This week, a successor show to episode 664, using 3 documentary films to trace a bigger picture carefully avoided by commercially-controlled media. Firstly, "Secrets Of The 7 Sisters" which retells the recent history of the Middle East focusing on its oil reserves. Secondly, we hear "Taken For A Ride", a 1996 documentary on how the logic of capitalism dictated the destruction of cheap mass transit in the US, in favor of a more resource intensive method:- the automobile. We conclude with the end of The Hidden Life of Garbage on the effect of petrochemical waste on the environment.
Thanks to Kenneth Dowst of New World Notes for the History of The 7 Sisters adaptation, thanks to Martha Olson and Jim Klein for producing Taken For A Ride.
Only in the post-Peak Oil world are the commercially-controlled media reluctantly mentioning the fact that the world's rate of fossil fuel use is now on the decline. Even now, few voices on commercially-controlled media are drawing the obvious connection between this fact and the so-called Financial 'Crisis'. Fewer still are ready to acknowledge the vast influence that the thirst for cheap and readily available oil has had on shaping both the main area of the world where it was extracted - the Middle East - and where it was burnt - the USA. In our first hour, we adapt an Al Jazheera documentary on the subject of the "7 Sisters" - a.k.a. Big Oil. A musical interlude from The Welfare Poets takes us into the second hour. Next we hear the soundtrack of the 1996 film, Taken For A Ride, a documentary about how key figures in big oil organized the roads lobby and especially how GM conspired to use the front company National City Lines to destroy the effective, convenient and highly popular trolleybus systems so they could be replaced by automobiles. We conclude with another look at organized deception by corporations - the conclusion of episode 534 about how Greenwashing was invented: corporations determined to use easier disposable packaging invented the concept of "litter" so that consumers blamed one another for discarding non-recyclable waste rather than demanding of corporations that they not make it in the first place. Music: Let It Be Known 2 by The Welfare Poets
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