online consumer rape, by Seattle Direct Coffee

Complaints Board Seattle Direct Coffee--Trusting soul that I am, I have been bilked by Seattle Direct Coffee, and it appears they've been getting away with it for a while. Here's my comment, way down the list, on the Complaints Board--

I just got the same hustle. I feel as though I've been raped. The grinder, a Cuisinart [made in China, by the way], stopped working after a few days. I opened up one bag of the coffee, and it was terrible--I never would have bought such dry, tasteless crap in a shop. They also sent me some sort of Hawaiian Hazelnut frou-frou blend that I never would have selected on my own.

I'm blogging this, contacting the BBB online, and asking my state's attorney general to see what they can do about it. This is fraud, and it seems that it's been going on for a good while now.

This was one of a package of deals that offered Microsoft Office 2007 as the premium.

"the neighborhood's the victim"

Mason prosecutes mortgage-fraud schemes in Solon worth $2.6 million - cleveland.com -- Bill Mason strikes a chord that should resonate with all of us, and this idea may form the basis for communities to recover from the lenders, the investment bankers, the brokers, the servicers, the hedge funds, and all others who have made transactional, short-term profits churning our capital and using our legal system against us, as it suits them.

Mason praised Solon police for paying special attention to mortgage fraud, a crime that many police departments are just beginning to understand.

Countywide, the prosecutor's office has so far this year filed 12 cases involving 60 properties, $8.4 million in loans and more than 130 defendants. Mason, who has an assistant prosecutor and three investigators focusing on mortgage fraud and related offenses, promised to aid any cities that bring cases to his attention.

"We want to get the corporations and people who are doing these practices," Mason said. "The neighborhood's the victim."

these are the same people who bring you SB117

Wait a minute! Where'd my phone card time go? - cleveland.com -- Let's start putting two and two together for a change, around here. Here's a story of how AT&T cheats customers on their calling-card phone minutes, perfectly legally, using "the fine print." This is one of the ways they help transfer wealth out of our hands and into theirs, where they can then use it in a lobbying and advertising effort to get SB117 passed, ostensibly in the interests of increased competition which would benefit us, the consumers.

Basically, all we should know about AT&T is that they're not trustworthy, and on that basis, out of hand, we should have our legislators bounce SB117 right out of the legislative process. Make no mistake, these two issues are related; they speak to the character of a corporation that has a history of exploitation of the public and quibbling over legalisms.

Get ready to defend yourselves, if your legislators down in Columbus don't. Here's part of the PD article; the bold emphasis is mine:

AT&T sells a card good for 500 minutes of long-distance calling. But if you use it to call from Mayfield Heights to Cincinnati, your minutes will be used up three times faster than you'd expect.

The reason's in the very fine print on the back of the card.

"Minute value applies to state-to-state calls only. . . . For calls that begin and end in the same state, minutes are deducted at these rates . . ." What follows is a long list that says in-state calls are charged at the regular 60-second minute in a handful of places, including the U.S. Virgin Islands, but it's 3-for-1 in most states, including Ohio; 5-for-1 in many others, including Pennsylvania; and a blazing 8-for-1 in Missouri, New Mexico and North and South Dakota.

This time manipulation is beyond government regulation. State agencies have no jurisdiction over long-distance carriers. And the Federal Communications Commission doesn't regulate long-distance rates. AT&T says it's the FCC's fault. In June 2006, an agency ruling required AT&T to pay state access fees for in-state calls. It decided to pass those fees along by speeding up the clock.

A spokesman for the Ohio Consumers' Counsel said AT&T is the only company it knows is compressing time. But there are other kinds of hidden fees, and the Counsel's office offers fact sheets; call 1-877-742-5622 or check online at www.pickocc.org.

Denise delivers a wake-up call--another strong voice emerging

Save Our Land: Losing Our History: You need to read the whole thing, about the emerging pattern of fraud and abuse. Denise nails it. About the only thing we don't have here is a recounting of how Allega, under contract, ripped the bridge's cantilevered sidewalk and gutter system off the bridge and accelerated it's surface decay, hastening they day when they thought they would get to pour more concrete. It's a hurt-and-rescue story that needs telling, in detail, even though they're now supposedly barred from doing work in the city (another "joke," perhaps?). We need to start talking about restitution. We need to start taking our money back. There's a pattern here, and Denise is onto it.

"The Fulton Road Bridge has been destroyed. Breuer Tower is on the destruction list. Other significant buildings downtown are endangered, if ODOT pursues its current plan for the Innerbelt.

WAKE UP, CLEVELAND!!

We who have been labeled the poorest city in America are losing our hard-earned dollars hand-over-fist to bogus projects our government and agencies have cooked up. Not only that, but we are becoming ever poorer in terms of our historic infrastructure and heritage"