Here is the first issue of Gonzo Times for Print. We ask that you print not only one for yourself but others to distribute in your area. Coffee Shops, Libraries, Campuses, Book Stores and Community Centers may be some places you can do this. This publication thrives on Mutual Aid so it needs your support. Small Independent press you can partake in.
Here is an example of a consultation led by ATD Fourth World in Brazil, with Brasil pela dignidade, Verdejar and Raizes en Movimento. A group in Petropolis welcomes mums and young people, from the street library in order to work on the research all together. It is a first, to work in this way with adults living in the favelas of Petropolis. A participatory process has been set up in order to...
A suffrage centennial special: Automobiles were used for campaign purposes in the suffrage movement to win voting rights for women. These photos are from the Library of Congress and the collection of Ken Florey, author of a book on suffrage memorabilia. Votes for Women campaigns decorated automobiles for parades, demonstrations and rallies. Automobiles made suffrage activists more mobile. They...
We stand on the shoulders of many activists who came before us. The women's suffrage movement was a nonviolent movement for social change that took 144 years from the Declaration of Independence and 72 years from the Declaration of Sentiments conference in Seneca Falls in 1848. The poem, "The Song of the Women" by Florence Kiper is the text for this video featuring New York...
Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed. Now dumb...
The problem: We wake up every day to go to work , taking orders from a manager. We sit at work counting down the minutes until we go home, counting down the days until the weekend, counting down the weeks until our next holiday, wishing our lives away. Or worse, we can't find a job, so we have to scrape by on benefits . We worry about paying the bills and making rent and we always...
Open democracy advocate and internet pioneer Aaron Swartz was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, flooding the digital spectrum with an outpouring of grief. He was 26 years old. Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal hacking charges. In July 2011, prosecutor Scott Garland working under U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, a politician with her eye on the governor's mansion...
January 25, 2012 - We've launched our new mobile site today, bringing the site's library of over 900 films, independent news and actions to the small screen inside your pocket. To check it out, simply go to www.filmsforaction.org like normal and you'll automatically be redirected to the mobile version. As you'll immediately see, we've remixed, loved, and simplified the site for full...
This film was created by New York City public school teachers and parents in response to Davis Guggenheim’s highly misleading film. Waiting for "Superman would have audiences believe that free-market competition, standardized tests, destroying teacher unions, and the proliferation of charter schools are just what this country needs to create great public schools. The...
A Different Kind of Education from a Different Kind of Educator… The Ultimate History Lesson is a 5 hour course, illustrating the cause and effect relationship of how Americans became incoherent, and thus how the American dream has was usurped by an international agenda. When John Taylor Gatto resigned from his job, he did so on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal . At the...
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demolish one of the central tenets of our political culture, the idea of the "liberal media." Instead, utilizing a systematic model based on massive empirical research, they reveal the manner in which the news media are so subordinated to corporate and conservative interests that their function can only be described as that of "elite propaganda." " If you want...
Most of what's known about the women's suffrage movement has been reduced to a photo and caption of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, key players in the suffrage movement. In fact, the movement involved tens of thousands of on-the-ground activists. As the 2017 suffrage centennial celebration appraoches in New York, and the 2020 national suffrage centennial, we'll be...
Films For Action is a local and international organization dedicated to providing you with the information and perspectives essential to creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic society. Along these lines we are many things. We're community film screening organizers. We're an alternative news center. We're a problem/solutions learning library. We're an international and city-focused...
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...
Last night, after one of the most remarkable days of resistance in recent history, some of us within Occupy Oakland took an important next step: we extended the occupation to an unused building near Oscar Grant Plaza. We did this, first off, in order to secure the shelter and space from which to continue organizing during the coming winter months. But we also hoped to use the national...
It's been five years since the Films For Action project began in Lawrence, Kansas. It started with one simple idea: we can't depend on the mainstream media to inform us, so let's become the media ourselves by hosting documentaries on issues that the corporate media ignores. Over the years we 've hosted over 30 film screenings, launched a website that has attracted over 380,000...
What is wrong with work? For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work . Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work, worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work.
Many of us believe the Internet to be open and free for us to explore all known information. Indeed, it is true that we currently can surf to any active website with our browser, and we can start a website or blog on any topic we wish to discuss. And it is quite a profound concept that everyone with a smart phone literally has all of the world's knowledge in the palm of their hand. Ben...
PROGRAMMING THE NATION takes an encompassing look at the history of subliminal messaging in America. According to many authorities, since the late 1950s subliminal content has been tested and delivered through all forms of mass-media including Hollywood filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and William Friedkin. Even our modern military has been accused of these practices in the "war on...
Oo-de-lally !! After twelve months in development, the site has finally gone live! What started out as a simple plan a year ago to make a few minor visual tweaks and navigational changes ended up morphing into an over-the-top, head-to-toe redesign of the entire site. It's been an epic adventure of long nights, coffee, and dreams of the day we'll someday be done, but the day has arrived...
18 minutes could save New York. PINK LINKS: Selected Compiled Research The Sky Is Pink- Annotated industry documents featured in the film: .rollingstone.com/extras/theskyispink_annotdoc-gasl4final.pdf Affirming GASLAND- Our responses to industry charges against GASLAND gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking/affirming-gasland
Films For Action's City Chapter websites aim to provide a definitive web-based resource for the activist community of that city. By providing a robust set of information and communication tools geared to amplify the impact of local efforts, the website serves to build synergy and momentum to affect dramatic and radical change at a city-wide level. We believe an informed, well connected, and...
Capitalism is presented as a 'natural' system, formed a bit like mountains or land masses by forces beyond human control, that it is an economic system ultimately resulting from human nature. However it was not established by 'natural forces' but by intense and massive violence across the globe . At its root, capitalism is an economic system based on three things...
Our Most Recommended Independent Media Links: Adbusters Aljazeera AlterNet Black Agenda Report Boiling Frogs Post Common Dreams Consortium News Counter Punch Democracy Now!
On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a story reporting that for the past decade the CIA has been funneling tens of millions of dollars, off-the-books, directly to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai . The payments, occasionally dropped off in plastic bags, were part of the intelligence agency's attempts to buy access in Karzai's government and encourage support for...
Several years ago, like so many others, we got tired of the most influential news outlets failing to inform the public about so many critical issues. But rather than wait for these media conglomerates to reform, we decided: better to just become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait on anything; each one of us can become a micro distribution network for the news that matters. It...
Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands...
Studying inequality in America reveals some facts that are truly hard to believe. Amidst all the absurdity a few stand out. A homeless person sits under blankets at a Wall Street subway station in New York City. (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan) 1. U.S. companies in total pay a smaller percentage of taxes than the lowest-income 20% of Americans. Total corporate profits for 2011 were $1.97...
Arianna Huffington has betrayed us, so let's huff and puff her house down. She built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she's cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp. But the...
I love Columbus Day. Each year, I recall the simple song I learned as a child about the man who "discovered" America. I still recall the innocent boy whose imagination was taken by the story of adventure and discovery. In fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue. On Columbus Day, I reflect on the facts of that fateful discovery. Hispaniola at the time of...
Preface: As a patriotic American – I was born here, lived here all of my life, and love this country – I want the best for the U.S. Lawless actions are tearing my country apart. I want my country to regain its vision, strength and moral compass. Thomas Jefferson said that “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. I criticize my country because I know we are...
Go to the average mainstream libertarian venue on any given day, and you’re likely to see elaborate apologetics for corporate globalization, Wal-Mart, offshoring, Nike’s sweatshops, rising CO2 levels, income inequality and wealth concentration, CEO salaries, Big Pharma’s profits, and Microsoft’s market share, all based on the principles of “the free...
I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up — and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighborhoods and...
Forget Boston, 9/11 and Oklahoma City … Is False Flag Terror Even a REAL Historical Concept? More people are using the term “false flag” than ever before . Some claim that the Boston marathon bombing, 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing were false flag attacks. Others claim that anyone who uses the phrase “false flag” is a nut conspiracy theorist...
Lynne Stewart, in the vindictive and hysterical world of the war on terror, is one of its martyrs. A 73-year-old lawyer who spent her life defending the poor, the marginalized and the despised, including blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, she fell afoul of the state apparatus because she dared to demand justice rather than acquiesce to state sponsored witch hunts. And now, with stage 4...
Frances Coppola explores how increasing automation is fundamentally shifting the nature of work away from 'making stuff' towards personal services. One of the most interesting issues to arise in the course of the "comment-athon" on my post "The Golden Calf" was the suggestion that the link between money and work is broken, and indeed that there is no longer...
The ongoing economic crisis that began with the unraveling of wildly inflated real estate prices and the Wall Street derivatives bubble in 2007 and the crash into near depression in October of 2008 resulted in trillions of dollars of public bail out money for banks and other institutions around the world. Other banks and businesses collapsed or went bankrupt and many individuals lost their...
Aviva Chomsky is a history professor and coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. Her 2007 book "They Take Our Jobs!" And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration provides a careful analysis of the overheated rhetoric around immigration policy in the United States, debunking the 21 biggest myths and stereotypes in today's...
A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work (Part 1) Last year in Lansing, Michigan, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union leadership fought a pitched battle with the Lansing City Council to push capitalist real estate developers to use union labor. When discussing the fight, Joe Davis, the union representative, proclaimed, “It’s important to...
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were a turning point in world history. We have been told that these attacks were planned and implemented by nineteen Arab Muslim hijackers under the direction of the leaders of al Qaeda. According to the official account, this criminal conspiracy received no help or funding from any government. Unfortunately, this explanation fails to address a...
What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories? You make a film like ‘ Thrive ‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen...
Meet the anthropologist, activist, and anarchist who helped transform a hapless rally into a global protest movement David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up. Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist—among...
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...
In your standard dictatorship, activists are brought out back and shot. In the United States' crypto-dictatorship, activists are bullied by the state until they go bankrupt, are buried under a mountain of legal woes, are publicly discredited or humiliated, or as in the case of activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz , made to crack under the constant pressure, and commit suicide...
The economy is changing. Dramatically. Coping with these changes means changing the way we do things. The path of the future involves root level, radical changes. Things we have always considered “normal” won’t work anymore. We must think LOCALLY, and act now to begin growing a resilient local economy. Understand the full extent of the problem. We’ve only seen the...
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 41 subjects to make it easy to discover content about specific slices of the social change pie...
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...
Ten and a half years into the Guantánamo experiment, as it becomes ever harder for those who are still appalled by the prison’s existence, and by the failures of all three branches of the US government — under Barack Obama — to close it, my friends and colleagues Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold are to be commended for not giving up, and for digging away at the...
Bruce E. Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, died Tuesday, July 29 2008, reportedly by suicidal drug overdose just as the Department of Justice was about to charge him with the 2001 anthrax attacks. The FBI had spent nearly seven years trying to railroad Steven Hatfill for the deeds, but failed miserably, and the Department of...
democracynow on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free As President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney square off in the first presidential debate in Denver on October 3, Democracy N