I can’t avoid linking that to earlier periods of American poverty (see the photos below), says The Automatic Earth's Raul Ilargi Meijer, times in which ‘leaders’ thought it appropriate to let large swaths of the population live in misery, so everyone else would think twice about raising their voices. A tried and true strategy.
Before you begin to mention the grandiose gains in the stock market since Obama took office, bear in mind a few things.
1. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to zero percent, making bonds and interest bearing accounts untenable for retirees, effectively forcing people into stocks. Also, the Fed's balance sheet went from ~$750b to $4.5t over that time frame -- rigging both equity, currency, and bond markets over Obama's entire 8 year term.
Authored by Robert Parry via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
It’s almost getting comical how everything that happens in the United States gets blamed on Russia! Russia! Russia! And, if any American points out the absurdity of this argument, he or she must be a “Moscow stooge” or a “Putin puppet.”
The FX series, “The Americans,” a spy thriller about two deep-cover Soviet spies in the 1980s
Since not a day passes without someone opining on the biggest witch hunt since the days of Senator Joe McCarthy to keep the "Trump is Putin's agent" media narrative going, and keeping at least half of America engaged with the "evil empire" plotline (we didn't say it was original), today it was Mark Cuban who decided to engage in some freestyle twitter narrative-shaping on whether Trump is involved some grand Russian hacking conspiracy.
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
The true face of the EU is presently on display in Greece, not in Germany or Holland or France. Brussels must first fix what’s going wrong in Athens and the Aegean, and there’s a lot going wrong, before it can move on towards the future, indeed towards any future at all. It has a very tough job in Italy as well, which it’s trying hard to ignore.