Video Underground 2011 Series

VIDEO UNDERGROUND 2011 FILMS SHOWN AND POSIBILITIES.  Give me your suggestions.   Dick

CAUSES OF US WARS

1.              (Feb. 13) MICHAEL MOORE, CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY (2009 127 MINS.).  Analyzes US market capitalism/Wall Street, its control over US politics—Congress, the White House--, and their selling out millions of ordinary people—the fired, unemployed, foreclosed, evicted, hungry.

2. (March 13) EUGENE JARECKI, WHY WE FIGHT (2005, 99 MINS.).  Why We Fight explains the powerful tendency toward war inherent in the US market economic and values system: the corporate--imperial--military-congressional-presidential-mainstream media complex

3.  (April 10) UNCOVERED by ROBERT GREENWALD (2003, 56 mins.).

Uncovered explains US international aggressions within the context of the militarized US culture as revealed in Why We Fight.  Uncovered specifically depicts the drive for war by a small clique of Bush officials who wanted war with Iraq as part of their plan to dominate the Middle East, and how they used disinformation and lying to start the war.

Related and Recommended Books:

James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.  2004.

Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell, Imperial Overstretch: George W. bush & the Hubris of Empire.  2004. 

Barry Lando, Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.  2007.

4.  (May 8) WAR MADE EASY BY NORMAN SOLOMON (2007, 72 mins.).  Narrated by Sean Penn.  The film recounts five decades of US presidents with media complicity selling one war after another to the gullible public.   In particular the film shows how the US news media have uncritically disseminated, and glamorized, the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.  Special comparison is given to government spin and media collusion during the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Related and recommended:  

Solomon’s book from which the film was made: War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005). 

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism by Robert Greenwald.   1999,  min.   Reveals the secrets of former Fox news employees who expose what it’s like to work for Fox News, and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. 

CONSEQUENCES OF US WARS