This film starts out with swear words, as Vultures' Picnic did before the editing--how Palast and how true!
Our Truth Sleuth weaves together into a seamless labyrinth his two major concerns that have absorbed his renowned and versatile genius since the turn of the century: voting and its raptors vulture capitalists; read: culture swilling down nature and nature in turn sealing us away from the beloved rising ocean toward the inland, where her violence is taking other forms.
Storms, fire, and vultures, devouring "our" culture, devouring us as nature will swallow them and spit out the remnants to re-form humanity and cleanse us from scratch.
Just as Palast is fighting to save us, We the People. The film nearly ends with this despair, but wait. There's yet another atrocity to film and publicize, yet another list of how to FIGHT BACK--SPREAD THE WORD!
Enough Levi Straus, enough "Beckett, but wait."
We get no lecture from this sometime professor of statistics.
We get the facts, on film, of the mauling of oil-soaked wilderness that once nurtured life, a shore covered with once-benevolent whales, now upside-down caracasses. And we meet the vultures drooling over the billions they squeeze out of this and more, much more.
Enter the Koch brothers and the ultimate vulture capitalist Paul Singer, whom some call super-brilliant, chewing up welfare aid for starving Africans, Africans being devoured by curable diseases, to build and maintain his mansions that sprawl around the world. The man has bills to pay, folks, like all of us! And needs more billions. We see cameo shots of the oft-bankrupt Donald, who spins this straw into gold.
The Kochs have bills to pay, too, and squeeze this oil out of Native Americans at three bucks a pop. We gave them the franchise not too long ago, after all. What do they want, blood? Blood for oil! Not nobloodforoil.org, one of the first websites to introduce our Sleuth to the world, which loves him BUT, just like the late factotum humanitarian Danny Schechter, who lured him into joining his FIGHT, THE fight, to whom this film is dedicated, only our U.S. press, fourth arm now of the vultures, ignores them--well, almost, but who reads the Guardian US or Rolling Stone except for us?
Headlines all over the world are garbage, in a country where media bow to and rape the Donald. Why does Hillary's campaign spend so much more money than the D's? Because the press loves the ratings his misinformed jabber brings in, his theatrics, his dumb machismo. They'd rather mess up his hair than publish the Truth, his nemesis.
Billy Koch, a younger brother of the dynamic duo, rats on them into Palast's office where his loyal Badpenny cajoles truth out of vultures, disguised as them, staking out their haunts, plundering the Internet. Somewhere all the rat crap lurks and she finds those places, too, rejoicing in their idiocy. Nature will devour them, too, maybe last of all, but she'll be there. Our planet will turn to putrid brown through the galaxy's eyes, no longer an orb of ocean blue.
FIGHT BACK. Attorney, activist, and academic Bob Fitrakis heeds Palast's midnight call and all of ours because the puppet strings of our electoral system are wiggled by, guess who, the Kochs and their symbiosis with their thinly veiled slime, politicians, who creep out from under rocks, promising nirvana to We the People, spraying us with "Cokes" and "Singer Songs."
Here is the second branch of Palast's lone crusade, attacking the people's will and dreams not only by foreclosure and exporting Delphi Auto Parts to China--to hell with our economy--but by sabotaging the roots of rule by the people, democracy. Worry not about Russians. They're just helping the vultures, having acquired one of their fangs.
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