DEAN BAKER—There are a whole a range of other measures which leave real enlightenment types appalled by the state of the country today. While Brooks/Pinker tell us “only half the population had any savings at all” in the 1950s, a recent survey found that 63 percent of the country could not afford an unexpected bill of $500. The homeownership rate is roughly the same as it was 60 years ago. Life expectancy for those in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution has barely budged in the last 40 years.
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STEPHEN LENDMAN—The shameless Western propaganda offensive to topple Pres. Assad has used some of the vilest and most cynical methods imaginable, anything that could fool the Western public, particularly the Americans, on whose awareness so much depends but who are also the easiest people to hoodwink, given their legendary ignorance and gullibility. Some of the sources used by the whore media are not just questionable, they are laughable, people and outfits that no serious editor would touch.
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Last week the Russian center for Syrian reconciliation announced that it had received information from a local resident that Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists and White Helmets were preparing to stage a provocation, involving the use of chemical weapons in Idlib in order to blame the government for the attack on civilians.
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RT COM—The organization has been one of the sources for the mainstream media to build their reports on Syria since the start of the civil war four years ago. The organization claims to have a wide network of contacts in the region who feed their information to the head office, where it is processed and later posted on the website, Facebook and Twitter accounts.
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MIKE WHITNEY—The whole thing is ridiculous and anyone with half a brain knows it’s ridiculous. The only reason this fiasco continues to drag on, is because the mandarins in the US National Security State run everything in America and they’ve decided that they can invent whatever reality suits their foreign policy agenda and the rest of us will simply accept it in silence or be denounced as “Putin apologists” or “Kremlin stooges”.
