michael parenti - the prosperity myth (8+ min)

took an excerpt from a Dr. Michael Parenti lecture(2012) and animated a bit of what he was talking about. some of the material is a bit dated, but a lot of patterns are the same over a decade later.

please buy and read Dr. Parenti's books.
source video here:

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[AntonioGarmsci]

The Great Dr. Michael Parenti!!! His work was important on my journey from a working-class conservative to an Anarchist!!! Capitalism is the crisis!!!

[TSALCOLLECTIVE]

so far, I've seen one typo "their accustomed" was supposed to be "they're accustomed". doesn't matter how many times I look over these. something always slips through.

[brenkelly]

There are two cigarette companies that control the majority of the crop (the same British and American two that started as one in British colonial Virginia by the King of England and his investors) and there are less regulations and oversight in the “developing” world, and a far bigger market. Discouraging American consumers actually allowed them to shift the crop to the developing world to hook them and grow their markets and industry. It was a brilliant move, looking guilty and getting hated but really just a ploy at market expansion.

[alfredflorin]

This rocks, dude - you even got Hakim to comment on it 😮

[guneskeskin]

another banger. Thanks for making these...

[Lanooski]

really dig the cropped circle. innovative to work in the source while mapping out the pop mographs.

[sadbots]

love it immediately sharing this around

[vivalaleta]

Excellent job illustrating this illustrious speech. Subscribed.

[amputd]

Thanks, using this in my class (opposite Ayn Rand). Really good work

[comrade_cat]

"grown in Argentina packed in Thailand"

[christofthedead]

awesome artwork; style kept me engaged

[sophon]

❤ I love when people put love into these great segments

[deanadam]

it’s si beautifully made, keep it up!!

[phoenixtealparis]

Thank you so much for these!! Genuinely

[lagringa]

Loved Michael Parenti.... he knew so much so long ago while we were still babes blindly skipping in the woods thinking we actually lived in a democracy. Well we're here now and everything has turned to this filthy government/corporate Fascism right before our eyes that the private powerful and those they buy, have always yearned for... and still too many of us sleep, in complete denial that this has happened.

[tcironbear]

Something interesting I learned about all those trolleys is they were actually part of a real estate scam. Basically the trolley companies would buy a bunch of land, then sell the land at a greatly improved price after they put in the trolley. They would operate the trolley at a loss and then dump the trolley line on the city once they had sold all the land around it. They made all their money on the buying and selling of real estate.

I will admit that it would have probably been a smart idea for the cities to just absorb the loses on the trolley lines because it would have reduced traffic, reduced over all costs to maintain the city, and maintained property taxes. But at the time a lot of cities found themselves saddled with trolley lines they never installed. City leaders might have not been so much stupid as they were bitter and ignorant of how useful those trolley lines would be in the future.

[PeterChoyce]

Thank u for making this and pls keep 'em coming. I can post an 8 min diatribe to my 5 thousand followers. u just can't convince people to take more than 10 mins. And the animation is wonderful, pretty hilarious, all done right.
Democracy for the few was the first political book i ever read but i was like 8 years old then. How does Parenti look so young? He should be 90.... no?

[eddiehopper]

I would smoke a caffeine cigarette idc

[abhaysharma-nwfm]

I started craving caffeine cigarettes as soon as I heard him

[cyberpunkalphamale]

If you want a deeper, more technical dive, look up Blair Fix.