[act-ma] Thursday 11/19: "Big Boys Gone Bananas" - Free UPandOUT film screening [perfect example for why TPP: no recourse, no redress]

[pf soto]

[this saga is a good example of why they are forcing TPP/TPPA on the planet:
i.e., no recourse from being subjected to chemicals,  no redress for the 
damage caused; how to go america :-(]

*<http://rule19.org/download-film/film-151119%20-BigBoysGoneBananas.pdf>**Big 
Boys Gone Bananas!*
*
What is a big corporation capable of doing to protect its brand (its 
dirty pockets)?


[see trailer <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqrX4BhtDHg>]

Showing Thursday, Nov 19, in Cambridge
[please download & distribute flyer 
<http://rule19.org/download-film/film-151119%20-BigBoysGoneBananas.pdf>]

This is a true David and Goliath story about a pair of Swedish 
filmmakers and a banana corporation. Dirty tricks, lawsuits, 
manipulation, and the price of free speech. (It's also a story about a 
country and it's media who refuse to knuckle-under to US corporate 
extortion. And of course that country is decidedly /not /the US.)

/*Big Boys Gone Bananas!**/ is the sequel to Fredrik Gertten's 
award-winning documentary, /*Bananas!** that /recounts the lawsuit that 
12 Nicaraguan plantation workers brought against the fruit giant Dole 
Food Company. It was a groundbreaking legal battle for Dole's use of a 
banned pesticide, which was known by the company to cause sterility. The 
plantation workers claimed they had been poisoned by pesticides such as 
DBCP (also known as Nemagon, which was banned in the US in 1979, and 
which Dow Chemical had recalled). Dole had been ordered in Nicaraguan 
courts to compensate the victims, but failed to do so. So the case was 
taken to America; /*Bananas!** /tells that story.

/*Big Boys Gone Bananas*/!* shows how Dole sued and harassed The LA Film 
Festival, Gertten, and others - trying to prevent /Bananas!*/ from ever 
being shown.*/Big Boys Gone Bananas!*/* can be seen as a thriller and a 
cautionary tale. But, mostly this is a personal story about what 
happened to Gertten, as a documentary filmmaker and to his company and 
how the livelihood of documentary filmmakers can be easily put into 
jeopardy. This powerful film reveals precisely how a multinational will 
stop at nothing to get its way - freedom of speech is at stake.

Just before leaving Sweden to attend the Los Angeles world premiere of 
his film /Bananas!*/, Gertten gets a strange message: the festival has 
decided to remove BANANAS!* from competition. Then, a scathing, 
controversial and misinformed article appears on the cover of the Los 
Angeles Business Journal about the film a week before the premiere. And 
subsequently, Gertten receives a letter from Dole€™s attorneys 
threatening legal action if the film is shown at this festival and to 
cease and desist.

What follows is an unparalleled story that Gertten captured on film. He 
filmed this entire process of corporate bullying and media spin - from 
DOLE attacking the producers with a defamation lawsuit, utilizing scare 
tactics, to media-control and PR-spin.

*Susanna Bohme,  in People vs Dole 
<http://bostonreview.net/world/susanna-bohme-dole-banana-workers-pesticide-nicaragua> 
*[at BostonReview.net]

  * /"a metal barrel, dull and rusty with age, bore Dow Chemical's
    diamond-shaped logo and its Fumazone brand name. The label included
    no warning of serious health effects, and, in any case, was in
    English, which wasn't much use to the rural laborers who dispensed
    its contents"/

  * "/tort lawyers representing banana workers had every reason to be
    hopeful: after U.S. chemical production workers had conclusively
    linked their sterility to DBCP in 1977, they /[the American workers]
    /won up to $2 million each in their own lawsuits./"

  * /"Plaintiffs also had a nice assortment of €œsmoking gun€
    documents, including toxicological evidence of testicular effects
    dating to 1956 and an agreement between Dow and Dole to continue
    DBCP sales to banana plantations after DBCP was undisputedly
    understood to cause human sterility. Perhaps most damning, one 1978
    Dole memo gave instructions to ignore *safety precautions because
    they were €œnot operationally feasible.€*/

  * "/The [Bananas'] victory, however, wouldn't last for long. First,
    Judge Chaney granted defendants' motion to reverse a punitive
    award€”-- $2.3 million of the total€”--on the grounds that a
    California court had little interest in punishing a U.S. corporation
    for actions outside U.S. borders. Then, chagrined by even the
    remaining judgment against their company, Dole leadership moved
    aggressively to vacate two similar cases--€” Mejia and Rivera--”
    queued for trial in Chaney's court. Dole and its lawyers developed
    what they called *the €œkill step€:* they would discredit their
    legal adversaries."

    /

/"/[Jacinto Obregon, Banana workers attorney] /cited an internal Dow 
Chemical memo in which *Dow accepted that the chemical was toxic but 
said that the product could be sold in Latin America as long as the 
expected earnings were more than would be lost in law suits." 
*~/Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign /

"Intimidation and threats are the primary weapons when Dole mobilizes 
lawyers and PR agencies to crush Gertten. They ...effortlessly get the 
US media on the train, they pressure Swedish journalists and the LA Film 
Festival. They even buy Google tags for Gerttens name so that every 
search for him or the film automatically generates Dole advertizing/"
~Louse Lagerstrom & Andres Hoffsten, BBGB Study Guide

*When/where*
doors open 6:40; film starts promptly 7pm
243 Broadway, Cambridge - corner of Broadway and Windsor,
entrance on Windsor
rule19.org/videos <http://rule19.org/videos>

Please join us for a stimulating night out; bring your friends!
*free film & free door prizes
****[donations are encouraged]
*feel free to bring your own snacks and soft drinks - no alcohol allowed

"/You can't legislate good will - that comes through education/." ~ 
Malcolm X

*UPandOUT film series* - see rule19.org/videos <http://rule19.org/videos>

Why should YOU care? It's YOUR money that pays for US/Israeli wars - on 
Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, Libya. Syria, Iran, So America, etc 
etc - for billionaire bailouts, for ever more ubiquitous US prisons, for 
the loss of liberty and civil rights...

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