Ten years ago, I used to subscribe to, or read often, daily and weekly news outlets such as Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times etc, as well as many other sources, and web sites, blogs and the social media.

I slowly stopped subscribing and reading the mainstream, as began to realize that these vaunted news sources were not real news, but market manipulations and perceptions of some of the writers, all of whom were stuck to a few universally accepted ideas that I was beginning to doubt – that constant rise of GDP measured in an unsustainable yardstick was the first and only measure of development, that constant upward development was a must, that only news was financial news, war news, sports news, or trivia.

In the last few months, I got thoroughly disappointed by almost all major news sources as I could clearly and plainly see that it was engaging in a concentrated attack on Donal Trump for minor or trivial issues, inflating them and turning him into a demon, while giving the nasty deeds of Obama-Hillary a total pass. I found it increasingly difficult to take any of these news sources seriously.

I came to realize another factor – the Democratic party of Hillary was far to the right of Donald Trump, and in fact, Hillary was likely more a fascist than Trump himself. And yet, even Jill Stein was identifying Trump as the fascist instead of Hillary! The world was gradually turning upside down and black was being painted white and vice versa.

I used to be an instinctive Democratic party supporter, somehow influenced in my school days by the charm of John & Jacqueline Kennedy. But I began to understand, now, that my fixation with the “liberal” wing was kind of wrong because the liberals were pretend liberals, and dishonest to boot.

I came to understand in the last fifteen years, the real dangers of removing the glass-steigel act and implementing NAFTA, the de-linking of currency from gold, and the ability of western economies to create vast amounts of money out of thin air, without any backing, and that all money thus created were in essence counterfeit money, legalized by state governments.

I came to understand the real goals behind the agendas of IMF and the world bank, and the reason WTO failed and the new drive for the west to create regional trade agreement so that difficult components and nations could be bypassed, thus writing down TPP and many other such localized trade deals, all of them designed to make money for multinational corporations and hurt local labour forces and remove the rights of nations to resist these efforts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

I also came to understand that the war mongering of the US government was more a democratic party gift than a republican one. I remembered that the only ex-president that warned the American people of the threat posed by an all consuming military industrial complex was Dwight Eisenhower, a republican and not a democrat. I also came to understand how the one living Democratic ex-president that to me appeared to be morally straight and willing to call a spade a spade – Jimmy Carter, would denounce Israel’s apartheid policies in his book with regard to the treatment of Palestinians and US governments incestuous relationship with Israel. He identify USA not as a democracy any more, but as an oligarch with unlimited bribery. And now, the democratic party was trying to create as much distance as it could, with Jimmy Carter.

I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.

I even found google news to be heavily biassed in favour of Hillary and I had to seriously fine tune google news asking it to specifically restrict sources like New York Times, Washington Post and the like.

I now find it amusing that The New York Times is asking me, here, to get back on board and start subscribing again….

Hahhhhh …. not a chance, buddy, you are not a news outlet. You and most others here are all paddlers. What I see is the death of mainstream news, replaced by rubble and a few paddlers, and a promising grassroots movement of a mass of citizen journalists mushrooming up through the social media.
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Thought I’d move all these from ranting on Facebook, into a blog.