Hidden History: The Interlocking Relationships Between Wall Street, the CIA and the So-Called Free Press

Mosaic of Facts: Inside the Information Web

RT (2014)

Film Review

In this 2014 documentary, free lance journalist Miguel Francis Santiago examines what he refers to as the “information war” between the US and Russia over recent events in Ukraine.

He begins by looking at evidence uncovered by late investigative journalist Robert Parry that the 2014 coup in western Ukraine was actually a US-sponsored “color revolution” to remove a democratically elected president (Viktor Yanukovych) and replace him with pro-EU/pro-NATO Petro Poroshenko.

Parry’s evidence pointed to open collaboration between former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the fascist and neo-Nazi Svoboda Party that (based on a 2012 BBC investigation) has a history of violently targeting Jews and ethnic Russians.

Santiago goes on to review a slew of widely promoted YouTube videos of both the Maidan uprising and the subsequent referendum in which 93% of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and request membership in the Russian Federation. In examining the origin of various pro-Kiev/anti-Russian videos, he discovers all were produced by people with links to the NED, USAID and/or the US State Department.

The film also includes interviews with retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, aid to former Secretary of State Colin Powell; Naomi Wolfe, former political advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore; geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser; and Peter Joseph, producer of the radical Zeitgeist film series.

Santiago uses these various sources to paint an extremely sophisticated picture of closely interlocking relationships between the US corporate plutocracy, US intelligence agencies and America’s so-called free press.

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*”Color revolutions” is the term used  to describe a series of failed “revolutions” in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa funded by the CIA, State Department and George Soros. The intent was to use popular uprisings to install more US-friendly regimes.

**National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a so-called non-governmental organization funded mainly by the CIA and State Department, used extensively to promote regime change via popular unrest.

***USAID is an agency of the State Department used extensively to promote regime change via popular unrest.

A Film About Dismantling Corporate Rule

Owned and Operated

Relic (2012)

Film Review

Owned and Operated is a documentary about dismantling corporate rule. This non-ideological film features dissidents across the political spectrum, among them John Oliver, George Carlin, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Rifkin, Rob Hopkins, Ron Paul, Ray McGovern, James Corbett, Alex Jones and Brian Wilson. In addition to the film’s touchy-feely ending, I was also disappointed in the filmmakers heavy promotion of technology as the solution to the world’s urgent political and ecological crises.

In my view, the best part of the film is Part 1, The Freak Show. This is a humorous but surprisingly accurate depiction of modern corporate culture and the dangerous and bizarre effect of systematic corporate indoctrination on human behavior.

Part 2, Class War and Organized Greed, concerns the obscene greed of the 1% and their systematic takeover of our supposedly democratic political systems.

Part 3, Freedom vs Security concerns the systematic loss of civil liberties that has accompanied the War on Terror.

Part 4, The Awakening, concerns recent mass movements triggered by the 2008 global economic meltdown, including Occupy, the Arab Spring, Anonymous and the Zeitgeist, Transition and Open Source Ecology movements.

Part 5, the Future, heavily promotes Jeremy Rifkin’s views on the role of the Internet and mass connectivity in solving mankind’s most pressing problems. I tend to agree with Ronald Wright’s analysis (in A Short History of Progress) that humanity’s eagerness to rush into new technologies has tended to create more problems than it solves.

That being said the film ends on an extremely positive note by scrolling the web addresses of scores of social change movements for viewers to explore.