the bleak news of the bleak news industry

ever since the economy swan-dived into the sewer in the fall of 2008, and the obama financial "rescue" fully took form early the following year, it has been a commonplace observation that the wreckage done by the banks was so great that employment would show no significant signs of recovery until at least 2016.

so with today's non-farm payroll report showing that the "recovery" is anything but, how can the news media and its reliable "sources" continue to spew forth such wretched misinformation:

"A bleak jobs report suggests the recovery from the Great Recession will be longer and bumpier than many economists had envisioned.
Most economists say job growth should strengthen later this year as gasoline prices drop further and the economy recovers from the effects of natural disasters in the U.S. and abroad. But the recovery is starting to weaken 17 months before the 2012 election, which could hurt President Barack Obama's re-election prospects.
The unemployment rate in May inched up to 9.1 percent from 9 percent, the Labor Department said Friday; when Obama took office, it was 7.8 percent."

the media amuses itself with various pretentious features like the one we have in our local rag, which dares call itself "politfact." politfact endeavors to perpetuate the conventional wisdom, occasionally tagging the occasional political outlier as "pants on fire" for some dubious assertion, while when it comes to powerful schmucks like eric cantor, not only does he get a free pass, but his wife is on the newspaper parent company's board.

we'll never get anything approaching a credible journalism unless our media institutions are completely abandoned by an already-bored public, should they ever realize that the steady diet of pabulum they are fed by the media conglomerates -- which you can now count on one hand -- is just a distraction and a diversion. while they may tout themselves as the source of everything you need to know, the reality is almost the complete opposite:

what you need to know to protect yourself and your family is being obfuscated and hidden by forces loyal to our oligarchs, since no one has yet disproved the aphorism that no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the american public.


did you see the story about how former presidential wannabe john edwards got indicted today for allegedly paying hush money to a former campaign worker with whom he had a child out of wedlock -- in an adulterous relationship!!!

this has been building as a story all week, and until it runs its course, it'll drive the financial chaos enveloping europe, as well as the escalating, illegal resource war against the libyan regime off the news pages and broadcast news. the US economy is in shambles, as the employment story attests, and yet the spinmeisters will  have banished the sour mood of the public with tawdry details of jaycee duggan's imprisonment by a perverted maniac, or the stomach-churning testimony in the caylee whatthefuck child-murder inquisition.

even as those stories are petering out -- or taking a weekend pause -- we have the demise of "dr. death," as jack kevorkian, proponent of assisted suicide was dubbed, of causes related to old age. after spending a number of years incarcerated for what seems to be a completely defensible and compassionate act, he lived out his years in blessed obscurity, as befits someone who went up against the machine that sensationalizes the suffering of others for its own profit, as it steers public attention from issues of far more demanding of passion and outrage.

if there's one thing we're missing here in the clusterfuck nation, it's a sense of personal responsibility and autonomy. we are being manipulated by the powers that run the amalgamation of institutionalized greed and destruction to be passive consumers of whatever trend of fashion that is pitched our way -- whether it be fear of terrorism or love of our iPods.

if this were not the case, would the chronically dysfunctional state of the national economy, and the lame and implausible assertions by politicians and their handmaidens in the press, be ladled out so uncritically within the mainstream conduits of news and information? could we continue to amuse ourselves with the antics of sarah palin playing cat and mouse with the media circus, if it was general knowledge how both political parties have robbed the taxpayers to pay off the bad bets of amoral bankers? would the president's nation of origin be more important than the payback to those same bankers from his administration is commensurate with the amount in contributions to his campaign in 2008?

we are being lied to and mislead in the most obvious and egregious manner, and yet the public's indignation seems to be aimed at mirages and holograms, projections of an alternate reality that is merely tasteless and banal, instead of malignant and evil. this is the bleak news feeds our minds and impoverishes our souls.