Chasing Ice
2012Gaetana Caldwell-Smith 2012-12Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 9 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 2012 9 “Chasing Ice,” a documentary by pho tographer James Balog, directed by Jeff Olowski.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which “snapped Americans to the reality that rising temperatures are a risk to their own well-being” (LA Times), the documentary “Chasing Ice”—filmed in 2009—is probably the most important film, if not the most impressive media event to date concerning climate change.
National Geographic photographer James Balog’s disturbing film deals with the dramatic and rapidly melt ing and calving (breaking) glaciers in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and in Glacier National Park in Montana (which Balog says will have to be re named “Glacierless National Park” by the end of the decade). He speculates on the cause of the rapid meltdown and how it will affect coastal areas.
Most dramatic is the superimposition of Manhattan onto one of the calving glaciers to gauge its size and impact (one thinks of Sandy’s effect on Man hattan at that time).
The film includes video clips from as personal fiefdoms, with voting blocs organized by the landed village elites, and the power bases of most of the major parties are centered in the landowning class.
This feudal economic structure maintains a corre sponding feudal social structure rooted in inequality between powerful landowners and workers with little access to land. It is also grounded in the inequality be tween men and women—who have still less access, despite providing all of a household’s domestic labor and a portion of the labor outside in the form of do mestic labor in other peoples’ homes and agricultural labor in the fields.
It is rural inequality that provides the basis for the oppression of women in Pakistan, not Taliban militan cy, which is itself an expression of those same patriar chal feudal relations. Thus, the idea that we advance the causes of Pakistani feminist activists like Malala Yousufzai and Fareeda Afridi by shooting rockets and
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Tony Savino / Socialist Action markets. The only way cities and towns can win access to those markets is by issuing tax-exempt municipal bonds. But that means Wall Street profits from those bonds through interest payments and through securi tization, as traders repackage bonds into debt bundles that are sold and resold on the global market. … After Wall Street’s mortgage-lending practices crashed the economy in 2008, many municipalities were unable to pay their debts.
“From coast to coast, cities have become completely beholden to big banks. The result is shuttered schools, smaller fire departments and block upon block of abandoned homes in foreclosure.”
And the manual gives examples of resistance by municipalities to such policies: “Some municipalities are fighting back against the big banks. After their pay was cut to minimum wage, Scranton’s municipal unions sued the city, and their wages were restored. Years of community resistance delayed the construc tion of Barclays Arena in Brooklyn because the sta dium was financed with tax-exempt bonds and built on land seized by eminent domain. Baltimore is suing more than a dozen big banks for manipulating LIBOR, a benchmark for interest rates. In July 2012, Boston activists held subway turnstiles open to protest Wall Street’s vise grip on their city’s transportation budget. After a toxic interest-rate swap deal sent it off a fiscal cliff, Oakland, California, is trying to take the dramatic step of severing its relationship with Goldman Sachs for good.”