After five years of Obama’s economic recovery, the American people are as gloomy as ever. According to a Bloomberg National Poll that was released this week, fewer people “are optimistic about the job market” or “the housing market” or “anticipate improvement in the economy’s strength over the next year.”
“The stories you choose to tell indicate your politics. Even leftwing critics referred to the latest round of American CIA films as not being political, when in fact of course the politics is embedded in them like the word Blackpool in a stick of Blackpool rock – it runs through it.” So in saying that you don’t take a stance, you in fact take a very powerful stance? “Yes, the characters you put on the screen, the stories you don’t tell, the whole way you treat people implies an attitude, and implies your politics. The Iraqis in these films are mostly deeply stereotypical, not to mention that the films don’t question why American is in Iraq in the first place.”
A Minneapolis television station aired an unprecedented 6-minute news report on PhotoReading during the evening news. The anchorman demonstrated PhotoReading and interviewed a University of Minnesota reading expert, a student who improved his grades from Cs to As, and other PhotoReaders.
In a revealing press release, Flanders said: “In many ways, I will be doing the same thing at J.P. Morgan Asset Management that I have been doing at the BBC…”
Yes, of that there can be little doubt. In fact, Flanders has been doing “the same thing” for most of her career, it seems. Before she joined the BBC, and before that the New York Times, she was “a speech writer and senior advisor to US Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers during the Clinton Administration”. That is, the banking criminals who contributed in significant measure to the destruction of western economies and the transfer of ordinary Americans’ wealth to the economic elite who really run the US.
How to become a mindless drone?
Chasing your dream requires you put everything out there and deal with the consequences. When aspiring entrepreneur Jia Jiang left corporate life to build his dream company, he had no idea it also meant facing crushing rejection.
The actual crisis of ‘confidence’ here lies not with the energy companies or any other money-driven corporation. Their primary motivation and function -greed and profit – is already established.
The real crisis of confidence, massively hidden by such diversionary speeches and reportage, lies in the complicit actions of a political class who allow, promote and excuse such market greed, and with a functionary media which says almost nothing to expose or challenge such manipulation and deceit.
47 million people are scraping by on food stamps, labor’s share of productivity gains have never been smaller, median household income has plummeted by 7.3 percent since the end of the recession, (Sentier Research), and 46.5 million Americans now live in poverty. (US Census Bureau). Inequality– which is already at levels not seen since the Gilded Age–continues to widen at an accelerating pace while the battered and rudderless economy drifts from one crisis to another.
The position I advocate is called maintaining “critical distance” and it the only insurance policy against being duped by our own side’s much more powerful and insidious propaganda. The denial of this obvious point by so many of those cheerleading another violent US-led assault on a Middle Eastern state makes me doubt their sincerity.
The families of 185 men, women and children killed by British forces actions, have been paid “barely £3,000 each.” However, where there are those “accidentally injured by British forces” – which can and does include the “accidental” loss of both legs, or arms, the average payment is: “at an average of £1,750 a time.”
Tripoli — Thousands of people in Libya remain locked up in militia prisons, outside of state control, more than two years after the revolution, according to a new UN report presented to the Security Council.
The report says many are suffering torture and mistreatment and calls the situation “unacceptable”.
When asked who he believed was responsible for the use of chemical munitions in Ghouta, the UN official, who would not permit disclosure of his identity, said: “Saudi intelligence was behind the attacks and unfortunately nobody will dare say that.” The official claims that this information was provided by rebels in Ghouta…
