You're right, Rick - the smart people will never be on your side...

To understand the plight of the American middle class today - you have to understand that a crime has taken place. The Middle Class isn't dying today because of a random financial crisis in 2007 triggering a deep, and long-lasting recession. The Middle Class is dying today because of a decades-long - arguably criminal - effort to rig the American economy in favor of the corporate elite - and transfer massive amounts of wealth from the vast majority of Americans up to the top 1%. We're now in the final stages of this effort - and more and more Americans are waking up to what's really happening. In a recent article published for AlterNet - David Degraw - highlights each incident of theft against the middle class by the corporate elite. There're the Reagan tax cuts and destruction of labor unions beginning in the 1980's that fueled an enormous pay gap between CEOs and workers - so that 30 years ago, CEOs made 25 times more than their average worker - and yet today make as much as 500 times more than their average worker. Those same policies have resulted in the top 1% seeing their share of national income triple over the last three decades, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop by 20%. Years of lobbying and outright bribery have rigged the tax code against working Americans - forcing them to pay a higher tax rate than members of the corporate elite like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett.