It’s a bit early for my annual blog post, but I thought I’d throw caution to the wind, in more ways than one. Intrigued - read on. Not - don’t, I can’t force you.

Anyone who has actually been following my blog posts may remember a post I made over 2 years ago about some questions I had regarding 9/11 and the official story. If you do give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve more but its the best I can do in the current economic climate.  If you didn’t, here’s a quick recap. I had to do a lesson on conspiracy theories, stumbled across some material on 9/11, watched a few ‘documentaries’ and became rather sceptical of the official story. Coming up with a credible alternative and proving it is a little more tricky – but the range of attempts provide food for thought, nightmarish visions or some pretty bizarre flights of fancy.  For the record, I still have trouble believing much of the official story whether in the 911 cOmission Report or the subsequent NIST report, but I won’t go back into it here – I promise, well not now.

Through the process, I realised that the mainstream media coverage was far from balanced on the subject which piqued my interest into other things that might actually be happening in the world, that the media decide it’s better for us to not know about.

As far as I can remember, I’ve always had a thirst for knowledge. I’ve been meaning to ask my parents if I was inquisitive as a child, but I guess I know the answer. My early experiments with technology, would suggest I was (and also that I’m lucky I still am). A couple that spring to mind are my early experiments with keys and plug sockets and attempting to empty the bathtub with the vacuum cleaner (see what I mean). Bright spark huh!

So when I realised I could find documentaries on pretty much anything I wanted over the internet, it probably should have dawned on me that I was on a pretty slippery slope. Fast forward 3 years and stone the crows there he is gleefully whizzing down said slope with a nothing more than a carrier back for protection. As a conservative estimate, I’ve probably seen somewhere in the region of 500 documentaries in the past year or so. (So that’s what you’ve been doing – yeah I guess it is). I suppose there are plenty of more worrying obsessions one could be afflicted with. I haven’t heard of any cases of people OD’ing on (mis)information before, but you never know. The further I ventured down this little rabbit hole the more it seemed to branch off and open up into a whole network of tunnels to explore, from war to climate change, politics to poverty, there seemed no limit to the routes. But what really started to fascinate me was that many of them seemed to share some common ground and some general themes started to emerge. The only problem was that before long the surface seemed so far away, and it seemed a little lonely down here.

I’ve mentioned the theme of isolation a number of times in previous entries, and threatened to write a piece about it, but struggled with putting these feelings into any kind of concept or order to feel like I could write about it. I think it originally came up from a friends, culture or communication perspective but it’s hard to tell now, (perhaps I should read back through earlier posts myself). I could always visualise it, but wasn’t sure how to express it – regardless of the arena the process seems to remain the same – plus there was/is the nagging doubt that it could just be me or it was just called ‘ageing’. I guess to sum it up in a sentence it would be that the more you are “into” something the less you have in common with the majority of people. I’d always imagined this as some kind of sphere, like the ever expanding universe with people as atoms. At the core the atoms are densely packed and very close to one another, but some, maybe all, are on a trajectory outwards but moving at different rates as time progresses. I’d also imagined these trajectories to have a destination too, but they don’t follow a straight line, and can change direction with some “life-changing” experience.Now imagine proximity represents similar interests world views and the like. Its kinda nice to be on a similar wavelength to someone, but maybe you’re going in different directions and eventually drift apart or see someone who should be going in a different direction, but can’t do much to change their path. In this analogy the core would represent the majority and is populated by people with mainstream tastes, and widely-accepted political views of the day, their natural inclination and curiosity should guide them on a path but there are also forces at work that try and keep them within a certain range, be it media, marketing, peer pressure, or some other force, social, corporate or institutional. However these forces only have a certain reach and after a certain point their gravitational pull gets weaker and no longer has a hold on you. In the centre you can’t see much of the whole, but as you move further out you get a greater perspective but its kinda cold and lonely out in the atmosphere, and in some ways you wish you’d never left – you know there must be people out there, but it just seems harder to make contact with them.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah documentaries. When you start to take a closer look at the details of the face of the world, the course of history, current world events and society as a whole – it has a pretty nasty complexion beneath the layers of foundation. Perhaps I was watching too much of the stuff, but after a while it was hard not to feel completely hopeless and so utterly powerless. - a daily diet of war, corruption and genocide is not exactly soul food let  me assure you. A typical course may have included an hors d'oeuvre of Darfur, followed by a portion of Palestinian conflict  with a side serving of Cambodia and it was proving pretty hard to digest.  Perhaps it was time to lay off of the heavy stuff for a while and lighten it up with the Consolations of Philosophy, Einstein’s unfinished Symphony or the story of Pythagoras (There was much more to him than triangles you know).

Although in general most of the documentaries would dovetail and concur in certain areas, some would directly contradict each other. This was particularly the case in the area of climate, how it was changing, to what degree and the causes of the changes. Although academic life revolves around and in some ways relies upon a process of criticising others research in the name of advancing science. It seemed that there was something more at work. I found this particularly frustrating, but more so that no matter how much I searched for the facts, the more elusive they seemed to become. Every time there seemed to be proof of something, there would be a contrasting paper from an equally respected scientist from an equally respected academic Institution. Who’s funding these guys?  Which particular industry or lobby group are they serving? Unfortunately that information was not so readily available. 

With most of the mainstream News channels serving their own corporate agenda it’s an increasingly confusing world we live in, where it seems virtually impossible to know what’s happening in the world unless you are directly involved in some way and if that’s anything like any of the stories running on the news at the moment that’s probably not desirable. I won’t regurgitate the list of problems of privately run news programmes, but anyone who’s seen Chris Morris’s The Day Today will testify, it’s hard to take certain news channels seriously after seeing it. More recently, Charlie Brooker’s excellent series Newswipe brings us pretty much up to date. I have to confess that I occasionally check in with CNN, although I’m not sure why as it inadvertently ends in some kind form of rant and switching off in disgust – unless it happens to be Jon Stewart’s Daily Show of course (It says something when the only breath of sanity on a news network is the comedy show).

The news according to CNN became increasingly surreal recently with the sudden emergence of one of the biggest non-stories of the year, the race between Larry King and Ashton Kutcher to be the first to have a million followers on Twitter, I wish I was joking, but sadly it was real. Not only that but then Twitter made an appearance in every story, even the weather forecaster would have some gushing conversation about Twitter with the anchor as he handed over. This went on for weeks, and was followed by a ‘news’ story of how the owner of Twitter was going to Iraq to see how Twitter could help?! I thought there must be some commercial reasons why CNN were plugging it and searched in vain on the net. Much to my growing despair my search only returned 1,000’s of articles about King and Kutcher’s Twitter race.

The CNN/Twitter insanity reached a peak as the story of the election in Iran began to unfold, and Journalists were ordered out of the country leaving Twitter to fill the void as protesters took to the streets. Viewer posted comments and videos ran as headline news for the best part of a week without any verification. I got an eerie feeling that something not quite right was going on, I’m sure the protests were genuine, but on what kind of scale they occurred remains unclear, the scope for manipulation in that environment was evident, the truth was a little trickier to grasp.

I won’t pretend otherwise, I don’t like Twitter, like Facebook, I think has a negative influence on society. However, in the interest of fairness I thought I would have to try it, to see what it was all about before writing about it. For the uninitiated, it’s been referred to as micro-blogging, you can write a maximum of 140 characters in each update – although why you’d want to, and why anyone would want to read it I’m less sure about. So the pathetic people who use Facebook status to update us on the mundane minutiae of their depressingly ordinary lives every 5 minutes will probably love it then. Probably -Well for me they can have it. Then just maybe we can have the news back.

I wouldn’t hold your breath though, the corporate shaping (I’m feeling generous) of news has been with us for a while. If you’re interested in learning more about this I would recommend Noam Chomsky’s book, “Manufacturing Consent”. If that seems like too much hard work there is a documentary version available which takes you on a whirlwind tour through the whole range of problems of communication, media and education in today’s version of democracy. One of the key mechanisms that Chomsky highlights is that the system is geared to maintaining the status quo, supporting the interests of the elite and leaving very little room for dissenting voices or genuine debate on issues. As newspapers are increasingly funded through advertising dollars, it becomes harder to see where the adverts end and the corporate-friendly news begins. And the parallels are clear in television. Whatever space is left between the commercials and blatant plugging of product X or Y, is insufficient for any real dialogue, but just enough space to bludgeon you to death with sound bites. Anyone for a round of ‘bullshit bingo’ – although I guess anyone with “Green shoots of recovery” and “Trickle Down Effect” on their card could run away with it.  The key ingredients in a theoretical democratic system are the people’s participation in politics and free access to information, so that they may form an opinion on policies. Now, I’m open to comments but I don’t see much evidence of either in the sham we call democracy today. Well how did we get to this stage, where faith in our politicians is pretty much as low as it has ever been? The films of Adam Curtis are an excellent source to fill this gap, in particular “The Trap”, “Century of Self” and more recently “The Power of Nightmares”, which together provide excellent background, tracing the mutation of politics from the Cold War to today, and as the latter may suggest how fear is used to shape both policies and public opinion with exaggerated or imagined threats, which our brave politicians are only too happy to offer us solutions for. What was particularly powerful about seeing the above is seeing the trends and distinctly remembering being affected by them, to find that more often than not I had been duped by an increasingly stage-managed performance.

 This brings me onto the recent Presidential Elections in America and the rise of President Obama. Ok, so it appears I’m a slow learner and genuinely believed he might be a force for change, hope and all the other campaign slogans we were blitzed with. I even stayed up to watch the election results come in. I mean anything would be an improvement on George Bush right? Yeah ok, rewind a decade and I was cheering on Tony Blair and look how that turned out (I told you I was a slow learner, I was young and foolish ok....). If anything an Obama presidency could be a more frightening prospect as the sleight of hand and political manoeuvring is masked by the rhetoric, charisma and eloquence. Several campaign promises have already flown out of the window along with billions of dollars of stimulus money to companies who continue to stuff their executives pockets with bonus money – and continue to do so, only the week before last Citigroup, which is now one-third owned by the American government as a result of the bailout, gave 738 of its employees bonuses of at least $1 million, even after it lost $18.7 billion during the year (ref). I’d guess said executives will be feeling pretty happy with their collective decision to finance Obama’s campaign right now and I’m pretty sure THAT money didn’t come from their personal funds.

I recently had a bit of a flashback, I remembered when I was a child in junior school and we were thinking about the future, I distinctly remembered the vision that with increasing automation, there would be less need to work long hours and in increase in leisure time for all as robots put in the longer shifts. More than 20 years later and this no longer seems to be an opinion let alone a prospect. Working hours seem to be getting longer, retirement age further away, and leisure time shrinking. What happened to this vision? Did we not make the technological advances we imagined? Well as there are now fully automated car production plants, this doesn’t seem to be the case. I guess I was foolish enough to think these advances would benefit the people and not just the chosen ones. Regardless of your opinion of dissenting voices it’s hard to argue against the data on income distribution. The graphs (see photo section) and figures are stark,

“The poorest 40 percent of the world population, 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day and account for five percent of global income, while the richest 10 percent account for 54 percent.” (REF)

“The three richest people in the world control more wealth than all 600 million people living in the world's poorest countries” (Ref)

 “Of the largest 100 economies in the world, 52 are now corporations; only 48 are countries

...and if you think that this is a problem of the developed world versus developing think again...”

“UK's income gap widest since 60s”

This brings me on to Globalization, the corporate world and business ethics , the latter could be the biggest oxymoron of modern times. The true horrors of the lack of ethics in business were revealed to me in the fantastic documentary “The Corporation” and the equally praiseworthy book “No Logo”. Both of which reveal the mechanics of the modern global corporation as a ruthless and well-oiled money-making machine, raking in unfathomable profits at the expense of the environment, civil liberties and employees the world over. I won’t attempt to summarise them here as this entry is already swelling to epic proportions, but dubious practices in marketing, employment, privatisation and the exploitation of natural resources are amongst the central themes.  In reference to the last two points the documentary “A World Without Water” provides an excellent case study of the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. I say we as a global citizen, rather than someone living in the western world as the problems of getting access to clean water is unlikely to have affected many in this part of the world other than rising utility bills. Although as the documentary reveals ‘the developed world’ is far from exempt, but still a far cry from the impending crisis in less privileged areas. The case study of Bolivia’s 3^rd largest city Cochabamba should provide sufficient evidence that there is something deeply wrong with the world we live in today. In short, the city’s water supply was privatized and the contract was awarded to a consortium including Bechtel, an American firm, prices were subsequently raised to a level that a large proportion of the population could not afford to pay (the equivalent of almost a years salary to some of the poorer citizens). Not content with denying them running water, the population were also forbidden from collecting rain water. Protests were inevitable, but were suppressed by the countries military to the extent that the crowd were fired upon with live rounds. Eventually the consortium realised the situation was untenable, and I guess it wasn’t looking good for public relations, so decided to extricate themselves but not before 6 people were killed and over 170 seriously injured during the demonstrations. (wiki)    

It’s important to realise that these problems are not limited to a few bad apples, but are intrinsic to the organisation of the corporation as they are legally obliged to put profits before any other concerns, and in doing so reduce expenditure and externalise costs. It’s not hard to see that when you have multinational corporations trying to squeeze infinite profits by plundering a world of finite resources, the idea of sustainability becomes a ridiculous notion. But its not just the corporations, but the whole financial system at the heart of the capitalist system that is unsustainable as the whole system runs on debt, which only serves to concentrate the world’s finances to those that already have a monopoly on them and with it the power and influence to direct, if not control, the world’s decision making centres and media channels that seek to maintain the system.

The problem is that in expressing these concerns you’re likely to be stigmatized with some disparaging label. I know this is the case, as I have done it myself. Seeing people protest about global corporations or some new development destroying the environment, my reaction would automatically have been to label them ‘crusties’ or ‘yoghurt weavers’ without even thinking about the issue they were protesting – I mean, they’re always moaning about something, right?  But take a moment to consider what kind of protest would you not stereotypically judge. In “Manufacturing consent” Chomsky describes how this process serves the existing structure, and also how anything that contradicts the official story is labelled as a conspiracy theory in order to discredit it by lumping it  in with UFO Sightings, Alien Abduction and stories of a less than dead Elvis. If you’ve made it this far then you’ll probably realised that immersing yourself in this material can leave you feeling pretty depressed and powerless to do much about it. And that’s the way I was feeling. Despite all the material that could point out the errors in the current system, there’s a distinct lack of alternative suggestions to offer any real hope of serious change. This left me feeling trapped, I didn’t want to write about this material without any real conclusion. But at the same time, this stuff was constantly swimming around my mind, and other issues, events or stories just seemed irrelevant in comparison, Which is why I haven’t wrote anything for almost a year. So, what’s changed? It was around 2am on Tuesday morning, I had just watched the documentary “Zeitgeist” for the second time and decided to follow it with “Zeitgeist Addendum”. On this occasion, the effect seemed to be compounded as many of the points raised in the film related to things I had seen or read more about elsewhere, and the Zeitgeist films seemed to draw on all these points and tie them all together to such a point that an hour into the addendum I had sunk to new depths of despair at the whole situation. But on this occasion there was a difference, the Addendum poses an alternative, with the an economy driven by resources and technology rather than money. I won’t attempt to summarise it as I feel it’s important to see the depth and range of the problems in order to fully comprehend the proposed solution. As the film acknowledges it isn’t perfect, but it would be hard to argue that it isn’t a vast improvement on a system that has produced the rapidly deteriorating mess we find the world in today. And just maybe my robot driven dream of the future is back on the agenda! I can’t convince you and wouldn’t want to, but what I do urge you to do is watch the material, follow the leads, form your own opinion rather than regurgitating what the media spoon feeds us. Turn off the TV, read an independent news source that doesn’t rely on corporate funding and ask questions. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m not an activist. I’m just someone who had a few questions.

Here are a list of references that I’ve referred to in the post, so that those who haven’t seen them and are interested in the future can follow them up – last time I checked they were available to view streamed from http://quicksilverscreen.com/videos?c=44&pt=list but if you can’t find any of them let me know, I’ll see what I can do.

(Disclaimer: Although I recommend everyone to watch these films I do not advocate all the views they express, and urge caution in taking any view presented at face value, it’s more important to weigh up the evidence, particularly in view of your own experiences. But, if these opinions do nothing else, other than make you think more critically about the information we are presented with, it has to be a good thing.)

Zeitgeist 2008

Zeitgeist Addendum (2008) 

http://therealnews.com/t/ (Member donation funded news sourse)

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Book and DVD)

The Essential Chomsky by Noam Chomsky

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe S1E1P1– (You Tube)

The Day Today - (Some of) The Best Bits & Brass Eye – Chris Morris - BBC –DVD

http://www.thedailyshow.com/ With Jon Stewart – Full Episodes Online

The Obama Deception (2009) [Megavideo] 

The Corporation (2003) 

No Logo by Naomi Klein  (Thanks to Paul for lending me his copy)

A World Without Water (channel 4) 

The Trap Ep1  - Adam Curtis– Docu

The Century Of The Self Ep1 [Google] 

The Power of Nightmares – Adam Curtis– Docu

Others Worth Checking

War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death 

The Fog of War – Robert McNamara

The Root of All Evil? Part 1: The God Delusion. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)