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The End of Poverty? A Movie Review By Bonnie Weinstein The End of Poverty? Written and Directed By Philippe Diaz; Produced By Beth Portello; Narrated by Martin Sheen. A Cinema Libre Studio Production. I urge you to see this movie and bring friends. Even though it claims not to be pro-socialist, it is a real condemnation of capitalism. While the overall message is that, through theft, oppression, war, pillaging, assassination, and massive "privatization" and selling off of all natural resources including air and water, in the countries in the southern hemisphere going back to 1492, the west is too materialistic and individuals must begin "de-growth," i.e., all of us in the wealthiest northern hemisphere must make a personal commitment to drastically scale back on our consumption in order to share the wealth with the rest of the world—the overwhelming majority of whom live in poverty. Of course, this is exactly what capitalism is doing to working people in the northern hemisphere right now. For working people this is not a matter of moral choice. Our wealth is being extracted, not to share it with the impoverished masses, but to fill the coffers and line the pockets of the wealthy, corporate elite. That's what the current economic crisis and the wars are about—to extract wealth from the only place left to extract it from—the western hemisphere's relatively wealthy working class. The film contrasts the incredible depths of poverty endured by the peoples of the southern hemisphere as a result of the selling off of water rights, land—even air rights, and, most importantly, labor rights—from the masses of starving workers, peasants and farmers, as they become at worst, pests to be exterminated and, at best, slave labor for the U.S. dominated corporate world. The film welcomes us into the homes of people with no access to water or even sanitation. We hear their descriptions of their lives. We see their starving children rummaging the dumps for a drop of something to drink from the bottom of an old bottle. There are no interviews with UN leaders or other so-called "world advocates" for the poor. Instead the documentary takes us to the Congo, to Brazil to the most poverty-stricken places in the world—and into the lives of the people themselves. How they scavenge the dumps on the outskirts of big cities or try to harvest the crops that have been polluted by the industrial waste from the theft of natural resources by private capital. These are the voices we hear in this film. These scenes of poverty contrasted to the raw humanity of the impoverished themselves—the majority of the film—is punctuated with interviews with historians and scholars who have documented many instances of the theft of land and resources by Western corporations over the centuries but mostly of more current examples. There are interviews with, in particular, John Perkins, author of the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, who gives testimony from his own personal experience as to how the land-grab deals were made by corporate "economic hit-men" (such as himself) that would spare no measures to attain the goals of the corporations they represented— including recommending assassination and war when necessary to accomplish their plunder and rape of the land and resources, with no regard to the humanity they destroy in the wake. Capitalism has no choice but to turn on it's own labor force to feed upon—to use humans up and spit them out when they are done. As the film aptly points out, it has already ravaged and impoverished the entire southern hemisphere. There's hardly anything else to steal there. But capitalism can't control capitalism any more than the banks and corporate CEOs can control their own overtly greedy behavior because the profit motive has a mind of its own and will stop at nothing to increase their profits. And nothing less than a massive, unified, world, working-class-based, socialist revolution will be able to stop the world's biggest monster, capitalism, from devouring it entirely. I urge you to see and publicize this very important film. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
