Something You Can Bank On

"Free checking as we know it is ending."


That's the headline that greeted me this morning. Free checking as we know it is ending. Really?


It goes on to say, "The days when you could walk into a bank branch and open an account with no charges and no strings attached appear to be over. Now you have to jump through some hoops -- keep a high balance, use direct deposit or swipe your debit card several times a month." It notes at one major bank you must pay $8.95 a month to use a teller or get a paper statement.

I find this interesting news. In 1984 I was the Project Manager of the introduction of so-called 'Free Checking" in this area. There were a few other banks in the country doing it then, but not many. Such accounts never came without strings and were very like what this article is claiming is just happening. (Photo to the right is from newspaper coverage when the "free checking" was unveiled in 1984.)


True, we did not require a high balance. That would have defeated the idea behind the service. Offering free checking was not totally altruistic. The account was basically aimed at easing pressure from the Federal Government to provide affordable banking services to the people of low income.  This is not to say the bank didn't see some benefit to it.


It was calculated the service would cut the costs of maintaining very low balance accounts for one. It was also seen as a way of generating future "good" customers by providing an entry banking account, something like the idea of starter homes. You know, we would attract young people just beginning in life to our bank and reap benefits later as they became successful. Our first promotions were heavily aimed toward attendees at a large state university in our area and most of the early growth in the account was among those students. 


We also didn't require the use of direct deposit, since such electronic processing didn't really come into its own until the 'nineties. There was not a required number of ATM card swipes required either, only that all common banking transactions be done at an ATM. Common transactions would be all deposits, withdrawals, transfers and balance inquiries. It was also our first public step into check safekeeping. If you opened this account you would receive a monthly statement, but you would not get your cancelled checks with it. If you needed a cancelled check for any reason, you would have to call the bank and pay a fee to receive a copy of that check. (This was a benefit to the customer. No longer did they have to maintain their cancelled checks and copies were safe from fire or theft. If a customer had the rare check they needed, the bank would provide the copy and they wouldn't have to find a copier service. A couple of years later we were beginning to offer Check Safekeeping as an additional service to all customers.)


Now there was no monthly fee of $8.95 to bank with a teller, which could actually prove cheap. A condition of this account, as stated previously, was you did your everyday banking at an ATM and you never used a teller. The only exception to this was in cases where the ATMs were down. Other than that, if you used a teller there was a $2.50 charge each time (a fee that was raised quite higher in later years). Under this system if you used a teller 4 times in a month it would cost you $10. 


In other words, Free Checking from the beginning was an account that came with no bells and whistles, but always came with strings attached.




Half way through the article it shifted gears. Taking note of a range of laws passed in the past year by the Congress supposedly to protect me and you from "harsh fees", it brought up overdrafts.  It stated overdraft fees made up 12% of a typical banks revenue.  Oh yes, I well know that overdraft fees have been very lucrative to banks.


Overdraft fees are one of the biggest scams going.


A few years back, I wrote to a Congressman (who shall be nameless, so let's just call him for the sake of this post -uh-I don't know-uh- "Mike Castle") about the need to examine the various outrageous fees banks charged. So I get a reply back from this "Mike Castle" and it was a lot of boiler plate and gobbledegook and I realized this guy was a twit. His reply had nothing to do with what I had written. It wasn't long after that I wrote him again to say after voting for him in every election for over twenty years I would never vote for him again, and I didn't. Although I never thought it would happen this unnamed Congressman that we are calling "Mike Castle" for convenience sake was recently denied his attempt to retire in his old age to the Senate.


Banks will claim they charge overdraft fees to discourage customers from overdrawing. Ha!  Maybe thirty years ago they meant it.


Thirty years ago, when I really entered my banking career, overdraft fees worked this way and the fee was $10 (it may even have been less, but I'll stick with the $10). If I overdrew my account up to $9.99, I would get a notice, but no fee was charged. The rule was we would not charge a fee on anything less than the fee amount. If I overdrew by $10 to $19.99, I would be charged $5.00, half the fee. Any overdraft of $20 or more I would be charged the full $10 fee.


Then a-sudden, the overdraft fee began to escalate. It seemed every year it would go up some more -- $15, $17, $20, $25, until it became $35 and even $40 and $50 at some banks. The bankers would tell you it was necessary due to rising costs. Baloney, the cost of an overdraft was always relatively low and over the years the cost even shrunk as electronic processing became more sophisticated. Most of the costs associated with processing an overdraft were in collecting the fee from you. The only other cost might be a loss in overnight interest for selling or buying funds to balance the banks position. In the early eighties while interest rates were still fairly high, this might cost the bank three cents on your $100 overdraft. This is a long way from justifying a $35 fee.


So why did the fees keep escalating? Because overdrafts were a cash cow and every time the bottom line began to look a little frayed, the bank would raise the overdraft fee to sure it up.


This, of course, gave the lie that the fee was to encourage you from overdrawing your account. If you were a good, steady customer, they practically encouraged such behavior. You generally carried a decent balance, had other accounts with the bank and always repaid the overdraft quickly, so why not? They knew they would get the overdraft back plus the $35 fee from you. So do it every week if you like. In fact, that you could even get overdrawn proved you were considered a low risk customer. You were coded. If you were fairly reliable, you might be able to overdraw by $50. If you were a real low risk customer, you could overdraw as much as $200. Why would they allow you such lead way if they wished to discourage overdrafts? If they really wanted to stop overdrafts, they would simply not allow them to happen. You would just have return checks and refusals to honor cash withdrawals at the ATMs.


In the news article it stated Bank of American "started offering "emergency cash" for a $35 fee to customers who went to the ATM for withdrawals that would exceed their bank balance." According to BofA spokesperson 50% of such "customers opted to go ahead with the fee." That is really hilarious. How shrewd, they charge these customers an outrageous amount as an overdraft fee, but disguise it as a customer service. I wonder if they limit the amount of "emergency cash" you may take? If it is the limit of $200 and you pay it back at the end of the week, that's what, something like over a 900% annual interest rate?


We mentioned if you are a "good" customer they will allow you to overdraw (and make a nice return on their investment). What if you aren't such a "good" customer?  Then they return your checks and charge a fee for each returned. This is often as much as the overdraft fee per check returned. 


Now thirty years ago we had this policy in place. If a customer overdrew the account with several checks, then we would honor the lowest checks first. But the banks reversed this in later years. They ordered that the highest check be honored first. What did this do to you?


Let's say you had $40 in your account and three checks arrived, one for $40, one for $20 and one for $15. That is eighty-five dollars in total and you have but $40 in your account. In the old days, the bank would honor the $20 and $15 checks, leaving you with $5 in your account, which would not cover the $40 check. The $40 would be returned and you would be charge a return check fee, if this is $35, then you would owe the bank $35. That's still a nice profit to the bank.


In the new way it is quite different and even much more advantageous to the bank. They would apply the $40 check first. Oops, this leaves you with zero in your account and thus they return both the $20 and $15 checks, charging you the fee on each for a total of $70. 


Now can banks lose money on overdrafts? Certainly, if they have customers who overdraw the account and disappear. The bank never gets the overdrawn amount back nor do they collect the fee charged. But that doesn't affect you, the good customer, because you pay back your overdraft and your fee and the bank is very happy if you keep right on doing just that. (One thing we discovered about those potential future good customers at the college where we pushed free checking. A lot of them overdrew their accounts at the end of their college career and simply disappeared.)


I guess it is worth mentioning that in the article it spoke of customers leaving this bank because of the overdraft fee and how the bank did things to stop that desertion. Really? It was my experience that customers who often overdrew their accounts brought relief if they left. Habitual over-drawers usually kept very low balance accounts and were very profitable if at all.  You hoped they would leave. Now someone who was a high value customer might somehow overdraw occasionally (some rich people did this a lot actually), but because they were high value, the bank generally weaved the fee. Ordinary folk didn't get the fee weaved, unless they were good at complaining.  Some 'good' customers might leave, but where would they go? All the banks seemed to have pretty much the same policy and fees on overdrafts. 


If you don't think your banker wants you to practice bad financial habits, think about this. You have a credit card and you have reached the credit limit, lets say it is $1,000. You use the card anyway and make a $100 purchase or withdrawal $100 at an ATM and lo and behold it is approved. How can that be because you have used your limit?


Do you know the bank will generally allow you to go 10% above your credit limit? They don't advertise this. They will say they do this so you won't be embarrassed when you pay for that restaurant meal and you exceed your limit. How silly is that? What if you have already exceeded your limit plus 10%, who's worried about the embarrassment then?


No, it just makes good business sense, now doesn't it? If you exceed your limit, they get to charge the interest on that additional naturally, but more importantly, they get to charge an "over-the-limit fee".  Ten years ago that fee was $15, which means it is probably more now. That is another tidy profit for doing nothing.


Finally in the article it said, "Several banks have started charging $7.50 for paper statements."


"Paper and print costs around $2.25, add postage to that, and if banks are losing income from other avenues, someone has to pay for it."


Yeah, right, can't argue with that can we?


Yes, we can. A bank is a business like any other in that it builds its costs into its pricing. Do you have a monthly "service charge" on your account? I do. If you don't have such a charge, do you have a required average balance you must maintain? These fees or requirements have been calculated to cover the costs of such things as the monthly statement printing and postage. Those costs aren't something new that just popped out of the woodwork. The banks are just finding new fees to make up for any old fees lost due to the new financial legislation and this is something you can bank on.

 

Bits and Pieces

(Some actual names have been changed. These pseudonyms appear in bold.-- Larry) 

1

I never wanted to work in an office.  I didn't want to be anything but a writer. But as a teenager I knew I had to find a job to support myself and get my parents off my back (not that they were nagging me, but they did expect me to find work).  If I have any regrets, it is the total lack of guidance and support that I got growing up.  Not just from my parents, but from the school system and other people.  Most of the teachers I had were more discouraging than encouraging. I think I can name the teachers who ever took a smidgeon of interest in me on one hand.  Miss Ezra in third grade who spark my interest in the written word. Mrs. Snellenberger in fifth grade liked me and she always praised my work.  Ms Pollack in Junior High actually encouraged me in my desire to write.  Mr. Ax was at least able to make math understandable and was always friendly, though I can't say he really encouraged me on an individual basis.  I was friendly with his son, Jakie Ax, who got me into boy scouts, so I also knew Mr. Ax outside of classes. 

I had two excellent teachers in Senior High.  The first was Mr. Brown.  He taught Biology and he had magic.  He was one of those teachers like you see in the movies, one who could actually inspire every kid in the class to learn. Everybody I knew wanted him for a teacher and we who were lucky enough to get him loved going to his class.  He just had some indefinable something that worked. He always had his students to his house at the end of the school year for an outdoor cookout and we all showed up for that.  I think the year I had him was his last teaching at my school. He was hired away by the Hill School in Pottstown.  Hill School is a very exclusive private school attended by the offspring of millionaires and movie stars.

The other teacher, the one who had the biggest influence on me directly and personally was my 12th grade English teacher, Mrs. Manser.  I've written of her before and how she got me writing assemblies and reading my work to the class.  But that was again encouragement for my writing.  No one ever encouraged any other talents I might have or helped me to understand the ways of the working world in general.

In 12th grade, the State of Pennsylvania sent advisors into the school. They gave us aptitude tests and then two of them (bad cop, good cop?) talked to us individually about our "future".  They started off asking me what I wanted to do.  I said I wanted to be a writer.  Do you know what they said?  First they kind of chuckled, then one said, actually said this: "You could never be a writer. You don't have a large enough vocabulary."  Well, I knew some vocabulary I could have said to her, but I don't say those kinds of words.  Can you imagine people who are suppose to be helping to guide your future saying such a thing?  What should have been said was something like, "That is great.  May I make some suggestions? Work on building your vocabulary."  Good golly, I don't claim to be a walking dictionary, but I bet I had a larger vocabulary than 99% of the other kids in high school. Heck, I had kids make fun of me as far back as grade school for reading books with "big words".  Besides that is a myth that you need an expansive vocabulary to be a good writer. In fact, a lot of editors discourage the use of fancy words because it turns readers off.  I just heard recently that Ernest Hemingway only used 1,000 different words in his books. It isn't how many words you use, its how you use those you do.

These people then told me my best career bet was running a machine.  Not computers, because they weren't thought about in 1959, but just some simple machine that does the same task over and over and over.  Well, I admit, I was a terrific addressograph operator and a very good bubblegum welder, but that isn't exactly the career I had in mind for my whole life.

2

If I had started out wanting to make money, if that had been my aim, I think I could have done it.  I succeeded on so many different jobs and in so much varied schooling after high school that if my focus was simply climbing the ladder to the top, I probably could have done it.  But I always had that desire to write and I never had that killer instinct for stepping  on, up or over other people.  Yet, despite my lack of desire to be in the corporate world, I kept getting promotions and more responsibilities.  I always met my responsibilities, but I always resented them, because the better I did in business, the less time I had for my family and my writing. 

I did change companies several times over my life and I think that was positive, because I didn't get stale and I learned more things.  I never took a job for less money than the one before until after my forced retirement in 2001. The last few positions I had at Whatta Bank I took at the same level, but that was because I had crossed the age gap and they were taking advantage of me. Still I kept getting decent raises each year.  That last year, when they let me go, my former manager has told me she had put me in for a 5% increase, which was higher than the "pool" percentage. Of course, I never got it because they retired me before it went into effect.  See I just thought if I simply trusted and worked hard, the money would follow.  But that just gets you more work.  And usually less respect because you don't demand the money and prestige that comes with the additional responsibility. 

3

When my long-time boss Will Waters retired from his Vice-President position, the job and title was given to Winston Bran, who at the time was 33 years old with no experience in the area. He even walked around bragging about knowing nothing about the area he was over and had no particular interest in learning it either. Why should he, every other year they moved him to a bigger position in another area he didn't know anything about either.  I can honestly claim every area I worked in was better off for my having been there, all he can claim is HE is better off for having been there.

4

“Everyone is a sales person” became the big slogan at Whatta Bank a few years ago.  Everybody was supposed to be out selling.  That was part of the emphasis of the Build Points Program.  We were supposed to be out there finding referrals. They actually told us things like, "Thanksgiving is coming next week.  We know many of you get together with your families for dinner.  This is a wonderful opportunity for you to find referrals. You can ask about your family's finances and recommend our products."

This is what Thanksgiving and being with your family meant to Whatta Bank: an opportunity for you to play sales person.  In every circumstance on every occasion they wanted you out there manipulating the conversation to the person's finances and get referrals for the bank.

They put into our yearly evaluation a line on how many Build Points we earned. They started to judge us on that more than on how well we did the actual job we were hired to do.  They further expanded this type of thing when they went to the folly of something called the "Collaborate Workplace". Now you had to be on teams in areas you didn't work and this seemed to count more than how you did in the area you actually worked.  This was madness, madness.

I honestly don't know why Whatta Bank keeps making money, (Well, in a way I do, but I keep waiting for the bubble to burst) because I have seen so much incompetence and error and foolishness in the last few years. I've seen their quality slip horribly as their fees have risen.

5

I had a lifelong friend we'll call Slim. Slim wanted me to join the army out of high school on the "buddy system". He said if we joined together we would be kept together throughout our training.  My parents just didn't go for the idea of me joining the service and wouldn't sign the permission slip. (I was considered a minor because I was not 21. This was a long time ago.) 

He also told me they told him that if you joined you would get a private physical and he came back a bit miffed because he was sent through the same old gang physical as everyone else. 

Slim told me he was going to join the Navy and had went to the recruiting place in Coatesville to meet with the Navel guy and sign up.  He said that guy wasn't there when he arrived and as he were waiting the Army recruiter motioned and said "Hey kid, come here."  So he joined the Army. When I asked, “how come you joined the Army”, he said, "They have cooler uniforms."  And I said, "Then why didn't you join the Marines, they have real cool uniforms."

6

Way back when I commuted to Philadelphia on the Reading Railroad and I generally caught the train in Royersford and sometimes Pottstown.  It was a long day because those trains didn't run very often. I had to catch a train around six in the morning to get into work on time at 8:30 and if I missed a train that left Philly a little after five, which got me home by 7 PM, I had to wait around for over an hour to catch the next one.  If I worked overtime, I had to worry about missing the last train out of Philly, which left at 8:30.

7

I had two brushes with Addressograph Equipment.  When I started at Hannifax Refining, I was hired as a Junior Clerk in Sales Accounting. I did that for eight months and posted for a level four job. This was a temporary position.  The person who held it was leaving for his Army Reserve training for six months. If I took the job and he came back and wanted that job, then I would be bumped back to my old position.  I took the job anyway.  It was in Addressograph and I started as a Graphotypist.  I was very good at that and I also ran the Addressograph machines well.  There were five of us in the unit. The Supervisor had been at Hannifax 11 years and he was a bit nuts. He once got mad at one of the other operators and threw a platen at his head.  Luckily it missed. (A platen was a very heavy metal bar used in the printing machine.)

Our Department Head decided to upgrade to a new system the AM Company called Speedomat.  This used small metal plates, didn't require frames and the printers could utilize a feeder for the envelopes and labels and stuff.  Because I was the best worker in the group, I was pulled out to work on the conversion. We had 43,000 plates that had to be cut in the new format. The plates were cut then printed on galleys and then the galleys were checked for errors, correction made, and so forth. Hannifax had coding on the plates that indicated the region and other info about the dealers.  This was on the bottom row of the plates.  We were almost through the conversion when the Postal Service announced the Zip Code. They also said there could be no other coding after the address except the Zip Code. This meant we had to reconvert every plate and move our coding to the top line and add the Zip Code. The Department Head immediately had a heart attack, literally. He went into the hospital ICU and I carried on converting.

The Addressograph supervisor kept resisting the change. When the conversion was complete, they moved him off somewhere else and I was made Supervisor. 

After I left Hannifax a few years later, I got a job as Circulation Manager at LotsaPaper Publishing. I was over the subscription and shipping of two magazines. Part of that Division required the cutting of Addressograph Plates for printing out the monthly mailings of the magazines so I was again overseeing some Addressograph operation.

Bad Markets

I think we have a subject that lends itself to a salad of discussion in the current corporate scandals and I’m going to start by expressing some of my own philosophy tossed with a bit of religion.

I have a deep faith in God (despite the desires of certain Federal judges).  There are many reasons. As a younger man I was a crusader against church and religion.  I still am at odds with some churches, but not with The Church; that is, the true Body of Christ.

When the Better Half lost our seventh child (and ironically seven is an portent number in Judeo-Christian history) she was in deep depression. The baby died at birth and the doctors were urging my wife to have her tubes tied, to give up thinking about having a baby.  She had had an operation called something like chi rock (which is probably not quite how you say it and is certainly not how you spell it) in which essentially a drawstring is implanted that is supposed to hold the fetus in place.  One of the Better Half’s problems was she could not hold on to the baby once it reached a certain weight. We had suffered two previous stillbirths because of this affliction.  The other four were all miscarriages.

When she began to lose this baby in her fifth month she was put in the hospital labor room and they hooked up a drip designed to stall labor. She was in this room a week struggling to hold on to the child. They had a monitor attached to her and you could hear the baby’s heart beat on the monitor.  I sat in that room many hours with her listening to a pretty strong heart fighting to survive and something in that sound convinced me there was a god. I didn’t come to believe in the God until later, but that was the start, even though in the end she lost the battle and the baby.

During her depression I suggested maybe we should try church one more time. I figured at least it would get her out of the house and around other people.  They had just built a new church down the road from us and so we went there the next Sunday. The pastor spoke on Elijah and what he said hit me as addressing exactly where I was and how I felt at the time. ( I Kings 19:4 But [Elijah] himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.)

The point was that Elijah was a very good man and he had done everything God had asked of him and now he found himself hiding in the wilderness in despair because the rich and powerful had sworn to kill him.  Much like Job, a good man losing everything to evil because he was a good man. This is where I felt I was then (and probably I’m back it that wilderness again now).  This was a church that gave a call at the end of each service and I raised my hand for prayer. Two weeks later I went forward and accepted Christ.

I began to read the Bible and now I understood it and found it made sense when you took it all in context and it seemed to explain exactly what the current day was like and where we were headed in this world.  In fact everyday that part of the message gets cleared and clearer.  This satisfied my intellectual needs.  Then in 1977 when the Better Half became preggers again and the doctors didn’t even want to take her case because they said there was no hope and she was a fool for letting herself get pregnant. (I was shocked, because she had told me she had had her tubes tied after she lost the last baby, but now she confessed she had lied because she still wanted to try and have a baby of her own. Personally I had already accepted the idea of never being a parent.)

A Christian doctor took her case and she had that operation again and he put her to bed for term.  Our new church began prayer circles just for us and they brought meals to us.  I was working, going to school and doing all the housework, cooking whatever. The Better Half could only be on her feet briefly, so in the morning she walked from the bedroom to the living room sofa.  I had arranged the living room to be as handy as possible for her, TV in easy reach, a cooler with some food and drink, etc.

She had our daughter on March 1, 1978 during a snowstorm. She was sure she was losing another, because it was coming way early. They tried to slow labor again and then they gave her steroids to help develop the baby’s lungs. This must have worked because Daughter #1 was born crying loud and angrily, as if disturbed from a sound sleep.  We named her Laurel for Laurel Hill Bible Church and Christine, which means “one of Christ’s”.   And then we had two more babies.

Noelle was born with no human aid. (Again the Better Half had lied about having her tubes tied after Laurel was born.)  When she realized she was pregnant again she thought she was about the second month. She wasn’t showing and it was November.  She never did go to a doctor.  In December, she though she was having a miscarriage and I took her to the hospital. Noelle was born, but not expected to live.  She was only 4 pounds.  They rushed her from Delaware County Hospital to Fitzgerald-Mercy, which had a neonatal intensive care unit. There she stayed all December. The doctors decided she would live, but said she would be blind and severely mentally handicapped. She had to have a blood transfusion because the Better Half and I have conflicting Rh factors. She had jaundice. She was down to 3 pounds 6 ounces.

She came home on January 1, 1981 in a giant red Christmas stocking. She didn’t die, wasn’t blind and hardly mentally incapacitated. She was in the honors classes in high school; she won several academic awards over the years, including the Presidential Academic Excellence Award.  I always said God gave us Noelle to prove it was He and not men behind the miracles of my children’s births.  Then He gave us Darryl so we’d have a son.  All were supposedly impossible births according to medical science.

I give you this testimony so you understand I do have a faith in a God who sets a standard for right and wrong, and I believe what we see everyday in the news now was predicted many centuries ago. And I also want to deal with the subject of money and riches that is often misinterpreted. And I want, if you’ll forgive a bit of preaching, quote the Bible a bit on the subject.

I do not think there is anything inherently immoral or sinful in having money or being rich. I know nothing in the Bible that says money or wealth is wrong. People misquote the Bible all the time on this.  We are always hearing “money is the root of all evil”. That is not what the actual quote says in 1 Tim 6:9-10

But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

It is not money per se that is evil.  It is the love of money. Treating money as simply a reward and a need and a tool is fine and necessary, but when you love money and crave more money, then you open up yourself for evil. Notice it says this love is the root of all evil.  Not some evil, but all evil and you look at what is happening and you can see this everywhere. No one is satisfied with having a comfortable profit and a comfortable life, they want more and more, money for the sake of saying they have a lot of money, money beyond all need and all want really.  If I can clear away a third of the debt burden I have, I could live a very nice life on the money I make. When I clear all my current debt, I can live a quiet nice life on my pension and social security and neither is a great deal of money.  There is probably nothing I need and very little that I want materially that I could not obtain on that income. What might someone possible need or want that multiple upon multiple of millions of dollars is able to buy?  Oh sure power and anything they want, but really there is a limit to what you really, really would want to get. And certainly a limit to what you need.

I am not against things or comfort.  I see money as freedom. But I can have some freedom with a minimal amount of money. I don’t need a mansion and certainly not mansions in several different places. After all, you can only live in one room at a time. I want a car that is reliable and gets me from point A to point B. It doesn’t have to be bigger and faster and shinier than my neighbors. I’m just grateful I can afford to have a car.

Look around at how many people are possessions poor. They have the big SUV and the fancy sports model and bills up the tailpipe. They teeter constantly on the edge of disaster simply because they want toys that say I have more than you do.  Don’t need to play that game. I have no problem with who I am. I don’t envy anyone, because I don’t really know his or her real situation.

But there are things I want. I do want my PC. That helps me keep in contact with people and it lets me do research on subjects that interest me and it is a tool for my writing. I want a TV and a machine to play music. I want to buy books to read and music to listen to. I would like to go to some cultural events: plays, concerts, ballets. I would like to travel and visit different parts of our world.  And you know what – materially that’s about it.  And I believe the economic system should be geared to providing us with these modest desires, but the love of money by some has robbed many of these simple pleasures.

Here is what I believe business should be.  It never was and never will be, but it is what I think it should be.

Businesses should not grow into giant conglomerates to begin with.  What ever happened to the anti-trust laws anyhow?  More businesses mean more competition and choices and respect for the consumer.  Forget the argument about the economy of scale.  That only works with an honest business climate that really does pass the savings of bulk on to the customer. But some of those savings come at a cost to one of the things I think should be part of business, employment.

A business should be developed to meet a need of people. There is nothing wrong with the person getting rich because they invented something people want.  There is something wrong, though, if that person deliberately doesn’t produce what he is capable of producing to create an artificial shortage and thus drive the price up.

I believe a business should provide:

A goods or service of use to the people and it should be honest in dealing with its customers, assuring quality and a fair price.

Jobs for people at a descent wage and with job security based on reasonable working hours and conditions and the true demand for the product, and on the acceptance of a reasonable profit, not an attempt to inflate profit at the cost of employee and customer.

Lastly, a reasonable return to the owners or investors in the business.  But the thrust of the business should be in development of a needed product, the quality of the product and the well being of the employees, not simply increasing the wallet of the investors.

There should never be the great chasms of cash between the upper managers and the lower workers. Certainly the higher ups should make more than the janitor and the clerk, but it should be in proper scale. And there should always be the opportunity for that janitor and clerk to work themselves up the pyramid by hard work and initiative.

Here is something I say: If I was an honest car mechanic I would never lack for customers. If I charged fair prices, did the work as I claimed and only where needed, people would flock to me.  I would make a profit and live comfortably and I would be respected.  And I would also have a house full of mirrors, because I could look myself in the mirror and see a decent human being.

Today’s CEOs and other top managers are like vampires in many ways.  They suck the lifeblood out of their fellow man and they have no need for mirrors, for one casts no reflection and the other can’t look at theirs.