Cornel West

CORNELL WEST debates Al Sharpton.

ONE OF THE QUESTIONS that puzzle us is why Cornel West took almost a whole decade to step forth and denounce Barack Obama’s frequent and clear departures from the implicit progressive agenda he ran on. 

It begins early in B-schools across the country, as business students are constantly urged to dream up “profit centers” (how to squeeze the last nickel out of their customers) to advance their careers, making it clear to the future top executives that the company’s bottom line comes way ahead of the public interest (ads to the contrary).

The whole culture of business in the US is permeated with an antisocial ethic that later produces one scandal after another, and what makes the news is a tip of the iceberg.  Living in the current regime of largely unregulated capitalism is like living with a psychopath under the same roof: you turn your back at your own risk. —PGWatch video below (NBC Today Show, 5.19.11)
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Rhetorically smooth, Obama is the perfect salesman for imperial policies. A great pick by the system managers.

“One of the most important films you could possibly watch this year or any other.”

“Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist democracy”, 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.

Original interview footage derives from Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Albert, John Stauber (PR Watch), Sharon Smith (Historian), William I. Robinson (Editor, Critical Globalization Studies), Morris Berman (Author, Dark Ages America), and famed black panther Larry Pinkney. 
Non-original interviews/lectures include Michael Hudson, Paul Craig Roberts, Ted Rall, Richard Wolff, Glen Ford, Lewis Black, Glenn Greenwald, George Carlin, Gerald Cliente, Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Wollin and Martin Luther King.

Visit http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php for more info.

“Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!” – Larry Pinkney – Editorial Board Member & Columnist – The Black Commentator

Viewer discretion advised –  Video contains images depicting the reality and horror of war.

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“Waste Land”
A Film by Lucy Walker

I RECENTLY BUMPED INTO THIS LYRICAL, SPELLBINDING FILM on our threatened PBS, a film made by the gifted Lucy Walker (more below)…a documentary of all things about garbage, or more precisely about Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s work among people who pick through literally mountains of garbage every day and night—the fabled catadores—in one of the world’s largest landfills—the Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro—and still not only manage to maintain their dignity and humanity but provide indelible lessons on how to act in the face of near insurmountable odds. Could a story like this be captured in the US? Have our poor—let alone our middle class— lost the common sense these humble protagonists exude? Perhaps. That is indeed one of the questions that may haunt us after encountering the stories described in this film.

The Honor Video Series Promise
PLEASE watch this film, BUT do make an earnest effort to acquire it . Only then will you be supporting progressive filmmakers everywhere, in this case, Lucy Walker. You can buy it here. And keep in mind that The Greanville Post derives zero income from this promotion.

Director Lucy Walker Reflects on Waste Land

BY MICHELLE MICHALOS

Monday, April 18th, 2011

In this week’s Independent Lens Director’s Statement, Waste Land director Lucy Walker discusses what first interested her in making a film centered around garbage, and what it was like working with artist Vik Muniz. Waste Land airs Tuesday, April 19 at 10 p.m. on THIRTEEN.

Statement courtesy of Independent Lens. For interviews and other Independent Lens film content, visit their blog.

Lucy Walker

I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can’t bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day. I read about one woman’s crusade to show her appreciation for all the sanitation workers in New York by hugging each of them, and I applauded the sentiment … and yet … there had to be some other way for me to show my appreciation.

Then when I was a graduate film student at NYU, I started training with the NYU Triathlon Club. As we endured the most grueling 6 AM workouts imaginable, I bonded with fellow triathlete Robin Nagle, a brilliant professor who was teaching about garbage. Listening to Robin talk about her work was so fascinating that I began sitting in on her Ph.D seminar, and loved deepening my thinking about the sociology and implications and revelations and actuality of garbage.

So when Robin took her grad students to visit Fresh Kills, the landfill on Staten Island, I was curious and gate-crashed. These days it is best known as the resting place of the debris from the World Trade Center, but this was back in March 2000. It was a shocking place, with chain-link fences clad with teeming nightmare quantities of plastic bags making the nastiest noise imaginable, and pipes outgassing methane poking up at regular intervals through the exaggerated contours of the grassed-over giant mounds of garbage. It’s a parody of an idyllic hyper-landscaped city park, with garbage hills 225-feet high — taller than the Statue of Liberty. We looked at the rats and seagulls and dogs, and at the palimpsests of layer upon layer of discarded possessions. And we tried to ignore the putrid smell.

I love great locations in movies, and I couldn’t believe I’d never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunting place. And all of the garbage I’d ever generated living in New York City was in there somewhere. This was the graveyard of all my stuff, along with everyone else’s. I immediately knew that I wanted to make a movie in a garbage dump.

Cut to 2006, and I met producer Angus Aynsley and co-producer Peter Martin at BritDoc and again at the London Film Festival, and instantly liked them enormously and wanted to work with them. Talking about possible projects, Angus mentioned that he had met Vik Muniz and been impressed by his highly entertaining slideshow about art history. I had seen and loved Vik’s work, and I was hugely excited about the possibility of working with him. So I read some of Vik’s writing and set off with Angus and Peter to meet Vik in Newcastle, England when he had an opening at the Baltic in January 2007.

When we met up again in Vik’s studio in New York two months later the conversation turned to garbage, and I suddenly thought about my trip to Fresh Kills seven years previous. That was the lightbulb moment. Vik had previously done a beautiful series using junk, and he had also done projects with street sweepings and dust. His creative use of materials is his signature — whether chocolate sauce, sugar, or condensation trails from planes — so this project would very much be an extension of his earlier work. After we’d started talking about it, no other ideas were interesting anymore. I knew that a collaboration between Vik and the catadores would be potentially very dramatic. Vik had previously done some brilliant social projects with street kids in São Paulo and had a wonderful ongoing project in Rio that employed kids from the favelas, and I was totally inspired by him.

A month later, Angus and I got exciting news that Fabio had found one landfill where the drug traffic was under control, and the catadores were being organized into a co-operative by a charismatic young leader who might be open to collaborating with Vik. We were all very nervous — there were so many things to be afraid of, from dengue fever to kidnapping — but we all wanted to go. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro in August 2007 — Vik, Angus, Peter, and me. Seeing the extremes of poverty and wealth so ostentatiously displayed through the car window … the contrasts of mountains and oceans, black and white, garbage and art, art stars and catadores … the contrasts couldn’t be more starkly drawn than in Rio de Janeiro, and I realized that it wasn’t a coincidence that we were tackling this particular topic in Rio. It was perfect.

For me this film, as with all of my work, is about getting to know people who you do not normally meet in your life. And, if I’m doing my job, I aim to create an opportunity for the audience to feel they are getting under the skin, to emotionally connect with the people on the screen. But you need people you can care about. And so when Valter first cycled into my line of sight, I knew for sure that we had a movie. That day I had gone on my first reconnaissance mission to the landfill and was dressed head-to-toe in protective layers fit for a moon landing. His bike was decorated so creatively with odd trinkets from the trash and he honked his eagle horn with such sweet wit that I was totally smitten.

And Vik, as an artist, plays between these levels of proximity and distance, between showing the viewer the material and showing them the idea, revealing the relationship between the paint strokes and the scene depicted by the paint. The portrait is Isis, it is a Picasso, it is a bunch of garbage, and it is a work by Vik Muniz — all at once. You can view things close in or further away. Likewise you can fear people from afar or you can go interact with them. I love the Eames’s Powers of Ten and I wanted to create a social analog. To start with we see the place from GoogleEarth, then from a helicopter, then from a car, then from a safe distance, then from a first meeting, then from a growing friendship, then from it having change you fundamentally and permanently.

Just as Vik wants the portraits to serve as a mirror in which the catadores may see themselves, so I hope the movie serves as a means for us to see our journey to becoming involved with people so far from ourselves. To zoom all the way in to caring about someone who was previously as far away as it’s possible to be.

My heartfelt thanks to the catadores. I can’t help seeing Waste Land as the third in a triptych with my earlier films Devil’s Playground and Blindsight, and not least in the awe and gratitude I feel for the group of people who were courageous enough to share their stories with us — and to live lives so rich in inspiration for us all. We dedicate the movie to Valter, and remember him saying that “99 is not 100.” A single can, or a single catador, can make the difference.

— Lucy Walker

To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
SUPPORT THE GREANVILLE POST AND CYRANOS JOURNAL TODAY.
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