ON THE PERSONAL SIDE OF THE DEBT CRISIS

Shebar Windstone argues passionately that debt has become a means of social control and personal pain:

”This issue has been flitting on the fringes of my consciousness for a long time; that piece by Parenti just brought it into focus. It’s something important that’s gotten little, if any, attention domestically. (We’ve seen how it works abroad.) If consumerism is the force that invades & conquers our lives & dreams, then debt is the occupying power, overseer, slavedriver, prison warden & torturer — ensuring/enforcing our obedience, compliance, complicity, cooperation & fear.

Students’ debt burdens force them to seek jobs as soon as they graduate (or to give up on hopes of ever graduating), rather than protesting, dropping out, exploring the world, working for nonprofits or doing all the creative things that young people used to do. Workers are forced to stay in unsatisfactory jobs, endure (or succumb to) unsafe working conditions & abusive bosses & coworkers, & are detered from organizing unions, demanding higher/living wages & better working conditions & benefits. Unhappy couples stay together because they can’t afford to live separately. Abused partners continue to suffer abuse because they can’t afford to escape.

Families stay together out of necessity rather than love, so busy working or shopping or worrying that there’s no time or energy left to do the things that keep love & families alive. Tenants shut up & put up with whatever they’re stuck with, & small landlords & businesses don’t have it much better. Faced with mounting debts for medical care, people with chronic or serious illnesses too often find the cure worse than the disease, so they’re the last ones who could protest or organize to change our life-threatening healthcare & insurance industries or the government agencies that prop up these corrupt & criminal monopolies.

Whole communities are kept so busy scrambling to keep up with interest rates, fees & taxes that they have no time to think about social, political, economic & ecological issues. & the politicians who could change the laws & regulations that keep this system in place are in hock up to their ears!

The costs & benefits of debt cannot be measured in dollars alone. Indeed, one might argue that dollars are the least important part!

PROBLEMS WITH ME AND THE WEBSITE

W M writes about his frustrations which I share. First let me explain that we are in the middle of building a new content management system that will help readers communicate and participate. We have done a redesign but the back end is being finished. PLEASE BEAR WITH US including those of you who are unable to subscribe or unsubscribe. I believe he overstates the link problem and believe he is generalizing, but so what? His perception is his reality. I copy links fully. One suggestion, go to the website. It maybe an email issue of some kind.

As for the Links, I use the ones that are sent to me. I agree they should be accurate and sometimes the problem is that I am rushing and don’t check them. (I am only one person pumping out 3000 words a day. Sometimes the people who send them screw them up. Whatever the reason, I agree this is unprofessional and I will try to do better. We are very underresourced and need help in editing and research. Any takers?

So it happens again. As much as I appreciate the work you do with your research and the Dissector, there remains one significant problem that has been ongoing, and in fact has gotten worse the last couple of days. I’m talking about your links to news rticles. Both yesterday and today, none of the links you’ve provided in the email version of the Dissector are in fact ‘linked.’ example:

“BUSH LOSES A BIG ONE

Judge strikes down Bush on terror groups - Yahoo! News
news.yahoo.com”

What article, I ask you, does that non-link lead to? This is not just an one-time mistake. Every issue of the Dissector that I receive has almost no functional links. Sometimes I can take the time to figure out where you had intended for it to lead, but most (like the example above) are worthless, or as has been the case the last two days, they aren’t even links to begin with.

This problems is very serious for two reasons. First there is the (arguable) damage to your reputation as a fact-checker, as it makes it nigh impossible for readers to do any verification or follow-up of our own. Second, the information you so vehemently argue that is important to bring to the attention of a wider audience is locked away behind shoddy work resulting in broken or complete non-links. This only continues to keep the public in the dark.

In fact, someone who wears a little more tin foil than myself might even be inclined to believe this to be evidence that you are in fact a solid source of mis- and dis-information. Please, take the extra 5 minutes to double check all your links before sharing them. Even if your intentions are good, the current result is little better than Faux News making their usual unsubstantiated claims.

I don’t intend this as an attack on your journalism, which IMO is top-notch, just some of this information I hear about nowhere else, and if I can’t follow a link, I continue to hear about it nowhere else but from your keyboard.

Keep up the good fight!

Frustrated In The Search For Truth…

PS. The contact form on your website didn’t think my email address looked valid. I hope you aren’t filtering all yahoo email.

I am not sure its truth you are after.

BILL MOYERS TO WEST POINT CADETS

Tom PAINE.COM Message To West Point
by Bill Moyers, TomPaine.com

?Before heading to Iraq, graduates are asked to consider the kind of country they are serving.”

http://ga3.org/ct/h1NLpbK1omhy/

And finally if the debt won’t get us, the environment might. Reuters reported:

Apocalypse on the installment plan….

SCIENTIST PREDICTS PLANETARY WIPE-OUT

LONDON (Reuters) - The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples’ lives, a controversial climate scientist said on Tuesday.

James Lovelock, who angered climate scientists with his Gaia theory of a living planet and then alienated environmentalists by backing nuclear power, said a traumatized earth might only be able to support
less than a tenth of it’s 6 billion people.

“We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don’t see the species dying out,” he told a news conference. “A hot earth couldn’t support much over 500 million.”

And on that reassuring note that makes “An Inconvenient Truth” seem mild, I bid adieu.

Please check out the new video on the homepage of Mediachannel.org on the new News Trust project.

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