We Don't Have an American Press, Instead We Have the Casey Anthony Reality Show

For over a week we've heard nothing else by the press but Casey Anthony. nancygrace.jpg Imagine what would happen if Nancy Grace used her never ending tape loop rants of hatred against tot mom to spew and prattle about the U.S. economy? Instead of some bizarre post traumatic public stress disorder, stuck in a rut, obsessive thought mantra, repeating ad nauseum, she's guilty, we might hear our politicians are selling this nation down the river. The real duct tape is over the mouths of anyone reporting our economy and jobs are being shipped out overseas.

 

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Think we could get one solid, economic reality based rant show on cable? Nope, although you were can get plenty served up with fictional spin. That right, our press, full court, 24/7, is a one trick pony, drowning the airwaves with rants about one crime and trial.

It's not like this hasn't happened before. The press always takes one non-story story and beats it to death, inciting and inflaming a frenzied obsession that allows no other thought into the mind. Beating the drum 24/7 or in this case over three years, drowning out events and issues that actually affect you, especially in the pocket book.

What this does is drown out the real news. Americans. Are you really that stupid to literally get obsessed and controlled by corporate media?

Folks, don't you think the economy is just a little more important and actually impacts your lives than one crime and trial? The reality is any story which really impacts the daily lives of working America is not covered or spun to fiction. It's so bad, broadcast news is now called cable noise for that is pretty much what it is, the random noise of punditry.

 

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Take this NFIB press release for instance. It shows hiring is a bust for June by small business. Do you care there is negative job creation and while corporations create jobs abroad they try to claim America doesn't have the skills, a brazen, bold faced lie?

New jobs are not to be found on Main Street. For small firms, reported job losses per firm declined sharply in June as did the net percent of firms that increased employment over the last 3 months. A seasonally adjusted net negative 7 percent of owners increased employment, a 4 point increase from May.

“Seasonally adjusted, 9 percent of owners hired new employees last month, a 1 point decline from May, while 16 percent reduced employment, a 3 point increase. The remaining 75 percent of owners made no change in employment. Manufacturing was the only winning sector to post average positive net growth; but job losses were posted by firms in financial, non-professional services, construction, negating any gains made.

“The poor recovery in the jobs numbers is a result of very low housing starts activity and lagging expenditures on ‘services,’ both labor intensive industries dominated by small firms. The most recent reports on consumer spending show continued weakness (except paying more for food and gas) and housing starts show no hope for much job creation in construction.

“Fifteen percent (seasonally adjusted) reported unfilled job openings (up 3 points), indicating a decline in the unemployment rate. Over the next three months, 11 percent plan to increase employment (down 2 points), and 7 percent plan to reduce their workforce (down 1 point), yielding a seasonally adjusted net 3 percent of owners planning to create new jobs, a 4 point gain from May. So, going forward, the job picture is a bit brighter than June’s actual dismal performance.

“But overall, the June employment numbers quashed any hope of establishing positive trend in job creation. It was a serious reversal.”

There is only so long the poverty stricken desperate can diverge their stress on some crime du jour.

Or how about covering this story which shows the latest corporate demand for a foreign tax repatriation holiday is a job killer and yet another squeeze on the U.S. worker as well as the deficit and economy.

If the objective of government policy is to provide a boon to stock holders, at the expense of non-stock holding taxpayers (you know which income deciles those folks would be in), then this would appear to be an ideal policy measure.

How about giving Clyde Prestowitz Nancy Grace's time slot to pound into America the U.S. is declining rapidly and it's all due to bad policy by our government. All he has to do is get the flames a burnin' is quote any reasonable person on the details:

1. The destruction of American industrial infrastructure. As former Intel chief Andy Grove says, it is absolutely critical that we continue to manufacture "commodity" industrial items, like bridges and rivets and bearings and computer chips and tires and steel and aluminum and commodity chemicals. Once we lose that, we lose the workforce. It takes many, many years to build up an industrial workforce, but only 10 years to destroy it. When younger people see jobs being lost in manufacturing, they turn away from it, with the result that the workforce dies off. That is exactly what is happening today -- industries cannot find enough well-trained young people.

2. The second problem is that as the industrial workforce (the people who make things that we can export) is reduced and laid off, they (and their children) go into "service" businesses, particularly health care. But health care is a giant monopoly -- the doctors have an iron grip on it. There is no competition there. What it means is that the only way more jobs are created in "meaningful" health care -- jobs like technologist or lab tech (as opposed to those in bedpan health care) -- is by doctors prescribing more MRIs, CAT scans, PET scans, and so on. That increases medical costs, especially because Medicare requires no second opinion. You walk in and before you know it, the doctor has prescribed 10 tests, because no one is checking; and he, and the hospital, make more money from more tests. So increasing health-care employment is not a winning strategy from a national economic viewpoint.

3. So now we have all these unemployed factory workers -- at least 4 million of them, thanks to China (8 million factory jobs have gone to China). What that means is that the income tax returns to states have dropped, exasperated by the collapse of the housing bubble. So the states cut back on the most productive government activity, education and community colleges and state universities. What that in turn means is that more R&D gets done in China, and more industries move there, because that is where the workers will be. The United States is going into a death spiral. I have the attendance record of the recent Materials Research Society conference in San Francisco. It is probably 60 to 70 percent Chinese. Americans were rather scarce. Most of these Chinese students are going back. What does it tell you? China is going all-out to capture the technology leadership. The country is offering terrific opportunities to the best Chinese students to go back, and the students are taking them up. We spend money to educate them, and they go back to China.

4. The Chinese are now not only demanding that factories move there in high-tech industries (for instance, Evergreen Solar, which closed down a plant in Massachusetts that was making solar cells and relocated to China), but that R&D also move there. I know this firsthand because I work with a company in Massachusetts that has developed great solar cell technology but cannot get capital here to expand. The Chinese offered us $30+ million to move to China, but we had to move the R&D there too, including us. We told them to go to hell.

5. I just came back from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers solar cell conference, an annual meeting that brings in lots of venture capitalists and industrialists. They all said the same thing: It's impossible to raise capital in the United States, and you cannot compete against China because land is free, water is free, electricity is sold far below production cost, there are no environmental restrictions, capital is freely available, and they can (and do) copy anyone's technology. How is this free trade? Subsidies have to be factored in when calculating cost. And if RMB were freely convertible, wouldn't the cost of doing business in China be 30 to 40 percent higher?

6. The only way to get out of this spiral is to recognize that to stay competitive, we must educate, we must retain and rebuild our industrial infrastructure, we must lead in R&D, because nothing less than our economic and national security well-being is at stake. Once the industrial infrastructure is gone, and with it the R&D infrastructure, we are back to being an agrarian country. I am not exaggerating. Guess who has this figured out? Hedge funds. They are buying up farmland in Iowa. Over the last five or so years, the price of Iowa farmland has tripled to $11,000 to $12,000 per acre, from about $4,000. Many of my farm friends are worth millions on their land.

7. Turning to national security, once manufacturing goes to China, how do we make F-35 fighter jets? How do we make nuclear subs? How do we make tanks? Should we buy those also from China?

Even in politics, we get talking points and buzz phrases. Did you know social security is under attack in the debt ceiling limit negotiations? That's right and they are doing it with the inflation adjustment, so it involves math, which they know quite well will go under America's radar.

One of the more insidious possibilities in a debt limit deal is the use of something called “chained CPI,” which would result in changes to how the government calculates the annual cost of living adjustment. This would impact both how tax brackets change on an annual basis, and also how the COLA gets applied in federal programs, particularly Social Security. And it would save quite a bit of money, around $300 billion over 10 years if applied to the whole of government. Congressional aides have confirmed that this is on the table in any deal.

Let’s look at reductions in the growth of Social Security benefits, for example. The Congressional Budget Office estimates a reduction in benefits from the baseline by $108 billion over 10 years. According to Social Security’s chief actuary, beneficiaries who retire at age 65 and receive the average benefit would get roughly $500 less in their annual benefit at age 75, and $1,000 less at age 85. The benefit cut compounds over time, as the COLA adjustment reduces every year. As this would take effect immediately, it also represents a benefit cut for current retirees.

Or how about this? While millions lose their homes in foreclosures, banks are busy reducing principle on mortgages where people didn't ask for a reduction.

Two of the nation’s biggest lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are quietly modifying loans for tens of thousands of borrowers who have not asked for help but whom the banks deem to be at special risk.

Rula Giosmas is one of the beneficiaries. Last year she received a letter from Chase saying it was cutting in half the amount she owed on her condominium.

Ms. Giosmas, who lives in Miami, was not in default on her $300,000 loan. She did not understand why she would receive this gift — although she wasted no time in taking it.

Or how about outrage >Bank of America is trying to settle it's toxic, fictional derivatives based on bad mortgages for a mere $8.5 billion?

Pick any economic story and get to the real details and that should put Americans on a rage loop by itself. What's more horrific than squeezing out any real journalism is when economic topics are covered, we have economic fiction and brazen lies presented as fact. When, o when will journalists stop presenting economic lies as fact?

Come on America, turn off that rant tube and start paying attention. It's only your economic livelihood at stake here.

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Comments

No network news works for me

I am just returning from a run to the store and visit with some friends in a nearby town. Something was said about a "Casey" having been found, I thought, not guilty. Or maybe guilty. I really don't know.

I assumed they were talking about a local case at the county seat. But I know now that they probably were talking about one "Casey Anthony."

My laptop does me just fine. All the news I can handle. Don't own a television set as such.

On the way out, my friend asked me if I wanted to stay for a while to watch the network news on his new cable-connected widescreen ...

Thanks but no thanks.

However, thanks to Robert Oaks and others for information sources like EP.

online everywhere as well unfortunately

It's what prompted me to write this for even online, print press, it's the same, 24/7 this story. But it's worse than that. There are a host of stories where they all just report "the one", from Michael Jackson to Balloon boy to Octomom or whatever, it's always almost on the trivial side but it sure isn't something major ....like BTW, under the guise of the "debt ceiling" they are cutting your social security benefits and you don't even realize it.

And NPR News is no better

However, there's some independently produced stuff that is carried on some public radio stations that are affiliated with NPR. BBC is sometimes good reporting on U.S.A. politics. The worst is the little news breaks on the C&W and R&R stations that so many working guys listen to in the background.

Online, cable or broadcast, you have to make an effort to be selective.

And, yeah, that's the key to all of it. You just cannot take any of the standard news sources without a large dose of critical thinking. Same thing is true of all the presumably independent online sources.

I support net neutrality. I THINK that's what I support, although the devil seems to be in the details what with the giants pushing for this and that. Concentrated-ownership media would love to co-opt "net neutrality" to mean whatever they say it means.

The bottom line is that I compare the content of all news sources to determine if it jibes with what I see and hear around me. You don't always have to agree with the slant of a webpage to find information there, but you always do have to separate the information from the spin.

You develop a sense of smell, and you can tell when you're nearing a factory pig farm.

What the fascists in the

What the fascists in the media need to report on are the illegal wars in the world the NWO implementation and Soetoro's illegal usurpation of the White House.