OK, everyone. Enough lollygagging around. Time to begin the year.

The Legislature begins its year tomorrow. The News Guy will be there, weather permitting, and explore the prognoses in Wednesday’s post. For today, though, a look at three disparate events:

EVENT ONE—Slip Slidin’ Around. In America, whenever there is a dispute between the citizens and any government, the default position is that the citizens are correct and virtuous while the gummint has to be incompetent if not corrupt.

Not necessarily, as illustrated last week when several cars slid off the icy surfaces of various highways (mostly Interstate 89), whereupon some of the drivers immediately blamed the state transportation establishment for not plowing the roads properly. One motorist, shown on WCAX-TV news, even wondered where on earth his tax money was going if not to keep the highways clear (and how much do you want to bet that this guy regularly kvetches that his taxes are too high?).

Transportation Agency officials claimed they were doing the best they could, but that the air grew so cold, and the wind blew so hard so soon after their trucks dumped salt on the road, that the salt blew away before it had time to melt the snow and ice. Gov. Jim Douglas pointed out that the State government promises drivers roads that are safe, not necessarily roads clear of every flake. Adding to the insult, the State Police said that the drivers whose cars slid off the road were going too fast.

Blaming the victim. What can you expect from bureaucrats?

Except in this case the bureaucrats would seem to have the better of the argument. Reaching a conclusive judgment on whether the road crews could have done a better job requires more intimate knowledge of the physics and chemistry of snow removal than exists in this precinct. But simple common sense tells us that it’s a driver’s responsibility to adjust to road conditions.

Oh, simple common sense and the law. There seems to be a popular delusion that because the signs announce a 65 mile-per-hour maximum, it is always legal to go that fast. It is not. That’s the maximum legal speed under perfect conditions. Less than perfect conditions require lower speeds. Even if he’s doing 50, a driver can be fined for careless or reckless driving if he slides off a snowy road and a cop says he was going too fast. “I was going 15 mph below the limit,” will not impress the judge.

It’s Vermont, folks. It’s cold and snowy in the winter. In bad weather, the best driving policy is to stay home. If that’ s impossible, the driver, not the cop or Jim Douglas, is responsible for the tires on the car (all-weather radials with still-noticeable tread, if not actual winter tires) and for going slowly enough to stay on the highway.

EVENT TWO. God Knows. The latest survey is out, and once again, Vermont is just about the least religious – or, perhaps more accurately, the most secular — state in the union.

The “just about” is required because Vermont is lumped in with New Hampshire as if the two were one state, otherwise the sample size would have been too small; as it is, the survey reached only 320 respondents in the two states, resulting in a relatively high margin of error, plus or minus 6.5 percent.

In addition, Vermont/New Hampshire is effectively tied with Alaska (one point difference, which in survey research is negligible) in the latest survey on religious attitudes and beliefs by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey found that only 36 percent of the Vermont/New Hampshire respondents reported that “religion is very important in their lives.” The two-state combo also ranked at the very bottom in the percentage saying they believed in God. But whatever they believe in, Vermonters and New Hampshirites apparently pray a tad more than people in Massachusetts, Maine, or Alaska.

However much some may celebrate and others mourn the result, in fact there’s not much peculiar to Vermont about the findings. All of New England was relatively secular, as was most of the rest of the Northeast, and many of the northern states regardless of longitude. Secularity also seems consistent with populations that are disproportionately white, affluent, and educated.

Vermont and New Hampshire’s shortage of religious enthusiasm probably helps explain why they are the only two states in which same-sex marriage is law by statute. Whether the findings have any further significance is best left to a higher authority, in this case perhaps just a more informed public opinion expert.

EVENT THREE. Bank Shot. The following is intended only to inform, not to persuade. For what it is worth, the News Guy himself has no plan to join this particular enterprise.

The enterprise is called “Move Your Money,” and its goal is to convince people to…move their money, in this case from big banks to what the organizers call “community banks.”

The big banks, say the “Move Your Money” mavens “propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year (while) they have also cut back on the money they are lending.”

By moving money into a local bank, they say, “we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. It’s neither Left nor Right — it’s populism at its best.”

Perhaps, but the organizers, on-line impresario Arianna Huffington (of Huffington Post) and film-maker Eugene Jarecki, are decidedly on the left side of the political spectrum. Most of their ire is directed at the “Big Four” banks – JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — which don’t have much to do with Vermont. But the web site allows anyone to key in his or her zip code and get a list of nearby “community banks.”

In Vermont, this basically excludes Chittenden, now part of Connecticut-based Peoples United; Citizens Bank, a unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland; and TD Bank, a subsidiary of TD Bank Financial Group in Toronto. They are big banks. People’s United is the tenth largest bank company “by market capitalization”, according to the street.com. Citizens is the eighth largest commercial bank in the country, and TD calls itself one of the 15 largest commercial banks.

On the other hand, not everything that “Move Your Money” calls a “community bank” is a mom and pop operation. Merchants Bank is a Delaware-chartered corporation whose stock can be bought on the NASDQ exchange. That means an investor in Bozeman, Bhutan, or Berlin (the one near Hamburg, not the one near Montpelier) can own a share, and probably some of them do. But the bank is not part of a holding company, and it does business only in the state.

The other big, but still “community” banks are Northfield Savings, Community National Bank of Derby, and Union Bank of Morrisville. A full list is on the “Move Your Money” web site.

If you decide to move your money on a snowy day, drive carefully. Oh, and while you’re at it, whatever you believe, you might as well pray. Like chicken soup, it can’t hurt.

Tags: Banks, Religion, Traffic safety

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 12:08 am and is filed under Business & Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.