Productivity produces wealth

 

If one studies conquests and the clash of civilizations it has been popular to label the conquerors as exploiters.  Their morals are condemned and their causes explained to show why (corruption and exploitation) one society is rich and another poor.  But despite the popularity of these exploitation theories, in the actual historical record they are rare.  Usually the mundane reality is that productivity produces wealth. 

            Exploitation theories have condemned European imperialism and colonialism.  But when the Europeans left Africa, instead of the continent becoming richer, the nations there saw national incomes and living standards fall significantly. The same was true when Romans left Britain and when every Chinese dynasty fell.  The overlords brought labor skills and abilities that the natives lacked.   Conversely, slavery, the ultimate exploitation, has never made slave-owning regions more prosperous. This was true comparing the antebellum North with the South in USA.  Northern Brazil with lots of slaves, was poorer than southern Brazil, populated with free Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants. So why do people choose to believe such bunk? Anger is the motivator. The true answer is that there are often great differences in productivity and wealth. It’s easy for the loser or their sympathizer to blame poverty on someone else’s malfeasance. But envy of someone rich is precisely what the last 2 of the 10 Commandments warn Christians against.

            Changes of productivity of the conquered can often be traced to transfers of cultural capital.  The English had laws, banking and improved agriculture that they transferred to the Scots. Henceforth,18^th century Scots had an explosion of prosperity. Western Europeans brought the industrial age to Eastern Europe.  China transferred a great deal to Japan and Korea. The Cowboys married the Oklahoma Indians and today we see Oklahoma rising from a poor state into the middle. Human capital, as it is transferred is often a boon to the lesser developed party, whether they be conquerors like the barbarians who invaded Rome (or the Hebrews who invaded Canaan) or conversely, Germans who brought industry to Brazil and transformed Argentina into an agricultural breadbasket. The Italians have been winemakers from California to Australia, transforming dry pastureland into wealth-giving vineyards.  The dominance of overseas Chinese who pick up ideas and teach production is stunning.  In 1994 the 36 million overseas Chinese had a higher GDP than all of Communist China.

            Perhaps no country has had more success in spreading productivity and culture than USA.  It derives wealth from a free market of goods and ideas of many immigrants. Its notion of Liberty and republican democracy has spread to nearly 70 countries in 200 years. Evidently free men work harder and smarter. John Locke, father of modern psychology, derived six principles from the Bible that he insisted people would thrive under—Liberty, Equality, Tolerance, Natural Law, Separation of Powers, and Rights—especially property rights.  Dinesh D’Sousa is an author and film maker. When he was an Indian exchange student at Dartmouth, said that people would come up to him and say, “Oh, you’re from India. I love India!” And he would say, “What part do you love? That the electricity works only 3 days a week—you just don’t know which days?  Or is it the constant riots between Muslims and Hindus that claim thousands of lives?  Wife burnings? Or is it 400 languages where no one can understand his neighbors unless they use English?”  Dinesh said he never asked if they admired the malnutrition. His dream of coming to America started by watching a socialist propaganda film in India in grade school where the narrator said that USA was a horrid country.  There were lots of food lines.  Indeed the film showed some poor Americans standing in line getting food. Another kid next to Dinesh gave him the elbow and whispered, “They are all FAT! I want to go to a country where even the poor people are FAT.” And so D’Sousa came to America, studied economics and began to understand that a system based on Christian liberty principles is superior.  This then led to the Christian faith and a spiritual walk that he claims has transformed his life. Truly the Holy Spirit will set up circumstances in your life, uniquely aimed at your heart, to bring God’s faith!

How English conquered the world

So how did English get to be so important?  I’m no linguist but I take the following summary from The Mother Tongue by Bill Brigdon, and numerous conversations with our foreign exchange students and a couple of good linguists I’ve know.  English is advantaged because it has simple grammar.  For example, there is no gender or declination of nouns except pronouns.  (“Dog” doesn’t have 7 different endings depending on how it is used—or 40 in Finnish!)  Verb conjugations are simple compared with other languages.  Latin alphabet beats every other language from Egypt to Japan. 200,000 words in common usage, is twice most other languages.  That is because English welcomes new words from other languages.  Thus English is chock full of subtle meanings of words.  Few other languages even print a “thesaurus”.  Easy cases, flexible word ordering, allows a new user of English to break-in fast.  As Ta-Weit used to say, “You just give it a try and let ‘er rip.  Then smile a lot.  And somehow everyone catches on.” The perfect language for engineers with less verbal skills.  Concise meaning means less writing.  So how did English get that simple, that easy to add onto? 

Historical linguists say that it happened because of the quirks of history that relegated English to peasants in the middle ages while the nobles spoke Norman French, then Norman French became an object of derision by the rest of France, setting up the adoption of English in England as a simplified official tongue. 

Let’s start with the Anglo-Saxons.  Angles, Saxons, and Jutes emigrated to Britain beginning about 450 AD.  They didn’t really invade, just took advantage of the land where Celts were left defenseless by the Romans who had pulled out.  Celts were sophisticated and Roman, needing baths and police to survive.  The functionally illiterate Germans didn’t and they swamped the kingdom with a more or less common tongue.  Celtic Bretons retreated to Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.  A few Breton inclusions may have survived for centuries but the new talk was almost all in Anglo-Saxon “Old English”.  You can still find enclaves of Old English dialect in Angleland (German Danish border) and Frisian coast where they say you will be stunned by the dialect of German so close to English. Some local guy may come up to you and say in perfect Angle-Old English, “What the clock?”  Few of the early Anglo-Saxons could read or write—only a few priests and important people did.  But the spelling is radically different than our English.  On paper it looks utterly foreign.  But you understand the phonetic letters, the  words sound womewhat like English, but very archaic. This was the language of Bede and Alcuin in the 700s after the Anglo-Saxons had become Christianized, educated and writing became commoner.

Then came the invasions.  First the Danes conquered northern England on the east coast beginning about 850.  Then in 1066, 7000 Norman knights beat Saxon king Aethelred the Unready, and found themselves in possession of a nation of 1.5 million.  Old English was relegated to a second class language of peasants.  For over 300 years it remained so.  And with Danes in the North, some Celts in the South, the dialects arose all over the place.  In order to understand one another, they had to simplify into a kind of pidgin.  Thus the loss of cases, conjugations, etc.  Instead of remembering 11 different cases of an adjective, there arose just one. Gender was scrapped by the illiterate serfs.  And the nobles, of course could care less.  But that was critical.  Instead of a learned class who are the cause of complexity in language (to make stories more poetic, speak more precisely, and separate themselves from the masses by manner of talk) English grew common. 

Meanwhile Norman-French was held with some disdain by the Parisians and other French.  Norman French or “Frensh” as it was laughingly called was a dialect put out to disdain by the other French.  Worse, the English nobles started using some of the common English in daily life.  Consequently, by the 1400s, the English nobles began to abandon Frensh in favor of an English with about 10,000 Frensh terms included. Legal, government and church terms were borrowed from Frensh. Meanwhile about the era of Chaucer, English,evolved into its simplest form and spellings, were becoming modernized as the language became more and more written.  This was complete by Shakespeare and Elizabeth in the late 1500s. 

Then the Spanish Armada couldn’t win and Elizabeth did.  A few years later, Britain was building a national navy and conquering the world.  The language spread everywhere. By the 19^th century English, French, German and Spanish were in a dead heat for the most international language.  France, the bounteous and populous country with all the science and engineering in the 19^th century, was favored by 1900.  Then WW I killed the wide influence of Germans and French. But there were other ingredients to their linguistic demise.  French people hate changes to their tongue.  German was Europe-wide but not world-wide.  English was the easy-to-use.  And nobody was easier in usage than those Americans who became leaders after WW II.  Quite simply, the world adopted English.  Since 1945, English has gone from 3% of world usage to 14%.  Hence every foreign exchange kid lists as Goal #1 to learn English fluently.  Our Finnish exchange kid called me up to celebrate acing his university language exam. I guess he’d underlined my colloquialisms in my letters to him.  Used them in his exam and the profs were very impressed.  He laughed and said, “Dad Z, you have a colorful speech.”  So there it is.  Okies and other peasants conquer the language world. 

Years ending in 15

A year ending in 15 has enormous centennials.  2015 was the 1700^th anniversary of the Christian cross and Chi-Rho, the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, 500^th anniversary of Luther’s beginning as a reformer, 400^th anniversary of the probable death of William Shakespeare, 300^th anniversary of the Jacobite uprising and beginning of English Parliament’s accendancy over kings, 200^th anniversary of Waterloo and the end of the War of 1812, 150^th anniversary of end of the Civil War, 70^th of WWII and 40^th of Vietnam.

Some weird twists happened with many of these. In 312 Constantine crossed the Rubicon and defeated a rival for Caesar.  Christian father and historian Eusebius dutifully recorded that Constantine told him that he had a dream to “conquer in this sign”, the cross, which he had his soldiers put on their shields.  But was Constantine telling the truth? Other witnesses to the battle for Rome say that a cross was implanted in a circle which was the symbol for the unconquered sun of Rome’s religion and the Manichean religion.  It may have been that Constantine was just playing to unity with both a Christian cross and a pagan symbol.  A lot of his soldiers were converts of these two non-mainstream religions. He may have just been a shrewd politician playing his power with the changing times.  We do know this.  In 313, Constantine made Christianity the official religion. By 315 AD Christianity had swelled to 36 million of 100 million Romans and Constantine first began to mint coins showing him wearing a helmet with a Chi-Rho embossed on it.  (Greek letters superimposed and standing for “Jesus Christ”) His mother became a devout Christian convert.  The church, which had for 3 centuries used a fish as their symbol, abruptly began using the cross.  It is almost as if the shame of a crucifixion was too much to publicly advertize until then. Wearing crosses around the neck would be like you and I running around with little electric chair necklaces.  

The Magna Carta was signed by King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215--a desperate king trying to buy time.  He’d lost most of his French territories even after cutting deals with the Holy Roman Emperor (Germany-Italy) and Pope.  Noblemen at home were rebellious over the war taxes and autocratic atrocities and so in order to keep his throne, he signed their wish list—trial by jury, independence of the church, trial by an assembly of peers and right to justice, limited taxes, and an approval committee of nobles for royal wars and treaties.  John slyly knew that the Pope would nullify this as a worthless piece of paper and a month later he did. But then a year later John died and his boy-king successor’s regent revived the Magna Carta to mollify the nobles.  Thus in the next centuries, Englishmen would come to claim the Magna Carta as applicable to not just nobles but all men.  The superiority of the church to king became the superiority of your chosen faith to government. “Assembly of peers” became trial by jury.  Right to justice became the right to a speedy trial. Limited taxation became the concept of limited government.  And the committee of approving nobles became English Parliament. Thus we recognize the first constitution in European history. It might be noted however, that King John surrounded himself with diehard statists that have descended down to this day known as the Democratic Party.

Martin Luther began publishing his lecture notes in 1515.  About the only men who could read in the Dark Ages were churchmen, and the tradition of illiterate knights and nobles (warriors, not scholars!) continued for centuries.  Luther was a born-again scholar of scriptures with much zeal, and his Compendium of Romans, published in 1515 was a stunning summary of grace and started him as the world’s first prolific, best-selling author.  In 36 months he published 30 books and oh, by the way, led much of the Protestant Reformation. 

Shakespeare wrote his last play in 1613 and died 2 or 3 years later in obscurity, 1615 or 1616. We don’t know the true date of his death! Wrote 38 plays and many poems.  Considered the father of modern drama, his plots and characters have inspired hundreds of knock-offs in theatre and movies ever since. And Hollywood refuses to pay Shakespeare’s heirs a dime, retaining a bevy of trial lawyers to protect what they consider “their own creations.”

1715 was the year that English kings gave way to prime ministers and parliament.  It started in 1701 when the British came together to write the Act of Settlement.  Queen Anne had lost her son, William, leaving the country without a clear line of succession, so the Act of Settlement defined all future kings and queens as must-be-Protestant heirs to the Stuart line.  But there was so much division in the Stuart house.  And, like they say, where there’s a will, there’s relatives.  Louis XIV of France wanted to declare his son as James III, but he wasn’t Protestant.  The nearest Protestant relative was Sophia of Hanover (German kingdom).  Alas, she died just a month before Anne died in 1714 and her son, George I became king of the United Kingdom of Britain and Scotland.  The Scots choked on this choice of a Lousy Kraut who couldn’t even speak English and wanted Lousy Louis’s son instead.  Known as Jacobites, these Scots held an uprising, but the Brits put them down in 1715.  George, who had just arrived the previous fall, and was more of a playboy (main interests were wine, women and horses) than being a strong monarch, went back to the security of Hanover and his mistresses, leaving government in the hands of Parliament. A few years later, Robert Walpole emerged as the first Prime Minister and was often de facto head of state in the absence of George I. And thus we also see members of the royal family have carried on the tradition of wine, women and horses.

So, 2015? I say it is the year of PARIS. 

P—Prevarication of Hillary over her emails and Benghazi

A—Alliance of Gays in Marriage as it became legal

R—Race Riots, attributed to killings by police of innocent black young men, but really Democrat exploitation

IS—Islamic State and the bewilderment of the West about what to do

And of course Paris, where Europe seems to have lost it’s non-chalance about terrorism. 

The Banking Monster

                Many folks wonder why the economy is so bad despite Wall Street’s record profits and low unemployment.  Why aren’t people getting raises and why do there seem to be no new businesses?  The usual explanations on the right have to do with heavy regulation and taxes as well as slight-of-hand in government statistics.  True enough. But there is something much more insidious and disastrous which takes some explaining. 

            Small businesses with under 50 employees create 70% of new jobs.  Their partners, the small banks hold only 10% of bank assets but do 40% of the loans.  Prior to 2009, on average 164 new banks appeared per year.  But since 2010 there have only been only two new banks started.  Meanwhile over 400 have failed—all small banks.  So the loan generators are dying and small businesses report it is extremely hard to get much of a loan.  What’s going on?

            What’s happening is that Obama’s socialist revolution is putting money in the hands of big bankers and killing the small community banks.  61% of all bank assets are now under the control of 6 large mega-banks.  In 2008 it was just 35%.  In 2007, the last year of the former expansion, 18% of corporate profits on Wall Street went to the financial sector.  In 2013, the last year statistically available, it was 23%.  Somebody is making a killing in finances but it isn’t the small, hometown banks who lend to mainstreet businesses. 

            Two culprits.  First is Dodd-Frank financial reform passed in 2010, the second is Fed policy.  Frankendodd banned banks from two activities: proprietary trading and ties to hedge and private firms.  Supposedly this was to keep banks from speculating  and getting into conflicts of interest.  But the reality is that anytime a bank trades equities, it is doing proprietary trading.  In other words, the ability of a bank to deal in bonds, contracts, and other equities-- the ability to do their normal business-- was prohibited, except by approval of the government.  Now what?  Compliance is almost impossible for banks to know.  Interpretive questions and being in cahoots with federal bank examiners is the only possibility.  Large banks closed many departments feeling they couldn’t defend their practices.  Small banks, out of compliance, often shut their doors. But when you are Too Big To Fail, you can browbeat the bureaucrats and fight with lawyers.  As a result, most foreign bankers have left our shores and many small banks have closed.  The big guys have inherited the market. 

            After the Shearson-Lehman Brothers bailout, the voters rebelled and many congressmen who voted for the bailout, then voted for the Stimulus, found themselves on the losing end of elections.  As a result, the government has come to lean heavily on the Fed to implement policy.  The QEs were instituted to provide further stimulus after interest rates were lowered to virtually zero, yet further stimulus was deemed necessary.  Result is that government bonds are bought, usually from large banks and institutional investors, putting money in their pockets.  That money sometimes went to buy stocks and sometimes was just stockpiled in the Fed’s depository reserves.  As a result, Fed depository reserves have gone from $43B to $2.5T in 6 years. (Yes. !!!!)  Those reserves are like a bank making deposits in a bank.  Should the economy improve and the bank have reason to loan, they can simply draw upon their own reserves.  Thus, should the economy improve, we are headed to near-certain inflation.  Meanwhile, only the mega-banks can play the game and they are getting very rich. 

            Ironically, Obama, a Democrat, has made the mega-banks and Wall Street crowd quite wealthy while most people are making less in constant dollars than they did 5 years ago.  But this is really not so strange, when you think about democratic socialists and national socialists.  The government’s  idea is to control the economy by owning or being in cahoots with the major industries.  Goldman Sachs donates 97% of their donations to the Democrats and Obama.  Krupp Munitions donated 97% of their political donations to Hitler and the National Socialists.

The tragedy is multifaceted.  Small businesses and jobs and the economy die a slow death.  Big boys with government connections  team with powerful tyrants to control the markets.  The rest of us are all invited to join the peronistas and rail against big business and the rich.

Obama created a banking monster.

For further information, consult the Economist, July 25 edition pages 57-61.

Is Cyprus the beginning?

Cyprus is broke.  Its government debt to GDP ratio is 145%--much like Greece and worse than Portugal @ 120% or Italy, 115% or USA, 110%.  The European Central Bank vowed last year to save the Euro but with member countries like Cyprus, et. al. how can it continue?  European finance ministers offered to bail out the Cypriots with 10 billion Euros but 17 billion are needed.  Everyone is arguing who ordered who to do what but the idea was floated that the Cyprus government would assess a 10% tax by fiat on all bank accounts.  That led to riots in the street and the members of parliament all passed the buck and said, no, we won’t do any such thing.  Then as the weekend started with banks closed for 10 days, they did a very similar thing, an ingeniously loopy thing, by assessing a whopping 40% charge against all accounts over 100,000 Euros. 

            In USA we’d call this unreasonable seizure, a violation of the Amendment IV.  But TV political idiots chortled that this only hurt the Russian mafia who created Cyprussia by parking big bucks in the banks there. 

            But what happens now?  Among the proposed daydreams of the political class is a Russian Bailout.  Something that would give Russia claim to most of the enormous natural gas field that has been found in Cypriot waters in exchange for a bailout.  But then the thought of having a puppet government and banking system run by Putin where German taxpayer money goes towards making the Russian mob whole isn’t very appealing.  Unlikely to happen.  Hereinafter, no sane individual keeps his money in a Cyprus bank.  No deposits, no banking or at least only a miniscule banking industry.  No banking, no business loans.  With little banking available, how do mortgages get paid, salaries get paid, or anything else commerce-wise?  Clearly in such an economy cash is king.  Bartering begins.  The economy tanks and the government collapses.  Eventually, a succeeding gov’t will have to prop things up by some technique and the likely outcome always points to inflation, which allows a Mt. Debt to look smaller with each passing year until it is under control.  

            But there is more.  Greece’s banking system is heavily interfingered with Cyprus and will likely collapse if Cyprus does.  The ECB and IMF suggested that individual’s accounts be zapped and they are likely to suggest this to other PIIGS countries.  Already there seems to be a solution trial balloon floated that essentially all private stocklholders and junior debt holders of banks be given a haircut (or beheading).  Now it may seem grossly unfair that old grandpa who keeps his life savings in an account, or some investor who bought bank stock should lose most of what they have, in order to bail out the government who created the debt.  True. But this is how government power works.

            What Europeans hope is that the Euro nations’ troubles won’t make the investors of the world very skittish about lending money to Europe.  If that happens, they will have to borrow at a premium of interest and likely make their economies into sinkholes for years to come.

            So what should an American think?  First, the people who are scoffing at concerns over our debt are Fools.   We must get deficit spending  under control, along with entitlement reform.  If you are pessimistic about this happening, then bury some cash, because if the debt disease spreads to USA, there is no big ECB or IMF to bail us out.  We are the IMF and we are too big to bail. Finally, if the credit crisis expands, there will be countries defaulting, that will bring high borrowing costs and stagnant economies, and opportunistic dictators will arise to blame someone else.  Like Hitler blamed the WWI allies.

            I just pray that Obama can watch what is happening to others and learn a lesson before it is too late. You are digging your hole in the backyard, aren’t you.

Obama and the Poor

I finished a mortgage on a property and suddenly found my bank account being raided.  The bank had required I have a small checking account with them in order to also have the mortgage, so I put $100 into an account I never used.  For all the time that loan was being paid, the account lay dormant, but as soon as the mortgage was done, they began charging monthly service charges of over $10 a month.  I just closed the account.  But then I began to wonder what was going on.

            What’s happening is that banks are having a hard time making money on small bank accounts often held by poor people.  For years they simply had hefty fees for things the poor folks do—overdrafts, low balances, etc.  But then came Frankendodd law and now banks are capped in fees.  The Durbin amendment to Dodd-Frank capped interchange fees on debit cards and just about ruined that business.  The result is that the economics of banking the poor is now a loser.  Thus my bank, once I had finished my loan, saw me as a small account and started zapping me for a large monthly charge, about the only recourse they had left to make money on a small account. 

            It used to be that banks made money on all their accounts.  Big accounts had a lot of money just sitting there and the bank could use that as an investment—making money on the “spread”.  Small accounts often ran into sundry fees.  But take the fees away and a lot of small accounts lose money for the bankers.  As a result of Frankendodd and other banking regulations, banks lose money on small accounts.  Thus the poor can’t bank.  USA now has one out of 8 people with no bank account anywhere.  That’s the 3^rd highest in the developed world behind Italy and Portugal who have a lot of Muslim guest workers. We have noticed this trend in our renters.  Very few even offer to pay with a check.  Only two use money orders which of course require a hefty charge.  So do paycheck cashing services, pawn shops, and payday loan joints which service the unbanked.

            So all that dreamy talk you hear about how we all will go to online banking is a dream for the well-fixed.  It leaves out that 12% who don’t use banks or the 20+% who are underbanked—have a bank account but mostly deal in cash and use the pawnshops and payday loans.  Dodd-Frank, like practically every other government program, entraps the poor and keeps them from upward mobility and makes them more dependent on the government—a cruel foster parent.

            I continually hear seniors lament that Obama is robbing our grandchildren.  True, but don’t think because you are senior you can escape the inflation to come.  Argentina had an economic crash in 2001 followed by wild and crazy spending by government officials who vowed to save everyone by Big Stimulus.  Sound familiar?  Big Inflation came. Result was that seniors who got government pensions (ANSES, their version of Social Security) were paid with deflated currency, fifty-cent dollars, so to speak.  Result: an old guy sued ANSES in Argentine Supreme Court and won his case that he must be paid in indexed currency.  But the government is doing that slick bureaucratic trick, delaying payment. It takes about 5 years of paperwork to get an indexed pension adjustment.  Maybe the old duffer will die in that time, eh? This is similar to the Obama IRS who delays payments of tax refunds.  With all our modern wizardry of online filing, with all the Golden Hordes of newly hired tax agents, the IRS has gone from 4 weeks for a refund to 3 months. So if inflation ever comes--gasoline prices rise, food prices rise, medical costs rise, etc.—the purchasing power of social security will sink like a stone and ditto the value of your savings.  What? You say those things are actually happening?

            Never fear, Obama wants to raise minimum wage, which will really help all those poor people get jobs, I am sure.  And he demanded that Congress pass cap-and-trade in his State of the Onion address.  Think higher fuel prices, higher utilities, higher transportation charges on everything sold. What a friend of the poor we have!

Banking

Well, appparently a Huntington Bancshares employee happened to find an old box full of checks. The checks included the last known signature of Abraham Lincoln on a check dated April 13, 1865, the day before he died. There were checks by Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, and many other famous people. They had been sitting in a vault of a former Union Commerce Bank which had been taken over by Huntington 30 years ago. Not to worry. The checks were put on microfische and we think we can read the copies before the checks were destroyed.

No, I'm kidding. But Huntington was going to sell the old checks off, like so much yard sale garbage. However, the employees put together a display and public outcry led the bank to cancel the sale. I suppose that is because the bank was mystified about the value of the signatures. They never check signatures anymore. Now I'm being sarcastic.

I still am sore about the way the banking industry went paperless. When I got my first set of copied check images, my accountant said, "Where's the backsides? I can't read the checks." There were 18 check images to a page. Was my CPA being picky? He said that in an IRS audit or a court challenge, the first concern is, Is a check available as proof? It must be legible. There is no proof of check-cashing unless the string of endorsers from the backsides are also known and provided as proof. My banker fussed around about how it costs more to put 8 images on a page and would double costs to provide backside images. We persisted. The next month we got a terse letter that said we could have 8 images, front and back for an steep fee. Eventually I wrote a number of letters and the bank compromised to their current 12 images per page.

What happens if you get into a donnybrook with IRS and the courts hold that the bank images are insufficient? I guess you can sue your bank. And the bank will have already concluded that the losses due to such things aren't large enough to sway their policies of destroying and copying checks in small scale. That is exactly what they told me concerning check forgery where they don't check signatures anymore. So it is caveat emptor, buyer beware. Make sure you check your check images. I am happy to report that a more recent check dispute wherein I had to have a better image of my check, the bank had it still stored electronically and could provide an improved copy.

But the attitude reminds me of some of the crazy characters in the oil industry over the years. "Oh heck, just dump that doggone tank battery into the river. It's cheaper to fight the Water Resources Board than to change the way we want to do things." Oh, by the way, FDR only wrote a check for $1.65. That must have been before he got his hands on government. I saw a vehicle that had a license plate on the front that announced, "I got my car from F.D.R." and then in fine print beneath said, "Ford Dealers Ranch". I gather it's a car dealship, but it makes Democrats nostalgic.