08:15 – Today was the day we intended to start shipping forensic science kits. We’re not going to make that deadline, but we will be shipping them by this Friday, the 31st.
I got an email this morning, apparently from Time-Warner Cable, saying that our account was past-due and that if we didn’t pay the balance they’d discontinue service. So I called their support number and bounced around through the menu system. It sounded like our account was current, but just in case I decided to wait on hold to talk to an agent. She told me that that notice was legitimate but should never have been sent. Apparently, when Barbara wrote a check to TWC earlier this month, she wrote it for $0.01 less than the actual amount of the bill. The customer service woman said not to worry about it, that they’d just tack the $0.01 onto our next bill. Fine.
But while I was bouncing around the menu tree, I’d chosen the option to check our account balance. It told me we were current, but mentioned that we had a promotional deal that was due to expire soon. When I spoke to the customer service woman, I asked about that. We’re currently paying $36/month for TWC VoIP telephone service, which I think is outrageous enough. That deal expires the end of this month, and they’ll start charging us $45/month. So, while Barbara was getting dressed to go to work, I walked back and suggested that we drop our land-line service, as so many of our friends and acquaintances have. She said that was fine with her. With her parents’ health issues over the last several months, she’s gotten used to depending on her cell phone anyway. I told her we’d just move our phone chargers back to our nightstands and leave our cell phones on 24 hours.
I assume you might be aware of the multi-handset cordless phone systems that connect to your cell phone via bluetooth? Gives you a home phone type system.
OTH a couple of months ago I moved my business line to VOIP from ATT via PhonePower and cut the bill to almost a third of what it was with far more features. Couldn’t be happier. Going to move the home line next.
Verizon has a pretty good one called Home Connect for $20 a month but I’m not sure I trust them not to jack it up later. That one is a cell box that just ties your current house system in.
For my wife it would be about keeping the home number we’ve had for over thirty years in spite of the four cell numbers we have.
Damn I have too much phone.
Yeah, we’ve had the same phone number since we moved into this house in 1987. I thought Barbara might have an attachment to it, but she doesn’t seem to care. She just said we’d need to reprogram the autodial on her parents’ phone. That’s likely to be necessary anyway once they move to their new digs, which we’re hoping will be this coming weekend.
Boy, I would be much more concerned about AT&T raising their rate than Verizon at this point. I fought AT&T for almost a year over the price of DSL service, which they told me would be $14.95/mo, then proceeded to charge me $50/mo for almost 8 months running. I had to call them every single month during that time to get the price reduced to what was promised. There is a mantra at AT&T: “I can fix that for you.” The fact is that all of them told me that, but it took 8 months for them to fix it.
Then, after just a few months of finally being billed correctly, the bill went back up to $50/mo. I called them and they said they had several “specials” that would reduce my price. The one I settle on was one that the person on the other end ALWAYS described as “half of $49.95”. Never did he say what the amount would be, but always “half of $49.95”.
Their calculator does not return the same figure as mine. I have been billed for $28/mo since that plan went into effect.
Boy this scam of “insuring” your water pipes from the street to your house, is really taking off here in Hoosierland. In the past month, I have gotten 3 solicitations from different ‘companies’ for insuring me against pipe damage between my house and the main distribution line in the street. The last one wanted $9.95/mo for their ‘insurance’. I checked around, and found that most water companies in the state are the same as in Tiny Town: the city is responsible for the pipes right into a backwash stop and shut-off valve inside your house. This has got to be the safest, most secure rip-off ever invented. There will never be a time they will have to pay off, because the city covers it all. This is like free money for these scam artists. There is no way somebody in the business of insuring such a thing, is not aware that they will never have to pay out.
That’s unusual. Most of the time, the city or other water company is responsible up to the meter, and you’re responsible on your side of the meter. In Winston-Salem, our meters are near the curb, so there’s quite a bit of pipe between us and the meter.
Same deal on sewer. Our demarc is near the street, and was originally in our driveway. A heavy truck crushed the junction and the city came out to look at it. The damage was between the demarc and us, so we had to pay both a plumber for running a new sewer line and the city for digging a trench from the main line to our new demarc. As I recall, the city charged us $1,300. I forget how much the plumber charged, but it wasn’t cheap either.
I suppose that in the North, meters are more often in the house. Every place I have lived has been that way—Indianapolis, St. Paul, Evanston, Natick, Melrose, and back to Tiny Town. Rich cities, like Chicago and Boston, put in a remote line from the meter inside the house, to a plug outside, so the meter reader just touches his portable reader to the contacts, and it enters the reading automatically. But Tiny Town and several nearby towns where I have relatives, say the practice in Indiana is for the city to be responsible up to and including the backwash stop and shut-off valve, which is inside the house—even if the meter is outside (very few in Tiny Town, and mostly commercial properties).
Our water comes from limestone wells, and there is so much sediment in the water, that pipes between the street and house, frequently have to be replaced because of deposit build-up in the pipes. In fact, they say if anything springs a leak here, just wait a few days and it will be plugged up tight with sediment in no time.
All other utilities are as you say—just to the meter, then it is the homeowner’s responsibility. But for some reason, not water here.
City responsibility in my town ends at the meter. Sewer is mine until the connection with the city. I had to replace my main water line at a cost of about $1K. It was deep near the house. Used copper. Sewer than had to be replaced. While doing that they discovered the old septic tank when the plumbers backhoe fell in. Had to have that filled with rock and gravel. Got hit with a $3K bill for that process. City just laughed at me.
I am fairly happy with AT&T at the moment. We get our phone landlines and DSL 12M/1M service from them out here in the sticks. Since I occasionally overwhelm the DSL line uploading 80 MB patch files to our website, I got another DSL line for us. The cost is $45/month each plus lots of taxes. I use a Peplink 30 to mix the two DSL lines into our LAN. Plus our Clear Wimax as the backup if the DSL goes out.
Is Texas conservative or what?
There were 2 versions recorded in San Antonio of the 1965 song young Texas Rockabilly artist Roy Head wrote with bass player Gene Kurtz, “Treat Her Right”, a song which made it to #2 on both the US pop and R&B charts. One version used the word “lovin’” in the lyrics—as in “if you want a little lovin’, you gotta start real slow”, while the other used “kissin’”. Over the years, the one with “kissin’” has been named “counterfeit”, but actually the different versions were released to different parts of the country on 2 different labels.
We were a little less repressed here in the North, and we got the “lovin’” version—which did not even stir our college radio station’s advisor, while the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” almost got banned. This video of a local Texas TV show used the conservative “kissin’” version, which was also the one the radio played there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BLQgQNuN-M
Here’s Head on Hollywood A-Go-Go with, of course, the racier lyrics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gEnQ8VVWEU
Beyond that, about 8 years earlier, while a couple members of Head’s band, The Traits, were still at San Marcos high school and Head had just graduated, the group was invited to Philadelphia to perform on a new TV show, Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”. But nope—the parents refused to let them go, because they were all still minors and 2 were in high school.
Head’s gymnastics were borrowed from the more energetic black R&B acts of the day (I have often wondered where in Texas he saw them), and they were different for each performance of the song, as he made them up on-the-spot. A real precursor to break dancing. TV is so tame today, by comparison with the likes of Shindig, Hullabaloo, Shivaree, Shebang. Guess those drugs they use on kids nowadays work.
RBT wrote:
“A heavy truck crushed the junction and the city came out to look at it. The damage was between the demarc and us, so we had to pay both a plumber for running a new sewer line and the city for digging a trench from the main line to our new demarc. As I recall, the city charged us $1,300. I forget how much the plumber charged, but it wasn’t cheap either.”
Who ended up paying? The truck owner’s third party property insurance or you?
Chuck wrote:
“Our water comes from limestone wells..”
How come? What about river water? Dams?
I used to have a phone line owned by Telstra, the 800 pound gorilla of the Australian telecommunications market. Then I got Cable TV, Internet and telephone from another provider, but decided to keep my original landline. That was before Telstra kept jacking up the monthly rental price by large amounts far too frequently. Eventually I just got sick of it – as I don’t get many phone calls at home, so I dropped it. I’d have dropped the phone provided by the cable company too but they won’t let me, and I have no real alternative source of broadband, so I just grit my teeth and bear it.
Coal miners say they were forced to attend Romney event and donate
Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore told Blomquist that the charges were untrue.
“There were no workers that were forced to attend the event,” Moore said. “We had managers that communicated to our work force that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend the event.
Mandatory, but not forced. Wasn’t there a discussion a few days ago about the wonderful flexibility of the English language for drawing fine distinctions?
We had to pay. It was just some big truck that decided to turn around in our driveway. By the time I got out there, he’d left and was driving away.
No rivers of sufficient size nearby, and the one that passes by is still not clear of upstream manufacturing residue. Nobody along the line uses that river for anything but manufacturing. Nevertheless, my parents as kids, used to swim in that muck in the neighboring town, where there was a kind of water park (primitive as it was in that era).
The water from the wells here is actually very sweet to drink. The Coca-Cola bottling plant here was prized for producing the best tasting Cokes in the Midwest, until they started consolidated plants and closed the one in Tiny Town. The other advantage is that those wells produce even in the drought. There have never been watering bans in Tiny Town.
Vote straight Libertarian. Convince all your friends to, too. Stop overspending. Get the military-industrial complex cut down to size. It is clear that Romney/Ryan are not going to do that job.
Voting Libertarian isn’t gonna get that job done, either. As we all know here. There will have to be a total re-format of this whole system and a hard reboot; nothing that needs to be done is gonna get done until that happens. The election charade is a total waste of time, effort and money.
Whichever Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum gets in there in November and his administration are gonna keep kicking that can down the road, as they are ordered to do by our lords temporal and their stooges on Wall Street and at DOD. Only one problem: we are running out of road. I give it ten years, tops. No way around this; voting is not gonna solve a damn thing. We are now tens of trillions in debt and can no longer even pay the interest on it. And don’t even try. Now cometh The Great Default, a situation that has no historical precedent and in a country of 315-million-plus people with around a billion or so firearms.
And looking at Greece or what is happening in other countries now or back in the history books is not gonna help us a bit. This is all new shit.
You do know that half of the Federal debt is held by agencies of the Federal government ? Social Security and Medicare are holding $4 trillion in tbills and the Federal Reserve is hold $3 trillion. I cannot find backings for those numbers though.
And the USA has defaulted on its debt before. The last time was 1933.
However, yes, we are running out of road. With Obama, I am not even sure we will make it to the end of his second administration. With Romney, I do not know. Ryan is gutsy enough but I am not sure that Romney is. The pain to balance the current federal deficit will be immense.
Yes, I am fully aware of where the debt is held. We are basically funding the Red Chinese DOD while we are at it, too. How they must laugh at us! While our lords temporal and their lackeys also laugh at us. This next default is likely to make 1933 look like a day at the beach. And the thin blue line ain’t gonna hold, no matter what the librul cretins think.
Fun times ahead.
I can hardly wait until those Federal Reserve dollars come to roost in the open. It wil be the 1970s all over again with people openly talking about inflation in the double digit range per year instead of this “hidden” inflation that we have right now.
It could be the 1970s but I think it will be closer to the 1870s, and if things really get sour, the 770s. Working in armor plate and leather may be a good trade to learn.
Ryan has admitted that his so-called ‘budget’ proposal has never been applied against the actual numbers to see what the end result would be. This, while he also complained that Romney’s recent proposal has not been tested by plugging in real numbers, either.
This is one election where voting anything but Libertarian really IS a waste of your vote. At least Johnson will veto spending and confound Congress like he did in New Mexico.
This time, voting Libertarian is not a waste of a vote; voting for either of the other two contenders is.
Ryan has admitted that his so-called ‘budget’ proposal has never been applied against the actual numbers to see what the end result would be.
Got URL?
Yeah. Try these:
http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/we-havent-run-numbers-startling-paul-ryan-admission-getting-little-attention
http://taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/romney-plan.cfm
indicates that nobody has run the numbers on Romney’s plan, because it is incomplete
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/opinion/krugman-an-unserious-man.html
Paul Krugman looks at Ryan’s plan, which he says no one can analyze because it contains “secret” provisions that will not be revealed.
Oh well, at least Romney is talking about balancing the federal budget and Obama is not. Romney has experience and a track record at this while he was governor of Massachusetts. In the awesome words of Clint Eastwood, “When somebody does not do the job, we gotta let them go”. And in the other soundbite of the evening, “Mr. Obama is not a bad man. He is just a bad President.”.
BTW, Krugman lost his journalist card with me a long time ago when he openly became a shill for the Democrat party.
Romney would be better than Obama, but that’s nowhere near good enough.
Yup, Miles_Teg (triethylene glycol ?), I totally agree. There are 535 people down the street that the President has to work with in order to set the ship right and I am worried. A balanced budget amendment would be a good start but these people make drunk sailors look good.
They’d insist on having a get-out clause for a balanced budget amendment, and they’d fine exceptions every year. I think they should have a BBA that starts in three years, no exceptions, so they don’t have to have a big bang. After that politicians get no salary and the air-conditioning and heating are turned off until the budget is balanced.
People’s political persuasion is something I try not to let influence my perception of their work. Krugman’s political preference does not preclude him from having some decent insights into the economy—which he occasionally does.
There is nobody I know in Mass. who liked Romney as governor. According to most of the friends there I am still in contact with, he was just like Pelosi: gonna shove this down your throat whether you like it or not. As I have said before, I have worked for guys exactly like Romney. They want NOTHING to do with you who are not multi, multi-millionaires, and they sure don’t want you to get one penny richer. Romney has demonstrated he is with the rich elites whose policies favor transferring wealth from the middle-class up to the rich elites. And he and his cronies are doing a damned good job of that. And if you lose your job/income in the process of their doing that—tough! Starve, because they don’t believe in unemployment compensation either. I really cannot believe anyone would actually vote for that. There is a complete disconnect between Romney and the ‘common’ working man. He shut down a huge paper products plant just north of me, that was profitable before he bought it. Aside from throwing masses out of work, Romney and his co-horts profited over 100 million selling off the assets. Job creator my arse. Like OFD says, he and Ryan are liars of the first order and proclaim themselves the saviour. Their track record sure doesn’t.
Balanced budget—hell, we don’t want that! We want a major disassembly of the military-industrial-Congressional tax-sucking complex, and massive reduction of everything but Social Security and Medicare/caid spending. You ain’t gonna get that from Romney. You will get quite the opposite. A vote for Romney is just a vote to tap the brake lightly, while turning up the military radio full-blast.
And remember this is coming from a guy who got a serious dog bite campaigning door-to-door for Goldwater.
You? Goldwater? Was he a populist too? {smirk}
I’m all for a more fiscally responsible government, but all a balanced budget amendment would accomplish is cause a massive tax increase.
Agree 100%.
If they give us a massive tax increase from a BBA then we would vote them out of office ? And the budget would be balanced. I am becoming a single issue voter on fiscal responsibility.
Great Britain is struggling right now and thinking about boosting taxes over 50% for millionaires – just temporarily. This is a good example of Margaret Thatcher’s saying: “The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”.
I have to strongly disagree that your single issue of a balanced budget at the Federal level will solve the problems we face. Have Romney/Ryan actually promised to balance the budget? I cannot find that anywhere. In fact, I do not believe Romney/Ryan—even if they promise and get elected—could actually deliver that balanced budget. If they do, it will be at the expense of your wealth assets and mine, and the collective health care of the disappearing middle-class.
What Romney has promised is war with Iran. Great! First that extreme danger of Iraq—and we have seen how that turned out;—now Iran. That will surely balance the budget.
Requiring a balanced budget at the national level in this era, is like balancing a wheel on a used car that is falling apart in all respects—balancing the wheel is not going to stop all the other problems. We have serious issues with education—especially in science as China overtakes us,—energy, a sound dollar, trade imbalances, protectionism that is falsely and outrageously called “free trade” by politicians, economists, and journalists, military interventions in places where we have absolutely no interests whatever—either strategic or our usual oil-theft interest,—big business getting too big to allow a failure and executive compensation being beyond all reasonable means when that compensation is examined by competition in the international markets, and a healthcare system that is truly out-of-control in all ways especially including cost and actually delivering longer lives.
Did you look at that chart of Congressional wealth I posted a while back? I’m not sure what your wealth situation is, but I am nowhere near a competitor with those rich elites. You think when the cuts come, they are going to affect their asset figures by even $1? Think again. Those bastards already exempt themselves from every program that you and I are subject to by their hand. Those cuts are going to come out of my pocket and retirement income and yours, unless you are as wealthy as they.
The common middle-class man is not going to be served by ANYBODY in the Republican or Democratic party—except for Libertarians running as Republicans (which both Weld and Johnson did to get elected). By the way, if Weld endorsed Obama, then he is truly getting senile. Good thing he is no longer in politics. Sounds like he is no longer a Libertarian.
Don’t waste a vote on Romney/Ryan. Unless you are as rich as they are, you and I will both suffer at their hands, while they and their country club buddies go entirely unscathed.
Lynn wrote:
‘Great Britain is struggling right now and thinking about boosting taxes over 50% for millionaires – just temporarily. This is a good example of Margaret Thatcher’s saying: “The problem with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”.’
You always need to be cautious of temporary taxes. They have a way of getting entrenched. “Temporary” taxes have been introduced in Australia during wars (WWI and WWII come to mind) and are still there. And the UK used to have a top tax rate of around 98%. Why would anyone bother to work?
I think I read somewhere that Weld “regrets” having endorsed Obama. As well he should.
As to Iran, perhaps the generals, bureaucrats and politicians will have learned the lesson of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. As our host says “Never send a man where you can send a warhead.” And there are plenty in the enduring stockpile. May as well use them.
That sounds a lot like something Madeline “Not-Too-Bright” Albright said a while back; gee we have this wonderful military, why don’t we use it?. All them beautiful warheads just sittin there, takin up space, doin nuthin…launch ’em on some raghead villagers over in the Sandbox…maybe some cannibals in the Congo….
Funny thing with these buggers is they usually end up killing a lot of people who had nuthin to do wit nuthin…and the top dogz always somehow skate. ‘Collateral damages, etc.’
I don’t care to have my tax dollars going to incinerate some civvies in the Sandbox on the say-so of some chickenhawk muthafuckas back here, whether perfumed princes at the Pentagon or the banksters on Wall Street or the nabobs of the media. They who bray incessantly of the glories and wonders of Moloch so long as other peoples’ kids have to go, need to be frog-marched to the front with an M4 at warp speed.
After 9/11 we needed to send a couple of spec ops teams over to Saudi Arabia to take out some of those madrassah-financing princes and the imams who send kids off to commit suicide. We mos def did NOT need to launch an Afrika Korps-type war into Iraq and Afghanistan. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And used up a bunch of waste-uranium warheads over there, too, which not only fucked up the local ragheads but also our own guys.
Either run this nation as a full-fledged fucking Empire and crucify opponents by the hundreds of thousands, literally, on the roads into Mordor, or get the fuck out of this sorry business altogether and stay home and fix things here; Lord knows there’s plenty as needs fixin.
I have great affection for the Irani people, having had a couple of really close Irani woman friends, who were smart as a whip, and as Western as any American female I knew. Neither bought into the fundamentalist Islamic faith, and neither ever criticized the Christian faith. There was a young Irani fellow in one of my German classes, who about once a month, would launch into very articulate criticisms of those in control of Iran in German. He could do the same in English. We were wowed.
Geez, Dave, I love your prose and politics. Don’t ever stop writing!
There but for a life of crack go I…
Seriously, I have no objections to most Iranians. I guess they didn’t like the US overthrowing their government in 1953 and they didn’t forget. What I said about nuking the place was over-the-top hyperbole. Mainly I don’t want the US or anyone else “going in” there. Just learn to leave these people alone and let them get themselves out of their own mess. No one there will thank us if we liberate them from the mullahs and ayatollahs. I used to work with an Iranian woman who was Baha’i. She was very attractive and great fun to to talk to and play backgammon against, especially in summer when she often forgot to wear a bra under her lose-fitting tops… 🙂
I haven’t really figured if Dave is just a right wing anti-country club Republican, a libertarian or just a loopy anarchist (is there any other kind?) Keep me guessing Dave.
Okay Chuck, here’s a couple of Krugman articles from the NYT for you to enjoy. The second even mentions your idol Dean Baker:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/opinion/krugman-rosie-ruiz-republicans.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/the-fire-last-time/
“…if Dave is just a right wing anti-country club Republican, a libertarian or just a loopy anarchist…”
Leave out “Republican” and you’ve nailed it, sir. Registered as an Independent here in Vermont in 1998, after many years drinking the Repub Kool-Aid. You can find my political leanings at Chronicles Magazine and American Conservative, and often at lewrockwell.com and antiwar.com. No secret to any of it. I also tend to mostly agree a lot with Fred Reed.
That figures. Fred is nuttier even than you. In fact, he’s nuttier than everyone in this forum put together.
Fred is a pleasant kind of nutty. The biggest bone I have to pick with him is that he is stuck in the past. For example, he examines everything military in the context of Vietnam. While that may be his personal experience, history is broader than that.
It’s tough to stay contemporary while growing older. I really cannot stand the music that radio plays today as contemporary hits, so I don’t listen to it. But that basically puts me out-of-touch with things my kids like.
There is zero creativity in the music that gets on the charts these days, and it is made even more milquetoast by running everything through auto-tune. Back when I was the same age as kids who were making the music, many of the kid composers were thoroughly familiar with classical composers and their works and the music theory behind them. To wit: Jerry Corbetta doing an instrumental version of The Band’s “Chest Fever”, which was based around Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. (The words to “Chest Fever” were meaningless drivel, anyway, so not missed here.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9YMsqDTZJg
The trademark Corbetta Hammond B3 sound for Sugarloaf—heard prominently in “Green-Eyed Lady” pops up near the end of that wonderful piece. Just try to find something as musically inventive as this today. It ain’t out there.
Miles_Teg says:
Okay Chuck, here’s a couple of Krugman articles from the NYT for you to enjoy. The second even mentions your idol Dean Baker:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/opinion/krugman-rosie-ruiz-republicans.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/the-fire-last-time/
Just now getting around to reading that, but I love it. Romney and Republicans attack Obama’s agenda as being leftist, but Baker recently had an item pointing out that Richard Nixon’s economic policy was far to the left of Obama.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-socialist-in-the-white-house-richard-nixon
It was during the Nixon/Agnew debacle that I became a Libertarian, dropping the previous family commitment to Republicans. At once, I began trying to convince my parents that their blind faith in the party (stemming from a switch to Repub from Demo during FDR’s Presidency) was sorely misplaced. Since then I have—correctly, I believe—characterized Republicans as intentionally lying, hypocritical wanna-be felons. The Krugman column on Ryan serves to reinforce that opinion.
For some time I have maintained that the export of jobs to the third-world by corporate CEO’s was a fully-conscious effort to enrich themselves and their insider cronies at the expense of putting less-educated Americans out of work—forever! Baker finally articulates this in the above column:
”Increased international competition can help to explain the desire to push down wages of ordinary workers, but it doesn’t explain why corporations have not felt the need to push down the wages of their lawyers, the doctors they indirectly pay through employer provided health insurance, or their CEOs. The pay for these groups are hugely out of line with international standards even though there is zero reason to believe that the professional who fill these jobs in the United States perform their work any better than their peers elsewhere.
“The explanation would seem to be that these professionals have been able to secure protection for themselves in ways that autoworkers and textile workers have not. In the case of CEOs, they essentially pay off board members to turn the other way as they pilfer the corporations they run. In short, the end of decent paying jobs for ordinary workers is not due to globalization, it is due to the fact that certain powerful interest groups have been able to use the forces of globalization to their advantage.”
IMO, a vote for either Republican or Democrat is a vote to continue the bosom-buddy relationship that business has with Congress, where Congressional campaign coffers are generously filled, in return for legislation that overlooks—yea, promotes—the export of income-producing jobs to the third world, while protecting top executives and the largest company shareholders who rake in multi-millions as the unemployment rolls—that the middle-class finances,—swell as a result. There is no level playing field in America, and the super-rich Republicans—Romney, especially included—are at the forefront of this greedy quest.
As the rich have gotten warp-speed richer since 1990 while the middle-class has not even kept their own pace, here’s what the lay of the land looks like today:
http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/if-american-land-were-distributed-the-way-american-wealth-is.html
Note that if you are out of the top 10% richest, you are one of 278 million. And 278 million of us, now seem incapable of just treading water. We are losing ground to the richest 10% at an increasingly faster rate. But that is understandable when Congress answers to the rich—whom they are a part of—and no longer gives constituents the time of day.
If you want to lose the battle between middle-class and the super-rich, then keep voting for Republicans and Democrats. Just like the Islamics who are out to destroy non-Islamics, so the 2 main parties in the US are out to wipe the middle-class off the face of the US map. Romney, especially, cannot hide his palpable contempt for those of us who are beneath the level of wealth that he and his friends have—as he is constantly reminding us with references to his family with horse stables and friends owning race cars, sports teams (with a demolished Indianapolis stadium, that we peasant taxpayers are still paying off the bonds on, so the rich out-of-town owner would have a new stadium at our expense, not his, in order to keep the team in town), yachts, and other rich-boy toys. You want to see your wealth and that “entitlement” of Social Security that you don’t deserve (forget the fact that you paid into it for your whole life—it’s an entitlement, not a retirement fund), disappear? Then keep voting for the likes of Nobama and especially the ever-lying Republicans who learned it from Tricky Dick Nixon—this time in the duo of Romney/Ryan—who lie with such ease and grace that even journalists repeat it without checking. It takes somebody like Krugman and Baker to do the digging and call them on it.