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Showing videos filed under: activism
Laurie Penny, the Economics of Happiness, and Snow Justice
January 27, 2011"It's a very, very exciting time to be involved in politics," says the New Statesman's Laurie Penny, who has a cover story in the magazine this week on what's next for the student protesters in London now that the Liberal Democrat/Conservative government has passed the education budget cuts. Disability funding and even the National Health Service are in the sights of the government's hatchet, and the students are hard at work reaching out to broaden their coalition.Best of 2010: Philippe Petit, Mountains that Take Wing, Tracie Morris
December 30, 2010Continuing our look back at some of our favorite interviews of 2010, we hope you'll enjoy this very special one. Philippe Petit is probably best known for walking on a high wire suspended between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. He was arrested as soon as he came off the wire, but his act was captured in the Academy Award-winning film Man on Wire. Petit has continued to perform on the high wire, as well as to draw, teach, and to challenge himself constantly. "If you are not taunted by artistic challenge at least once a day you're dead," he says.Got Docs: Mountains that Take Wing
December 24, 2010Angela Davis and Yuri Kochiyama are renowned activists, scholars, and friends. The documentary Mountains That Take Wing is a story of a friendship, captured in conversations between women who have taken part in nearly every major social movement of the 20th century. C. A. Griffith and H. L. T. Quan spent over a decade on this film, and we're happy to share a selection from it with you.Philippe Petit, Mountains That Take Wing, and Tracie Morris
December 23, 2010Philippe Petit is probably best known for walking on a tightrope suspended between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. He was arrested as soon as he came off the wire, but his act was captured in the Academy Award-winning film Man on Wire. Petit has continued to perform on the high wire, as well as to draw, teach, and to challenge himself constantly. "If you are not taunted by artistic challenge at least once a day you're dead," he says.Personal Democracy Forum: Is the Internet Free?
December 15, 2010"We do not have the Internet we think we have," says Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed. What we think of as a free and open Web is actually highly controlled by corporations and cash flow. We saw one example of this when WikiLeaks found itself without server space or fundraising ability when Internet service providers, including Amazon.com, cancelled their services and PayPal and MasterCard and Visa refused to process their transactions.Personal Democracy Forum: Is the Watchdog Press Dead?
December 15, 2010"The sources are voting with their leaks," notes Jay Rosen of New York University's school of journalism. If the watchdog press was doing its job, wouldn't leakers be going to mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian directly, instead of to WikiLeaks first? Meanwhile, Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now at Columbia University's journalism school, says that whether we like it or not, WikiLeaks is the new face of journalism.Personal Democracy Forum: Wikileaks and Internet Freedom
December 14, 2010This weekend, the Personal Democracy Forum convened a symposium on WikiLeaks and the Internet. GRITtv was there as well, and today we bring you excerpts from that event, with journalists, academics, activists, and others talking about the impact of the leaks site on our political and technological systems.Dean Baker, Laurie Penny, and the Coming Water Crisis
November 15, 2010“It's the wrong answer to not a problem," says Dean Baker of the report out last week from the leaders of Obama's deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. The report, which recommends massive cuts across the budget, most significantly to Social Security and health care programs, has been roundly criticized by progressives for its targeting, but Dean notes that the biggest problem with it is that without the health care crisis we still have, we wouldn't have deficits in the first place.Laurie Penny: Smashing Up the Future
November 15, 2010"It's fair to smash up someone's future but not to smash up someone's lobby," notes UK journalist Laurie Penny of the student protests in London last week, now being branded as "violent" and "out of control." Aside from one person who dropped a fire extinguisher off a building, she points out, the protests were free of violence against people, and property damage needs to be put in the proper perspective.Got Docs: (Astro)Turf Wars
November 13, 2010(Astro)Turf Wars is a new documentary from Australian filmmaker Taki Oldham that looks into the corporate funders behind the “grassroots” uprising against health care reform and the Obama presidency in the U.S. What he found was not a citizen movement, but a “Free Market” movement sponsored by groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.
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