Unreported World travels to eastern Turkey, where Europe and Asia meet, to report on the rekindling of a largely forgotten and ignored war that threatens the stability of the region and the European Union’s expansion plans.

Reporter Matthew McAllester journeys from Diyarbakir, the centre of the Kurdish heartland, deep into Kurdish Turkey and on to the border with Iran, home to thousands of Kurdish PKK fighters, before meeting one of the group’s leaders in Iraq.

“Witness capitalism on a grand scale: how Shell Oil and Royal Dutch merged, then challenged the supremacy of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. A compelling tale of how oil transformed everyday life in the farthest corners of the globe, made Russia a great oil power, and helped the Allies win World War I.”

“A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.

Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.

Two individuals emerge whose ideas, shaped by very different experiences, will inform this debate and carry it forward. One is a brilliant, unconventional Englishman named John Maynard Keynes. The other is an outspoken émigré from ravaged Austria, Friedrich von Hayek.

But a worldwide depression holds the capitalist nations in its grip. In opposition to both Keynes and Hayek stand not only Hitler’s Third Reich but Stalin’s Soviet Union, schooled in the communist ideologies of Marx and Lenin and bent on obliterating the capitalist system altogether.

For more than half a century the battle of ideas will rage. From the totalitarian socialist systems to the fascist states, from the independent nations of the developing world to the mixed economies of Europe and the regulated capitalism of the United States, government planning will gradually take over the commanding heights.

But in the 1970s, with Keynesian theory at its height and communism fully entrenched, economic stagnation sets in on all sides. When a British grocer’s daughter and a former Hollywood actor become heads of state, they join forces around the ideas of Hayek, and new political and economic policies begin to transform the world.”

A great, very Swedish documentary about consumerism and globalization based on the ideas of John Zerzan. Zerzan is an interesting fellow, on the one-hand arguing for property damage, but on the other, nearly admitting that his ideas are nearly impossible to implement. From the description:

Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers is a 2003 Swedish documentary film on consumerism and globalization, created by director Erik Gandini and editor Johan Söderberg. It opens with footage of the protests at the 27th G8 summit in Genoa and prominently features the views of anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan.

From FRANCE24 comes a debate discussing Musharraf, the Seige of Red Mosque, and in general peace in Pakistan.

From 2000, well after Bill Clinton declared the end of the Old Left. From the description:

The Guests talk about economic theory in a Paradigm sense. The raise the idea that it ultimatly is the basic source which informs all National & International Political decison making at a policy leval. They (particurly Ashford) strongly question the “Labor Theory of Value” which informs in a fundemental sense virutlaly all Economic Theory from from the far Left to the far Right as outdated in an era when economic production (and the trends therein) is increasingly the result of capital assets which are overwhelmingly owned by a very narrow owership class.

Tony Smith at the New America Foundation, discussing some large changes in the way policy is made. The sound quality is pretty bad, you’d think the NAF could get it right. From the description:

Many liberals as well as conservatives supported the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. In his provocative new book A Pact with the Devil: Washington’s Bid for World Supremacy, Tony Smith, professor of political science at Tufts University, criticizes liberal hawks as well as neocons for sharing a common project of American world supremacy.

In 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba experienced an ‘energy famine.’ Transportation and agriculture virtually came to a stop due to lack of diesel fuel and fertilizer shortages. This film explores what changes were put in place. The makers of the film “The End Of Suburbia” went to Cuba to explore it as a test case for what the conditions after Peak Oil would look like. This is that story.

These talks at UCBerkley presented online are great (second place goes to the University of Chicago). From the description:\

China expert and Harvard political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar joins UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism Dean Orville Schell for a lecture and discussion of the lasting impact of Chairman Mao’s Communist Revolution in China