This one is just excellent. I wish there was a way to give it a bigger stage, but there is no way the powers that be would allow this to get near mainstream exposure channels.
Yes, you have to get passed the narrator (I thought I was in for an idiocyfest the minute I heard Sean Penn's unmistakable nasally drone), but the film itself is superb. The footage they've been able to compile and the picture they were able to piece together so clearly is uncanny. This is truly a really well done film, and needs to be shared.
War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
You can view it free at SnagFilms (online link) or at YouTube. (Also, if you have a Roku, SnagFilms has a channel, so you can view it easily on your television that way)
Secrecy
This one is pretty good in its own right, but it's even better just because it's an entire film dedicated to the subject. They do include interviews from obvious statists (and one very conflicted NSA agent who doesn't seem to realize she contradicts herself every other sentence), so you do get the glimpse of the other side, but the exposure is there and it's great.
This one is not as accessible as the top one. I haven't been able to find it streaming online, but I viewed it on Netflix Streaming (although it looks to have expired from there). There's also other Places it can Be found.
"There's also other Places it can Be found."
For those who don’t understand what John James and Neodoxy are talking about, TPB is the acronym for the Pirate Bay.
If anyone wants to join internet pirate John James, one should be protected. Use PeerBlock to keep unwelcome visitors out of your computer.
Here is the War Made Easy transcript.
Thanks, Gero. I was just about to Google "TPB" and figure out what the heck they were referencing.
Okay so thanks to Gero I just watched The War on Kids, and everyone I know is going to get sent a copy.
If you don't want to watch it in pieces at Gero's link, you can find it in the torrent of the Internet...Not in the bay though. However I'd really like to find a version that doesn't have the aspect ratio distorted. If anyone can find one that has the proper ratio, let me know
:EDIT:
Now I'm feeling a little regret for giving Gero credit now that I see he has decided to be a tattletale. (As if people couldn't use google.)
The War on Kids disturbed me. The prison-like environment of some schools, the drugging of students, the boredom, and so forth showed an educational system that teaches obedience and simple memorization, not how to think critically. When I saw the Stupid in America special by John Stossel, I thought public schools were just bad at teaching, but the War on Kids shows an almost militarization of the schools via surveillance, police raids, and zero tolerance. Sad, very sad.
So I just watched Trading on Thin Air without having any idea what it was about before starting it.
It turns out a surprisingly useful piece. I'm not sure who actually made the film, but they seem to be average (or perhaps smarter-than-your-average) global warmists, so it's built on the AGW premise, and of course includes some economic misunderstandings here and there...but it's remarkable how accurate it is and how well it captures the real issues behind fiat currency and Cap & Trade...so remarkable in fact that it's almost (almost) astounding how they could be so close yet still so far away.
One perfect example is when a talking head author lady points out how the price of oil more than doubled over a period of time when demand had gone down while supply had gone up (allegedly...she uses a timeframe of only 6 months), and then makes a comment about how "if you know anything about basic economics, if demand goes down or supply goes up, price should go down...so the fact that the price went up shows that markets aren't working, and they aren't working because we're not regulating them.") So obviously the implicit argument is, we need more regulation...but this is the argument she's making while trying to make the case that Cap & Trade is a horrible idea. What she thinks Cap & Trade is, I have no idea.
Another great example is at 46:06, when a guy says "when Obama, or Biden or those people say 'think of the national budget like a household budget...we're spending too much money..." (I guess he easily confuses Obama/Biden with Republicans). He continues: "Wrong! The national budget, the national debt has nothing to do with domestic debt." (I have no idea what that is supposed to mean).
But as bad as that is, he follows it up with "..it has to do with the creation of money, it has to do with the banks, it has to do with the Federal Reserve. It has to do with who is actually making the money, and then who is using the money created by the Federal Reserve — which of course is a creature of the banks..."
The film is one of those counfounding pieces like Paul Grignon's Money as Debt and Bill Still's Money Masters. It seems to see all the problems with monopoly control, has no real problem pointing them out, and even some of the negative effects, and then goes on to offer no "solution" other than maybe more monopoly control.
The only difference here is Thin Air doesn't rest on that notion. If I had to make a firm statement I would say the film offers no real solution at all. It literally ends with guys saying how "there's still hope...we sheep just need to start asking questions and educating ourselves". Which, while it's not very useful, it's not exactly damaging either...as it's true, and certainly isn't a faux "solution" like that presented in Grignon and Still's films.
Overall this one presents much more good stuff than bad, and ultimately I think can be a very useful tool against the well-meaning do-gooder Ralph Nader types you might know, who just don't know any better. Thin Air does a great job of turning so many of the "green" arguments on their heads, and actually using a lot of the environmentalist, tree-hugging, bleeding heart pathos against those who would argue for something like Cap and Trade and more subsidization of "green energy" projects and the like. The film talks about South American's being forced off their lands so that some company might plant eucalyptus trees and then be able to sell cabon offsets. They show Africans talking about how their land and livlihood is destroyed by the building of dams.
It does get off track for a short bit in the middle, but by the end of the film they've got one guy talking about how economic ruin and profit for the corporations is brought about by the "anthropomorphic global warming scam" (his actual words), another guy even says how "their are a host of problems that are created by our attempts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, they are environmental, and they also affect the ability of people in the 3rd world to feed themselves", and then finally just concludes that "Kyoto has emerged as the single biggest destroyer of the environment."
So while the film will most definitely leave viewers with virtually no idea what the solution is, it will do a great job of shaking up the notions they currently hold about government regulation and environmental programs being the answer. And for this, I think it can prove invaluable.
It's not every day you get a film tying something the environmentalists like (global warming) to something they hate (corporations) and pointing out how it's a quite cozy relationship for the two. You don't often see images of African villages being destroyed alongside audio of how "green energy projects" are the cause of it.
You can watch and share the full film on Amazon and free on Hulu.