New York, New York: When will 9/9, the day of the release of the new IPhone and Watch replace 9/11 in the consciousness of Americans who put consumption way ahead of civil activism?
The wizards of Apple, who will soon have a device on the market to help you pay your bills, (and take a micro slice) must be aware that consumer borrowing has just seen its biggest hike since November 2001--just two months after the big event--and now stands at a whopping $3.24 TRILLION. According to the Federal Reserve, there has been a hike of $16.01 Billion in July alone.
When I made the film In Debt We Trust in 2006 about the immense debt burden of Americans, I didn't connect the phenomenon to hikes in federal borrowing to finance our other pre-occupation: war spending. Significantly, earlier in this same week, President Obama asked for another $5 billion for a new costly counter-terrorism offensive to fight ISIS.
This came just a few weeks after the Administration said it didn't really consider ISIS a threat and had no strategy to fight it. Where might we ask was the National Security Agency with all its pervasive surveillance technology? Could they have missed its emergence because they are too busy sucking up metadata on our web and phone records?
Even superhawk Henry Kissinger downplayed ISIS, claiming Iran is a bigger threat--just before we learned that both Iran and the US are fighting ISIS, some say, together.
When did no threat become the biggest threat in the world?
Could the media have had anything to do with it? Kill a reporter or two and you are guaranteed massive publicity. These horror shows--and they are both, horrors and shows, rocketed the need for a global response of the kind Washington is now pushing up the escalation ladder.
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