Restoring the Greatness of Civilizations in Decline? (Four Corners of American Politics: Delusional Dems, Feckless Repubs, Deep State Handmaidens & the Golem-King) The Dick Dr. Speaks: Let's Make War On Everyone for the Good of US (And Shut Up About It or We'll Send in the Troops) Neoliberalism Brings On Civilization-Ending Disaster or Just Self-Serving Nihilism? (Green New Deal? NO WAY!)

Well, it's okay.

No one else knew about it.

Except for everyone.

Look at the election results (not just the large-state results).

It was no mystery in North Carolina.

With the decline of manufacturing jobs in the rust belt having become a significant issue in this turbulent election year, the arrival of the play in New York, where it opened on Thursday at the Public Theater after originating at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, could hardly be more timely. But the issues it explores have been making headlines for years.

Much of the play takes place in 2000, with a prologue and other scenes that are set eight years later. In the prologue, we meet two men, still young, in encounters with their parole officer. One is the truculent, uncooperative Jason (Will Pullen), who’s white and doesn’t seem interested in resuming a fruitful life; the other, the black Chris (Khris Davis), is doing his best to get back on track. Both Jason and Chris, we gather, were convicted of the same crime, although its details remain unmentioned, stoking suspense.

The play then moves back in time. The setting is mostly a bar in Reading, Pa., where workers at a local steel-tubing factory — by this point, one of the few functioning local industries, it’s implied — regularly gather, to celebrate or just ease the burden of another long shift on the factory floor. (To research the play, Ms. Nottage and Ms. Whoriskey interviewed inhabitants of the city, which was cited as the most economically depressed in the country in 2011.)

Tonight, Jason’s mother, Tracey (Johanna Day), is celebrating her birthday with her co-workers Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), who is Chris’s mother, and Jessie (Miriam Shor, convincingly a mess), who’s not much fun, slumped over the table, dead drunk. The bartender, Stan (a gruffly sympathetic James Colby), who worked at the same plant for 28 years before he was injured on the job, joins in the party. Grim gossip going around concerns an acquaintance who snapped when his wife left, feared he’d lose his job, and tried to burn his house down.

Tracey jokingly asks the bar-back and general handyman, the younger Oscar (Carlo Albán), if he might know a fellow Puerto Rican she could hire to burn her house down, should the urge arise. “Well, I’m Colombian,” Oscar replies, with just a hint of offense, “and I don’t know.” (Mr. Albán gives a tender, sensitive performance in this comparatively quiet role.)

The more serious subject is the murky news about changes at the plant where Chris and Jason — who we soon learn are close friends — also work. Stan recalls that another local plant shut down with little warning. “You could wake up tomorrow, and all your jobs are in Mexico, wherever,” he says. (Although they are all drawn with nuance, Stan, and a few others, can be sententious:  “They squeeze us like a sponge, drain every last drop of blood out and then throw us away.”)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

The graveyard of world empires — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian — followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus.

The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.

The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.

The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”

Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.

___________

Wondered much about what that latest WikiLeaks exposed?

And who?

From our valuable source at Chasing the Squirrel:

Reading the Vault 7:  documents I see Linux is not secure. But I did not think it ever was. My contention is that when they are out to make your flash memory vanish or ruin your hard drive. Windows does it better! A bit finer control. Yet upon reflection I was losing hard drives under both systems when I was under heavy attack. Three in a couple of months. Cylindrical read errors on all of them. All that from sniffing around and watching them work the net. The thing is, rigging my Windows machine so it would turn on when I walked into the room was really creepy. It took a while to figure out how they were doing that. Windows can also eat USB devices very effectively. That gets expensive fast, but not as fast as hard drives do. They made me their bitch both ways, but Windows was the creepshow.

It saddens me that most Americans are apathetic about being spied on and manipulated. They are complacent and comfortable allowing this evil to flourish so long as they do not become a victim of it.

If nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another. - Joseph Addison

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference. - Buckminster Fuller

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. -- Harold Pinter

_____________

From my pal Coyote Prime, we find the latest insights on the current American nightmare from Kunstlerville. Almost reminds you of the end of the Vietnam catastrophe, doesn't it? (But where are the helicopters? Other than at Trump's places.)

“The Pause That Refreshes”

Thursday, March 16, 2017

James Howard Kunstler

“Let’s take a breather from more consequential money matters at hand midweek to consider the tending moods of our time and place. It is clear by now that we have four corners of American politics these days:  the utterly lost and delusional Democratic party; the feckless Republicans; the permanent Deep State of bureaucratic foot-soldiers and errand boys; and Trump, the Golem-King of the Coming Greatness. Wherefore, and what the f**k, you might ask.

The Democrats reduced themselves to a gang of sadistic neo-Maoists seeking to eradicate anything that resembles free expression across the land in the name of social justice. Coercion has been their coin of the realm, and especially in the realm of ideas where “diversity” means stepping on your opponent’s neck until he pretends to agree with your Newspeak brand of grad school neologisms, and “inclusion” means welcome if you’re just like us. I say Maoists because just like Mao’s “Red Guard” of rampaging students in 1966, their mission is to “correct” the thinking of those who might dare to oppose the established leader. Only in this case, that established leader happened to lose the sure-thing election and the party finds itself unbelievably out-of-power and suddenly purposeless, like a termite mound without a queen, the workers and soldiers fleeing the power center in an hysteria of lost identity.

They regrouped briefly after the election debacle to fight an imaginary adversary, Russia, the phantom ghost-bear, who supposedly stepped on their termite mound and killed the queen, but, strangely, no actual evidence was ever found of the ghost-bear’s paw-print. And ever since that fact was starkly revealed by former NSA chief James Clapper on NBC’s "Meet the Press," the Russia hallucination has vanished from page one of the party’s media outlets — though, in an interesting last gasp of striving correctitude, Monday’s "New York Times" features a front page story detailing Georgetown University’s hateful traffic in the slave trade two centuries ago. That should suffice to shut the wicked place down for once and for all!

The Republican Party, to avoid going full-Whig and sliding down the laundry chute of history, made a bad deal for a new figurehead who is liable to make the party look way worse than it could ever accomplish on its own. This golden boy has dragged the party poobahs to the put-up-or-shut-up room of our nation’s capital - the place that Senator Rand Paul was searching high and low for last week - where they are charged with reforming the country’s health care racket.

It looks for now like they will cook up a toxic farrago of new giveaways to their patrons in the hospital cartel, the insurance companies, and pharma. The voting public already detects the odor of 30-day-old carp in the first tastings of the dish. There’s a fair chance that the recipe will end up getting tossed in the Capitol dumpster, and that in itself could finish the party because there’s little question that the current system known as ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act (not) is something like a fatal tumor in the nation’s craw. If the effort to fix that fails, the Republicans complete their transformation from the Party of No to the Party of Just Go.

The Deep State seems eager to sever its connections to both putrifying parties and attempt to run the groaning colossus of government ad hoc if necessary. The military and intel chains of command remain intact, along with their “assets,” and one can easily imagine anxious meetings of scenario-running in the back rooms of the Pentagon and the Langley frat house. What if…? “What if we just smoke the dude?” an old Agency warrior remarks offhand, and the roomful of colleagues pause in their cogitations to weigh the notion. Some of them nod and make a moue (Moue, noun:  a pouting expression used to convey annoyance or distaste - CP) and others just cough into their sleeves. One young striver in the back mentions “a little something” they’ve been working on that involves hairspray and a neurotoxin derived from the Gaboon viper…

And then there is our President himself:  Donald J. Trump, in the awesome solitude of his Twitterverse dome. A strange destiny brought him to his place in history thus far, and many of us surveying the scene lo these many months kind of get it:  the festering disgust with the other three corners of American power; the dismal fall of the middle class into a purgatory of repossession, idleness, opiates, and tattoos; the accelerating purposelessness of the dwindling consumer economy; the matrix of racketeering that systematically drains everyone’s financial mojo while adding humiliation to the shoddy service it delivers; the pointless, costly wars in faraway places and their conversion into permanent sewers; the disgraceful disfigurement of a once grand national landscape into a wilderness of dying malls and freeway ramps.

So, onto the scene strides The Donald, a giant among the squalling midgets of our time, with his promise to bigly re-greatify this suffering land. I suppose he means well in his torturous way. So did a lot of other figures in history who found themselves at the top:  Idi Amin, Uncle Joe Stalin, Vlad the Impaler, King Leopold of Belgium, Adolf You-Know-Who, Pol Pot. The list of the well-meaning is very long.”

____________

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake:  neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand:  a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was:  “All is hell.” Clinton answered:  “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to "Black Lives Matter" Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

____________


Ready to go to war?

For Russia?

Surely they are just kidding us.

Again.

And you thought their long-term planning skills were nonexistent.

According to their main man, senior General Wesley Clark, in his 2007 speech about seven wars in five years, they are right on schedule. (Okay, maybe a little bit late - but they had to run an election, so it held them up some.)

Even when they have to ride the wrong horse.

Funny how easily those horses change color.

In the above video, General Wesley Clark one of the most highly decorated 4 star generals of the US military openly admits that there has been ‘a policy coup’ in the US government. He explains that he was told, back in 1991, that the US would actively invade and destabilise countries across the Middle East to take control of the region. These are not the words of an outsider conspiracy theorist, but the man who did this job for the US government. . . .

Russia ‘Hack’ of US Elections an ‘Act of War’ — Dick Cheney

Russia’s “hack” of the 2016 US elections could be “considered an act of war,” says former Vice President and noted warhawk Dick Cheney, speaking at an event in New Delhi, India. He joins the chorus of US notables resorting to the groundless accusation.

"In some quarters, that would be considered an act of war. I think it’s a kind of conduct and activity we will see going forward," said Cheney, the neocon’s neocon. "There’s no question" that the Russian government tried to "interfere" with the US elections, Cheney added.

Despite his seemingly sadistic love of watching the US go to war, Cheney himself deferred being drafted by the US military five times during the Vietnam era.

Democrats have been equally quick to launch the "Russian hacking" attack for their own political gain. Rep. Jackie Speier of California said so-called Russian meddling "was an act of war, an act of hybrid warfare," according to a report by the "Independent Journal Review".

A letter written by dozens of former intelligence, diplomatic, and military officials addressed to President Barack Obama concluded that "DNC and HRC servers alleged to have been hacked were, in fact, not hacked."

For one, the FBI never accessed the compromised servers at the DNC, Sputnik reported.

Bill Binney, a 35-year NSA veteran and former technical director at the spy agency, said the publication of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta’s emails were the result of an insider leak rather than an external attack.

I keep wondering why no one has explained the definition of a "hack" to any of these hackers.

Other than the NSA/CIA fall guys.

Dangerous, sometimes rabid fall guys (whose leaders have a damning history of disappearance, strange death or suicide).

And they are our keepers.
____________

The Confederacy - and the slavery that spawned it - was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form. 
You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks - a third of the South’s laborers - to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

...[M]ost Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now:  the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.

How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s, wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would - in today’s lingo - trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, "Reason" magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers (who didn't support Trump - Hillary was their preferred candidate) and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid - which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites - resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day.

One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it. Only by shedding those too, will Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, health and education.

There's been lots of progress in Virginia, some in Florida, some in Texas. And the Deep South? That's another signal Georgia voters in the Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb county 'burbs north of Atlanta may soon be sending the rest of the country when they turn out on April 18 and June 20 for Jon Ossoff. Replacing Mick Mulvaney in South Carolina (May 2 for the primaries and also June 20 for the runoff) with a non-Confederate will be a lot harder.

The Republicans are likely to run a backward-facing state Rep., Tommy Pope, and the DCCC is pimping for some Goldman Sachs guy, Archie Parnell.

As usual.

The best reason why a big (extremely large) broom is needed for sweeping out the reigning Dem oligopoly.

After which, a huuuge dose of DDT (which the right wingers are now touting as incorrectly targeted by Rachel Carson - "Thanks! Charles and David.") to air the place out.
____________


So who or what is the Deep State?

It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects.

It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.”

It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”:  the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.

It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

These are the key players that drive the shadow government.

Lofgren, mentioned above, wrote a book titled, The Deep State, and says of the Deep State:

It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.

That Deep State operatives would use the propaganda media to tell you at this point in history that the Deep State does not exist tells that this new scrutiny is unwelcome.

The Deep State is the spying apparatus that scarfs up data on everyone all around the world and meddles in supposed free and fair elections and overthrows regimes for its own purposes. It is the regulatory bureaucracy that writes laws and regulations on such a scope that every American commits multiple felonies through the normal course of a day so that the state can expropriate their land and their wealth.

It is the police state that enforces these and other regulations and laws passed legally and illegally and extraconstitutionally, and which steals the people’s liberty and livelihood through asset forfeiture (a practice just upheld by the Supreme Court).

It is the CFR which puts up presidential candidates in both parties and populates the government in the departments of State, Treasury and Defense regardless of the party of the president, and establishes policy which is rubber-stamped by the elected class. It is the military-industrial complex which recognizes no international borders and makes war on nations that have not attacked us and pose us no harm beyond idle threats.

It is the banksters who create money out of thin air to pay for the wars and use it to rape and pillage the resources of foreign countries as readily as America. It is the house of Rothschild and the house of Rockefeller and globalist elites who annually meet for Bilderberg.

It is the Federal Reserve — which is not federal (it is a private bank) and does not hold reserves – which prints money that is then used (often by being passed through extra-governmental agencies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, etc.) by corporate jackals and hit men who bribe and, if necessary, threaten leaders of other nations into accepting deals to build or rebuild their countries’ infrastructure for the benefit of powerful multinational corporations.

This saddles those countries with burdensome debt and locks their populations into permanent poverty and deprivation. Those leaders who do not play along are assassinated or their countries invaded by U.S. troops under some created, high-minded justification.

The Fed produces nothing but more paper money, and it takes from the producers. Therefore, its only solution for the collapsing financial system is to steal wealth from the producers of goods and services through taxation and provide more and more fiat money and credit.

A fiat paper money regime always becomes autocratic or fascist toward the last days of its existence. This is the time when the state makes war on its own people. Most never know it because it is not announced, but hidden in propaganda within such terms as “for the common good.”

An unlimited supply of paper money buys sophisticated arms that create fear and the propaganda to manipulate the people against their personal freedom and best interest. Fiat paper money is tyranny or becomes tyranny. It guarantees criminal government.

Paper money, personal freedom and privacy are incompatible. Paper money centralizes power to the state and diminishes the individual. This is the first cause of all you see happening.

The Deep State retains its hold on power by creating chaos and causing destruction. Chaos around the globe is growing more rampant thanks to beating of war drums by the warmongering “D” people and the war-loving neocon false conservative “R” people and the machinations of the Deep State.

I would not be at all surprised to soon see the Deep State create or instigate a false flag event and blame it on Russia or North Korea or China or Iran. It could be a terror event, or an attack or even an “accidental” collision between a U.S. military plane or ship and one from Russia or China. Or, it could be a collapse of the electrical grid or the banking system.

Whatever the case, it is almost too late for preparedness. You should have cash (enough to cover a month of bills, if possible), gold and/or silver, guns and ammunition and stored food and water – enough to last at least 30 days in a crisis. More is better.

I believe a crisis event looms.

Another one?

Max and Stacy come to the rescue.

[KR1050] Keiser Report:  ‘The New Detroit

We discuss the cheap wages and crushed limbs of Alabama’s auto manufacturing boom. In the second half, Max interviews Professor John Mill Ackerman in Mexico City about what the NAFTA renegotiations might mean for Mexico and world trade and whether or not Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador could win the next elections with his anti-neoliberal economic message.



[KR1048] Keiser Report:  Heading for Global War

We discuss the racket that is war. In the second half, Max talks to JP Sottile of NewsVandal.com about trumping Trump and howling at the Moonves: how corporate media raked in the big bucks pushing a reality tv star as president.



[KR1049] Keiser Report:  Trail of ‘American carnage’

We discuss the trail of ‘American carnage’ and how it led to a Trump presidency. In the second half, we discuss the OxyCartel pushing millions of prescription pills on small towns across the USA.

Certainly some very hard choices coming up.

Lee Camp talks about how the mainstream media is tainted by corporate power, given the fact six companies control the bulk of what we watch and hear daily. Lee also reveals how Walmart and Lowes’ use of slave labor is getting swept under the rug by media companies that play their ads on repeat.

In the second half, correspondent John F. O’Donnell delves into the Dumpster fire that is Trump’s 2018 budget proposal and how it will scorch social services that provide basic needs for Americans. Finally, correspondent Naomi Karavani reveals the attempt by tax giants like H&R Block and Intuit to block access to services that allow Americans to file their taxes for free.




Lee Camp uses details from the CIA leaks to to tell us what remains of our privacy in the surveillance state. As technology advances we will have to be more vigilant of our rights in the weirdest ways ever imaginable. Then Lee reveals the more egregious parts of Trumpcare that no one is talking about. Why exactly are 20 million at risk of losing coverage?

Correspondent Naomi Karavani reveals new developments in climate change science that are being ignored by weather reporters, despite extreme weather that’s destroying people’s lives. Finally, correspondent Natalie McGill delves into the most important federal civil rights case since Brown v. Board of Ed in 1954. Historically Black Colleges and Universities are losing funding, as state university systems are overlooking their importance.