"In the Totoless Land of Oz - La, la, la, la, la"
From today's LA Times we get this story. "What recession? Places like Sioux Falls, S.D., prove resilient"
"One chunk of the nation has avoided much of the current economic misery: the region from North Dakota to Texas, most of it sparsely populated. This area includes five of the six states that analysts at Economy.com have classified as not yet in recession. And other states in the Rocky Mountain West -- from New Mexico to Idaho -- are facing relatively mild downturns...
For decades, Sioux Falls was a modest agricultural outpost, a place for farmers to pick up new equipment or have a fancy dinner. Its main employer was a hog-butchering plant. But in the early '80s, Citibank and other financial companies began to open branch offices here to escape New York usury laws that hampered their efforts to expand into the credit card market.
"People were very proud," [Mayor] Munson recalled. "It lifted the whole being of Sioux Falls to say we can get a corporation like Citi to come here."
