February 13, 2012

MEDIA ROOTS — Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity is a film featuring a diverse array of thinkers offering common sense analysis of the trappings of modern life and critical perspectives on basic assumptions of capitalism and democracy.  The film presents original interviews, including Chris Hedges, David Graeber, Derrick Jensen, Michael Hardt, Leo Panitch, David McNally.

The movie is about waking up our neighbours to the glaring ills plaguing our society. It argues that capitalism is the crisis and dares us to imagine saner alternatives.

“The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.”  —John D. Rockefeller, American oil magnate, robber baron

“The engines of corporatists cannot be halted.  They are impervious to the will of those who they exploit, they are more powerful than the governments they control, and they have built within them an inevitable, kind of, mechanism for self-annihilation because corporations have this strange pathology where they turn everything into a commodity.  Human beings become commodities.  The natural world becomes a commodity.  And you exploit these commodities until exhaustion or collapse.  And that’s precisely what’s happening.” —Chris Hedges

Messina

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Capitalism is the Crisis

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CAPITALISM IS THE CRISIS — The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history.

Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights.

Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010.

This documentary explains the nature of capitalist crisis, visits the protests against austerity measures, and recommends revolutionary paths for the future.

Special attention is devoted to the crisis in Greece, the 2010 G20 Summit protest in Toronto, Canada, and the remarkable surge of solidarity in Madison, Wisconsin.

It may be their crisis, but it's our problem.

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Photo by flickr user JHS