The film, “Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion,” is mostly focused on the United Kingdom, but, according to Lifesite News, “one of its most powerful sub-narratives is relevant worldwide: How pharmaceutical manufacturers sidestepped safety hurdles and misled the public regarding the effectiveness and potential harms of the COVID jabs.”
A new documentary is being described as “brilliant” for its meticulous exposure of the coordination between key government agencies and Big Pharma to push harmful COVID-19 vaccines on a frightened and unsuspecting public.
As the country is still recovering from mass shutdowns and other disruptions to daily life, the pandemic now seems like it happened so long ago. But the after-effects of the vaccine continue to harm the public to this day and likely will into the foreseeable future.
The film, “Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion,” is mostly focused on the United Kingdom, but, according to Lifesite News, “one of its most powerful sub-narratives is relevant worldwide: How pharmaceutical manufacturers sidestepped safety hurdles and misled the public regarding the effectiveness and potential harms of the COVID jabs.”
The documentary includes experts who are able to show how vaccine trial data was flawed and how “vaccine” makers used “very, very misleading” figures to push the shots. One such expert, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist, and consultant who was “one of the first to take the Pfizer vaccine,” explained how Pfizer promoted its jab using relative risk reduction and not the industry standard, absolute risk reduction, which then led to the widespread perception that the mRNA vax was much more effective at preventing infections than it really was.
“The guidance has been for many years that we must always use absolute risk reduction in conversation with patients, not just relative risk reduction alone. Otherwise, it’s considered unethical,” Malhotra explained, according to LifeSite News.
“The accusation is that governments acted on Pfizer’s relative risk figure of 95 percent efficacy, when the absolute risk was a mere 0.84 percent. In other words, you’d have to vaccinate 119 people to prevent just one from catching COVID,” added John Bowe, founder of C.O.V.I.D. Charity Organisation for the Vaccine Injured.
The outlet adds:
The film went on to highlight the “shocking allegations” of clinical trial research specialist Alexandra Latypova, who studied Pfizer trial documents that were force-released in the U.S. after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Her findings include the following:
— Pfizer skipped major categories of safety testing altogether.
— The toxicity of the COVID-19 vaccines’ mRNA active ingredient was never studied.
— The FDA and Pfizer knew about major toxicities associated with the gene therapy class of medicines.
— The CDC, FDA, and Pfizer lied about vaccines staying in the injection site.
— My examination of leaked Moderna documents also revealed that vaccine-induced antibody-enhanced disease was identified as a serious risk.
Making the problem of wholly inadequate trials and studies of the vaccine even worse was the failure to use standard regulation processes, according to Bowe. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Chief Executive June Raine “admitted that the agency had changed from Watchdog to Enabler.”
The documentary also contained video clips featuring a confession from Raine that normal safeguards during the vaccines’ clinical trials were not followed at all for the COVID shots.
“We tore up the rule book and we allowed companies to immediately start juxtaposing not sequential phases of clinical trials, but overlapping. Beginning the next one before the previous had been finished,” he said, according to LifeSite News.
In addition, the documentary contains several examples of Brits being harmed permanently after taking a vaccine, like their American cousins, with many unable to care for themselves anymore and becoming entirely dependent on others for their care.
One British minister of parliament took to the floor of the chamber to denounce physicians in the country who claimed that the shots had nothing to do with those outcomes.
“Those who were in perfect health before their vaccine have encountered too much ignorance and skepticism when seeking medical help. For some, their GPs have refused to engage and that has reached the extent that they are made to feel gaslighted, Madam Deputy Speaker, with their physical pain being dismissed or explained away as mental illness. How insulting and humiliating is that?” MP Sir Christopher Ghope said.
The American film industry changed beyond recognition after the milestone year of 2001, director Oliver Stone told RT, with producers using financial restraints to censor movies challenging the US military or the CIA.
“Maybe in the 1980s, when I did ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Heaven & Earth’, I could do that, because it was a slightly more relaxed system,” said the award-winning filmmaker, mentioning his famed movies while making his case during former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s show on RT Spanish.
When the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War ended, things didn’t change for the better, Stone believes. “My film career has suffered, because sometimes I’ve said things that American producers hate to hear,” he revealed, adding that those sponsoring film productions sometimes resort to “economic censorship.”
Hollywood has changed since 2001. It has become more censored. The military, the CIA, the depictions of these organizations has been very favorable.
“You can take the budgets down… let’s say you want to make a film criticizing the American military, taking an Iraq war story or a horror story that recently happened in Iraq… You do those kinds of stories, it’s not going to happen,” he explained.
Stone, who scored a number of Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, has been widely criticized for his anti-war dramas and, most recently, for a series of films questioning the widespread Western narrative on the Ukrainian turmoil, as well as exclusive interviews with Vladimir Putin.
“Now, censorship isn’t something that exclusively affects the American film industry,” Stone lamented, “I can read the American media but they all say the same things … And you don’t hear from Iran and China, you don’t hear from [North] Korea, you don’t hear from Venezuela, you don’t get their point of view.”
The CIA realized – after World War II, basically – they [went into] the business, the news business, they put their people, their agents at newspapers, at magazines and television.
‘It’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings’
The famed film director sounded pessimistic when asked if there is hope for change – or, at least, if the system allows for that change. He said that both parties – be it Democrats or Republicans – act by the same playbook when dealing with issues of war and peace.
“There is no party in the United States, no democratic voice except third parties that are small, that would say ‘Why are we fighting wars?’” Stone exclaimed, adding, “it’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings.” Democrats are no better than Republicans, he says: “Hillary Clinton and her group, and Joe Biden, are just as pro-war as any Republican Dick Cheney.”
Stone thinks Donald Trump who has done “horrible things” by pulling out of the Paris climate accords and the hard-earned 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But, argued Stone, at least Trump was asking why the US needs to fight the Russians, which alarmed the mainstream so much that the media was attacking him from day one.
Stone lamented that politics is transiting from the art of the possible to the art of raising money.
“So much money is spent in politics, it’s impossible for my vote to make any difference… Candidates in America now have to raise billions of dollars to be considered serious,” Stone said.
Empires fall. Let’s pray that this empire, these evil things… because we are the evil empire. What Reagan said about Russia is true about us.
Where does one start. Biggest sell-out in the world, Scorsese? Overrated? Bought?
The film is about Hoffa and his killing. In the process, Scorsese writes away the Jewish mob, AKA the Kosher Nostra, the Purple Gang, Murder Incorporated, Allen Dulles, the real Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and mixes it all together with fiction and intent.
I don’t normally write movie reviews. I grew up in Detroit, my dad was a Teamster organizer who grew up with Jimmie Hoffa, someone at our home often until mom decided dad would get an auto plant job instead of one making license plates.
Scorsese doesn’t film a second of it in Detroit, his Machus Red Fox, the Hoffa disappearance joint is dismal. He writes out Tony Giacalone and also forgets who the head of the “Italian mob” worked for, Maxie Stern, down at the vending companies I will leave out.
Stern came up working with Josef “Legs” Lehman, Detroit enforcer and, curiously enough, brother of my grandmother, Marta Lehman.
My dad and “Jimmie” went to work for very German and very non-Jewish, non-Irish and non-Italian Josef at around age 12.
What began as a kidnap/ransom business eventually turned into running security for bootlegging on behalf of the Lansky-Purple Gang-Bronfman empire. Boats ran from Bronfman’s Seagrams distillery to Wyandotte, just south of Detroit. In 1926 my father was arrested in a shootout with State Police (I ended up one of them later on….ironicalness) and it took a while to get him out of lockup in Marquette.
The story revolves around Russell Bufalino, didn’t know him but knew the family, Detroit Italian Bakery, Home Juice Company, folks we would visit from time to time, I just knew them as family friends, nice people.
Key to the fiction is the war on the Kennedy family by the Kosher Nostra who is rewriting history.
Let’s establish a few facts. Allen Dulles planned the Bay of Pigs as CIA director under Ike, and did it with help of Nixon who was going to be placed in the White House in a rigged election.
Joseph Kennedy didn’t rig the election with “the mob,” which is and always was Jewish, like in the film “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Kennedy and Bronfman were far from close and Bronfman was Meyer Lansky’s partner along with J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles and Richard Nixon later using Spiro Agnew as a cutout.
Dulles and Nixon began together in 1946 when Nixon came home from the Navy (non-combatant/Quaker) to work with Dulles bringing war criminals into the US under Operation Paperclip.
The Bay of Pigs was a Nixon/Dulles/Bush deal run through Zapata oil, not out of Miami with featured David Ferrie running the boats out of New Orleans, not as depicted. I know or rather knew everyone involved, they were all brought out to run cocaine later under Reagan.
Under Hoover, the FBI did the dirty work of the Jewish mob who owned the FBI. Nothing has changed.
Now it’s Epstein and MEGA that are being camouflaged, providing cover for the ADL and AIPAC and blaming poor Woody Allen and the Pope.
The ADL is Murder Incorporated, shaking down top corporations under the guise of persecuting Palestinians, something prettymuch everyone loves to do.
As to the Hoffa death, as depicted accurate with the exception of those involved. Few are alive today.
What is not such a great film, slow-moving with some decent bloodletting, is also a political smear job, covering up so much of the history which VT exposes.
“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live
We’re living in two worlds, you and I.
There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.
Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.
All is not as it seems.
This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released more than 30 years ago, and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.
Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.
Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.
In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.
In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.
In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.
In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”
And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.
It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.
When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them.
Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”
When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.
This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.
A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.
In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).
They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.
They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.
Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.
In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.
Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”
In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”
Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.
Sound familiar?
Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.
We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism.
Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.
For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.
But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”
In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live.
From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.
Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, laptops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?
Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega-corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
If we’re watching, we’re not doing.
The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.
When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”
We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.
Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.
So where does that leave us?
The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.
Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.
When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.
That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.
Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.
The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.
The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes if we would only open them.
All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.
Wake up, America.
If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.
On Wednesday night I attended the New York Film Festival and witnessed a cinematic masterpiece, the film that last month won the top prize as the Best Film of the Venice International Film Festival. It’s called “Joker” — and all we Americans have heard about this movie is that we should fear it and stay away from it. We’ve been told it’s violent and sick and morally corrupt — an incitement and celebration of murder. We’ve been told that police will be at every screening this weekend in case of “trouble.” Our country is in deep despair, our constitution is in shreds, a rogue maniac from Queens has access to the nuclear codes — but for some reason, it’s a movie we should be afraid of.
I would suggest the opposite: The greater danger to society may be if you DON’T go see this movie. Because the story it tells and the issues it raises are so profound, so necessary, that if you look away from the genius of this work of art, you will miss the gift of the mirror it is offering us. Yes, there’s a disturbed clown in that mirror, but he’s not alone — we’re standing right there beside him.
“Joker” is no superhero or supervillain or comic book movie. The film is set somewhere in the ‘70s or ‘80s in Gotham City – and the filmmakers make no attempt to disguise it for anything other than what it is: New York City, the headquarters of all evil: the rich who rule us, the banks and corporations for whom we serve, the media which feeds us a daily diet “news” they think we should absorb. This past week, a week when a sitting President indicted himself because, in true Joker style, he was laughing himself silly at Mueller’s and the Dems’ inability to stop him, so he just quadrupled down and handed them everything they needed. But even then, after ten days of his flaunting his guilt, he was still sitting with his KFC grease-stained nuclear codes in the Oval Office, so he told Captain Sketchy to fire up the helicopter, the sound of its blades revving up, meant only to alert the reporters to scurry outside for the daily “press conference” — Trump walks outside into the deafening cacophony of the whirlybird and publicly and feloniously asks the Peoples Republic of China to interfere in our 2020 election by sending him dirt on the Bidens. He and his magic carpet of hair then walked away and, other than the citizen howls of “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!”, nothing happened. As “Joker” opens this weekend, Joker, Jr. Is still still sitting at John F. Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office on the days he shows up to work, dreaming of his next conquest and debauchery.
But this movie is not about Trump. It’s about the America that gave us Trump — the America which feels no need to help the outcast, the destitute. The America where the filthy rich just get richer and filthier.
Except in this story a discomfiting question is posed: What if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back? And I don’t mean with a clipboard registering people to vote. People are worried this movie may be too violent for them. Really? Considering everything we’re living through in real life? You allow your school to conduct “active shooter drills” with your children, permanently, emotionally damaging them as we show these little ones that this is the life we’ve created for them. “Joker” makes it clear we don’t really want to get to the bottom of this, or to try to understand why innocent people turn in to Jokers after they can no longer keep it together. No one wants to ask why two smart boys skipped their 4th-hour AP French Philosophy class at Columbine High to slaughter 12 students and a teacher. Who would dare ask why the son of a vice-president of General Electric would go into Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT and blow the tiny bodies apart of 20 first-graders. Or why did 53% of White women vote for the presidential candidate who, on tape, reveled in his talent as a sexual predator?
The fear and outcry over “Joker” is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings — 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence. Cramming 59 students like worthless sardines into classrooms in Detroit is an act of violence.
As the news media stands by for the next mass shooting, you and your neighbors and co-workers have already been shot numerous times, shot straight through all of your hearts and hopes and dreams. Your pension is long gone. You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth. The violence in “Joker”? Stop! Most of the violence in the movie is perpetrated on the Joker himself, a person in need of help, someone trying to survive on the margins of a greedy society. His crime is that he can’t get help. His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous. When the Joker decides he can no longer take it — yes, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you were cheering him on – and if you’re honest when that happens, you will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day. Thank you Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, Warner Bros. and all who made this important movie for this important time. I loved this film’s multiple homages to Taxi Driver, Network, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon. How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick? Go see this film. Take your teens. Take your resolve.
This Australian documentary challenges whether job growth in the US (25 million new jobs in ten years) really represents economic recovery. The film makes three important points: 1) the vast majority of new American jobs are minimum wage part-time jobs, 2) well-paid middle-class jobs continue to vanish, and 3) approximately one-half of US workers live in poverty.
The film follows three families. The first, in Orlando Florida, consists of a single mother of three who works 70 hours a week for Dunkin’ Donuts and MacDonald’s. Earning $8 an hour, she and her family live in a cheap motel because they can’t afford rent. She sleeps 1-2 hours a night, and her mother-in-law provides childcare while she works.
The second family is a couple with two children who live in a homeless camp in the parking lot of a Seattle church. The wife works full-time as a cashier at Seattle Center, and her husband takes temporary construction jobs when he can find them. Most of the camp residents are employed workers with kids.
The third individual is a middle-aged machinist in Erie Pennsylvania who has been just been laid off from General Electric Transport after 13 years. The factory is moving to Fort Worth Texas. GE anticipates cutting wages in half because Texas in a non-union state. In addition to losing millions of industrial jobs when manufacturers moved overseas in the eighties and nineties, the US lost an additional five million industrial jobs in the last 15 years.
The Power of the Israel Lobby Is Unrivaled Zionists openly brag about the power of the Israel Lobby, but others who mention the lobby’s power are branded
Zionists openly brag about the power of the Israel Lobby, but others who mention the lobby’s power are branded as anti-Semites. We are supposed to accept the lobby’s power but never complain about it.
This documentary prepared for broadcast by Al Jazeera shows the extraordinary power of the Israel Lobby in two ways.
One is that it consists of recordings by a Jewish journalist who infiltrated Zionist organizations and captured the self-satisfied bragging of Israeli and American Zionist agents about how they destroy critics of Israel and defenders of Palestinians and exercise Jewish power over the US Congress, US media, and US universities.There is no doubt that the Zionist Lobby is extremely powerful.Former US Representative Jim Moran describes how the Israel Lobby ended his 24-year career in Congress, not for criticizing Israel but just for opposing one of Washington’s wars that Israel regarded as beneficial to Israel.
The other is that the Israel Lobby succeeded in preventing the broadcast of the documentary prepared for the Arab news agency.
Eventually the documentary was leaked to the Internet and can be watched at the URL above. For a one hour abridgement of the 4 hour film, see:
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, […]
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.
“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”
Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.
Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.
Episode 1
The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.
“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”
The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.
“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”
He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”
“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”
“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”
“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”
Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.
The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”
“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”
The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.
“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”
“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”
“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”
“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”
“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.
“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”
Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.
“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”
Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.
“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”
“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.
She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.
The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.
“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”
Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.
“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”
Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.
The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.
Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”
UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”
Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”
Episode 2
Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”
“StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Projecthelped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”
“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”
The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says,
“There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”
“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”
“You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”
But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.
“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”
And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.
“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”
But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.
“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”
“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.
Mearsheimer says,
“What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”
“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”
“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”
“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”
“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”
There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”
Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.
“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”
“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”
“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”
Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.
“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”
Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.
The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”
“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”
Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.
“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”
“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.
*
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Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
“I would never give my daughter, or my son the shot… This is a massive PR event by the company that makes Gardasil, and the same is the truth for the company that makes Cervarix… I think one needs to do a lot of research, and I think parents are in the best position to do that.” – Dr. Christopher Shaw – University of British Columbia
This is a great point, and one that was further emphasized by Dr. Peter Gotzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, the world’s foremost body in assessing medical evidence.
“The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life… Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe.
The patients don’t realize that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that’ve been carefully concocted and dressed up by the drug industry… If you don t think the system is out of control, please email me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death… If such a hugely lethal epidemic had been caused by a new bacterium or a virus, or even one-hundredth of it, we would have done everything we could to get it under control.” (source)
The HPV Gardasil vaccine is at the top of the list when it comes to controversial vaccines. Despite its supposed safety and necessity, new information is showing us that this may not be the case, and that its purported safety might be a result of a very heavy, and what now seems to be unethical, marketing campaign. That being said, it’s still taboo to question vaccine safety, which is extremely confusing because there are a number of peer-reviewed publications, along with hundreds of scientists and researchers in the field, who are dedicating their lives to creating awareness about the fact that vaccines aren’t really as safe as they’re marketed to be.
“When one looks at the independent literature, so studies which are not sponsored by the vaccine manufacturers, so with relation to Gardasil there have been several reports documenting multiple sclerosis and encephalitis, which is brain inflammation, in girls who have received their Gardasil vaccine. So just because a study sponsored by the manufacturers does not identify problems with the vaccine does not necessarily mean that the vaccine is safe. In fact if one looks at the manufacturer studies, they’re often not designed to detect serious adverse events.”
– Dr. Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD, Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she works in Neurosciences and the Department of Medicine (source)
Multiple Deaths have also been caused as a result of the HPV vaccine. Researchers from Mexico’s National Institute of Cardiology pored over 28 studies published through January 2017, containing 16 randomized trials and 12 post-marketing case series pertaining to the three human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines currently on the market globally. In their July 2017 peer-reviewed report, the authors, Manuel Martínez-Lavin and Luis Amezcua-Guerra, uncovered evidence of numerous adverse events, including life-threatening injuries, permanent disabilities, hospitalizations and deaths, reported after vaccination with GlaxoSmithKline’s bivalent Cervarix vaccine and Merck’s quadrivalent or nine-valent HPV vaccines (Gardasil and Gardasil 9).
You can access that study and ready more about it here.
For example, although there are many safety concern issues, aluminum has continued to be prevalent, despite the absence of any appropriate safety toxicity studies proving that it’s safe to inject this heavy metal into a fetus or young infant, let alone an adult. A recent study found some of the highest brain aluminum content ever measured in a human being within the brains of several deceased autistic people. Another recent study found that aluminum does not exit the body when it’s injected, it actually travels from the injection site into distant organs and into the brain, where it eventually ends up staying.
Sure, our bodies do a great job of getting rid of aluminum from other sources, like water or food, but injected aluminum does not flow into the same methods of excretion. This is extremely concerning because the HPV vaccine is loaded with aluminum.
Total compensation paid to families through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act/National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program sits at approximately $4 Billion. The alarming part is that only 1% of vaccine injuries are even reported, and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated. This means that 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported and the families of the vast majority of people injured by vaccines paying the price. Vaccine manufacturers cannot be held liable for injuries or deaths that occur from use of their vaccines. And so, the pharmaceutical industry has no incentive to care about our health when it comes to making our ‘medications’ safe, since there is no punishment for them for not doing so. They can legally be careless with their product, and this is evident by the EXTREME lack of safety testing for many ‘medications’ including vaccines, especially the HPV Vaccine. (source)
This is why it’s great to see a new film coming out, attempting to bring more awareness to the topic. It’s called Sacrificial Virgins, andit investigates widespread global concerns over the safety of the controversial HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix. It recently won two awards at the Watchdog Film Festival: one was for the best film of the festival, and the other one was the Watchdog Spirit Award in recognition of its investigation “in search of truth and justice.”
It also recently won the Social Impact Award at the Queens World Film Festival.
In Japan, women suffering from injuries as a result of the vaccine have had hearings, with the science showing cause for concern. Their injuries have been medically validated.
After a public hearing in February 2014, the Japanese government rescinded its recommendation that girls receive the HPV vaccine. Japan has actually established guidelines and special clinics for evaluating and treating illnesses caused by the vaccine. It is a scenario that Merck, GSK, and vaccine stakeholders globally are extremely anxious to suppress. (source)
“It is a vaccine that’s been highly marketed, the benefits are over-hyped, and the dangers are underestimated.” – Dr. Chris Shaw, Professor at the University of British Columbia, in the department of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, and Visual Sciences (Taken from the One More Girl documentary)
It’s not like there haven’t been initiatives. In January 2016, pathologist Dr. Sin Hang Lee, MD, Director of Milford Medical Laboratory, sent an open letter of complaint to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Margaret Chan. In the letter he challenges the integrity of the GACVS Statement on the Continued Safety of HPV Vaccination (issued March 2014), and charges professional misconduct on the part of several individuals (and suggests that others may have also been actively involved) in a scheme to deliberately mislead the Japanese Expert Inquiry on Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Safety before, during and after the February 2014 public hearing mentioned above in Tokyo.
Dr. Lee challenged the integrity of the GACVS Statement on the Continued Safety of HPV Vaccination written by Dr. Pless, accusing him of deliberately misrepresenting his scientific findings in order to mislead non-scientific readers and those who set vaccination policies. Dr. Pless is accused of deliberately conflating two unrelated articles, dealing with two different chemicals, written by different authors “apparently to create a target to attack.” Furthermore, Dr. Lee notes that the GACVS Statement relied on an unpublished 12-year old “Technical Report” written by an unofficial, unnamed “group of participants” (according to CDC’s disclaimer).
Why I believe It Makes No Sense To Take The HPV Shot
Of all the women who get an HPV infection, approximately 70 percent of those will clear that infection all by themselves in the first year. You don’t even have to detect it or treat it. Within two years, approximately 90 percent of those women will clear it all by themselves. By three years, you will have 10 percent of that original group of women left who still have an HPV infection, and 5 percent of this 10 percent will have progressed into a pre-cancerous lesion. So, “now you have that small group of women who have pre-cancerous lesions and now let’s look at that moving into invasive carcinoma. What we know then is that amongst women with. . . [pre-cancerous] lesions. . . it takes five years for about twenty percent of them to become invasive carcinomas. That’s a pretty slow process. It takes about thirty years for forty percent of them to become invasive cervical carcinomas.” (source)
Those comments are from Dr. Dianne Harper, one of a select few specialists in OB/GYN (in the world) who helped design and carry out the Phase II and Phase III safety and effectiveness studies to get Gardasil approved. There are only 50 HPV experts in the world, and Dr. Harper is one of them, arguably making her an expert on the subject.
Since Harper’s involvement in getting Gardasil approved, she has condemned the vaccine, stating that it is neither safe nor effective. But she’s gone back and forth, making positive comments as well.
Harper has told CBS that these vaccines are essentially useless, explaining that “the benefit to public health is nothing, there is no reduction in cervical cancers, they are just postponed, unless the protection lasts for at least 15 years, and over 70% of all sexually active females of all ages are vaccinated.”
This begs the question, why do nine-year old girls need vaccinations for symptomless venereal diseases that their immune systems kill anyway?
A brand new study recently published in the journal Pediatrics has found that many paediatricians don’t strongly recommend the HPV vaccine. Researchers used a national survey asking approximately 600 doctors to outline their stance on the HPV vaccine. Conducted between October 2013 and January 2014, the study found that a large percentage of paediatricians and family doctors — nearly one third of those surveyed — are not strongly recommending the HPV vaccine to parents and preteens, which is why, as illustrated by the study, HPV vaccination rates continue to drop.
Dr. Genevieve Rail, Professor of Critical Studies of Health at Concordia University, recently received a grant of $270,000 from the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) to study the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). She concluded that there is absolutely no proof that the human papillomavirus directly causes cervical cancer.
“I’m sort of raising a red flag, out of respect for what I’ve found in my own study, and for the despair of parents who had totally perfect 12-year-olds who are now in their beds, too tired to go to school,” she said. “Yes, we’re going against the grain, and we are going against those who are believed, i.e. doctors and nurses and people in public health.” (source)
She feels there are “serious concerns” about the vaccine, yet no research on how young people “experience” the vaccine. (source)
I could literally write a book on the HPV vaccine. The above information is not even a tidbit of info that all parents should be made aware of.
The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine.
The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known… Hollywood.
Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner ‘Wings’ in 1927, the US military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows. Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Captain Philips,’ and even blockbuster franchises like ‘Transformers’ and Marvel, DC and X-Men superhero movies have agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of US military hardware over the years.
In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD), producers must sign contracts that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.
Capt. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation: “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”
Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear. “If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”
In other words, the Department of Defense is using taxpayer money to pick favorites. The DOD has no interest in nuance, truth or – God forbid – artistic expression; only in insidious jingoism that manipulates public opinion to their favor. This is chilling when you consider that the DOD is able to use its financial leverage to quash dissenting films it deems insufficiently pro-military or pro-American in any way.
The danger of the DOD-Hollywood alliance is that Hollywood is incredibly skilled at making entertaining, pro-war propaganda. The DOD isn’t getting involved in films like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘X-Men,’ ‘Transformers’ or ‘Jurassic Park III’ for fun. They are doing so because it’s an effective way to psychologically program Americans, particularly young Americans, not just to adore the military, but to worship militarism. This ingrained love of militarism has devastating real-world effects.
Lawrence Suid, author of ‘Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film’told Al Jazeera, “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why. And when I was getting my film degrees, it suddenly occurred to me that the people in the US had never seen the US lose a war, and when President Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”
As Suid points out, generations of Americans had been raised watching John Wayne valiantly storm the beaches of Normandy in films like ‘The Longest Day,’ and thus were primed to be easily manipulated into supporting any US military adventure because they were conditioned to believe that the US is always the benevolent hero and inoculated against doubt.
This indoctrinated adoration of a belligerent militarism, conjured by Hollywood blockbusters, also resulted in Americans being willfully misled into supporting a farce like the 2003 Iraq War. The psychological conditioning for Iraq War support was built upon hugely successful films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, and ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that emphasized altruistic American militarism. Spielberg and Bruckheimer are two Hollywood heavyweights considered by the DoD to be their most reliable collaborators.
Another example of the success of the DoD propaganda program was the pulse-pounding agitprop of the Tom Cruise blockbuster ‘Top Gun’ (1986). The movie, produced by Bruckheimer, was a turning point in the DoD-Hollywood relationship, as it came amid a string of artistically successful, DoD-opposed, ‘anti-war’ films, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ which gave voice to America’s post-Vietnam crisis of confidence. ‘Top Gun’ was the visual representation of Reagan’s flag-waving optimism, and was the Cold War cinematic antidote to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.
‘Top Gun,’ which could not have been made without massive assistance from the DoD, was a slick, two-hour recruiting commercial that coincided with a major leap in public approval ratings for the military. With a nadir of 50 percent in 1980, by the time the Gulf War started in 1991, public support for the military had spiked to 85 percent.
Since Top Gun, the DoD propaganda machine has resulted in a current public approval for the military of 72 percent, with Congress at 12 percent, the media at 24 percent, and even Churches at only 40 percent. The military is far and away the most popular institution in American life. Other institutions would no doubt have better approval ratings if they too could manage and control their image in the public sphere.
It isn’t just the DoD that uses the formidable Hollywood propaganda apparatus to its own end… the CIA does as well, working with films to enhance its reputation and distort history.
For example, as the ‘War on Terror’ raged, the CIA deftly used ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ (2007) as a disinformation vehicle to revise their sordid history with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to portray themselves as heroic and not nefarious.
The CIA also surreptitiously aided the film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), and used it as a propaganda tool to alter history and convince Americans that torture works.
The case for torture presented in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was originally made from 2001 to 2010 on the hit TV show ‘24,’ which had support from the CIA as well. That pro-CIA and pro-torture narrative continued in 2011 with the Emmy-winning show ‘Homeland,’ created by the same producers as ‘24,’ Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.
A huge CIA-Hollywood success story was Best Picture winner ‘Argo’ (2012), which ironically is the story of the CIA teaming up with Hollywood. The CIA collaborated with the makers of ‘Argo’ in order to pervert the historical record and elevate their image.
The fact that this propaganda devil’s bargain between the DoD/CIA and Hollywood takes place in the self-declared Greatest Democracy on Earth™ is an irony seemingly lost on those in power who benefit from it, and also among those targeted to be indoctrinated by it, entertainment consumers, who are for the most part entirely oblivious to it.
If America is the Greatest Democracy in the World™, why are its military and intelligence agencies so intent on covertly misleading its citizens, stifling artistic dissent, and obfuscating the truth? The answer is obvious… because in order to convince Americans that their country is The Greatest Democracy on Earth™, they must be misled, artistic dissent must be stifled and the truth must be obfuscated.
In the wake of the American defeat in the Vietnam war, cinema flourished by introspectively investigating the deeper uncomfortable truths of that fiasco in Oscar-nominated films like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ all made without assistance from the DoD.
The stultifying bureaucracy of America’s jingoistic military agitprop machine is now becoming more successful at suffocating artistic endeavors in their crib. With filmmaking becoming ever more corporatized, it is an uphill battle for directors to maintain their artistic integrity in the face of cost-cutting budgetary concerns from studios.
In contrast to post-Vietnam cinema, after the unmitigated disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, there has been no cinematic renaissance, only a steady diet of mendaciously patriotic, DoD-approved, pro-war drivel like ‘American Sniper’ and ‘Lone Survivor.’ Best Picture winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008), shot with no assistance from the DoD, was the lone exception that successfully dared to portray some of the ugly truths of America’s Mesopotamian misadventure.
President Eisenhower once warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
Eisenhower’s prescient warning should have extended to the military industrial entertainment complex of the DoD/CIA-Hollywood alliance, which has succeeded in turning Americans into a group of uniformly incurious and militaristic zealots.
America is now stuck in a perpetual pro-war propaganda cycle, where the DoD/CIA and Hollywood conspire to indoctrinate Americans to be warmongers and, in turn, Americans now demand more militarism from their entertainment and government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The DoD/CIA-Hollywood propaganda alliance guarantees Americans will blindly support more future failed wars and will be willing accomplices in the deaths of millions more people across the globe.
Michael McCaffrey, for RT
Michael McCaffrey is a freelance writer, film critic and cultural commentator. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he runs his acting coaching and media consulting business. mpmacting.com/blog/
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The video is so damning to the deep state establishment’s role in installing neo-nazis in Ukraine that it was blackballed for distribution. Now you can see why that is.
A full original English version of controversial director and documentary filmmaker Oliver Stone’s “Ukraine on Fire” has finally been made available in the United States — after being blackballed for distribution in the US and Europe when released in 2016.
The film openly explores Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan, and in the process, uncovers some damning truths about the forces that propped up, and participated in, what eventually became a violent coup d’état that overthrew pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
What appeared on western corporate media to be a popular uprising, was, in fact, nothing more than a well-scripted coup attempt meant to install a pro-Western government in Ukraine.
The Euromaidan was used by the West as an opportunity to pull Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence and into a pro-Western economic and security paradigm under the guise of supporting democratic freedom and fighting corruption. This resulted in an internal conflict of identities within Ukrainian society.
Over the course of the three months that the protests took place, conflict solidarity was seen rising on both sides, as well as clear indications of mobilization by both groups, with sporadic episodes of violence and occupation. After months of Independence Square being occupied by protestors, the tragic events of February 20, 2014, which left over 70 dead, drastically changed the trajectory of the conflict and served as a conflict trigger event that would begin a multilevel action, with the massacre eventually leading to the deposing of the Yanukovych government.
While there is almost wholesale acceptance amongst the Western academics, media, and governments, that the mass killing of protestors was undertaken by Berkut special police and government snipers, due to this narrative’s promotion by the post-Yanukovych government, the evidence underpinning these conclusions is scant at best.
A detailed academic investigation by Ivan Katchanovski revealed that these events were actually a false flag operation, which was planned and operationalized with the intent of overthrowing the Yanukovych government by an alliance of ultra-nationalist organizations, such as Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, specifically Fatherland.
Additional evidence indicates that the U.S. was already actively planning the creation of a new Ukrainian government as evidenced by the leaked audio of a conversation between Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
After Yanukovych was deposed, the eastern regions of Ukraine, with large Russian speaking populations, refused to recognize this illegitimate government and requested federalization as to maintain a semblance of autonomy from the pro-Western regime that took power.
However, the new pro-West government refused and instead sent in military forces and neo-Nazi militias to occupy the region. This precipitated local resistance and Russian assistance to the local Ukrainian forces fighting to defend their home from the newly installed regime in Kiev.
In 2014 and 2015, when Ukrainian soldiers and pro-government neo-Nazi battalions were engaging Ukrainian separatists in fierce door-to-door, house-to-house fighting, Russia didn’t back down – instead, they escalated and forcefully stepped up support – as they supplied not only personnel, but tanks, supplies, and reinforcements to stop Kiev’s advances.
While these moves were framed as “Russian aggression” in the western corporate media, Russia was simply working to protect a large Russian speaking population in eastern Ukraine, that largely supported the Yushchenko government that had been the subject of a covert regime change operation.
Stone’s film was originally released in 2016, but unsurprisingly, he was unable to find any Western distribution – although a Russian dubbed version was available almost immediately and was aired on TV in Russia.
Indicative of the preferred method of keeping Americans subservient, English speaking audiences were simply denied access to the film altogether.
Ironically, a similar dynamic is playing out in western social media – the new medium for news distribution — as all opinions contrary to the corporate mainstream narrative are being censored using a combination of humans and computer algorithm to parse any dissent out of your social media news feeds.
The lesson is that an ignorant American population is more easily controlled and manipulated.
In an effort to break through the corporate-state imposed veil of ignorance, here is the full Oliver Stone exposé on the Euromaidan.
Of course, everyone is encouraged to purchase a copy to support Stone’s penetrating documentary.
An Open Secret is a documentary that tried to lift the lid on the sex/child-abuse scandals occurring in Hollywood years before Harvey Weinstein got his comeuppance.
Predictably, the film got buried when it was released in 2015, receiving absolutely no television distribution or media coverage. This was despite being directed by Oscar-nominated Amy Berg (nominated for her documentary Deliver Us from Evil, about sex abuse in the Catholic church. Hollywood is okay with sex-abuse revelations – as long as it gets to look good and maintain its own image of course).
Hoffman would release the film free of charge on Vimeo, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal – the film would go on to obtain millions of views that it deserved, yet tellingly it still did not receive a distribution deal.
“There was nowhere to see it,” said Lorien Haynes, the film’s writer. “I don’t think it impacted at all. Nobody saw it. We released a film that didn’t [seem to] exist.”
Berg had uncovered evidence of a pedophile ring that preyed on teens and preteens who were trying to break into the movie industry.
Michael Harrah, co-founder of the SAG-AFTRA Young Performers Committee, resigned soon after being interviewed by Berg. It was revealed in the documentary that Joey Coleman, a former child actor and client of Harrah, had taped a phone conversation with him that proved that Harrah had done some despicable things.
“I didn’t like when you tried to have me sleep in your bed and touch me and everything,” Coleman said to Harrah on the phone. “I hated that.”
“Yeah, and that was something unwanted I shouldn’t have done,” Harrah replied, unaware that he was being taped. “And there’s no way you can undo that. But it certainly is something I shouldn’t have done.”
Another victim, Evan Henzi, was 11 years old when his manager Martin Weiss started sexually assaulting him. Weiss faced eight felony counts of molesting a young artist and pleaded no contest to two counts of “committing lewd acts on a child under the age of 14” in 2012 – for which he was only sentenced to a year in jail and 5 years probation but was freed immediately for time served.
“I shared my story in An Open Secret so other victims who have been molested for years just like me can heal,” Henzi said. Interestingly, Henzi seemed to believe that even some of the film-makers of the documentary had some role to play in the initial failure of the film:
“When the film was released, I witnessed a lot of support from people who actually saw the film. What I did not witness was support from film festivals or Hollywood at large to promote the film. I do believe, though, that both some of the film-makers of An Open Secret and the Hollywood establishment are responsible for this.”
“I do believe that the allegations against Harvey Weinstein have completely opened up the door to having a grand conversation about different experiences of sexual assault by people in the entertainment industry, and that will be really beneficial for a lot of people. It is about time.”
From sustainability to the education system to protests against the Vietnam War, there’s a documentary here to interest everyone.
The idea of changing the world may seem vast and unattainable, but with the many ways people are achieving this on a daily basis it seems more and more doable as time goes on. With social media, it’s easier to find out about people making a difference in their community all around the world, and those people often inspire others to do the same, creating this beautiful ripple effect of positive change.
With the rise of documentaries being produced comes a rise in the awareness of all kinds of problems, from the ethics of the palm oil industry to the starvation of children in different parts of the world, and with it has come a new generation of people looking for a way to help.
If you are one of those people, you might be confused about where to start when it comes to learning about what’s going on and what needs to be done, but you need look no further. This article contains a comprehensive list of documentaries that are life-changers and will motivate you to get up and make a difference.
The best part is that all of the below films are free to watch online, unless otherwise stated. Just click on the title and it will direct you to the site where they can be viewed. Go forth and watch these films, then let us know in the comments what you thought of some of these titles.
Explores the world’s conflicting states: those who want to consolidate corporate power and advocate for globalization and those who want to de-regulate these old institutions of power.
Promotes learning from other cultures to create a new story for humanity going forward that relies on the interconnectedness of humans and the environment.
Examines the nature, evolution, impacts and future of the modern business corporation and the increasing role it plays in society and our everyday lives.
Captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.
The film reveals the inner workings of the human experience in the 21st century, urging viewers to step out of the box and challenge their own assumptions about who we really are, and why we do what we do.
One couple sold all of their belongings to “bike-pack” 6500 miles around the U.S. to explore 100 ecovillages, cohousing communities, co-op houses, communes, transition towns, and their own principles and commitment.
This documentary is a journey, which takes us across the Americas, to attempt to answer one of the most important questions of our time: What is Democracy?
Offers a theory of political power as a tool for making tools of human beings — an engine that converts human energy into authority and privilege for the rulers.
This film is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things like printing their own money, growing food, and localizing their economies.
journey deep inside the global revolution of the heart that is erupting around the planet, showing that humanity is waking up and choosing love over power.
INHABIT explores the many environmental issues facing us today and examines solutions that are being applied using the ecological design lens of permaculture, which is the replication of designs found in nature.
‘Propaganda’ mysteriously appeared on YouTube in 2012 and has since gone viral and undergone tons of speculation about its origins… It’s recommended that you just watch the film without reading too much about it first.
This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to a cut in oil imports and food.
This stunning film takes you on a hypnotic journey, reaching to the past to understand the origins of the catastrophic environmental transitions we now face.
A feature length documentary by Peter Joseph that presents the case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.
A dark comedy remix mash-up bonanza about the end of industrial civilization. featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, super heroes, and xylophones and much, much more.
A powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq.
Edible City tells the stories of the pioneers who are digging their hands into the dirt, working to transform their communities and do something truly revolutionary: grow local food systems that are socially just, environmentally sound, economically viable and resilient to climate change and market collapse.
This film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements”, the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself.
Provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Delving deeply into the often misunderstood and frequently over looked historic realities of the American Indian, The Canary Effect follows the terrifying and horrific abuses instilled upon the Indigenous people of North America, and details the genocidal practices of the US government and its continuing affects on present day Indian country.
The film enlarges the issue beyond climate impacts and makes a compelling call for bold action that is strong enough to tip the balance to build a clean energy future.
A passionate argument on behalf of the middle class, INEQUALITY FOR ALL features Robert Reich—professor, best-selling author, and Clinton cabinet member—as he demonstrates how the widening income gap has a devastating impact on the American economy.
FIRST EARTH is a documentary about the movement towards a massive paradigm shift for shelter — building healthy houses in the old ways, out of the very earth itself, and living together like in the old days, by recreating villages.
In 2004, thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers from all four corners, moved by their concern for our planet, came together at a historic gathering, where they decided to form an alliance: The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. This is their story.
Based on the book by Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed navigates the steady stream of narrow working class representations from American television’s beginnings to today’s sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows.
“Can We Do It Ourselves?” asks if it is time to start pushing for a democratic, cooperative way of doing business, showing case studies of businesses who are surviving as democracies within our capitalist system.
A feature-length documentary that follows a community in Australia who came together to explore and demonstrate a simpler way to live in response to global crises.
Economics of Prout covers the basic economic principles of Prout, which offers a viable alternative to the materialistic, anti human philosophies of Capitalism and Communism.
A groundbreaking film that diagnoses a serious social disease – caused by consumerism, commercialism and rampant materialism – that is having a devastating impact on our families, communities, and the environment.
Utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of “elite propaganda.”
Narrated by Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, the film follows The Global Commission on Drug Policy on a mission to break the political taboo over the United States led War on Drugs and expose what it calls the biggest failure of global policy in the last 40 years.
Follows the journey of Professor Timothy Beatley as he explores urban projects around the world, representing the new green movement that hopes to move our urban environments beyond sustainability to a regenerative way of living.
A documentary film by Dennis Trainor, Jr. about a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution so that Corporations are not considered people, and money is not considered speech.
A screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world’s most outrageous pranks.
When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination.
A provocative look at capitalism and its unintended price of success. The film tracks the changing landscape of business with the rising tide of conscious capitalism through the stories of local entrepreneurs who have found innovative ways to bring humanity back into business.
The film offers an in depth look at the influence of money in politics–analyzing social forces and events that the mainstream media and scholarship have largely distorted or kept hidden. It also analyzes the meaning of democracy.
The multi award-winning documentary DIVE! follows filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and friends as they dumpster dive in the back alleys and gated garbage receptacles of Los Angeles’ supermarkets.
The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), production and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.
Examines the ways in which power and hierarchy affect individuals, society, and the world at large. It’s possibly the best film on the subject ever made.
Examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations.
The film exposes Wal-Mart’s unscrupulous business practices through interviews with former employees, small business owners, and footage of Walmart executives.
This video illuminates this hidden sphere of public relations in our culture and examines the way in which the management of “the public mind” has become central to how our democracy is controlled by political and economic elites.
A film about the unprecedented transition that we are undergoing from a culture of industrial growth and inequality to what must inevitably be more localised, sustainable, living economies.
Explores the idea that the Earth is an integrated, self-regulating living organism and asks what function humanity might have for this planetary being.
Funny, provocative and surprisingly accessible, the film explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, world-renowned linguist, intellectual and political activist.
Follows the filmmaker’s journey to understand why current food systems leave hundreds of millions of people in hunger. It’s a journey to understand how the world will feed itself in the future in the face of major environmental challenges.
This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.
This feature-length documentary focuses on the efforts by troops in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to oppose the war effort by peaceful demonstration and subversion.
The film includes facts regarding the Federal Reserve System in the United States, the CIA, Corporate America and others, concluding the advocation of a libertarian movement called the Venus Project, created by social engineer Jacque Fresco.
The documentary film critically analyses what is considered socially relevant in a new education system which brings out the most potential in all of humanity whilst also detailing specific educational methods from a wide range of sources on how to nurture social skills, critical thinking techniques and a larger variety of important practices to positively reinforce from our earliest years onwards.
A documentary that systematically challenges the common human belief that humans are superior to other life forms. The documentary reveals the absurdity of this belief while exploding human bias.
A short documentary meant to give an overview of what a worker co-op is, how it can transform lives and communities, and the realities of starting one.
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney presents his take on the gap between rich and poor Americans in Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream. Gibney contends that America’s richest citizens have “rigged the game in their favor,” and created unprecedented inequality in the United States.
This is a movie about how we have left the natural connection to the planet. The movie investigates how this has happened, the incredible amounts of pollutants that we are exposed to, even as a fetus, and the technology that can help resolve these challenges over time.
A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.
Analyzes the new global economy and reveals that the divisions between the rich and poor have never been greater – two thirds of the world’s children live in poverty – and the gulf is widening like never before.
Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for the truth, director Robert Kane Pappas explores what the media doesn’t like to talk about: itself.
This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.
This film presents a huge social problem called technological unemployment. Whilst doing so, the film also presents two potential solutions to this major social issue.
Drawing on leading thinkers from around the world, and with a torrent of mind-expanding ideas and information, THE LOTTERY OF BIRTH will make you think again about what it means to be free.
This is a powerful 10-part compilation that (in important ways) pulls aside the veil of Official myths and Lies about “freedom”, “democracy”, Human Rights, etc., being the basis of U.S. foreign policy.
Part III of The Bloom “New Ways of The Sacred” looks at how Transformational Festivals are venues for an active engagement with ancient, universal themes of MYTHOS, RITUAL and THE SACRED, exploring ways which both honor the traditional, while reflecting our unprecedented realities of the third millennium.
A documentary feature film about the unintended consequences of suburban sprawl. It illustrates the importance of altering the course of how we develop our nation’s cities.
Asks these important questions: What if we decided that every human being has a right to income security? How could a basic income change our lives? Could this relieve our society from the stress and anger that comes with the rising inequality?
Does the philosophy of materialism work to destroy our identities, experience, and environment? Join narrator Daphne Ellis on a radical romp through the evidence and decide for yourself if you’re in the cult and need to escape!
The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Oct 31, 2017
“Few holidays have a cinematic potential that equals Halloween’s,” wrote the American cultural critic David J. Skal. For over a century now, US film studios have exploited the commercial possibilities of All Hallows’ Eve as enthusiastically as any maker of frightening masks or baker of pumpkin pies. IMDB currently lists 200 titles featuring the word “Halloween” alone.
But it can still be hard to define a “Halloween film”. Skal takes it to be one in which the holiday is the “central subject”, rather than there merely to add atmosphere. But this still leaves open the question of genre. As it turns out, the Halloween movie is a highly elastic category. The five titles I’ve selected here show it ranges from horror to farce, and from parody to animation.
In the 1930s, the Betty Boop cartoons challenged mainstream America not only with their voluptuous heroine but with what animation scholar Paul Wells calls their “fantastical incongruities”. In this Halloween special, which lasts just over six minutes, the animators’ customary visual exuberance is given further license by Halloween’s permitted mischief. A scarecrow throws paint onto the wall and each time, creates a witch complete with broomstick. Meanwhile, a weird assembly-line in the kitchen sees bull’s horns being used to pierce pumpkins. Over it all Betty presides cheerfully, suggesting women could have roles in Halloween films besides that of the victim.
The Middle American town which is so familiar in many Halloween movies is left behind here, in what an opening caption calls a “Hallowe’en tale of Brooklyn, where anything can happen”. Ignore the plot that creaks as loudly as any haunted house’s staircase, and dwell instead on the film’s moments of tonal strangeness and blending of genres.
The main premise of this black comedy is rival serial killers who face body disposal problems at Halloween. In some scenes however, it forgoes good humour altogether and becomes genuinely disturbing. Several sequences are framed and lit as if they have been spliced in from horror cinema. Even the usually poised Cary Grant is seen in sweaty closeup.
Puritanical attitudes stalk this film as persistently as its serial killer antihero. Therapeutic models for treatment of psychopathy have no chance here against what film critic David Thomson describes as:
The certainty that the mentally disturbed are going to be dangerous until the end of time.
The plot sees three high school students brutally punished for having opportunistic sex. Laurie, their bookish and sexually inactive friend on the other hand, exemplifies what film theorist Carol Clover has called the “Final Girl.” This is a trope common in slasher films, and refers to the last woman alive to confront the killer. Laurie wards off her attacker with the gendered weaponry of knitting needle and coat hanger. But running against the film’s strait-laced politics is a mischievous humour, and a DIY aesthetic – director John Carpenter also scored the keyboard soundtrack as well as co-writing the film.
At the start of this animated musical, derived from a poem written by Tim Burton in his Disney days, Jack Skellington – master of ceremonies in “Halloween Town” – despairs of the familiar Halloween routine. He exclaims:
And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King / Have grown so tired of the same old thing.
Here the Halloween movie confronts its own possible staleness – by 1993, John Carpenter’s film alone had generated four sequels. But the danger of “the same old thing” is warded off here by fusing Halloween cinema subversively with its sentimental cousin among the seasonal sub-genres: “the Christmas film”. Jack finds a portal to “Christmas Town” and attempts to darken that festival too.
Scholars such as Rick Altman have argued that films tend to show genres colliding with each other, rather than staying separate. And just like the merging of comedy and horror in Arsenic and Old Lace, The Nightmare Before Christmas reveals this genre fusion at work in the Halloween movie itself.
Rob Zombie’s exploitation horror film begins in an “off-beat attraction” in rural Texas called Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen. The Halloween kitsch on display here includes tiny skulls with flashing red eyes, and it all serves to lull not only the quartet of young out-of-town visitors but also the unwary film spectator.
These early scenes present a commodified Halloween, one where terror is manageable, compared with the abiding horror that will soon confront the protagonists – and the viewers. The dead, who were traditionally honoured by both pagans and Christians on All Hallows’ Eve, are instead treated roughly in Zombie’s film. Bodies are fashioned into phantasmagoric, necrophile tableaus. The effect is highly disturbing: House of 1,000 Corpses ends as a new day breaks, but atmospherically we are still in darkness.
Jeremy Corbell investigating the alien implant case in a scene in Patient Seventeen.
A paranormal documentary filmmaker who explores people’s extraordinary beliefs, has tackled the often ridiculed topic of alien abduction, and the related phenomenon of alien implants. However, this documentary features an actual doctor, a credible alleged abductee and some science. All of which has convinced filmmaker Jeremy Corbell that alien implants deserve a serious examination.
Of all of the fringe ideas in the UFO field, the idea that people are being snatched up by aliens and then returned without their knowledge is pretty hard for many to swallow. Added on top of that the claims some of these people have had implants placed inside of them by the aliens, well, for many, that is bat-poop crazy.
When first asked to document a surgery to remove an alleged alien implant, Cobell responded it was “way outside of my scope of knowledge or interest.”
“It seemed too wild for me to put my mind around,” explained Corbell.
However, since he was asked by friends, and has an interest in extraordinary beliefs, Corbell decided to do it. His experience ultimately resulted in his newly released documentary, Patient Seventeen.
One of the main characters, who Corbell grew very fond of, is pediatric surgeon and alien implant specialist, Dr. Roger Leir.
Incidentally, Leir was also skeptical when he was approached years ago with the request to remove a suspected alien implant. He thought it was ridiculous. But when he removed the object, begrudgingly, he said it was unlike anything he had seen before, and became very interested in the topic. He then removed, or aided in the removal, of dozens of the objects before passing away in 2014.
Corbell says Leir passed away while he was putting his documentary together, but it was not so much Leir that convinced him the alien abduction and implant phenomenon may be real.
“It was the patient that transformed my opinion,” says Corbell. Corbell describes the man he refers to as patient 17, the namesake for his film, as an “average guy of above average height.”
He is referred to as patient 17 because he wishes to remain anonymous, and because he was Leir’s 17th patient to undergo an “alien implant” removal. Corbell says patient 17 is a very down to earth person.
In fact, Corbell says, “He was, and remains, the biggest skeptic that this object removed from his leg – that is hands down extraordinary – has anything to do with his abduction experiences.”
So what is so extraordinary about the object? Well, for the full story you will have to watch the film, but, according to Corbell, some experts have interpreted the data from test results conducted thus far as being made off-world.
Corbell admits more testing has to be done, but he is convinced this thing is really weird.
A short version of Patient Seventeen was entered into the EBE Film Festival at the International UFO Congress several years ago. Although I knew Leir personally, the film exposed me to aspects of his life I was not familiar with, such as a beautiful scene of Leir playing a gigantic organ. The scene was very intimate and moving.
As for patient 17, the man. He did come across as credible, and certainly does not fit the mold of what many think of as an “alien abductee.” He came across as an independent professional who did not seem interested in seeking attention.
I admit, alien abduction is a weird topic that can be uncomfortable. The awkwardness of the phenomenon is portrayed well in the comedy television show People of Earth on TBS. However, if there was ever a documentary that would convince those interested in hard evidence, this may be the one. Not only that, I have to admit, I am partial to Corbell’s shooting style, which is intimate, beautiful and up close and personal.
As of today, Patient Seventeen is available on iTunes, and will be available on other streaming outlets soon.
Web Warriors is a documentary about the vulnerability of major computer-controlled power, communication, transport and military grids to attacks by hackers, viruses and worms that have the potential to bring regional and national economies to a standstill.
The goal of the film is to confront viewers with the stark reality that the Internet was never designed to be secure. The World Wide Web was never designed to be an engine of commerce or to safeguard bank and other financial data. At present, it’s still virtually impossible to design a 100% secure computer network.
The video opens by exploring the likelihood that the August 24 blackout that shut down the eastern US and Canada for two days in August 2003 was most likely caused by a computer worm attack, rather than a “programming error,” as claimed by company officials.
It goes own to identify other Fortune 500 companies shut down at various times by hackers, including Yahoo, Ebay, Dell, CNN, Amazon, Amtrak and Air Canada. Most companies try to cover up incidents of cybercrime so as not to alarm their shareholders or customer base.
Microsoft’s monopoly on the operating systems used in commercial computer networks (ie they all use Windows) significantly increases their vulnerability to hacking, viruses and worms.*
*This was seen recently in the critical infrastructure in countries all over the world shut down by the May 2017 WannaCry Ransomware attack. See WannaCry Ransomware Everything You Need to Know
FACT: Recently, the film Vaxxed (trailer) was shown in locations across Australia.
FACT: The film exposes horrendous and criminal scientific fraud at the US Centers for Disease Control.
FACT: Vaxxed features the 2014 public confession of William Thompson, a long-time CDC researcher.
FACT: Thompson states that he and his colleagues falsified data to make it appear that the MMR vaccine has no connection to autism, when in fact the vaccine does raise the risk of autism.
FACT: The film’s producer, Polly Tommey, came to Australia with the film and spoke with audiences at showings.
FACT: The Australian government, upon her exit from the country, canceled her visa.
Why?
Here is one version of the story, from the Australian press, about Polly Tommey and a colleague, Suzanne Humphries. Herald Sun, August 7-8: “…[they] entered the country on false visas…it is believed they did not declare their intentions to work…”
It is believed? By whom? Three drunks in a bar? A ghost in an attic? A paid public-relations hustler for a vaccine manufacturer?
Well, here is the actual statement of the Australian government canceling Vaxxed producer Polly Tommey’s visa. Here’s the actual statement, signed by an anonymous government official who scribbled his unreadable name at the bottom of a document issued on August 8th at 10:45 hours:
“Ms. Tommey stated in her subclass 651 visa application that the purpose of travel to Australia was ‘business’ however there is no further details [sic] as to the business she intended to undertake. Given this visa does permit the holder to undertake business visitor activities, I give a little weight in Ms Tommey’s favor.”
I see. So Polly Tommey DID state her intention to work. The press story was entirely misleading.
The document continues, with its real bombshell, under the section titled, “Evidence for grounds of [visa] cancellation”:
“Open source information indicates that Ms Tommey is a prominent anti-vaccination activist in the United States of America…”
“I am satisfied that if the wider Australian community became aware of Ms Tommy’s intended activities…her presence in Australia would be a risk to the good order of the Australian community.”
“’Good order’, in the context of 116(1)(e) is concerned with actions by a visa holder which have an impact on public activities…including the risk of an adverse reaction by certain members of Australian society…Therefore, it appears Ms Tommey’s presence in Australia would be a risk to the good order of the Australian community and I am satisfied that there is a ground to cancel your [Tommey’s] visa under section 116(1)(e).”
My, my.
“Certain members of Australian society” might react adversely?
Who are they? Vaccine-company CEOs? Three drunks in bar? A few snowflakes who are “triggered” by the presentation of ideas they haven’t been trained to believe?
This towering government document, this gibberish is—“Australian Government, Department of Immigration and Border Protection, Decision Record of Visa Cancellation under Section 128 of the Migration Act.”
By its brand of logic, many, many people could be banned from Australia for causing an adverse reaction in “certain members” of “the Australian community.”
How about banning a man with a moustache? There are those who don’t like moustaches. How about banning a woman after she had a bad facelift? Bad facelifts can be visually troubling. How about a priest who tells his flock the only way to God and salvation is through the Church? How about an American tourist wearing checkered pants, a pink and purple shirt, and an orange fedora lugging a giant bag of golf clubs and holding a tiny yapping dog?
As you can see from the government document, maintaining “order” is the primary obsession. No matter what. Keep the sheep in line.
“We don’t want any outsiders coming in here with disruptive ideas. And that goes for internal control, too. Don’t say anything that punctures the status quo.”
Vaccination is a holy of holies. People must get jabbed. People who point out dangers are heretics.
Questioning the Church of Vaccination is a sin.
But the whole point of the film Vaxxed, and the whole point of what producer Polly Tommey was doing in Australia, impacts that Church—because the film reveals a “priest,” CDC researcher William Thompson, confessing that sacred doctrine has a giant hole in it. Thompson and his colleagues cooked data to make it seem the MMR vaccine is safe—and it isn’t safe. That’s the revelation.
The Australian government doesn’t want citizens to know that. It doesn’t want ANY public conversation around the issue. It wants to push people into abject surrender.
That’s why they canceled Polly Tommey’s visa and banned her from the country. That’s why they want to keep her out.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
