MOVIE ABOUT CORPORATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT - READ REVIEW, WATCH FREE...
Ethos (2011)

REVIEW

At the surface level, Ethos is a movie about corporations and environment—how they win and the earth loses. But it goes deeper than that, delving into the tangled web of ills that afflict the modern world, including war, poverty, and ecosystem degradation—and the controllers that run the system that causes these ills. Some of the better points in the film include:

• The influence of corporations on politicians is pervasive. In the US, we don't have elections, we have auctions.
• The manic drive for corporate profits and revenue growth compels corporations to externalize all costs possible, including those related to environmental preservation, human rights, human health, product safety, and product durability. That corporations must behave this way to maximize shareholder value was codified as a judicial decision. But this is something that can be undone.
• Manipulation of public opinion is orchestrated thru corporately owned and sponsored media outlets to simultaneously foster consumerism, create a soft totalitarian state, and still maintain the illusion of freedom and a free press.
• Capitalism—that is, rule by the global financiers—is winning. Worse, they're not just bankers, they're hegemons—they want power, not just money.
• The politically influential military-industrial complex uses the smokescreen of the "war on terror" to promote the need for a huge military budget and unquestioned, unending wars, which are really about control of depleting resources and profiting from war.

I have some gripes about Ethos as well:

• The film spends far too much time on the Bush II era—the more recent Obama era has offered just as many offenses in the trend towards unending war and deepening totalitarianism.
• From the perspective of one who is well read in how the "corporate/central-banking/warfare model" of civilization works, I can tell you that the film only goes midway into many of the problems it discusses. (Then again, given that the average person can only handle so much information at one time about how things really are, maybe that's OK.)
• In the end, the film laughably advocates green consumerism as the most important way to address the problem. The logic is that by withdrawing financial support for corporations that use bad practices or make bad products, they and their system will change or perish. That's an important step, but there is no way it will solve the problem. Rather, the most important action is this: The license to create a nation's money and profit from its management must be wrested from the banksters and refashioned as a public commons. Given that Ethos spends a fair amount of time talking about the Federal Reserve and the plague of banksters, it's mystifying that this action was not identified.

Gripes aside, Ethos paints a clear picture of how the world's central bankers and political minions use the corp-gov axis to run the corporate/central-banking/warfare model and how they use the mainstream media to "manufacture consent" in our supposedly free society. For this achievement, the film is worth watching.

POST-NOTE: Ethos offers the following admonition: "If we are to make decision about the future of our society, the single most important thing we need is the truth." Toward that end, I hope you will monitor Grinning Planet's free feed of downloadable audio, which was designed to provide a clear picture of what is really going on in the world.

Movie about corporations and environment; written by Dan Briody; narrated by Woody Harrelson; interviewees include Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson, Chuck Lewis, Edward Griffin, Stan Goff, Robert Jensen embed source: (YouTube version no longer availble; sorry)

(YouTube version no longer availble; sorry)

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