior I-Team reporter Dale Russell found one Atlanta developer on the show, Sam Leccima, wasn't telling the truth about his renovations.

Now, I am heart broken!

Sam was ON THE BALL! Instead, it was a scam and he not only involved and scammed people who thought they were friends, he seemed to focus on Black people. Here is part two of the investigation. Dude never made a profit! Dude even lost his license BEFORE the "Flip This House" shows!

Check out Dale Russell's blog about this.

I also started a show called "The Real Deal". The person who stars in this flipping show was also on "Flip This House". Check out the flipthislawsuit blog. It's not associated with "The Real Deal" but it's an interesting read.

After watching a few shows, one with Armando Montelongo, I was impressed with the series, BUT I told my wife that if Montelongo ever did anything in my area, I wouldn't buy from him because he really seemed to be focused more on money vs. doing a good job.

Man, I'm really crushed.

Expensive and Unreliable

I like the look, drive, and ride of Mercedes-Benz cars. I really like the SLR and CLS class cars.

I just read the most recent issue of Consumer Reports and I was surprised to find that Mercedes has the least reliable rated cars. They are rated as less reliable than Jaguar!

You pay for the prestige and "German engineering" and the car is, essentially, a piece of crap.

Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti, in the end, will eat their lunch.

Your Social Security Number

By law, your social security number is NOT to be used as a form of identification.

Bank of America Corp. has begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers, typically illegal immigrants, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

In recent years, banks across the country have been offering checking accounts and even mortgages to the nation's fast-growing ranks of undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, the paper said, adding these immigrants generally have not been able to get major credit cards.

The new Bank of America card is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft, the Journal said.

So why is that getting some people mad?

Yes, immigration, but also, we all know that your social security number is now just that, a form of identification.

The United Way Is At It Again

The United Way seems to be in financial trouble again.

The chief financial officer of the United Way of the National Capital Area has resigned in frustration over the organization's reluctance to abandon questionable financial practices she was hired to fix, the Washington Post reports.

Kim Tran, who left the United Way of America in 2003 to help clean up the United Way of the National Capital Area's bookkeeping, resigned in March after UWNCA CEO Charles Anderson instructed her to include $1 million in questionable corporate donations in the announced total for its 2004 campaign. "[Anderson] literally told me, 'I want that [total] as high as possible,'" said Tran, who said she was given no proper documentation for the donations and stayed at her post long enough to make sure accountants used the correct numbers when they finished auditing the organization's books earlier this year. Two other employees, including marketing and communications chief Anthony Owens, also left the organization in March and have confirmed Tran's account.

Yes, I know it's the D.C. region of the United Way. But I still think that organization should be considered to be suspect.

Money

I had an interesting thought about money today:

• For retirement, there are 401(K)s available. That's a government program that "allows" you to set aside "your" money, tax free, for retirement. But when the money is withdrawn, you will have to pay gains on the amount. The calculation for that amount for people who are young is going to be hard.
• For health care, you can have money set aside, tax free, that "allows" you to set the money  aside for medical purposes. What you don't use in the year, you lose. That's another government program.
• For kid's college education, you can have money put into a college savings account that "allows" you to place money into the account where the gains are tax free as long as the money is used towards college. That's another government program.
• For kid's, you can place money into an education account where the gains are tax free as long as the money is used for grade school educational purposes: private school tuition, tutors, etc; That's another government program.

It would be far easier if they just didn't tax capital gains and interest and let people do what they will with the money they earn.

One United Online Bank

One United Online Bank

Electronic Commerce

Recently I decided to get a credit watch service to "protect me" against possible identity theft. The following two stories indicate, to me, that the money may be worth it.

Pin Scandal "Worst Hack Ever;" Citibank Only The Start

The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date."

Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K.

But Citibank is only the tip of the iceberg, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner research vice president. The scam -- and scandal -- has hit national banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual, as well as smaller banks, including ones in Oregon, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have re-issued debit cards in recent weeks.

"This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things."

...

The problem, she continued, is that retailers improperly store PIN numbers after they've been entered, rather than erase them at the PIN-entering pad. Worse, the keys to decrypt the PIN blocks are often stored on the same network as the PINs themselves, making a single successful hack a potential goldmine for criminals: they get the PIN data and the key to read it.

Here is the other story that I read about:

SSL Trojans getting ever nastier

Based on increases in Trojan technology, frequency, Roger predicts a
major bank heist is on the horizon

By Roger A. Grimes
March 10, 2006

Last week's column on SSL Trojans generated a lot of interest and some
new information. First, I must admit to feeling like I've been living
in a sheltered time warp. Although SSL Trojans are new to me, a little
Googling turned up similar Trojans going back as far as 2004.

LURHQ's description of an E-gold Trojan was an early foreshadowing of
things to come. E-gold is an e-cash operation, similar to Paypal.
Turns out they've been under constant attack from these advanced
Trojans for a few years now.

The E-gold Trojan waits for the victim to successfully authenticate to
E-gold's Web site, creates a second hidden browser session, and uses
various spoofing tricks until it drains the victim's account. Because
the stealing and spoofing is started after the authentication is
completed, no amount of fancy log-on authentication would prevent the
heist. All too telling is LURHQ's prediction that "other banking
institutions are sure to be attacked in this manner in the future."

I wonder how many of these attacks it will take before people start making the choice to go back to using snail-mail?

"State of the Black Union" on CSPAN

I've got kid duty.

CSPAN-1 is tuned on all televisions in the house, so I'm burning electricity, just to hear what is happening.

• At the start, Tavis thanked CSPAN for covering this event for 7 years, noting that they are the ONLY station who deems it worthy to cover. Ain't that a slam on BET? :-D

• It should also be noted the number of "white" companies who are backing the event: Nationwide, Wells Fargo, McDonalds, and others. To those who say "white America" is out to hold "Black America" down, you have no leg to stand on, IMO.

• The economic stats on Black America is depressing. "We" are making money and seem to be not doing much with it. Now, Michelle Singletary is talking on this one...

[ Update 1 ]

• She's saying that we are more likely to take care of others in our family, so starting off behind and taking care of others, hurts the bottom line. But, stop spending and live below your means.

[ Update 2 ]

• Alphonso Jackson was invited, said he would attend, then backed out.

[ Update 3 ]

• Michelle Singletary is troubled by defining wealth as having money and owning businesses vs. spiritual wealth, having a  home, being fed, etc. Interesting view. I don't like the idea that if you aren't a business owner, you aren't building wealth.

[ Update 4 ]

• Floyd Flake is the man. Every time I hear the man speak, I came away saying the same thing.
• The moderator is doing a bad job keeping control.

[ Update 5 ]

 

• blah blah blah
• Overall, from listening, I think there are 15 minutes worth of good stuff in the morning session.

Real life moves on...

Taxes

I'm here doing my taxes and I'm happier with the results this year than the past 3 years. If people make life decisions based on finances, there is no way couples who intend to be dual earning would marry. There is just no way. Last year my wife became unemployed, and with the addition of "DS 2.0", it's become a choice to stay home, for now anyway. Well, it's helped the tax situation A LOT. For grins, I did the taxes as if she had the same income as last year. Even with the addition of the tax deduction, I would have not been a happy camper. Her lack of income has made a big difference. Around this time of year, I get a major bad attitude. I call it TRPMS; tax related pms.