Military coup in Bolivia: election “disputed” giving the military their cue

Military coup in Bolivia: the head of the military told the president and vice president to resign and then they did.

 

Evo Morales was Bolivia’s first indigenous leader and credited with lifting nearly a fifth of Bolivia’s population out of poverty since he took office in 2006.

 

He was criticised for standing for reelection a 3rd then a 4th time, but he stood each time and won in a democracy not a dictatorship, like these, for instance: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Brunei, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa), Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Mauritania, Myanmar, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

 

The election last month was called “disputed” because the same tactics were used as has become almost commonplace from rightwing losers in elections: dispute it loudly despite never presenting any evidence (because there is none or they would present it). The Organization of American States claimed “clear manipulation” while showing no evidence whatsoever. They also claim as fraud the Venezuelan 2018 election acclaimed for its trustworthiness by the actual election observers on the ground. The US supplies 60% of the budget of the OAS.

 

Amy Goodman: “You have the CIA involvement in coups in Bolivia in 1952, in 1964, 1970, 1980. Would you add 2019 to that list?”

 

Mark Weisbrot: “2009 in Honduras, where Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoirs that she worked in the OAS, too, to prevent the elected president from coming back to the country and to the presidency. I think we’ll find out more later.”

Lula, hailed by Chomsky, released from prison against his wishes

Brazil: Chomsky’s “most important political prisoner in the world”, Lula da Silva, who raised an estimated 40 million out of poverty as leftwing former president of Brazil, has been released from prison.

But Lula attempted to remain where he was.

The Carwash corruption conviction was shown to be fraud the The Intercept, via its massive trove of audio and written information showing the judge – later given a place on rightwing president Bolsonaro’s cabinet – lead the prosecution rather than acting as (impartial) judge.

Lula wished to remain in prison for full exoneration. His suspicions have proven accurate as the Supreme Court has instead suddenly ruled the ending of mandatory imprisonment of people convicted of a crime who have lost their first appeal.

The ruling restores a previous policy that allows people convicted of a crime to exhaust all of their appeal options before being sent to prison. In order to release Lula without being forced to do it in the full glare of the publicity of their fake trial, the Supreme Court has gone to the extent of setting up the freeing of some 5,000 other prisoners who happen to be in the sam position as Lula – appealing their convictions.

People are like nothing to them – the right who conspired against Lula then were found out – in their efforts to lie their way out of their lies. Same the world over, the difference being this man’s achievements.

Ever felt used? Recycling; plus fossil fuels, transnational investment, and American media monopolies

For decades the plastic industry has convinced the world that saving the environment is a matter of personal responsibility. And they got us!

Corporations that manufacture and use plastics have successfully fought regulation and can continue to pollute the earth with poisonous plastics while we try and be as eco-friendly as possible. Part of the campaign to keep plastics on the market (and in the ocean) is the promotion of recycling.

Nearly everything can be recycled but just 9 percent of plastic is being recycled. 12 per cent is incinerated releasing toxic chemicals, while the rest piles up in landfills or in oceans (100 million tons). Internal documents of some plastics lobbyists admit that recycled plastics have “no viable end markets”.

We’ve been convinced that recycling will save us all. Case study: 7 schools collected plastic bags and wrap to win a park bench made of recycled plastics for their school. The contest was, in fact, funded by the American Progressive Bag Alliance, a lobbying group that fights restrictions on plastic. The alliance sponsors preemption bills that make it illegal for cities or states to ban plastic bags in response to legislation banning plastics in states like Vermont and California. Publicly, the plastics industry supports recycling, behind closed doors it fights regulation of plastics.

The fossil fuel lobby and plastics production industry are intertwined, plastics being made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels. Last week, GateHouse of the Fortress Investment Group, whose executive Wes Edens also owns New Fortress Energy a firm with investments in natural gas infrastructure worldwide, merged with Gannett, America’s largest newspaper publisher. They own 1 in every 6 newspapers in the nation. So, reporting can go on as before except where coverage touches on free market access to oil worldwide, fossil fuel money in politics, the negative impact of fracking on climate change, and disagreement with recycling as the panacea for all plastics ills.

You know what they say about recycling jokes. You shouldn’t say if it’s garbage. Shh. Don’t say it out loud! Plastics sent for recycling are nothing more than garbage: getting burned or piling up in Indonesia, India, and Malaysia. Recycling today: in January, 2018, China stopped taking American and European recyclable plastic causing plastic to pile up in even greater quantities. Some cities in the U.S. are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins, saying the quantities of plastic are now no better than trash. Abhorrent as it is to find myself on the same side as those that knee-jerk reject all industry regulation (protection of people and environment), the support without which abusive industry couldn’t abuse, but, yes, recycling doesn’t work.

Recycling fun facts: while we diligently separate our trash, the plastics industry is expected to grow more than 40 per cent by 2028 (U.S.).

Source: perhaps the best single political show I’ve ever seen, taking in top-notch comedy from Lee Camp, Naomi Karavani, and Natalie McGill, last week’s massive further consolidation of fossil fuel-friendly corporate media, billionaire climate denier David Koch’s death, and the conspiracy by the plastics industry to distract with recycling: Redacted Tonight.

Bernie t-shirt

My Bernie t-shirt: dark blue background with light blue dove made of words, Bernie underlined in the middle, says USA, hope, leader, true change, loyal, honest, qualified, moral, brave, trust, credible, future, climate, real issues, equality, love, change, wise, you and me, community, peace, fair, US, vote, together, human, president, united, strength, dream

but there are all the negatives:

1. He’s divisive. Clearly, he brings the party together as everyone and their dog can only get support by mouthing his Progressive outlook though they don’t mean it and their versions pull all of its teeth.

2. Only old white men like him, while polls have shown he’s now most popular with African Americans. One poll of African Americans pitted him against Oprah. Bernie won, obviously.

3. He’s too old. He has the quick wit of a speaker so on top of his information and outlook that he does without the rehearsed lines of Harris, Booker, Buttigieg, free then to turn on a dime as he does in the debate for pointed responses. He was even able to work with his opponents right there on stage to bring them into his vision. Corporate Dems are often asking for the party to come together i.e., stop thinking differently, but there it was, happening on stage, as Bernie brought them into his vision. That’s a leader.

4. He hasn’t done anything. Well, recently he pressured Amazon into raising wages, followed up by going after Walmart, condemned Saudi Arabia and sponsored the resolution to end support for the war in Yemen, introduced the No Money Bail Act, committed to a federal job guarantee, campaigned so powerfully for Medicare for All that he shifted the entire Democratic Party. And Bernie saved a woman from being hit by a car.

5. He’s not polite enough. But then again, he’s been cheated by a supposedly impartial party, and continues to be cheated by the press because he really and truly wants big money out of politics when that can’t be allowed to happen if money isn’t to continue to buy opposition to change!

4TH DEMOCRATIC DEBATE

4th DEMOCRATIC DEBATE:

JOE BIDEN FACT CHECK: He insisted, “I support a woman’s right to choose”, but just last year Biden made a paid speech supporting anti-abortion Republican Fred Upton for $200,000.

KAMALA HARRIS FACT CHECK: She said, “I took on the big banks”. She didn’t prosecute Steve Mnuchin, though, who illegally foreclosed on homes. Her office found over a thousand instances of fraud and recommended prosecution, which she refused to do.

CORY BOOKER. Somehow the leading issue last night, healthcare, didn’t come up so Booker didn’t get caught. He has said, “We’ve put a pause on receiving contributions from pharma companies because it arouses so much criticism.” We pause until I get elected?

JULIAN CASTRO FAILED FLINT: “People don’t have to wonder what I would do. I’ve actually done it. I was Secretary for Urban Housing and Development when Flint had it’s water crisis. I went to Flint. We did what we could”. And the problem was never addressed, still exists …

TULSI GABBARD speaking some truth: The Trans-Pacific Partnership, “a panel of international corporations whose rulings would supersede any domestic law” and “end these regime-change wars”.

This is transnational finance exerting enormous influence over global policy making money in 1. risky financial speculation, 2. wars and war preparation, and the 3. privatization of public institutions, their best sources of revenue being the worldwide flow of free capital, dollar hegemony, and access to oil.

JOE BIDEN at the beginning again incoherent.
“I’d be happy to discuss it more in detail if the senator would want to. I -err you know, I look at … Anyway. I, that’s what I think. I know what my plan does! And I think it’s not dissimilar from what the senator said we should be working together on getting things done …
The fact is the bills that the president … excuse me … the future president, here … that the senator’s taking about …”

A weaker debate all around than yesterday’s. This debate was free of yesterday’s detailed proposals and ideas for the change that will present the electorate with a different Democratic Party than the one that lost to Donald Trump last time. Biden, Harris, and Booker (at the start) today struggled even to put words in the right order.

Democratic Debate July 30

The debate in text. Any comments by me are clear as not those of the candidates.

Bernie Sanders onto stage first = of course. He has the top polling.

Elizabeth Warren = bigger cheer.

Buttigieg third in. These first three got the significantly bigger cheers.

The treatment of the anthem is unbelievably schmaltzy.

Bullock – “populist” “progressive”

Marianne Williamson – “An amoral economic system has turned short-term profits for huge multi-national corporations into a false god. And this new false god takes precedence over the safety and the health and the well-being of we, the American people, and the people of the world, and the planet on which we live. Conventional politics will not solve this problem because conventional politics is part of the problem.”

Delaney: “We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us, which is with ‘bad policies’ like Medicare for All, free Everything and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump re-elected. Or we can nominate someone with new ideas to create universal healthcare for every American, with choice.”

Me: “Universal”! Galaxy-wide.

“My wife, April and I, have 4 amazing daughters!”

He was once the youngest CEO on the New York Stock Exchange – he is the enemy personified? Lumping them (Bernie and Warren) together as homogenous helps Warren.

John Hickenlooper – “Last year, Democrats flipped 40 Republican seats in the House, and not one of those 40 Democrats supported the policies of our front runners, at centre-stage.”

Yes, it’s terrible?

“Now, I share their Progressive values (!!!), but I’m a little more pragmatic.” (??)

O’Rourke – blah, blah

Buttigieg – “endless war … climate change.”

Warren – “Trump is part of a corrupt, rigged system.”

Sanders – “Tonight, as we speak, 87 million Americans are uninsured or under-insured, but the healthcare industry made 100 billion dollars in profits last year. 500,000 American are out on the street, and yet companies like Amazon did not pay one nickel in federal income tax. The fossil fuel industry continues to receive hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks while they destroy this planet.”

CNN: “You support Healthcare for All that would eventually take private healthcare insurance away from more than 150 million Americans in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone.  … Congressman Delaney has just said it is political suicide that will just get Trump re-elected. What do you say to Congressman Delaney?”

Sanders: “You’re wrong! (Screams of approval.) Right now, we have a disfunctional healthcare system – 87 million uninsured or under-insured. 500,000 Americans every year going bankrupt because of medical bills. 30,000 people dying while the healthcare industry makes tens of billions of dollars in profits.” 5 minutes away from me, John, is a country. It’s called Canada. They guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a human right. They spend half of what we spend. And by the way, when you end up at a hospital in Canada, you come out with no bill at all. Healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. I believe that. I will fight for that.”

Delaney: “Well, I’m right about this!” (Who says? You would say that, you want you to win) “We can create a universal healthcare system to give everyone basic healthcare for free. My dad the union electrician loved the healthcare he got from the …. “

It’s not the provider, it’s what you get and for how much.

Sanders: “The fact of the matter is tens of millions of people lose their health insurance every single year when they change jobs, when their employer changes that insurance. If you want stability in the healthcare system. If you want freedom of choice with regard to doctor or hospital, which is a system which will not bankrupt you. The answer is to get rid of the profiteering of the drug companies, and insurance companies, and move to Medicare for All.”

Warren: “We should stop using Republican talking points in order to talk with each other about how to best provide healthcare. I want to have the chance to tell the story about my friend, Eddy Barkin.”

Oh god!

“… he has a cute little boy named Carl … !!”

CNN: “You have said you are with Bernie on Medicare for All (vigorous, happy, nod of the head). Senator Sanders has said that people in the middle-class will pay more in taxes to help pay for Medicare for All (big smile from Bernie as he acknowledges that CNN is again trying to undermine him) though that will be offset by the elimination of insurance premiums and other costs. Are you also ‘with Bernie’ on raising taxes on middle classes to help pay for it?”

Warren: “Giant corporations and billionaires and going to pay more. Middle class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their healthcare. And I’d like to finish talking about Ady.” (Crowd laughs as it does sound ridiculous.) This isn’t funny!” … for middle-class families, costs, total costs will go down.”

Bullock: “This is an example of wish-list economics. It used to just be Republicans who wanted to repeal an replace, and now many Democrats do as well. (He sounds like a snake oil salesman!) We can get there with negotiated drug prices.” (Yeah, right!!)

Question again and again framed to attack Sanders: “On the topic of whether the middle-class should pay higher taxes in exchange for guaranteed healthcare and the elimination of insurance premiums.”

Buttigieg: “Medicare for All Who Want To” – unbelievable. “We will see Americans walk away from that corporate option into the Medicare option, and it will become Medicare for All (in a pig’s eye!)

Buttigieg will not answer the question on raising taxes on middle-class Americans, so after offering wishy-washy alternative avoiding doing it but at the same time doesn’t say no, loses the favor of the middle-class, anyway.

O’Rourke gets his answer “right” by saying “no”.

… “people are not guaranteed the healthcare that they need, as the example that Senator Warren showed us …”

Klobuchar looking insufferably smug. CNN: “You do not support Medicare for All.”

“We need the public option. That’s what Barack Obama wanted (someone on microphone, woman host, or Warren laughs at this blatant name-dropping). And Bernie and I have worked on pharmaceutical issues together.” (More name-dropping).

Sanders: “As the author of the Medicare bill, let me clean up one thing. People talking about ‘having insurance’; there are millions of people who have insurance. They can’t go to the doctor, and when they come out of the hospital, they go bankrupt.” (Crowd unnoticed until this point claps him). What I am talking about, and what others up here are talking about (he is very fair as he could have this win but chooses to share it) is no deductibles and no co-payments. And Jake, your question IS a Republican talking point. (Bigger clapping again from the crowd.) And by the way, the healthcare industry will be advertising, tonight, on this program.” Jake comes in quickly cutting him off to stop this going any further. But big clap again.

Warren: “These insurance companies do not have a god-given right to make 23 billion dollars in profits and suck it out of our healthcare system.”

Delaney: “I’m the only one on this stage that has experience in the healthcare business.” (Yeeaugh!) “I don’t think my colleagues on the stage understand the business.”

Sanders: “It’s not a business!!” (Sanders, great, really strong this debate.)

Delaney: “The public option is great.” Applause. Hmmm.

Hickenlooper: “Proposing a public option that allows some form of Medicare, that maybe is a combination of Medicare for All and Medicare. Eventually, in 15 years you could get there.” (Like Biden, slurring.)

Williamson: “They will so shut us down.” Williamson just lost her support by putting herself on the right on medicare.

Buttigieg pretends he’s a smart wit with off the cuff remark, but it’s clearly prepared: “If we embrace a far-left agenda, Republicans are going to say we are a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re gonna do? They’s going to say we are a bunch of crazy socialists.” Crowd appreciate this, but are being manipulated. He is saying nothing. With this prepared off-the-cuff remark, he almost obscured the strong point – “It’s time to stop worrying what the Republicans will say” – he began with.

Sanders: “Let’s be clear what this debate is about. What we are taking on is that in the last twenty years, the drug companies and the insurance companies have spent four and a half billion dollars of your health insurance money on lobbying and campaign contributions. That is why when I went to Canada the other day, people paid one-tenth the price for insulin that they’re paying in the United States.” (To claps again even as Tapper talks over his last words to get someone else in.)

Ryan: “You don’t know that, Bernie.”

Sanders quick as a flash: “I do known that. I wrote the damn bill!” True off-the-cuff honesty and wit. Roar of applause – biggest of the night since the introductions.

“Second of all, many of our union brothers and sisters – nobody more pro-union than me up here – are now paying high deductibles and co-payments. And when we do Medicare for All, instead of the having the company putting money in to healthcare, they can get decent wage increases, which they’re not getting today.”

Ryan: “The only thing they (union workers) have left is possibly really good health care, and the Democratic message is gonna be, we’re gonna go in, and the only thing you have left, we’re gonna take it and taken it, and we’re gonna do better. I do not think that is good policy.” Huh?

Delaney (why is this former banker with heath industry experience getting so much time? Oh because this is CNN, and he’s a former banker with heath industry experience.)

Sanders: “Under Medicare for All, hospitals will save substantial sums of money because they’re not gonna be spending a fortune doing doing billing, and the other bureaucratic things that they have to do today. Maybe you did that and made money off of healthcare! (cheers) but our job is to run a non-profit healthcare system.”

CNN: “Mayor Buttigieg, you’re in favor of getting rid of the law that makes it a crime to come across the US border illegally.”

Bullock – real hawk on immigration.

Buttigieg (talk about being young, talk about being young): “This is the exact same conversation we’ve been having since I was in high school. I was a junior when the Columbine shooting happened. I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings. We have now produced the 2nd school shooting generation in this country. We dare not allow there to be a third.”

FACT CHECK: There have been school shootings in the US every year back to 1973. Buttigieg’s statement is then likely a pre-prepared means of telling people again how young he is. (The last 3 years in a row with no school shootings was during World War II.)

Klobuchar’s strongest moment: “House of Representatives passed universal background checks. And now that bill is sitting on Mitch McConnell’s doorstep because of the money and the power of the NRA.”

Bullock: “That’s been the fight of my career. Kicking the Koch brothers out of Montana, taking the first case after Citizen’s United up to Supreme Court.”

O’Rourke: “In this country, money buys influence, access, and increasingly, outcomes. We will make sure we ban political action committee contributions to any member of Congress or any federal office.”

FACT CHECK: O’Rourke has taken more fossil fuel money than anyone else in Congress other than Ted Cruz. (But some people clap.)

Buttigieg: “Of course, we need to get money out of politics.” “When I propose the actual structural, democratic reforms that might make a difference: end the electoral college, amend the constitution if necessary to clear up Citizen’s United. Have D.D. actually be a state. And depoliticise the Supreme Court with structural reform, people look at me funny.”

FREE RUN: This is all just talk. Buttigieg is allowed to get away with critizising lack of change in getting money out of politics. He is a mayor. He’s trying to impress, easy when he’s never been in a position to make policy. His is just talk. Bullock doesn’t call him on it.

FACT CHECK: Richard Zinman, JP Morgan, gave Buttigieg $2,000 in late April. James Mahoney, the head of global communications and public policy at Bank of America gave $2,000 in June. Former chief at Goldman, Bob Rubin, who worked at the bank for over two decades and later became Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton gave a total of $8,400 to Biden, Buttigieg and Harris.

Williamson’s great moment and perhaps even the single stand-out moment of the night:

“The issue of gun safety of course is that the NRA has us in a choke hold, but so does the pharmaceutical companies, so do the health insurance companies, so do the fossil fuel companies, and so do the defence contractors. And none of this will change until we either pass a constitutional amendment or pass legislation that establishes public funding for federal campaigns.

But for politicians, including my fellow cases who have in some themselves have taken tens of thousands, and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars from these same corporate donors, to think that they now have the moral authority to say that now we are going top take them on, I don’t think the Democratic Party should be surprised that so many Americans believe that it’s yada yada yada. It’s time for us to start over with people who have not taken donations from any of these corporations, and can say with real moral authority, ‘That is over.'”

CNN: “Governor Hickenlooper, you ran a Facebook ad that warned, ‘Socialism is not the answer.’ The ad also said, “Don’t let extremes give Trump 4 more years.”

Sanders: “The truth is that every credible poll that I have seen has me beating Donald Trump, including the battleground states of Michigan, where I won the Democratic primary, Wisconsin, where I won the Democratic primary, and Pennsylvania. The American people want to have a minimum wage, which is 15 bucks an hour. I’ve helped lead that effort. The American people want to pay reasonable prices for prescription drugs not the highest prices in the world. I’ve helped lead the effort for that as well.”

Hickenlooper: “If we’re gonna force Americans to make these radical changes, they’re not going to go along. (Sanders throws up[ his hands in exasperation.) Throw your hands up!”

Sanders: “I will!”

Hickenlooper: “You don’t have to implement the plans. Us governors and mayors have to pick up all the pieces! You can’t just spring a plan on the world and expect it to succeed.”

Sanders: “John, I was a mayor, and I helped transform my city. I have some practical experience. Interestingly enough, today is the anniversary of Medicare. Fifty-four years ago under Lydon Johnson and a Democratic congress, they started a new program. After one year 19 million elderly people in it. Please don’t tell me that in a four year period, we cannot go from 65 down to 55 to 45 to 35. This is not radical. This is what virtually every other country on earth does. WE are the odd guy out!”

Paul Ryan: “We have to talk about the working-class issues, the people who take a shower after work, who haven’t had a raise in thirty years.”

Beto O’Rourke goes off on one about Texas, not addressing anything said. “We had the courage of our convictions, talking about ‘universal healthcare’, comprehensive immigration reform and confronting the challenge of climate change before it’s too late.”

FACT CHECK: O’Rourke has taken more fossil fuel money than anyone else in Congress other than Ted Cruz.

Delaney: … “fairytale economics” …

Warren’s great moment: “You know, I don’t understand why anyone goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.” (Roar of approval). Our biggest problem is corruption. It is giant corporations that have taken our government and are holding it by the throat, and we need to have the courage to fight back against that. And until we’re ready to do that, it’s just more of the same. Well, I’m ready.”

Warren: “He (Delaney) talks about solutions that are workable. We have tried the solution of Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance. And what have private insurance companies done? They’ve sucked billions of dollars out of our healthcare system.”

Sanders: “Detroit was almost destroyed because of awful trade policy that allowed corporations to throw workers from this community out on the streets as they moved to low-wage countries.”

“To win this election and to defeat Donald Trump – which by the way in my view is not gonna be easy – we need to have a campaign of energy, and excitement, and of vision. We need to bring millions of young people into the political process in a way that we have never seen, by among other things making public colleges, and universities tuition free, and cancelling student debt.” (Roar of approval.)

Klobuchar MOST DISINGENUOUS (telling half the story or much less)  “We’d better be very straight with the American people. And, no, do I think that we’re going to end of voting for a plan that kicks half of America off their current insurance in 4 years? No, I don’t think we’re gonna do that. I think there is a better way, and what we all want to see, which is lower costs for healthcare. Do I think that we’re gonna vote to give free college to wealthiest kids? No, I don’t think we’re gonna do that. We are more worried about winning an argument that winning an election. And I think how we win an election is to bring everyone with us”.

O’Rourke CONSTANTLY OFF THE POINT … “mental health care” …

Warren used the “existential” word – argh.

Hickenlooper MOST BI-POLAR: “We’ve gotta be building bridges right now with people like China, who are cheating on international agreements, and stealing intellectual property.”

Warren: “No-one wants to talk about it. What you wanna do instead is find the Republican talking point of a made up piece of some other part, and say “oh, we don’t really have to do anything. That’s the problem we’ve got in Washington right now. It continues to be a Washington that works for big oil companies, just not for people worried about climate change.”

Tim Ryan best moment, strong on renewables. “You cannot get there on climate unless we talk about agriculture. We need to convert our industrial agriculture system over to a sustainable and regenerative agriculture system that actually sequesters carbon into the soil. We can move away from all the subsidies that we are giving the farmers. They haven’t made a profit in five years, and we can get good food into our schools and our communities. That’s going to drive healthcare down. How do we start talking about health instead of just disease care?”

Sanders: “Here is the bottom line. We gotta ask ourselves a simple question. What do you do with an industry that knowingly, for billions of dollars in short-term profits, is destroying this planet? I say that is criminal activity and it shouldn’t be allowed to continue.” (Big cheer starting but cut off by CNN.)

Tim Ryan: “You don’t have to yell, Bernie! Cut the worker in on the deal. I will double union membership and make sure these new jobs pay what the old fossil fuel jobs paid.”

Sanders: “Look, on this issue. My friends. There is no choice. We have got to be super-aggressive if we love our children and we want to leave them a planet that is healthy and is habitable. What that means is that we’ve gotta A. take on the fossil fuel industry, B. It means we have to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, and a hell of a lot of good union jobs as we do that. We gotta transform our transportation system. And we gotta lead the world cos this isn’t just an American issue.”

Bullock: “There are folks who have spent their whole lives powering the country.”

Sanders: “Look, Steve, there ‘aint nobody in the Congress who’s more strongly pro-worker than I am. So, when I talk on taking on the fossil fuel industry, what I am also talking about is a just transition. We can create millions of good-paying jobs. We can rebuild communities in rural America that have been devastated. So, we are no anti-worker. We are going to provide, make sure that those workers have a transition, new jobs, healthcare and education.”

O’Rourke on climate change. Hypocritical when he has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry.

Buttigieg: “We have all put out highly theoretical visions on climate. It is all theoretical.” This framing is damaging.

1 hour 33 minutes so far.

The Michael Powell classic that remains out in the cold

Walter Chiari

Previously thought of as an abomination, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom is now, if not rehabilitated, then long been given its due as a masterpiece. Currently, Powell and Emeric Pressburger are even overturning Francois Truffaut’s ruling on British film with their The Red Shoes. It has been deemed worthy of screening at 50+ cinemas in France during the first two months of 2011 alone. But there is one film that remains which though a great example of Powell’s art, is refused entrance into the pantheon by critics and Powell Pressburger fanatics alike. No UK VHS release exists let alone a stand-alone DVD. It even boasts Emeric Pressburger as screenwriter, marking the culmination of their masterful feature film collaboration. The film in question is the routinely maligned They’re A Weird Mob made in Australia in 1966. The struggle to set aside preconceptions is well worth it, the film being richly deserving of a fresh look.

Building site end of day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the 1940s and ’50s, the partnership of Powell and Pressburger produced exquisitely beautiful films. Never in a merely ornamental way, these often deviated wildly from the path favoured in Britain of realism. The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Tales of Hoffmann were not in the least about ordinary people. Against such a background, even the title They’re A Weird Mob is so jarring as to dislodge perception. Worse, the rest of this film of the Italian migrant Nino Culotta’s (Walter Chiari) beginning in Australia concerns itself with the down-to-earth fellowship offered between men who get their hands dirty. And yet it is a hilarious, inventive and beautifully played film — one for Powell and Pressburger enthusiasts to be proud of.

Nino Culotta

They’re A Weird Mob is said to be one of Powell and Pressburger’s worst. The film is commonly spoken of as containing none of Powell’s characteristic visual invention and artistic experiment. These aspects can only be evident, of course,  if viewers allow themselves to accept what their eyes are showing them. Second only to Ian Christie in importance as a writer espousing the Powell-Pressburger cause, Andrew Moore concedes the “expressionistic” wavering visuals as Nino succumbs to the heat on the building site. But even Moore chooses then to negate it by decrying the sequence as crude and “roughly cut”. There is apparently no account taken for the fact that the roughness is coherent, certainly, in terms of subject.

From intended office to a roof over his head

Nino’s intended workplace, at the La Seconda Madre publication of his absconded uncle, provides another set readily exploited for full expressionistic effect by an imagination which was up for it. Exhausted, he sleeps out of necessity in the shambles of discarded magazines in what was to be his office. Culotta collapses in a heap, his sports editor name plate perched by his nose. As he washes using magazines as shorts and towel and sits in a throne made of piles of them overseeing his wrecked prospects, we laugh and feel for him simultaneously. Chiari’s performance is wonderful and even given credit in some quarters. “The acting is mostly indifferent” sums up the critical consensus though.

Unobtainable girl/creditor/landlady played by Claire Dunne

The cream of Australian stage and screen – names and faces that have cropped up everywhere there since – filled the parts of They’re A Weird Mob. Every actor here is so talented that they easily bring off all that is asked of them. The final scenes, for instance, are beautifully played. Emeric Pressburger’s script helps greatly, as in the thrust and parry of the verbal duel between Nino and his potential father-in-law. Equally great is the subsequent scene of the builders meeting Nino’s supposedly posh girlfriend. The nudges from one to the next along the complete length of the sofa to come up with a suitable reply, until the last who adds “yeah”, are hilarious.

The lads chief

“Thoughts and feelings, surprises, suspense, accident” was Emeric Pressburger’s assessment to Michael Powell of what a story is made up of. They’re A Weird Mob is another film where Pressburger’s screenwriting was invaluable. Powell turned to “Richard Imre”, as was Pressburger’s nom de plume at the time, when Powell and writer John O’Grady’s best attempts had failed. Their final combined effort brought forth revealing tangents that would have been shorn from lesser films. As Nino and his Australian co-worker  look in a shed for working clothes for the dapper Italian, the latter reveals his impressions of Italy when there in the war. Incidental details sparkle with the added depth they offer: the faithfully reproduced Italian song at the wedding Nino is best man at, and the long, long camera pan down the table filled, from end to end with the food of the old country. Even better is a scene which is one of the furthest from the gorgeous spectacle of the superior people of Powell and Pressburger’s previous films, that of the wife of his boss at the home they share with Culotta, cutting her toenails on the sofa in front of him.

Chiari with real-life girlfriend, invited to her Weird Mob wedding

Getting shown up

They’re A Weird Mob is, in fact, packed with ideas, including some of which are reminiscent of past glories. A note from the girl Nino aims to win recalls those prominent letters of I Know Where I’m Going! and Black Narcissus. The rain falling then, drenching it as he reads, is the force of nature once again taking a hand as with the mystical winds of Gone To Earth and Black Narcissus, and the final moments of torrential rain in the latter. The enclosed interiors of Small Back Room and The Spy In Black, in turn, are recalled by the shots within the changing cabin at the beach. Far more so than in its echoes of the past though, They’re A Weird Mob stands on its own singular style and inventiveness in which the stunning visuals and marvellous sets of the past Powell-Pressburger partnership have no place.

Trying to do the right thing

A search of the They’re A Weird Mob, using not search terms but the attributes imagination and creativity, brings forth many results. Witness the rapid cutting of the cement mixer sequence; the shadow of Chiari’s hand as he gestures to get the attention of Kay Kelly (Claire Dunne) at the beach, resting for a moment on her friend’s bottom; the likeness of a fish evocatively etched into the rock by an earlier visitor to the plot of land he’s bought to make his home; the subsequent sudden daydream of himself, his girl and their future sons; the beer crates thrown over fences, from back yard to back yard down the hill to the party; and the final shot of the Harbour Bridge being turned its right way up for northern hemisphere viewers. The warmth and wit barely let up.

How it was sold at the time

A couple of decades after the release of They’re A Weird Mob; the Guardian newspaper referred to the ghastliness of the material. “Ghastly”! Recently, an amateur reviewer wrote, “Simply put; I’d not allowed them to fail”. In fact, Powell’s audience hadn’t, and still won’t, allow him to change.  Esteemed critics and writers who are confirmed Powell and Pressburger acolytes have spoken of They’re A Weird Mob’s lack of sophistication. The film has been called rough and ready as if this necessitates a lack of quality. According to Powell, Rank wanted, at the time of release, to cut down on the work scenes and beer scenes; Powell suggested that it “soured their delicate stomachs”. Even present-day fans, enraptured by ballet, opera, and tales of poets, lairds, generals, nuns, impresarios, magistrates, commodores, scientists and squires balk at the contrast presented by They’re A Weird Mob.

Pope in a tent

Michael Powell noted that writer John O’Grady’s character, Nino Culotta, translates as John Big-Bum. John Big-Bum seems so utterly removed from the worlds of Lermantov et al as to be practically an admission of failure in advance to uphold the standards of John’s predecessors in Powell and Pressburger films. Then They’re A Weird Mob, once begun, quickly launches into the near-constant conversational cursing which enabled Powell to get it through the censors unscathed. Fans of the intense, magus-like patriarchs, and marvellously rarified atmosphere they inhabit within Powell and Pressburger’s oeuvre, soon experience the stripping away of the last vestiges of their sympathy. But They’re A Weird Mob shouldn’t be the embarrassment it is to Powell and Pressburger fans, or for that matter to modern Australians, who will see fair, enlightened Australians in the supporting cast’s willingness to believe in an outsider’s potential.

They’re A Weird Mob actually lacks nothing at all in its so-called “lack of sophistication”. What place would sophistication have in this movie? Here, is the crux of the misconception of the film as a bad one. With viewers conditioned to respond to magnificent set design and exquisite visuals, and characters who correspond to a whole other plane to those here, there is no chance that this film could make the grade. But They’re A Weird Mob is a classic nevertheless, and wonderful in its own way; The film’s coming in out of the cold is long overdue after taking twice as long — and counting — as Peeping Tom to be allowed to do so.

Michael Powell (far right) off out with the stars of his Australian smash hit

Baffling Brilliance: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

I gave Blimp another shot tonight! My 2nd film of the PnP festival in Stockholm. I left disorientated as usual. This is an almost 3-hour story of a career soldier, which eschews all scenes of violence. A career soldier who is foolishly and dangerously innocent but with such a capacity for love that he must see the image of the love he had let leave again and again in other women.

What is Clive doing during the middle of the film: the WW1 section? Delivering a message?

t seems to me to be a flimsy device to show him as getting another chance to capture the image which haunts him. I can understand, though, that it’s a brilliant idea, in that as it is his memory, he picks out what matters to him — the end of the war moments and seeing her image again — while the rest fades to unimportance. I like the thought that she didn’t, in fact, look as we see her because Candy’s memory has made her an exact copy of Edith rather than a likeness. Then there’s Murdoch’s remark too: “She must be a very common looking girl”. You imagine how pervasive is the hold on him of the loss of Edith, that he has been struck again and again in different places by likenesses of her. I think it’s the sudden shift into a stronger sense of unreality (unreliable memoir) that throws me, in the unreal-looking, bombed-out set where Candy and Murdoch are alone as the war ends and the skylark sings on queue, causing them to raise their heads in the necessary artificial looking pose to listen.

The era of the “second Edith” ends with a brilliant piece of writing which struck home with me for the first time this evening. Candy starts humming the tune from 1902 and his meeting with Edith, and his wife, who represents her to him, stops him from doing it. It’s a wonderful way of showing that although he believes he now has what he’s been searching for, the woman who is his wife has nothing whatever to do with that fateful time in Berlin and there is no connection at all.

I’m sure it’s just me, but the Boer War-era sequence seems overwritten, the only occasion when considering their ’40′s output that I would say this. But probably the seeming excess of talk, plus the pace and the farce all reflects their youth. The rule book sequence slows the film down again, and it and the fencing introduction seem like a perfect miniature within the film. Certainly my preference, though, is for the superb last section, during WW2. I’m mad about Anton Wallbrook as Lermantov, but believe Roger Livesey’s performance as the old man outstrips his in Blimp. There’s always praise for Wallbrook’s speech as a refugee, but Livesey’s “I never got over it” I think is as good or better. The whole of this final section is amazingly good and is carried to a great extent by Livesey’s performance. Deborah Kerr’s Johnny is also excellent. Her three characters do have distinct personalities though their strong-mindedness makes them appear similar.

I really should rank Blimp up there with The Red Shoes, A Canterbury Tale, A Matter of Life and Death, Peeping Tom, Small Back Room and Black Narcissus. At every screening of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I see something else great about it, and one day may appreciate the farce, changes of pace, plus the artificiality of the middle, really to get to like it, and rather than keep getting thrown off the scent!

A marvellous though infuriating resource

David Thomson’s “New Biographical Dictionary of Film”, is a wonderful tome of essays rather than simply film reviews. The man has in no uncertain terms a gift for divining the core of these actors and directors, offering believable explanations as to what makes them tick psychologically. Who would choose the standard guide in preference to having these names brought to life before our eyes by a few well-chosen remarks (and much insight)? I’ve been gorging myself on this book over these last weeks, opening it at random and diving in.

Given what I say there seems to be no reason to downgrade the achievement. It happens in reviews of the book though, consistent with the level of hurt felt at the damning words given to our favourites. When a common-or-garden film guide fails to praise a film that they obviously should, they have few words to set about it with, and it’s mostly concerns little more than a score out of five. This book, on the other hand, has the space to twist and twist again, the knife, and after all, that’s the strength of Thomson’s compendium, that it gets to the innards of its subjects. Thomson creates the opportunity for himself not only to be wrong but to be very wrong. I admire the Biographical Dictionary as incisive and well-written rather than opinionated but am not alone in believing Thomson to be terribly opinionated when he puts down my favourites.

It was my misfortune to begin the book (and thereafter put it down for a lo-o-ong while) by turning to the section on Charlie Chaplin. It’s been the style for some years now not to put up with the sentiment within his work (with which, in fact, he gave comedy depth and meaning by focussing on the life of those at the bottom). Unfortunately, Thomson’s method doesn’t allow for exceptions to the rule and especially not when faced with icons. So, Chaplin’s early Mutual years’ genius can not possibly be credited as such. For Laurel and Hardy too, Thomson gives a poor showing, wasting space on this occasion by blithely supposing an element of homosexuality (which of course is more of a flashy eye-opener than the pair’s really rather plain misogyny) instead of looking at their great work, through perhaps not comprehending it.

On other occasions, the author admits to being ignorant of the films of a director (such as Maurice Tournier)before proceeding to dismiss them, which does down the medium he has obviously spent so much time on. Thomson appears to have little comprehension of wild, unruly and inventive fantasy, apparently finding it an affront (the Coen’s brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy; “travesty” I believe he said!) He will often though stick “brilliant” or even “magnificent” in front of an unknown film which will turn out to be justifiably unknown. (See, or rather, don’t see, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s unchanging troubled expression and huffing in Owning Mahowney.) He can never be said to be a snob, however. See the section on Eddie Murphy for an example of an actor that no film snob who would buy this book could like.

If readers can (eventually) move beyond Thomson’s obviously utterly mistaken take on some of their favourites, like Fellini, John Ford, Chaplin etc, etc, then they will find this book to be truly a marvelous resource.

When an art form is mature enough to play with knives

Peeping Tom

How to find this one boring? Britfilm surrounding it on both sides though, which made the UK look like the emotionally stunted runt of world cinema, sure. There were the stiff-upper-lipped boys’ war games, as railed against in another masterwork by Michael Powell (with Emeric Pressburger), Colonel Blimp; the disaffected but deadly dull young men & films; Hammer barely scratching imagination’s surface; the god-awful farce. PT is the idea-filled film to match those of France of the time, and the work of a mature filmmaker to rank with those of Japan. It is proof that, on occasion, Britfilm wasn’t doomed to be underdeveloped…

The silent film tradition continued through Powell’s devotion to that most cinematic era in his foregrounding of image, image backed to the hilt by depth of feeling. Peeping Tom marshals limited resources magnificently in a film with a multiplicity of ideas; It is bursting with ideas, being visually powerful but with feet firmly rooted to the ground. The British critics, hamstrung in their treatment of Powell due to their hang-up, the need for so-called realism, couldn’t abide the real thing illustrating the complexities of the human psyche compared to the clear-cut lines they had the emotional range to deal with. They wished to ‘flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer’. The sordid side of life was shown to bear no class barriers; and the to-be-despised killer could be a victim capable of great tenderness, the direct result of one (the father) deemed as most worthy of respect. The British ‘highbrow’ critics could never really make head or tail of Powell and Pressburger’s propensity for showing that people are complex and not subject to Britfilm’s absurdly linear and pat ‘realism’. The earlier ‘Colonel Blimp’ was Pressburger’s triumph of a character of many sides, a fully formed flawed character, and far more real and hard to understand than those conforming to British realism.

Peeping Tom bears all sorts of analysis though never for being anything as dull as the ‘psychological’ tag that would be doled out to any ‘horror’ film that apparently requires one to think. This film is simply ‘intelligent’, the intelligent of Bergman’s ‘Seventh Seal’ or Nicholas Ray’s ‘Johnny Guitar’, with an equally masterful mustering of the visuals despite not having the technicolor of his glory days, of more than a decade before…