Black Panther: Insidious Imperial Propaganda?

 

I have a problem with Black Panther

• Trope number one: African and African American estrangement
• Trope number two: African American pathology
• Trope number three: the White Savior

Photographer Screwed by Walmart

 

They paid $1.88 and used his photo on half a million items.

Photog Shocked After His $1.88 Stock Photo Shows Up On Walmart Goods

 

Trump’s Grand Hypocrisy

PRESIDENT TRUMP HIRED UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS FOR $4 AN HOUR FOR DEMOLITION PROJECT: COURT DOCS

 

This fascist monster is the worst America has to offer. The very worst. The biggest liar. The most hate and racism packed into one blustering asshole.

 

 

Corporate Enslavement

 

When you talk with ignorant “Libertarians” who are in fact the recipients of the benefits of centuries of labor struggle–before they were even born–you see a mindless disconnect. They really don’t understand the topics they are so passionate about. Useful idiots of capitalist dogma.

Inside the Corporate Utopias Where Capitalism Rules and Labor Laws Don’t Apply

UnReal – My Review

J. Giambrone

Hollywood Sleaze

You wouldn’t think I would have bothered with a show about making a “Bachelor” styled reality TV show. I would never watch such a thing in the real world. But UnReal is highly rated, and it’s done right. No holds barred, there are scummy characters running this circus. It reminded me of Californication.

I hesitated when I saw “Lifetime” channel logos. But they’ve changed. This could have been on Showtime or HBO.

Okay. The show is run by a carniverous psychopath who genuinely gets off on sadism. She pays cash bonuses. The corrupting effects of the job then filter down to the other producers and crew. Some may snap.

The prospective girls are paraded as in a Bangcock brothel and selected by the hunky British playboy. Their various personalities are exploited by the show’s handlers in unethical ways. The tension seems to ratchet tighter every episode.

So…

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Django Unchained And The Black Professional Athlete

Professional Slaves

 by Lawrence Ware

The most insightful scene about sports and race in an American film is found in something that’s not technically a sports movie.

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained is a film about slavery disguised as a spaghetti western. When we come across the scene in question, Django is a former slave in the Antebellum South looking for his wife. It’s a little over half way through the film. Jamie Foxx’s Django is playing the role of an expert in Mandingo fighting to gain the trust of the man who has his wife — Calvin Candy played by Leonardo DiCaprio. When we meet Candy, he is leisurely enjoying a fight while smoking a cigar. At the end of the fight, the loser is killed, and the winner is sent off with a beer in his hands. He shuffles away with a smile on his face because he pleased his master and has been, in his eyes, properly compensated for risking his life.

This is without question the most insightful scene in an American film about the role of black men in sports. Indeed exploitation is not exclusive to black athletes (white and brown athletes are often financially exploited — especially when coming from an impoverished background), butDjango Unchained brilliantly comments upon the marginalization black male athletes have suffered in America.

Still don’t see it? Let me break it down.

Microsoft and Your Children

Art of Luis Quiles

Luis Quiles, a Spanish artist, does this by drawing pretty controversial cartoons, has spent the last few years creating hundreds of powerful drawings, showing a disturbingly accurate vision of our world.

Some of the images I didn’t choose are pretty harsh…

Taco Bell Exploits 1984

Taco Bell’s weird-ass Orwell ripoff, complete with totalitarian clowns (yes, you read that right)

I suppose it’s not much of a leap from this to Divergent/Insurgent.

If I had the chance to vomit up some Taco Bell breakfast onto the heads of the assholes responsible for this — well you’d have to take it, right?

James Foley Is Not a War Ad

David Swanson:

UTR: Juan of the Dead (2012)

 

Cuban Politics & Zombies

It seems a lot of American critics saw only the surface criticisms of the film, and ignored the equally scathing critique of capitalism contained therein. US pundits, who raved about the movie, sought to use it as a propaganda piece for their own purposes, ignoring the complexity. Predictable.

The film contains an obvious set of barbs skewering the Cuban socialistic system for its shortfalls. It is cut off, with an embargo from the US for fifty years, because the US doesn’t like to have bad examples where the people get health care, for example. The Cuban economy has been hit pretty badly, but it still attracts tourists from across Europe and Latin America, as acknowledged in the film.

Juan and his gang are low level criminals, thieves, grifters, opportunists. Here’s where the unacknowledged critique of capitalism enters the story. When the zombiepocalypse hits, Juan takes it upon himself to start a Ghostbusters type zombie killing service – for a fee. He’s a mercenary, entirely in it for the money and unwilling to help others because it’s the right thing to do. Did you catch that?

He’s a criminal turned capitalist. They are closely related.

His sidekick then literally machetes a man to death, not a zombie, a man who owes him money. Driven by the desire to have money, he murders a begging neighbor in broad daylight.

While the anachronistic Cuban state TV propaganda receives much deserved satire, so too does the mercenary ruthlessness of disaster capitalism. Both these extremes are lampooned. This also elevates the film well above and beyond the simpleminded propaganda championed by simplistic US proponents. It takes a broader view, a more mature view of economic realities and shortcomings.

Spoiler

To bring the story full circle, Juan reconsiders his own personal self-interest by film’s close. Instead of running off to America with the others, he does a 180. As a patriotic Cuban, he returns to shore to do battle with the zombie hordes and save Cuba: a selfless act in the interest of the many, not of his own skin.

The deeper message is one of sacrificing for the good of the people, the socialistic ideal. The Cuban government, while evolving from the structures of the old Soviet times, retains this sense of the good of the many over the profit desires of psychopathic billionaires from abroad. That much is reinforced in the film. It takes some knowledge of the world beyond US State Department propaganda, though.

Juan is not a great zombie film, but it is a unique one. It’s an interesting take on a part of the world we don’t see too much.

World Bank Policies Destroying Environment

 

Leaked World Bank lending policies ‘environmentally disastrous’

Radical plans by the World Bank to relax the conditions on which it lends up to $50bn (£29bn) a year to developing countries have been condemned as potentially disastrous for the environment and likely to weaken protection of indigenous peoples and the poor.