The next time someone asks me the reasons for being an anti-capitalist, I’m just going to tell them to watch GREEN: DEATH OF THE FORESTS by Patrick Rouxel. A stunning visual essay showing the reasons behind and consequences of Indonesia’s massive deforestation, GREEN connects the extraction and exploitation through to the consumers on the other end, while our animal cousins pay a devastating price. The doc is without narration, talking heads or barely any humans at all, and as such is a unique AlJazeera Witness doc. It’s also some pretty serious fodder for anyone arguing against our system of consumerist, free market capitalism. A sad but eloquent and unforgettable film.
Today is my birthday, and my birthday wish—aside from health and happiness for my friends and especially my family—is for widespread and even sustained! support for alternative and independent media, especially from the anniversary wish-list below.
Every time we buy a Globe and Mail newspaper or watch any Canadian news program on television we are tacitly, if not consciously, supporting the status quo. The status quo, at least in Canada, currently consists of a government aggressively pursuing an economic agenda that favours corporations over people and the environment, and mainstream media that serves as cheerleaders for that agenda.
Capitalism is in a protracted state of crisis, and the structural violence, inequality and injustice inherent in that system remain invisible, washed over or camouflaged by a corporate and mainstream media determined to uphold a culture of consumption, complacency and individualism.
Without a doubt, Coca-Cola is one of the worst companies on the planet. From its murderous human rights violations stamping out unions in Latin America (especially at Colombian bottling plants) to its marketing to youngsters to its environmental record (especially concerning water), it is hands down a terrible corporation getting away with incredible harm on this planet.
So it’s refreshing indeed to see Killer Coke get its comeuppance in this amazing Australian Greenpeace TV advert about Coke and plastic pollution. While it’s not surprising that Coke is blocking a new recycling scheme in Australia it is surprising that the advert had to be removed because Aussies found it “too disturbing” — come on mate, that seems like a bit of greenwashing counterspin to me. The likely culprit? Coke. Take action here.
Remember when crowd funding was a baby? It was an innocent but fierce little phenomenon that you would feed, along with a whole community, and lo and behold, a project would be raised, big and strong ready to tackle the world. Amazing things like literacy projects, art therapy, and independent documentaries were among the steadily highlighted cultural offerings on sites like Indiegogo.com.
These days I look at my weekly emails (like the one to the left) from Indiegogo and I see nothing but entrepreneurs trying to raise money to sell stuff right back to us. Of course many have a “socially responsible” element, like giving poor kids socks or donating ten percent of the price of those fancy underwear to charity, but Do-good Capitalism has been around long enough for most of us to know that we can’t buy our way out of the world’s problems, especially inequity.
Indiegogo is but another example of the displacement of independent art and culture by capital. Chantal Mouffe writes that in order to fight the trend of cultural production serving the role of capital valorization, we need to widen the field of artistic intervention, “[B]y intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism” (artandresearch.org). This isn’t about going against people that want to start up businesses on Indiegogo, surely there are bigger fish to fry. It’s about finding ways to intervene in processes of cultural colonization by capital.
This is a great independent doc by a friend from British Columbia. It is absolutely shocking to see the lengths the provincial and federal governments are going to in order to not allow the dissemination of information about the role of BC fish farms in the destruction of wild salmon populations. According to the doc, wild salmon are being killed off in alarming numbers and independent studies show the diseases are linked to fish in West Coast farms, who are carrying viruses and pathogens from Norway. I’m particularly disturbed by a former fellow high school student, Don McRae who, after allowing my home town of Courtenay to be ravaged by developers and big business while he was on council, has now as an MLA recently introduced Bill 37. The entirely unconstitutional Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Amendment Act, 2011 would, if passed, make it illegal to report the location of the fish farm that diseased fish samples originated from.
IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY It was a year like any other – the ceremonial swap between less liberal and more liberal leader of the US took place when Clinton picked up where Bush left off (launching a cruise missile attack on Iraq just half a year into his term and fine-tuning the ongoing [...]
Svetla and I are giddy with anticipation with the thought of attending the world premiere of a new doc by our Bulgarian friends Vanya and Svetlo, THE LAST OF THE BLACK SEA PIRATES at this year’s Hot Docs. If the film is half as good as the incredible trailer above, then we’re in for a [...]
Kudos to the Guardian and to the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [ICIJ], for their ground-breaking investigative work that has now revealed the names of the world’s most questionable millionaires. In an era of austerity, with massive cuts to services, the arts, education, and labour in many countries, it’s sobering to know that world’s most [...]
In just under a month on May 11th, I’ll be speaking in Vancouver at a conference about the intersection of documentary, addiction, madness and social health. I’ll be speaking about NFB and activist docs and focusing on three new conceptual frames I’m developing in my documentary research: proximal empathy, hierarchies of harm and anti-gratification. I’m [...]
