View Large to feel sick I bank in a credit union 1,400 miles from where I live. The union does quite a few things for me, has done them for decades, has never fined me for anything, is successful & enduring & charges low interest rates, returns my money when I want it - even from ATM machines - at no added cost to me, charges no check fees, immediately answers the phone & talks with me when I call, advises me by phone when any security threat is suspected, is federally insured, etc., & so on & on, & as I just discovered, both hurray & alas, does not treat me like a criminal. I've not been in any Big Bank in many years. Recently, I received a check written on a Wells Fargo account from a large organization in payment for a photograph. There is a Wells Fargo bank next to a center where I sometimes go to buy groceries, so, desiring cash in my pocket & the bank being right there, I entered it & got in the short line. Soon enough, I walked up to the window, put the check on the counter in front of the clerk, & she grabbed my thumb, banged it on a tiny ink pad - damnably indelible ink, I should add - then banged it on the check's face marking it with my thumbprint, held the check up to her myopic eyes, simultaneously verified that it was negotiable, asked me to sign the back of it & added, in her most sugar coated voice, "There will be a five dollar fee for cashing it." I asked, "What if I say no to all of this?" She replied, "I could not cash the check." "Then hand it back to me," I said. "It's our bank's policy," she remarked sternly, in the way someone might repeat Thou Shalt Not Covet. I grabbed the check from her hand & departed from the Wells Fargo Police Station, determined to remove my thumbprint from the check before mailing it to my credit union. I tell you, this shit was unimaginable before that ignorant B grade actor, Reagan, played President. Last year Big Banking hauled in 37 billion dollars in fees & fines charged to their own customers & depositors, while their executives, seated on The Fed which gave them 18 trillion dollars in guarantees & newly printed cash (at zero interest), got laid in Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court & the White House. We should be closing them down & opening a National Bank that serves the nation & its people, allowing independent local financial institutions to thrive, of course. Till then those Big Bankers are in charge of destroying me, you & the world. Their casino, the derivatives market, is estimated to now have - get this - a minimum 600 trillion dollars of bets in play on its tables (up to over 790 trillion dollars). That's our money, not theirs, you know ... all of the whole world's printed money comes to less than 50 trillion dollars. The world global capital markets (Stocks & Bonds) total approximately 115 trillion dollars. Do the numbers tell you a little about what happened last year when the cash needed to pay bettors ran out & the casino's banks had to get trillions of dollars of new money printed & given to them at zero interest by The Fed & its Chairman, Ben Bernanke? It was not too difficult to get all the free money, however, because the banks own half of The Fed & their chieftains sit on its board. The banks own, run & do most of the gambling in their casino. No great winner came in & broke its bank - the owners of the establishment did that by themselves to themselves, & are doing it again with their newly printed free cash. Warren Buffett, sometimes the richest & at other times the second richest man on Earth, & not at all my favorite fellow but certainly someone who knows money, said, in 2002, speaking to his stockholders about "derivatives & the trading activities that go with them ... [they are] time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system." Buffett went on to say, "Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on the creditworthiness of the counterparties to them. In the meantime, though, before a contract is settled, the counterparties record profits and losses – often huge in amount – in their current earnings statements without so much as a penny changing hands." Later, he called derivatives "financial weapons of mass destruction." Fuck Big Bankers & their goddamn stealing & gambling.

At the end of August 1936, as New Castle sweated through the hottest weekend of the summer—temperatures in the mid-nineties, with no breeze to stir the air—Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, arrived in town to launch his presidential election campaign. Landon, the Republican nominee for President, had been born in the nearby village of West Middlesex. On Saturday afternoon, he gave a speech at the Tam o’ Shanter golf club there, which was heard by more than a hundred thousand people who had travelled to see him from across Lawrence county and the rest of western Pennsylvania. Landon spoke of the problems of uneasy and restless labour, of the strange forces that were loose in the world and of the dangers of fascism in Europe and told his audience that the world as they knew it was about to be changed forever. The New Castle News wrote, “It was a half hour of Americanism that rang true. A half hour of speaking interspersed with applause and cheers, and the boy from West Middlesex was through. Back to the hills that gave him birth he had come, honored and respected, the product of a village, who is the hope of a nation.” Landon’s supporters crowded the streets of New Castle that weekend; his entourage, the gentlemen of the press and every Pennsylvanian Republican with any ambition or standing filled the hotels. The downtown area was decorated with bunting, and a sunflower—the state flower of Kansas—was painted on a huge sheet of heavy muslin that was draped from the Johnson building overlooking the East Washington street bridge. Local industrialists and businessmen held a banquet in Landon’s honour, celebrating him as “the man who will rid us of the four horsemen of the new deal.” For just under forty-eight hours, New Castle was the political centre of the nation; a makeshift convention town that ably accommodated its illustrious visitors. Crime was unusually low, and Alice Steel was among only a few people who were arrested; all, like her, for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. The thunder storm that had threatened all weekend broke late on Sunday night, just before Alice’s arrest. The following morning, as Alice waited in court to be discharged by the mayor, Landon left New Castle by train. The decorations were removed from the city streets by nightfall. Three months later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the election in a landslide. Alf Landon served out the rest of his term as governor, but did not seek elected office again. Sources: New Castle News (22 August 1936, “Lobby Lounging At GOP Headquarters”; “Governor Landon Opens Presidential Campaign”; 24 August 1936, “Pa Newc Observes”; “Governor Landon Enjoys Week-End Stay In District”; 15 Oct 1936, “What Kind Of A Man Is Alf M Landon?”).