Fox News is The Ministry of Truth for Big Brother. Welcome to the Orwellian world.

Fox News is a dangerous organization; that is, if you care about the objective truth. We are living in the world descibed in George Orwell's book "1984".  Except reality is playing out a little differently than the book.  Instead of the government controlling everything, things are actually reversed.  Fox News is the Ministry of Truth, and large corporations are acting as a collective Big Brother.

Technology is reducing the need for many middle class jobs.

The concept that high technology inventions in computers and machinery create more higher level type jobs has been a working assumption for a long time.  For the most part, it has been true.  But recently, empirical evidence is showing that high technology (in the form of computers applied in various contexts) are actually eliminating many good middle class jobs at an increasing rate, and that the jobs being eliminated are moving up the hierarchical ladder into fairly sophisticated functions that (used to?) require advanced college degrees.

Infrastructure needs: Who will pay?

I decided to create a new thread for this topic, even though it is closely related to some of the other discussions we've had here so far. 

The issue is, our aging infrastructure. What prompted this entry is a short article on the "Smartplanet" website, entitled "Five Percent of American's dams could fail".   It's worth reading here:
Five-percent-of-Americas-dams-could-fail

Where is the money to maintain, let alone rebuild and create anew, our aging infrastructure, which I should point out, was created largely by the Federal Government.

The article in Smartplanet also references a recent article in the New York Times on the topic:
Science: Dams

Data on the disparity in wealth and income.

David Cay Johnston, a tax expert and author of the book "Perfectly Legal", explains how the very top income earners are not only doing far better than everyone else, but are doing so at an increasing rate. Their doing so puts increasing tax burdens on the middle and lower middle classes. I have valuable information from his recent article further down in this post, and I will attempt to explain the ramifications on the rest of us.

Healthcare hypocrites and what to do about it

This conversation started on a friend of mine's Facebook page, based on the initial posting of the following URL:  http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/gop_healthcare_hypocrites/index.html?rc=hlinko_1142110_GOPHealth_lac1


Kevin:    

Either way they would have better than us. If they want ObamaCare...let them be on it as well. Send the same note to Pelosi and Harry Reid...if you want to shove through a government sponsored debacle...partake in it as well. Then let the chips fall where they may. 

U.S. still ranked best for innovation by world execs

The following is an article from the SmartPlanet web site. I think it is worth highlighting this fact in the midst of the conservative bashing of U.S. government policy. It's an interesting read in any event.
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If you want to innovate, the best place to do it is the United States, senior business executives say.
According to a new “Global Innovation Barometer” report from GE, which polled 1,000 senior execs from 12 countries, the U.S. is the clear “innovation champion” in the world, followed by Germany, Japan and China.  The top 10, along with the percentage of agreement, below:

The Middle Class is disappearing

This post is a collection of various commnents and references that will be continually updated.
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Robert Reich talks about "income concentration" in his latest book, "Aftershock". It is being caused by the usual ego and greed, but enabled by new technology, and supported by governmental policies that are unduly influenced by the small but very rich upper class. I believe that we may need a new economic model that takes into account the idea that technology is increasingly reducing the need for human labor to produce goods and services. Some people might interpret this to mean typical communist like redistribution of wealth. I assure you, I am not advocating communism or socialism.