We Feed the World

We Feed the World is a film about globalisation and scarcity amid plenty.  From the Fanonite.

The Great African Scandal

Academic Robert Beckford visits Ghana to investigate the hidden costs of rice, chocolate and gold and why, 50 years after independence, a country so rich in natural resources is one of the poorest in the world. He discovers child labourers farming cocoa instead of attending school and asks if the activities of multinationals, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have actually made the country’s problems worse.

Burp! Pepsi Versus Coke

John Pilger’s first collaboration with fellow Australian director Alan Lowery, looks at the worldwide struggle for soft drink supremacy by the Coca Cola company, and illuminates the power of multinational corporations.

(Watch the whole film)

The True Cost Of War

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.

The Great Green Smoke Screen

A channel 4 documentary (52 mins) looking at some of the problems with the carbon offsetting industry.

See also CheatNeutral.com:

When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

Commanding Heights

The Battle for the World Economy

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.

The Century of the Self

Adam Curtis’ acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty.

Episode 1 – Happiness Machines

Episode 2 – The Engineering Of Consent

Episode 3 – There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed

Episode 4 – Eight People Sipping Wine In Kettering

To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

The Freud dynasty is at the heart of this compelling social history.

Karl Marx – The Mark Steel Lecture

If you know Mark Steel at all, it’s probably as a recurring guest on BBC comedy panel shows (Buzzcocks, QI, etc). However, he’s also an ardent socialist, and for those of you who are getting sick of badly sync’ed audio on video clips, I offer you the following audio clip: Mark’s lecture on Marx, an entertaining biography of a flawed but brilliant man, worlds away from the sinister figure of capitalist demonology and equally distant from the equally sinister figure of Stalinist hagiography.

click here to play the whole lecture

Crude Impact

Last week we looked at how our societies were changed by the oil boom, and how they will have to change to cope with the oil crunch. This film (98 mins) is a much broader look at the fossil fuel industry and its effects worldwide.

Beyond Surburbia – Surviving Peak Oil

The oil boom of the 20th century allowed millions of Westerners to flee the cities and spread out over miles of countryside.  That boom is now over and, with oil becoming ever more scarce, that sprawl is looking less and less sustainable.

The End Of Suburbia

This documentary (79 mins) focuses almost entirely on North America, where the oil boom and the attendant rise in car culture and consumerist suburbia took of more than anywhere else.  However, we face similar problems in Britain, Europe and elsewhere, and could do much worse for an watchable and informative introduction to the socioeconomic implications of what’s become known as “Peak Oil”.

(This is just a trailer; click here to watch the full film on Yahoo! video)

The Power Of Community

The island republic of Cuba has already weathered a severe energy famine, when trade with the USSR was cut off by the latter’s collapse in 1991.  In this sequel (53 mins) to The End Of Suburbia looks at the community networks and structures which allow the Cubans to survive on a fraction of their previous fossil fuel consumption.