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Smiley Faces In The Sky Won't Save Us
WITH FIREWORKS TO DISTRACT US INTO LOOKING UP, ARE WE PAYING ATTENTION TO THE DEPRESSION TAKING US DOWN?
By Danny Schechter,Author of the Crime Of Our Time
Two days after a jobs report showed how many Americans are down, the nation was looking up -- at fireworks signaling the anniversary of American independence (even as the BP disaster shows how dependent we've become.).
On July 4th, here in New York, my block was jammed with ooing and ahing onlookers as was the whole West Side of Manhattan when the Macy's Department store shot off 40,000 shells at a rate of 1500 a minute and at a cost of $500,000.
It reminded me of deadlier fireworks over Baghdad.
This event, symbolically, may have been a shock and awe campaign of an economic war aimed our way, but we couldn't see it.
Across the river in New Jersey, town after town cancelled local shows because they had no money in the budget left for bread and circus extravaganzas.
Oh, how we love our country, reported the Daily News,
"Red, white and boom, boom, boom!
The skies over the Hudson River were transformed Sunday night into a patriotic canvas bursting with bangs 1,000 feet in the air and even exploding smiley faces."
We need more than smiley faces these days. The alleged "recovery" is slowing. Many experts don't expect a turnaround until 2011, too late for next fall's elections. Some fear another crash. A few say the Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell in 1929.
In England, The Telegraph reports a truth that many Americans and our media cheerleaders really don't want to see or face,
"With the US trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932"
The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation."
Robert Reich, the former Labor secretary has no use for rockets bursting in air, writing, "The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing.
