In 21st century America, the few people who have experienced income gains are the executives and shareholders of firms who offshored their production for US markets, Wall Street which makes bets covered by the Federal Reserve, and the military-security complex which has been enriched by the neoconservatives’ wars.
Every other American has lost.
a deepening global Depression just began. It’ll last years before ending, and cause grave harm to billions worldwide, not responsible for their leaders’ malfeasance, especially those domiciled on Wall Street, complicit with political puppets in Washington they own.
Moreover, the greater pain caused, the more they benefit like their Western counterparts, wrecking their economies for personal gain.
No wonder astute analysts like Grantham expressed lack of confidence in America’s leaders, disgust with a “dysfunctional Congress,” and questioned “capitalism itself,” perhaps self-destructing as he wrote.
For billions of global victims, it can’t happen a moment too soon, if it isn’t already too late to help.
But unlike the more overt despotism of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain has benefited from the tutelage of British deception and, in more recent years, that of Washington too. Bahrain has thus embraced – very superficially – the trappings of constitutional government and rule of law. In reality, the government and courts are appointed arms of the Khalifa clan. Scratch the surface and the same abominable despotism reigns as in neighboring Saudi Arabia.
A documentary, directed by Chis Smith, on Michael Ruppert, a police officer turned independent reporter who predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness.
Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who describes himself as an investigative reporter and radical thinker, has authored books on the events of the September 11 attacks and of energy issues. Critics call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist but he’s been proved to be truly prophetic.
The economic logic behind austerity remains as flawed now as it was when first announced by the coalition. Rather than understand the deficit as a consequence of a global recession decimating demand in the economy, with a sharp fall in tax revenues due to a sharp rise in unemployment, the government is intent on deepening the same cycle by introducing drastic cuts in spending in the forlorn hope that the private sector will invest and create new jobs to replace those lost. But with a lack of demand for goods and services, the private sector is still refusing to invest, despite sitting on a huge cash surplus. The most obvious example of this is the banking sector’s continuing refusal to lend, despite repeated pleas by the government, and despite being bailed out by the UK taxpayer to the tune of tens of billions of pounds over the past four years.
“In the last three months alone 21,000 NHS employees have lost their jobs, and those nurses, doctors and other health professionals that remain feel that no-one is listening to them and that they are being asked to achieve more with less. As a result morale is at rock bottom.
“This is no way to run our most important, most cherished national institution. Those who sacrificed so much during World War Two to build a better future for themselves and their families didn’t want this.
Artists, like rebels, are dangerous. They speak a truth that totalitarian systems do not want spoken. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.” Without artists such as musician Ry Cooder and playwrights Howard Brenton and Tarell Alvin McCraney we will not succeed. If we are to face what lies ahead, we will not only have to organize and feed ourselves, we will have to begin to feel deeply, to face unpleasant truths, to recover empathy and to live passionately. Then we can fight.
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.”
Walkouts and protests by fast food workers demanding higher wages and collective bargaining rights began last November and spread to 60 cities nationwide at the end of August. It is an inspiring grass-roots movement led by some of the nation’s most underpaid employees and should be supported by everyone who has a sense of fairness.
In a continent ravaged by those whom Nixon called “our bastards”, Latin American governments have defied the likes of Clarridge and implemented much of Allende’s dream of social democracy – which was Kissinger’s fear. Today, most of Latin America is independent of US foreign policy and free of its vigilantism. Poverty has been cut almost by half; children live beyond the age of five; the elderly learn to read and write. These remarkable advances are invariably reported in bad faith in the west and ignored by the “realists”. That must never lessen their value as a source of optimism and inspiration for all of us.
The famed 99 percent meme that the movement blazed into mainstream consciousness still lives on in the mass mind, like a festering infected thorn in the side of Goliath. As that mysterious and mystical being once said, “You can’t kill an idea.” As for the movement, it is presently a chasm of unfulfilled potential, temporarily infiltrated and infested with saboteurs, tamed by the forces of centralization and co-option, fractured by factionalism and ego-driven agendas. Yet, it still glimmers on the periphery, just over the horizon. Beneath the calm surface, there is a vast ecosystem of latent energy ready to erupt once again.
