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Archive for the ‘Paper Trail’ Category

Reporters Note Book

Campaign Trail Diary

Tuesday – 11:30 A.M.

Nasua New Hampshire

- I’m sitting down at a lunch counter café in down town Nasua New Hampshire, nursing my tenth cup of coffee while waiting for Hillary Clinton to arrive. The short order cook is busy in the back flipping over egg’s and bacon on a hot grill as Sally, the lone waitress in this joint, is carrying plates in both hands and delivering it to the two burly looking steel workers sitting next to the entrance. Immediately they begin to gobble down their luscious, beautiful breakfast while I sat there and watched, trying to keep the excess saliva from drooling out of the corners of my mouth.

Sally, an old coot of a girl, is getting angrier at me by the minute because of my flagrant abuse of the free coffee refill policy. She has already sensed the scorch marks of poverty that radiate from my being and she knows that no matter how good the service or how big the smile, that there will be no substantial tip forth coming. In her eye’s I am no longer worthy of the courtesy of being asked for a refill. I must humiliate myself by standing up and getting it myself which is a signal to everyone else in the joint that I have no money. In their eye’s I’m not a hard working journalist trying to crank out the truth, I’m seen as a no good dead beat bum, which considering the publication I work for, is unfortunately very close to the truth.

Sitting back down with my cup of steaming java, I shake sugar out of a clogged sugar jar and glance over at the other patrons sharing the counter space with me. I’m reminded by their cold stares that I’m a stranger here, and if not for the Constitution, I would probably be cast out and stoned to death in the public square. Reaching over for a roll in the bread basket I hear a small sub sonic boom as Sally smacked my hand with a fly swatter and scolded me by barking out, “He dead beat!. The rolls ain’t free “.

01:30 P.M.

Clinton people call and explain that Hillary ate some bad brisket and has been vomiting all morning. They apologize for any inconvenience and promise to send an autographed picture. Immediately following the call, the owner of the Café comes over and tells me to leave.

04:00 P.M.

I just picked up my expense envelope and discovered that my no good son-of-a-bitch of an editor gave me 100 dollars and a book of happy meal certificates to cover 10 days of hotels and meals. I’ve also been informed that my bus ticket is one way. No story, no return ticket.

Wednesday

09:30 A.M.

Went to the Clinton office downtown and tried to obtain press credentials. Clinton people said they never heard of the Washington Toast and call security to have me escorted out of the building.

11:00 A.M.

Showed up at a pro Hillary rally at a local high school and slip in a side entrance. Inside, I actually got close enough to see Hillary waving and shaking hands with the teeming throngs of cheering teenagers who were attending the staged, serve it up to the press rally. Thinking I had pulled off a coup, I tried to inch my way closer.

Upon my first step toward Hillary, I Felt a hand on my shoulder. Looking up I see four pairs of dark sunglasses. The lips under one pair of the sunglasses move and ask me for my non existent press credentials while the other pair of sunglasses rifle through my backpack, briefly pausing and gagging as they come across my used undies which had been fermenting in my bag for the past week. Following a brief verbal exchange where I tried to plead my case, I was ejected from the event. For some perverted reason that kept the undies.

Thursday

02:30 P.M.

It’s as cold as fuck outside, and since I didn’t bring a decent coat I spent most of my time looking for someplace warm to sit and write. I used the last of my happy meal certificates and bought a burger which I accidently dropped on the floor where it was stepped on and rendered uneatable by a four hundred pound big mac stuffing, size 15 shoe size wearing mother fucker. Sinking deeply into despair I ate my fries and a half eaten burger left by a previous occupant of my booth. By accepting this assignment with the Toast I knew that I had reached the rim of the toilet as far as my career was concerned, but I had to remember that no matter who I worked for, I was still a journalist and I had a responsibility to do the story.

02:20 P.M.

Ejected from the Mc Donalds.

4:00 P.M.

Trying to maintain my integrity as a journalist I decided to canvas the neighborhood to get peoples opinions on the up coming primaries. First door I knock on this old man comes from around back brandishing a shot gun and tells me to get the hell off of his property. Having no desire to pull buck shot out of my ass I departed the vicinity.

On my second attempt I knock on the door and as I’m standing there, I look down and this mutt looks up at me, opens his mouth, and throws up on my foot. The owner comes out and throws me out of the house for making her dog barf.

On my third try I knock and the door pushes open. I stick my head inside and there is a couple having sex on the floor. The surprised copulators looks up and the man looks down at the girl and say’s ” Who is this ? Is this the guy you’ve been doing on the side !” Immediately I depart the vicinity, but not fast enough. The angry man comes running out of the house pulling his pants up shouting something about cutting off my wee, wee as the guy with the shotgun comes running around the corner and let’s me have it with a load of rock salt. The pellets bore into my hind end as the adrenaline rush reached my feet and I ran all the way back to the center of town and back into the sanctuary of McDonald’s.

6:35 P.M.

Once again, ejected from McDonald’s.

9:35 P.M.

Desperation had set in. I was hungry and in need of shelter and some kind of support from my paper. During a brief telephone conversation with one of my editors I got support, but not the kind I was hoping for. I was told that if I did not get the story, that my return bus ticket was not guaranteed. No story, no return trip. When I asked them to wire me enough money for a hotel room they told me that they had taken care of it and to check my e-mail.

Thinking that maybe I had these guys figured wrong, I found the nearest electrical outlet, which happened to be located in a Laundromat and plugged in my lap top and went on line. The e-mail was a list of homeless shelters.

Friday September 15
11:10 A.M.

Thoughts of finishing this story are long gone. My story now is that of survival. I checked into a hotel last night, and the hotel manager is outside the door pounding and shouting about the maxed out credit card I gave him. I have no money and no where to go except out a window that is a three story drop to the ground. My story is coming apart at the seams.

06:35 P.M.

I’m sitting on a toilet in the restroom of the downtown Grey Hound bus station pounding out these garbled notes into my faltering lap top to use in my court battle against the Washington Toast. There is a guy pounding on the door of my stall telling me to hurry up cause he’s got to go, and a few moments ago a hand reached under from the stall next to me and tried to steal my back pack. I’m pretty sure I broke the guys hand when I stepped on it with my foot and he let out a loud scream as he ran away.

I have no where else to turn. I must now pop the cd, and find a pawn shop that will give me enough money for my lap top to buy a ticket out of here. And for all of you at the Toast, I promise
you, I’m going to torch your office, if and when I find it considering, you never gave me an address.

Editors Note – Henry disappeared the day this story was found by a bum with a broken hand. If you know where Henry is, please send us a e-mail at dctoast@aol.com

www.washingtontoast.com

I think a piece of paper is one of the most powerful resource you have. It can be a great source of innovation and motivation.

For some reason, when we write our thoughts down on a piece of paper, the thoughts and our vision becomes more alive and complete.

I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it goes back to the days before we had paper or writing instruments. Imagine cave men counting on their fingers instead of just counting with their head.

The act of visualizing and seeing your thoughts, create more clarity and create more meaning.

Using a piece of paper and a writing instrument have help humanity advance to where we are act today.

When you are writing something down, you make connections that you haven’t seen before when the thought was just in your head.

I encourage you to write down your thoughts and ideas. You should never be more then a hand grab away from a pen and paper.

Some tips on innovative writing,

1) Write till your brain is empty. Do no critique your ideas, or ’spell check’ your words while writing for ideas. There are no wrong answers or ideas in the brain storming stage.

Often times the crazier the ideas the better. It’s much better to “go out of this world”, then bring it back home, then to have mediocre ideas from the start.

2) Have a healthy supply of pen and paper. Nothing worst then running out of paper. If you don’t have much writing room, your brain automatically shuts down and don’t come up with as much ideas.

So always have a healthy supply of writing canvas to come up with your ideas. Have a writing utensil that works.

3) Let the mind wander while brainstorming. Wherever your mind takes you, go for it. Get deep within your thought trails, there’s creative ideas to be uncovered.

If 75% of women wear the wrong bra size, and 75% of men wear shirts with the wrong sleeve length, is it any wonder that so many people do not understand paper trails, do not understand their critical roles in con games? Fraud, shell games, scandal-revelation and creation, and rip-offs of every kind flower from this tell-tale debris.

And, alas, most importantly, it is essential to understand how all of this paper trail information is tied together by social security numbers. (For the intent to rob you blind, this information collecting method is, obviously, patently illegal. For the lawn mower manufacturer, in his search for demographics trying to sell you a new riding mower, however, society seems to feel this is O.K)

Spreading like wildfire, with the aid of an internet stage setting, what are paper trails anyhow? Let’s be more specific.

Simply put, as they might affect you, they are every sort of record, kept anywhere, that link business transactions back to you. These can be any paper document such as a bill of sale, promissory note, receipt, application, resume filing, customs claim, insurance form, notarized statement, any legal form. These spell out into computer records.

It’s largely society’s propulsion into the computer / internet era of the 1990s that has brought about this current-day fleshing out of the “paper trail.” It’s now so efficient that the structural schematic of this thought-police invasion–this total assault on your privacy–should indeed frighten you. What next? you might ask. Will you be marked with a tracking device so the government always knows where you are?

In this day and age it’s computers, computers, internet, internet. Far and wide. They are to blame. It’s computer records that pull all these bits of paper information together, to the delight of con artists.

Examples: Credit card purchase? Computer. Bank deposit? Computer. House purchase? Computer. And, the list goes on and on. Endlessly.

Take a simple, one-time credit card purchase. This is stored in the bank’s computer, as well as several way stations along the path back to your bank, in the network’s computers. When you deposit cash into your checking account the information is stored in a computer. when you deposit cash into your savings account the information is stored in a computer. when you buy a house you get a triple-whammy, the transaction is stored in a computer, in paper form, and on microfilm at your county recorder’s office. Every time you turn around and blink these days, it seems, something about you is recorded in a computer.

And, sad to say, the common link that pulls all of your business transactions together is your social security number. It is the commonly used identifier of the present day age. By using only your social security number the con man can put together a near-total list of your business transactions stretching back over the years.

So, stealing your ss number–it being the string-tying mechanism which pulls everything together– then packaging it neatly and presenting your financial affairs to the world as the “whole you”–makes it easy for the con man. These data include such invasion-of-privacy issues as what assets you have, where you shop, what you buy, and what you owe on various credit accounts and loans. The skilled con artist knows precisely how to pull this string.

Unfortunately, too many people today regard this as only a mild irritation, like talking to robots on the phone while trying to make a warranty claim on a defective computer. Red flag! It’s far more serious than that So, like it or not, the challenge is on you, to weave, dodge, confuse, and bewilder any scam artist who might be about to stalk you.

How do you do this? How do you fortify your defenses?

You must disrupt your paper trail. This can partially be done in several ways, or combination:

1. A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (seemingly), cash was used. Stash your credit and debit cards. Earmark them for occasional or emergency use only, and for the most part rediscover cash money, paper and coin. Go back to this simpler form of exchange wherever possible. We all feel nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, but this step alone will go far toward masking your paper trail.

2. Set up a Trust. This is like turning the porch light on, with nobody home. It somewhat confuses the paper trail by disrupting the con man’s view, due to the linkage between you and your Trust. Like the service station attendant washing your windshield with a soapy brush, this will partly obscure the vision of the con man trying to put together a financial profile on you.

3. Refuse to star in the con artist’s psychodrama. Go offshore. Not physically. Just export some of your assets This is not considered socially acceptable. Not patriotic, either. But, it’s not illegal, and it is most effective. If you make yourself invisible to the bureaucrats–and the scam artists–they will have no address with which to find you. (A page torn from a legal thriller?)

4. You ask, what if the Hokey Pokey is really what it’s all about? Incredibly, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that bank records enjoy no privacy protection. That’s right, none. They are considered property of the bank, You are not, however required to reveal your social security number when opening a non-interest bearing account, e.g. checking, debit, credit card. So, don’t. You are only required to reveal your social security number to a bank when interest-bearing accounts are involved. This is because the bank must report to I.R.S., for tax purposes, on how much they paid you.

5. You can even out-con the con man. Follow the New Hampshire state motto: “Go away and leave us alone.” Get yourself a post office box, then write, “Moved, left no forwarding address” on the face of every envelope that the postman tries to deliver to your home. That would certainly leave anyone trying to steal your identity hanging by a quickly-shrinking thread. This would be like giving a seeing-eye sled dog to a blind Eskimo..

These are just a few of the steps you can take to shore up your privacy. These steps will not totally obliterate the scam artist’s view of your financial structure. But, it will hinder it to the point of nearly crippling him, leave him babbling to himself, wondering how to write zero in Roman numerals. Consultation with an expert attorney would undoubtedly reveal more avenues of privacy restoration.

If such preventive steps were universally adopted, it would be quite a blow to the scamsters. It would leave con men everywhere quaking in their Hummer SUVs and calling their analysts on their cell phones.