Let's Make Money

Through the documentary "We Feed The World" I stumbled across Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer. His second documentary is called "Let's Make Money". It was released in 2008 and is 110 minutes long. It is on its way to be as successful as his first documentary. It already won the German Documentary Prize in 2009.

The official web site and the partner site are currently available only in German. The trailer is here. The German version of the full film is currently on YouTube.

In it he interviews investors, financial managers, politicians, workers and homeless people. It is about globalization and privatization. It is sizzling. I love the line "Privatization originates from the Latin word 'privare' which means 'to deprive'." A viewer posted a comment in IMDB with the title "Anyone with a bank account should see this film". Do you have a bank account? If yes, go see it!

We Feed the World

"We Feed The World" is a 96-minute documentary by Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer released in 2005. In it he traces the origins of the food we eat. Where does it come from? Which use or misuse do we perform with it? How has farming industrialized? How has it affected farming and farmers? It includes an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The official web site lists that it has been the most successful documentary ever in some European countries. The highlights are shown in this 8-min summary. The full film is currently on YouTube. Food for thought.

The Future of Food

This 90-minute documentary film entitled "The Future of Food" was produced in 2004, but today in 2010 it is as relevant if not even more relevant as in 2004. Food is the most vital and critical element to our life and we have been passing control over to a handful of corporations. We need to reclaim control and return to basics.

The documentary was shot by Deborah Koons Garcia, wife of late rock music legend Jerry Garcia. The official website operates under the same name: www.TheFutureOfFood.com. Different trailers are here and here. The full length film can be found here (US only) and here. On interview with Koons Garcia is also on YouTube.

I found the documentary powerful and highly interesting, enough to make me look forward to Deborah Koons Garcia's upcoming project "In Good Heart: Soil and the Mystery of Fertility". No surprise that GM and Monsanto pop up throughout the film.

Supermarket Secrets

UK's Channel 4 has produced a very insightful 100-minute documentary on the topic of supermarkets and how they control how and what we eat. As we all shop in supermarkets it is an absolute must see. The documentary skilfully highlights things behind the scenes we cannot image such as animal cruelty, how the supermarkets select individual food varieties for their merit of transportability and eliminate all other varieties from the market, how they force organic and non-organic farmers to create up to 30% of waste of the harvested food, etc. The documentary is entitled "Supermarket Secrets". The bottom line is something that should not be news to us: Just like the farmers' job is not to produce food but to produce profit, so are the supermarket chains. Their primary interest is not in providing us with a variety of food, or healthy food, or safe food; their only interest is to maximize profits - and that they do very well. The final comment of the documentary is: It is time again that we learn to shop. Well said.

Spin

"Spin" is the title of a 1-hour documentary by Brian Springer, released in 1995. It can be found on the Internet here and here. It provides a behind the scenes look at the 1992 US presidential elections. This documentary is outstanding in showing how elections are fought and won. It shows the work of spin doctors and speech writers. The documentary has a lot of material of what politicians say when they believe to be off the air. This gives a good contrast to the actual thinking versus to what they say in front of the running camera. Please keep all of this in mind when you go voting the next time. The message is very clear: do not trust a politician, certainly not one in our modern political machinery.

9/11 versus Oklahoma Bombing

Since 9/11 seems suspicious, it is time to go back and also reevaluate similar incidences of the past. One of them is the Oklahoma Murrah Building bombing in 1995. Have a look at these videos entitled "Oklahoma City Reality Check" and "Turning Buildings to Dust" and interpreted by Brasscheck TV. It brings up more doubts of the same style (why and how) as associated with 9/11.

Price of Nature

The Economist published an article on why it is important to put a price on nature. This article and the story it presents is a step into the right direction. There is a lot of danger though. First -- ideally -- we should not be a profit-driven society. It is not a sign of healthy living and a mature society that everything has to have a price tag. Some things are simply priceless. Today a value of zero is attached to nature for most purposes. All such cost is "externalized". As the article correctly says "the profit is for the private pockets, the indirect costs (to nature, our health) are to be paid by the tax payer or the general public". Coming from such a misled system, putting a price onto nature is a step forward. Not ideal, but better than putting a tag of $0 on it.

Other dangers of such a system are: How do we agree to the price tag? How much is a species worth? As the article says "pandas are cute, bugs aren't". Should we put a higher price tag on pandas than on cock roaches? Further down the road we are running into a situation as we doing now with CO2. We will start trading with nature, I will kill some natural habitat here, but offset it by buying some "habitat" or "species credit" there. Everything will be bought and sold and traded. The only guaranteed winners are then traders and banks. Just like CO2 or emissions trading does not reduce or eliminate emissions, habitat and species trading will not reduce or eliminate habitat and species destruction.

It is good that people and companies start recognizing that nature has value and that it provides innumerous services to us "freely". It is good to include these values in our decisions. But we need to remind us, as an example, that when we use such tools to decide where we build our next factory, we only try to find the least detrimental solution. "Least detrimental" still is bad for us. We should first ask us if we can avoid building the factory all together through other means such as consuming less.

Thumbs Up for GM Crop

In the high tech section of the news today were three headlines:
Genetically Modified Crops Get Vote of Approval (Wall Street Journal), Gene Engineered Crops Profit Farmers (ABC News), and Biotech Crops Found to Offer Substantial Benefits for Farmers (Science Magazine). Three articles on the published 253-page report, and all three are positive. All three articles report that more than 80 percent of all soybeans, corn and cotton grown in the U.S. are now produced from genetically modified plants. None of the three finds this worrisome. Critical thinking is clearly not on the forefront of the media.

The benefits are at best short-term and shallow ignoring all the risks, while the true costs are huge, partially hidden and paid by all. Public reports do not see it that way.

Worst of all was a user comment left at the WSJ article. It basically stated his opinion that there is no difference between organic and GM food because many existing crops are cross-breeds, which is just a low-tech version of genetic modification. How did we come this far? And to such an extreme? Was it greed on the part of the politicians steering us into this direction? Blind faith in technology? Profit thinking by corporations, i.e. Monsanto? The preconceived notion that anything new must be better?

The World's Smallest Political Quiz

Are you left, right, central, a statist, or a libertarian? This tiny quiz gives you an answer. It is not too serious, but even a game can sometimes give insights. It is good to see into a mirror to see where one stands. Left and right refers to the US interpretation of these political sides, not the European one.