Documentary
promoted to primary
aha all Left are targets (except klein?)
3/16 merchants of doubt, this changes everything
THOM HAD REBOOT 12 25? HEIST GOLDMACHER
Antidote (2025): Chronicles the stories of investigative journalist Christo Grozev and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, who put their lives on the line to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and faced severe consequences.
Power to the People: Reclaiming Democracy (2025): A Season 2025 PBS special exploring ways to strengthen and reclaim democratic processes.
Identity Crisis: Gen Z and the shift to the right (2025): This documentary explores the unexpected shift of some Gen Z voters towards the political right in the aftermath of the 2024 election
PBS FRONTLINE 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xxiIejOmSo
How the Citizens United Decision Changed U.S. Political Campaigns (full documentary) | FRONTLINE BOPP ONLY LW WACKOSCARE
2017 PBS FL
ar on the EPA (full documentary) | FRONTLINE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFfYKOTj-48
America's Burning | Official Website |
off bs
From Executive Producers Michael Douglas and Barry Levinson, America’s Burning draws on an amazing collection of thinkers and strategists, from James Carville and Amy Chua to Ian Bremmer and Leon Panetta, as New York Times best-selling author David Smick guides the viewer on a journey to discover the reasons for today’s hate and division — and rising risk of civil war.
For 40 years, the US economy has been a paradox. It’s been an extraordinary wealth-creating machine, but only for the half of the country that owns stocks. Capitalism has, as James Carville put it, become “a racket” — the ultimate corporate insider’s club, a system centrally controlled by the well-connected few. As a result, the middle class is shrinking and the American Dream’s promise of social mobility for all who work hard is dying. A new Velvet Rope Society of brains and money has cut itself off from the rest of America. Working families feel forgotten and angry, but it doesn’t have to be this way. America has an impressive history of resilience. Narrated by Michael Douglas, the film shows why our best days could still lie ahead.
Directed and Written by David Smick
Executive Produced by:Michael Douglas, Barry Levinson
Produced by:Ian Michaels, p.g.a.
Co-Produced and Edited by: Ron Vignone
Associate Produced by: Ryan Pallas
Featuring:Michael Douglas, James Carville, Ian Bremmer, Leon Panetta, James Baker, Amy Chua, Katherine Gehl, Arthur Brooks, Hawk Newsome, Derek Black, Gilda Alegria, Stan Druckenmiller, and Larry Summers
NOT MENTIONED LANGONE
David M. Smick, Sr. is an American global macroeconomic strategist, magazine publisher, best-selling author, and documentary filmmaker. He is the chairman and CEO of Johnson Smick International, a global strategic advisory firm in Washington, D.C., where he is in partnership with former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Manuel H. Johnson.[1] (The firm was originally known as Smick Medley International, Inc.)
The firm has provided strategic advice to some of the world's most successful investors, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Nomura Securities, Tiger Management, Duquesne Capital, and Moore Capital Management. Smick's first client was George Soros. Smick was closely involved with Soros Fund Management's role in the Black Wednesday 1992 sterling crisis.[2]
Smick first registered to vote as a Democrat, switched to Republican during the Carter Administration, and is now a registered independent. He has worked on tax reform and on dollar policy solutions with legislators from both political parties.
Career
In 1975, Smick arrived in Washington, D.C., to work as a staff member of the United States Senate. Beginning in 1978, at the age of 26, he served for five years as chief of staff to a member of the leadership of the United States House of Representatives.[3]
In 1985, as a private consultant, Smick co-organized a series of prominent global monetary "summits", sponsored by both the U.S. Senate and House leadership, involving the industrialized world's finance ministers, central bankers, and foreign exchange experts. The first summit set the stage for the official 1985 Plaza Accord, the G5 agreement among the major industrialized nations to bring down the value of the dollar during heightened trade tensions. Washington Post correspondent Hobart Rowen wrote that the conference served as the “final nail in the coffin of the pure floating exchange rate system.”
Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), a prime co-sponsor of the summits, at a second event in Zurich, floated the idea of developing-world debt restructuring which, within several years, led to the issuance of the popular Brady Bonds. Those bonds helped lead to developing world economic renewal.
David Smick is the co-founder (1987), publisher, and editor of the distinguished quarterly magazine The International Economy, which the president of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet called ″both agenda setting and inspiring.″
David Smick has written op-ed pieces for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today. He has appeared as a commentator on a variety of news outlets including CNN, CNBC, The Charlie Rose Show, Bloomberg News, Fox Business, and Morning Joe.
In 2020 (with help from Academy Award-winning director Barry Levinson who served as executive producer), Smick wrote and directed Stars and Strife, a full-length documentary that predicted a coming tidal wave of political, social, and economic division in America and throughout the industrialized world. Tom Friedman of the New York Times described the film as ″an incredible work.″ Stars and Strife was acquired by Lionsgate and premiered on Starz on September 21, 2020.
Smick's 2024 documentary America′s Burning had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival and was shown nationwide on Regal Cinemas. The film describes the economic reasons for America′s division including the weakening of the middle class and decline of the American Dream. Its bipartisan cast includes James Carville, Leon Panetta, James Baker, Katherine Gehl, Larry Summers, Stan Druckenmiller, Arthur C. Brooks, Rahm Emanuel, Ken Langone, Ian Bremmer, Hawk Newsome of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, and many others. The film is executive produced by Academy Award-winners Michael Douglas and Barry Levinson, and narrated by Michael Douglas. David Ignatius of the Washington Post called the film ″incredibly powerful.″ Whoopi Goldberg on The View (talk show) labeled the film ″imperative.″ In 2025, Smick executive-produced the documentary Bucks County, USA, directed by Levinson. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Smick′s first bestseller, The World Is Curved (2008), has been published in 32 languages and was described by David Brooks of the New York Times as ″astonishingly prescient.″[4] The book discussed the financial perils of globalization and questioned whether the Wall Street banks were in full understanding of the values of the assets on their balance sheets. The book arrived just as the 2007–2008 financial crisis hit. President Bill Clinton called it ″one of the three best books on the financial crisis.″ Smick's second bestseller, The Great Equalizer: How Main Street Capitalism Can Create an Economy for Everyone, argues that a ruthless corporate elite with deep political connections is rigging American capitalism, making it less dynamic and fair, producing a dangerous decline in social mobility and the loss of the American Dream.
Personal life
Smick is married and has three children and four grandchildren.
Books
- The Great Equalizer: How Main Street Capitalism Can Create an Economy for Everyone. New York: PublicAffairs. 2017. ISBN 978-1-61039-784-1.
- The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy. New York, N.Y: Penguin Portfolio. 2008. ISBN 978-1-59184-218-7.
Tucker Carlson then reposted this two hours later, with the message: "Coming soon..."
O'Keefe posted a video to his X account on the evening of September 24 of him and Carlson in Fort Worth and a trailer for his new film 'A Line in the Sand.'
The film premieres on October 10 on the Tucker Carlson Network.
insert
Undercover journalist James O'Keefe goes to the front lines of the migrant industrial complex using hidden cameras and raw testimonials. O'Keefe reveals the shocking reality of the U.S. border crisis like never before: Mexican freight trains, cartel tunnels, and U.S. funded child detention camps. Watch this gripping exposé of a corrupted system that demands change. "Line in the Sand" premieres October 10th, exclusively on the Tucker Carlson Network.
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rww February 15, 2024
“God & Country,” a new documentary about Christian nationalism, is set to be released this week. Produced by Rob Reiner and based on Katherine Stewart’s book “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” the film explores that ways in which far-right Christian activists use and misuse religion and the Bible for political purposes and the role that Christian nationalism played in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The roster of right-wing figures featured on the film reads like a who’s who of Right Wing Watch posts over the years; the film’s credits include thanks to Right Wing Watch for providing source material. In anticipation of the film’s release, we have put together his a quick overview of just who these activists are to help viewers understand their views and roles within the larger Christian nationalist movement.
- Greg Locke is a radical right-wing pastor and fervent conspiracy theorist who pastors Global Vision Bible Church in Mt Juliet, Tennessee. Locke has incessantly refused to accept that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election and he was among the speakers at rally in Washington, DC, the night before the insurrection. Locke’s sermons frequently consist of him screaming conspiracy theories from the pulpit.
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| WATCH: Big Oil’s climate deception is “one of the biggest corporate crimes in history” |
Big Oil has known and lied about the dangers of fossil fuels for decades. An excellent new video from More Perfect Union explains how the companies’ efforts to deceive the public about climate change constitute “one of the biggest corporate crimes in history.” Watch and share the episode below, featuring CCI President Richard Wiles, Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta. |
Disney heiress Abigail Disney,who is an outspoken progressive, even made a documentary about the poor treatment of Disneyland workers in Anaheim, California,
https://www.alternet.org/new-brett-kavanaugh-investigation-documentary/
We Are Many, directed by Amir Amirani, eleven years in the making and shot in over seven countries, demonstrates the power of coming together the protest, the knowledge created and learned by people in the process of choosing to protest the war, the ongoing impact of these political protests, and the disregard, disavowal, and dismissal of these voices by political and media elites.
"On February 15th 2003, 30 million people protested against the USA and UK's plans to invade Iraq. Demonstrations spread across 789 cities, in 72 countries, covering every continent.
aha: used to be bad corps that SLAPPed good guys press, now tech corps big enough to make bad corps behave?
proof of benefit?
an 5 22
sixteen months into Joe Biden’s presidency, far-right pundit and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza continues to shamelessly promote theBig Lieand falsely claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump — a claim that the 61-year-old D’Souza makes in his new documentary “2000 Mules.” Journalist Anthony L. Fisher critiques “2000 Mules” in a scathing op-ed published by the Daily Beast on May 19, arguing that D’Souza’s documentary is so sloppy and badly done that even Fox News and Newsmax have ignored it.
“The new documentary ‘2000 Mules,’ a Dinesh D’Souza joint,is barely more credible than your average rando conspiracy theory video on YouTube, but its production values attach to it a superficial seriousness,” Fisher explains. “The film’s intended audience will see a rational ‘just asking questions’ kinda guy, D’Souza, talking with some ideological allies — like Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka and Larry Elder — who are merely concerned about voter integrity in the America they love.”
Fisher continues, “But the bulk of the film consists of D’Souza’s highly dramatized explainer sessions with a couple of technological ‘experts,’ also credited as executive producers, whose claims that they’ve used geotracking data to uncover thousands of vote-harvesting mules fall apart under the barest of scrutiny. Surveillance footage of people taking selfies after dropping their votes in dropboxes is presented as ‘A-ha!’ evidence — while ignoring the fact that people taking voter selfies was a mundanely common thing to do in 2020, and for quite a few years prior.”
According to Fisher, “2000 Mules” suffers from “relentless repetition of innuendo” and “almost no verifiable facts.”D’Souza, Fisher notes, complains about Republicans who want to move on from the 2020 election and slams them as cowards.
“D’Souza’s whining extends beyond the film itself, and into coverage of the film,” Fisher observes. “Or in the case of Fox News and Newsmax, the lack of coverage around ‘2000 Mules’ — likely because both networks have already been sued for pushing potentially slanderous Big Lie accusations against voting technology companies. D’Souza’s white knight, Donald Trump, came to the film’s defense when he slammed Fox for ignoring ‘the greatest & most impactful documentary of our time.’But even a Trump-supporting right-wing firebreather like Ben Shapiro can’t bring himself to say D’Souza made a persuasive case with ‘2000 Mules,’ because the film’s central thesis simply isn’t backed by any supporting evidence— much less an overwhelming amount of verifiable, unimpeachable data.”
Someone who doesn’t already buy into the Big Lie, Fisher stresses, won’t change their mind because of “2000 Mules.”
“The film isn’t meant to persuade anyone, it’s meant to reinforce the already passionate certainty in people who believe in something that simply does not exist,” Fisher writes. “It is a vile piece of agitprop, pushing a falsehood that could very well tear our country apart. It’s also a very stupid movie, packaged as smart, fearless muckraking. In a sense, it’s a 90-minute safe space for MAGA snowflakes who can’t accept the fact that their hero is a loser.”
see cornwall
ref
http://web.archive.org/web/20170517004058/http://www.heritage.org/environment/event/convicted-how-climate-alarmism-harms-the-worlds-poor
May 17, 2017
Convicted: How Climate Alarmism Harms the World’s Poor
Co-Hosted by The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Learn why top experts risk their jobs, funding, and public reputations to oppose the politicization of science.
iStock
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
The Heritage Foundation
Allison Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington, DC
20002
RSVP FOR THIS EVENT
Co-Hosted by
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman, The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Becky Norton Dunlop
Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow
Description
The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation presents its latest documentary, Convicted: How Climate Alarmism Harms the World’s Poor (working title). As the sequel to Where the Grass is Greener: Biblical Stewardship vs. Climate Alarmism, Convicted delves into the deadly impacts of climate alarmism on people in developing countries, and what Biblical Stewardship requires of us: “To seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”
Learn why top experts risk their jobs, funding, and public reputations to oppose the politicization of science and the use of scientific theories to push social, economic, and political agendas. The science is not settled, watch Convicted: How Climate Alarmism Harms the World’s Poor to know more.
View the trailer at https://vimeo.com/216242322
see usrtk on entine and pam ronald uc davis monsanto funding
FOOD EVOLUTION GMO FILM SERVES UP CHEMICAL INDUSTRY AGENDA
Posted on February 4, 2018 by Stacy Malkan
This post has been updated with reviews of Food Evolution:
Letter from 45 academics: “Food Evolution deserves to be called out for what it is: a piece of propaganda“
Letter from University of Minnesota research scientists: “The Food Evolution movie is agribusiness propaganda“
NYU Professor Marion Nestle: Food Evolution is a “slick piece of GMO industry propaganda” … “I have asked repeatedly to have my short interview clip removed from this film. The director refuses. He believes his film is fair and balanced. I do not.” Follow up post by Marion Nestle: “A win for GMO trolls: this blog no longer accepts comments“
Michael Pollan: “My experience and take much the same” and “This movie is funded by industry“
UC Berkeley Associate Professor Alastair Iles: “No evolution in thinking in Food Evolution“
UC Berkeley Professor Miguel Altieri: “Food Evolution is propaganda for public support of GMOs“
Doug Durian-Sherman, PhD: “Food Evolution Supports GMOs, but Not Science” Part 1 and Part 2
Vice article: “This Documentary Wants to Teach People About GMOs, But Experts Call It Propaganda“
Alternet by Stacy Malkan: “Neil deGrasse Tyson Owes Fans a More Honest Conversation About GMOs“
By Stacy Malkan, 6/19/2017
Some industry messaging efforts are so heavy-handed they end up highlighting their own PR tactics more than the message they are trying to convey. That’s the problem with Food Evolution, a new documentary by Academy Award-nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy and narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The film, opening in theaters June 23, claims to offer an objective look at the debate over genetically engineered foods, but with its skewed presentation of science and data, it comes off looking more like a textbook case of corporate propaganda for the agrichemical industry and its GMO crops.
That the film’s intended purpose was to serve as an industry-messaging vehicle is no secret. Food Evolution was planned in 2014 and funded by the Institute for Food Technologists, a trade group, to culminate a multi-year messaging effort.
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IFT is partly funded by big food corporations, and the group’s president at the time was Janet Collins, a former DuPont and Monsanto executive who now works for CropLife America, the pesticide trade association. IFT’s President-Elect Cindy Stewart works for DuPont.
IFT chose Kennedy to direct the film, but he and producer Trace Sheehan say they had complete control over the film they describe as a fully independent investigation into the topic of GMOs including all points of view.
The film’s credibility suffers from their choice to embrace only the science and scientists who side with the chemical industry players who profit from GMOs and the chemicals used on them, while ignoring science and data that doesn’t fit that agenda.
The Monsanto Science Treatment
The clearest example of the scientific dishonesty in Food Evolution is the way the film deals with glyphosate. The weed killer chemical is at the heart of the GMO story, since 80-90% of GMO crops are genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate.
Food Evolution reports that the increase in glyphosate use due to GMOs is not a problem, because glyphosate is safe. Two sources establish this claim in the film: a farmer says glyphosate has “very, very low toxicity; lower than coffee, lower than salt,” and Monsanto’s Robb Fraley – in response to a woman in an audience who asks him about science linking glyphosate to birth defects and cancer – tells her that’s all bad science, “it’s pseudoscience.”
All science raising concerns about glyphosate is “pseudoscience,” says Monsanto.
There is no mention of the carcinogenicity concerns that are engulfing Monsanto in an international science scandal, or the many farmers who are suing Monsanto alleging they got cancer from the company’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide.
There is no mention of the 2015 report by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency that classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, or California’s decision to add glyphosate to the Prop 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer, or the peer-reviewed studies that have linked various adverse health outcomes to glyphosate and Roundup.
Instead of an objective look at the evidence, Food Evolution gives viewers the full Monsanto science treatment: any science that raises concerns about the possible health risks of agrichemical products should be ignored, while studies that put those products in a favorable light is the only science worth discussing.
Double Standards in Science and Transparency
Equal treatment of interview subjects with different points of view would have helped the credibility of Food Evolution. Instead, the film paints the GMO critics it features as dishonest or out to make a buck off the organic industry, while leaving out key details about its pro-industry sources.
In one scene, the film’s main character, UC Davis professor Alison van Eenennaam, frets that appearing onstage with a Monsanto executive at a debate could sully her independent reputation. Viewers never learn that she used to work for Monsanto, or that she holds several GE patents which suggest a financial interest in the topic at hand.
Pro-industry scientist Pamela Ronald, another key science source, gets the hero treatment with no mention that two of her studies have been retracted. Yet viewers are hammered with news that a study by French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini – which found kidney problems and tumors in rats fed GMO corn – was “retracted, retracted, retracted!”
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The film leaves out the fact that the study was subsequently republished, and was retracted in the first place after a former Monsanto employee took an editorial position with the journal where it was originally published.
The “Africa Needs GMOs” Narrative
In another neatly spun narrative, Food Evolution takes viewers on an emotional journey to the developing world, and along another favorite industry messaging track: rather than focus on how genetic engineering is used in our food system now – primarily to convey herbicide tolerance – we should focus on how it might possibly be used in the future.
With plenty of airtime and dramatic tension, the film examines the problem of banana wilt, a disease killing staple crops in Africa, and leads viewers to believe that genetic engineering will save the crop, the farmers and the community.
Maybe. But the film neglects to mention that the savior GE technology is not yet available and might not even work. According to a paper in Plant Biotechnology Journal, the resistance shown in the lab is robust but may not be durable in open fields.
The film is “fundamentally dishonest.”
Meanwhile, a low-tech solution is working well and looks like it could use some investment. According to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Development and Agricultural Economics, farmer field schools, which help growers acquire hands-on knowledge of techniques to prevent banana wilt, led to lower infection rates and high crop recovery in Uganda. Results from farmer field schools “have been remarkable,” according to the UN.
The solution doesn’t warrant a mention in Food Evolution.
“It’s fundamentally dishonest of the film to tout a GE solution that may not even work, as the scientists themselves acknowledge,” said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, “while failing to point out another way to control the problem that works very well, but doesn’t involve selling a product to make money.”
Did Monsanto have anything to do with Food Evolution?
Monsanto and allies were discussing plans for a documentary in late 2013, according to emails obtained by US Right to Know. The emails do not contain evidence linking those discussions to Food Evolution, but they do establish Monsanto’s desire for a film that sounds surpassingly similar to the one Kennedy created.
Monsanto’s Eric Sachs wrote in Dec. 2013 to a group of PR advisors, “there is clearly a lot of interest to pursue a documentary film. Importantly, the consensus was that Monsanto’s participation was welcome, particularly in the planning phase.”
He recommended a January 2014 planning call. Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project stepped up to take the lead, and mentioned he had “gotten a personal pledge of $100,000 from a private business person if we can get” (the rest of the line is cut off). Entine also has a connection to the Institute for Food Technologists; he spoke about “anti-food activism” at IFT’s 2012 annual meeting.
Another person mentioned in the Monsanto emails, Karl Haro von Mogel – who had discussed with Sachs “the downsides of a film funded by the ‘Big 6’” and suggested “what would matter more than their money is their participation” – was interviewed in Food Evolution, and was also involved in filming one scene, which suggests some behind the scenes coordination with the filmmakers.
In reaction to the emails, Kennedy wrote on Twitter: “@foodevomovie has had ZERO $ or INPUT from #Monsanto. We are fully transparent & happy 2 have fact-based dialogue.”
He said in an interview, “that email exchange had absolutely nothing to do with our project whatsoever … we hadn’t even committed to making the film with IFT at that date in 2013.”
The people in the email exchange were not involved in filming or advising, he said, and Karl Haro von Mogel “was a subject in the film and had no involvement or influence on any creative/editorial decisions on the film at any point in the production. Also it may be useful to point out that the email conversation you reference occurred long before we ever even knew Karl or any of these people.”
Sneak Peek Behind the Scenes
Another email exchange obtained by US Right to Know offers a peek behind the scenes at the narrative development in Food Evolution. The exchange depicts Kennedy’s search for examples to feature for “us/developing world need GMO.”
“Any other ‘us/developing world need GMO’ you can give me names of aside from oranges? Shintakus lettuce?” Kennedy asked. Producer Trace Sheehan responded with a list of GMO products including drought-tolerant rice, allergy-free peanuts, carcinogen-free potatoes … “and then button with Golden Rice.”
When Kennedy pushed for “the top GMO crops currently in use, and what countries,” Mark Lynas of the Cornell Alliance for Science wrote, “Really Bt brinjal in Bangladesh is the only one that is truly GMO in and is in widespread operation.”
The film’s frame-driven reporting ignores that detail about the lack of operational GMO solutions, and doesn’t mention that the closer example, vitamin-A enhanced Golden Rice, still isn’t available despite huge investments and years of trials, because it doesn’t work as well in the field as existing rice strains.
What is propaganda?
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In a scene that is supposed to convey scientific credibility, Food Evolution flashes the logo of the American Council on Science and Health at the very moment Neil deGrasse Tyson says there is a global consensus on the safety of GMOs. It’s a fitting slip. ASCH is a corporate front group closely aligned with Monsanto.
The ACSH logo scenealso appears in the background in this 2-minute clip from a recent Climate One debate, as Kennedy pushed back against the suggestion that his film is propaganda.
“How do we determine what is propaganda?” Kennedy asked. “I say one of the ways we do it is (to ask), are results asked for, or results promised? I was not asked for results and I did not promise results. If you have a problem with the film, the problem lies with me.”
This review originally appeared in Huffington Post and has been reprinted in Alternet.
See also: Stacy Malkan’s follow-up article, Neil deGrasse Tyson Owes Fans a More Honest Conversation About GMOs than Food Evolution. “Interviews with several other GMO critics who appear in the film, or were asked to be in it, corroborate the picture of a strange process involving sneaky filming, selective editing, misrepresentation and lack of disclosure about the film’s funding.”
Food For Thought, GMOs Alison Van Eenennaam, American Council on Science and Health, Cindy Stewart, Cornell Alliance for Science, CropLife America, Dupont, Eric Sachs, Food Evolution, Genetic Literacy Project, GMO, Institute for Food Technologists, Janet Collins, Jon Entine, Karl Haro von Mogel, Mark Lynas, Monsanto, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Pamela Ronald, Robb Fraley, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, Trace Sheehan, UC Davis
...
820
https://www.invisiblehandfilm.com/
INVISIBLE HAND is a “paradigm shifting” documentary about the creation of ‘Rights of Nature.’ The defining battle of our times where nature, democracy and capitalism face off in rural America.
SHORT SYNOPSIS
Produced by award-winning actor Mark Ruffalo, INVISIBLE HAND takes you behind the curtain of the global economy where ‘Rights of Nature’ becomes “capitalism’s one true opponent.”
In the fall of 2014, for the first time in United States history, an ecosystem filed to defend itself in a lawsuit claiming its ‘right to exist' in Grant Township, Pennsylvania. For attempting such a radical act, Grant’s rural community of 700 people were sued by a corporation, then by the state government, and are now locked in a battle to defend the watershed they call home through civil disobedience. The water they drink, the Rights to Nature laws they've passed are all on the line in this exclusive story.
In Toledo, Ohio an earth-shattering vote was passed to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), granting personhood to international waters.
Half a continent away in Standing Rock, North Dakota, the same industry threatening Grant Twp. is using militarized force against indigenous tribes and allies fighting to protect Mother Earth.
Activists leaving Standing Rock are rejoined on the Pennsylvania and New York border where the Seneca Nation of Indians aligns with communities in the Triple Divide to stop radioactive fracking waste from entering Ohi:yo’ waters. Terry Pegula, owner of Buffalo Bills and Sabres, threatens to sue INVISIBLE HAND filmmakers and whoever continues to speak out about his oil and gas company and their efforts.
The four, Grant Township, Lake Erie Bill of Rights, Defend Oh:yo’ and Standing Rock, are joined in an international fight to protect more than just water. They fight for their community, democracy, and for Nature as a living entity unto itself.
In the end, "Who will speak for Nature?"
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https://www.investigativepost.org/2018/05/08/pegula-back-fracking-and-violating-regulations/
no lnx audio
Pegula back fracking – and violating regulations
By Jim Heaney
https://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/presskit.pdf
off bios gaffney
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netflix but also Hillary the movie?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/jared-kushners-tenants-are-davids-going-up-against-goliath-in-netflixs-dirty-money/
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aha ish: cu fake hillary doc, now bannon campaigns under flag of doc promo?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/steve-bannons-use-of-private-jet-linked-to-chinese-businessman-could-violate-campaign-finance-law/
no lnx
Steve Bannon’s use of private jet linked to Chinese businessman could violate campaign finance law
Written by Justin Elliott / ProPublica February 26, 2020
Former Donald Trump campaign CEO and chief strategist Steve Bannon used a private jet apparently owned by a wealthy Chinese businessman to fly to events to promote Republican congressional candidates in 2018.
The previously unreported flights could run afoul of a campaign finance law that bars foreign money from U.S. elections, according to campaign finance experts, though it depends on several factors that are not known. One of the unknowns is whether Bannon paid Guo Wengui — the Chinese businessman, who is a vocal critic of the Chinese regime, and with whom he has other reported financial ties — for the use of the jet.
Bannon flew on the jet, a Bombardier Global Express that can seat up to 13 people, to 2018 events supporting Republican candidates in New Mexico and Arizona. He also flew on it to Mexico City and New York, and possibly to other cities. The flights were confirmed by footage taken for “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, and by videos of Guo on the plane, interviews and FAA flight records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
“The foreign-national prohibition is the broadest prohibition in the Federal Election Campaign Act,” said Brett Kappel, a government affairs partner at the Akerman law firm, speaking generally. “It prohibits foreign nationals from making any contribution or donation in connection with any election in the United States. It also precludes foreign nationals from making in-kind contributions, such as paying for campaign-related travel.”
The same law also prohibits receiving such a donation. Bannon’s one-way trip from New York to New Mexico alone would be worth around $35,000, according to public jet charter rates.
Lawyers for Bannon and Guo (who is also known as Miles Kwok) did not dispute that Bannon used the Chinese businessman’s plane for trips. But Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing Bannon’s nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic, wrote in an email, “The meetings and rallies hosted by COAR in 2018 were to promote thefilm, Trump\@War, and to encourage Trump supporters to vote in 2018. These were not candidate or campaign rallies.” Guo’s attorney said in a statement that “Mr. Guo has not participated in or supported, directly or indirectly, any political activity or party in the United States or elsewhere. To the contrary, Mr. Guo has consistently emphasized that he has no desire to participate in politics anywhere.”
Nothing about the trips appears to have been disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, either by Bannon or the congressional candidates he traveled to support.
Guo told Vice in 2017 that he owns two private jets. Han Lianchao, a Guo associate, told ProPublica, “I know he allowed Steve to use his private jet from time to time.” Han said he did not know the specifics of their arrangement. A Bannon aide also told Alison Klayman, the filmmaker who made “The Brink” and flew on the jet, that it belonged to Guo, Klayman told ProPublica.
In one scene in the film, Bannon is shown on the plane praising Guo’s analysis of Chinese politics while on a flight from New York to Dallas in October 2018.
Official records don’t identify the ultimate owner of the jet, which bears the tail number T7-GQM. The jet is registered in the tiny Republic of San Marino to Whitecroft Shore Limited. That, in turn, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, an offshore dominion known for secrecy. There are multiple videos online of Guo that appear to be taken on the plane that match independent photos of the interior and exterior of the jet with the same tail number. Other articles link the jet to Guo.
Bannon left the Trump White House in the summer of 2017 and has spent the past couple of years jetting around the country and the globe to promote right-wing causes, candidates and his own brand. It is a continuing mystery who is supporting his efforts. His use of the Guo plane helps fill out the picture.
The unlikely relationship between Bannon and Guo is one of the defining features of Bannon’s post-White House career. It continues through the present, with Bannon and Guo frequently appearing together on Bannon’s podcast and Guo’s news site commenting on Trump, China and the coronavirus, among other topics.
Guo, who has described himself as a successful real estate developer and investor, left China for the U.S. in 2015 and is reportedly seeking asylum. He is a critic of Chinese leaders, churning out a stream of online videos commenting on the news of the day, from the coronavirus to his “crusade against communism.” The Chinese government has, in turn, sought Guo’s arrest on corruption allegations, which he has denied. Guo frequently appears in videos with Bannon, who has predicted a war between the U.S. and China and says he is currently producing a “takedown” film about Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The New York Times recently reported that Bannon’s relationship with Guo began with a $150,000 loan to Bannon shortly after his 2017 departure from the Trump administration. Axios reported that a company linked to Guo had contracted with Bannon for at least $1 million for “strategic consulting services,” beginning in August 2018. (A Guo spokesman told Axios that the contract was for media investment and other consulting, and that Guo “had no involvement in [Bannon] being retained.”)
In fall 2018, Bannon and his dark money organization, Citizens of the American Republic, were pushing to keep Republican control of Congress during the midterm elections. A Bannon aide told ABC at the time that the group had an election war room focused on “explaining that a vote for any House Republican is a vote to stop the Democrats.”
Bannon made the trips to promote GOP candidates on the Bombardier jet in October 2018, under the aegis of Citizens of the American Republic. (The organization raised a total of $4.5 million in 2018 from a handful of donors, according to its filing with the IRS. But as a “social welfare” nonprofit organized under section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code, it is not required to reveal its donors.)
One of the trips was to Arizona in support of congressional candidate Wendy Rogers. Bannon told the Arizona Daily Star at the time: “If she can beat [Rep. Tom] O’Halleran, we’ll hold the House. We’ll hold the House by one or two seats. And that’s why it’s so important, and that’s why I wanted to come down here.”
Rogers, who ultimately lost the race, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The trip to Roswell, New Mexico, featured U.S. Senate candidate Mick Richand a screening of Bannon’s film “Trump\@War.” According to video from the Roswell event viewed by ProPublica, Bannon and Rich strategized about the campaign before Bannon’s public remarks. “Tell me about this race,” Bannon said in the video. “How are we going to win this thing? I’ll come back here as many times as — ” Rich interjected: “Getting you out here is number one.” Rich also asked if Bannon could get President Trump to tweet about the race, and Bannon said he would try.
During the public event, Rich introduced Bannon, who in turn praised the Senate candidate as a “real populist.” Bannon urged the audience members to vote for pro-Trump candidates.
Rich lost the 2018 race and is running again this year. A spokesman told ProPublica in a statement that “Mick and his campaign had no knowledge of Bannon’s transportation to or from the event. Mick and his campaign had no coordination of any kind with Steve Bannon or any Steve Bannon group before, during, or after this event.”
Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, said that the New Mexico event “could well implicate Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui for violating the law that prohibits foreign nationals from paying for campaign activities,” if the Federal Election Commission deemed the event to be an “independent expenditure” by Bannon’s group, or a Rich campaign event.
The FEC doesn’t currently have a quorum and it, along with the IRS, have historically done little to scrutinize political nonprofits like Bannon’s.
Apart from the use of the jet, there’s also the question of whether the event would run afoul of the rules barring an outside group like Bannon’s from coordinating with the candidate, Rich.
Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center said political nonprofits are operating in a grey area because of the FEC’s failure to outline rules for what sort of contact they are permitted to have with a candidate. “To any rational person that looks at this, of course it’s a campaign event. But it might be allowed, which is the scandal.”
In a March 2018 filing in an unrelated lawsuit, an attorney for Guo noted the prohibition on Guo making expenditures in connection with U.S. elections. He wrote that “Because Plaintiff Guo is a foreign national, he is prohibited, by 52 U.S.C. 30121, from making any contributions, monetary donations or expenditures in connection with any federal, state or local election in the United States.”
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https://www.whitepinepictures.com/the-corporate-coup-dtat
A democracy should protect its citizens, especially the most vulnerable among them, but increasingly the United States is failing to do so. This investigative and persuasive documentary blends the insights of philosophers, authors and journalists with the experiences of citizens of the Rust Belt in the U.S. Midwest, where the steel industry once flourished, but where closures and outsourcing have left urban areas desolate and hopeless. It’s here that Donald Trump finds some of his most fervent supporters, as he’s not considered part of the hated Washington establishment.
Journalist Chris Hedges, argues that the crisis predates Donald Trump’s election by many years. Like his source of inspiration, the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, Hedges regards Trump as the symptom rather than the disease. Decades ago, U.S. democracy began selling its soul to big corporations. Lobbyists and corporatism took control in Washington, gradually undermining the will of the people. Journalist Naomi Klein recently described Trump’s administration as a “corporate coup d’état”. Hedges and Ralston Saul argue that the real coup took place long before.
Featuring: Chris Hedges, John Ralston Saul, Cornel West, Sarah Jaffe, Lee Fang, Maude Barlow, Phillip Martin
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzWpog6TBZg
astra tayor interview
trailer: https://vimeo.com/266692157
Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone: Astra ...
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Exist-Well-Miss.../125017984X
1.
https://www.alternet.org/fast-growing-christian-movement-believes-trumps-election-part-gods-plan
A new film, “Trump Prophecy,” will be shown in some limited theaters on Oct. 2 and 4. The film is an adaptation of a book, co-authored by Mark Taylor, a retired firefighter, who claimed he received a message from God in 2011 that the Trump presidency is divinely ordained.
Liberty University film students are reported to have participated in the making of the film. At the same time, however, thousands of Liberty University students are also reported to have signed a petition saying they did not support the film.
Media outlets, such as the Religion News Service, commented that the “film is part of asmall but influential Trump prophecy movement” that believes Trump’s election was part of God’s plans, and those who condemn him are servants of Satan.
Here are three stories from The Conversation’s archives that further explain a fast-growing Christian movement, and some others from the past, that have left a lasting impact.
1. Fastest-growing Christian movement
Related to the Trump prophecy movement is a rapidly growing Christian group that scholars Brad Christerson and Richard Flory call the “Independent Network Charismatic,” or INC, Christianity. As they explain, INC Christianity is led by a network of popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to as “apostles.”
These scholars found that the apostles have close ties to conservative U.S. politicians, includingSarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry and more recently, President Donald Trump.“
INC, they argue, is among the fastest growing Christian groups and is not concerned with building congregations, as has been the case in the past. Rather, its goal is to spread beliefs and practices. These scholars found in their research that, INC seeks "to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing ‘kingdom-minded people’ in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society.”
To this movement, the Trump presidency is part of God’s plan.
2. Christian movements and their legacy
A question that could be asked is: What appeal does President Trump hold for an evangelical Christian base, given that, as Boston University’s Christopher Evans says, he “does not demonstrate any of the beliefs that have historically characterized evangelicalism.” Trump, for example, “does not speak about the centrality of the Bible or, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of being ‘a born again’ Christian.”
A 19th-century movement known as New Thought, argues Evans, might provide an answer. According to Evans, New Thought ideas about individual happiness and wealth were later brought together in a movement called the prosperity gospel. Theprosperity gospelspread the belief that religious faith can lead one to personal health and material wealth.
Norman Vincent Peale, who Trump cites as his “major religious influence,” further fused some of these beliefs. Peale believed that only in a free-market society could Christianity thrive. In this view of Christianity, Evans says, “personal weakness or failure,” is not an option. Peale also believed in a pro-Christian nationalism – all of which are also at the heart of Trump’s beliefs, Evans argues.
As Evans points out, Trump’s minister, Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher, said in her invocation at the president’s inauguration, “We recognize that every good and every perfect gift comes from you and the United States of America is your gift, for which we proclaim gratitude.” These assertions, as Evans notes, are consistent with Trump’s faith.
3. Moral Majority’s influence today
President Trump with Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. AP Photo/Steve Helber]
That Liberty University has been involved in the making of the film is also significant. Chris Nelson, an actor and film professor at Liberty University, plays the part of fireman Mark Taylor.
Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. is now led by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., who has been a vocal supporter of Trump. As USC Dornsife’s Richard Flory explains in another article, Falwell Sr. founded the Moral Majority in 1979 as a conservative Christian political lobbying group.
Falwell Sr. later moved into politics. However, as Flory says,
“Falwell’s move into politics also entailed a shift in his theological perspective. He moved from a separatist stance that taught that God controls everything, including politics, to one that required human action to fulfill God’s intended destiny for America.”
Flory notes that Falwell Sr.‘s movement represented a “mostly white, conservative fundamentalist and evangelical Christian world.” Their political battles were intended to save America from becoming a “moral quagmire.” Following Falwell Sr.’s death in 2007, that commitment, he says, seems to have fallen to his son.
Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor, The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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http://www.alternet.org/documentaries/military-experts-give-climate-skeptics-scathing-warning-age-consequences
"Requiem for the American Dream” director Jared P. Scott is back with a new must-see documentary. Billed as "The Hurt Locker" meets "An Inconvenient Truth," his new film, "The Age of Consequences," offers a chilling warning for climate skeptics from an unlikely source — members of the U.S. military.
"From my perspective, as a former member of the United States military with 30 plus years of service of service in uniform, climate change is what we call an accelerant to instability," argues retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney in the film. "It is what's causing a lot of the conflict or helping assist the confict that's going on around the world. And you can see that on the front pages of the paper virtually every day."
"Consequences" also relies heavily on a landmark study by Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, linking Syria's 2007−2010 drought to its 2011 civil war.
"This is the first study that quantitatively draws a connection between climate change and the onset of the conflict," Seager explains in the film. "Farming families just cannot survive on the land when a drought lasts that long."
The drought in Syria forced to 1.5 million to flee their homeland, many of them young men.
"That has a major destabilizing imact when people have to pick up and leave," says Army officer Michael Breen, now executive director of the Truman National Security Project. "As anyone can tell you, a bunch of unemployed young men in a major city is not a recipe for social stability."
"The Age of Consequences" is now available for pre-order on iTunes. In honor of "Earth Hour", the film can be purchased for just $6.99 from Friday through Sunday. Every pre-order dollar to goes to the #cleanjobs4vets campaign to create more renewable energy jobs for veterans.
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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/12032015/leaked-email-reveals-whos-who-list-climate-denialists-merchants-of-doubt-oreskes-fred-singer-marc-morano-steve-milloy
ICN reporters Lisa Song and Zahra Hirji contributed to this story.
In the months before the debut of thenew documentary film "Merchants of Doubt," long-time climate denialist Fred Singercontacted more than two dozen bloggers, public relations specialists and scientists asking for help in derailing the documentary’s release.
"Can I sue for damages?” Singer asked in an email last October. "Can we get an injunction against the documentary?"
Singer is one of the "merchants of doubt" identified in the documentary, as are a number of other recipients of his email. The documentary, released nationwide last week, exposes the small network of hired pundits and scientists helping to sow doubt about climate science and delay legislative action on global warming in the United States.
Singer's email became public earlier this week when it was leaked to journalists.
Many of those copied on the email thread, such as Singer and communications specialist Steven Milloy, have financial ties to the tobacco, chemical, and oil and gas industries and have worked to defend them since the 1990s. Others seem relatively new to the denialist camp, such as climate scientist Judith Curry. All, however, have been vocal before Congress, on broadcast news or on the Internet in arguing that human activity is not the primarily driver of climate change.
Here is InsideClimate News' guide to those who were on the emails, in alphabetical order:
Ron Arnold
Arnold is the executive vice president of the think tank the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which has received funding from various conservative foundations and oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil. Arnold used to have a weekly column in the Washington Examiner and is a frequent guest on Fox News. There is "vanishing public concern over 'dangerous man-made climate change' and growing discontent with the politicized rear guard's increasingly desperate search for new scare words and its bigoted hate speech hurled at skeptics ('deniers,' evoking the Holocaust)," he wrote in 2014.
Timothy Ball
A retired geography professor from the University of Winnipeg, Ball says he doesn't believe humans are behind climate change. The "claim" of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that humans are almost solely responsible for global warming "is not proven except in their computer models and cannot be proven until we understand how much climate varies naturally," he wrote on his website.
Joseph "Joe" Bast
Bast is president and CEO of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think tank that supports climate change denial events and researchers. According to an essay he published in 2011, Bast attended the University of Chicago but never graduated. He started Heartland during college and dropped out to work there full-time. Last month, public documents revealed that Harvard-Smithsonian researcher Willie Soon failed to disclose funding from fossil fuel sources for some of his contrarian research. Bast has since said the Heartland Institute offers its full support to Soon. Bast called the researcher a "brilliant and courageous scientist" and said Soon's critics are, "all ethically challenged and mental midgets," according to Heartland Institute blog post.
Joe Bastardi
Bastardi has a bachelor's degree in meteorology and worked at Accuweather before joining WeatherBELL Analytics LLC, a meteorological consulting firm. Last September, Bastardi told the website beforeitsnews.com, "Nature, not man, rules the climate system." He said the people who participated in the People's Climate March were "more concerned with their political agenda than climate science," and that they shouldn't be "prostituting the weather and climate for [their] own needs."
Michael Bastasch
Bastasch is a reporter for The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. He covers energy and environmental news and often provides a platform for skeptics. In May 2014, he wrote, "The Obama administration and environmentalists have tried to make it seem like there are virtually no dissenting voices among scientists that mankind is causing the Earth to warm rapidly and towards a catastrophic end. But not all scientists are in lock-step with the White House on climate science."
William Briggs
Briggs is a statistician at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and a consultant at New York Methodist Hospital. More than two decades ago, he spent a year as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. He is listed as anexpert on the Heartland Institute's website, where he wrote, "Climate change is of no real interest to anyone except climatologists." Earlier this year, he co-wrote an article in the peer-reviewed Chinese Science Bulletin with fellow climate denialists Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon arguing that the IPCC's models are inaccurate and the world won't warm dangerously this century.
Russell Cook
Cook is the editor of the website GelbspanFiles.com. According to Cook, he uses the site to "dig deeply into the accusation that scientists and others who express skepticism about the theory of man-made global warming are being paid by the fossil fuel industry to lie about the issue." Cook hasseveral connections to the Heartland Institute, a conservative think-tank: he serves as a contributing editor to Heartland's Environment & Climate News publication and the Somewhat Reasonable blog.
Judith Curry
Curry is a professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. During a January 2014 hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Curry said the problem of climate change has been "vastly oversimplified." She said scientists should pay more attention to the role of natural variability in the climate system and the uncertainties in climate modeling. She also said the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is overly confident in attributing most of the warming to human activity.
Joe D'Aleo
D'Aleo is a former Weather Channel meteorologist and executive director ofIcecap.us, a project that seeks to connect "respected scientists and journalists that are not deniers," but who don't believe human activity is the main driver of global warming. Last May, D'Aleo was one of 15 climate skeptics who wrote a rebuttal to the White House's National Climate Assessment report. "As this rebuttal makes clear, the NCA provides no scientific basis whatsoever for regulating CO2 emissions," they wrote.
James Delingpole
Delingpole is a British climate writer and author of the 2012 book "Watermelons: How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future." He identifies himself as "libertarian conservative" and on his personal web page lists "the 'global warming' myth" as one of his dislikes. Delingpole's work has been published in the Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, among others.
David Paul Driessen
Driessen is senior policy adviser at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank focused on environmental issues that has received funding from fossil fuel interests such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. A frequent contributor to the conservative news site Townhall.com, Driessen says he doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming. "Every measure of actual evidence contradicts alarmist claims and computer model predictions," he wrote in January. "No matter how fast or sophisticated those models are, feeding them false or unproven assumptions about CO2 and manipulated or 'homogenized' temperature data still yields garbage output, scenarios and predictions."
James Enstrom
Enstrom is an epidemiologist and president of the Scientific Integrity Institute. He argues that air pollution doesn't lead to serious health effects and has challenged the California Air Resources Board and the California legislature's attempts to regulate car emissions. He was fired after 35 years at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011.
Steve Goddard
Goddard is the pseudonym of climate denialist Tony Heller, who has been active in the anti-global warming action campaign since 2008. Heller has degrees in geology and electrical engineering. He currently runs the blog Real Science, where he comments on climate research and political news. He has called it "a massive lie" that 97 percent of climate scientists agree the world is warming. He also maintains that U.S. and global temperature records have been tampered with, rendering global warming projections inaccurate.
Pierre Gosselin
Gosselin is the author of the climate skeptic blog NoTrickZone.com. He said he thinks humans have a "modest" role in impacting the planet's climate, but ultimately he believes "the forces of nature overwhelm anything man puts out." Gosselin owns a small business involving communication work for various industries. He has an associate degree in civil engineering from Vermont Technical College and a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona, according to his website.
Greenie Watch
The Greenie Watch blog is run by Australian social scientist John Ray. It questions the scientific evidence for global warming. "Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance," he wroteon his blog's home page. In response to the release of Fred Singer's emails about the film "Merchants of Doubt," Ray wrote, "We skeptics have got Warmists on the defense, a pathetic 'ad hominem' defense though it is."
William Happer
Happer is a physicist at Princeton University and an outspoken critic of global warming. He has repeatedly called global warming trends "exaggerated." In a TV interview last year, he compared the scientific community's treatment of carbon dioxide to 
." During President George H. W. Bush's term, Happer was director of the office of energy research at the Department of Energy.
Jim Lakely
Lakely runs the blog Somewhat Reasonable out of the Chicago-based libertarian think-tank the Heartland Institute. Lakely is also thecommunications director and co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy at the institute. Previously, he worked as a journalist covering politics and technology. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, according to his Heartland profile. In a December 2014 blog post, Lakely wrote, "The reason why the United Nations and the world's governments focus on fighting climate change is because that mission gives them license to control everything about the economy of every state in the world."
Patrick J. Michaels
Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. He was long considered the most credible scientist in the climate denial campaign. He was the president of the American Association of State Climatologists and an IPCC author, sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with other contributing scientists. But Michaels—who at one point estimated 40 percent of his funding came from the fossil fuel industry—has been caught repeatedly making inaccurate climate claims, including on Fox News and in the Washington Post and Forbes.
Steven J. Milloy
Milloy is the director of external policy and strategy for Murray Energy Corp., the largest privately held coal producer in the U.S. He also runs the website JunkScience, which aims to cast doubt on peer-reviewed climate research. He got his start as a denialist working for the tobacco and chemical industries in the 1990s. In 1998, he helped write the American Petroleum Institute's strategy to challenge climate science. Milloy is a former columnist for Fox News who now frequently appears as a guest to discuss energy and climate issues. His bio boasts that he has written "over 600 articles/columns published in major newspapers/web sites, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, FoxNews.com, Financial Times, National Post (Canada), USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, New York Post, New York Sun and other print and web outlets."
Christopher Monckton
Monckton serves as chief policy adviser to the conservative think tank Science & Public Policy Institute. He has written several articles denouncing the severity of global warming and is a regular speaker at anti-climate action conferences. In testimony before Congress in 2010, he said climate change was a "non-problem." Earlier this year, he co-wrote an article in the peer-reviewed Chinese Science Bulletin with fellow climate denialists arguing that the IPCC's models are inaccurate and the world won't warm dangerously by the end of the century. Monckton also invented the "Eternity" puzzle, has a background in journalism, and in the early 1980s served an adviser to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Marc Morano
Morano runs the denialist blog ClimateDepot. He's also the communications director of the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank focused on environmental issues that's received funding from fossil fuel interests such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. He got his start on the climate issue working as communications director for Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma from 2006 to 2009, and before that for conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. He's a frequent speaker at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change and often appears on Fox News and other conservative media outlets. In 2010, after months of stoking Climategate on his blog, he said climate scientists "deserve to be publicly flogged."
Joanne Nova
Nova is an Australian climate denialist and author of "The Skeptic's Handbook," a crash course in false science claiming global warming isn't happening and isn't human-caused. The book has been translated into 16 languages. Nova and her husband, fellow climate denialist David Evans—whose name was attached to Nova's email address in Fred Singer's messages—also run Science Speak, a "scientific modeling and mathematical research company" that challenges evidence the world is warming.
Roger Pielke
Roger Pielke Sr., a controversial climate scientist, said he believes that "humans have altered the climate system." However, he also supports the idea that warming has recently stopped and has argued against some well-established points of climate science, such as observed sea level rise and glacier melting. Pielke holds the position of senior research scientist at theCooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies. He also is a senior research associate the University of Colorado in Boulder. It's unclear whether the intended recipient of an email thread concerning "Merchants of Doubt" was Pielke himself, or his son Roger Pielke Jr. His son is a policy researcher at the Center for Science and Technology in Colorado and has criticized those who have linked climate change to increasingly extreme weather.
Thomas P. Sheahen
Sheahen is a physicist and director of the Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology. According to the Heartland Institute, he is also the vice chairman of Fred Singer's Science and Environmental Policy Project's board of directors. "The science is NOT settled at all," he said in testimony in West Virginia earlier this year challenging the teaching of man-made climate change as scientific fact. "It would be a great disservice to children to indoctrinate them with one currently fashionable theory."
S. Fred Singer
Singer is one of the earliest and most vocal scientists in the climate denial campaign. He was an academic and government space researcher for nearly four decades before working on behalf of the tobacco industry to discredit scientific evidence that smoking was bad for human health. In the early 1990s, he started attacking global warming. He founded an anti climate-action think tank, the Science and Environmental Policy Project, using fossil fuel funds. The group has denied the existence of man-made climate change for 25 years. He also created the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a publication of junk science that counters the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's work. He has called the IPCC's latest assessment "a wonderful paper weight or door stop."
Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon
Soon, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has posited that increased energy from the sun—not the burning of fossil fuels—is the biggest driver of modern climate change. His theory has been widely refuted by the scientific community, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences. In February, public documents showed that Soon received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel interests to publish "deliverables" in the form of articles about the solar-warming theory in scientific journals. He failed to disclose conflicts of interests to those journals and during congressional testimony. Soon also has ties to several conservative, climate-denying think tanks, including the Heartland Institute and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.
Roy Spencer
Spencer is a scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and a former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He says he believes natural fluctuations in the climate system could be the primary driver of global warming. During a Senate hearing in July 2013,Spencer told the committee humans "are having some influence" on climate change, "but it is impossible to know with any level of certainty how much influence."
James Taylor
Taylor is vice president of external relations and a senior fellow of environment and energy policy at the conservative think tank the Heartland Institute. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College and a law degree from Syracuse University. In 2012, it was revealed that the Heartland Institute had plans to spend $200,000 over two years to circulate materials sowing doubt about climate change in classrooms. In an interview with InsideClimate News, Taylor said the material would act as "a nice counterweight" to material with "an overtly political and alarmist message in regards to climate change."
Anthony Watts
Watts edits the blog Watts Up With That, which questions climate science and presents, "the untold story of the climate debate from the climate skeptic side." Watts studied electrical engineering and meteorology at Purdue University but never graduated. He then served as an on-air meteorologist for 25 years. He's a frequent speaker at anti-climate action events hosted by the Heartland Institute. "I believe that our [man-made] contribution [to climate change] may be far less than has been postulated," he told a California newspaper in 2007. "Our measurement network has been compromised—not intentionally, but accidentally and through carelessness."
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11/15
http://www.desmogblog.com/2015/11/12/marc-morano-s-climate-hustle-documentary-ready-paris-premiere-same-old-denial-myths
morano
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frontline icn exxon study early, high quality "monster" data
tanker pjt, then scaled back, did modelling
then GCC 1986-9 shift in thinking, new ppl
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/24/inside_exxons_great_climate_cover_up
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oreskes doubt 3/15
An environmental documentary that’s being called China’s “Inconvenient Truth,” or, according to China’s new minister of environmental protection, its “Silent Spring” has already racked up more than 175 million views since it was posted online Saturday — a viral phenomenon that’s reportedly catapulted the country’s air pollution woes to the center of conversation.
The film, “Under the Dome,” is hosted by former state television reporter Chai Jing, who blends frightening statistics about the air, water and soil pollution that has accompanied China’s rapid industrial development with a personal narrative about the birth of her daughter — an event she credits with awakening her awareness of pollution’s dangerous toll.
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newest 2014 on rumy rumsfeld
slate: ...In a devastating moment near the end of The Fog of War, McNamara all but admits that some of his actions in Vietnam constituted war crimes. It’s a scene that could be construed as a kind of redemption, though Morris himself has rejected the notion that his job was to wring an apology out of McNamara: “I’m a Jew from Long Island, not a Catholic priest hearing confession.” At any rate, the then 85-year-old McNamara’s disclosure is a moment of introspection and self-scrutiny, a morally gratifying surprise twist that no doubt helped secure that film its Best Documentary Oscar for 2004.* The Unknown Known contains no such humanist satisfactions. Rumsfeld, now 81, remains chipper, opaque, and chillingly assured of the rightness of even the administration’s most lamentable choices.*...
imdb
His documentaries helped spur a rebirth of non-fiction film in the 80s & garnered wide critical success. But until 2003's "The Fog of War," Morris was shunned by the Academy Awards.
Morris' first two films won much acclaim (Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida(1981)). In the second movie, Morris intended to explore "Nub City," the town known for residents trading limbs for insurance settlements, but death threats (and some other equally fascinating locals) morphed Morris' focus into profiling other citizens instead.
After his first two films, Morris found financing for new projects scarce, so he turned to a unusual source of income - working as a New York private detective. Finally, after 6 years, he moved into feature-length, (and more serious projects) with The Thin Blue Line(1988).
Errol Morris cites his detective experience as providing new skills for his investigative filmmaking, most notably in "The Thin Blue Line", which resulted in a wrongfully convicted man being freed from a lifetime sentence in Texas after serving 13 years for a policeman's murder. Morris persuaded the real murderer to help free the innocent man. The real killer was subsequently executed for a unrelated murder.
Morris uses techniques not traditionally seen in documentaries, to make his films more dramatic and diverse, such as the Thin Blue Line's incredibly eerie Philip Glass score, and the haunting reenactments of the policeman's murder. Thin Blue Line's multiple points of view have drawn favorable comparisons to Kurosawa's ground-breaking cinema classic,Rashomon (1950). His own striking, innovative film style is very influential. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Morris knows how to create careful doses of emotional reality, which can have much more impact on a viewer than a literal reality can be on film.
Technical problems forced Morris to insert his voice as an interviewer for the first time, at the end of The Thin Blue Line, and he's experimented with using himself in his documentaries since. Morris incorporated his reaction to his parents' recent deaths inFast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997).
Morris feels his interviewing of subjects, has been greatly enhanced in his later work, by devising the Interrotron (terror and interview). It's two cameras, one on Morris and one on the interviewee. Each sees the other's images staring directly into the lens, to give the audience the appearance the subject is talking directly to them.
While his work explores a wide range of subjects, Morris has stated his films break down into "Completely Whacked Out" and "Politically Concerned." Many focus on people with strong, unusual obsessions. His cable documentary series First Person, was especially effective presenting with great sympathy, power and humor, compelling individuals such as Temple Grandin, an animal scientist who has autism. Grandin designs animal slaughterhouses to be humane.
Fred Leuchter, the subject of Morris' film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) was slated to be one of the people profiled in Morris' "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control", but Morris decided putting Leuchter in the same film would overpower the other portraits. Leuchter'd been dubbed "The Florence Nightingale of Death Row" for his career of making prisoner execution methods more humane, was invited by a Holocaust denier who was on trial, to examine the site of the Auschwitz death camp. Way out of his league, Leuchter's faulty, amateurish research led him to claim that Auschwitz could not have been used for executions. "Accidental Nazi" was considered as a title for the film. Morris prefers characters who are puzzling.
The film brought Morris (who's Jewish) much criticism and attention. One of Morris' recurring themes is the powerful contrasts between how his subjects view themselves, and how audiences view them. The witty Morris revels in his own off kilter humor, iconoclasm, and extreme skepticism when he's being interviewed.
Morris had problems when he ventured into directing a Hollywood fiction film as did his contemporaries Michael Moore, Joe Berlinger, and Bruce Sinofsky. The Dark Wind (1991) was held up by the studio for 2 years, then released on video. It was an adaptation of a Tony Hillerman mystery novel, executive produced by Robert Redford. Morris has continued entirely with non-fiction, though many of his subjects are much stranger than fiction anyway.
He has taken on difficult subjects, such as A Brief History of Time (1991), about the paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking, illustrating Hawking's revolutionary theories, and comparing the paralyzed scientist's own rich interior world periled by ALS, with the complex, dying universe Hawking limns.
Morris' film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), examines the architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Morris' academic training in philosophy and history shows in his documentaries' vast depth. While getting a history degree at University of Wisconsin, Morris explored doing a film on notorious local murderer Ed Gein (Gein was the basis forPsycho (1960)). Morris also studied at Princeton and University of California - Berkeley.
Morris' directing career started while he programmed shows at the California's Pacific Film Archive. A newspaper headline spurred his first film "Gates of Heaven," revealing with bizarre developments in 2 widely contrasting pet cemeteries. The uncut film confounded editors, such as Academy Award nominee David Webb Peoples (Unforgiven (1992)). German film director Werner Herzog bet Morris that the film would never get made. At Berkeley, Herzog settled the bet on stage in an incredible display, as documented by director Les Blank (whose son 'Harrod Blank'_ is also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker) in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Morris, who received a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, says none of his films have made him money, so he directs commercials, and won an Emmy in 2001. A series of campaign ads he did for John Kerry was little shown. Morris' much-criticized approach was to Interrotron actual Republicans and conservatives who had switched to support Kerry, versus George W. Bush. Morris has an occasional feature in the New York Times ruminating on the power and meaning of photos.
Opening April 2008 is his new feature, Standard Operating Procedure (2008), which explores abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The film is accompanied by a book of on-set photos of Morris' productions.
Not Evil Just Wrong (documentary) shown at koch conf attacks Gore, DDT rules
Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney
rebuttal: http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/the-curse-of-not-evil-just-wrong-still-evil-and-wrong/
2006 Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism (video documentary)
Those investigating large corporations also run the risk of being sued for libel. Swedish journalist Fredrik Gertten was targeted by US fruit companyDole Foodin 2009 after releasing a documentary, Bananas!,examining the risks to plantation workers' health from pesticides used on company farms. Dole launched a lawsuit against the Gertten documentary and lobbied the Los Angeles Film Festival to have that documentary removed from its bill, leading to allegations of censorship. It was screened but not as part of the main festival competition.
Similarly, UK filmmaker Tracy Worcester's Pig Business documentary was the subject of several legal threats by pork giant Smithfield Foods in 2008 and 2009. The company sent four letters to Channel 4 threatening legal action, the last of which was sent an hour before the film was broadcast. As a result of the letter, Channel 4 delayed broadcast of the film and footage was removed in order to make one of the perpetrators less identifiable. The lawyers acting on behalf of the company also contacted London's Barbican arts centre, claiming the film was defamatory and asking them not to show it. The screening only went ahead after Worcester agreed to indemnify the Barbican.
Inc Truth
Take the case of Bananas! and the hell the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten and his producer went through when putting on the screen the stories of workers who were "allegedly" suffering from infertility due to exposure to pesticides while employed by the biggest fruit company in the world. The well-known legal story of Joe Berlinger's never-ending battles with his film about Chevron's pollution and the health affects on people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Crude, overshadowed his message at times. And some turn to fiction to avoid the lawsuits by making feature films such as Michael Clayton which refer to the wrongs of companies such as Monsanto.
greenpeace • $360,000 to Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRIPP) which
supported and funded An Inconvenient Truth…or Convenient Fiction,4 a film
attacking the science of global warming and intended as a rebuttal to former
Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary. PRIPP also threatened to sue the US
Government for listing the polar bear as an endangered species.
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/Global/usa/report/2010/3/koch-industries-secretly-fund.pdf
astroturf wars