White Coffee with Human Blood

2007-06-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought that the Coffee you buy at ASDA and TESCO … and drink at STARBUCKS contains human blood … and a lot of it!

With 400 million cups drank every day by a 100 million Americans – that is a Euphrates (and Tigris!) Rivers of human blood streaming every day down the US gullets and gutters.

Why pick on the poor Americans when 2 billion cups of coffee are drank every day all over the world? – Because their governments brag about being the most powerful nation in the world, messing about with the rest of us, and shamelessly, incorrigibly ir-responsible about polluting the planet for mere infantile Power-display.

Post-modern governments made in the USA, since the unnecessary explosions of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic and hydrogen bombs have never ceased from terrorizing the rest of the peaceful world. They just won’t let us live in peace, from Colombia to Iraq to Afghanistan … And now they plan to criminalize – fingerprint and bio-metrize and steal the bank details of every airline passenger that visits any US airport! [1]

Of course the 45 million Americans living in abject poverty – under the poverty line – have nothing whatsoever to do with the global murderousness of their governments – they probably have to beg half a dozen times a day for the 3 Dollars needed for a single cup of coffee … and I am almost certain that they first of all, rather than the filthy rich, would be the first to be outraged to find out that the Ethiopian farmers are paid a hundred times less - 3cents for a cup!

Whatever you do, do not miss seeing the film Black Gold. It is not a cinematic masterpiece, but it is an exceptional film – what I define as a genre of ‘Revelatory Documentary’.

You’ll experience heartbreaking but also heart-warming realities there – beautiful Ethiopian women – no over-stuffed US fatties here walking like elephants – gazelles ‘caged’ in sweaty basic-rooms manually picking out ‘bad’ coffee beans from the numberless good ones … to provide ‘perfect’ beans for the delectation of the rapacious Fatties of this world.

You’ll meet the remarkable human being Tadesse Meskele, an incorruptible trade-union organizer, who lives not in London Docklands-luxury, but tends a cow for milk, in his backyard (in Ethiopia) … Tadesse lives and breathes coffee, not out of choice, but as a means to improve the lot of his fellow human beings, the starving farmers, whose coffee produce constitutes 67% of their country’s income from foreign export.

In the vast stunningly beautiful region (aerial long-shot) reserved for the voluntary-slaves of the US Starbucks, you shall be haunted by the soul-breaking (never mind heart!) sequence (in a mud-sodden improvised medical centre) of the frightened, obviously undernourished infant being weighed, with the mother’s anxious, sad re-assuring words, and then, returned to her by the doctors, and both of them packed off and dispatched from the medical centre because the starving child … “was not starving enough” to be kept there … I cry even now remembering the bare-footed mother carrying her infant in a sling on her back exiting the gates, never to be seen again …

And my blood boils when I remember the US Prig, whose name I neither want to know nor mention, at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) meeting in Cancun, shamelessly barking at a world press-conference that ‘the US government shall do what it wants regardless of what the world thinks’ … never mind what the world thinks, US governments won’t even hear to their own American people, let alone the African representatives completely blanked out of the talks.

World Trade Organization? – My foot! It is McCarthy’s Stalinist US oligarchy talking down to the rest of us … And it is who manipulates [forget ‘free markets’!] the price of the coffee globally in New York, and not only the coffee …

The strength of the film lies in the subtle British way of consciousness-raising … by the end of it, you are aware that it is no more the Ethiopians and their Black Gold being ripped off by US imperialism – almost every commodity essential for human life is traded in the ‘global’ markets of New York, to feed the blood lust for the cancerous growth of US Mafia Capitalism, which is the new drug-fuelled porno-form of the old decent British Industrial Capitalism already destroyed by Globalization. Thanks to Reaganite Mrs Thatcher, Britain produces no more machinery except arms and ammunition to kill and maim and destroy life on earth.

The Brilliant youth of Britain

According to the Murdoch controlled press in Britain, the British 'Youff' are no more than druggie drunken idiots vomiting in city centres every weekend stretching from Friday nights to Monday mornings … and the best of them, the creative artists, are the ones to sell for millions of pounds to Mrs Thatcher’s marketing men Unmade-sex-beds, and sharks-and-sheep in formaldehyde, or ornamented elephant dung, and gold-plated human faeces …

But the young Directors of this film are two superlative human beings – Nick and Marc Francis, brothers actually! – Who could render any Jewish Mama – and a Papa too – proud!

I myself certainly felt proud of them, as if they were my own wonderful children. They, the non-advertised kindly and caring youth of Britain, represent truly and truthfully the hopeful and humanitarian future of the British nation, not the Thatcherite-Murdochite Yobs of the City of London money-laundering Brothels.

Nick and Marc Francis – are obviously not Marxist scholars. According to their press-pack (p. 9), very much like the New Labour ‘theoretician’, prime-minister-in-waiting Mr. Gordon Brown, they even want “to make globalization work for the producers behind some of the world’s most valuable products.”

Their film in fact unwittingly ends up calling the bluff of this New Labour hot air – Globalization is no more than a mere honey-tongued grand imperialist Lie for the Exploitation of Labour diagnosed by Karl Marx a hundred and fifty years ago. It is the Marx-diagnosed inhumanity of exploiting child-and-family [man-and-woman] Labour-force that is now universalized, globalized throughout the world, as “dirt-cheap” resource(American ruling-elites discourse).

In “Smell-ing the Coffee” (the film's subtitle), following the paths of their artistic noses in the real world, the Francis Brothers unwittingly vindicate Marx’s economic theories proving them to be incontrovertibly true.

They even additionally (unwittingly I am sure) prove Lenin’s highly original concept of Imperialism being a manifestation of advanced Capitalism – abundantly demonstrated by Noam Chomsky’s oeuvre on American imperialism and its terrorist attempts at world-domination for global markets and unfair Business.

The film starts with Coffee – only to have opened the Pandora’s Box of diseased capitalism, and stirred the hornet’s nest of inhuman imperialism.

It is no more a problem of a single product – the Ethiopian coffee. It is … Everything, in perverted manipulated markets of the un-fair trade in the world – the West pays their farmers 300 billion dollars every year as subsidy … The film pushes the viewer’s mind beyond itself to the Tea, and the Bananas, the hamburger-cattle devastating South American forests … British “New Kitchens” made in China by Chinese expropriated peasants working for 20 cents an hour!

The Emotional exploitation of the Consumers

Thank god the film wisely does not buy into the latest US marketeering trick of “Fair Trade”, pricking the Consumer’s conscience to camouflage the Profiteers’ obscene profits – that we should all pay more to help the starving producers, when in fact We, the ‘affluent’ consumers are already ripped off in our own countries many times over by the exorbitant and indecent mafia-profits the companies make – the non-stop daily pile-up of unlawful profits made by the Banks and the Airlines and the Insurance Companies and the Multi-nationals are too well known to be mentioned here.

The emotional exploitation of the Western consumer is the new side of the coin of the physical exploitation of Afro-Asian cheap labour. While the Third World, and a third of the whole world, starves – 900 million people live on less than 1 dollar a day [www.stwr.net] – the Multi-nationals rip us off - the Western Consumers - simultaneously starving the ‘Eastern/Southern’ producers, right, left, and centre, and make Gordon Brown-esque New Labour-ists rob our non-existent rich pockets to send invisible Aid laced with Arms-deals, to encourage the Afro-Asian countries massacre each other more efficiently …

It seems to me that the sweet Brothers Francis began humbly with Coffee, and they got lost in the enormity of the complexity of the socio-economic problems they encountered – being inexperienced as film-makers, they had difficulty not-losing the plot, and they instinctively left the camera running as it were …

Their artistic loss in terms of a well-made film – for example, I would have made much more of that mother-and-child refused medical treatment for not-starving enough – turned out to be ultimately their gain in a certain kind of naïve un-intended complexity, but intense humanity and compassion.

While the title of the film – Black Gold – is masterly, its unnecessary subtitle is camp nonsense – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. I would not give the film any artistic awards, but I sure would want it to be seen in every school and educational institute all over the world …

And I was delighted to discover that Christopher Hird is the Executive Producer. I had guessed it as much, as he is one of a rare breed of high-powered film-producers with a social conscience and/or what I call “true socialist humanism” completely lacking in Brown-Blair New Labour. God help us all through another spell of Brownism.

Notes

[1] vide, "Air passengers face more delay as US plans fingerprinting" by Dan Milmo, Transport correspondent, The [London] Guadian, 7 June 2007, p. 16.

One of those grand controle-freak lunatics, no less than the Deputy Secretary of the US department of Homeland Security - I don't wish to soil my page with his name - wants to

"accumulate information on every foreign national travelling through America. 'We will [note his illiteracy - 'we shall' is the correct English - HIP) need biometric as well as biographical data', he said. [...] American authorities are also seeking access to credit card details and email accounts. [...] the procedure would be easy to integrate, over time, 'into the business model of the [airline] industry' ", says the same lunatic.

We have become so perverted, that instead of protesting against the US Government measures as a Human Rights issue, and Mafia-led robbery of identity-theft and bank-accounts, the Director of Communications at the Virgin [personal names are not important] objects to the US government's fascist plan because "it could create longer queues" at the airports ... Laugh or cry? You decide!

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Explore further Prof HIP’s archival website (s) http://pilikian.blogspot.com/
http://exciting-sculptures-by-pilikian.blogspot.com/
http://profpilikian-on-life-in-britain-today.blogspot.com/
http://godsavehugochavez.blogspot.com/

Professor H. I. Pilikian on Exceptional Films

White Coffee with Human Blood