Directed by Russell Brand and Michael Winterbottom (2015)
Film Review
In a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, British comedian Russell Brand uses this 2015 documentary to expose the total insanity of our present global economic system.
The film begins with an examination of neoliberalism (aka free market fundamentalism), an economic system glorifying greed and selfishness that engulfed the world under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It would set off a 40-year wealth transfer, in which working people got poorer and poorer while the fortunes of the rich skyrocketed.
Corporate deregulation, one of the major tenets of neoliberalism, would lead to major criminal behavior on the part of bank officials, including rigged interest rates schemes, foreign exchange fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. Unchecked, this crime spree inflicted crushing misery on billions in the 2008 global financial crash. Yet no banksters ever went to prison for it.
Instead, too-big-to-fail banks got taxpayer-funded bailouts that banks used to buy back shares (to increase their stock prices) and pay obscene CEO salaries. Unfortunately the film fails to make clear the essential role of private banks in money creation, the alleged reason why they can’t be allowed to fail. At present private banks create 97% of our money out of thin air when they issue loans.*
Instead of bailing out them, we should have allowed criminal banks to fail and restored authority for money creation to publicly accountable government bodies.
1986: The Act, Dr Andy Wakefield’s* sequel to Vaxxed was just released last week. The price to rent the 2 1/2 hour film is steep – $US12.99. Some may want to wait until the price comes down. People can rent the film at https://7thchakrafilms.com/home-page
This documentary, simply, is a history of the 1986 US National Vaccine Injury Act. This legislation guarantees pharmaceutical companies totally immunity from liability for adverse reactions to vaccines by transferring the liability to US taxpayers. It also creates a special vaccine court to decide on the merit of the hundreds of disabled children who file claims every year. President Reagan (a strong opponent of big government) threatened to veto the bill. However he caved in and signed the law when Wyeth threatened to withdraw the Pertussis vaccine from the DPT (trivalent diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus vaccine).
The history of vaccine injury in the US is long, complicated and politically corrupt. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to learn the CIA was directly involved in suppressing public information about adverse vaccine side effects owing to some bizarre Cold War competition with the Soviets over vaccine supremacy (???).
It was largely due to CIA interference that 63 million Americans were injected with the cancer-causing SV40 between 1955-63 and thousands of children suffered from acute encephalopathy following inoculation with the cellular pertussis vaccine.** Available in other countries in 1981, the acellular pertussis vaccine wouldn’t be mandated for use in US infants until 1996. CIA interference is also implicated in the failure of the FDA to shut down polio vaccine production at Cutter Laboratories in 1954, after an NIH researcher discovered their vaccine contained live (as opposed to inactivated polio vaccine). Eventually 40,000 children would develop polio from the Cutter vaccine, 164 would experience paralysis and 10 would die.
1986 wasn’t the first year the US government assumed liability for vaccine injuries. In 1976 a swine flu vaccine was rushed to market with inadequate testing after four soldiers contracted swine flu at Fort Dix. When the insurance industry refused to issue liability insurance, the federal government assumed liability. In this case, 200 people caught swine flu with one death. In contrast the the vaccine caused 58 deaths, 532 cases of paralysis, and thousands of lawsuits against the US government.
The 1986 law provides that claims must be filed within three years of learning of the vaccine injury (especially onerous given most parents have never heard of the vaccine court). Hearings are closed to the public, have no discovery process and are run by a special master (as opposed to a judge). The Act initially included a table of recognized injuries (developed by the CDC) which were automatically compensated. In the beginning, regressive encepalopathy (in which seizures and autism are often a major outcome) was an on table condition, which meant 95% of autism/seizure cases received compensation.
After the incidence of autism began to skyrocket in the early 1990s, Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services removed regressive encephalopathy and many other common vaccine injuries from the CDC table. This, in turn, forced parents to prove a direct link between the vaccine and their child’s disability, which is extremely difficult as most of the research is suppressed.
The most serious downstream effect of the total immunity 1986 Act granted pharmaceutical companies is the removal of any incentive on their part to study (and guarantee) the long term safety of their vaccines.
**In 1976, the FDA commissioned a study (which was suppressed) revealing that 1 in 300 children receiving cellular pertussis vaccine developed generalized seizures, and 1 in 214 developed other serious neurological reactions.
This documentary is a thoughtful exploration of the crucial role of the 13th amendment played in the president mass incarceration of African Americans, who currently provide captive labor for major Wall Street corporations for pennies a day. Featuring such luminaries as Van Jones, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, retired Black Congressional Caucus member Charles Rangel, and former (Republican) House Speaker Newt Gingrich*, the film highlights major landmarks in the evolution of the US prison industrial complex.
According to filmmakers, the 13th amendment was the most significant in that it essentially preserved slavery as “punishment for a crime.” Having lost their four million strong slave labor force, Southern states facing economic collapse, were quick to adopt “convict leasing” systems. In this way former slaves arrested for minor crimes such as loitering and vagrancy (ie failure to carry a letter certifying employment), could be leased to plantations, mines, and developing industries.
Likewise the 2015 release of D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was instrumental in the emerging mythology of black criminality. The overtly racist films glamorizes the Klu Klux Klan, while implanting the fiction in the public mind of an irresistible African American desire to rape white women. KKK cross burning was another fiction Griffith invented, which the terrorist organization subsequently adopted. .
The film’s release, which greatly increased KKK membership, also triggered thousands of lynchings between World War I and World War II. This state sanction terrorism against Southern Blacks, rather than economic privation, would be the main driver of northward African American migration in the early 20th century.
The film also recounts Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” in which he used subtle “war on drugs,” “law and order,” and “tough on crime” rhetoric to appeal to Southern Democrats’ unease with the civil rights movement – thus persuading them to vote Republican.
Reagan, in turn, would provide the legislation and funding to prosecute the war on drugs, significantly ramping up the arrest and conviction of low income minorities for victimless crimes such as marijuana and crack cocaine possession.
The film attributes most responsibility for the America’s obscene incarceration rate (2 million+ and growing) to Bill Clinton and his 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill. The latter significantly increased the militarization and numbers of cops on the street. Clinton also heavily promoted “three strikes you’re out” and minimum mandatory sentencing laws that have massively increased the US prison census.
*Newt Gingrich: “No one who is white understands the difficulty of being Black in the US.”
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths
By Mariana Mazzucato
Anthem Press (2013)
Book Review
This book totally shatters the lie that the free market makes the US the world’s greatest economic power. Mazzucato leaves the reader with absolutely no doubt the exact opposite is true: the US became an economic powerhouse after World War II as a direct result of massive government intervention – more so than any country in history except for China.
As Mazzucato’s research ably demonstrates, capitalism doesn’t work without massive state investment in research and development because no private investor (ie neither banks nor venture capitalists) will risk investing in new technologies that require 15-20 years to produce returns.
Without massive state intervention, there is no economic growth – anywhere. This is why austerity budgets adopted by most of the industrialized world have been so damaging. According to Mazzucato, austerity itself is directly responsible for current global stagnation (with a decade of near zero growth). Moreover industrialized countries with the lowest level of state-subsidized research and development (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) are the ones struggling the most economically.
The book mainly focuses on US programs that have financed technological research and development – via grants to universities and researchers, loans, loan guarantees, and subsidies. Not only does this funding support basic research (which venture capitalists almost never fund), but it also assists private corporations in commercializing these new technologies. She emphasizes that without strong support by alleged free market champion Ronald Reagan for massive state intervention (during the 1980s), there would have been no personal computer and Internet revolution the following decade.
The main federal agencies responsible for funding technological research and development (R&D) are National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)*, National Institutes of Health (funds research for nearly all new pharmaceuticals before handing them over to pharmaceutical companies), Small Business Administration, National Science Foundation (developed Google’s search algorithm), ARPA-E, and Department of Energy (helps private industry bring clean energy technologies to market).
Among other technological innovations made possible by federal R&D funding:
nanotechnology
biotechnology
Tesla electric vehicle
Apple computer, ipod, ipad, iphone, and SIRI (Apple bought SIRI from Stanford Research Institute aka SRI)
the jet engine
aerospace (space) technology
semiconductors, hard drives, microprocessors, hard drive, and RAM technology making personal computers possible
GPS
lithium batteries
fracking technology
nuclear technology (still massively subsidized by the state in all countries that employ it)
*NASA and DARPA were not only responsible for creating the Internet but for helping private industry to commercialize it.
Age of Assassins: The Loners, Idealists and Fanatics Who Conspired to Change the World
Faber and Faber (2013)
Book Review
In essence this book is an encyclopedia of modern day assassinations. In addition to providing comprehensive details of more than a dozen political murders, Newton proposes a general theory of what motivates assassins. In my view, this aspect of the book is a total failure. Mainly because it largely omits compelling evidence of US intelligence/military complicity in the assassinations of Malcolm X, JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon and the attempted assassinations of Reagan, Ford, George Wallace and John Paul II.
I also have a problem with Newton’s assertion that the era of assassinations began with the Lincoln assassination. Assassination via poisoning dates back to Roman times at least.
According to Newton, the Lincoln assassination inspired the Russian Nihilist movement and their numerous assassination attempts (which were ultimately successful) against czar Alexander II.
The Nihilists, in turn, inspired the Irish nationalists and the “propaganda of the deed” (see Why Social Studies Never Made Sense in School: The History of Anarchism ) tendency of the anarchist movement. The result would be a wave of attempted and completed assassinations across Europe and in the US.
The book contains a long section on the life of US anarchist Emma Goldman and the attempted assassination oshe plotted with her lover Alexander Berkman on Henry Clay Frick (hired by Carnegie to break the steel workers union) s. Although she would later renounce violence, her huge public following (according to Newton) would inspire Leon Czolgosz to assassinate president William McKinley.
The book devotes a long chapter to the rise of Serbian nationalism, the Black Hand and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the purported cause of World War I. It devotes numerous pages to the Armenian genocide by Ottoman rulers and several assassination attempts against Roosevelt and Truman.
I found the later chapters, beginning with the assassination of John Kennedy, a big disappointment. In my view, this section of the book is pure pop psychology and psychobabble.
Newton identifies three primary motives for assassination:
1) A desire to end the suffering engendered by capitalist greed.
2) The drive for violent retribution in reaction to other killings.
3) A desire to smash the state and other authoritarian structures.
This leaves out all the lone nut assassinations – in which misfits try to murder prominent political figures for no apparent reason at all. Except for the JFK assassination (Newton acknowledges Oswald had accomplices* ). Newton seems to be a strong supporter of the lone nut theory of assassination. He blames the rise of lone nut assassins on deep seated decay and alienation in US society, which he believes is aggravated by the motion picture industry.
*Based on an acoustical recording obtained from a Dallas police microphone, the 1978 House Committee on assassinations ascertain that Oswald had to have at least one accomplice. See https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKassassinationsC.htm
This is a fascinating documentary featuring a rare appearance by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. It begins by examining a mutual disarmament treaty Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan negotiated in 1987. Reagan was clearly acting in opposition to the reigning military-industrial-complex, just as Trump is in his negotiations with North Korean president Kim Jong-un. This seems to be why Reagan waited to launch disarmament talks until he safely won re-election in 1984.
The arms reduction treaty had scarcely come into effect when Gorbachev’s Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring),, in concert with CIA meddling, triggered the rapid break-up of the Soviet block. By 1990, thanks to Gorbachev’s commitment to non-intervention in Soviet allies’ internal affairs, the Berlin wall had fallen and Communist governments had been overthrown in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
An August 1991 coup, led by (CIA-backed) hard line Communists, failed but significantly weakened the Soviet Union by strengthening the hand of CIA-backed (see US Agents Helped Yeltsin Break Coup) Russian president Boris Yeltsin.
Within months, Yeltsin conspired with the presidents of Kazakstan, Belarus and Ukraine to declare independence simultaneously with the Russian Federation. The move would lead to Gorbachev’s resignation in December 1991.
The EU, concerned about preserving the Reagan-Gorbachev arms reduction treaty, proposed a number of countermeasures to improve Russian economic stability. Among them were a proposal to integrate Russia into western Europe by admitting them to the G7 and the NATO missile defense strategy and granting them $30 billion in aid. All were vetoed by the Bush senior and his successor Bill Clinton in favor of NATO expansion.
*In his book Manifest Destiny, F William Engdahl talks about the Enterprise, a private intelligence/security network created by George H W Bush and run by Oliver North and Richard Secord. In addition to organizing illegal weapons sales to Iran (see Iran-Contra Affair), the Enterprise recruited corrupt KGB generals to help bring down Gorbachev’s government. According to Engdahl, these generals and their young proteges would become Russia’s corrupt billionaire oligarchs. The Enterprise financed the KGB generals’ coup against Korbachev in 1991 and installed Boris Yeltsin as president. The latter allowed the oligarchs, with the help of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and other Harvard economists to loot Russia exactly as they had looted Poland. See Russia’s Criminal Oligarchy: The Role of Bush Senior and the CIA).
This documentary is about the US export of toxic pesticides that are banned in the US. This is ironic. Despite these domestic bans, heavy dependence on food imports means that most Americans end up ingesting these toxins in imported produce. In fact the only way Americans can avoid pesticide-laden food is to buy certified organic food from local farmers.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order banning the export of toxic pesticides. The order was revoked by Reagan a few months after his inauguration.
The US controls 75% of the global pesticide market via five notorious companies: Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow and BSAF. Although Bayer, Syngenta and BSAF are European companies, they produce their toxic pesticides in the US, where export regulations are more lax (ie non-existent). The pesticide industry has one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. Thanks to the courage of Democratic Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate has passed several bills banning pesticide exports. However because members face re-election every two years, they have no hope whatsoever of winning in House.
Most of the film concerns the epidemic of cancer and horrendous birth defects in India, Mexico, Argentina and other countries that continue to use US-produced pesticides that are banned in the global North.
Surprisingly it ends on an optimistic note with news about the growing organic food movement in Argentina, Kerala India and Bhutan. Rather than pressuring their governments to ban toxic pesticides, activists are learning chemical-free organic soil building techniques. In doing so, they also significantly increase their yields. In replacing monoculture techniques with crop diversity, organic farming methods are far more productive per unit land than traditional agriculture.
The full video can be viewed for free at the Al Jazeera website: Circle of Poison
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)
By David Cay Johnston
Penguin Group (2007)
Book Review
This book is an encyclopedia of the complex system of taxpayer-funded subsidies government grants the business elite to curry their political support. This support occurs in three main ways: as campaign contributions, as jobs (at the end of a civil servant’s government career) and outright bribes. According to Johnston, corporate welfare is as old as capitalism itself. Adam Smith (who Johnston quotes frequently) refers to corporate subsidies as “bounties.” He warns against them in his 1776 Wealth of Nations.
The author, who views corporate welfare as a major cause of America’s growing inequality, details a number of examples in which federal and state subsidies transformed ordinary entrepreneurs into billionaires.
Sports stadiums – between 1995-2006 sports team owners persuaded state and local authorities to build more than 50 new major league stadiums and countless minor league stadiums. In many cases, the state or city seize private land via eminent domain on which to build the stadium. Johnston maintains that running a sports team is always a money-losing proposition – in nearly every case any profit is almost identical to the size of the subsidy. Former president George W Bush made his first millions by buying the Texas Rangers and using his father’s influence to pressure the city of Arlington to seize 200 acres of private land via eminent domain for a sports stadium.
Walmart – founder Sam Walton built his retail empire by hiring lobbyists (Johnston calls them “bounty hunters”) to grant him free land via eminent domain, to “gift” him the sales tax he collects from customers and allowing him to raise capital via low cost government-sponsored industrial bonds. In total, Walmart has been granted more the $1 billion of government subsidies in 1/3 of their stores and distribution centers. In addition, as of 2007 they had (legally) avoided $4 billion in property and state income taxes.
Health Maintenance Organization (HMOs) – Nixon launched the first non-profit HMOs in the early seventies. His goal was to reduce health care costs by enrolling patients in repaid care in where doctors worked on salary. In 1981, Reagan phased out the federal loans and loan guarantees Nixon enacted to help subsidize HMOs and allowed them to become for profit businesses.All over the country, CEOs sold and traded shares in HMOs built at taxpayer expense.The CEOs of non-profit hospitals and Blue Cross plans quickly followed suit. Johnston calls it the greatest legalized theft of public assets in US history.
This Guns and Butter interview is full of astonishing information (that you will never find in the corporate media) about the role of Bush senior and CIA-funded foundations in the creation of Russia’s criminal oligarchy and the systematic dismantling of communist Poland and the Soviet Union. Bonnie Faulkner and F William Engdahl are discussing his new book Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance.
In the first 15 minutes of the interview, Engdahl describes Reagan’s creation of the CIA-funded National Endowment for Democracy and its sister groups National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI) Freedom House, and Solidarity Center. The formation of the so-called independent foundations enabled the CIA to fund a full range of illegal covert activities without being subject to congressional scrutiny. All worked closely with various foundations funded by George Soros to deliberately destabilize the Warsaw Pact.
15.30 Engdahl discusses the CIA conspiracy to bring down Poland’s communist government, starting with the secret pact Reagan and Pope John Paul II (the first Polish pope) formed in 1982. In this clandestine campaign, NED invested tens of millions of dollar in fax, copy machines, etc, which they smuggled into Poland with the help of Polish priests. This equipment, in turn, was used to facilitate mass protests supposedly organized by Solidarnosc, the dockworkers union led by Lech Walesa.
20.19 Engdahl talks about the 300 CIA agents left over from George Herbert Walker Bush’s tenure as CIA director – and how Bush senior regrouped them into private entities to engage in covert activities in Poland and the USSR.
21.00 Engdahl covers the mass protests leading to the collapse of the communist government in 1989 and the election of Lech Walesa as president. Walesa, in turn, opened the door for George Soros and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to strip the Polish economy of all its assets and impose harsh austerity measures.
32.00 Engdahl discusses Executive Order 12333 (signed by Reagan), which put Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush in charge of all US foreign and national security policy after 1981 – and Executive Order 13233 signed by George W Bush, which severely limited public access to the records of prior presidents.
36.00 Engdahl talks about the Enterprise, a private intelligence/security network created by George Herbert Walker Bush that included teams run by Oliver North and Richard Secord. In addition to organizing illegal weapons sales to Iran (Iran Contra), The Enterprise recruited corrupt KGB generals to help bring down Gorbachev’s government. According to Engdahl, these generals were the real origin (not the Russian mafia) of Russia’s corrupt billionaire oligarchs. The oligarchs were young proteges of these generals.
39.00 Engdahl explains Operation Hammer which financed the KGB generals’ coup against Korbachev in 1991 and installed Boris Yeltsin as president. The latter allowed the oligarchs, with the help of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs and other Harvard economists to loot Russia exactly as they had looted Poland.
49.54 Engdahl describes how the Open Russia Foundation bribed corrupt legislators in the Duma to privatize all Russia’s natural resources and richest industries (minerals, oil, gas, the largest aluminum smelter in the world) and how Sachs, Soros and their cronies assisted the oligarchs in selling off all these industries for pennies on the dollar. When the giant Russian oil company Yukos was privatized, international banker Jacob Rothschild, George Soros and Henry Kissinger were appointed as Yukos board members.
52.00 Engdahl traces the downfall of Yeltsin starting in 1998 when the Duma refused to approve Chernomyrdin as prime minister. Yeltsin then appointed Yevgeny Primakov, who immediately filed criminal charges against oligarch Boris Berezovksy, who fled to London. When Clinton began bombing Serbia in March 1999, Primakov was en route to Washington DC and order his pilot to turn around and return to Moscow. When he demanded Yeltsin support the Serbs, Yeltsin sacked him.
54.00 After Yeltsin lost control of the Russian military, which dispatched troops to seize the airport in Kosovo, he appointed Putin as Prime Minister. Engdahl attributes this decision to KGB deception operation that convinced Yeltsin and his oligarch buddies that Putin would play along. Instead Putin threatened Yeltsin with corruption charges unless he resigned. Putin would serve as acting president until he was elected in his own right in March 2000.
This documentary traces the rise of the “white rights” movement that elected Donald Trump. This movement, of mainly white blue collar males, promotes the distorted image of white people as a disenfranchised minority. According to the filmmakers, it has its roots in Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. By heavily emphasizing “states rights,” Goldwater successfully exploited the anxieties of Southerners over forced integration by the federal government. It would be the first time Southern states had voted Republican since the Civil War.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy
In 1968, the Nixon campaign built on Goldwater’s success by implementing a formal “southern strategy.” By reaching out to the “silent majority,” and emphasizing law and order in the face of race riots and anti-war protests, his campaign sought to win the votes of northern blue collar voters. In subsequent elections, Democratic Party strategists would seek to win back blue collar voters by recruiting two conservative governors to run for president (Carter and Clinton).
As the Watergate scandal undermined all Americans’ confidence in government, corporate oligarchs would build on growing anti-government sentiment by massively funding right wing think tanks, lobbying and conservative talk radio. This, in turn would lay the groundwork for Reagan’s 1980 massive deregulation and tax and public service cuts.
Corporate Giveaways By Clinton and Obama
When Clinton was elected in 1992, he quickly surpassed Reagan’s record of corporate giveaways, with his total deregulation of Wall Street, his Three Strikes and Omnibus Crime Bill (leading to mass incarceration of minorities) and his creation of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These free trade treaties resulted in the wholesale export of rust belt industries to Mexico and China, effectively ending any incentive for working class males to vote Democratic.
Obama, elected on the back of the 2008 financial collapse, would prove even more pro-corporate than Clinton or Bush. Instead of prosecuting the banks who caused the 2008 economic crash, he granted them massive bailouts, while ignoring the plight of millions of homeowners who lost their homes when these banks foreclosed on them. He also significantly increasing mass surveillance and aggressively prosecuting whistleblowers. He also effectively repealed posse comitatus* and habeus corpus.**
The Rise of Occupy and the Tea Party
Obama’s pro-corporate policies led to the rise of both left wing (Occupy Wall Street) and right wing (Tea Party) popular movements. The latter received major corporate backing (largely from the Koch brothers), enabling Tea Party Republicans to shift the blame for the loss of good paying industrial jobs from Wall Street to minorities, immigrants and women.
Is the US Moving to the Right?
For me, the highlight of the documentary is commentary by former Black Panther Party president Elaine Brown, the only activist featured. Brown, who is highly critical of the left’s failure to acknowledge the problems of poor white people, is the only commentator to dispute that the US is “moving to the right.” She points out that prior Republican campaigns used coded language (such as “state rights,” “law and order”) to target racist fears of blue collar whites. Trump, in contrast, openly caters to these sentiments. Brown reports that some blacks welcome the end of political hypocrisy and greater openness about the pervasiveness of white racism.
She believes this new openness offers a good opportunity to build a genuine multiracial working class movement. She gives the example of successful collaboration in Chicago between black activists and the Young Patriots (a white separatist group) against corrupt landlords.
*The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, prohibited the use of federal troops to enforce domestic policies within the US.
**The right of Habeus Corpus, guaranteed under Article I of the Constitution and the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, prevents government from illegal detaining US citizens without charging them.
The Most Revolutionary Act 