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Note to the U.S. Government: Don't You Work for Us?
September 19, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Thomas Jefferson said that when people are scared of their government, that is tyranny. When government is scared of the people, that is democracy. We need to get back to that concept in a hurry.
The June 8 weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal mentioned that in 2008-2009, the U.S. was ranked as the most competitive country by the World Economic Forum. In the most current ranking, for 2012-2013, we have fallen to seventh place.
One reason for this dramatic plummet is the increasing deluge of interference by our government on U.S. business. As a supplier of precious metals, we must verify that our customers are not using these transactions for money laundering (an anti-money laundering program is part of the Patriot Act). We are also pouring substantial time into the totally onerous conflict metals (a slide into the Dodd-Frank bill), even though none of that gold ore was ever reported to have come to the U.S.
Recently, a company that buys more than 95% of their boards in Asia (where most of the conflict gold has been shipped to) asked us for our conflict metal statement on gold. After sending it, we received a curt response that we would be in trouble if that is all we had. We then sent our EEIC/GESI forms and received a quick thank you.
Customers (or in this case, a customer’s customer) don’t often know what they want so we end up spending extra time and money for no recompense. Also recently, a former small customer who has not bought anything from us in four years asked that we fill out a REACH report. When we responded that we would be glad to once they are customers again, we received another very curt response: “Our other vendors have submitted these.” The keyword there is “vendors.” They are vendors and are at least earning some money for doing clerical work--we are not. Yet, there were several e-mails to close this one non-business issue. No income, but work nevertheless.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the August 2013 issue of The PCB Magazine.