What the U.S. news media has been feeding to Americans leaves much to be desired. Economic recovery … $ 50 billion job-creating infrastructure programs … deficit-reducing measures – all of it pretentious nonsense. And we swallow it. Hook, line and sinker.

What’s actually taking place within our borders, however, is being reported on a daily basis by news media outside the U.S. None of it makes for pleasant reading, and when the extent of our national calamity can no longer be covered up by the controlled U.S. media, the repercussions will be severe.

Here’s what outsiders are reading about us, but isn’t being included in U.S. news reports:

– “In February, the board of commissioners of Ohio’s Ashtabula County faced a scene familiar to local governments across America: a budget shortfall. They began to cut spending and reduced the sheriff’s budget by 20 per cent … The sheriff’s department adapted. ‘We have no patrol units. There is no one on the streets. We respond to only crimes in progress. We don’t respond to property crimes.’…

– “If a county without police seems like a weird throwback to an earlier frontier-like moment in American history, it is not the only one. ‘Back to the Stone Age’ is the name of a seminar organized in March by civil engineers at Indiana’s Purdue University for local supervisors interested in saving money by breaking up paved roads and turning them back to gravel … The state of Michigan had similar conversations. It has converted at least 50 miles of paved roads to gravel in the last few years …

– “Cincinnati, Ohio, is cutting back on trash collection and snow removal and filling fewer potholes …

– “The city of Dallas is not picking up litter in public parks …

– “Flint, Michigan, laid off 23 of 88 firefighters and closed two fire stations …

– “In some places it’s almost literally the dark ages: the city of Shelton in Washington state decided to follow the example of numerous other localities and last week turned off 114 of its 860 street lights …

– “Others have axed bus service and cut back on library hours. Class sizes are being increased and teachers are being laid off. School districts around the country are cutting the school day or the school week or the school year – effectively furloughing students.

– “The National Association of Counties estimates that local governments will eliminate roughly half a million employees in the next fiscal year, with public safety, public works, public health, social services, and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks …

– “Facing a US $ 1 billion budget shortfall, Montgomery County in Maryland appealed for corporate sponsors to step up and adopt porta-potties in public parks … Meanwhile, Montgomery County’s school system, banking on its reputation for high standards and test scores, took the unusual step of selling its curriculum to a private textbook publisher, Pearson, for US $ 2.3 million and royalties of up to three per cent on sales. As part of the deal, county classrooms can be used as ‘showrooms’ – which critics said effectively turns students and teachers into salesmen for a corporation. But the superintendent, Jerry Weast, told the Washington Post, ‘I tend to look at this from the perspective that we are broke’ …

– “When the eight-lane Interstate 35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145, the American Society of Civil Engineers warned that the infrastructure deficit of aging postwar highways and bridges amounted to US $ 1.6 trillion. More than a quarter of America’s bridges were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete …

– “On education, the United States has been falling behind in everything from science and engineering to basic literacy. The U.S. once had the highest proportion of young adults with post-secondary degrees; now it ranks 12th, according to the College Board on association of education institutions …

– “In 2001, the U.S. ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use; it now ranks 15th out of 30 nations, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development …

– “Meanwhile, prolonged rates of high unemployment are taking a toll on families today, and will for years to come. Studies have shown that the longer a person is unemployed, the more difficult it is to find a job – partly because skills deteriorate, and partly because employers become suspicious of why someone hasn’t worked for a year. ‘The United States is expanding its underclass of a whole group of individuals who will become less employable, less integrated, more subject to criminal and other deviant behaviour – and probably become part of the larger problem of structural poverty in America as well,’ says Sherle Shenninger, director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank …

– “Arianna Huffington sees an even starker big picture emerging from the reams of economic bad news. ‘As we watch the middle class crumbling, for me this is a major indication that we are turning into a Third World Country,’ said Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post. ‘The distinguishing characteristic of the Third World Country, is you have people at the top and the rest – you don’t have a thriving middle class’…

– “Over the past decade, private sector job growth was sluggish. Combined with recession job losses, there are now only as many private sector jobs as there were in early 1999, a decade ago, while the population continues to grow. And incomes stagnated for a full decade – the longest such period since the U.S. Census Bureau has been keeping track of household income …

– “Clyde Prestowitz, a former Reagan administration trade official and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, says the scope of the problem came into focus for him one day last year when he read, in the same newspaper, that China was launching a new 240-mph high-speed train, and then an article about city leaders in Pittsburgh considering a tax on university tuitions in order to fund the municipal employees’ retirement pension plan. ‘I thought, the Chinese are building world-record trains and we’re taxing kids to go to school!’ says Prestowitz. ‘We’ve been in decline for quite some time – we haven’t recognized it and have been fooling ourselves’ …

– “Shenninger points in part to foreign policy: waging expensive wars overseas rather than spending the money at home. ‘Our priorities are horribly distorted,’ he says. ‘We spent billions on new energy plants in Iraq and most of the money got siphoned off. We are spending billions of dollars trying to build schools in Afghanistan. But we are not willing to borrow at historically low rates to keep teachers at work or improve public infrastructure at home.’ …

– “While some critics are calling for a major program of reinvestment in public infrastructure and reviving parts of the U.S. manufacturing base, the politics do not favour it. In a speech in Milwaukee on Monday, Obama asked Congress to pass a $ 50 billion infrastructure spending program to refurbish roads, runways and railways. But concerns about government deficits among Republicans and some Democrats make it unlikely that any large spending package could pass Congress – especially after the gains the GOP is widely expected to make in the mid-term elections on Nov.2 …

– “Republicans are calling for aggressive spending cuts. When Democrats pushed through their spending bill for local governments, Republicans called it a ‘bailout’ of profligate local governments that overindulged public sector unions with generous salaries and benefits …

– “But where does that leave people like the good citizens of Ashtabula County, Ohio? How can they be safe from criminals without a fully staffed local police force, TV station WKYC asked a local judge in April. ‘Arm yourselves,’ came the reply from Ashtabula County Common Pleas Judge Alfred Mackey. ‘Be very careful, be vigilant, get in touch with your neighbors, because we’re going to have to look after each other.’ And so they did. In July, a group of farmers surrounded a trailer in which a suspected house robber was hiding while they waited for the county’s lone squad car to arrive.” –

None of this should be happening. Laying off policemen and firemen? … “Breaking up paved roads? … Turning off street lights? … Axing bus services and closing libraries? … Increasing class sizes and laying off teachers? … Is there a clearer indication “that we are broke” and only a Manhattan-type job-creation effort will save us from attaining Third World status?

Is there a sure-fire program that will create the millions of jobs so badly needed by the masses of unemployed Americans? Yes, there is. An Emergency Shipbuilding Program mercifully ended the Great Depression of the 1930s, and only a similar effort will pull us out of today’s economic tailspin.