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...
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?...
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...
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...
A new initiative is re-energising the Occupy movement. Called the Rolling Jubilee , it is a plan to use money from donations to buy distressed consumer debt from lenders at a marked down price, just as debt collection agencies normally would. But instead of hounding debtors for payments, it will simply cancel the debts. The hope is that the liberated debtors will themselves contribute to...
Do you mulch your relationships? Kim Millar explains how Permaculture principles work just as much in the home, as they do in the garden Most of us don't 'design' our relationships consciously, we're more likely to stumble and/or bumble along in the hopes that they'll grow in the right direction. They usually catch our attention only when things have gone wrong and we scramble around...
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...
People are waking up. They're getting involved. They're saying, "Not another day! This is where I mark the line." Their desire to change the world is turning from simple wishful thinking on Monday mornings into tangible action. The thoughts they used to have only occasionally about their relationship to the rest of the world now occurs to them all the time. They're...
For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive ... The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination... The worldwide...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Will Stewart-Starks, an Iraq Veteran and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) gives an audience of Lawrence art enthusiasts and local activists a summary of his organizations recent campaign to address military deployments of wounded soldiers. Ar t show introduces Lawrence community to Operation Recovery Campaign February 12, 2011, Lawrence, KS --
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...
The FBI caught another homegrown terrorist this week, except like many recent plots the agency has “uncovered,” the attack was a plant, a plan concocted by the FBI itself. It’s the latest in a growing number of terrorism plots that the FBI stirs up by infiltrating communities and helping to devise attack plans. The practice raises serious questions about the...
Have you ever fallen into a black hole of comparison shopping? You’re looking for a new digital camera, for instance. You head over to Cnet.com and read some reviews of various cameras, watch the video demos, identify the model you want. Then perhaps you employ Google’s shopping search to price out the options and find the best deal. All of the sudden, it’s four hours later...
Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones...
My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests, and India’s forest...
A bold new threat to the economic status quo brings on a press blackout. Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the...
I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll [continue to vote in] elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together. For me, big government has become...
I get a lot of emails as to why I do not bring up notions such as the “New World Order”, “Illuminati”, “Zionism”, “Secret Societies” and other popular occult/conspiracy concepts which are very topical in this day and age. While I, of course, acknowledge the “men behind the curtain” and the various levels of manipulation and corruption...
It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI , the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters...
It looks like the Japanese whaling fleet is ready to rumble. They fired their opening shot today by having the United States 9 th District Court issue an injunction against Sea Shepherd and Captain Paul Watson, specifically. The court order was a single page e-mail granting the injunction despite the fact that the preliminary injunction was denied in February 2012 by Judge Richard Jones...
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...
We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy’s side of the front is always propaganda, and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace. — Walter Lippmann Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds : the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. The...
In a massive blow to multinational agribiz corporations such as Monsanto , Bayer, and Dow, Peru has officially passed a law banning genetically modified ingredients anywhere within the country for a full decade before coming up for another review. Peru’s Plenary Session of the Congress made the decision 3 years after the decree was written despite previous governmental pushes for GM...
Atomic Weapons Were Not Needed to End the War or Save Lives Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives. But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise . The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air...
I live in a purple part of the country (Virginia) and move in academic circles, so of course I know many, many people who will be voting for Obama. It is impossible to know, but if I sodomized the Easter Bunny in front of their children the look on my Obama-voter friends’ faces could scarcely be much different than the look they get when I say I am voting for Jill Stein. “But...
We wanted a Tahrir moment , an American Spring, a new vision of the future, and they attacked us in Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011 in the dead of the night with military precision. The surprise raid began with a media blackout. Our movement's founding encampment was surrounded by riot police, credentialed mainstream journalists who tried to enter were pushed back or arrested, and the...
Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But...
I’ve written about or linked to a great deal here “chronicling Mitt’s mendacity” — to borrow Steven Benen’s phrase. Mitt Romney says many, many things that are not true. He says this despite being in possession of the correct facts of the matter. Which is to say that Mitt Romney lies. A lot. He lies more than any other national candidate for office in my...
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...
As a filmmaker, it’s a rare privilege to stumble upon a completely unique story—in the case of my new documentary, Grasp the Nettle , a motley collection of land rights activists , squatting a three-acre piece of land in the heart of suburban London. With my video camera and microphone in hand, I decided to give up my job and flat to move in with a group of outsiders...
Dear Mark, I hope this letter reaches you, and finds you well. First of all, allow me to congratulate you on your well-recognized achievements. Not everyone creates a telecommunications platform that redefines the way in which we all connect. I became a big fan of Facebook after incorporating it to my transmedia project Beware of Images . The project is aimed at generating media literacy...
‘Mindless, violent thugs, hell-bent on sowing chaos.’ That’s the kind of press anarchists often get. Uri Gordon provides a more sympathetic take on a growing yet still little understood political movement. I must have been eight or nine years old when I first heard the a-word. I don’t remember the context, but I do remember asking my mother what...
“…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
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...
In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained...
The odd thing about Wikileaks is that their success has been assured, not by what they leaked, though there is some important information there, but by their enemies. The massive and indiscriminant overreaction by both government and powerful corporate actors has ensured this, and includes but is not nearly limited to: Shutting down Wikileaks servers, starting with the Amazon server
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...
T he Carnivalesque Rebellion is about to begin. From November 22nd to the 28th, culture jammers of all kinds – from artists to churchgoers, anarchists to carpenters – will disregard the illegitimate laws of consumer society. For seven nights, they will honor instead the dictates of their hearts and the demands of their conscience. Overwhelmed by a myriad of insurrections and...
Climate change got you down? Don't despair. Here's a visual exploration of what you can do to make a difference, featuring art, video, and dinosaurs.
Preamble We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common...
No need to modernize the phrasing of this most obviously relevant Orwellian slogan. Obama, our Nobel Prince of Peace, continues the endless wars, warrantless and evidence-less detentions, and illegal torture. The public is kept in an increasing state of fear of a manufactured bogeyman that assumes the faces of individual leaders as needed (and their countries), but ultimately is defined as a...
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...
Driving to the airport to pick up a friend, I stop at a red light. My eyes wander to a bus-stop bench across the intersection. 'Norma Whitfield - Your Real-Estate Connection.' Wham. Before I even have time to react, the advertisement has entered my mind and lodged itself between the folds of my thoughts. Another chunk of my mental landscape, grabbed without consent. There was nothing special...
You may want to think twice the next time you share a link to your favorite video. In a case against a New York website owner, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime. DHS, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seized Brian McCarthy's domain, channelsurfing.net, in late January. The site has now been...
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...
Language is powerful. Language is deceptive. Propaganda is pumped into U.S. citizens heads daily without question or critical evaluation. The rhetoric is chosen and the connotations as well as the implied half truths are more powerful than what is directly said. We see this in our news outlets as well as the opiate for the masses, sports games such as the Superbowl. The best lies are not...