Bolivian President Evo Morales, on his first visit to Washington, addressed the Organization of American States (OAS) and a standing-room only audience of diplomats, scholars and students at the American University. Explaining the extraordinary transformations taking place in Bolivia in the past few years, his overall theme, as he himself defined, was visible change. Contrary to the Bush administration, who always antagonized him, and whose ambassador was declared persona non grata in Bolivia by the President, Evo Morales – who was called the Indian President – hoped bilateral relations under Obama – the Black President – will improve.
From midnight tonight, you can be one of the first people ever to legally download, for FREE, a brand new, feature-length film. Michael Moore’s new movie, “Slacker Uprising,” is being made available for free from various outlets in a bold move by the documentary maker.
There are a number of ways from midnight that you can download or stream “Slacker Uprising” thanks to distributor, Brave New Films:
1) Blip.tv will provide standard resolution streaming, free of commercials and advertising.
2) Amazon Video on Demand will provide a high quality version of the above stream.
3) iTunes will make it easy for you to download “Slacker Uprising” on your iTunes, iPod, or Apple TV, and view it there or transmit it to your television. This way, the film can be portable as well as for home viewing.
4) Hypernia is providing bandwidth, servers and management to host “Slacker Uprising” online, so you can download the film and view it at any time or burn it onto a DVD.
(For those of you who don’t download, there is a low-cost DVD available.)
When the people of Oaxaca decided they’d had enough of bad government, they didn’t take their story to the media… They TOOK the media!
In the summer of 2006, a broad-based, non-violent, popular uprising exploded in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some compared it to the Paris Commune, while others called it the first Latin American revolution of the 21st century.
But it was the people’s use of the media that truly made history in Oaxaca. A 90-minute documentary, Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad captures the unprecedented media phenomenon that emerged when tens of thousands of school teachers, housewives, indigenous communities, health workers, farmers, and students took 14 radio stations and one TV station into their own hands, using them to organize, mobilize, and ultimately defend their grassroots struggle for social, cultural, and economic justice.
“Beautiful, powerful, dramatic… magnificent… provides a remarkably deep and penetrating look into the people who made up the movement. Everyone interested in Mexico, in teachers and education, in workers’ movements, in indigenous people, in the state of our world and the struggle for social justice should see the video.”
A queue of children wait to exchange their toy guns for non-weapon-like toys as part of a government project to reduce violence in the area, in the Petare district of Caracas, Venezuela, August 20, 2008.
Caracas, Aug 21 (Prensa Latina) Aware of the transforming role of culture in society, the Venezuelan government is carrying out a revolution in that sphere in all states of the country. Continue reading →
Children living on England’s poorest estates will be provided with musical instruments and taught for free how to perform works by composers such as Bach and Beethoven.
They will then be encouraged to join full-scale orchestras as part of a government scheme, spearheaded by internationally renowned cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, that aims to tackle disaffection and boost aspiration. Continue reading →
The diverse factual reports and other data included in this article are culled from documents made available by the Venezuelan Embassy in the U.S.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution is exciting and exemplary, yet few people know much about where Venezuela is headed.
Misrepresentations abound. Data is limited and people interpret it in quite contrary ways. Information deficit plus skewed interpretations cause many people who ought to support the Bolivarian Revolution to instead doubt or even reject it. Useful lessons from Venezuela go largely unreported and thus have less than their widest possible effect.
Overview
Hugo Chavez became President in 1999 and in that year, largely due to the ravages of neoliberal reforms in the 80s and 90s, the Venezuelan poverty rate had reached 50%. The aim and promise of Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution was to not only eliminate rampant, raging, poverty, but to attain a new economic and social system consistent with the highest standards of human fulfillment and development.
In the 1999 constitution, Article 299, for example, emphasizes “human development” as the cornerstone of social judgements and Article 70 states that the “involvement of people in the exercise of their social and economic affairs should be manifest through citizen service organs, self-management, co-management, cooperatives in all forms, community enterprises, as well as other kinds of associations guided by the values of mutual cooperation and solidarity.”
But, as many skeptics would point out, words are not deeds, and you can find nice words everywhere – including, say, in the constitutions of countries suffering dictatorship and economic and social injustice, as but one example, in the constitution and other literary organs of the the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Words matter some, but they become infinitely more important and reliable as evidence if there are deeds in their support and particularly if institutional relations breathe life into the words every day.
Un video donde prodrás disfrutar de una demostración de las posibilidades expresivas del cuatro venezolano. / A demonstration of the expressive possibilities of the Venezuelan cuatro courtesy of google video.
The term “exploitation” typically conjures up images of horrendous working conditions, perhaps sweatshops in China or India, or the child labour used by Western clothes manufacturers. We think of people working long hours for little pay in terrible conditions ruthlessly bullied by unscrupulous bosses or gangmasters.
Such “exploitation” is presented to us as exceptional – and contrasted with the “normality” of working life for most people, particularly in countries such as Britain.
Karl Marx had a different understanding of exploitation. Rather than seeing it as exceptional, he argued that exploitation is fundamental to capitalism.
For Marx, exploitation was not just about the level of wages received, or working conditions, but was the very process whereby capitalism creates profit out of the work we do.
In order to understand what Marx meant by exploitation we need to start with his explanation of where profits ultimately come from – the “labour theory of value”. Continue reading →
In a socialist society the means of production [1] are owned by the workers rather than by a rich minority of capitalists or functionaries. Such a system of ownership is both collective and individual in nature. Continue reading →
The Big Brother State is an educational film about what politicians claim to be protection of our freedom but what we refer to as repressive legislation.
Since terrorism has become a global threat, especially after 9/11, governments all over the world have started enforcing laws which, so the governments say, should increase national security.
These laws obviously aim at another goal: the states gaining more and more control of their citizens at the cost of our privacy and freedom.
[***Please note: Jihan El-Tahri’s film has been removed and replaced with a short related film***]
“CUBA! AFRICA! REVOLUTION!”
Jihan El Tahri’s 2007 documentary “CUBA! AFRICA! REVOLUTION!” (aka “Cuba, an African Odyssey”) tells the previously untold story of Cuba’s support for African revolutions. This documentary unravels the story of the so-called Cold War,through the prism of its least known arena: Africa. Against colonialism, capitalism, and communism, the newly independent nations attempted for the first time to gain real control of their own countries. From Che Guevara’s military campaign to avenge Lumumba in the Congo, up to the fall of apartheid in South Africa, 300,000 Cubans fought alongside African revolutionaries.
Patrice Lumumba was an African anti-colonial leader, and the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after he assisted it achieve independence from Belgium in June 1960. Only ten weeks later, Lumumba’s government was deposed in a coup. He was subsequently imprisoned and assassinated. President Colonel Mobutu, the key figure in the coup, supported by the Congo’s former colonial power, Belgium, and the CIA, became the Congo’s ruler. Cuba shared Africa’s revolutionary quest for independence.
Fidel Castro decided that Cuba could not stand idly by, so he sent Che Guevara to Africa to assess how they could aid local liberation movements. In 1965, Guevara went to the Congo in an attempt to spark a revolution against the pro-Western regime, which had emerged after the assassination of Lumumba. The problem was, Guevara was without formal military training, and was up against the Congolese, who were aided by US Army Special Forces. So he returned to Cuba and recruited 120 soldiers, taking them back to the Congo. Still, Guevara’s army was no match, and they eventually withdrew in August, 1965.
From the tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in Congo, to the triumph at the battle of Cuito Carnavale in Angola, Cuba: An African Odyssey attempts to understand the world today through the saga of these internationalists who won every battle, but finally lost the war.
The Century of the Self is an acclaimed documentary by filmmaker Adam Curtis released in 2002.
“The series (below) is about how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” – Adam CurtisContinue reading →
“Today’s world, as we all know, is faced with multiple threats. From whichever angle I look at this menace, I always come to the conclusion that salvation can only come through a profound awakening of man to his own personal responsibility, which is at the same time a global responsibility. Continue reading →
The following film premiered in Tokyo on September 11, 2002 on the first anniversary of the 9.11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The film chronicles the thinking and activism, at that time, of the noted linguist Noam Chomsky, who since the Vietnam War era has been a vocal and consistent critic of the way the United States exercises state power in the world arena. Continue reading →
There are certain distinctive characteristics that can be attributed to Rupert Murdoch’s media. In the ever-changing media landscape the look and feel of Newscorp’s products is changing in an effort to reach out to new markets, but the content and style is always the same.
“A great many activists and concerned people ask, quite rightly, what alternative form of social organization can be imagined that might overcome the grave flaws — often real crimes — of contemporary society in more far-reaching ways than short-term reform. Parecon is the most serious effort I know to provide a very detailed possible answer to some of these questions, crucial ones, based on serious thought and careful analysis.” Continue reading →
Bala Fria 