by cameron | Oct 4, 2009 | Cuba, geopolitics
Tonight I finally had a chance (thanks to Jason Nelson) to see Part 1 & 2 of Steven Soderbergh’s amazing film CHE, depicting the life of Che Guevara, starring (and produced by) Benicio Del Toro.
It’s an amazing film that, predictably, did very poorly at the US box office. I believe it opened in cinemas in Australia just recently so go see it if you can. If you can’t, try to pick it up when it comes out on DVD. The depiction of Che in these films is the most honest ever put into a major movie. It puts lie to the propaganda and lies told about Che by Americans for the last 50 years.
Jean-Paul Satre called Che "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era’s most perfect man."
Listen to the full 1964 radio interview with Che which appears, in part, in the first film.
by cameron | Oct 1, 2009 | banksters, capitalism
It’s time for all of us to get rid of our credit cards, once and for all.
As if the "Global Financial Crisis" (or, as I like to call it, the "Greedy Fuckers Crisis") hasn’t already taught us that we need to wean ourselves off of this credit-based culture we’ve built for ourselves, then this story should. According to News.com.au, "one in five Australians is a victim of credit card fraud or computer hackers."
More quotes:
"Credit card crime is by far the biggest single fraud issue, with almost 10 per cent of those surveyed falling victim to card theft or skimming."
"The news will be an embarrassment to the banks, who repeatedly claim that their systems are secure."
The banks make BILLIONS and BILLIONS of profits every year and they STILL can’t stop credit card fraud. Why? Because they don’t care. It would cost more to fix it than it does to pay out the claims. It’s the same reason they can’t develop an e-banking system that doesn’t look like it was made my monkeys in 1993. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. They care about profits, not people, not customers – PROFIT. That’s why their customer satisfaction scores are in the toilet.
Credit cards are just another way that the banks, corporations and the government manages to keep us up to our eyeballs in debt. They know that human nature means that if you CAN spend it, you WILL – eventually. And then they have you by the balls. And if you’re living on debt, you’re easy to manipulate. You can’t afford to quit your job – so they can screw you down a little bit more. You can’t afford to lose your job – so you put "the economy" ahead of other issues, like "the survival of the species" when you vote in elections. You dance to their tune.
Let’s get a campaign going to get a million people to cut up their credit cards this year. Along with my other campaign to get a million people to walk away from the "big four" banks and take their banking to a smaller, member-owned credit union.
Let’s take control of our destiny people.
UPDATE: Check out @mrshlee! He already decided to cut his up! (video)
by cameron | Sep 24, 2009 | US politics
I know you’ve all seen this video before, but here’s my translation:
The white team are the Democrats trying to push through health care.
The black team are the Republicans trying to stop it.
And the moonwalking bear? He’s America’s Military Industrial Complex, selling 70% of the world’s arms, overthrowing countries, and stealing natural resources from developing countries.
by cameron | Sep 24, 2009 | US politics
Wendell Potter, former Corporate Communications Exec at insurance giant Cigna, was on Bill Maher’s show last week talking about how Big Insurance are screwing Americans. He talks, among other things, about how he worked when at Cigna to discredit Michael Moore’s film "SICKO" when it came out but how the film was "exactly right". Watch the interview here.
In a related story, it seems that the woman who came up with the "death panels" rhetoric, Betsy McCaughey, is the same woman who worked with Big Tobacco to develop a disinformation campaign to kill health care reform under the Clinton administration.
by cameron | Sep 21, 2009 | geopolitics, Iraq, US politics
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, has written an excellent post up on CBS (surprisingly) about America’s addiction to war:
"The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market."
And here is what I think is the killer line:
"Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this,"
But the end of the sentence has it back to front:
"… which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers."
Perhaps if more newspapers wrote about America’s warmongering more often, then more people might be comfortable thinking about it. It’s been my experience that nearly all Americans I’ve spoken to – including those that are intelligent, well-read and anti-war – find it almost impossible to conceive that America is the cause of many of the world’s tensions instead of the last great salvation. They have been drinking to Kool Aid for so long it’s next to impossible for most Americans to even CONSIDER the alternative view.
Engelhardt finishes with two powerful paragraphs:
"And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.
What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war."
Read the entire article, it’s well worth it.
by cameron | Sep 16, 2009 | geopolitics, US politics
Do you really think America wasn’t involved in torture, secret prisons or wanton death and destruction before 9/11?
The record shows that they existed before. In fact, 9/11 was in many ways a REACTION to those things, not the cause of them. The USA has NEVER lived up to the virtues Temporal Flush mentions here. Read Zinn’s “People’s History”. The myth of America may survive in the minds of many Americans who don’t read the history of their own country, but outside if the US borders, many people know the other side of the story.
All 9/11 provided was justification to be more aggressive with programs that had been running for many decades in one form or another and continue today under the Obama administration.
There are two Americas – the mythical one that most Americans seem to believe is real, the country that are the good guys, the white knight, the protector of democracy and freedom – and then there is the real America, the one run by corporations and the wealthy elite, the one that, for the entire country’s history, has oppressed the poor and the weak in countries around the globe and at home. The one that stole land at the point of a gun, first from the Native Americans, then from the Mexicans, then from the Cubans, then from the Alaskans, then from the Hawaiins. The one that built its power and wealth on the back of the slave and segregation and imported Chinese labour. The one that did and does deal with the most despicable dictators around the globe to protect American corporate interests.
9/11 may have brought some of the other America to your attention, but it’s a mistake to think that it started then. It’s always been there. You just weren’t paying attention.
