It's Not Christmas Yet!

It's the day before Thanksgiving, and at the moment, snowing out. Yesterday I put up our exterior Christmas lights in front of the house, but I'm not turning them on until tomorrow evening. I'm not jumping the gun on what has been a lifelong tradition.

Christmas Season begins after the turkey.

Of course today we have the greed mongers and the shopping addicts who want stores to be open on Thanksgiving. Man the cash registers and damn the family get-together!

They will push for the stores to be in full fury on Christmas Day as well, I'm sure. Meet the new millennium Scrooges: CEOs Marvin Scrooge, Eddie Scrooge, Ronald Scrooge, Gregg Scrooge, Doug Scrooge & Terry Scrooge.

 

 It is somewhat ironic that Terry Scrooge is in the list. The 1948 book and movie Miracle on 34th Street was a broadside against the merchandising of the holidays and turned that Mr. Macy's hard heart into a cream puff. But these Ceos pictured here have more in common with Mr. Sawyer. They obviously don't believe in family, tradition, Thanksgiving or rest for the weary. They will excuse themselves of guilt by blaming it on the shopping habit of 18% shopaholics that could use a little cold turkey rehab on Turkey Day for their own good.

Nonetheless, greed does as greed wishes and when comes to stuffing it evolves a different kind of "bread" for them. Thus they how have extended the season until by Thanksgiving instead of feeling uplifted we almost are tired of it. The ads began just as the last witch parked her broom after Halloween and has continued ad museum ever since. But then it is appropriate to their mindset, for indeed, there is more of the Devil of Christmas presents to them then the Ghost of Christmas Past.

The object has been all along to remove Christ from Christmas and turn it into Seasons Greedings and so me have a Holy Day that is an empty secular holiday of little warmth and meaning. But these merchandise mongers have turned every other holiday in a Sales Celebration and deprived them all of their raison d'être, so why not do the same to Thanksgiving and Christmas?

As for me I keep the old ways in my heart and practice. I still get that glow when Thanksgiving comes, when my family would gather for the day, to watch the parade or the football game, to simply talk or help in the preparation for the feast of turkey and candied yams and stuffing and Harvard beets and mashed potatoes and cole slaw and cranberry sauce and other sides all followed with pumpkin or mince pie. Then we would kind of sit around in overstuffed inertia and satisfaction.

In my boyhood I would feel a shiver of anticipation as the November skies turned to their slide gray and the trees fell bare to the winds. The leaves were long raked and burned, the pungent aroma of the ash gone to be replaced with a underlining scent of impending snow. This shift of nature told me it was near time when I could erect my electric train platform for another season.

I only got to put my trains up from Thanksgiving until Epiphany, but building the countryside for my
Lionels and American Flyers to rumble through was my passion.  I

constructed papier-mâché mountains, turned mirrors into snow-rimmed lakes with skaters and invent my own little town of Plasticville buildings. I wired each structure so I could gradually light them up as my pretend night fell. I accomplished the transition of time with a board above the tracks that held tiny flickers to be stars when I turned off my main light that substituted for the sun.

There were in the weeks between the turkey and Santa, visits to the Big City, Philadelphia and the great department stores - Gimbles, Strawbridge & Clothier, Lit Brothers and John Wanamaker along East market Street. These were magical places to this boy with the dancing fountains, enchanted village, The Magic Lady, Punch & Judy, and the great train layouts of the giant toy departments. Even getting to the city was an adventure. We rode the Short Line Bus to West Chester where we caught a Red Arrow Line trolley to 69th Street in Upper Darby. Perhaps there I would attempt again to conquer the giant slide constructed before the terminal. We would catch the El-Subway train to center city and then walk the lit up avenue taking in the window displays.

I embraced all the nooks and crannies of the time: the catalogs from Sears, Montgomery Ward and Western Auto. And then the baking cookies, the Christmas Cards, the trimming of the house and the Christmas Tree and the Candle Lit Christmas Eve Services that brought us the solemnity and promise of the day, and the day itself with all that meant to our family and mother especially. And the peace and quite of the day after with all did feel right with the world for a while.

This is almost a piece for Throwback Thursday a day early. But I tell you, I toss aside this jumping the season to chase a buck and I celebrate as I did in those days long ago. This is how I raise my own children. I will turn on my lights tomorrow night after The Dinner with my family. And in the days ahead watch those old chestnuts, It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story and A Christmas Carol and rejoice in the saving grace that Christmas really is.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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.

...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.

Upticks and Updates: More Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't

That is pretty much the stock market these days. They seem to jump this way or that on whispers of the least little thing. Yesterday the Dow jumped up 186.45 points for what reason?  What have we heard this week that says buy? Retail sales last month were flat, nothing was selling, especially clothes and back to school didn't sent people out spending this year. The number of people beneath the poverty line rose, the medium household income fell. Europe is in financial turmoil. We had a rise of violence in the Middle East. First time unemployment claims were up...again; and the unemployment rate didn't fall. There were no new jobs created last month and a number of employers announced big lay offs to come. The cost of living rose and ever people are moving in together in homes, which tends to decrease spending for goods.

It was noted Wednesday that mortgage applications rose last week because the interest rate had fallen to a new low. Well, hallelujah, happy days are here again. Of course, a good number are people refinancing while they got the chance to maybe lower their payments. Meanwhile, a way too high percentage of home sales are on foreclosed property and foreclosures remain a problem, bloating the inventory.

Stock Markets went well up today on the belief now that Greece won't default. That is the state of it now. We don't have stock growth on positives, just that the worse negatives don't occur.

But no matter the state of the state or whether Greece is well greased or not, it doesn't mean you can't make money in the market if you are a Wall Street type and have wealth. If you have lots and lots of money you can play the Long and Short Selling game and you can even make money by betting stocks are going to fall. If you have enough dough, you can even manipulate the rise and fall by buying large amounts of a stock.

The rich guy buys enough of one stock hoping others jump on the bandwagon seeing his buy and they start buying and the stock goes up.  Then when the rich man wishes, he dumps the stock at a high price and sends it plummeting. Once it has bottomed out, he may buy it back at the low cost again. This is having your cake and eating it too. The guy makes money on the profit from his initial purchase and then buys it back low, thus keeping his profit and having the stock as well.

Now to update y'all on my previous post, "Tangles of the Ticker Tape: Why the Rich Get Richer and You Don't". In that piece I spoke of a certain CEO who bought 342,876 shares of his own company at $.92 a share. That was the report I read that day. It seems he actually bought a bit more than that over a couple more days. He bought another 342,876 shares on the 9th at $1.19 a share and then 481,714 shares on the 13th at $1.36. Notice how each time he has bought, the price has been higher. He spent $1,378,599.40 overall and do you know where that stock stands now? It is currently at $1.59, meaning if he sold it this instant it would sell for $1,856,270.94, a tidy profit in a week of $477,671.54 less broker fees.

Now the price has went up because his purchases gave confidence to other investors to also buy that stock. They believe if he has this much faith in his company turning around, he must know something. So, his money enables him to manipulate the price upward.

Could you or I do that? Well, if you be rich, probably. I am not rich. I might have been able to buy, oh say, 100 shares of that stock at $.92, a cost of $92 (plus broker fees of course). I don't think my ninety-two dollars or my reputation is going to encourage any followers to jump on any stock because I do. Then if I sold my 100 shares at the current price I would make a profit of $67 (less those broker fees cause brokers gotta eat too). That is a nice gain on my investment of 73%, but a long way from making me rich.

Besides, by the time we little fish jump in the pool, the sharks have driven the price to the heights, then they drain the pool and leave us high and dry. Of course, a bit earlier in the day I could have made $79, but by the end of the day that stock dropped $.12 since the opening

Will the stock regain today? Will it continue up, stay even, begin to drop back where it started? A lot will depend on how well the CEO's new business plan succeeds. If the efforts to turn the stores around faultier, then so will the stock price, and then will the CEO dump the stock for a profit or go down with his ship?

We shall see.

How Greedy can you get? Major League Baseball hits a fowl ball..

The Associated Press reports Major League Baseball has banned Little League Teams from using shirts with the names of Major League Teams, unless these are purchased from a specific vendor, which charges a higher price. Now why would they care where the kids get their team uniforms? Because they want a cut of the purchase price, of course. You would think Major League Baseball was making enough money all ready, but to those who love money there is no limit to greed.

Without players, there is no Major Leagues and thus no money for the already too rich owners of sports teams. It would seem to be in their best interest to encourage the youth playing baseball in Little League or Babe Ruth League or any other league giving youngsters a place to learn and love the sport. Some of these kids will grow up to be the future baseball stars that draw fans into the seats that put the bucks in the owner's pockets. Or even more importantly from a business sense, the fans who go to the game or watch TV and thus put money in the owner's pockets through ticket purchases or cause those lucrative TV contracts owners receive. In fact, even if most of these kids will not ever be major leaguers, it boosts their interest in the game, and in the teams whose names are blazoned across their chest.

Instead of dictating that Little League must buy more expensive logo shirts from the licensed shills of Major League Baseball, the team owners, if their had an ounce of decency, would donate uniforms to Little League. At least, they could take it as a charitable contribution on their corporate taxes so they got something back, since obviously generous hearts are not part of the issued equipment of Major League Baseball.