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| Source:Russia Today- Thom Hartmann doing his nightly talk show on President Vladimir Putin's Russia Today. |
"Let's think about what's going on in the United States right now...Everywhere you look - the profit motive is replacing the public good. What used to be our commons: our education systems, our roads and bridges, our social safety nets, our prisons, our water and power systems, you name it - they are all being devoured by billionaires and their for-profit corporations. And they only have one motive - to make higher and higher quarterly profits.
So with the privatization of water facilities in Detroit - it's no longer a question of, "How water can be supplied to the most residents in the best way possible?" - it's now a question of, "How can the basic human need for water be used to turn a profit?" With the privatization of prisons in places like Ohio and Arizona - it's no longer a question of "How we can administer our criminal justice system for the good of the society?" - but, rather, "How we can lock up more and more Americans to increase profits?"
And with the privatization of education - which can be seen in the push for charter schools and billionaire-funded Hollywood movies - it's no longer a question about, "How we can educate our kids to be leaders in the new economy?" - but, rather, "How we can shuffle kids in and out of classes in the most profitable way possible?" The Republican Party has pushed privatizing Social Security since the thirties, and privatizing Medicare since the sixties. Our food supply is now increasingly dominated by one private corporation - Monsanto - that is peddling genetically modified foods that scientific tests have proven to be unhealthy in lab animals - but are extremely profitable."
"RT (formerly Russia Today or Rossiya Segodnya)[10] is a Russian state-controlled[1] international television network funded by the tax budget of the Russian government.[17][18] It operates pay television or free-to-air channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Russian.
RT is a brand of TV-Novosti, an autonomous non-profit organization founded by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti in April 2005.[8][19] During the economic crisis in December 2008, the Russian government, headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, included ANO "TV-Novosti" on its list of core organizations of strategic importance to Russia.[20][21][22] RT operates as a multilingual service with channels in five languages: the original English-language channel was launched in 2005, the Arabic-language channel in 2007, Spanish in 2009, German in 2014 and French in 2017. RT America (since 2010),[23] RT UK (since 2014) and other regional channels also produce local content. RT is the parent company of the Ruptly video agency,[5] which owns the Redfish video channel and the Maffick digital media company.[6][7]
RT has regularly been described as a major propaganda outlet for the Russian government and its foreign policy.[2] Academics, fact-checkers, and news reporters (including some current and former RT reporters) have identified RT as a purveyor of disinformation[58] and conspiracy theories.[64] UK media regulator Ofcom has repeatedly found RT to have breached its rules on impartiality, including multiple instances in which RT broadcast "materially misleading" content.[71]
In 2012, RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan compared the channel to the Russian Ministry of Defence.[72] Referring to the Russo-Georgian War, she stated that it was "waging an information war, and with the entire Western world".[18][73] In September 2017, RT America was ordered to register as a foreign agent with the United States Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.[74]
RT was banned in Ukraine in 2014 after Russia's annexation of Crimea;[75] Latvia and Lithuania implemented similar bans in 2020.[76][77] Germany banned RT DE in February 2022.[78] After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Poland and then the entire European Union announced they were formally banning RT as well, while independent service providers in over 10 countries suspended broadcasts of RT.[79][80] Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube followed by blocking RT's social media content from being accessed in the European Union,[9][81] while Microsoft removed RT from their app store and de-ranked their search results on Bing.[82][83] Apple has removed the RT News app from all countries except for Russia."
Unless we hire a group, agency, or department of mind-readers (you might need to go to another planet (not just mentally) to find those people, I don't know how you judge people by whether they're happy or not.
The reason why we look at countries based on how they're doing economically (economic growth, gross national product, unemployment, poverty, education, cost of living, national debt, etc) because that's how you know how a country is doing because there's evidence and factual data that backs up and makes it clear how a country is doing. We can know how a country is doing economically based on a criteria that I just laid out.
But anyone can say they're happy and perhaps they can back that up as well, but unless you can actually get into someone else's head and read their minds, you'll never know for sure. But we can always judge countries about how they're doing economically.
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