This week I suggest you go to the cinema.
The Green Lie
Environmentally friendly electric cars, sustainably produced food products, fair production processes: Hurray! If everything the corporations tell us is true, we can save the world through our purchasing decisions alone! A popular and dangerous lie. In his new documentary film, Werner Boote shows us, together with environmental expert Kathrin Hartmann, how we can protect ourselves. Down with green lies!
This movie has an important message for us: using all kinds of social and ecological labels, the industry is giving us the responsibility for their crimes against the environment and against human rights (the two of them are frequently directly connected). As one person in the movie says: „I buy fair-trade coffee. Because the alternative is what? Bastard coffee?“
The industry is telling us that we are responsible for picking the right products, that it is not them that are responsible for producing fair products. But that’s a lie: bastard coffee & slavery t-shirts & coal electricity should not be allowed to be produced at all. The companies know that, and what they are afraid of is that we also recognize it: that we recognize that we shouldn’t just pick fair-trade coffee in the supermarket; that we recognize that we have to fight for a different economy, and that those companies have to go out of business!
(And economists share that opinion. I quote Jeffrey D. Sachs, special adviser to the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, from a recent talk: „ExxonMobil has to go out of business. Big oil has bought US politics. They own the Republican Party.“)
