We fill our lives with media.  Day in and day out the screens and voices spin a tall fictional tale of Americans with good jobs, houses, cars, educational opportunities and money.  Frontline brings home the real America, the one we don't want to face.  Gone is the American Dream, replaced with foreclosures, food stamps and work that doesn't pay enough to even make the most modest rent.  The new America is a wasteland of broken dreams, broken promises and broken people working themselves into the ground and still not even getting by.

Tonight's Friday Featured Documentary is the three hour PBS documentary Women Who Make America.  The film goes trhough the history of the woman's movement of the 1960's.  Recently we wrote about foreign guest workers enabling sex discrimination in high tech.  This film shows just how bad it was for women's equal rights and the battles fought.  Yet in 2013, Republicans are yet again blocking a bill to guarantee equal pay for equal work.

It's Friday Night! Party Time!  Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!  Tonight's documentary is Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box.   It is a nanosecond by nanosecond account of the May 6th, 2010 flash crash,  the most famous of sudden jolts to the markets due to automated computerized trading. 

With the latest mass shooting tragedy dominating the news, we thought it might be time to re-watch Michael Moore's award winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine.

There have been 63 mass shootings in the United States since 1982 and it seems in 2012 there is an epidemic of horror and violence. We know extreme poverty increases violence as does general economic stress. The loss of a job, a threat to career can tip the scales towards tragedy. Workplace abuses have increased as jobs became scarce.

Some will blame guns, some will think the answer is even more guns to shoot the other people with guns.

Could it be the real problem is our me first, f*@k you society? Think about it. If one is mentally ill, they will probably be fighting just to survive, never mind be in any sort of environment where that person would be accepted, with all of their limitations. We have more people in prison than any other industrialized nation. We have homeless kids and homeless people, an entire invisible world of American poverty out there, served platitudes with nothing to stop the downward spiral and slide.