ACLU stands for American Civil Liberties Union and is concerned with the protection of the Bill of Rights. Their interests don't extend beyond Americans border unless it's defending an American entity against a foreign entity in an American court.
While your legal action will make their lawyers happy it won't make their accountant happy. AT&T can only pay the bills of so many lawyers before they start losing money. File a law suit if they've wronged you, the CFO might call you and beg you to forgive the company.
Over the past 10 years, I've had utterly horrible service with anything with the AT&T letters in it. Cable, cell and long distance.
Amen brother. When I had AT&T cable I returned my cable box and disconnected the cable, but they didn't log the cable box as turned in for 6 months! They charged me and REFUSED to correct the charges! AT&T's cable operation (which they sold to Comcast here in Northern California) had such terrible customer service that when Comcast bought it they had to run a HUGE commercial campaign to convince people that Customer Service under Comcast was going to be different (and you know what, Comcast has been a happy wonderland in comparison.)
If it asn't for my pre-AT&T buyout contract with Cingular I wouldn't have any AT&T products. The AT&T brand name alone is enough to completely turn me off to a product.
It struck me as absolutely bizzare that SBC would want to be associated with the AT&T monopoly identity. Now I see that it goes even further than just a brand association, it is a monopoly mentality in customer management. As long as AT&T thinks that they can get away with treating their customers this way they will continue to treat them this way.
I forget to mention that the nurses were all Filipino spoke broken English and were nearly impossible to convey ideas to/from. While they were excellent nurses, the language barrier was significant and complicated the post-care instructions considerably.
Yes I did ask for more details, and never recieved them. It took them 3 hours to get a wheelchair to his room so they could discharge him. Apparently there is one wheel chair for the entire cardiac unit (there were about 40 patients.) At that point I was worried that if I started insisting they do anything else that we would miss our "wheelchair" and it'd be reassigned to another room and we'd spend another 3 hours waiting for our turn in the round robin scheme for discharges they had going on. I also figured I could just call the pharmacy or the cardiologist once I got home and get more detail (which I did, but because their computer system was fugged up they weren't sure if he had gotten his medication or not.)
My father had a heart attack about a month ago. He is a member of Kaiser. Kaiser has it's own hospitals, doctors, and entire network that you must use. His heart attack resulted in him needing to undergo heart surgery. (The advantage to this sort of system is that my father's heart surgeon performed over 1000 bypasses every year and as a result is in the top tier of experts.)
For me the biggest issue came when it was time for discharge. The handed me a hand written sheet with about 12 different medications scribbled in "Doctorese" cursive writing. I couldn't read half of the sheet, and only the briefest of notes for each medication was listed. I was shocked that I didn't receive a computer printout with the medication instructions, especially for medications needed to be taken in the case of quadruple bypass heart surgery.
After many hours of sorting through the medications, trying to figure out if he had already been given a dose at the hospital or not, etc... I realized that when I had visited a non-Kaiser emergency room for a sprained ankle I got a multi-page printout with very thorough instructions for the medication and aftercare. On another visit when I had 107 temperature it was the same thing. I was very certain of the doctors orders for post-visit care.
With Kaiser though I was left confused with short hand written notes about a dozen medications. Confusion is not a state I wanted to be in when I'm charged with the care of one of the most important people in the world (to me) who has a life threatening condition!
And an article interpreting that government report: article "Look at the jobs we are creating. Yes construction (higher paying jobs) rebounded but much of the real growth is in leisure and hospitality, which are very low paying jobs."
"First, almost all of the new jobs created in July were in the service industries (generally lower paying jobs with worse benefits) as the employment picture is still very bleak in the manufacturing and good producing sectors (generally higher paying jobs with better benefits)."
So I went and looked up the data for 2004 (the latest year the IRS has released data for.)
Here are the numbers. The top 10% earned 3.049 trillion dollars and paid.567 trillion in taxes. The bottom 90% earned 3.9 trillion dollars and paid.264 trillion in taxes.
For a total of.831 Trillion in paid taxes on a total of 6.949 trillion dollars earned..567/.831 = 68.23% of all income taxes paid to the US by the top 10%. Leaving approximately 31.77% paid by the bottom 90%.
What about the top 1% though?
1.3 Trillion dollars went to the top 1% of Americans. They paid 306 billion in taxes, or 36.89% of all taxes.
1.3/6.949 = 18% of all money earned in the United States going to the top 1% leaving 82% of wealth going to the bottom 99%.
The bottom 99% pays.497 trillion dollars in taxes, 63.11% of all income taxes.
Alright, so I stand corrected on my numbers regarding tax burdens. However I must say that the minimum cost of living for those in the lowest 90th percentile is a far greater percentage of their income than it is for the wealthy in the top 10%. That the bottom 90% should be paying less, they need the money to survive.
As for the higher tax rate on the wealthy... Sure it must be awful to have to pay such high taxes when your wealth is being generated in part by the infrastructure you're paying taxes for. (Highways, roads, police, etc...)
"The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes. If that isn't "sharing the wealth," then socialism is much nastier than I thought."
Fascinating, that 10% you're talking about also earns 95% of the countries wealth in a year! Meanwhile the 90% that earns 5% of the country's wealth each year is paying 30% of the taxes! Wow, what a burden that must be for the bottom 90%, paying 6 times the rate the top 10% does.
Your one experience doesn't dictate the reality of the state of the countries middle class economics in general. It's easy to insulate yourself against the "losers" who make minimum wage when you live in a gated community or a suburban housing tract that is 4 miles across filled with identical homes with other people working similar jobs. It's easy to never see the people who are suffering under the Bush administrations policies.
You're trolling. You must be. I find it hard to believe anybody could be this blind. How about you login and resubmit your demand for evidence? I thought so.
Richard Daly was how long ago? He's been dead for 30 years, so maybe it's time for you to give up the ghost. We're still saddled with a President who obtained office through systematic election fraud carried out on a national level by the Republican party.
Who cares about the economy if the people at the top aren't sharing the wealth? Unemployment is down, but only because people are taking jobs that paid 1/2 of what their previous job paid. Why would they do that? Because those are the only jobs the fat modern day robber barons are willing to create.
Globalization is a race to the bottom for the middle class.
"Please show me ONE SHRED of credible evidence that Republicans did this more than Democrats. ONE SHRED."
You have got to be kidding. The machines are owned by the Republicans, not outright, but indirectly. That's how they do all these things, indirectly. They hire a whole boat load of tiny companies to do a small thing here, and a small thing there, and next thing you know you've got an entire network of fraud. And it's all been architected by the RNC.
If only the Democrats were nearly this ingenious in their electioneering efforts. Instead you have the occasional local idiot who runs out and does something stupid "for the party." There's no architecting behind it... no grand scheme. It's just some idiots doing things they think is going to help the party which ends up hurting it.
Oh please. Like Democrats didn't do the very same thing. Remember how the tires on all vans the Republicans in some county had rented to take people to the polls were slashed the night before the election? And in all this US Attorney firing flap it came out that some of the people the DNC contracted to run a voter registration drive (in Utah, I think) had falsely registered children to vote.
I'm sure that some of the Republican operatives were not saints either, just as I'm sure that these sorts of things are not representative of most Democratic operatives. You are either beyond naive or willfully blinded if you think that this sort of stuff was one-sided.
You're comparing that to altering vote totals on election night in the Republican owned voting machines? You need to get some perspective.
Perhaps the people who aren't voting shouldn't be voting. God knows the people who aren't voting are clearly the ones who aren't educated enough on the stakes to know why they should be voting. I'd hate to see a law that would compel politically uneducated citizens to enter the voting both to vote on civil right limiting propositions.
So, what you're saying is that two wrongs make a right? Or in the case of the Republican party a thousand wrongs and a handful of Democratic wrongs make a right?
I also feel that there is a principle at stake here beyond smart implementations. What if a whistle blower is driving around Washington DC right now with proof of Presidential wrong doing. This whistle blower is looking for a wide open WiFi spot where he can anonymously set up a yahoo account and email his info to the Washington Post, or FoxNews, or NBC?
It's a bit contrived, but not at all improbable. You can send anything you want anonymously through the US Postal System, why should the Internet be any different? Should the US Postal System have exclusive domain over anonymous communication?
The Republican party didn't win 2004's Presidential election legally. They cheated in many races. I was doing "Get Out The Vote" work in Nevada and witness the Republican intimidation tactics personally. When I saw the news coverage of what was happening in Ohio I wasn't surprised at all. Now there's this, once again, I'm not surprised. The Republicans targeted that state for election tampering and they won as a result. And yet there are Republicans who will defend this to no end. Who will reply to this and basically say "it doesn't matter that the RNC controlled the voting machines at every step, from design, software engineering, fabrication, delivery, vote tabulation, and result announcements!"
Our democracy is in great peril as long as these "win at all costs" idiots are in the game.
Anonymity is an American tradition. I disagree that we have to register in order to use the Internet. If I want to give away my broadband access to the masses for free, and anonymously, I should be able to do so. If the masses cause a problem I should also expect to have my ISP revoke my access.
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In this case though the "crime" was committed on US soil, by a US company. Extradition may not apply, which is why we have extradition hearings.
ACLU stands for American Civil Liberties Union and is concerned with the protection of the Bill of Rights. Their interests don't extend beyond Americans border unless it's defending an American entity against a foreign entity in an American court.
While your legal action will make their lawyers happy it won't make their accountant happy. AT&T can only pay the bills of so many lawyers before they start losing money. File a law suit if they've wronged you, the CFO might call you and beg you to forgive the company.
Over the past 10 years, I've had utterly horrible service with anything with the AT&T letters in it. Cable, cell and long distance.
Amen brother. When I had AT&T cable I returned my cable box and disconnected the cable, but they didn't log the cable box as turned in for 6 months! They charged me and REFUSED to correct the charges! AT&T's cable operation (which they sold to Comcast here in Northern California) had such terrible customer service that when Comcast bought it they had to run a HUGE commercial campaign to convince people that Customer Service under Comcast was going to be different (and you know what, Comcast has been a happy wonderland in comparison.)
If it asn't for my pre-AT&T buyout contract with Cingular I wouldn't have any AT&T products. The AT&T brand name alone is enough to completely turn me off to a product.
It struck me as absolutely bizzare that SBC would want to be associated with the AT&T monopoly identity. Now I see that it goes even further than just a brand association, it is a monopoly mentality in customer management. As long as AT&T thinks that they can get away with treating their customers this way they will continue to treat them this way.
I forget to mention that the nurses were all Filipino spoke broken English and were nearly impossible to convey ideas to/from. While they were excellent nurses, the language barrier was significant and complicated the post-care instructions considerably.
Yes I did ask for more details, and never recieved them. It took them 3 hours to get a wheelchair to his room so they could discharge him. Apparently there is one wheel chair for the entire cardiac unit (there were about 40 patients.) At that point I was worried that if I started insisting they do anything else that we would miss our "wheelchair" and it'd be reassigned to another room and we'd spend another 3 hours waiting for our turn in the round robin scheme for discharges they had going on. I also figured I could just call the pharmacy or the cardiologist once I got home and get more detail (which I did, but because their computer system was fugged up they weren't sure if he had gotten his medication or not.)
Considering he was having a heart attack "shopping around" wasn't exactly our priority at the moment.
My father had a heart attack about a month ago. He is a member of Kaiser. Kaiser has it's own hospitals, doctors, and entire network that you must use. His heart attack resulted in him needing to undergo heart surgery. (The advantage to this sort of system is that my father's heart surgeon performed over 1000 bypasses every year and as a result is in the top tier of experts.)
For me the biggest issue came when it was time for discharge. The handed me a hand written sheet with about 12 different medications scribbled in "Doctorese" cursive writing. I couldn't read half of the sheet, and only the briefest of notes for each medication was listed. I was shocked that I didn't receive a computer printout with the medication instructions, especially for medications needed to be taken in the case of quadruple bypass heart surgery.
After many hours of sorting through the medications, trying to figure out if he had already been given a dose at the hospital or not, etc... I realized that when I had visited a non-Kaiser emergency room for a sprained ankle I got a multi-page printout with very thorough instructions for the medication and aftercare. On another visit when I had 107 temperature it was the same thing. I was very certain of the doctors orders for post-visit care.
With Kaiser though I was left confused with short hand written notes about a dozen medications. Confusion is not a state I wanted to be in when I'm charged with the care of one of the most important people in the world (to me) who has a life threatening condition!
Is there an audience for fighting the same beast over and over again, and watching the same cut scene "magic spell" repeatedly for 10 years?
here are a couple more sources: BLS.gov
And an article interpreting that government report: article
"Look at the jobs we are creating. Yes construction (higher paying jobs) rebounded but much of the real growth is in leisure and hospitality, which are very low paying jobs."
Sure thing, here you go:
"First, almost all of the new jobs created in July were in the service industries (generally lower paying jobs with worse benefits) as the employment picture is still very bleak in the manufacturing and good producing sectors (generally higher paying jobs with better benefits)."
Source: OMBwatch
So I went and looked up the data for 2004 (the latest year the IRS has released data for.)
.567 trillion in taxes. .264 trillion in taxes.
.831 Trillion in paid taxes on a total of 6.949 trillion dollars earned. .567/.831 = 68.23% of all income taxes paid to the US by the top 10%. Leaving approximately 31.77% paid by the bottom 90%.
.497 trillion dollars in taxes, 63.11% of all income taxes.
0 .html
Here are the numbers.
The top 10% earned 3.049 trillion dollars and paid
The bottom 90% earned 3.9 trillion dollars and paid
For a total of
What about the top 1% though?
1.3 Trillion dollars went to the top 1% of Americans. They paid 306 billion in taxes, or 36.89% of all taxes.
1.3/6.949 = 18% of all money earned in the United States going to the top 1% leaving 82% of wealth going to the bottom 99%.
The bottom 99% pays
Source Table 1: http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/25
Alright, so I stand corrected on my numbers regarding tax burdens. However I must say that the minimum cost of living for those in the lowest 90th percentile is a far greater percentage of their income than it is for the wealthy in the top 10%. That the bottom 90% should be paying less, they need the money to survive.
As for the higher tax rate on the wealthy... Sure it must be awful to have to pay such high taxes when your wealth is being generated in part by the infrastructure you're paying taxes for. (Highways, roads, police, etc...)
"The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes. If that isn't "sharing the wealth," then socialism is much nastier than I thought."
Fascinating, that 10% you're talking about also earns 95% of the countries wealth in a year! Meanwhile the 90% that earns 5% of the country's wealth each year is paying 30% of the taxes! Wow, what a burden that must be for the bottom 90%, paying 6 times the rate the top 10% does.
Thank you. I was going to say the same thing.
Your one experience doesn't dictate the reality of the state of the countries middle class economics in general. It's easy to insulate yourself against the "losers" who make minimum wage when you live in a gated community or a suburban housing tract that is 4 miles across filled with identical homes with other people working similar jobs. It's easy to never see the people who are suffering under the Bush administrations policies.
You're trolling. You must be. I find it hard to believe anybody could be this blind. How about you login and resubmit your demand for evidence? I thought so.
Richard Daly was how long ago? He's been dead for 30 years, so maybe it's time for you to give up the ghost. We're still saddled with a President who obtained office through systematic election fraud carried out on a national level by the Republican party.
There is a REAL threat RIGHT NOW.
Who cares about the economy if the people at the top aren't sharing the wealth? Unemployment is down, but only because people are taking jobs that paid 1/2 of what their previous job paid. Why would they do that? Because those are the only jobs the fat modern day robber barons are willing to create.
Globalization is a race to the bottom for the middle class.
"Please show me ONE SHRED of credible evidence that Republicans did this more than Democrats. ONE SHRED."
You have got to be kidding. The machines are owned by the Republicans, not outright, but indirectly. That's how they do all these things, indirectly. They hire a whole boat load of tiny companies to do a small thing here, and a small thing there, and next thing you know you've got an entire network of fraud. And it's all been architected by the RNC.
If only the Democrats were nearly this ingenious in their electioneering efforts. Instead you have the occasional local idiot who runs out and does something stupid "for the party." There's no architecting behind it... no grand scheme. It's just some idiots doing things they think is going to help the party which ends up hurting it.
Oh please. Like Democrats didn't do the very same thing. Remember how the tires on all vans the Republicans in some county had rented to take people to the polls were slashed the night before the election? And in all this US Attorney firing flap it came out that some of the people the DNC contracted to run a voter registration drive (in Utah, I think) had falsely registered children to vote.
I'm sure that some of the Republican operatives were not saints either, just as I'm sure that these sorts of things are not representative of most Democratic operatives. You are either beyond naive or willfully blinded if you think that this sort of stuff was one-sided.
You're comparing that to altering vote totals on election night in the Republican owned voting machines? You need to get some perspective.
Perhaps the people who aren't voting shouldn't be voting. God knows the people who aren't voting are clearly the ones who aren't educated enough on the stakes to know why they should be voting. I'd hate to see a law that would compel politically uneducated citizens to enter the voting both to vote on civil right limiting propositions.
So, what you're saying is that two wrongs make a right? Or in the case of the Republican party a thousand wrongs and a handful of Democratic wrongs make a right?
Stop deflecting. Your party is vile.
I think you are correct in many ways.
I also feel that there is a principle at stake here beyond smart implementations. What if a whistle blower is driving around Washington DC right now with proof of Presidential wrong doing. This whistle blower is looking for a wide open WiFi spot where he can anonymously set up a yahoo account and email his info to the Washington Post, or FoxNews, or NBC?
It's a bit contrived, but not at all improbable. You can send anything you want anonymously through the US Postal System, why should the Internet be any different? Should the US Postal System have exclusive domain over anonymous communication?
The Republican party didn't win 2004's Presidential election legally. They cheated in many races. I was doing "Get Out The Vote" work in Nevada and witness the Republican intimidation tactics personally. When I saw the news coverage of what was happening in Ohio I wasn't surprised at all. Now there's this, once again, I'm not surprised. The Republicans targeted that state for election tampering and they won as a result. And yet there are Republicans who will defend this to no end. Who will reply to this and basically say "it doesn't matter that the RNC controlled the voting machines at every step, from design, software engineering, fabrication, delivery, vote tabulation, and result announcements!"
Our democracy is in great peril as long as these "win at all costs" idiots are in the game.
Anonymity is an American tradition. I disagree that we have to register in order to use the Internet. If I want to give away my broadband access to the masses for free, and anonymously, I should be able to do so. If the masses cause a problem I should also expect to have my ISP revoke my access.