Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. By hosting community film screenings and sharing them online, they offer a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait for anyone or anything. Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries below. Just imagine...
Ladies of New York , you are free to walk bare-breasted through the city! New York City's 34,000 police officers have been instructed that, should they encounter a woman in public who is shirtless but obeying the law, they should not arrest her. This is a good step towards gender parity in public spaces. This decision means that breast exposure is not considered public lewdness...
New Orleans, LA - "The fishermen have never seen anything like this," Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. "And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I've never seen anything like this either." Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University's Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen...
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why did tens of thousands of people risk arrest all over the world to set up encampments and protest the status quo?...
In a brewing scandal that should shock and trouble all of us, Exxon silenced us this week. We put together a nationally crowdfunded PSA , promoted by thousands online who threw in a dollar or a click or both in favor of two simple ideas: we should be able to get the word out about the most pressing issue of our time, climate change, on television primetime; and we should be able to demand...
Something is wrong, and the signs of it are everywhere. Somebody flies a plane into an IRS tax office in Texas, and millions of people around the country cheer, while the media speak of a “senseless attack.” In a black neighborhood in the slums of Hartford, someone opens fire on a SWAT team that has busted down their door, and people in the gathered crowd of neighbors whisper...
2012 was another big year for break-out films in the social change genre. With most of the bases covered for all of the major problems we're facing, more and more films this year focused on the solutions side of the equation, giving a voice to the uplifting stories of people working to realize their dreams of a thriving, sustainable world. For the films that focused on the...
Ignoring the memory of the over 1,100 factory workers that passed away at the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh last month, at least 14 major North American retailers have declined to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety , an agreement that would have entailed a five year commitment from all participating retailers to conduct in
No issue may be more contentious or more misunderstood than the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Hatred, fear, religion, politics, propaganda, media misinformation, and decades of cyclical violence has made understanding the roots of this conflict (not to mention finding potential solutions to it) seemingly impossible. But if we're to ever see reconciliation for the people suffering on...
2011 will likely be remembered in America as the year that the nation's youth finally started to wake up - all that bubbling knowledge of the world's problems, all the discontent and disillusion with our broken system finally burst into a flurry of creative action. Our understandings of the deep, structural flaws in our economy, politics and culture reached new heights of collective awareness...
Late last night I saw on Twitter news reports coming in about the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon. I saw the photographs of bloodied runners on the ground, read the stories about how people had their legs and ankles blown off. I heard that an 8 year old boy died from the bombs. I lived in Boston for six years and stood on the road outside Wellesley College to cheer on the marathon...
Forty-five years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "turn on, tune in and drop out", researchers have found that magic mushrooms do change a user's personality – for the better. The fungi have long been known for their psychedelic effects, but far from damaging the brain, the hallucinogenic drug they contain...
Every year Project Censored puts together a list of the top 25 stories censored and ignored by the mainstream media. The recently published Censored 2013 covers the period between 2011-2012. How many of these stories were you aware of? Even regular consumers of alternative, independent media may be surprised to learn about some of these stories, but by and large, turning off the TV and...
To murder several runners using bombs at a sporting event is terrorism. To murder 175 children using military drones is U.S. policy. We should accept neither. We should fight against both. List of children killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen: Compiled from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports PAKIST
PART ONE Closing In on the Problem I heard this, naturally, from my grandfather, he from his grandfather, he from his own grandfather, and so on, back many hundreds of years. That means this tale is very old. But it won't disappear, because I offer it to my children, and my children will tell it to their children, and so on. GYPSY STORYTELLER LAZAROS HARISIADIS, QUOTED BY DIANE TONG...
When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week began taking military action in the Gaza strip against Hamas ( as the IDF announced on Twitter ), Anonymous declared its own war as part of #OpIsrael . Among the casualties are thousands of email addresses and passwords, hundreds of Israeli Web sites, government-owned as well as privately owned pages, as well as databases belonging to Bank...
10. 9/11: Press For Truth (2006) The best introduction to the movement, following the 9/11 familes' search for truth, and their fight to get an investigation into 9/11, which they ultimately found unsatisfactory. It is the most conservative 9/11 film, and it is has also been the most ignored by the mainstream media. After watching it, you'll see w
The uncle of the two suspected Boston bombers in last week’s attack, Ruslan Tsarni, was married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller The discovery that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had spy connections that go far deeper than had been previously known is ironic, especially since the mainstrean media's focus yesterday was on a feverish search to find who might have...
“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” —Arthur Young; 1771 Our popular economic wisdom says that capitalism equals freedom and free societies, right? Well, if you ever suspected that the l
A dangerous thing can occur when you start learning about what's really going on in the world. The problems start to seem so complex, and you're just one person, doubts begin to creep in. You sincerely want to help change the world, but from all this knowledge you start to believe that the world is too out of control and too big to change, so you end up not doing anything. What aspiring...
Dear Citizens of the United States of America, It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch--the billionaire owners of Koch Industries--have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back. Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most...
INTRODUCTION. Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It...
There are few ways to make a decent living in Bangladesh, but there are many ways to die trying. The cruel weight of that reality bore down on a Dhaka factory complex on Wednesday as it crashed to the ground and instantly extinguished hundreds of lives and livelihoods. As of this writing, the body count at Rana Plaza is about 300 and rising , with hundreds more workers still unaccounted...
Thank you, Scott Walker! And you, too, Charles and David Koch! Thanks for being so ham-handed in pushing your self-serving, virulently anti-union agenda on the schoolteachers, health care workers, park rangers and other public employees of Wisconsin. The Birchite billionaire Koch brothers and Walker, their gubernatorial hatchet man in the Badger State, have unwittingly done a tremendous...
At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News' controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network's journalists not to use the phrase "public option." Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion...
The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is Russell Means's most famous speech. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, he was perhaps the most outsized personality in the American Indian Movement...
There's not much to say about Monday's Boston Marathon attack because there is virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why. There are, however, several points to be made about some of the widespread reactions to this incident. Much of that reaction is all-too-familiar and quite revealing in important ways: (1) The widespread compassion for yesterday's victims...
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that...
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail. Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and...
Over the last 7 years, Films For Action has been cataloging an online library of the best social change films that can be watched free online. Opting for quality over quantity, the site has grown slowly to include 500 documentaries and 900 short films, trailers and presentations indexed into 40 subjects to make it easy to discover content about specific slices of the social change pie...
Lawrence, KS -- After 12 months in development, Films For Action has launched its new website - a head-to-toe redesign that lays the foundation for a vibrant community-powered news site dedicated to inspiring positive social change. At the heart of the new site is a constantly growing learning library of over 200 documentaries and 500 short films that can be watched free online, daily...
Update 8/6, a clarification. The below article's quotes were taken a bit out of context: http://www.rt.com/news/bolivia-coca-cola-ban-770/ In a symbolic rejection of US capitalism, Bolivia announced it [hopes to] expel the Coca-Cola Company from the country at the end of the Mayan calendar. This will mark the end of capitalism and usher in a new era of equality, the Bolivian govt says...
Address given at EnvironDesign 3, Baltimore, MD, April 30, 1999. Editor's note: Even though this essay is over 10 years old, it's as relevant today as ever, especially considering the mass shootings that became a tragic outlet for wounded human beings has only increased as the years go on. We need to start solving for causes rather than effects if we ever want to see this end. - Ed...
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man...
Since 1997, the biggest shopping day of the year in North America has also been known as Buy Nothing Day - a playful protest against the cultural and commercial pressures that compel us to consume more every year, grow more in debt to prove our love to our loved ones and find temporary happiness in that euphoric moment of purchase. It's a movement that has been growing internationally...
Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terror plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country's government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and...
Many of you have visited the Films For Action website and asked us why we have not posted any Alex Jones documentaries or included Infowars, Prision Planet, Natural News or other like-minded sites on our list of recommended independent media. Unfortunately, we feel it would be irresponsible to promote Alex Jones, his websites, or any of his films. His films were always overly sensational...
What is the full truth of 9/11/2001? It is, quite simply, to tell all sides of the story. It means weaving together all the known facts, unanswered questions, significant actors and conflicting viewpoints into a single complex narrative that gives fair weight and context to all the relevant perspectives. It means writing the news - and the analysis of that news - independent from government...
Left-libertarians differ from the (current) libertarian mainstream both in terms of what outcomes they regard as desirable , and in terms of what outcomes they think a freed market is
As a sustainability-loving transportation planner, I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Kee Yeon Hwang would be visiting Vancouver and talking about the project that has made Seoul, Korea a legend in urban planning circles: the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project .
A round up of the 10 best films about climate change or the issues related to it. Click the title of each film to watch all of these documentaries online. 10. Who Killed The Electric Car? (2006) In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline... Ten years later, these cars
The Sandy Hook conspiracy can no longer claim censorship by the mainstream media as one of its articles of evidence. Sandy Hook 'truthers' can now find their claims mentioned and addressed in dozens of articles online, and in some TV coverage. The best written response I've found so far addressing the claims can be read here and watched here. Yet rather predictably, the...
Alex Jones must be either getting lazy or think his readers are really dumb, because his grand theory about the Boston Marathon bombings is the sloppiest concocted narrative we’ve seen since that dog ate your homework. Of course, Jones and his comrades at InfoWars thinks the brothers suspected in the bombing are innocent, citing such reliable sources as Twitter user...
So, I was trying to get my friend to read a recent issue of Adbusters magazine. "You've got to read this!" I said. "There's an article about how the media today is owned by only a handful of corporations, and corporate consolidation is leading to fewer voices getting on the air and stifling the range of debate, which is stifling the health of our democracy. And...
The Boston Marathon bombing’s cruel use of a second bomb, designed to harm anyone assisting those injured by the first, reminded me of the “Collateral Murder” video , which depicted U.S. military helicopters first gunning down a group of mostly unarmed men (including two Reuters journalists), then killing a separate pair of unarmed men after they exited their van, attempting...
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006. Before we look at the details, a heartfelt plea from the Save the CEO’s Charitable Trust: There’s so much suffering in the world. It can all...
If you're not the type to keep up with ugly, soul-killing political controversies, let me catch you up: A while back, hugely popular political commentator Rush Limbaugh lost a bunch of advertisers because he publicly called a college girl a slut and a prostitute after she suggested that health insurance plans should cover birth control. But he's paid to say outrageous things. If you really...
#ANONYMOUS has issued a warning that governments are ordering Youtube to censor protest videos to stop populist rage from spreading. Statement below http://anoncentral.tumblr.com/post/11697760542/urgent-government... "Forget copyright infringement, YouTube is now complying with removal orders from governments to stop populi
The purchase of the Huffington Post by AOL left many of the progressive writers and readers that made the site into a powerhouse looking for a new home. Adbusters magazine set out to unite those disaffected former supporters of Arianna Huffington's flagship site by suggesting they use social media to promote alternatives. "Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of...
This series will attempt to roughly give some examples as to how the urban environment can be altered so that cities can not only sustain themselves but also become ecologically rich environs benefiting mankind and servicing nature. In order for us to do so, we must create radical shifts in the way we think about the vital needs of our civilization and follow the examples biology can give us...