CRUISING TO DEATH

January 16,2012 – Photos of the crippled cruise ship Costa Concordia on its side reminded me of a morning a few years ago when I stood at a window of the Doge’s Palace on San Mark’s watching a seven storey tall cruise ship slither past. The gigantic vessel was so close we could see the faces of the passengers on deck frantically filming and photographing.

Next to me an elderly professor shook his head. “There goes an ecological catastrophe in-the-making,” he sighed. Then he went back to the podium to chair a U.N. seminar on environmental perils.

The tragedy of the Costa Concordia has been as much in-the- making as the probability that one of the average eight giant cruise ships that pass through the center of Venice every day from April to November will eventually ram into what is the world’s most delicate urban habitat.

Greed prompts ship owners to offer more daring and more spectacular voyages for their customers like the promise to view Venice at sunrise from the decks, a major promotional asset. In Venice itself the greed of merchants and port workers accepts the dangers and the damage the cruise ships cause when their passing churns up the lagoon’s sea floor and diesel fumes (from running generators around the clock while the vessel is moored) have given Venice, a city without traffic, a higher pollution emission than its traffic jammed neighbor cities.

Greed to cut costs by selecting a shorter route prompted the captain of the Italian container vessel Rena to cut through –and founder – on New Zealand’s Astrolobe Reef spilling its oil on protected marine life and vegetation. And it was greed and the promise of a bonus perhaps that prompted the captain of a Chinese oil tanker to seek a short route home through Australia’s pristine Great Barrier Reef. He ran into rocks and spilled his cargo of oil across a maritime reserve marked world heritage and banned to all commercial shipping. READ….

AN ITALIAN DILEMMA

   AN ITALIAN DILEMMA November 9, 2011 – The greatest asset of Italians is their optimism, closely followed by their love for radical changes. This fosters their belief that by removing their scandal–scarred prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, la bella Italia will be saved from economic disaster and a menacing default on its debts. Like in Greece tens of thousands have been out in the streets in Rome clamoring for the prime minister’s resignation as if his withdrawing from the rudder of State, by sheer magic, would free Italy of its problems. At the same time however the protesters and intellectual groups are posing profound questions like:  Is Western democracy as practiced today redundant? Can peaceful protests still achieve results? And why should nations not default on their debts? Europe has already decided Italy is too big an economy to rescue with Union funds which means Italians must suffer deprivations in order to put their accounts in order, a decision volatile in a country whose citizen in the past have rarely taken adversity quietly or accepted austerity. This week, one of the country’s most outspoken and influential political commentators, Franco Berardi Bifo, encouraged the impoverished to go to supermarkets and shop for their needs then give the cashier a piece of signed paper with their name and address stating “I will pay when I have an income that allows me to pay.” Bifo also wrote that anyone hungry should eat to their hearts content in luxury restaurants then present a similar promissory note when the waiter comes with the bill. He also encouraged the homeless and those evicted for their failure to pay rent to occupy one of the hundreds of vacant Vatican-owned apartments around Rome. In recent history Italians have often been in the vanguard of revolts, political movements and new ideas. They are notorious for civil disobedience and have scant respect for authority. In recent months Italian protests against intended austerity measures imposed by the European Union have become increasingly violent with many rebellious leaders arguing that peaceful protests have not and will not achieve results. The danger signals are ubiquitous. Read….

Lebanon: Fallouts from the Arab Spring

MAROUN EL RAS, Lebanon, Sept. 2011 – From the cliff top at this Lebanese border town anyone can see the lush fields of the Israeli Galilee roll like a green carpet right up to the wire fence dividing the two countries. On the Lebanese side of the fence the soil is dry, barren and the landscape is desolate.

The Arabs say the Israeli settlements, clustered in the valley below and the high plain above, have siphoned off all the available water resources leaving the Arab side bone dry. Of course the Israelis argue the Arab side was always bone dry and it was Jewish ingenuity and diligence that turned the barren High Galilee into a vegetable garden with orchards as far as the Golan Heights on the edge of the horizon. The Heights were snatched from Syria in the 1964 war.

The contrast in the look of the land is like a festering wound for Palestinians and Lebanese. It is also a constant reminder to the Jewish-Russian immigrants who the Israelis settled along the contentious border that their Arab neighbors believe the settlers have stolen the water from their wells.  Read…

SABRA and SHATILA: Let us not Forget

SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, Beirut, Sept 18, 2011 – Plaster and decay have healed the bullet scars on the concrete walls but not the scars in the collective memory of those who continue to live here – 29 years after an Israeli-armed and commandeered Christian militia shot, knifed and beat to death thousands of unarmed Palestinian refugees during a three day killing spree for which no one has yet been brought to justice.

  Under banners reading ‘Justice for Sabra and Shatila’ the new generation of  Palestinian refugees (and thirty Italian sympathisers who come annually) this year commemorated the massacre with flowers laid on the mass graves of the martyrs, holes hurriedly dug, filled with corpses and earth by Israeli army bulldozers and finally cemented over.

In the rest of  Beirut life went on as usual on September 16 this year. No one here wants to remember those days of shame in 1982, certainly not the Maronite Phalangists, allies of the occupying Israeli army, who carried out the massacres while the Israelis provided transport and pretended they did not see. Israeli commander, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, claimed ‘I did not know.’….Read

VENICE Film Fest: Despair, fear, no future and apocalypse

VENICE, Sept 12, 2011 – The 68^th Venice Film Festival was staged this year around an abandoned construction crater that became symbolic for a film fest whose movies reflected a society despairing of its future, scared of immigrants, conned by banks or financial mafias and hoodwinked by politicians.

To no one’s surprise the Golden Lion award went to ‘Faust,’ Russian director Aleksander Sukorov’s 134-minute saga of the man who sold his soul to the devil in return for one night with a coveted virgin, a Faust forever borrowing money from the devil to finance his bacchanalian pleasures, his hunger, his lust, an unhappy, hounded creature who constantly rushes off to new adventures – in short a man symptomatic of our times.

Like ‘Faust’ the Venice films were tenebrous.

Take ‘4:44: Last Day on Earth’ directed by Abel Ferrara, a peep into the final few hours of earthlings before a colossal apocalypse wipes out all life on the planet. The catastrophe is caused by the disintegration of the ozone layer due to decades of environmental damage, in short a man-made disaster which nearly all politicians (except Al Gore) ignored or belittled.

Italian director Gian Alfonso Pacinotti adds his own flavor to the doomsday dramas: His film ‘The Last Earthling” shows the arrival of aliens who find a tired, disillusioned world in economic crisis. The coming of the extra-terrestrials produces a wave of racism and bizarre religious cults.

As could be expected Japan’s Sono Sion adds salt and pepper to the universal tragedy with ‘Himizu’ (the Mole) showing a dysfunctional, disorientated and desperate Japan in the wake of the devastating tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a Japan that no longer trusts or obeys its authoritarian hierarchy, a film in which the wisest man is a Yakuza.

Not all movies were catalytic. The majority mirrored modern society’s defects whether in the blatant violation of justice (French film ‘Presumed Innocent’ by Vincent Gareng based on a real story) or in Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s haunting ‘Life Without Principles’ which details how banks, loan sharks and organized crime manipulate the stock market and swindle a credulous public out of their savings.

Many of the films shown in Venice are unlikely to be commercially screened by the American studios that monopolize distribution rights.

Few cinema buffs are likely to see courageous films like Russian director Angelina Nikonova’s ‘Twilight Portrait’ the story of a social worker physically and mentally raped who finds her rapist, a policeman. Rather then kill or denounce him she manipulates the man into a sexual relationship to experience the mentality and brutality of the marginalized part of Russian society, the part that lives without hope and thrives on hatred. The film turns society inside out. Read…

LONDON RIOTS: I-PHONES NOT BREAD

Venice, August 2011    In the Middle East young people are fighting the authorities these days, risking their lives to achieve democracy while in England rioting youth this month illustrated just how badly democracy has failed them.

Not a surprise to anyone who followed the ever closer and corrupt relationship between finance and politics with politicians elected on the strength of campaign contributions from financial institutions or major corporations and managers of major financial institutions ending up in parliaments and senates, often as ministers.

In England the establishment and its serfs, the mass media, instantly denounced the looting, store-burning youths, mainly unemployed and living in marginalized urban areas, as ‘thugs’ or ‘underclass’ rather than what they were in reality: The discards of a ‘democratic Capitalist system’ that condemns more and more of its young citizen each year to unemployed poverty while real wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands thanks to ‘democratic legislation’ that appears to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor.Read…

EUROPE: HOW LONG WILL SHOCK THERAPY WORK?

VENICE, Italy, July 15, 2011 – In an abstract way Italy’s economic troubles are a stand-off between international speculators hollowing out Europe’s economies one by one and a public no longer willing to see their country’s ‘privatized’ public assets and services snapped up by foreign investors buying well below real value.
The saga began with the results of a referendum on June 14 this year when Italians, not always the wisest in choosing their leaders but sometimes endowed with great foresight, voted a resounding ‘no’ to their government’s intention to introduce nuclear energy and privatize public services. Few noticed that only three days later Moody’s Investor Service and Standard and Poor, the self-appointed arbitrators of a nation’s economic standing, warned international investors that Italy’s debt was heading the way of Greece, Spain and Portugal as well as Ireland (whose bonds the agency now considers ‘garbage.’)
The aim of this warning was obvious. Read…

GIVE A VOICE

GORTAHORK, Donegal Co., Ireland, June 16, 2011 – In this small coastal town in picturesque Donegal county where even the fairies in the bogs still speak Gaelic, so it is said, young film makers gather each year to screen the kind of documentaries people everywhere should see – but rarely do.

                        This year the main theme at the Guth Gafa (Give a Voice) international documentary Film Festival gave audiences a startling peek into what happens when governments and corporations ignore the legitimate protests of concerned citizen. As everyone knows not all protesters go home, curse official intransigency and drink another pint – or two. Read…

BHUTAN: Is Gross National Happiness a seductive slogan or a pioneering ideology?

        THIMPHU, Kingdom of Bhutan – People are killed every day in the struggle to replace tyrants with freedom. But in this Himalayan kingdom, wedged between global giants India and China, a place where demons and spirits still roam and fairytales are still told, an absolute monarch recently imposed democracy even though his subjects begged him to maintain his arbitrary rule.

Anomalies are not unusual in this quirky little nation where Vajrayana Buddhism and secular powers share government, where birth and marriage certificates are a recent novelty and separations are usually settled amiably since there are few lawyers to litigate. Everyone here wears skirts, the knee-length gho for males and the ankle-length Kira for women, the compulsory dress at work, in school, at official functions and to enter a temple or government building. This is a country where education and health care is free for every citizen and villagers pay no tax, where the official ideology is neither socialism nor capitalism but a home-spun policy of Gross National Happiness (GNH) a policy no one in the kingdom can accurately define though everyone will tell you how it is supposed to work – for them.

The Kingdom of Bhutan is certainly no Shangri-La though sometimes it feels as if the country had been left in a time-warp in the Himalayan foothills, too poor in resources to be bothered, too inaccessible to be conquered, too complex in its Buddhist-Shamanic faith for missionaries and so reclusive everyone almost forgot it existed – until its sweet innocence lit a beacon for a new kind of world order.

That happened after its visionary king, the one who forced democracy on his subjects, also coined the revolutionary economic slogan: ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.’

And that did it….. Read

FALL-OUT

Melbourne, Australia, April 28, 2011 – While Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant keeps shedding radiation at an unprecedented rate our mainstream media appears to have taken no further interest in what scientists like Australian Helen Caldicott bluntly describe as “the greatest health hazard the world has ever known.”

Behind the sudden silence about what threatens to become a colossal manmade disaster is a concerted effort by the governments of industrialized nations to save a nuclear industry they see as the only viable means to maintain the high level of energy consumption that will guarantee the comfortable lifestyle of the world’s affluent societies and assure the survival of their own crooked and corrupt governance systems.

Trillions of dollars are invested already in nuclear power and hundreds of nuclear plants are being constructed or planned to come on stream. Scrapping nuclear power and nuclear plants would probably send into bankruptcy many of the enterprises and mega-corporations who finance the election campaigns and expenses of our members of governments and are part of the de facto corporate powers running the world today. In the absence of viable alternate energy it would plunge the world into an acute energy crisis.     Read…