"President Obama is expected to set the major theme for his 2012 re-election campaign with a State of the Union address on January 24 that portrays him as the defender of the middle class and Republicans as the party of the rich and big corporations."
The guy who has done the most in decades to destroy the "middle class" is now its defender?
Ruin it while defending it. Looked it up.
Rome absorbed and economically ruined -- 96 to 250 CE
During the first half of the 200s, taxation encouraged men of commerce to hoard their money rather than invest it. To pay soldiers, emperors debased money. Prices skyrocketed. The empire's middle class went bankrupt, and roads deteriorated.
More people had become beggars, and many others feared that they too would soon be impoverished. In Rome and other big cities, proletarians remained disinclined to organize themselves against authority, but here and there in the countryside desperate peasants did revolt, but their uprisings were not coordinated and not widespread enough to challenge the empire militarily. In various parts of the empire, bands of desperate people wandered the countryside, surviving by theft. In 235 bands of brigands had swept through Italy. In Gaul, hordes of people roamed about, pillaging as they went. Piracy grew on the Aegean Sea, and tribal people from the Sahara attacked Roman cities along the coast of North Africa.
Disorders sometimes cut off trade routes. By 250, Rome's trade with China and India had ended.
Operations return to normal at West Coast ports (after freeloaders leave)
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — West Coast ports tried to get back to business as usual Tuesday as they tallied their losses after anti-Wall Street protests that blocked trucks and curbed business along busy waterfronts.
Amazing.