The New American Poor : The Middle Class

Lose your job in Australia and there's a good chance there will be a safety net to catch you. The Newstart allowance, Medicare benefits, along with other programs provide help. But it's a very different story in the United States.

It may be the wealthiest country in the world but as documentary maker Philippe Levasseur shows in America's Broken Dreams, when you lose your job in the US there is very little to protect you. In 2008 the global financial crisis hit the poor first, but now America's middle class is being devastated.

Larry, 52, used to manage a large customer service department. But two years ago he lost his job and house. Today he lives in a motel room with his wife and two children and scrapes by on $820 dollars a month, welcoming tourists to Disney World. After he has paid the motel fees, he's left with just $70 a week for food and other necessities.

Terry used to be a sales manager and enjoyed a good life until he was made redundant. He ended up roaming from motel to motel in Florida in his car and eventually was judged 'economically incapable' of raising his six children. The three eldest were placed in foster care.

There are currently 1,800 children growing up in the motels around Disney World. They move from school to school as their parents are forced to find cheaper accommodation.

Amber and Daniel are married but are forced to live on different sides of the United States. Why? It's the only way they can honestly make enough money to stop themselves and their children going hungry.

Three unique stories, but all have one thing in common: they are America's new poor, who struggle for work but can barely survive.

Filmmaker Philippe Levasseur takes his camera into car parks, trailer homes and motels across the country as middle class families try to regain the American dream. What he found is simply shocking.

Deborah Tavares - They Control Everything Now

Jeff Rense & Deborah Tavares - They Control Everything Now
Deborah Tavares explores some of the ways depopulation may occur and everyday things we are exposed to may be used as weapons against the people. If Depopulation is the objective these may be the tools to do just that.

Education Puts Us To Sleep and Enslaves Us – By Jason Liosatos

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.- Albert Einstein.

The word education comes from the Latin word educo which means to educe, to draw from within. Generally in school we are convinced that education comes from the outside in, with lots of information to fill our minds with to make us clever and ‘successful’. The beginning of school is the beginning of children being robbed of themselves, and being taught that they are not adequate, and not enough or complete people as they are, but will only be enough when they get the next exam, result, better class, better job, better house etc.

This brainwashing literally leaves a person scrambling forwards for the rest of their life trying to find themselves, when they were there all along. Our education and schooling system is not an education, it is a system which teaches us to endure boredom, gets us used to being somewhere between 9 to 4, and forces us to listen to and answer to authority.

Real education should wake us up. Conventional education puts us to sleep and robs us of ourselves. I can remember seeing it in the face of other kids in school, it was an empty look, a look of someone being forced to hand their will and life over to a system they deeply deplored and felt uncomfortable in.

It really was a sort of concentration camp. I felt it was almost like frontal lobotomy en masse. There was a look of confusion and hopelessness in the kid’s eyes, like trapped geniuses. I remember well the feeling of whether you achieved another gold star on the wall chart of the class and the rivalry and fear of who would be best or worse. And the school reports with the comments about your brightness or short attention span. It was not an attention span problem I had, it was that I was bored out of my tiny mind having to go to this same building for years on end listening to the same uninteresting, useless rote.

Over the course of our schooling that system which is supposed to educate us actually does almost the opposite, it dulls and chokes off our innate creative genius, gifts and abilities, which every human being is born and gifted with.

It is like chloroform for us, which creates an amnesia which disconnects and dismembers us from ourselves at a very early age, and cuts us off from who we really are. This may sound harsh but school turns us into robots that are programmed and conditioned to fit into the system that we are forced into when we leave school. By the time we leave school we have become thoroughly conditioned to function in the system of virtual slavery, of working for the next 50 odd years. Looking forward to our lunch break, home times, and weekends off if we are lucky, and our pay cheques which barely feed us, clothe us, and house us. I recently spoke with a disillusioned teacher that had left the system through frustration, who said he can teach a child how to learn what they learn to pass an exam in a few weeks, which they would normally take two years to learn, sat bored to death in a classroom. – Jason Liosatos www.jasonliosatos.com