Examining the causes of the Wall Street
Crash, when the US stock market lost a third of its value over six
desperate days in October 1929, causing the loss of more than $25billion
in individual wealth. 3,000 banks later failed and took investors'
savings with them. People who lived through that turbulent period
describe the biggest financial catastrophe in history.
Most people see drones as a controversial weapon prowling over foreign battlegrounds. But as America's military campaigns wind down, these machines are coming home and set to change civilian lives forever.
"This is a powerful technology. No amount of hand-wringing is going to stop it", says drone expert, Peter Singer. Whether it's a floating TV station streaming live to the web, the prying lens of the paparazzi, the police chasing a criminal or a government agency spying, small domestic drones are experiencing an exponential growth. At the world's largest drone convention in Las Vegas a salesman tells the crowd, "this can be used in law enforcement, disaster relief and industrial applications. It's also very good at dusting floors. Every home owner should have one". And as the technology advances at a frightening speed, anyone with a few hundred dollars can buy one over the counter. These hobby drones can fly for miles and provide sharp video feedback to the pilot. "I wouldn't cheat on your wife!", laughs columnist Charles Krauthammer. But jokes aside, there are real fears over the "political, legal and ethical issues that play out with this", argues Singer. In 3 years time an order from the US congress will see tens of thousands of drones legally occupy an already crowded sky, raising numerous questions about basic safety, terrorism and civil liberty. As companies rush to cash in on this new billion dollar industry, experts warn, "we're not ready for this".
THE BIG SELLOUT (http://www.thebigsellout.org/) is a political film. In various episodes the abstract phenomenon of privatisation is depicted in stories about very concrete human destinies around the globe. The documentary tells tragic, tragicomic but also encouraging stories of the everyday life of people, who day by day have to deal with the effects of privatisation politics, dictated by anonymous international financial institutions in Washington D.C. and Geneva, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
In his film, author and director FLORIAN OPITZ reveals the reality of the privatised and globalised world, which is supposed to be effective and shiny. He examines the effects of THE BIG SELLOUT, the worldwide privatisation of basic public services, such as water supply, electricity, public transportation, and even public health care. In South America, Asia, Africa, but also in Europe and the United States, OPITZ meets people, for whom these promises are nothing more than hollow phrases. And what he finds is that THE BIG SELLOUT has only just begun.
FLORIAN OPITZ talks to the architects of the new economic world order, as well as to ordinary people who have to deal with the politics of the former. He tells the story of a South African activist who helps poor families in Soweto, who are disconnected from electricity by the to-be privatised electricity supplier ESKOM, because they cannot afford to pay the high electricity bills anymore. Hunted by the Police and the company's security he and his team of guerilla electricians reconnect these families back, illegally.
Another storyline is about a Philippine mother living with her family in a slum area in Metro-Manila. For years now she has been struggling to find money to pay for the dialysis, her son needs twice a week. If she doesn't succeed until the end of the week, her son will die.
A humorous British train driver and union activist is the protagonist of the third episode. Having proudly started his career in the most efficient railway system in Europe, some years later he finds himself in a privatised, totally fragmented, and run down industry whose service regularly collapses. He is constantly fighting for his colleagues who have been facing more and more pressure from their private employers over the recent years. Pressure that has already lead to a numerous deadly accidents in the British railway system.
Last but not least, THE BIG SELLOUT tells us about the fight of the Bolivian citizens of Cochabamba against an US corporation that had tried to take over the municipal water supply. The tempted takeover lead to the first “water war” in human history, in which tens of thousands Bolivian citizens fought against the Bolivian police and military.
Allthough depicting the tragic privatisation failures all over the world there is a lot of hope in the episodes. In a desperate situation that seems to have no alternative to a „survival of the fittest“ mentality, people unite and stand up against a seemingly all-powerful enemy.
In the documentary, Joseph Stiglitz, one of the world's best known economists and Nobel Prize winner for economy makes the viewer understand where the dogma of privatisation came from, who profits from it, and what societies lose, when following it blindly. As refined former director of the World Bank, he comes from the world of financial institutions, but today he is fighting for the losers of the privatisation process, triggered by these same organizations.
THE BIG SELLOUT is a very special film: The different storylines of the film are not narrated one after the other, but woven together and carefully intertwined in a thrilling, episodical structure that is as compelling as truthful, and results in a film that is even more exciting than the sum of its parts.
Our leaders need to be held accountable, says journalist Heather Brooke. And she should know: Brooke uncovered the British Parliamentary financial expenses that led to a major political scandal in 2009. She urges us to ask our leaders questions through platforms like Freedom of Information requests -- and to finally get some answers.
Heather Brooke campaigns for freedom of information, requesting one secret document at a time. Full bio »
Comment les logiques de rentabilité pulvérisent les liens sociaux et humains
A l'heure où certains événements bouleversent l'opinion et nous interpellent sur la place du salarié dans l'entreprise, cette série documentaire nous permet de mieux comprendre cette relation complexe entre le travail et le capital, entre des entreprises, leurs dirigeants et leurs salariés.
Dans ces trois films qui mettent en scène des caissières d'Intermarché, le patron de Carglass ou les actionnaires de Fenwick, on découvre ce qui participe de l'épanouissement des uns et de la souffrance des autres. En quoi les logiques de rentabilité des actionnaires financiers pulvérisent les liens sociaux et humains qui faisaient la force des entreprises. Pour la première fois, une série explore les méthodes de gestion dans l'entreprise. Pour la première fois, une série sur le travail parvient à allier rigueur sociologique, enquête journalistique et dramaturgie. Ce qui jusqu'alors n'était traité qu'avec une accumulation de témoignages prend ici toute sa force documentaire.
Épisode 1 : la destruction
Dans un monde où l'économie n'est plus au service de l'homme mais l'homme au service de l'économie, les objectifs de productivité et les méthodes de management poussent les salariés jusqu'au bout de leurs limites. Jamais maladies, accidents du travail, souffrances physiques et psychologiques n'ont atteint un tel niveau. Les histoires d'hommes et de femmes que nous rencontrons chez les psychologues ou les médecins du travail, à l'Inspection du Travail ou au conseil des prud'hommes nous révèlent combien il est urgent de repenser l'organisation du travail.
Épisode 2 : l'aliénation
En France, 3 salariés sur 4 travaillent dans les services. S'il il y a une crise du travail, c'est donc de là qu'il faut l'observer. Nous nous sommes installés dans une entreprise anodine, une entreprise comme il en existe aujourd'hui des dizaines de milliers dans le monde : Carglass. Mondialisée, standardisée, Carglass est une filiale du groupe anglais Belron présent dans plus de 30 pays du monde. Ici, deux crédos : une productivité maximale et un client roi totalement satisfait... Deux notions qui, aujourd'hui, dans toutes les entreprises de services du monde, imposent la mise en place d'un management de la manipulation...
Épisode 3 : la dépossession
Alors que la crise fait vaciller le capitalisme financier, La Dépossession raconte l'extraordinaire pouvoir des actionnaires sur le travail et les travailleurs. L'histoire nous transporte d'une usine Fenwick - un fabricant industriel de matériel de manutention implanté dans le centre de la France - jusqu'aux arcanes de la finance new-yorkaise. Petite entreprise française née il y a 150 ans, Fenwick est racheté en 2006 par l'un des financiers les plus redoutés des États-Unis, Henry Kravis. Un homme à la tête du fonds d'investissement KKR, dont les ventes annuelles dépassent celles de Coca-cola, Disney et Microsoft cumulées. Avec ce rachat, pour les salariés français de Fenwick, la donne va radicalement changer. Cette même histoire se déroule dans des dizaines de milliers d'entreprises à travers le monde...
António Borges, o mesmo que se propõe vender Portugal a retalho, tenta mostrar ao entrevistador que os fins justificam os meios e o neoliberalismo é o caminho. Só não contava ser arrasado pelo jornalista da BBC, Stephen Sackur.
"Se toda a gente soubesse o que se está a fazer não haveria mercado". Borges sorri várias vezes, tenta esconder-se no jargão técnico e na suposta respeitabilidade da sua "indústria" de hedge funds. Defende o privilégio e o segredo partilhado pelos amigos. Quando notam a imoralidade responde com "oportunidades de mercado". É para elas que trabalha. Ainda hoje. Se toda a gente soubesse para quem eles trabalham, Borges não sorriria.
(publicado no dia em que apregoa, qual varina dos mercados, que a dívida portuguesa é linda: lá está, oportunidades de mercado)
http://www.thejuicemedia.com Juice Rap News - Episode 16: Electile Dysfunction. It's nearing the end of 2012, and bastion of world democracy (The United States of America) is displaying its free and open process of elections for the world to observe. As is customary every four years, the rigorous selection process has served up a number of philosopher kings and queens from which to choose. But why have so many choices when with a bit of effort you can whittle it down to two candidates and let the people pick from those? Especially when it makes for such scintillating debates. Join Juice Rap News stalwart host Robert Foster as he shares his dreams for the Presidential Debates... and then receives something of a rude awakening.
- Written & created by Giordano Nanni & Hugo Farrant in a suburban backyard home-studio in Melbourne, Australia - on Wurundjeri Land.
- We would like to express our deep gratitude to our donors whose generosity has made this episode possible. SUPPORT the creation of new episodes of Juice Rap News, an independent show which relies on private donations: http://thejuicemedia.com/donate -
In this speech excerpt, Arundhati Roy describes the intersection between foundation and corporate funding, capitalism and the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).
The following text is an excerpt from "Capitalism: A Ghost Story | Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?" by Arundhati Roy. Published March 26th, 2012:
"Mischievously, when the government or sections of the Corporate Press want to run a smear campaign against a genuine people's movement, like the Narmada Bachao Andolan, or the protest against the Koodankulam nuclear reactor, they accuse these movements of being NGOs receiving "foreign funding". They know very well that the mandate of most NGOs, in particular the well-funded ones, is to further the project of corporate globalisation, not thwart it.
Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development—the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights. ..."
On September 17, 2012, Noam Chomsky held a public lecture with the title "The Emerging World Order: its roots, our legacy" at Politeama Rossetti in Trieste.
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
L'aluminium envahit discrètement notre vie quotidienne. Tout le monde en consomme chaque jour sans s'en rendre compte.
Il est pourtant toxique. Dans l'alimentation, dans les produits cosmétiques, dans les vaccins et même dans les laits pour bébés, les fabricants utilisent de l'aluminium : agent levant dans les pains et les viennoiseries, conservateur dans les charcuteries et les plats préparés, antiagglomérant dans le sel ou pour les crèmes cosmétiques, colorant dans les confiseries, blanchisseur dans les dentifrices, anti-transpirant dans les déodorants...
A doses répétées, il est ingurgité, injecte, pose, bref... le consommateur s'intoxique.
Le métal multiplierait par deux les risques d'Alzheimer et les chercheurs decouvrent peu à peu qu'il provoque d'autres maladies graves.
Il y a trois ans, l'Europe a tiré la sonnette d'alarme et conseille à chacun de ne pas absorber plus d'un milligramme d'aluminium par semaine.
Mais comment éviter la surdose ? Impossible de le savoir car les fabricants ne signalent pas les quantites utilisées dans leurs produits.
David Korten, author of "Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth," discusses his views about the U.S. economic system. He also comments on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
UO Today, the Oregon Humanities Center's half-hour television interview program, provides a glimpse into the heart of the University of Oregon. Each episode offers viewers a conversation with UO faculty and administrators as well as visiting scholars, authors, and artists whose groundbreaking work is shaping our world.
Global financial markets are awash in hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of derivatives. By some estimates, the total amount exceeds one quadrillion.
Derivatives played a central role in the 2008 credit crisis, as they had a brutal multiplying effect on the magnitude of the carnage. As a bad asset was written down, oftentimes there were derivative contracts written against it that resulted in total losses 10x greater than the initial write-down.
But what exactly are derivatives? How do they work?
And have we learned to treat these "weapons of mass financial destruction" (as Warren Buffet colorfully coined them) any more carefully in the aftermath of the global financial crisis?
Not really, claims Janet Tavakoli, derivatives expert and president of Tavakoli Structure Finance.
But the danger behind derivatives doesn't lie in their existence, she stresses. They play and important and constructive role in a healthy financial system when used responsibly.
But when abused, derivatives can create massive damages. So at the root of the "derivatives problem", Tavakoli stresses, is control fraud - the rampant unchecked criminal action by influential players on Wall Street. (This is the same method of fraud we've explored in past interviews with Bill Black and Gretchen Morgenson). Derivatives contracts are too often constructed in favor of these parties, who if they end up on the losing side of the trade, are able to socialize their losses. Until we address this root problem of corruption, says Tavakoli, derivatives (as well as other securities: stocks, bonds, etc) will continue to subject investors and our makets, overall, to unacceptable risk.
Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America's top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty - while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.
In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system.
A warning: there's much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Threat Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.
Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. So how many criminal referrals did the same agency, the Office of Threat Supervision, make?
Zero.
Similar dismal action was taken by such other financial regulators as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal reserve and the FDIC.
Where is the accountability?, you may be asking. Or perhaps, how did we allow things to get this bad?
Quanto poder tem a Goldman Sachs? Bancos que não pagam impostos, e recebem resgates bilionários do dinheiro dos contribuintes. Pagam empresas de cotação para fornecer dados falsos, controlam a pauta mídia. Funcionários que vão trabalhar em governos, e gente do governo que depois vão trabalhar para os bancos... Golpes, conspirações e toda espécie de tática ardilosa para manter os privilégios do grupo responsável pela crise de 29 voltar a atacar a economia mundial no início desse século.
Militainment, Inc. offers a fascinating, disturbing, and timely glimpse into the militarization of American popular culture, examining how U.S. news coverage has come to resemble Hollywood film, video games, and "reality television" in its glamorization of war. Mobilizing an astonishing range of media examples - from news anchors' idolatry of military machinery to the impact of government propaganda on war reporting - the film asks: How has war taken its place in the culture as an entertainment spectacle? And how does presenting war as entertainment affect the ability of citizens to evaluate the necessity and real human costs of military action? The film is broken down into nine sections, each between 10 and 20 minutes in length, allowing for in-depth classroom analysis of individual elements of this wide-ranging phenomenon.
Filmmaker Info Written, produced & narrated by Roger Stahl
--World View with Denis Campbell,
Editor-in-Chief of UK Progressive Magazine, talks about increasing
police militarization, including in Egypt and surrounding the 2012
London Olympics.
--On the Bonus Show: Gordon Klingenschmitt followup, Oxford hunting bigfoot, 3rd grade anti-gang education, more.
The David Pakman Show is an internationally syndicated talk radio and television program hosted by David Pakman http://www.davidpakman.com
Tracy Worcester's film about factory pig
farming, a system which abuses animals, pollutes the environment,
damages human health and destroys rural communities.
Eduardo Galeano: "El mundo se divide en indignos e indignados"
The Crime of Ecocide
http://www.pollyhiggins.com/
"... move away from property laws to trusteeship laws, so rather than I own, to I owe. I owe a duty of care to this planet."
12-year old Victoria Grant explains why Canada (her homeland) and most of the world, is in debt.
"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London
In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]
McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15] http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html
I am just an anonymous citizen who firmly believes that we are the ones we are always waiting for. No saviors, heroes, leaders, gurus, or superior or inferior, we are all equals, and we need to think and behave as if it matters.
