Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Pilger: Why the Oscars are a con

Why the Oscars are a con
11 Feb 2010
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=566
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger asks why directors and writers allow Hollywood formula propaganda to dominate the movies, with a hot contender for Oscars airbrushing a million dead Iraqis, and Clint Eastwood dispatching the truth of the struggle against apartheid while George Clooney amuses himself with the same old stereotypes.

Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America’s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal “culture”. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an “American tragedy” with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

What nonsense. Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed as “the film that could purge a nation’s guilt!” The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis for another American “noble failure” in Somalia while airbrushing the heroes’ massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers. There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was ordered that their faces be ordered blacked out “for legal reasons”, De Palma said, “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted.” After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.

Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the “other” who are allowed, at best, to be saved by “us”. In Avatar, James Cameron’s vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na’vi need a good guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are “good”. Natch.

My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the “rainbow nation”, Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela’s embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence – but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because “we didn’t really know”. The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice.

At first I thought Invictus, could not be taken seriously, then I looked around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons. Imagine Eastwood making a happy-Sambo equivalent in the American Deep South. He would not dare.

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in the Air, which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is “a movie for our times”, says the director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people. “We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy,” said he, “then we’d fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism.”

Wow, what a winner.

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Friday, February 12, 2010

Global Tax On Financial Speculation - Goldman Using Dirty Tricks To Subvert

0.05% from speculative banking transactions, 
hundreds of billions of pounds would be raised every year,

global deal on a financial transaction tax was in the offing and could be agreed by the G-20 countries at their next meeting in June.  

A tax of 0.20 percent, could raise $100 billion per year. be used to put Americans back to work, rebuild our ravaged economy  
+++ 

Goldman Accused of Rigging 'Robin Hood Tax' Vote

by Mary Bottari
It's really unbelievable. The way that Goldman Sachs keeps sticking its foot in it is simply unbelievable. Lets not review their gross profits and bonuses or their many failed PR schemes to gloss over unseemly profits (a practice we have dubbed "greedwashing"). Let's simply recap this week's news. On Sunday, the New York Times detailed in a front-page expose how Goldman may have hastened the demise of AIG (and perhaps the global economy), by betting that the housing market would collapse and jacking up its insurance for mortgage securities with AIG to extract more and more money from the firm as the housing market went south.

On Tuesday, we reported the respected German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that Goldman did a billion dollar deal with Greece in 2002, which helped that nation hide its staggering debt for years. Now Greece is tottering on the brink of default, a scenario that could lead to another global meltdown, and Goldman's role is coming under scrutiny. (Unlike the rest of the world, Goldman is probably hedged against a Greek collapse.) Now the trenchant traders at Goldman have picked a new target. Not satisfied with bringing the global economy to the brink, they now appear to be devoting time and energy to mini, cyber attacks on bank reform campaigners.

Little Lloyd Goes After Robin Hood

 

On Wednesday, British activists launched a major campaign to push Gordon Brown's government into adopting a "Robin Hood Tax" on financial transactions. "By taking an average of 0.05% from speculative banking transactions, hundreds of billions of pounds would be raised every year," their website claims.

The campaigners unveiled an amazing ad featuring British actor Bill Nighy (Love Actually, Valkyrie, Pirates of the Caribbean) as a deliciously smarmy banker. Nighy also took to the airwaves on the BBC's biggest morning shows arguing that a tiny transaction tax would be "small change for the bankers, but big change for the world."

The Robin Hood Tax campaign website is loaded with lots of clever downloads and posters and attracted visitors by asking them to vote for or against the transaction tax. On the first day of the campaign launch, the tech-heads running the site noticed that they were being spammed with 4,600 "no" votes in a short period of time. They posted a message on the site saying "naughty naughty" letting the spammer know that he was being "watched from the trees." Within 24 hours they say they traced the spamming to two computers, one allegedly registered to Goldman Sachs.

[The video is well worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYtNwmXKIvM ]

 

It's Not Just A Fairy Tale

Goldman has reason to be worried. On Thursday, the Financial Times front page proclaimed that a global deal on a financial transaction tax was in the offing and could be agreed by the G-20 countries at their next meeting in June.  Goldman has a lot to lose if such a tax becomes a reality. Goldman's computers may buy or sell shares as many as 1,000 times a second. It is these high-volume, high-speed trades that would take the biggest hit. Average investors, who hold stock for the long term, would hardly notice.  

A tax of 0.20 percent, as has been proposed in the U.S. Congress, could raise $100 billion per year. That is real money, money that could be used to put Americans back to work, rebuild our ravaged economy and meet other critical needs. By today, the Robin Hood Tax "yes" vote had a substantial lead on the "no" camp, with 28,017 votes compared with 3,300. Let's hope the vote keeps on mounting and the campaign spreads around the globe.

There is nothing that would put the brakes on the reckless casino-style gambling on Wall Street more than this tiny tax on the likes of Little Lloyd Blankfein.