New Film By Scott Noble - Plutocracy [History of Political Repression in USA]

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/plutocracy/

Plutocracy maps the history of political repression in the USA, a multi-part series by filmmaker Scott Noble. Part I focuses on the the ways in which the American people have historically been divided on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex and skill level.
Plutocracy: Divide et Impera includes sections on the American Constitution; the Civil War draft riots; Reconstruction; Industrialization; the evolution of the police; the robber barons; early American labor unions; and major mid-to-late 19th Century labor events including the uprising of 1877, the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead strike and the New Orleans General Strike. The introduction examines the West Virginian coal wars of the early 20th Century, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Plutocracy is the first documentary to comprehensively examine early American history through the lens of class. Part II ('Solidarity Forever') will cover the late 19th Century to the early twenties.
The filmmaker is currently seeking donations to complete the project. If you'd like to help, you can donate to their Patreon account.
Sources: http://metanoia-films.org/plutocracy/

Metanoia

From the Greek to perceive, to think, the result of perceiving or observing metanoia means "a change of mind."
In Theology, metanoia is used to refer to the change of
mind which is brought about in repentance.
The prefix "meta-" carries with it other variants that are
consistent with the Eastern Greek philosophical mindset,
"Meta-" is additionally used to imply "beyond" and "outside of."
E.g., metamorphosis as a beyond-change; and, metaphysics as
outside the limits of physics.
The Greek term for repentance, metanoia, denotes a change of mind, a
reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook, of an individual's vision of the
world and of her/himself, and a new way of loving others and the Universe. In the words of a
second-century text, The Shepherd of Hermas, it implies "great understanding," discernment.
In Carl Jung's psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of
unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.

[Peter Lemkin]

Anyone who wants a good and quick lesson in the real structure of society and real history could do well to watch any of these films, or tell their friends who may not be so enlightened to do so....

http://metanoia-films.org/films/

[Peter Lemkin]

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Fake News?

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[TD]Hello everyone,
I rarely send out emails on topical issues but decided to make an exception in this case.
There is a bizarre Orwellian effort underway by old media outlets like The Washington Post -- organizations that have consistently promoted disinformation and propaganda virtually from the time of their founding -- to label independent alternative media "fake news." They are working in concert with tech giants and social media outlets like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Frankly it all seems rather desperate.
There is even a strange and plainly ridiculous neo-McCarthyite co-strategy involved. Evidently it is designed to tie dissidents in the United States to Russia and Vladimir Putin. This is strongly reminiscent of previous efforts to portray leftists in eg Guatemala or Nicaragua of being Soviet spies, or indeed MLK and the "New Left" of being stooges for the Soviet Union. Adding to the surreality of the whole affair, these accusations are being leveled at the far right as well as the left and independent researchers.
Anyone who has followed these issues closely already knows that these media corporations, owned by a handful of billionaires and closely linked to the "intelligence community," have censored content from their users. It appears that this pattern of deception is about to get much, much worse.
If anyone has any doubt about the propagandistic nature of corporate media they may wish to view my films Psywar and The Power Principle II: Propaganda. The sub-header to Psywar is "The real battlefield is the mind." I meant that quite literally. This shouldn't even be controversial outside of grade school. Whether it was "Remember the Main!", Gulf of Tonkin, WMD's or "Israel did nothing wrong!", the corporate media consists mostly of whimpering sycophants who serve power, not truth.

Here: Bloomberg news, owned by NY billionaire Michael Bloomberg, crusher of Occupy Wall Street, claims that Mark Zuckerberg's new "truth police" will determine what is suitable "news" for the American people. Say what?
A "blacklist" has been created of "fake news" websites. The list includes dubious click-bait websites and promoters of disinformation, bigotry and general quackery. However it also includes media orgs of an anarchist bent; "deep politics" websites; and leftist websites that remain independent of the Democratic Party establishment.
Some of the blacklisted sites have promoted my own work, including Films For Action, Counterpunch, Information Clearing House, Global Research, Black Agenda Report, Paul Craig Roberts and the Corbett Report.
It is my hope that this rather lame attempt at Orwellian mind control backfires a la "The Streisand Effect," described as a "phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet."
Many of the blacklisted websites are indeed garbage. But many are jewels in the rough and frankly superior to much of what passes for "journalism" in the 21st century.
According to a Gallup poll conducted in September, Americans' trust in corporate media is at an all time low. Perhaps this is an opportunity to turn the tables. I signed up for Twitter last year but have since abandoned the platform. Unless you're very pithy indeed, Twitter is mostly trash. Alternatives to Google are available. Facebook is useless and potentially very harmful. If you want your friends to know what music and movies you like just tell them.
The UK government has announced that it will make people's entire Internet history available to police and other authorities -- minus politicians, of course. This is horrifying. Along with the obvious chilling effect for free speech, and the ability to compile "lists" of a much more sinister nature than alleged "fake news" websites, the possibilities for blackmail are endless. What is to stop them from actually faking a person's internet history?

Ordinarily I would suggest using TOR or a VPN, but I'm not convinced that there aren't honeypots in some anonymizing services as well; I mean, it would make sense. I would at least hope that people recognize the danger of self-censorship when it comes to political affairs. I explored this topic when I covered the NSA in part I of "Counter-Intelligence" and compared mass surveillance to the Panopticon prison model developed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The ideal slave is someone who polices themselves and does not require coercion by authorities.

Ideally, someone will leak the Internet history of every British politician who authorized this travesty. Other, even more creative counter-intelligence strategies should and presumably will be developed by freedom loving hackers.
Some of you have emailed me asking what I think of the American Presidential election. I have been reminded of Frank Zappa's quote that "Government is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex." If the degenerates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the best the ruling class can offer, then it's clearly time for restart aka a revolution.
Speaking of independent news sites, Socialist Worker has reviewed Part II of my "Plutocracy" series. It is mostly positive and a pretty good recounting of the film's contents. There is some criticism toward the end that the film is less cohesive than part I, which I suppose is fair. As the reviewer herself acknowledges, the "progressive era" was one of the most complicated affairs in American history. Although a strictly linear approach may have been more superficially "cohesive" it would have been less enlightening, since the seminal events in American history relating to mechanization and de-skilling; sexual, ethnic and racial conflict; voting rights; labor unions etc. were not strictly chronological.
Ultimately I would like to go all the way up to the present day. Since I have no funders except my supporters I have no need to pull any punches on any particular issue, no matter how controversial. Just the facts ma'am.
Thank you to everyone who donated to the fundraiser and thank you to everyone supporting me via Patreon. I hope to have the next installment online in about four months. It will cover roughly 1912 to Back Tuesday and will be titled Plutocracy III: Class War.

Scott Noble
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[Peter Lemkin]

The third installment in the "Plutocracy" documentary series is now available for viewing online. It is titled Plutocracy III: Class War. Apologies for the previous email; this link works.

https://vimeo.com/221675839
I had hoped to release the film on the hundredth anniversary of America's entry into WWI but didn't quite finish in time. As it turns out, Donald Trump decided to bomb Syria on that date, dispelling any hopes that American foreign policy would fundamentally change under the new administration.
With Class War I bring the Plutocracy series full circle, ending just before the Battle of Blair Mountain, where Part I began. The film opens with the Ludlow massacre of 1914, perhaps the most notorious American labor event of the 20th century. Those of you who watched my first documentary effort, Psywar, will recall that Ludlow also resulted in the birth of the modern public relations and "crisis management" industries via Ivy Lee and the Rockefeller Foundation. Along with Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays and other intellectuals, Ivy Lee went on to serve as a propagandist under the Creel Committee during WWI.
WWI is the centerpiece of Class War, and the title has a dual meaning. Beyond the massive bloodshed of the war itself -- killing mostly working class men -- there was also a war at home. Draconian legislation was passed -- some of which remains on the books. The previously marginal Bureau of Investigation (later to be known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI) came into its own under a young J. Edgar Hoover. The Espionage Act of 1917, which has been used in the modern era to persecute or threaten whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, was used to incarcerate numerous great figures of the age such as socialist leader Eugene Debs and anarchist leader Ricardo Flores Magon. It was also used to break up the Industrial Workers of the World -- the most radical union in the history of the United States.
I covered the IWW (aka the Wobblies) extensively in part II of the series ("Solidarity Forever") and continue their story in part III. In terms of personal tales I focus on Joe Hill, Frank Little and Wesley Everest. The latter two men were lynched by right-wing vigilantes in collusion with police; Hill was lynched by the state for a crime he didn't commit and executed by firing squad. Less well known are Frank Mooney and Warren Billings, two labor leaders who were framed for a 1916 bombing in San Francisco and spent over 20 years in prison. I also return to the inspiring Lawrence Textile strike, briefly covered in Part II, and the stories of Arturo Giovannetti and Joseph Ettor.
Bleeding through WWI was the "red scare", in which immigrants involved in the labor movement were rounded up, denied due process rights and in many cases deported (among them Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), as well as the "red summer," a series of riots against blacks in 1919. As I have done in previous entries of the series, I try to stress the role that class conflict played and continues to play in causing racism and other forms of division.
Against this backdrop was a bombing campaign allegedly committed by the "Galleanists" (after Luigi Galleani), a group of mostly Italian American anarchists committed to the "propaganda by the deed" strategy. I cast doubt on the claim that all of these bombings were organic in nature, noting the widespread use of agent provocateurs by private detective agencies and police.
Chris Hedges wrote, "World War I ushered in the modern era. The war bequeathed industrial killing - wars fought with machines and sustained by industrial production - as well as vast wartime bureaucracies, which could for the first time administer and organize impersonal mass slaughter over months and years that left hundreds or thousands dead in an instant, many of whom never saw their attackers."
Millions of American men were forced under threat of imprisonment or execution to "die for Wall Street," as Eugene Debs put it. Emma Goldman and other dissidents attempted to challenge the Selective Service (conscription) Act on the grounds that it violated the 13th's amendment's prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude. Their legal challenge failed, as did a petition by peace activists in Nebraska demanding that any politician who voted in support of the war be themselves forced to serve. A terrific idea, never implemented for obvious reasons.
There was a remarkable but little known episode in Oklahoma that occurred in response to the Selective Service Act: the Green Corn rebellion. I devote about 7 minutes to the subject, not enough to do it justice but enough to give the viewer a general idea of what happened. The Green Corn rebellion was an attempt by desperately poor black, white and Native American sharecroppers to literally overthrow the United States government. I couldn't find a single image of the event online or anywhere else, nor could the good folks at the Oklahoma Historical Society, but I did manage to track down a few newspaper clips via the the OHS's online database.
WWI also saw the birth of the modern propaganda industry. The efforts of the Creel Committee (named after its head George Creel) probably constitute the largest propaganda campaign in American history. I explore the subject in depth, in particular the idea of "Americanism" and the demonization of the enemy. More controversially I suggest that the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania by German U-boats was a desired event by certain British figures (notably Winston Churchill) as well as pro-war factions in the United States.
The film ends with the Seattle General Strike of 1919. Though it lasted barely a week, it is recognized as perhaps the closest American workers have ever come to autonomy and self-management.
To my knowledge, this is the first documentary to comprehensively examine the domestic experience of the American people in the period between 1912 and 1919. It is a truly remarkable tale.
Some of you emailed and asked whether I would be covering the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in Part III. I figured it best to leave that subject to Part IV. I also delayed the section on Taylorism, Fordism and Scientific Management, as I'll be dealing with Henry Ford and his private army extensively in the next segment. Ditto the relationship between American corporate/banking elites and the rise of fascism.
Class War is my favorite of the series so far, and I hope to say the same of the next entry, which will focus mainly on the great depression period, though will also include a section on the 20's. I intend to begin with the bombing of Wall Street in 1920.
To that end I'm hoping people will consider donating to my fundraiser. I no longer have any reserve capital to finance my films, and rely entirely on donations. I don't need all that much. You can view a progress bar for the fundraiser at Metanoia Films. For a donation I will send you a DVD. Just make sure to indicate that you desire one if you donate.
As always, I couldn't have done it without you.
In solidarity,
Scott Noble

[Peter Lemkin]

The War Against Workers and the Poor

A Review of Plutocracy: Class War from Metanoia Films

By Kim Petersen
June 26, 2017

In 2017 the United States finds itself with a billionaire president who defeated, as adjudged by electoral college votes, the multimillionaire Hillary Clinton. In fact, high political office in the US has become a stepping stone to personal enrichment. Barack Obama is cashing in now with exorbitant book deals and speaking fees.




It is highly illustrative of the divide between the working masses and the 1%-ers of Wall Street who effectively own the American political system. The politicians know the voters want change, but they also know who butters their bread. Empty campaign promises are followed by endless betrayals.
While the common folk fight asymmetrical US wars far from American shores, the fat cat Wall Street investors profit from the violence. It is nothing new. In the introduction to Scott Noble's Plutocracy: Class War we find 19th century president Rutherford B. Hayes writing in his diary that the United States had become a government "of corporations, by corporations and for corporations."
Classism has been around a long time. Some amelioration has taken place, but the class divide remains enormous.
Scott Noble is a brilliant thinker and excellent filmmaker. Working with the tightest of budgets he has produced several significant documentaries on power relations and the human condition all available at Metanoia Films for free viewing. Metanoia's recent release is the third installment of the Plutocracy series. It is set around the period of the First World War, a time of unprecedented labor unrest and state repression.
Class War begins in Ludlow, Colorado with the massacre instigated by the robber baron J.D. Rockefeller using the Colorado National Guard. Troops machine gunned a tent city housing striking coal miners and their families then set fire to the camp. Eleven children, two women and ten miners were killed. The Ludlow Massacre epitomizes how government has used violence at the behest of wealthy industrialists against the working class.

Source: Top Documentary Films

Class War tells the tale of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies. The Wobblies were an anarcho-syndicalist union open to all skill levels, races, and sexes. Such progressivism was met with state violence, including the use of torture. Frightened of their appeal to poor workers, several states banned Wobblies from public speaking.
As activist Brian Jones explains in the film, the Wobblies were "unwilling to accept terms of exploitation." They devised innovative tactics such as sit-down strikes and revolving picket lines. This was an unacceptable challenged to the owner class. The organs of the state, police, security forces, and the so-called justice system were bent to the cause of the robber barons.
Class War tells of Joe Hill, an IWW-union organizer and popular singer, song-writer. Among his songs was "Preacher and Slave" a response to the Salvation Army preaching docility to workers. Eventually Hill was tried for the murder of a grocer and executed by firing squad. The evidence implicating Hill was flimsy at best. According to the film, the more likely culprit was a petty criminal named Magnus Olsen, who went on to serve as a bodyguard for the gangster Al Capone.
Class War tells many stories of men and women who resisted the oppression of the age. Along with Joe Hill, we learn of Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Helen Keller, Frank Little, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Louise Strong and more. The fight for the dignity of labor was vast.
When a movement becomes large, the age-old tactic is to divide it. The advent of WWI provided the state with such a divisive tool. The IWW was anti-war, but president Woodrow Wilson secured the volte-face of the American Federation of Labor whose union head Samuel Gompers was offered a government advisory position. Gompers was anti-IWW and an anti-socialist. This eased the government's push for US entry into WWI. In his book The Great Class War 1914-1918, historian Jacques R. Pauwels compellingly paints WWI as a class-war instrument.
Anti-war socialist Eugene Debs noted that workers were the chattel for wars. He captured the public sentiment such that, in 1916, one group of Nebraska citizens petitioned for a constitutional amendment whereby any politician casting a vote for war would be required to volunteer for war duty. Needless to say, the petition failed.
Graeme MacQueen of the Center for Peace Studies notes in the film that WWI was engineered by European aristocrats and capitalists. Competing and collapsing empires sought to secure resources, territory, slaves, and markets. At the time, the conflict was openly praised by leaders as a "romantic adventure." The reality was more akin to a "slaughterhouse."
A split occurred among women's groups and socialists in opposition to war. This split was brought about by as Christopher Simpson, author of The Science of Coercion comments "feel good propaganda," as well as the slandering of anti-war people as cowards and traitors. In Illinois, a German immigrant and socialist named Robert Prayger was lynched after being falsely accused of being a German spy.
Propaganda, disinformation, and false flags were part of the imperialist repertoire. The ocean liner RMS Lusitania carrying munitions from New York to England was sunk by a German U-boat. Americans on board were sacrificed; American conscription was enacted. In Oklahoma, on August 1917, a coalition of desperately poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers opposed to conscription and the war began a march on Washington. It was called the Green Corn Rebellion. Notably the coalition was multi-racial, made up of blacks, whites, and Mukogee people. The rebellion was violently halted by posses organized by business leaders and state officials.
The Wobblies were entrenched as enemy number one. Two leaders (Frank Mooney and Warren Billings) were framed for a bombing in San Francisco and spent 20 years in prison. IWW offices were raided and union leaders arrested under the Espionage Act which prohibited any attempts to interfere with the war effort. Among others imprisoned under the legislation were socialist leader Eugene Debs and anarchist leader Ricardo Flores Magon.
Following the horrifying Prospector mine disaster in Butte, Montana, IWW leader Frank Little arrived and urged Americans to "fight the capitalists but not the Germans." He was lynched by "capitalists interests" the next day. Little's murder was especially brutal: he was tied to the bumper of a car wearing only his underwear and dragged down the street for several miles, then strangled to death. No suspects were charged by authorities, some of whom were considered complicit.
State actors and right-wing vigilante groups such as the Klu Klux Klan and American Protective League (APL) terrorized unionists and socialists, culminating in the Red Scare. The Sedition and Immigration Acts of 1918 sought to further curb the actions of dissidents, allowing for the deportation of anarchists and other "undesirables." It was during this period that the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) became a force to be reckoned with. A new "radical" division headed up by a young J. Edgar Hoover engaged in a campaign of terror against poor immigrants. Their tactics included assault, false imprisonment, unconstitutional search and seizure, the use of agent provocateurs, and ultimately deportation.

Women munition workers turning copper bands for artillery shells during the First World War at Royal Shell Factory (Source: Pinterest)

Worker rights could be viewed as a backdrop to WWI. The war caused an industrial boom. The cotton crop decimations led to the migration of African Americans northward. They were met with hostility and later race riots. Unlike most liberal and quasi-left analyses of racism, the film does not blame "white people" as a group. Instead it draws attention to the ways in which poor workers were turned against each other in their desperate attempts to survive in a capitalist economy.
The year 1919 was a high point for strikes. Class War winds up in Seattle where workers staged a general strike for the right to a living wage, worker safety, and free speech. Labor sought to avoid harming others through the strike and issued passes for necessary work (e.g., doctors and nurses). Nonetheless, the workers' vision for a just society was again put down by the state.
Class War documents how the government has always sided with money against the worker. The state's arsenal against unions and labor has included war, propaganda, disinformation, agents provocateurs, violence, false flags, state agents (police, FBI, vigilantes, the attorney general, courts), and the so-called justice system.
The film presents a plethora of information, with first-rate narration, at an appropriate pace for it to sink in. There are plenty of fascinating snippets of little known history, and there are also some inspirational sequences to offset the often grim subject matter. Class War is a necessary backgrounder to understanding our present situation. The viewer will be able to identify obvious parallels with current events.
Filmmaker Scott Noble hopes to bring the Plutocracy documentary series to the present day. I hope to see that. Metanoia Films is currently raising funds to complete subsequent entries in this worthy series. You can donate here.

[Peter Lemkin]

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The Future of Metanoia Films

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[TD]Hello everyone,
I have an important update on the state of Metanoia Films and a few words on Syria.
In case you missed my last email, I recently released a new entry in my Plutocracy series titled Gangsters for Capitalism. The new film can be viewed here. The full series can be viewed here.
A terrific new review of Part IV has just been published by labor organizer Tim Goulet. It ends with the sentence "the Plutocracy series highlights the most powerful weapon oppressed people have: class organization, and the power that can be leveraged through such solidarity and unity."
Thank you to everyone who has donated to my patreon and/or fundraiser. For those who requested DVD's, I'll be sending them out this weekend.
Unfortunately, though donations so far have been very generous, only about a dozen people have contributed. As it stands I've achieved less than one quarter of what I need to continue making documentaries. This has left the Metanoia project in limbo. Hopefully it won't come to a premature end.
Upon reflection I've decided to end the Plutocracy series after part V assuming I am able to fund it. Its primary area of focus has been the American labor movement, and labor militancy peaked in the US around the year 1937 (part IV ended circa 1935). Events in 1937 probably constitute the closest the US has come to a popular revolution since the uprising of 1877 (which I cover in Part I). Since then the labor movement has unfortunately been declining for reasons I intend to cover in the final entry.

Here is the link to the fundraiser.
My follow up project would be a study of the FBI's "COINTELPROs" against the New Left during the 60's and 70's (with some flash-fowards and flash-backs to other decades). It would be of interest not only to historians, activists and students of the "deep state" but really anyone interested in civil liberties and the remarkable lengths to which the American government has been willing to go in order to quell dissent.
Right now, it is unclear whether I will be able to complete Plutocracy, let alone the film on COINTELPRO. If I unable to continue this would be rather unfortunate, as I have already conducted interviews with a number of legends from the time period (including American Indian activist John Trudell, civil rights activist Staughton Lynd, Peter Dale Scott, Black Panther founding member Larry Pinkney, New Diggers founder and actor Peter Coyote and others), and I have remaining unseen footage from some people who have passed on, including Howard Zinn and John Judge.
Regardless of what happens with the fundraiser I intend to spend the next month producing a short film of approximately 20 minutes in length titled Casus Belli: A Short History of War Pretexts and False Flag Operations. Like the rest of you (I assume) I was appalled by the recent attack by the Trump administration in concert with Britain and France on Syria.
The attack, which included a strike on a cancer research facility, comes on the heels of a now-several-years-old campaign by the West, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to fund, arm and train mercenaries and Islamist terrorists with the apparent aim of destroying that country. Just as occurred in Iraq. Just as occurred in Libya.
An estimated half a million people, most of them civilians, have so far died in what the media calls the "Syrian Civil War." The recent missile attacks were made in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Douma, a suburb outside of Damascus.
Veteran war journalist Robert Fisk (seven-time winner of the British Press Awards' Foreign Correspondent of the Year) was the first western journalist to visit Douma; he suggests there is no evidence a "chemical weapon attack" occurred at all.
Casus Belli will begin with the explosion aboard the USS Maine in 1898 and end with recent events.
I have copied and pasted some quotes about Plutocracy below in the hopes it will encourage people to give one or more entries in the series a look and perhaps contribute to the fundraiser. If the current campaign is successful I plan on holding only one or two more fundraisers, probably over the next year or two, after which I will be seeking alternate funding sources. I have grown tired of asking people for money, especially when most of you can't afford it in the first place.
Thank you,

Scott

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"Meticulously researched…absolutely brilliant on numerous levels, Scott Noble's Plutocracy series is the story of the American working class. It is also the story of the brutal repression American workers have suffered in their courageous struggle for human rights, dignity, and in some cases revolution."
"Bringing an unapologetically pro-working-class viewpoint to his analysis, Noble vividly dramatizes entire epochs in American history, paying special attention to the ways in which workers have been divided and conquered' according to race, sex, skill and other attributes. The series also explores a number of highly inspiring episodes whereby everyday people struggled and triumphed against all odds."
"I look forward to the day when the Plutocracy series will become part of the historical education available to every new member of the labor movement, to teach the next generation of activists the lessons of our history, and to arm them for the future."

• Sharon Smith, Labor Historian, Author Subterranean Fire: A History of Working Class Radicalism in the United States
  

"Remarkable…Meticulous research, powerful visuals, and interviews with a broad range of dedicated labor historians. Truly untold stories', but stories we should know."

• Peter Rachleff, Professor of History, Macalister University
  

"Very much in keeping with the tone of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Plutocracy depicts history from the bottom up. The saccharine and overly ideological textbook version of this era--especially the birth of the U.S.--is nowhere to be found in this series…Full of powerful images…Highly recommended, Plutocracy contributes a much-needed dose of dynamism to our understanding of how U.S. capitalism evolved."

• Ruth Hurley, Socialist Worker
  

"Brilliant…fascinating…Inspirational."

• Kim Peterson, Dissident Voice
  

"The Plutocracy series is a sobering, compelling and inspiring look at U.S. history from the bottom up, centered around the fiery struggles of the working class and the downtrodden…In the best tradition of Howard Zinn and other people's histories…Shows us that workers are capable of heroism under the seemingly worst of circumstances…Highly recommended."

• Tim Goulet, Union organizer, Teamsters Local 810
  

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[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD]Plutocracy - Subterranean Fire
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[TD]Hello everyone,
I've just uploaded the final entry of the "Plutocracy" series: Subterranean Fire. It can be viewed online for free. If you missed any of the previous four entries they can be viewed at the Metanoia website, where I'm currently holding a fundraiser for my next planned series. Plutocracy has been described by historian Sharon Smith as the "story of the American working class."
Subterranean Fire is my longest film to date, a full two hours, divided into three parts.
All of the entries in the series were designed to be self-contained. In other words, you needn't have viewed the previous films to enjoy the latest.
The new documentary focuses mostly on the 1930's to 1950's arguably the most important period in modern American history. These decades included the Great Depression, the peak of labor militancy in 1937 (probably the closest the US has come to a popular revolution since 1787), the rise of the "guest worker" phenomenon, the counter-attack against labor unions, the creation of the military industrial complex, the rise of the FBI, the foundations of the civil rights movement, and the purging of radicals from organized labor and public life.
For those who think this is ancient history and not particularly relevant, you will be surprised to see the many parallels to current events. The film is particularly relevant insofar as it explains how American unions were rendered more and more powerless, leading ultimately to neoliberalism and a general lack of effective working-class resistance.
I'm expecting a couple of reviews in the coming weeks, and will send those out as they come in.
The subject matter of the Plutocracy series is not exactly light and fluffy. It's frequently very dark, because it's an accurate telling of the American experience. I'm not Ken Burns. But I've also tried to focus on some of the many inspiring episodes of American history: stories of ordinary people coming together and fighting back against incredible odds. Part V includes a section on the incredible sit-down wave of 1937, focusing extensively on the auto industry.
I've also ended each film on a positive note. In part I it was the New Orleans general strike of 1892; in part II it was the Lawrence Textile Strike, etc. I end part V with the current resurgence of strike activity. Although the situation looks rather bleak, we witnessed more American strike activity in 2018 than any year since 1986. We also saw the largest strike in human history occur in India.
At this year's Milken Institute conference (basically a gathering of billionaires), one hedge fund manager warned that they either had to reform capitalism or face global revolution. There are interesting times ahead.
Thank you again to everyone who has donated or otherwise contributed to my work. The fundraiser for my next planned series, "BlackList", is here. Blacklist would focus mostly on the American state's Counter-Intelligence Operations against dissidents during the 60s and 70's, but also include some material on the 50's, 80's, and (time permitting) the current state of affairs. I would also like to address broader institutional issues such as the development of the war on drugs, the militarization of the police, the prison industrial complex, and negative forms of pseudo "left" identity politics. I'm hoping to raise funds for three entries.
This may be the last of these types of fundraisers I conduct. For awhile now I've been thinking about trying to reach a larger audience through mainstream distribution networks. "BlackList" however has no conceivable chance of being funded let alone promoted by any semi-mainstream organization because the subject matter is simply too controversial.
The series would include for example a skeptical take on the authorship of the assassination of Martin Luther King; the use of agent provocateurs by the FBI; and outrageous but little-known incidents like the aerial bombing of the MOVE compound in Philadelphia during the 70's.
The lawyer and historian James Wolfe argues that the FBI's counter-Intelligence programs were in many ways a domestic manifestation of what the CIA was doing abroad. Domestic operations were typically much less bloody, but the "dirty tricks" were pretty similar, and indeed they sometimes involved extreme violence including assassinations. Indeed virtual death squads were created on American Indian reservations.
I've already interviewed a number of scholars as well as activists from the time period. These include interviews with eg the late Howard Zinn and John Judge; Noam Chomsky and Staughton Lynd; founding Black Panther member Larry Pinkney; AIM original founding member John Trudell; Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report; Christian Parenti ("Lockdown America"); Peter Dale Scott; actor and activist Peter Coyote, and others.
There have been several excellent documentaries made about this era, but all such films either take too narrow a focus or too broad a focus. I would like to create the first comprehensive look at what happened during the 60's and 70's vis a vis "counter-intelligence" and the crushing of dissent in the United States. I'd also like to explore how this oppression coincided with the rise of the national security state (including the NSA) and a sharp decline in union power. Which brings us back to Subterranean Fire.

Scott Noble [/TD]
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