Season 4 Episode 9 February 26, 2023

Hello! It’s season 4, episode 9, the first episode of the second year of The Listening Tube! All opinions are my own, so if I say something you don’t like, you only have yourself to blame! On this episode, we’ll hear about witch hunts, the first census of the United States, a little -known attack on the U.S. Capitol, and what to do when you need help with your pizza! But first (not the headlines)…

There’s a pregnant woman in jail in Florida, and a petition has been filed for the release of her fetus because it’s alleged the fetus isn’t getting adequate medical care, including prenatal care for the mother like extra vitamins and nutrition. The mother-to-be is in jail, being held without bond, for second-degree murder of another woman while in a hired car. She’s been in jail since August, she’s pleaded not guilty, and her trial is set to begin in the middle of April. The story from NBC News says she’s 8 months pregnant, so the amount of time until she’s no longer pregnant will probably come to pass before any law is established and acted upon. But the father of the baby-to-be hired a lawyer and came up with some very clever wording to advance their case. The petition is for the release of the fetus, not the woman in whom it is. The release of the woman would be merely a by-product of justice for the fetus. In addition to that, the lawyer contends the fetus is more accurately described as an “unborn person” who has Constitutional rights. The lawyer says, and I quote, “Once you define an unborn child as a person, then the unborn child acquires constitutional rights that apply to any person. And specifically, in this case, that’s the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of the law. And in this case, the unborn child has received absolutely no due process at all,” he said. “The court should … let the mother go into an environment that protects the rights of the child.” It’s a valid argument, except for one small problem. And we’ve talked about this before in the context of abortion rights. The Supreme Court has not ever issued a ruling on when a fetus becomes a person with Constitutional rights. Because if they did, and if they ruled that a person becomes a person before it’s born, abortion would become illegal nation wide. So the lawyers argument that the unborn child is a person won’t stand. But it’s a slick way to use the child as a proxy to get the woman out of jail a month early. There will come a time when the Supreme Court will have to decide when a person becomes a person, and gets all of the Constitutional Rights that come with it. Right now, the way I see it, you have to be born to be a person. In order to be a citizen, you must be a naturalized citizen, or you have to be born here. Nothing in the law says you’re a citizen just because you were conceived here.

For it’s part, the jail where the pregnant alleged murderer is says they’re committed to ensuring all inmates receive professional, timely medical care and all appropriate treatment. As for her release, the Corrections department says the lawyers argument is beyond the scope of when a subject should be released, and adds that the mother and unborn child’s care are a priority.

Here’s the way I see this playing out: The child will be born, and in the spirit of the petition to release the fetus, the child will be taken out of the prison system. After all, the lawyer said the child had no due process at all, and was being deprived of liberty by being kept inside the jail walls for no other reason than that it was trapped inside its mother’s body. Once that happens, the lawyer will file a petition to get the incarcerated woman custody of her baby, because, after all, babies need their mothers, even if they’re in jail. All the while, the baby, who since birth has all the Constitutional Rights as the rest of us, has no say-so as to where it lives or with whom.

But when that kid grows up, with any luck it will have the freedom to read or think whatever it wants. Sure, we also have freedom of speech, but there are certain things you can say that will solicit a negative response in most social settings. And certainly, if you say the same thing over and over again, it will have negative effects on your social life. People will begin with trying to justify you but ultimately your opinions will lead to people avoiding you. And each of those people will make that decision on their own. And that’s how it should be. But that’s not always how it is. A National Review story recently revealed that Stanford University had a program that allowed students to report other students for behavior that was deemed to be biased or discriminatory in nature. The Stanford program is a way for Stanford to look into incidents where a student feels attacked due to their identity. For example, one complaint was a photograph of a student reading the Adolf Hitler autobiography Mein Kampf.When a report is filed, both parties are contacted within 48 hours and an investigation begins. Participation is voluntary, but some argue it may not feel that way to accused students. Accused for reading the wrong book or saying the wrong thing in front of someone else who disagrees with your point of view, Stanford policy provides a Protected Identity Harm report. Now, you might be thinking, “But Bob, we all know these universities are run by a bunch of liberal professors who provide safe spaces for fragile socialists.” Well, you may be right, but in this case, the faculty didn’t even know about the program! More than 75 professors have signed a petition to end the bias and discrimination reporting system, and investigate academic and speech freedoms at Stanford.A statement by a group called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says they will “continue to call on Stanford to avoid launching a formal process that students could construe as some sort of investigation into protected speech, or that effectively requires them to admit their protected expression was problematic. Instead, Stanford can support students who are sensitive to speech without involving the speaker.” I love that quote, because it covers three important subjects. One, investigating protected speech is wrong, trying to get someone to believe their protected speech caused a problem with somebody else is wrong, and blaming someone else’s protected speech for activating another person’s trigger is wrong, and that trigger can and should be dealt with without blaming the speaker, or the writer. American’s don’t have completely free speech. We can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. But we do have protected speech, and I applaud the faculty at Stanford for demanding an investigation of the freedom of speech and academic freedom, as well as an end to the “Protected Identity Harm” bias reporting system.

Let’s Go back liner…. 

1681

Charles II grants a land charter to William Penn for the area that will later become Pennsylvania. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and after moving around the world with the United States Air Force, and across the country as a civilian, I live in Pennsylvania again. It’s not a bad place to live, but I prefer warmer weather all year long. This winter, up to this point, anyway, has been relatively mild. Is it because of global warming? Maybe. It it caused by human industry and the consumption of fossil fuels? Maybe. Is the Earth’s climate changing all the time? Yes. Has it been changing since the beginning of time? Yes. All I know is I’ve only had to shovel snow a couple times so far this winter, and I like it that way. It can rain all it wants. I don’t have to shovel rain. 

1692

Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba (I like the name Tituba. It has Tuba in it) are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials. We still have witch trials in the United States of America. Lately, they’ve been initiated by the United States House of Representatives rather than wild-eyed villagers filled with the fear of God. We now know that a lot of the witch trials under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi while Donald Trump was President were a waste of time and taxpayer’s money, based mostly on fabricated documents and unfounded accusations, many of which are similar to the shenanigans the accusing party is now seen as committing. The Democrats accused Donald Trump of being a partner with the Russians, but now we know that Hunter Biden took millions from the wife of the Mayor of Moscow. We’ll see what the latest witch hunts produce as they proceed along in the House. The real question is how much can be done about it even if it’s discovered that the worst has happened and the President of the United States and some of his family members are indeed an international influence-peddling syndicate? What deals will be made then? Who will be held accountable? And what if it goes even deeper, deeper into the socio-economic condition of the world and all of us have been fooled by the people who took an oath to protect our constitution? From all enemies, foreign and domestic...or both, working together. Well, witch hunts have been around since 1692, maybe someday they’ll find some, and they’ll be purged from the institutions that make the rules that keep society civil.

Well, it took nearly a hundred years for those accused of witchcraft to get any Consititutional rights, because it was this week in 1789 that the first congress, meeting in New York City, put the United States Consititution into effect. The very next year, this week in 1790, Congress figured they should probably try to get an idea of how many people lived in the new United States of America, and where they lived. So the first United States Census is authorized. Signed by President George Washington, Vice-President John Adams, and Speaker of the House Fredrick Muhlenberg, the Census was the responsibility of the marshals of each judicial district of the 13 original States, as well as the districts of Kentucky, Maine, Vermont and the territory that is now Tennessee. The law required that all households be visited, and six groups of people shall be accounted for shall they reside there: Free white males 16 years old or older, free white males under 16, free white females, and slaves. The final tally of the first census? Three point nine million! President Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, under who’s general direction the census was taken, were both skeptical of the final count, expecting it to be much higher, according to an account on census dot gov. 

1797

In the first ever peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in modern times, John Adams is sworn in as President of the United States, succeeding George Washington. I said on a previous episode that it is John Adams who, by virtue of becoming the second President of the United States, became the most important of all U.S. Presidents. His taking control of the Executive Branch without coup or military intervention, by a vote of the citizens in accordance with the rules of the Electoral College, built the very foundation upon which the United States has thrived as an example of what can be accomplished when a society works within rules of its own making under the guidance of elected officials who have the needs of the people they represent in their best interest. Sure, the ancient Greeks invented democracy, but America makes it work on a scale larger than anyone thought it could. But John Adams wasn’t where it began, John Adams is the result of local elections held in villages and cities no bigger than a few thousand. But it all led up to a President of the United States, and the peaceful transfer of the office at the whim of the voting public. The voice of the people means something in the United States. There are some who are trying to silence others. Always try to hear both sides of the issue. There may even be more than two sides to an issue. Have an open mind, and the peaceful transfer of power will continue to be the hallmark of the American way of life.

1801

Pursuant to the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, Washington, D.C. is placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress. And right now, Congress is sending the D.C. council a reminder of that fact. Just as the voting public determines who becomes President and all the other elected offices of local and state government, the people who run the District of Columbia feel that anybody who lives there should be able to vote for the people who run the District. But unlike other voting districts, the District of Columbia isn’t a State, and has to live by a different set of rules. So no matter what the D.C. Council wants, Congress has the final say, because they live and work there, too. Albeit part time. And normally, the D.C. council gets their way, but when it comes to letting non-citizens vote in local elections, well, there are many in Congress that think we may be opening a can of worms, so to speak, if we let people who are not citizens of the United States have influence over our government. And that’s certainly something we should be worried about. The vast freedoms we have here in the United States makes us vulnerable in a variety of ways already, and allowing non-citizens to vote will dilute the will of Americans over the long run, and maybe even create pockets of America that wish to divest themselves from our nation, thus dividing us and making us weaker.

But there are those who believe that if you’re a contributing member of your community, you should have a voice in how that community is run, regardless of your citizenship. I for one believe that if you want to have a voice in the government of your local community, your state government and the federal government, then you should show your allegiance to our country and become a citizen. Prove to us, and to yourself, that it’s important enough to you to have a voice in our government system, and be proud enough to call yourself an American instead of some hyphenated form of American. It’s okay to be proud of your heritage. I’m mostly Polish, but I don’t walk around telling people I’m a Polish-American. I’m just an American. And if the people in our nation’s capital want the privilege to vote, then become Americans. There are all kinds of clubs in America that were founded by people of different nationalities and heritages, and if you qualify, you’re welcome to join them, and be with people who share the same values and have the same customs as you recall from your homeland. But you’re still not allowed to vote on the leaders of the club unless you’re a member. It’s the same with America. Join the club by becoming a member, and you’ll have full privileges, just like everybody else. 

1807

The U.S. Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, disallowing the importation of new slaves into the country. But that wasn’t the end of slavery, of course. Because is was this week in 1864, during the American Civil War, the first Northern prisoners arrive at the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. Andersonville was only used as a prisoner of war camp for the final 14 months of he Civil War, but gained a notoriety like none other. IT was overpopulated, even after growing from 16 ½ acres to 26 ½ acres. Anyone who stepped within 19 feet of the stockade was fair game for target practice by the guards, stationed 30 feet apart in pigeon roosts. Thirty-three thousand northern prisoners were squeezed into a space made for 10-thousand. When the Civil war ended, the stockade commander at Andersonville was arrestted and charged with murder in violation of the laws of war. He was hanged. Today, there is a monument at Andersonville in his honor, the only U.S. monument to a war criminal.

1873

E. Remington and Sons in Ilion, New York begins production of the first practical typewriter. There was a time when only nerds knew how to type well. Ditch-diggers didn’t need to know how to type, ironworkers, coalminers, street sweepers didn’t need to know how to type. My first exposure to a typewriter was my step-father’s manual typewriter, with the keys on gradually rising levels until you got to the top where the letters would slam against the roll with the paper wound around it. A mistake would require backing up and using an eraser tape to cover it. My first lesson in typing was in High School, on an IBM Selectric II. That was a great machine, with the ball that rotated to imprint the symbol, and you could even use different balls for different fonts. Plus, it was electric, which make it much quicker if you practiced. I didn’t. But I was glad I had the class, as using a typewriter has become a regular part of my life, and now it’s a large part of everybody’s life because of the digital revolution. In school, they don’t call it typing anymore. It’s now known as “keyboarding.” Touchscreens have only added to the ways we write things down, but as I pound on the keyboard to write the Listening Tube episodes, I kind of miss the design of the old Selectric II, with it’s gradually rising keyboard. Like the ones they made in 1873. And if you were lucky enough to have a typewriter in 1873, you had to be careful what you wrote with it, because it was this week in the same year the first practical typewriter became available that the U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail. Granted, not all of the content was the written word. Photographs in books had been done before, and the law applied to both words and pictures.

1918

The first case of Spanish flu occurs, the start of a devastating worldwide pandemic. Today, we wouldn’t be allowed to call it the Spanish Flu. It would have a more scientific name like Covid-18. Some estimates say the Spanish Flu wiped out a third of the world’s population. Conservative estimates put the number at half that or less, but still at least 20-million people worldwide. Many of the preventative measures we used to fight Covid-19 were employed then as well: Quarantines, mask wearing, closing public places like schools, churches and theaters and other measure were taken to no avail. According to History dot com, even spitting on the sidewalk could get you a warning from a Boy Scout. There were no vaccines then. There was a wonder drug available, though. Discovered in 1899 in Germany by the Bayer Company, and having the patent expire just a year before the Spanish Flu, aspirin became the go-to drug to fight the symptoms. But many people, under the direction of medical professionals, were taking up to 30 grams of aspirin a day, which turned out to be toxic. By the end of 1919, the pandemic ran its course. If you didn’t get it, you were lucky. If you did get it, you either developed an immunity or died. Many of the same things that happened during the Spanish Flu epidemic happened again during the 2019 Covid epidemic. It hasn’t yet run it’s course, but it’s not killing people as it did in the beginning. There have been others between then and now. It’s how we deal with them and how we treat them that will make the difference as to how devastating they will be. Personally, I’m glad we have a scientific community that has been working on vaccines for decades, and I have a lot of faith in their abilities to adjust to the changing forms of viruses that will continue to attack the most intelligent life form on the planet. 

1939

United States labor law: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that sit-down strikes violate property owners’ rights and are therefore illegal. I totally get that. It’s like if you had a housekeeper, and one day, your housekeeper says, “I’m not going to do any more work until you give me a raise.” Then the housekeeper puts a chair in front of the closet where all the cleaning supplies are kept, keeping you from using any of it.

1954

Puerto Rican nationalists attack the United States Capitol building, injuring five Representatives. Four people, according to wikipedia, entered the capitol building and went to the visitors balcony called the Ladies’ Gallery, which is in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The representatives were at the time debating an immigration bill, while the Puerto Rican Nationalists unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and began firing bullets from semi-automatic pistols at the representatives below. All recovered, and the four assailants were arrested. Given long sentences after being tried and convicted, they were expected to die in jail, but their sentences were commuted less than 25 years later by President Jimmy Carter, who as of this writing is now in hospice care at home in Plains, Georgia, age 98.

This week in 1964, the government of Italy asks for help to keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over. Now, this wasn’t the first time attempts were made to keep the building from falling. Hell, even Mussolini had engineers try to straighten the tower way back in 1934. But the trouble with the leaning tower or Pizza goes back even to just a few years after construction began. There was a lull in construction after the first three stories. A 95-year lull, during which it was visibly leaning, so the next engineer made one side slightly taller to compensate. By the time the seventh story was finished, the lean was nearly three feet off center. When the eigth and final story was finished, 70 years later, workers again tried to compensate for the lean. Ten years later, it was finished. People came from far and wide to see it, according to history dot com. The problem was, it wasn’t finished leaning, to the south to be more precise. Holes were drilled into the foundation to pump in concrete. It had the opposite effect than that which was desired. But the official call went out in 1964 to see if anybody could save one of the great tourist attractions of Italy. Another hole-boring attempt in 1985 caused even more lean to the south, and in 1990 the tower was closed. Then, in 1992, external measures were put in place, and in 1995 underground cables were employed. They didn’t work, either. Finally, a plan did work! Gradually removing soil from the north side of the tower, no more than a gallon or so each day, resulted in reduction of the tilt by more than an inch! Five years later, the tilt had been reduced by more than a foot, and in 2001, the tower was reopened to the public, and the the tower is expected to stand for another 300 years. That calls for a Pizza!

1971

A bomb explodes in a men’s room in the United States Capitol: the Weather Underground claims responsibility. So it seems the United States Capitol has been the target of attacks throughout American history. This attack didn’t kill anybody, and the weather underground wanted it that way. This wasn’t their first bombing, either, and warnings were often issued in the minutes prior to an explosion so that evacuations could take place. The weather underground had a long history before the capital bombing and after, but often splintering into sub-groups with different agendai...agenda’s. Whatever the plaural of agenda is. Anyway, the bomb cause about 30-thousand dollars in damage. There were no arrests.

This week in 1998 the Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services verdict comes from The Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Scalia delivers the ruling that federal laws banning on-the-job sexual harassment also apply when both parties are the same sex. Now, on the surface, this sounds like a gay-rights law, but after reading the ruling on the Cornell Law School website, I discovered that it doesn’t even consider the sexual preferences of the plaintiff or the defendants. IT all started when an oil well driller on a rig in the Gulf of Mexico was being verbally harassed by some of his co-workers. Many of the verbal slings involved sexual innuendo and even outright promises. Well, the guy couldn’t take it anymore, and left, citing sexual harassment and verbal abuse. The Supreme Court decision quotes the man as saying “I felt that if I didn’t leave my job, that I would be raped or forced to have sex.” 

Now, this case didn’t get to the Supreme Court right away. The original suit went through the United States District Court for the Easter District of Louisiana. He claimed he was discriminated against because of his sex. But because his alleged harassers were also male, the court said there was no cause for action under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the closest law we had to the subject at the time. But a 1983 decision in another case established that workplace discrimination apples as much to men as is does to women, and the sex of the offender and the sex of the offendee are irrelevant. The ruling went on to say that, “Because of the many facets of human motivation, it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not discriminate against other members of that group.”

Today, we have a Supreme Court Justice who refuses to even define the word “woman.” The Supreme Court established that sexual harassment can happen between members of the same sex, in addition to those of opposite sex. Now, it seems like they might have to consider what the definition of sexual harassment is between two people of indeterminate sex, or people who don’t identify with the sex their body says they are or whatever state of sexuality they identify with. Is a Supreme Court Justice can’t define a woman, how long will it be until the Supreme Court recuses itself from sex-related cases because they now lack the jurisdiction thanks to the myriad graduations between a self-proclaimed man and a self-proclaimed woman, each with the vital parts to back up their claim, and a birth certificate to certify it. If you consider yourself somewhere in between a man and a woman, be careful if you have to maneuver your way through a civil court case, because we may not have laws specific enough for you yet. And yes, I realize the root word of maneuver is “Man.” It’s from the French “manouvre” or “manual labor,” much like what might be done on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Phone and email liner...

There are a lot of companies that serve a lot of different clients or customers, and every time they interact, there’s probably a transfer of money. And throughout history there have been many different ways to pay debts. From bags of salt to gold and livestock. The transfer of goods is what led to civilizations cooperating with each other, and ultimately to the capitalist society we have today. The reason it’s lasted for so long is because it works. I give you something of value for something of value that you have that I need. It’s fair, and it leads to other advantages that advance cooperative societies and exchanges in cultures and customs. There were disadvantages as well. Wars were fought over monetary wealth and physical riches, usually when one accumulated too much. There are many accumulators today. Companies and persons who’s wealth is almost incomprehensible. While there are those who suddenly found themselves in the thick of riches, such as lottery winners, most of the entities who have vast amounts of wealth accumulated it a little at a time. Maybe it was song royalties, or some invention that caught the interest of the people. The more people bought the song or the thingamajig you invented, the more money you made. That’s a fair and honest way to accumulate wealth. There are other ways entities accumulate wealth. It’s often not because of something the public wants, and is willing to pay for because it brings joy to their life like a song or because it makes their life easier like a kitchen tool that someone invented. No, the other way money is made a little at a time is by charging fees for the actions we take in our everyday lives, as if there was a tax on how we behave. One of those taxes is a fee for using your credit card. For years, the company I work for allowed our clients to pay their bill using a credit card. We still do. But as of the new year, we’ve been telling our clients to pay in another way if at all possible because by company has basically been strong-armed into charging a three percent fee for making a payment with a credit card. Until this year, we absorbed any charges the credit card companies charged us for using their service. But now, the credit card companies, or the banks that administer them, have increased the amount of money they want to continue to do what was done before at a lesser cost, or even for free. If my company were to absorb that fee, it could amount to tens of thousands of dollars a year. Money that would go to the bank or the credit card company instead of being used to pay our employees or upgrade equipment vital to delivering our product.

My company has taken it upon ourselves to warn our customers and clients that we’ll be charging a fee to use a credit card to pay a bill, but how many don’t? How many fees are we being charged without knowing it? How many bills are we paying extra for because of fees that may or may not be justified? We’ve all see the signs near the cash register that tell you a three percent fee will be added to all credit card transactions. Not just credit card transactions, but even transactions made with a debit card. So you’re paying extra money just to use your own money. And if there’s a place that only takes cash, and you don’t have any because you’ve been trained to use credit and debit cards to make transactions, there’s a convenient ATM machine you can use to get some cash, but it will cost you money to get access to your own money. For decades, we’ve been trained to pay extra money for using our money in the first place. It’s not bad enough that it was taxed when it was earned, then taxed again when it was spent, but it’s also being taxed for simply having access to it by banks and credit card companies. Banks are famous for fees that don’t make any sense or have any value to anyone but the bank. Like when they charge a customer for depositing a check from somebody else that bounces. The person depositing the check had no control over the condition of that check, and took it in good faith from a customer for services rendered. Why should the depositor get charged a fee for that? Overdraft charges are another way banks steal your money. Let’s say you write four checks. Three of them are for less than a hundred dollars. The fourth one is for several hundred dollars. You wrote them all in good faith, knowing you had enough money in your account to cover all of them. In the meantime, you forget about one of the smaller checks, and use the ATM to get some cash. Now there is only enough money in your account to cover the large check or the three smaller ones, but not all four checks. So the bank will cover the larger check, and then charge you for bouncing the three smaller ones at about 35 dollars a piece. So now the bank made over a hundred bucks on your three bouncing checks instead of the 35 dollars they would have made by honoring the three smaller checks and bouncing the one big one. To add insult to injury, the bank knows you also have a saving account with them, and there’s plenty of money in there to cover the overdraft of the checking account, but instead of providing a service and asking you to transfer money from your savings account to your checking account to cover the checks, they’d rather take your money from your checking account that clearly isn’t in there to begin with! 

But banks aren’t the only entities that add inexplicable fees to your final cost, or as penalties for something or other. The water company in my town charges a 10 dollar administrative fee. Where does that money go? Does it go straight to the woman behind the counter who took my check and gave me a receipt? Probably not, but that’s about all the administrative energy it took for me to pay my bill. It certainly doesn’t seem worth ten dollars!

There are a variety of fees that companies charge, and some of them actually thrive on the fees they charge instead of the original purpose of the company. The good news is that President Biden is trying to do something about hidden and junk fees that hurt consumers and line the pockets of the already rich. So what do these fees cost the average American consumer every year? How much of our money goes to banks in the form of overdraft fees? Well, the White House report say banks made 15.5 billion dollars in 2019. That’s 15 and a half billion dollars of our money the bank kept because of over draft fees. Money that most likely came from lower and middle-class families and small businesses. I began this segment talking about credit card fees, and how my company has to charge an extra three percent for the privilege of using their service. But if you’re a consumer who is late to pay your credit card bill, that will cost you. Credit card companies hauled in a whopping 12 billion dollars in late payment fees in 2020. Booking a hotel at a fancy resort? Hidden fees when you book, or even at checkout added another 2.93 billion dollars to resort incomes in 2018, and of course, you have to get there first. Usually in an airplane. Baggage and change fees charged by airlines in 2021 raked in 5.97 billion dollars in 2021. It’s not just banks and vacation plans that will surprise you with fees. Even if you stay home and entertain yourself with the television, your monthly cable bill will likely have some surprises in it. Hidden fees by cable companies totaled 28 billion dollars in 2019. Some industries thrive on the fees they charge us, like banking and hospitality, but even internet and cable companies use fees to significantly supplement their income. 

Next time you look at your cable bill, or anything else you buy online, take a quick look to see if or how many fees there are for so-called “services” you may be receiving. Then give a quick thought to how the economy would be different if we still used cash for all of our transactions. Maybe there are more than fees to worry about in the future. If we concede to a cashless society, if all of our money is nothing but a number on a receipt we get in the mail, we’re vulnerable to a number of scenarios that spell trouble for those who don’t obey the rules of society, be they right or wrong. When we have no control over the fees we pay, that means there isn’t any competition for the service we’re using. When our money is just a number on a ledger somewhere, it can be turned off, denied to you when you need it. Your money can be used as a tool to force you into conformity, much like the Canadian truck drivers who’s bank accounts were frozen while they protested in their nation’s capital. 

When you’re cautioned to be careful with your money, it usually meant to spend it wisely, and it still does. But the more invisible our money becomes to us, as in the form of bank statements, the more vulnerable it is to those who would take it from you. We used to call them thieves, but today we call them fees. I hope the Biden administration can actually accomplish the goal they set for themselves, and help protect all Americans from further thievery by those who claim to be providing a service.

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly. Copyright 2023. Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube. I’m your host Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.