From The Real News:
Yes Mr President, This Is Who We Are
Michael Ratner and Paul Jay analyze President Obama’s defense of his drone and Guantanamo policies - a policy based on continuing US dominance in the Middle East; Obama’s speech was interrupted by Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin
Al Jazeera English:
Empty buildings in French capital being occupied by familes on public-housing waiting lists for years.
Tackling the housing shortage in larger French cities was at the centre of President Francois Hollande’s election campaign promises last year.
Since taking office, his government has been trying to identify disused buildings that could be converted into public housing.
Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reports from Paris.
“King: A Filmed Record” (1970) directed by Sidney Lumet
A powerful and rarely seen documentary that shows how organized people, taking nonviolent action, can change a seemingly intractable situation. With James Earl Jones, Ruby Dee, Paul Newman, and your friendly local KKK.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:
Tens of thousands of climate activists marched in Washington D.C.on February 17. The event brought together religious leaders, climate campaigners and Canadian indigenous rights activists. 350.org’s Bill McKibben said they were “the antibodies kicking in as the planet tries to fight its fever.”
Did the corporate media notice them?
My latest on Truthout:
When Bubbles Burst
Those seeking deeper understanding of the planet’s shaky economic and financial condition should watch Hans Petter Moland’s When Bubbles Burst. The main subject of this Norwegian documentary is the relationship between finance and what economists call the real economy, and how unleashing finance to grow at the expense of the real economy—to allow a parasite, essentially, to overtake its host—leads inexorably to greater economic suffering and environmental degradation. The film revolves around the tragic story of a small town in Norway whose elected officials were persuaded by financial consultants, at the height of the stock boom, to invest in Citibank’s mortgage-backed securities, products that became worthless with the crash of the global casino in 2008. We follow two representatives of the formerly wealthy town as they journey overseas to New York and Detroit in order to investigate causes and effects. Along the way we hear many voices of reason, including those of Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Lewis, and the inspirational Carlota Perez. Perhaps most valuable is the film’s long view of financial-economic history and the cogent policy discussion it offers (hint: tight regulation of finance, public investment in green industry). If Inside Job left you feeling like you wanted more intellectually, When Bubbles Burst will satisfy that thirst.
We’re Not Broke
Victoria Bruce and Karin Hayes have put together a well-researched and powerful new documentary about a crucial but largely ignored piece of the national economic puzzle: Most large American corporations—via international tax havens, lobbying, and the exploitation of loopholes in corporate law—pay nothing in federal taxes, and many even receive large refunds from the IRS. In addition to playing a key role in the slashing of public spending on things like teachers, police, and firefighters, the special coddling of the corporate giants by the federal government puts small businesses—which have no lobbyists or teams of corporate lawyers—at a distinct competitive disadvantage. At a time when the necessities of economic belt-tightening and faith in the so-called “free-market” are still considered conventional wisdom, We’re Not Broke rationally and competently dismantles political economic myth. It also provides a helpful look into the grassroots activism raising awareness about corporate tax-dodging since even before the takeover of Zuccotti Park by Occupy Wall Street. If the film’s exposition of the problem unfolds without fanfare, the images of massive crowds in Times Square demanding an end to corporate rule over national politics still bring chills. Will the public keep up the pressure? [Disclosure: I appear briefly in this film.]
Downeast
David Redmon and Ashley Sabin (the directors of the excellent Girl Model) inform us at the end of Downeast that 132,000 factories have closed in the U.S. since 2001, resulting in a loss of 6 million jobs. This film presents the story of one of those factories: A sardine cannery with 128 employees in small town Maine that closed in 2010. Enter Antonio Bussone, an Italian immigrant and small businessman who aims to take over the space, convert it into a lobster meat cannery, and restore jobs for the city’s elderly, impoverished residents. The town is eligible for federal stimulus money, but the city council—whose top official owns a competing business—coldly forgoes its approval. The film follows Bussone and several of the town’s unemployed 70somethings as they desperately try to turn things around despite the lack of local government support. Things actually start looking up, that is until business begins to get personal in the meanest way. Bussone’s efforts start to resemble the steaming, rotting piles of lobster shells the old ladies mechanically shuck and discard each day. Bussone’s bank ultimately freezes his accounts and seizes his assets, leading to the shuttering of the plant for the second time in a matter of months. The most poignant moment of the film has to be watching the exhausted ladies at the end of their shift speculate on what a lobster might or might not feel as its life is being taken.
Big Boys Gone Bananas
A compelling study in the ongoing megabattle between corporate public relations and the search for truth, starring an enormous American multinational and a muckraking Swedish film director. Big Boys Gone Bananas* exposes the ruthless machinations of the PR industry and goes a long way towards explaining how the public’s perceptions of economic realities are deliberately distorted by corporate professionals. It begins with director Frederik Gertten—who also made the 2009 investigative documentary Bananas*, about pesticides and the health problems of banana workers in Nicaragua—receiving a cease and desist letter from the Dole Food Company before his film’s premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. From there we witness some of the best of corporate intimidation, with targets including Gertten’s partners, film festival managers, journalists, the Swedish ambassador, and some incredulous members of the Swedish parliament. This is a film about systemic manipulation of information by the most dominant institutions in democratic society—a freedom of speech drama between the little guy and the largest fruit and vegetable company in the world.
NYTimes:
Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.
NYTimes:
Ms. Rivera said that she was thankful for the help, but that its face — mostly white, middle- and upper-class people — made her bitter.
“The only time you recognize us is when there’s some disaster,” she said. “Since this happened, it’s: ‘Let’s help the black people. Let’s run to their rescue.’ ”
“Why wait for tragedy?” she added. “People suffer every day with this.”
Democracy Now:
It’s been more than two weeks since Superstorm Sandy hit New York City, yet thousands of people in the city’s public housing buildings are still in the cold. The city says it has restored some level of power to all housing projects, but as of Wednesday nearly 16,000 public tenants were without heat and hot water. Some remained without any reliable water — hot or cold. Also out of service were dozens of elevators impacted by the storm. One of the areas most affected has been Coney Island at the southern tip of Brooklyn, where the storm poured saltwater into basements, devastating equipment. Despite going weeks without power in some cases, the city’s public tenants are still being asked to pay their rent on time before getting a credit in January. New York City Housing Authority Chairman John Rhea drew criticism earlier this week when he called the upcoming rent credit “a nice little Christmas present.” On Wednesday, Democracy Now!’s Amy Littlefield and Martyna Starosta headed to Coney Island and filed this report.
Kickstarter:
The Yes Men Are Revolting is a funny, action-packed adventure. With the environment on the brink of collapse, we ask a pressing question: at a time when corporate forces have bought and sold democracy, how can we effect real change? Our answer: get every viewer involved in the struggle.
For the last four years we’ve worked with dozens of groups on infiltrations, impersonations, and mass actions to try to make a difference. Check out the video on this page for a little taste! After the part where we ask for your support, you’ll see a scene where we hold a press conference pretending to be from the US Chamber of Commerce (big-money lobbyists who spend hundreds of millions blocking and dismantling environment, labor, housing, and health laws). The press conference goes well, and the Chamber’s real PR guy even shows up—comedic vigilante justice at its best. Stay tuned to this page for more videos in coming weeks.
But as we continued pulling off actions like the one against the Chamber, the Obama years rolled by, and as money’s chokehold on democracy got tighter, we got more frantic. We even took it out on each other, and our “band” almost split up. But then, a sequence of unbelievable global uprisings, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, got us excited about the idea of a global revolution–and we began to realize that we can do it too.
Then, energized by our involvement with the Occupy movement, we came to realize our true role in social change. Now, we’re hatching our most ambitious plan ever.
National Catholic Reporter:
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan uses graphs, charts, sociological research and statistical analysis to show how in the last century, nonviolent movements were far better at mobilizing supporters, resisting regime crackdowns, creating new initiatives, defeating repressive regimes and establishing lasting democracies.
Gene Sharp is ‘an 84-year-old man whom dictators around the world fear and despise’
If his NYTimes profile interests you, I recommend the documentary, How to Start a Revolution by Ruaridh Arrow (2011). (Read my review of it.)
Chris Hedges: The system has not been able to respond in a rational way, the way the Roosevelt administration responded rationally through the New Deal. And because of that, we’re in deep, deep trouble. So I think all of our hope now has to be invested in acts of civil disobedience
Francis Fox Piven, professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York:
The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
BBC: Six Greenpeace activists have boarded a Russian offshore oil rig in protest over gas and oil exploration in the Arctic, the group says. The group says drilling plans by Russian energy giant Gazprom are “dangerous” and should be abandoned. They are now hanging off the platform on small portable ledges, out of reach of its workers, reports the BBC’s Daniel Sandford in Moscow.
