This weekend Venezuela's recall finished in an overwhelming victory for Chavez. An extraordinary result given the incessant campaign by the US government against him including the failed coup of April 2002. This film, "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" is an epic account of the days of the coup with extraordinary fly on the wall footage. Irrespective of one;'s attitude towards the bolivarian regime, this film must be seen. And best of all, it's now available.... you guessed it... on suprnova.org. The torrent file is here. Directions on using the software can be found in the Fahrenheit 911 thread. I include an interview with the film-makers from z-net."


The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

An Interview With Documentary Filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain

Brian Forrest

In 2001, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain traveled to Venezuela to videotape a behind-the-scenes profile of President Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected leftist president who had been swept into office by a groundswell of support from the poor sections of Venezuela’s cities and countryside. While filming in April of 2002, they found themselves in the midst of a coup attempt against Chavez, and their cameras were there to capture those incredible moments of April 2002. They compiled this footage to create the documentary “The Revolution will not be Televised.” Bartley and O’Briain were interviewed by Brian Forrest in October of 2003.



Outfoxed is available for download here using bit torrent.
This review is from Alternet.


"OutFoxed: How Rupert Murdoch Is Destroying American Journalism"

"Outfoxed" demonstrates in painful detail how one media empire, making full use of the public airwaves, can reject any semblance of fairness or perspective, and serve as the mouthpiece of right-wing conservatives, fully relishing its role. Media critic Jeffrey Chester describes the Fox News operation most succinctly in the film: "Fox News Channel is a 24/7 commercial for the conservatives and the Republican Party."

hydrarchist writes

Marcus Rediker author of
Villains of All Nations

the http://www.readysteadybook.com interview



Marcus Rediker is a historian, writer, teacher and activist. He is author of four books, all "history from the bottom up," most recently Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age(Verso). He teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh. Here, he kindly answers a few of my questions




Mark Thwaite  What began your fascination with pirates and piracy?


Marcus Rediker  "It was an accidental beginning, which is one way of saying, I suppose, that I never intended to write a book about pirates. I had no personal connection to the sea, having grown up in landlocked Kentucky and Tennessee in the upper south of the US When I entered graduate school in the mid-1970s I wanted to do the kind of work being done at Warwick by Edward Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, and others – that is, to use legal records to write the history of working people who left no records of their own. “History from the bottom up” or “peoples’ history” as it was called. So I looked around for a group of historical subjects who had caused enough of a ruckus in their day to create substantial documentation. I settled on pirates.


Primitive terrorists

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier—Explorer, Naturalist and Buccaneer
By Diana and Michael Preston
Walker & Company; 368 pages; $27. Doubleday; £16.99

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age
By Marcus Rediker

Beacon Press; 256 pages; $24. Verso; 240 pages; £18.99

From

The Economist


THE business of piracy changed utterly between 1680, when William Dampier set out in pursuit of Spanish barques, and the 1720s, when rascals such as Blackbeard terrorised the Atlantic. Dampier and his fellow privateers were amateurish, eclectic in their interests, and mostly inoffensive. The outlaw pirates of the early 18th century, by contrast, were single-minded and lethally effective. These two books take after their subjects.

Diana and Michael Preston concluded that, in order to understand Dampier, they should retrace some of his steps. They cannot have got far. Dampier was an adventurer in the Walter Ralegh mould—at one point, he set sail from Mexico to Guam, not knowing whether it was 5,500 or 7,000 miles away. As a raider of Spanish gold, Dampier was inept, seizing his first true treasure ship at the age of 60. That does not seem to have discouraged him, however. The buccaneer's first love was natural history, a subject to which he devoted much time and colourful prose. Having wowed the British public with tales of exotic lands, he retired and died, apparently safe in his own bed.

"The Pomo Marx & Engels"

Adam Kirsch, New York Sun

Like a dog to its vomit, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri return in "Multitude" to the vapid and deeply
irresponsible politics of their 2000 book, "Empire."


By fusing the favorite ideologies of the academic Left
— Marxism and postmodernism — into a new theory of
geopolitics, "Empire" won a surprising amount of
attention: here, the New York Times proclaimed, was
the "Next Big Idea" we had all been waiting for. The
New Statesman called it "perhaps the most successful
work to have come from the left for a generation."

hydrarchist writes... this from the Brooklyn Rail

In the Belly of the Beast

by Saul Austerlitz

July 2004

The Corporation Download vis suprnova using bit torrent

Directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan

Making a feature film about corporations is a bit like trying to cram the entire history of the United States on the back of an index card. After all, the corporation is a phenomenon that has existed for well over 100 years, and its tentacles extend into every aspect of modern life the world over. Yet while Mark Achbar (director of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) and his two collaborators, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, have done plenty of cramming in The Corporation, they emerge largely successful. This briskly edited 145-minute tour of corporate influence covers a wide swath of topics: the history of corporations, the damage done by their human-unfriendly policies, and potential areas of transition in the corporate outlook.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Multitude: An Antidote to Empire"

Francis Fukuyama, New York Times


Well before 9/11 and the Iraq war put the idea in everybody's mind,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had popularized the notion of a modern
empire. Four years ago, they argued in a widely discussed book —
titled, as it happens, Empire — that the globe was ruled by a new
imperial order, different from earlier ones, which were based on overt
military domination. This one had no center; it was managed by the
world's wealthy nation-states (particularly the United States), by
multinational corporations and by international institutions like the
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. This
empire — a k a globalization — was exploitative, undemocratic and
repressive, not only for developing countries but also for the excluded
in the rich West.

Hardt and Negri's new book, Multitude, argues that the antidote to
empire is the realization of true democracy, ''the rule of everyone by
everyone, a democracy without qualifiers.'' They say that the left
needs to leave behind outdated concepts like the proletariat and the
working class, which vastly oversimplify the gender/racial/ethnic/
class diversities of today's world. In their place they propose the
term ''multitude,'' to capture the ''commonality and singularity'' of
those who stand in opposition to the wealthy and powerful.

From New Left Review


New Wave Argentine cinema—documentaries from the badlands, taxi boys on roller-skates, escrache protests—thriving after the crash of 2001, in the diary of an émigré practitioner.

Edgardo Cozarinsky


Monday 9th June

I left the long summer days of Paris for the Buenos Aires winter: it was zero degrees and the afternoons were over by five thirty. The Kirchner government had been installed in May, and even among the capital’s disillusioned, not to say cynical inhabitants, it was enjoying the obligatory honeymoon period. In the taxi from the airport, the driver asked me my opinion of the president’s first measures: a green light for the trial of corrupt Supreme Court judges, the sacking of dozens of high-ranking military officers, government subsidies for public works under the auspices of select workers’ organizations. I tried to explain to him that, having witnessed an array of more or less inefficient civilian governments and brutal military regimes, it was hard for me to have any illusions on this score, even if the outlook seemed quite positive. ‘We are just like you,’ he said, ‘waiting for the first foul-up.’


Majority of US Adults Expect to See "Fahrenheit 9/11"

David W. Moore, Gallup News Service


PRINCETON, NJ — According to the most recent Gallup survey, more
than half of all American adults (56%) either have seen or expect, at
some time, to see Michael Moore's controversial movie, Fahrenheit
9/11, a highly critical look at the Bush administration's decision to
fight a war in Iraq. The poll was conducted July 8-11. At the time,
8% of Americans said they have already seen the movie, 18% expected
to see it in the theater, and 30% expected to watch the video. Among
all Americans, more people have an unfavorable than favorable
impression of the movie, but those who have seen it are
overwhelmingly favorable.

"Maufacturing Dissent:

Think Before You Cheer — Michael Moore is Making a Noose for the Left's Neck"


Shlomo Svesnik, WW3Report.com

Who can resist the urge to cheer?

George W Bush has gotten away with stealing an election, waging an illegal
war of aggression, and redesigning the entire federal security and
intelligence apparatus, expanding its powers on a level not seen since the
dawn of the Cold War. A sniveling mediocrity who achieved the pinnacle of
global power entirely through family connections, he is leading the world
into a state of permanent war, turning the planet's lone superpower into a
despised and isolated pariah. All decent, thinking people want to see him
soundly trounced in November, and Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9-11 is
the most effective piece of anti-Bush propaganda to hit the American
mainstream, by a mile.