Suspicious Dishes at the Buffett Table

As long as we're talking of people who get under my skin (re: Mitt Romney) or perhaps I should say, get my goat, since this guy has rounded up a lot goats in his life. Or at least rounded up a few bucks. He has a herd of about 37 Billion give or take a billion.

Warren Buffett sings a good song,  but there is something wrong with his lyrics. Lets long at this man who spent his life bellied up to the Buffet Table of wealth.

He says he has no real need for money, he lives a modest frugal life, and he doesn't believe in inherited wealth so his kids be left enough to sit about on wealthily bottoms doing nothing, but will have to earn their own keep. It isn't right people just got lucky in the sperm lottery. He is going to give away 99% of his wealth when he dies because he looks at what he earned as a collection of Social Credit Claims. He also famously complained about paying less taxes than his employees and how unfair that was.

All very righteous statements it seems.

After all he had such a rough beginning, being the son of a Brokerage Firm owner and four-time Congressman.

Buffett is an example that if you're only goal in life is to rich, you can become rich. Now, he did get paid a salary of only $12,000 a year for the job he took at age 24. A modest sum, right, except it would be a starting salary of about $100,000 in today's money. He got almost as much in that first year as I paid for my first house in 1961. Put that $12,000 in perspective. In 1959 my starting salary was $2,808 a year and that was considered above average for a beginning wage. When I was a teenager we dreamed of making a fabulous $100 a week and really successful guys, guys who were at the top, guys who had it made, earned $10,000 a year.

He doesn't feel any guilt about doing nothing in life but chasing after more money. He says he has little use for material things and so doesn't spend a lot. (Then why didn't you have an ambition to go out and become a plumber, garbage collector or something useful like that, but not as well paid?) After all, he still lives in that modest little house he bought for $31,500. Of course, that modest house is valued at $700,000 today and I guess his $4 million home in California doesn't count. But then again, when you have $37 Billion dollars more or less $4 million is a modest sum.

But his viewpoint on consumption is this: "The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. Its like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GDP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."


Well, why didn't he take that money and hire those 10,000 people to do AIDS research? Or use it to train those 10,000 as teachers and nurses and pay their salaries for the rest of his life so they can nurse the indigent or teach the downtrodden? Wouldn't that still help the GDP? Wouldn't that be a good use of those claim checks?


He does make charitable donations. For instance, he auctioned his 2001 Lincoln Town Car off on eBay to raise money for Girls, Inc. Don't know what it went for. I've given three of my cars to charity, by the way, and I don't rank on any Forbes List; I can't even afford to subscribe to Forbes magazine. Big deal, Warren.


Lets see there was also:


            He auctioned a luncheon with himself and got $650,100 for charity.
            He auctioned a Power Lunch with Himself and got $2,110,100 for the Glide Foundation.
            And Salida Capital Corp. gave $1,680,000 to dine with him. (I bet they wanted to get some valuable advice for their "gift".)


Don't you love how the really rich people are always getting praise for the charitable contributions that cost them very little of their time and nothing out of their own pocket.


And why don't the people who can afford to pay $650,100 for lunch, just give the money to a charity without having to get something in return, even if only a Buffett? 


But never fear, he is going to give 99% of his fortune to charity when he died. Why not now? Just do it. Give the 99% away now while you can bask in all the testimonial dinners and see the plaques they'll hand you. You'll still have enough left over to live your modest life style.


But when he dies he'll give the 99% away elsewhere so his children will "have enough to do what they want, but not enough to do nothing".  I would love to leave my children in that position, to tell the truth, but I don't have enough to leave that they could do what they want. My kids will inherit one-third of an artificial Christmas Tree and one-third of an electric wok and they'll have to fight over the tree stand and the power cord. 


He will leave behind to his heirs a meager 1% of his fortune, which is $370 Million. His three kids will have to get along on a mere $123,333,333 each. Now maybe, just maybe considering his children are all middle-aged and doing okay in their own right, that just might be enough they could kink back a bit in their later years.


Finally we have the big tax concern of the man who spent his life on his one great purpose, making money. Poor thing doesn't pay enough taxes. His statement was made in 2006, and his claim is he only paid 19% of his $48.1 million income in tax and his employees paid 33% on theirs. His employees evidently are paid well to be in that 33% bracket, so some generosity there. So his complain was he only paid $9.139 Billion in tax. Well, if you felt so bad why didn't you just give a gift to the government that would equaled with your tax that 33% rate? You can legally do that, you know?


Besides, why this discrepancy anyway? You didn't pay the 33% because you took measures to avoid paying income tax in the first place. He paid himself a salary of $100,000 a year. A nice sum, but far less than other CEO in his league. A lot of these CEOs take these modest salaries, some only take One Dollar a year. My, aren't they a generous lot? They care about the welfare of the company so much they take almost no salary. But they do take a lot of Stock Options and that kind of compensation, because then they only have to pay the capital gains tax of 15% on their income -- while their employees have to pay the full measure of their tax bracket because they are getting a salary considered earned income!


You want to pay the higher taxes, give yourself a great big salary! And don't take the allowed deductions! Then maybe you'll be happy.


And stop running about patting yourself on the back and telling everybody else to give away their money.




 

Mitt Gives me Fits

I have always avoided writing anything political in my Blogs. For one, I don’t like politics. For two, I think it is a good way to lose friends. For three, no one seems able to discuss issues rationally. All people do is stick some brand on your hide and then they tell you what YOU supposedly think on every issue, whether you do or not. For four, I usually let anything these windbags of any and all parties say roll off my back blow away in the breeze.

But for some reason this Romney guy gets under my skin.

When asked recently if he thought he had the best chance to beat Obama, he said, “I don't think if I have the best chance, I think I have the only chance."

Maybe its just hubris, but we already have an egomaniac in the White House we don’t need another. He says things in a stupid way that can be used against him, maybe that’s why? A man running for President should know better how to phrase his remarks. “I just love firing people…”, “I don’t care about the poor…”, “I don’t think people want their President [paying more taxes than he owes…”

Opponents and Press took these out of context of what he meant, except the last statement where he was preparing everybody to hear just how little he pays in taxes compared to what he makes, yet he seems too dumb to understand that is the way his remarks will get played.

Now he tells us he is the only person in the whole wide world great enough to beat Obama. This guy doesn’t even know how to fake humility.

But he should learn or he shouldn’t give speeches in stadiums that make it look like nobody showed up to hear him. Maybe his ego told him 65,000 people would actually show up and fill the seats.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone wants to be President, but I really don’t know why this guy does. I can’t see where he has any strong convictions about anything. I get the sense of a salesman selling whatever is hot at the moment, but ready to switch his pitch as soon as it wanes. But his faulty marketing sense tells me he doesn’t understand the market he’s pitching too.

I think he wants to be President as a resume enhancement.

Now he is campaigning on rising both the age for receiving Medicare and Social Security. Well, isn’t that cute. If I had a quintillion dollars stashed away in the Cayman Island and a Swiss bank Account where I could avoid income tax maybe I wouldn’t care what age I got Social Security either.

To tell the truth, I think we might have all been better off never having the Social Security System. We would have been better off knowing it was up to us to set aside for our old age and as a society to look after each other within communities rather than ending up at the mercy of Washington politicians. But we DO have Social Security and just about every person living in the U.S. today has grown up under this system. It is what it is and I think we’re stuck with it. They promised us this would be there for us and forced by law to contribute to it all our working life. I am in my seventies collecting it, but also still paying into it when I work, and then paying some income tax on the portion I receive.

I remind those such as Mitt, rhymes with Nitwit, that I paid into this. I made premiums as I would into any annuity promising an investment to provide for my old age. I am sick and tired of politicians talking as if we are getting some kind of welfare. We are simply collecting what we paid for.  It was the politicians who cheated and took from the fund; it wasn’t my fellow seniors or I who not paying our premiums. We met our obligation; now the government must meet its own.

Mitt can run out there and talk about how everybody lives longer and therefore the age of payout should be later. Mitt finds that easy to say when he doesn’t have any worry about whether his car breaks down or the roof leaks or he gets sick, because he has a quintillion dollars. If I hadn’t been able to get Social Security when I did, I would have been in a world of hurt, maybe I really would be on welfare…and homeless. Mitt doesn’t have to worry about being homeless.

If you rich politicians, which is most of them and most of whom never did an honest days work in their lives, want to raise the age people can receive Social Security and Medicare, you better darn well do something on the other side of the equation.

You better tell those businesses out there not to terminate us old people. My friends and I talked about the fact that we don’t know anyone – NOT A PERSON – who managed to stay with a company and retire at 65. They could save a little in salary and benefits so bounced me out at age 60 after 21 years.

We can’t all get elected to the Senate and leach off the public until we die, now can we?

Many I know, including me, started working early in life. I began working in Grade School. I’ve worked continually ever since. I continued working after at 60. My jobs have been physical part time labor paying just above minimum wage. They keep laying me off because of the economy. You know, the ones on the bottom go first when the CEOs sees his or her stock options tail off. And you know at 70 it gets a little harder to get hired and a little harder to keep the body in working shape.

So, give me somebody with some positive ideas that help everyone, not the typical Corporate-think of let’s cut costs by cutting the employee health care and wages. Give me somebody who says what he means both today and tomorrow, and knows how to say it correctly so it isn’t misunderstood. And give me somebody who isn’t so rich they know knowing about the real world where most of us survive.

It is so sad if Romney is the best we can come up with.

Quiting the Writing Game

Okay, don't anybody gets too excited that they will not have to read anything by me again. I said, " The Writing Game" not writing.

It is easier for an alcoholic to give up drinking than a writer to quit writing. Writing isn't like an addiction; it's more an incurable disease. One doesn't give it up anymore than someone gives up cancer.

I'll continue writing until they pull the keyboard from under my cold, dead fingers. I've been writing professionally for 60 years if you count the newspaper Stuart Meisel and I wrote and sold in the school hallway in 1952-53. It's been 55 years if you count it from the song "My Little White Lamb" my first New York published piece. I have been published somewhere or other in every decade since.

I have written almost every day since I was 12 years old. It may turn into gibberish if I go senile, but someone would have to shoot me to stop me. (Now I fully understand some people may say I already write gibberish. To them I say, "@&#*!" Just typing gibberish, translate at your own risk.)

The Writing Game has very little to do with actual writing. The Writing Game is what you play when fame and fortune is what you think you want. It is the desperate rules you follow to be published and see your name in print. It is the conventions you cow tow to in order to impress an editor. In other words it is pandering to please someone else's dictates of what writing is, but it is not writing.

In every art form their exist a coterie of elitist snobs who claim privy to what is and isn't proper. Well, there is another kind of privy and that is where their opinions really belong. If we depended on the considerations of these mutually declared haut monde of culture we probably would not have the great variety of art we enjoy. Like most elitist these person's main purpose is to keep things to themselves, for to share is anti-privileged  They tend to cling to the last best thing or speak mumbo-jumbo to declare something unfathomable as insightful. We must remember these people generally have stood in the doorway of evolving art for centuries and one wonders how many artists they have killed figuratively speaking over the years.

One must remember Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Kathryn Stockett was rejected by 60 agents before one agreed to market her novel The Help. We probably would never have heard of such people as Beethoven, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, James Joyce or Jackson Pollack if those elitist who think they uphold the pillars of the media had their way during their times.

Now don't misunderstand, I am not trying to place myself on the level of those I just mentioned. As a teenager I was content to dream of being a hack writer of horror stories. Basically I achieved that and had some success as a pulp writer. If anything I have written rises about that level, then fine. I don't care. I've quit the writing game.

I have seen my name in print many times and it is no big deal. I am tired of changing things to suit some editor or to avoid upsetting the politically correct applecart. We have the internet now and the freedom to write what we would write to the best we can write it. If some read my words and enjoy them or think about them that is enough. If people read my words and dislike what I wrote then they are totally free never to read my words again. That won't stop my words.

What finally persuaded me to quit the writing game was some criticism of a story I wrote. It was made by a college professor, someone very much in a position to poison young mind. Her criticism was not of my style or content per se. Her statement was, "You didn't describe if your character was white or black, American or Canadian or whatever nationality or race; therefore, I could not relate to your character."

Is this what we have come to? This kind of bigoted need of superficialities to understand a story? These things did not matter in my story. The main character could have just as easily been of Asian ethnicity. The main character could have been a black man or a Hispanic woman, these random accidents of birth had no bearing on the story. It was about a human being dealing with life. If the color of her skin had a bearing on the plot I would have put it in there.

I thought, "Gimme a break! Are you kidding me?"

No, from now on I write what I write. Read it for what it is worth. If you like it, come back and read some more. If you don't like it, then go away. That is the freedom we all have now.

This is not a Political Post.

My grandmother had an old country expression, “That man don’t have a lick of sense.” Now we all have slips of the tongue or say things without thinking, but if you are running for President and making public statements you need to have a good editor up in your brain.

Mitt Romney looks good. He cleans up real nice, don’t he? Has that little touch of gray at the temples, his tie on straight. He “looks Presidential” as they say. But he don’t talk good. (Yes, it is ungrammatical, but I’m not running for anything.) Romney is leading in the GOP circus right now, but his handlers better get him into Poli-Speak College for the course 101 - How Not to Give Your Opponents Negative Sound Bites.

This wouldn’t make no never mind (another old country saying) if we had an honest and decent Press in this country. We don’t. We have a bunch of vultures more interested in the gotcha moment than reporting fact or explaining anything fairly and at depth. If a candidate can’t grasp the need for caution when speaking to the Press, he is a fool.

Last week in the debates Romney made two comments about his tax statements that showed he is out of touch with the everyday working person in this country.

First he stated his 2010 tax return would “show he paid all the taxes he was obligated to pay.” Well, so do I. Of course, to do otherwise would be illegal and the IRS would be coming after me. I mean, what the heck is that? It sounds like every politician or business executive ever charged with cooking the books or fraudulent activity. “I have done nothing illegal. It was all within the law as it is written.”

In other words it sounds as if he is exploiting a bunch of loopholes to avoid paying tax. It may be legal, but it doesn’t look good and the average guy can’t do it. You know, like having a secret Swiss bank account or money stashed in the Cayman Islands.

Not realizing how such a statement would play in the press, he went up and compounded it with this quote, “I don't think the voters want a president who pays more than he owes." That quote just triggers people to be suspicious and look for something hidden.

Well, I suppose we don’t want anyone paying more than they owe, but why in the world would you make such a remark? It just reinforced the idea you pulled some shenanigans to avoid paying tax.  It also indicates a person knowing his returns are going to show something he wants to prepare people for because he knows it will look like he got off cheap.  It also says he is out of touch with the common man. It ranks up there with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake," when people were asking for bread. As an old Credence Clearwater song goes, "I ain't no privileged son." Mitt is a privileged son.

Now a week later he opens his mouth and stupidity spews out. You would think he would have learned how the press, TV comedians and his opposition work from his previously and famously misquoted, “I love firing people.” You may be saying a perfectly reasonable and logical thing, but if you don’t frame it correctly, no one will hear the real message.

His “I love firing people” was only part of the statement, because he was referring to getting rid of service people who failed to provide the service promised. We all have done this at times. I switched phone companies some years back for service issues. It was the correct thing to do. But it was stupid to frame this very sensible and commonsense practice using the words “love” and “firing”.  And the predictable happened. Only that part of his comment was used in a totally different way than he used it to make him look like Ebenezer Scrooge rubbing his hands in glee because he loved firing poor Bob Cratchet. Unfair, untrue, but today’s reality.

Yet he made the same structural gaff again. He explained how he was concentrating on the vast majority of Americans, strengthening the middle class, an absolute necessity if we are to bring this country back to economic strength. He also said he would help fix any “holes in the safety net” for the poor. 


Unfortunately he again framed his statement stupidly. He began it by saying, “I don’t care about the poor…” That is all the reporter heard, not what he really said. Now that bad phrasing is going to show up on the lips of Colbert and Leno and Letterman and Fallon. Now those out of context words will become a nice sound bite for his opponents’ negative ads. I can hear the spots now: “Here is what Mitt Romney says, “I love firing people…I don’t care about the poor…”

Now this is not a political post. I am neither endorsing or non-endorsing any candidate of either party. I am angry that the press in this country does not bother to explain and illuminate rather than glory in “gotchas” and even will distort things in order to create one. But it is what it is and the fact Romney can’t seem to get a grasp on that fact bothers me. He manages to get his ties properly tied, but he needs to find a way to tie down his tongue.

Of course this constant distortion by the Press and others of what people actually say is what keeps good people from running for office. And look what we get stuck with.

Pain

Life in recent times is a four-letter word spelled P-A-I-N. This is the cost of carrying this body none to gently through the years. Age has a way of reminding me that the smooth and sturdy container I gave no concern to in youth is now dinged and dented, wrinkled and wrecked.

In my younger days I was a fast runner, but you can't outrun age. Your sprints and dashes gradually become rapid walks and then you find that four miles an hour pace has slipped by a mile. All those old slowpokes you use to breeze pass on the trails are now going by you. You don't outrace that old geezer with the scythe. He was out of sight and out of mind once upon a time, but now I can catch a glimpse of him over my shoulder.

I suppose at this point I should put up that warning that this blog may contain images some would find disturbing.

I am referring to my knees.

Old Man Time doesn't like knees and elbows. He really warps the skin on those body parts. I have seen elephants with smoother skin than what my kneecaps have become.

In fact, I use to have nice looking legs and as these first pictures from the past summer attest, not so long ago I still had human-looking limbs, but this week not so much. Now admittedly arthritis has played a role in rearranging my landscape. My fingers have developed a curve and I can no longer completely close my hands into a fist. My feet have especially suffered the slings and arrows of uric acid overindulging in their joints like some mean drunk always spoiling for a fight. There are days few and far between I wake up pain free. Mostly it is a twinge in a toe or a stinging about the ankle that is barely noticeable in the daily activity of my life. Sometimes it is a flare-up of angry bees with red-hot fireplace pokers for stingers doing battle here or there. Never have these bouts prevented me from working and very seldom deterred me from my daily walk through the forest, even though such pain never rests, even when you do, and it bites you when touched, latching on like a Pit Bull having roid rage. I have a high pain threshold. I can deal with Mr. Arthritic Pit Bull.

But that Old Man Time hit me low this week. I was thinking perhaps tendonitis, but it looks more and more to me like bursitis, his second cousin. I've had a couple bursitis attacks on my elbows. I was a bit self-conscious about my big freak elbow, but after a couple weeks it went back to normal. It didn't much bother me unless I leaned on my arm or brushed against something. This knee thing is a  bit more obtrusive.  I was wondering if I could get on some weirdo TV show and make a few bucks by claiming I had a grapefruit implanted in my knee.

My daughter and I visited the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia last week, maybe I picked it up there. My knee certainly looks like an exhibit you'd find in that place. Over in this display we have a man with balloon leg! Admittedly my right kneecap ain't no beauty contest winner either, but at least it has some shape to it. My legs look like the before and after pictures of a participant on The Biggest Loser. Besides the pain, I really can't bend the blasted thing. You should see me try to put my pants on (well, maybe you shouldn't) or my shoe and sock. I haven't even been able to tie my own left shoe, although I did manage to do just that this morning. I felt the same sense of accomplishment as I did as a toddler first mastering such a feat. Oh, Larry tied his shoe all by himself, he gets a gold star!

I am doing all one can for such an inflation, keeping off my feet, resting, popping Ibuprofen and getting a healthily understanding why some people get hooked on pain pills. I did notice in this last picture I took this morning that the swelling has decreased ever so slightly. Hopefully in another week I can snap a portrait of matching kneecaps.

It does have me wondering how my dad stands it. I am going stir crazy because I can't do much physically around the house. It is a major task getting in and out of the car. I have to put in my right leg, then push this hulk of body up almost over into the passenger side to drag my left foot into place. But at least I am hobbling about. I took out the trash, took the barrel down to the curve yesterday. I can feed the cats and feed the birds and fetch the newspaper. I also have my writing, which I can sit at the computer to type and it is my lifetime love. Yet my dad can't do anything. He can't go out and get the paper or the mail. He was a long distance trucker until he was 75, then a school bus driver into his late eighties. Driving was his love and passion, but he isn't allow to do that anymore. It pains my knee to drive, but I can do it.

Old Man Time is a mean son of a goat!

Anger at How They Pick Your Pockets

Now where were we? Ah yes, the Little Woman had accidentally overdraw one of our bank accounts resulting in a $37 dollar fee of 131% on $28.

(To understand how this happened go to my previous post, "Anger from One Year to the Next".)

We do not keep much money in this particular account. There is a large deposit on the First of each month (more about that to come) and by the last week of the month little remains. It's a special purpose account. So there was only $8 remaining when my wife pulled out the wrong debit card to pay a $36 purchase (prescriptions),

I asked a question. Why did the bank allow this overdraft to happen?

Obviously when the card was swiped the computer noted there were insufficient funds and one would expect the transaction to be denied. Isn't that what you have always been told about a debit card? You had to have money in your account for it to be used?

One of the dirty little secrets, among many, is the banks encourage overdrafts. This is one of their most profitable services. This is not what they tell you, of course.

They will give you three reasons to justify this usury interest rate, the overdraft fee.

1.  They don't want you to be inconvenienced by rejecting a transaction over such a low sum. Thus, you are paying for not being embarrassed by public rejection. They are doing it for you!

2.  Overdrafts cost the bank a lot of money.

3.  They impose the fee to encourage customers to be more financially responsible.

They leave out the fourth and most important reason: it's easy and lucrative revenue for the bank. The other three reasons are basically bogus. Only Reason Number 2 has any iota to truth to it, but even that is distorted from reality and should not be considered a valid reason for these high fees.


What kinds of overdrafts do we have? We have accidental ones, such as my wife using the wrong bank card or someone thinks they have a higher balance than they have. It is difficult in these times to sometimes know your balance if you have a joint account. You take some cash from an ATM and mean time your joint partner is buying a new pair of shoes unaware of your withdrawal and voila, accidental overdraft.

We have the knowing overdraft for an emergency situation. This is where the person knows they don't have enough in the account to cover a transaction, but are willing to absorb a fee for a perceived necessity. "If I don't take twenty dollars out of the bank today, my children will have nothing to eat tonight." The person knows money will be in the account in a day or so to cover both what they took out and the greedy fee.

These are overdrafts made by basically honest persons who are good customers of the bank. The bank knows they will get that money back and their fee. If the bank thought otherwise, these people would NOT have been able to overdraw.

That's another of the dirty little secrets, you are coded.  As a new customer you may be coded 1 and this tells the system to allow up to a $50 overdraft. This will change over time as you build a reputation and profile with the bank. Each code will bring a higher allowance of overdraft, maybe as much as $200, maybe more if you are wealthy. (I know of cases of wealthy people having no limits and even when they overdrew their account by thousands of dollars paid no fees. You will find in most situations if you are rich enough to afford the fees, you never are charged any.) Naturally, if you become known as a risk or have a very minimal average balance, you may be coded down to a zero and no overdraft allowed.

So there goes Reason Number 3, because if they really wanted to encourage you to be financially responsible, they wouldn't allow you to overdraw at all. But then they wouldn't be able to charge you a fat fee and make money.

And let's forget Reason Number 1, that's just PR. They couldn't care less about you being embarrassed. It's a convenience all right; a convenient way for them to make more money.

What about Reason Number 2, overdrafts cost the bank? It may cost them interest on money borrowed overnight at the Fed Fund Rate of interest. The current Fed Fund Rate is .25%. That is the annualized rate. Banks generally borrow overnight, just as we basically borrowed $28 overnight. So the bank paid a use fee of .000007% (rounded up) for a total cost of $0.00019. We paid a use fee of $37 at a rate of 48,180% annualized. See how they turned a microscopic lost into a big fat profit?

"How about processing costs caused by an overdraft?" you ask.

First of all, there is no direct cost caused by the overdraft, except that minuscule interest rate.  The bigger extra cost was having an OverDraft Unit to prepare those notices mailed to the miscreants and the postage to send it. I don't know how big those units are these days. Most of the notice preparation and mailing is probably pretty much automated by now. The costs are a nanosecond of computer time, a bit of paper and postage; and the postage is probably the highest expense. Does this add up to anywhere near $37? I rather think not. Maybe a buck-thirty-seven.

However, there is a legitimate cost from overdrafts of a higher nature. This doesn't come because of those accidental overdrafts or the deliberate emergency of the moment ones. No, there is a third kind of overdraft, theft.

Yeah, there are people who overdraw an account with no intension of ever making it good. They not only aren't going to make a deposit to cover the overdraft, they aren't going to pay the fee either. Now some of these thieves know how to milk the system for all its worth. (They would probably make valuable advisers working for the bank actually. They think alike when it comes to maximizing undeserved profit.) They will make overdrafts here, there and everywhere in a short period of time before the previous overdrafts are noted and their withdrawing spree ended.  With the speed of today's systems, though, the banks have probably cut down on this.

But these thieves have nothing to do with our little miscues and small overdrafts. Those people are not going to be encouraged to be more financially responsible. And they can cost the bank a hunk of change, but you and I shouldn't be punished for this. Higher overdraft fees won't stop these crooks.

I am not against the banks charging a reasonable fee for an overdraft. We are using their funds in what could be called a small, temporary loan. When I initially began in banking (40 plus years ago) such fees were kind of reasonable. Our overdraft fee was $10. If you were over from one cent to $9.99 you were not charged. We did not charge anything if under the fee amount. From $10 to $19.99 you were charged half the fee, $5.00 and $20 or above you paid the full fee. Given the minimal cost to banks when the average depositor overdraws this would still seem a reasonably excessive profit for the bank.

However, I would be inclined to say they should be restricted to charging the same rate as their small personal loans on overdrafts. I see that rate  is somewhere around 15% currently. That would mean for my wife's little one day loan of $28, I would have paid a fee of one and one-tenth cent. Bank still made a profit, and if the overdraft remained another day, then another one and one-tenth cent. Okay, I can be reasonable. Let them charge a minimum fee, but no more than $12. $12 would be equivalent to a small personal loan of $1,000 for a month (31 days) at 15% annual interest. They still make a huge profit.

But banks shouldn't be living off the backs of honest people making small overdrafts, because every time they want to raise their bottom line, they raise the overdraft fee while they continue to encourage this behavior. As I stated earlier, if they truly wished to stop this behavior, they would allow no overdraft, which they do with some riskier people, so it is possible.

But that overdraft fee, despite how it sounds, was not the true source of my anger. My anger came from that combined with the same bank depositing my pension late. This is why I have an account there to begin with, my monthly pension payment is deposited there and then I have specific payments dedicated to that account monthly, which is why it shrinks almost to nothing by month end just before another infusion of my pension.

My pension check is due on the first of every month. Now usually if the first falls on a weekend, they deposit it on the Friday before. However, the first of January fell on both a Sunday and a holiday and the holiday extended through Monday and they didn't deposit my pension until Tuesday. I guess because I get a yearly pension they have to keep that amount isolated to each calendar year, but still, make it on the due date. If I am late paying something on the due date, I get charged a late fee, usually as outrageous as the overdraft fee. Not having my pension on the First caused me untold worry and aggregation and inconvenience. I am not a well-off guy, I depend on deposits being there when they should be. Not being there could cause me to make a late payment on something and incur more bloated fees.

There is no reason why it could not have been done automatically on a Sunday. They would have put a charge to my account on Sunday if I incurred one. They cancelled an automatic payment I had setup for the Second, even though that was a holiday, so why not make my deposit.

What I should do is bill the bank a $37 late fee. Fair is fair.

Anger From One Year to the Next

I am not a person easily angered. It usually takes a lot. Nor do I stay angry long. On those occasions in my life when I have reached a boiling point I usually let off steam by throwing something, generally what is in easy reach. I don't throw it at anyone. I just throw it. My anger goes away then like a cold when the fever breaks. I throw it, I feel better immediately and I fairly quickly cool down.

Then I feel bad because I probably broke something of mine I didn't want to break.

These instances occur, thankfully, very, very infrequently.

It's also something those knowing we well are happy about. They know my anger is rare, comes quickly and goes away just as quick. I am not someone whose anger will seethe and continue for hours or days. So this is probably the exception that proves the rule.

I became angered prior to New Year's Eve and it has not gone away. I am still angry. Perhaps it is because I didn't throw anything and it is too late for that now. And I am not angry at one thing, either, but several things.

The first thing that angered me was my wife overdrew our account at one bank. No, I wasn't angry at my wife. I was upset because I figured we'd get charged a fee and I was unhappy because we haven't had an overdraft on our accounts for at least a decade. But I wasn't angry at anyone or anything yet.

My wife went to have her prescriptions filled and she used the wrong card in paying. It had been an honest mistake. We have accounts at two banks. Unfortunately the debit cards of both are green and look similar. She thought she was using the bank card of the account we had money in. It wasn't and this resulted in a $28 overdraft.

I check my accounts online regularly. I was shocked to see an overdrawn account. I did not see any fee charged yet, however, and I went immediately to that bank and deposited $40 dollars. My receipt then showed us having a positive balance, not much, but positive nonetheless.

Thus the next morning I am doubly surprised when I check my account and see it overdrawn $25. Why am I doubly surprised? Not so much by the fact this was caused by the charging of an overdraft fee as the fact my pension check was not deposited as expected. This is when my anger began.

Definition of Usury: the illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.


It would seem that an interest rate of 132% for a one day "loan" is a high rate of interest. Of course there is that phrase in the definition: "the illegal action or practice". Certainly 132% is a high rate, but is it actually legal?


Definition of a Loan Shark: A person or entity that charges borrowers interest above an established legal rate. Depending on where a person lives, lenders typically cannot charge more than 60% interest per annum. A loan shark, then, would be someone who illegally charged interest over the state's legal limit, which could range up to, or even over, 100%.


So, 132% is more than 60%, but the definition says per annum. This 132% I was charged was daily, actually less than a full 24 hours before I deposited the $40. That is an annual rate of 48,180%, which would make any loan shark drool with envy.


Now I know it would not become 48,180%. If I didn't deposit to my account for two days or a week or a month, it would remain at 132% If I waited a year, although they would probably have closed my account by then, it would still be 131%, but still a lot more than 60% per annum!


Do I think this is fair and right? No, but I will explain why in my next post. I'll give you a partial reason, why did the bank allow her to overdraw? Why didn't they reject the purchase? I'll tell you next time.




Meanwhile, I leave you with this:

What’s the difference between Congressmen and manure?

With manure you can spread it across a field and it will yield worthwhile crops.

While congressmen are full of it, all they produce is crap.

(The photograph of Congress in session taken by the author, 2011.)

...To the Dark of the Dungeon

As I entered the waiting room and looked around I saw the sign on a mantle.

"I guess my wife's out of luck," I said to another man sitting nearby.

"Uh?" he said and I jerked my thumb to the old notice.

My wife is Irish; well, part Irish anyway. She had an Irish maiden name. Her other main parts are German and Native American (one-quarter Creek).

T'is, me Lads, the irony that Mauch Chunk should end up named Jim Thorpe. It is also an example of how this country can and does change usually in the right ways. You see, Jim Thorpe had a part-Irish, part-Sac and Fox father, one Hiram Thorpe. Jim's mother, Charlotte Vieux had a French dad and Potawatomi mom. Hiram and Charlotte named their son Wa-Tho-Huk ("path lighted by great flash of lightning") and raised him as a Sac and Fox. He was also Roman Catholic, which was probably another strike against him in some places in those times.

Jim Thorpe was born in 1888. Eleven years earlier there was an incident in Mauch Chuck that shows he probably wouldn't have been welcome there in 1877, even possibly the decade-plus later when he was born in Oklahoma. He probably would have been shunned or worse for being  (1.) Irish, (2.) an "Injun" and (3.) a papist.

To illustrate some of the mind-set of those times I will take us back to those mansions on top of the hill, specifically the home of Asa Packer.  I mentioned therein that the Packers, rich as they were, but people of hard-working humble beginnings, existed in wealth a long while without the prerequisite servants, until Sarah Packer reached a point when doing it all herself was difficult. They hired a Butler and a Maid, who each had separate quarters in the house. The Packers, faithful to their Protestant morals wanted to be sure there was no hanky-panky between this single man and single woman. Thus they hired an Irish Catholic Butler and a German Lutheran Maid, knowing one would never have anything to do with the other. (This is another story with ties to The Little Woman, with her Irish father and German mother, and being raised a Lutheran.)

If that is an amusing story, there are many darker tales to tell of the prejudices of those times, especially against the Irish.

The Irish lot on their native sod was not a particularly happy one in the 19th Century. They were viewed as less than vermin by England, to which they were subject much against their will. Many lived in abject poverty; in fact, it was rare if an Irish family was able to serve one piece of meat a year in their meals. Beginning in the 1840s many Irish began to immigrate to the United States and this flow continued well into the 1880s. The English took a "good riddance to rubbish" attitude and encouraged this.

The United States also encouraged this influx of Irish, at least the industrialist of the day did. They saw these people as an underclass, a supply of cheap labor and a desperate people they could exploit. They were not welcome in every place of business, as the sign at the beginning of this post shows, but they were welcomed into the black holes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia where coal could be harvested.

Mauch Chunk was a coal town.

Working as a coal miner was far from paradise, not only might you be digging down toward Hell, your life was the Devil's own as well, barely a notch about slavery. You worked a long day on a dangerous job for very little pay. Worse yet, you owed everything to the company. You lived in homes provided by the company, so leaving your job was forfeiting the roof over your head. You had to buy your own work tools and supplies from the company, which you could get at the company store, where you also bought the other necessities of your life. You got credit on your purchases, so to speak, but then your bill was deducted from your wages on payday. It wasn't unusual for a miner to find he owed more than his pay and so go home with nothing in this pocket.

During the time of this miserable situation grew a secret organization known as The Molly Maguires. How secret were they? So much so historians really know very little about them. Were they the terrorist one owner painted them to be in their day, killing brutally and often? Were they a discredited and maligned group of fighters for labor reformation? Truth is they were probably somewhere in between, but they had enough influence that owners of the coal industry saw them as a threat to the status quo and of course blamed every dirty deed that came down the pike on them.

One such industrialist was Franklin B. Gowen (pictured left). Like Asa Packer, Gowen was a wealthy, powerful man in Pennsylvania. He was the president of the Philadelphia Coal and Iron Company and the director of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. He was also a former Attorney General.

To say he was anti-union is an understatement and he did everything in his power to destroy any progress by labor that might effect his business. He made this statement about the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal":

“Men were not created equal, the distinction between mind and matter, between the men who labored with their heads and those who labored with their hands. There [are] two great classes of people in this world, men of genius, or intellectual men, and those who [are] not so, the men of labor."

 Anyway, to make a long and fascinating story short, Gowen came to blame the Molly Maguires for all things Union and hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to bring the group down. Eventually several men were arrested and charged with murder on the word of one detective, James McParlan, who went undercover and acted as an informant. He began accusing Molly Maguires after a murder where he had a hand in and may have been responsible for.

Four men were brought to trial at the Old Jail of Carbon County in the town of Mauch Chunk upon the lone testimony of McParlan. This was not a criminal trial, but a private one in which the county simply supplies the facilities. The Judges were men connected to Gowen and there is the possibilities he rigged the jury. In 1877 four men, accused of being  Molly Maguires and murderers were hung inside the Old Jail on gallows brought in for the occasion. They were John Donahue, Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle and Alexander Campbell.

Campbell left an impression behind. Declaring his innocence, he rubbed his hand on the floor and pressed his handprint into the wall of his cell. This was 137 years ago, but the handprint is still there for all to see (I saw it myself). Attempts were made to remove the print, but all failed. Here is the history of the handprint as described at Paranormal@101:

Over the years, county sheriffs have tried to remove the handprint to no avail.

In 1930, Sheriff Biegler had the wall torn down and replaced. The next day, the handprint reappeared.

Around thirty years later, Sheriff Charles Neast covered the handprint with latex paint, but it reappeared. His son, Tom, in the 1960s, loved to tell friends about the ghostly phenomenon. Word spread and people visited the Carbon County Jail to see the print.

Attempts to wash the image away failed.

In recent years, James Starrs, George Washington University forensic scientist, and Jeff Kercheval, Hagerstown MD police chemist, analyzed the handprint using high tech equipment. They found no logical scientific explanation for the handprint’s existence. They finally measured the exact location of the image in the event it there were attempts to remove it and it reappeared, they would know if the phenomenon returned to the same location or a different one.

The jail’s last sheriff, Bill Juracka, said he wouldn’t try to remove the handprint.

Now a days you can tour the Old Jail in Jim Thorpe. It is fascinating and a bit spooky. You enter and get your tickets and then go to the waiting room to await your guide. This area was actually the home of the Warden and his family, so in a sense the Warden was in jail with his prisoners.  In fact, when you go upstairs you are brought through the Warden's family bathroom and into a side wing of the jail where women offenders were housed.  

From there you wend your way back down into the main cell block where the men were. Here you see the infamous gallows that hung the Molly Maguires and Cell #17, where Campbell's handprint can be viewed upon the wall. (Sorry, they would not allow photographs of the handprint. Now, to tell the truth, it would have been very easy to sneak a picture, especially with my Flip, but I chose not to do that. The photograph seen above is from Weird Pennsylvania.)

To say the interior of the jail is bleak is an understatement. It would not be a place I would ever wish to find myself. That in itself should encourage one to behave. More depressing were the dungeons in the basement. Visiting these isolation cells certainly gave more meaning to the old coal miner's song:

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew 
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

I don't want to tell some of the stories I heard there because if possible I think you should go and enjoy the tour. One of the amazing things to me is this jail was in service until 1995. I will leave you with a few more photos of the place, including our charming young guide holding up the narrow window through which a prisoner once escapes.

Although this prisoner was only sentenced to about a third of a year, he determined to break out. His method was probably worse than his punishment. First he starved himself until he felt he had lost enough weight to squeeze through the window frame the guide is holding up. meanwhile he stole the soap from the shower room until he had a supply hidden away. On the day of his escapade, he striped naked and lathered up his whole body. With help from his cell mates he pushed this window frame out on its pivot. He tossed his clothes down in a pillow case and flung tied together sheets out to climb down upon. Believe it or not, he got through that window and probably would have been far away, except he attempted his escape at 12 noon. Some women eating lunch on their porch were surprised seeing a foamed up naked man shimmying down the jail wall and...well, he was soon caught.

A word about Franklin Gowen, the head of the Philadelphia and Reading railroad. Said Mr. Gowen was found dead in a Washington DC hotel room on December 19, 1889, a small caliber pistol by him and powder burns on his face. His hotel room was locked and his death at age 53 was ruled a suicide. Stories and speculation arose that he had been murdered, and it was claimed this was done by a Molly Maguire who actually looked like Gowen. It was said this assassin had stalked him for years, had even purchased the pistol using Gowen's name and had hid in the hotel room, did the deed and escaped out the window.

People questioned his taking his own life because he was still relatively young, had wealth, reputation and a family. They saw no reason to think he would do such a thing, so it had to be murder and who better to blame than the Molly Maguires. However, I lean toward it being suicide. Gowen was no longer the head of the railroad. In fact, he was seeing a number of bonds he was involved with declining in value at this time and it might have been more a financial concern that led to his self-elimination.

All photos inside and out of the Old Jail by the author except:

The portrait of Franklin Gowen
The Jim Thorpe Wheaties Box
The Campbell Handprint in Cell 17 is from Weird Pennsylvania.