Let's See. . .

Just Your Current Situation via Reality-Based Information...
by The Old Hippie Because You Keep “Allowing,” And So Far...  Nothing else.

-  Naomi Klein Strikes Back at Critics of Her ‘Shock Doctrine’ Book       “The Shock Doctrine” has withstood a year's worth of intense media       scrutiny in dozens of countries ... this is the benefit of a methodology that       is grounded not in anecdotes but in thousands of sourced facts and figures.   -  Twenty-Six Things We Now Know Seven Years After 9/11       Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary       citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001.  This is the 7th annual       look backwards, a 2008 update that contains new information and surmisings       about those horrific events and what followed.

Quote of the Week

St. Paul was not ultimately about selecting a presidential candidate.  It was about the power of the corporate state to carry out pre-emptive searches, seizures and arrests.  It was about squads of police in high-tech riot gear, many with drawn semiautomatic weapons, bursting into houses.  It was about seized computers, journals and political literature.  It was about shutting down independent journalism, even at gunpoint.  It was about charging protesters with “conspiracy to commit riot,” a rarely used statute that criminalizes legal dissent.  It was about 500 people held in open-air detention centers.  It was about the rising Orwellian state that has hollowed out the insides of America, cast away all that was good and vital, and donned its skin to shackle us all...

St. Paul is a window into our future.

Chris Hedges

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A“Below The Fold” bonus -related- article...

Why An Economy for All?
[ emphasis are mine, not the author’s ]

“Conservatives call it the “greatest story never told,” an economy in which jobs are up, profits are up, stock prices are healthy, productivity is increasing, and inflation is low.  In reality, today’s economy is more reminiscent of the Gilded Age.  A few people at the top are profiting handsomely, but the myth of a booming economy does not reflect the everyday experience of working class Americans.  In fact, most Americans think we are either in or near a recession.

A majority of Americans struggle with stagnant wages and rising costs of living.  They see good jobs getting shipped abroad while companies use global competition as a bludgeon to exact cuts in health care, pensions and other benefits for the jobs that are here.  For the first time, parents worry that their children won’t be better off than the generation before them.  As the housing bubble bursts and millions of Americans face foreclosure on their homes, Americans’ economic situation is only going to get worse.”