Highway 61 Revisited

Zo ongeveer ziet de werkelijkheid er langzamerhand uit voor degenen die maf genoeg zijn om alle propaganda voor zoete koek te slikken. Alles is mogelijk geworden. Paul Craig Roberts schrijf in CounterPunch: '"Even Jobs at McDonald's Aren't Safe."Their Own Economic Reality.
One might think that the Iraq experience would restore sober judgement to policymakers. Alas, neocon reality has spread everywhere. It has infected the media and the new Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, who just gave Congress an upbeat report on the economy. The robust economy, he declared, could soon lead to inflation and higher interest rates. Consumers deeper in debt and fresh from their first negative savings rate since the Great Depression show high consumer confidence. It is as if the entire country is on an acid trip or a cocaine trip or whatever it is that lets people create realities for themselves that bear no relation to real reality. How can the upbeat views be reconciled with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ payroll jobs data, the extraordinary red ink, and exploding trade deficit? Perhaps the answer is that every economic development, no matter how detrimental, is spun as if it were good news. For example, the worsening US trade deficit is spun as evidence of the fast growth of the US economy: the economy is growing so fast it can’t meet its needs and must rely on imports. Declining household income is spun as an inflation fighter that keeps mortgage interest rates low. Federal budget deficits are spun as letting taxpayers keep and spend more of their own money. Massive layoffs are spun as evidence that change is so rapid that the work force must constantly upgrade skills and re-educate itself. The denial of economic reality has become an art form. Except for Lou Dobbs, no accurate economic reporting is available in the “mainstream media.” Occasionally, real information escapes the spin machine. The National Association of Manufacturers, one of outsourcing’s greatest boosters, has just released a report, “US Manufacturing Innovation at Risk,” by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe. The economists find that US industry’s investment in research and development is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing, because it is rapidly being shifted overseas: “Funds provided for foreign- performed R&D have grown by almost 73 percent between 1999 and 2003, with a 36 percent increase in the number of firms funding foreign R&D.”' Lees verder: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts02162006.html Over mafkezen gesproken: 'Benedict Carey reports in the NY Times: ”All told, almost half of American presidents from 1789 to 1974 had suffered from a mental illness at some point in life, according to a recent analysis of biographical sources by psychiatrists at Duke University Medical Center. And more than half of those presidents, the study found, struggled with their symptoms — most often depression — while in office. "What is hopeful about this is that it is evidence that people can suffer from depression or other mental problems and still function at a presidential level, if not at their best," said Dr. Jonathan Davidson, who, along with Dr. Kathryn Connor and Dr. Marvin Swartz, cataloged symptoms from presidential papers and biographies, and identified those disabling enough to qualify as disorders. They reported their findings in the current issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. “The authors acknowledge the hazards and uncertainties of diagnosing from such a distance. But the lifetime rate of mental illness they found in these 37 presidents is identical to that found in some surveys of the American population.' Ah wel, ondertussen is men op Highway 61 druk doende met de voorbereidingen voor de Derde Wereldoorlog.