Progressive Commentary Hour - 02.03.15

With John Pilger on the IMF & World Bank's economic warfare. 

John Pilger is a multi award-winning investigative journalist, author, film director and playwright.    A major theme overriding his reporing is social injustice and human rights violations. While reporter for London’s Daily Mirror, he twice received Britain’s Journalist of the Year awards for his reporting from Vietnam. While in the US, he reported on the blight of America’s poor following the assassination of Martin Luther King and was present when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.  He also reported on the plight of Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s regime, which led to his documentary “Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia.”  He also performed multi-year investigations into the damage caused by the drug Thalidomide, Indonesian occupied East Timor, and struggles of the indigenous Aborigines in Australia. Has directed over 50 documentary films, including the noteworthy “The War You Don’t See” (about Julian Assange and Wikileaks) and “War on Democracy” (about US covert efforts in Chile, Venezuela and Boliva). Over the years he has contributed to BBC, the Guardian, Radio Australia, al-Jazeera and Russia Today.  We will be hearing from his documentary film ”War by Other Means” which takes a hard look at the failures of the World Bank, such as the bank’s corrupt Structural Adjustment programs, and in particular in the Philippines, where 44% of the country’s national budget has gone towards paying foreign debt off alone. The devastation the World Bank has contributed to in developing nations such as Philippines provides a compassionate case for debt cancellation for at least the most indebted nations to western corporation interests and supported by the World Bank and IMF.

If you would like to learn more about John Pilger, his website is JohnPilger.com