Enough of Lincoln - He was a Railroad Lawyer!

They have a temple to him in Washington DC - out sixteenth president. He is a demi-god in the grand Roman tradition. The temple, the Lincoln Memorial, is of a scale fit for Jupiter and or Zeus. We in this secular culture have as close to a secular saint or god (small “g”) as you can get in Old Abe. Hey we are a democracy of sorts. There are no ground rules. We have, in some ways, evolved like the old Roman Empire.

Getting back to Old Abe. I was surprised to read that President Zachary Taylor had offered Lincoln the post of Territorial Governor of Oregon around 1850. Think about how history would have changed if he had taken that job.

The truth of the matter was that Lincoln was a railroad lawyer. He got paid the big bucks and when he went to Washington, his estimated wealth I once read was about $100,000. I think the statistic then was that there were only something like six millionaires in America before the Civil War.

I do not want to downgrade President Lincoln’s place in history or how his CEO abilities were taxed in trying to find the right generals to mop up the Southern Mess. While on a tangent, just remember that Robert E. Lee was married to Martha Washington’s great granddaughter and step-great granddaughter of George Washington. The landed gentry of Virginia were living in a aristocratic bubble supported by an obsolete inefficient cruel system of slavery. There was no easy way to convert old wealth, land and slaves, to the new wealth, factories and railroads.

There was class warfare going on between the progressive states that banned slavery and the old dying economic culture of the South. There was one blip on the radar however. In 1860, 51% of all foreign capital coming into the US was from cotton. The south in many ways could have converted that wealth in a few number of years into a modern economy that could have rivaled the north’s factory wealth. More likely, the aristocracy would have just bought more oriental rugs for their ante-bellum mansions.

The prize in those days for the northern states or the confederate states was the untapped wealth of the western United States in the form of territories waiting to be settled and admitted to the political structure of the United States Congress.

The wealth of southern landowners, slave owners, could not compete with the western movement. Slavery and the landed aristocracy were doomed in a matter of years, not decades.

Nobody in the south thought Lincoln a fool. Lincoln was a wealthy man with an eye on the future. That future was railroads and the west. The other guy who had his eye on the west was Jefferson Davis, one time son in law to General Zachary Taylor and Secretary of War under President Zachary Taylor. One of Jeff’s pet projects was several feasibility studies for the positioning of the proposed, envisioned, needed Transcontinental Railroad. What to tell Congress? That the best route of the taxpayer subsidized railway was the southern route and not the northern route???

The history books paint Abe as a saint, martyr, visionary, emancipator etc. They rarely mention his railroading job skills. Can you imagine if Booth had not shot him. Can you imagine Lincoln as head of one of the New York based railroad empires stretching from NYC to San Francisco? Picture Lincoln’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, 120 rooms, and fifty servants. Picture the probate of his twenty million dollar estate etc.

It is all right and good for a republic to have its iconic figures but put them back into human scale sometimes.

All in all Lincoln was a giant among the pygmies of his timeline group peers.

Happy Two Hundredth Birthday Mr. President Lincoln!

Didymas Account in Banking Needed

Now that we in America have socialized banking with Government/Taxpayer money propping up these useless giants, why not pass some savings onto the consumer by reducing fees for non-existent service providing by passive non-existent outsourced personnel.

The biggest B.S. things out of corporate banks since the rise of robotic banking in the past two decades has to do with charging fees for check overdrafts. They have extended this to electronic banking.

Banks in order to outsource more personnel and make bigger bonuses for CEOs have pushed the idea of convenience and telling you to have an automatic withdraw every month for your utility bills, credit card bills etc.

Well, is you don’t have money in your account at the millisecond that the electronic banking withdraw happens, then BINGO, the bank charges you $35 for each overdrawn electronic banking demand on your account.

Well, you know that this can be inconvenient and a downright pain in the ass besides being a lowering in your life savings in favor of the mandated by God CEO million dollar plus bonus.

I may be cynical and sarcastic here. But we have been the victims of all this free market B.S. for the past thirty years and the bottom line in banking is that you have no rights as a consumer to try and amend this kind of highway FEE robbery that does not in any way reflect the real cost of non-human robotic banking.

I had a temp job twenty five years ago in a big bank and I used to write a manual letter on a typewriter and send it to a bank customer to explain why we were deducting $1.25 for an overdrawn check. The letter also said that we were raising our fee to $5.00 for overdrawn checks shortly. Hey nobody is sending me a real live human generated letter for every one of my overdrawn checks or overdrawn electronic transfers.

The people who used to do these obsolete functions of people to people business communication in banking -those jobs are long gone. Outsourced to Asia. Did the computer that replaced those people cost a lot of money? Yes. But that was twenty fives years ago. The real cost of dealing with overdrawn checks and electronic banking transfers must be pennies on the dollar.

Why don’t we propose to Congress and its committees to write some new Human Rights laws for banking now that we the people own a piece of all these big banks?

What I propose is monthly overdraft insurance fee and for two transactions a month gone awry before a bank can charge a large unearned fee for being overdrawn. I propose a $5.95 per month fee and part of what I call a Ditymas Account whereby this monthly fee can cover the real costs for the odd overdraft situation.

Didymas account meaning twin account where the first two overdraft fees can be recorded, not charged, used as an audit trail for banking activities and or other written off charges.

It would nice if Congress would pretend that is knows and likes and cares about the average citizen who has been tortured for decades now by fees from these robotic banking institutions. We cannot bring back all the jobs from Asia. But let’s even the playing field a bit and in favor of the average American Joe.

You could however interject a little bit of humanity and common sense to this brave new world of bloodless banking.

Age of Robot

Age of Robot is upon us.

The high technology is all powerful. Bow your heads.

ATM machines are robots. Very convenient sometimes.

Telephone answering machines are robots. Not that convenient when you have to spend five minutes getting from A to E trying to pay a bill or get your credit card balance.

Computers are robots - electronic brains that mimic humanity and in need of very specific programs to function.

The Internet with its visual cover blinds us to how we do things now as opposed to how we did things ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

I am cursed. I have a memory. I know what a typewriter is.

In the future, robots may aid sick people in need of medical care.

In the meantime, I am human and everyday I come up against a wall of robots or robotic functions and sometimes I come out ahead and other times I feel like a loser especially when I forget a password.

The corporations that have squeezed more and more profit out of our everyday life are partially responsible for this age of robots. We in our present myopic state of bliss and in need of chronic luxury fed by the by-products or the collateral damage of this new age of robots are also responsible for what we have.

Is this all a complaint? In a way yes. The human touch is gone. The human voice answering the telephone was part of the social equation for close to one hundred years. I got used to it.

I have put up with the bullshit mantra of “change is good” all my life. Maybe change isn’t always good.

I harken back to two jobs I had in Arizona and over a decade ago. Those jobs touched people directly. It was a transition period whereby not everybody was texting or even e-mailing.

One was in a mortgage company and they were putting the telephone answering machine on at lunchtime at the reception/switchboard desk. “No Go” said the regional management which ran into this local matter one day. You got a live customer on the line, you keep them there and make sure you put them through or take an accurate detailed message for the sales force to follow through on. Sales were a crucial part of mortgage business before they threw away the rule book. You don’t let potential customers get turned off and walk away because you turned on the robot answering machine at the reception desk.

The other job I had was in enrollment in an HMO which practiced Japanese style, Covey type management. In that situation, everyone who got a phone call from a customer from the president of the company down to the lowest clerk, which was me, would help a customer and if I could not help, they got put on hold, and I called around until I found a live body, explained what the customer wanted and asked my fellow employee to take charge of the phone call with the customer. That was pro-active. Pro-active in New York City style management I have found is just a word.

In Arizona, it is a thin economic situation. The saying was that if you pissed off one customer, they turned around in their social network and told ten other people about lousy customer service. Those ten in theory might tell another ten. Pass it along.

I, we, can’t change a whole lot of things. We can’t bring back all those outsourced jobs to Asia.

But maybe out of the tens of millions of dollars the CEO gets for being lucky enough to have frat house connections to get the job in the first place, maybe the CEO could give up a lousy few tens of thousands of dollars to put a live person on the phone up front of their marvelously and probably mismanaged robotic organization/corporation.

It’s just a thought.