Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Market forces

According to the spokespersons for capitalism, if you just 
leave it to the market things will sort themselves out to 
perfection. Well, in California, film production is down by 13 
percent so far this year. It seems the industry is moving its 
filmmaking offshore to where it's cheaper.

Never mind, the market will take care of all those film industry 
workers suddenly bereft of mainstream film production. Porno 
movie production is up 25 percent.

Yep. According to the Los Angeles County Economic Development 
Corporation (EDC) one out of five film shoots in July was a porno 
movie. Isn't it good to know that art and culture and creativity 
can still flourish under capitalism?

Official estimates place between 10,000 and 20,000 people in 
Southern California alone as being employed in the pornography 
industry. It's a big business.

Around 10,000 new pornographic videos will be released in the US 
this year — a significant increase on the 8,950 released last 
year. Jack Kyser, chief economist of the EDC told the Los 
Angeles Times that "given the distress in the entertainment 
industry, the success of the adult segment is a welcome anchor in 
the wind".

By that logic, we should encourage "snuff movies" (filming actual 
killings) and the televising of executions because they would 
help keep the industry afloat.

And to think some of us have denied the worth of market forces. 
How could we have been so blind, I wonder?

* * *

More market forces

Still on market forces for the moment: while the US stock 
market reaches ever newer highs as share dealers speculate in 
stocks whose prices no longer have any relationship to their 
earnings capacity, have you ever considered where the money comes 
from?

Some of it, of course, comes straight out of the pockets of 
working class people. And not just working class people.

According to data from the US Congressional Budget Office, four 
out of five US households, or about 217 million people, are 
taking home a thinner slice of the economic pie today than in 
1977.

But another source of money to fuel Wall Street's merger mania 
and stock speculation is the drug trade. The CIA is today 
estimated to control drug trafficking worth a whopping US$200 
billion a year.

Laundering that money provides a welcome source of low cost 
corporate loans that big business is only too pleased to utilise.

It also provides a source of funds for political campaigns which 
cost tens of millions in the US now, and for financing covert 
operations and "guerrilla" wars in foreign countries as well as 
covert police and intelligence operations in the US itself.

This is funding over which the US Congress has no control at all.

But successive US administrations have used the drug trade to 
fund covert activities from domestic spying to actual wars in 
Asia and Latin America, notably in IndoChina, then in 
Afghanistan, then in Nicaragua and El Salvador, more recently in 
Venezuela, Chechnya, Kosovo.

But to have a drug trade, you have to have someone to sell the 
drugs to. The CIA, and their underworld associates, chose to 
target the black community in the US (beginning with South 
Central Los Angeles). They thus demonstrated their innate racism, 
but also their class allegiance.

Because of historic racism in the US, the black community figures 
disproportionately among the poor and the lower-paid workers.

Black workers are among the most militant, the most radical of US 
citizens.

By targeting the black community, the CIA drug marketing campaign 
fostered the growth and influence of a criminal element, provided 
a "valid" excuse to impose a severe terrorist police rule over 
the black neighbourhoods and to imprison the black community.

The number of black Americans in prison is no accident. The furor 
that erupted over the initial press disclosures of CIA past 
involvement in fostering the crack cocaine epidemic (specifically 
to fund the Nicaraguan Contras) was abruptly shut down with a 
campaign of vilification of papers and journalists who tried to 
pursue it.

However, the most recent report of the CIA Inspector General 
tended to support the allegations and Congress was moved to 
investigate. The right promptly asserted pressure to "hose down" 
(if not shut down) this investigation too.

Public pressure and courageous campaigns by activists for civil 
rights and a handful of honest cops have forced the House 
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the body 
doing the investigating, to continue their hearings and not shut 
them down.

A key witness the HPSCI is now to hear from is former Los Angeles 
Police Department narcotics investigative officer Michael 
Ruppert. He has supplied the Committee with thousands of pages of 
information on the subject of the CIA and drugs.

Ruppert says he can prove CIA complicity in the illegal drug 
trade is still ongoing, on an enormous scale.

* * *

Jesus, it's the millennium!

I suppose it was inevitable, but the imminent arrival of the 
year 2000 also means the imminent flooding of our TV screens with 
made-for-TV movies about Jesus.

This would not matter so much if the movies came from anywhere 
except the US commercial TV networks, not exactly notable for 
their understanding of either the teachings of Jesus or the 
historical significance (still less the actual history) of 
Christianity.

The three big networks all have a prime-time Jesus movie on the 
way. American ABC will screen The Miracle Maker, the life 
of Christ done in animation using clay figures.

NBC is going for human interest with Mary and Jesus while 
CBS has gone for the big one: a four-hour mini-series (also on 
the life of Christ, but apparently with actors). All of them will 
then turn up on our screens here.

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