Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsAlex Jones' Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2010
This documentary rightly deserves to be called Alex Jones' masterpiece. It's far more focused than any of Jones' other works - which is to say it's far less rambling. It's as if Jones and his editors decided to filter out as much of the irrelevant data that usually clutters his documentaries as possible. The result is a much clearer and a much more effective presentation of his central theme: the almost complete takeover of the world's economy by the international banking establishment. So far so good: there's very little one can say to debunk that idea since it's so transparently obvious that the bankers are calling most of the shots. However - and that's a very big "however" - there is a monstrously glaring omission from Jones' scenario: Big Oil. He barely mentions Big Oil, and when he does it's only in passing - as if the international oil cartel were merely a pawn of international banking interests. Given that the various oil companies consistently post the highest earnings in the history of business, it's a quite a stretch to accept them as little more than handmaidens of the banks. That aside, it's almost impossible to seriously question, let alone debunk, the main thrust of his presentation of the banks' enormous power: the creation of President Obama as a tool of international banking. He insists that every president since Kennedy has also been merely a tool of big banking - and that President Kennedy was, in fact, assassinated because he was not following the bankers agenda. Again, it's not that difficult to accept this view of the American presidency, since every modern president seems to have done everything possible to promote a corporate agenda, even at the expense of the greater social good; and, more than any other president, Obama has consistently done a 180 degree shift away from everything he pledged to do during his campaign - not just some things, which you expect, but everything.
So, except for downplaying big oil's role in shaping American politics to its own interests, Jones seems to have presented an almost air-tight case for the virtual corporate takeover of the world's economy. He should have stopped there; but, of course, being Alex Jones, he kept on until he managed to undercut his own thesis. Two pieces of speculation almost - not quite, but almost - turned his studied and well documented presentation into a comic farce. The first involves, of all things, Social Security, which, according to Jones, was created by FDR entirely for the benefit of the bankers. Here's how his reasoning goes: by 1933 the USA was totally bankrupt and was desperately in need of being re-financed by the international banking community. What FDR did - wait for it! - was to put up the American people as collateral on the money he had asked the banks to loan the US government, the Social Security trust fund he set up being the mechanism for providing this bizarre "collateral." A bit far-fetched, even for a man of Alex Jones' imagination; but, even so, not without a certain rationale, because it seems very clear that the banks are attempting to take over the Social Security trust fund - which, by the way is far from bankrupt and which the banks are acting as if it's rightfully theirs. But in the final analysis, this notion of the American people being "collateral" must be accepted on faith.
The second piece of speculation involves climate change. Jones considers global warming to be the biggest scam in history - which would put almost all of the world's leading scientists squarely in the banks' pockets. The reason for the climate change paradigm, in his view, is to enable the enactment of a "carbon tax" on a worldwide level. Once again, no compelling evidence is offered for this bombshell; we must accept it on faith - just as he insists we have been accepting the worldview promulgated by the world's bankers on nothing but faith.
In the end, though as usual Alex Jones makes a very good case, he fails to make a convincing case. As Carl Sagan had noted in his "Cosmos" series: if you make extraordinary claims, you must present extraordinary evidence. And Alex Jones has not.