EzraWinton.com | Media arts and politics

A friend of mine, Rajesh Thind, is a UK-based documentary filmmaker who is making a documentary about the socio-political challenges faced by rural people in India. Below is an excerpt from his description of “Twelve Acres,” after you read it, please consider helping him out by donating a few bucks through the Chip In widget above. Thanks all.

Twelve Acres — that’s the amount of Punjabi farmland that I will inherit from my 70 year old father when he dies. The film will document my attempt to figure out what to do with this land when the time comes. More than that though, it’s a film about families, migration, and living outside of the constraints of the high-pressure urban life we live in London. That’s the skeleton on which the flesh of the film will hang…

The same pressures that people in Western cities are used to living under are increasingly at play in India. Fifty years worth of consumerism and materialism have been unleashed there in just the past decade or so, and the impact this is having on the lives on Indians is profound and wide-reaching.

Many of you have heard the terrible stories of farmers in India committing suicide because of the burden of debt, but we haven’t heard of what I found in my village and others around it - that teenage boys are killing themselves because their parents can’t buy them the shiny new consumer goods that their satellite TVs are exposing them to; that women are being killed by their husbands so they can get a new dowry; that young people see no future for themselves and are struggling to adapt to a new world.

Again, score one for the corporations and zero for the people. Today’s broadcast of Democracy Now is providing in-depth coverage of the news that Exxon has been handed a gift by the US Supreme Court: it no longer is required to pay back the $5 Billion in punitive damages that a jury ordered it to pay after its 1989 spill on the Alaskan coastline (1200 miles to be exact). I visited the coast of British Columbia in the winter of 1989 to pitch in and help clean up the oil-soaked beaches. I remember seeing globules and puddles of oil all over the sand. I also remember seeing two super-sized dumpsters full of oily and very dead seabirds. I took photos and did a story for my student paper at Vanier Highschool in Courtenay.

Back then the story was that it was an isolated incident involving a drunk captain. Today we know that there is much more to the story of how a rapacious, profit-mad oil giant dumped 11 million barrels of crude oil into a delicate ecosystem that resulted in the worst ecological disaster in America’s history. Faulty equipment, negligence and typical corporate corner-cutting are responsible for the spill. The ship had no functional radar, and while the drunk captain slept off his booze-up below deck, the seaman steering the tanker had no indication they were bearing on the jagged reef that would pierce the ship’s single hull (another cut corner: no double hull for protection from leaks).

So maybe we should stop telling Exxon we don’t care about oil spills. By conspicuously consuming massive quantities of oil for frivilous and downright STUPID reasons such as bottled water and plastic grocery bags, we are saying WE LOVE YOU OIL CORPORATIONS, and we’re showing our love through our purchase of products that need petroleum to exist. 16 million plastic water bottles are thrown away in the US every year. Less than 3 percent are recycled. Not only does it take 20 million barrels of crude (nearly double the Exxon spill) to produce these bottles each year, but they end up in our landfills, and in our ecosystem. When I was in Vancouver recently I saw 12 packs of Nestle (largest supplier of bottled tap water) water bottles for 4 dollars. I told my friend that it should be illegal, that there should be government regulations to prevent the selling of bottled water for so cheap. Whether these are restrictions around extraction, production, or retail, they need to be put in place.

Yes, I am an eco-fascist. That is because I believe fighting the info-war for the consciences of citizens everywhere is not enough. We need policy that forces our hands away from consumption and away from lining the pockets of the Exxon’s out there with riches just guaranteed to them in today’s ruling. The court has basically reversed the earlier decision and has told Exxon that they only need to pay 10 percent of the original 5 Billion. Greg Palast also reported on this decision today, here is an exerpt:

[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. And now they won’t have to. The Supreme Court today cut Exxon’s liability by 90% to half a billion. It’s so cheap, it’s like a permit to spill.

Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.

There is a documentary that we have screened at Cinema Politica called “Out of Balance: Exxon Mobil’s Impact on Climate Change,” and you can check it out and watcht the trailer here. OK, to cheer myself up, I’m heading off to the FREE outdoor concert that, being a tribute to Leonard Cohen who is in town preforming at the Montreal Jazz Fest, might just feature a cameo appearance by Canada’s famous poet.

Neoliberalism:
My PhD is keeping me busy with 250+ pages of reading per week, but I’m immensely enjoying it. The program at Carleton is what I had hoped for - four of us students in a small classroom with one professor engaging deeply with the material we’ve read for a good three hours. We just finished a great book by Armand Mattelart (pictured at left) called “Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture.”

Here’s my Favorite quote from this excellent historical reading of the field of communication:

As we have already noted, in the redeployment of free enterprise the consumer is keystone. He or she is at once, as “coproducer,” one of the links in the production process and, as representative of the people-as-market (peuple-marché), the key to the process of legitimation of the neoliberal conception of society. For it is not a matter of just any consumers, but rather of consumers who are sovereign in their choices in a free market. Neoliberalism, in its struggle against all forms of control (except of course its own, those of free enterprise), whether they emanate from the state or from organized civil society, reveals itself as a form of neopopulism as well. Thus it experiences the constant need to reaffirm the representativity of consumers in their role as market shares. It speaks in their names. Hostage and alibi, the consumer has, indeed, the starring role on the stage of the democratic marketplace; he or she is a a “citizen” of it. The discourse built around the consumer, a consumer free of all attachments and determinations other than his or her own will, claims such authority that it often becomes a totalizing discourse, one leaving no place for other issues than those related to consumption. Consumption is assumed to contain within itself its own explanation and raison d’etre.(Mattelart, 1994, p.234)

Big Brothers:

Last week I received a letter informing me that I have been accepted as a Big Brother. The program, which is across the world, is called Big Brothers and Sisters, and matches adults with children who are in need of companionship, friendship, and positive role models of their same sex. The initial testing was a rigorous two and a half hour interrogation by two psychologists about my past, present and future thoughts, experiences and problems. I was definitely not prepared for it, and hadn’t eaten breakfast, so by the time it was over, I was ready to collapse. I understand the thoroughness however, and I’m glad I not only survived, but I passed! So next week, I go through a bit of training and look at files of little brothers that they have chosen. Every two weeks I’ll spend four hours hanging out with a kid, which will be great for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that I miss my family here in Montreal.

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You’ve probably noticed by now that I’ve switched my blog over to Wordpress, and the snazzy digs have inspired me to get back into posting. Right now I’m concerned about submitting my finished thesis to the Graduate Studies Office of Concordia, but soon after that, I’ll be setting aside time to post the odd rant here.

For now, I’d like to point you in the direction of a great article I’ve just found on line. I’ve been doing some research for Liz Miller’s documentary film The Water Front, and well as you could probably guess, one of the big “water issues” is bottled water. I’m sure as I continue researching I’ll be posting all kinds of wonderful facts here about the privatization of this public resource that billions still do not have direct access to. So to tide you over, if you’re interested in the environment and health, you’ll want to check out the two links.

To read Paul Goetlich’s excellent article, “Get Plastic out of your Diet,” go here.

For a full list of facts and figures on water in Canada, such as the fact that a ten minute shower uses 100 Liters of (drinking) water, go to this great CBC resource page.

In a recent spat of protests of white males who drive Hummers (WMWDH), tempers flared and anger rose to the point that the mainstream media had to search for “arab looking Canadians” in the bystander crowd to photograph and subtly connect to rioting and violence. The Hummer owners marched down the streets of several Alberta and Texas communities chanting “Hummers are Hungry! Israel must be stopped!” in an apparent reactionary stance to the recent IDF bombing of a power station in Lebanon which has led to 35,000 tons of oil being spilt into the mediterranean (pictured above). The environmental catastrophe is said to be the worst that Lebanon has seen, and the UN, in a position typical of the organization, released a statement saying that it was “very bad,” and that “someone should do something.”

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