Corporations, Natures revenge
It’s been a great year for documentaries. No doubt inspired by our current deliberately orchestrated worst of times, there seems to be no shortage of stories induced by a plague of what must be marauding business suited psychopaths ‘running’ (ruining) pretty much everything (see Jon Ronson’s book, The Psychopath Test), where money is maniacally, vampirically pillaged at will, only to be virtually stored in tiny tax havens the size of commas in oceans of zero’s. Because that makes sense/cents doesn’t it? And the result? Not only does the buck not stop here, it can never be sated.
I’ve just watched a video on the extremely secret (and dangerous) Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which is being pushed (forced) through by the US government onto and in conjunction with a number of countries including Australia. It may seem slightly off topic, but it runs in tandem with the ultimate result of John Pilger’s extremely (rightly) angering new documentary ‘Utopia’. There is nothing that won’t be done to help spread the Corporation virus. And this virus operates with a literal scorched earth policy. It’s like Nature created it, to protect herself by making us whip ourselves away.
Jumping back, I can’t remember a documentary that made me angrily gasp ‘WHAT THE FUCK?’ so many times, and so frequently, as John Pilger skilfully, slowly unweaves the bloodied sack cloth mask of Australian history, to show an even more horrific festering face (of white business men) underneath, effectively operating a deliberate financial apartheid on the native Aboriginal people, and it’s natural bedfellow being racism too.
It is all credit to John that he investigates the treatment, both past and present, of Australia’s original inhabitants at the behest of what are historically foreigners, and it is deeply disturbing. It’s also a credit to him that he doesn’t act physically against some of the clearly inept Australian politicians (they make UK politicians look like Einstein) that he interviews as part of the work. It’s very high on the WTF metre watching a politician sit and indifferently speak about the death of an Aboriginal man, who effectively cooked to death in the back of a security transit van he was being transported in. And that’s just one of the many many intolerable travesties flung at these people. Who in the eyes of some are just seen as jail cattle for privately run for profit prisons.
And then of course there is the government employ who goes on a ‘news’ programme to present know lies about an apparent paedophile ring operating in an Aboriginal community, that just happens to be living on one of the wealthiest natural mineral reserves on the planet.
None of this may sound tempting viewing at all, but is fantastic and very real journalism. The more one sees of works such as these, the more you realise the gulf between how the world actually is, as opposed to how it’s presented on main stream tv. Also, it becomes apparent that certain practices are being used by governments universally, in particular, spending outlandish amounts of money (80 million on state surveillance), whilst many starve and die from lack of necessities and medicines that cost pennies.
Utopia is out today, and released by Dartmouth Film in association with Network Releasing.