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It would be a breath of fresh informative air if the 24/7 mainstream corporate media had more REAL journalists like yourself and Sarah Kendzior on their daily broadcasts rather than the usual (waiting for a spinoff of their own) pundits. Nothing but former-politicians and lawyers rattling on with the same derivations of the same spin of disbelief.

I'm just a blue collar Johnny that is resigned and removed from the exhaustive outrage machine of cliched responses that come out of their mouths. It's like watching Sportscenter for corporate controlled politicians with news hosts and their semi-regular guests doing puff pieces and passive/aggressive hatchet jobs alike. Like Max Mercy the weasly sportswriter from Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural said, "I'm here to protect this GAME. And, I make it a bit more interesting."

To me, most of these televised careerist clowns are in it for the prestige and perks instead of the social responsibility. Every Trump move from "good people on both sides", the insurrection, and the "only on day one" dictator wink. But that's to be expected when parent companies control their properties output. They are as complicit in leaving the back door unlocked with the porch light on for all the autocrats, plutocrats and oligarchs to set up shop and reap the rewards of the tax haven and trickle the wealth upward that is and has been the USA. Yet still, the financially challenged lower rungs of the American middle class continue to suffer and the impoverished are always ignored.

BUSINESS....as usual....

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Now and then over the past year or so I have thought about the contributions that US businesses, our federal government, and US financiers have made to create the modern China with which so many are now so troubled. In 1978-79, when Deng changed the orientation of the Party and government, China was desperately impoverished - lots of people starved to death every winter, there was no modern healthcare, although there was traditional medicine, there were not the modern tools and research labs that were in the First World countries, so Deng & others opened the country to foreigners, foreign money, foreign inventiveness and foreign investments. Western businesses, governments and financiers competed to "get in on the ground floor." Chinese people worked, learned, invented, copied and created their rather modern country. It now is assertive, sometimes aggressive, and seldom sees the world as the movers and shakers in the US do. But the Chinese did not create their buildings, wealth, research labs and financial institutions - and enormous army - out of mud; they used what they attracted from outside China, often developing and making it their own. But I never see any writing about our contribution to the creation of present day China, the contributions, that in my view, resulted from desires to make money. I am old and retired but once worked in a large law firm that had gotten in on the ground floor with an office in Shanghai, populated with American and Chinese people. The firm was very proud of that office, and partners who went there with their families for 2+ year terms were very enthused, which I understand. But even after ten years that office was still losing money - was, indeed, supported by the earnings of us in the US offices. Thus, even the law firm where I worked for a while was contributing to the growth of the now-fearsome Chinese juggernaut. And we (Americans & Murricans alike did it for money). Now we expend enormous resources to keep that money machine from eating us.

Rick Geissal

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