All too often, the phrase "corporate free press" is something of an oxymoron. Whether to maximise sales, to attract advertisers, or simply to promote the interests of their wealthy owners, the mass media open strange, self-serving and grossly distorted windows onto the world.
This website is another window. Here you'll find documentaries, lectures and interviews following a different editorial line.
People say that there are two issues in this year’s elections: the war and the economy. But in many ways, that’s just one issue – Joseph Stiglitz talking at the London School of Economics last month(paraphrased from memory).
Wars are always expensive affairs, but the occupation of Iraq has taken that to new levels. Private armies of “civilian contractors” and cost-plus “reconstruction firms” have notoriously pushed up the price, but caring for wounded veterans also takes its toll on the economy, as does the increase in the price of oil.
However, few of these costs made themselves felt in the first four and a half years of war. The Federal Reserve has created a bubble of debt, allowing half a trillion to be spent on the military (never mind all the hidden costs) without any associated tax increase. That bubble is now bursting – or so argues the Nobel Prize-winning economist and notorious World Bank whistleblower Joseph Stiglitz in this address to Colombia University.
Click here to watch the video of the addres, as well as an introduction, Q&A and response. Click here for a paper (pdf) in which Stiglitz and his collaborator Linda Bilmes explain their thesis.
Here is an excellent three part series from PBS that presents a rather celebratory but interesting account of globalization.
1. The Battle of Ideas
A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.
Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.
I have taken this documentary down, as it became apparent that it was bringing traffic in from the fascist British National Party and their supporters.
If you’re not with these scum, I apologise for the inconvenience.
If you are, then all I have to say to you is FUCK OFF AND DIE YOU NAZI BASTARDS!
An informative and very human look at what neoliberal neocolonialism is doing to this island paradise. Narration based on Jamaica Arcaid’s A Small Place.
After years spent undermining the economies of developing nations, bringing them under control of history’s most subtle and most global empire, self-described economic hitman John Perkins blew the whistle in 2004. Though studiously ignored by the mainstream media, his Confessions… found a massive audience; it spent some time in the New York Times’ bestseller list without that paper ever having reviewed it.
In this address (52 mins + 16 mins Q&A) to the activist group Veterans For Peace (h/t Opinionated Indian), Perkins explains the methodology of what he calls Imperial Corporatocracy and how it has dominated the history of the last 60 years.
Part One…
… where Perkins explains how debt is used as a tool of empire, and looks at the last three decades in the Middle East. The oil embargo of the early 1970s was followed by an intense colonisation of Saudi Arabia; it took some time longer to get there in Iraq.
Part Two…
… on the decades of repression of South America, and the recent continent-wide popular uprising against the Corporatocracy. Also, Perkins’ call for activism against corporate excesses.
When asked to name the most powerful force in the universe, Albert Einstein famously replied “compound interest”. Unlike gravity, say, or electromagnetism, this is a phenomenom entirely of our own making, yet how many of us even begin to understand it?
More generally, it’s often said (and rarely without reason) that money is the root of all evil. Yet who among us knows the root of all money? If knowledge is power, then watching this animated film (47 mins) might represent a big step towards your emancipation.
