Young friend Jennifer steered me to the movie “Ethos” which I watched on my son’s Netflix (why get your own when you can use your kids’?). Written and directed by Peter McGrain and narrated by Oscar nominee, Woody Harrelson, the documentary gives a succinct and harrowing analysis of the state of our world, yet ends with the purview of our own real power.

The two major U.S. political parties are shown for what they are: one has a marginal concern for certain civil liberties issues, masking the degree of consensus it shares with its alter ego. The bottom line for both parties: privatized healthcare, global trade agreements that undermine workers and the environment, huge defense expenditures, and dictatorship by corporations.
Noam Chomsky does not equivocate: our society is not democratic; most real power is wielded by the non-elected. We pretend to have elections which in reality are auctions by corporations. They are given personhood, designed to benefit  their stockholders above the public good and to externalize as much of their costs as possible.

In the past 60 years, corporations have become far more powerful than governments, and are leaving every living system in the biosphere in decline. The thirst for short-term profit has brought expansion into other countries and hence, war.

“Ethos” goes on to look at the Federal Reserve Bank which was designed to make loans to the U.S. government. The people repay the money and the loans’ interest through tax dollars. And what is the Federal Reserve?: a banking cartel that has monopoly control of the money supply and whose members we can only guess about. In 1910, the year both my mom and dad were born, The Morgans, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds met to develop the idea of a private central bank. They bankrolled the election of Woodrow Wilson and got his support.

Beginning in 1921 this cartel increased the money supply, then, in 1929, exited the markets and called up their loans. Markets crashed, folks went scurrying, and the fat cats bought up failing banks and corporations for pennies on the dollar. The monetary junta became absolute. 2008 surely sounds like a replay.

Media became corporate money’s ally. I recall hearing the name of Walter Lippman as a kid. He was a powerful journalist who believed the elite were needed to control the masses, and that they could do it through the press, Hollywood and electronic media.

Enter Ed Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who invented the term, public relations. This was the real beginning of selling gadgets, cars, warfare to the public by appealing to deep desires and fears. Democracy began to take on the connotation of the public as consumers.

When the corporate world began to see the immense amounts of money they accrued from war, they brought us to constant war. By marking a worldwide people, muslims, as our enemy, our ‘leaders’ thwart attention away from real inequities. Journalist Norm Solomon points out that not only should we fear terrorists, but we’re supposed to gain vicarious pleasure from warring on them.

The president begins to act as dictator with a blank check for war. George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act; Barack Obama signed the even more ominous National Defense Authorization Act. With the former, we lost freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, rights to a trial, all stricken from our federal Bill of Rights. With the latter, we lost even the right to life.

Chalmers Johnson, regarding the new Rome the U.S. has become: “It doesn’t matter that they love us, but that they fear us”. The auctioned presidents have bankrupted our budget, taken our civil liberties, made us a warfare state. We’re supposed to be spectators and go shopping. It’s capitalism versus democracy and capitalism is winning.

Some of the upshots? Coke and Pepsi are invited to National Security meetings. Local police are sold military equipment. Any talk against the government can be called an act of terrorism. A Federal ID is in the works.

One of the Rockefellers glows over his proposal that everyone in the world will have a chip. Money will be on those chips and if anyone disagrees with the way things are, the chip will be turned off. The movie ends with the idea that our power lies within what Rockefeller holds most dear, the exchange of money. “Ethos” is an informative, sobering watch.