Wait, hold on for a moment, we're being held up?

When we read today's news, what happens to yesterday's news?

We tend to forget it. We look at news at least in part as entertainment. When news outrages us, we tend to forget yesterday's outrage.

This doesn't help us prioritize the issues we face. Bank scandals get old. What else ya got? We've learned as a society not to let anything take us down, not for too long anyway. Cheer up man, have some fun. No one likes the buzzkill. The party is marching off the cliff but are you going to be the one to try to stop it? It's certainly not fun trying.

Is there new news today? Sure. US intelligence has confirmed that Iran is not developing nukes:

"Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them."

Except, hmm, US newspapers are spinning the opposite story:

U.S. now sees Iran as pursuing nuclear bomb

It's so easy to forget how misleading headlines can me -- agendas can beobvious if you stay alert, though even when you're aware of them, they can be effective propoganda.

Ailing banks need even more money.

Deutsche Bank Writes Ransom Note to US Government: Overpay For Our Assets, Or You'll Regret It

But enough of today, what happened to yesterday, or the day before or the day before or last September or the past 8 years or the past 40?

Let's recap and simplify:

Wall Street is international organized crime. Wall Street firms conspired to engineer a fraudulent housing and debt bubble, illegally shipping vast wealth to foreign banks and then held the government ransom in order to secure massive amounts of taxpayer money -- money that dwarfs the cost of Obama's stimulus plan. The mouthpieces for the international organized criminals object to spending any money on healthcare, education or infrastructure. Why do US politicians and US media only label spending that helps US citizens as "big government" spending?

We are their enemy. The SEC protects them, not you. They have more power than the president. The largest robbery in the history of the US hasn't ended.

That's not the story the US media tells, is it, but the US media, like Wall Street, is a business. There is a seemless transition between legal big business and illegal big business, with both having more power over the government than you do. This is our crisis folks and we haven't come even close to rising to the challenge to address it.

How much money are we talking about? The following is a chart of federal borrowing through Dec. 2007:

After the September, 2008 electronic run on the banks, there was so much ransom demanded that when charted, the fluctuations seen in the above chart are not visible when we plot borrowing through December, 2008:

Electing Barack Obama was an inspiring event, but it's possibly served to pull the wool further over our eyes, believing that one man can change all of this. Some Obama critics like to say that Obama is no different than Bush. I strongly disagree. Obama is more intelligent, honest and ethical and cares more about the American public than Bush or his administration did. That's not however, nearly enough.

Your Job:
Stop for a moment. Stop going on quickly to the next thing just for a moment to process this. I learned long ago not to wallow in my own pain, but that's not what I'm suggesting you do. We can still enjoy our lives and even consume news as entertainment, but if it's only entertainment to us than as a society we're nothing more than pawns in our own small ponds. But I can't do anything about it, you might tell yourself, and this is not true. Culture changes when we change. We change when we let information sink in. Culture is our best weapon as a people. We can still celebrate our lives along the way. If we didn't do that, we'd forgot what we were fighting for.