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Which stories did the media ignore this year? Project Censored on Al Jazeera
January 7, 2013
Inside Story on Al Jazeera English invited Mickey Huff, director of Project Censored, and Greg Mitchell, media analyst for The Nation, to discuss the most under-reported and misrepresented stories in the media. From climate change to the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the emerging police state, these serious issues have major impacts on Americans’ daily lives, yet get little to no coverage.
There are stories that have enormous consequences on the lives of Americans but are regularly under-reported or misrepresented by the mainstream media. Project Censored, the US media watchdog group, has released their annual report examining the shortcomings of reporting in 2012.Check out the entire interview on Al Jazeera English.
For the last thirty-seven years, Project Censored has produced a Top-25 list of underreported news stories as well as the book Censored, dedicated to the stories that ought to be top features on the nightly news, but are barely or rarely mentioned because of media bias and self-censorship.
Tags: Al Jazeera English, Censored 2013, mickey huff, project censored
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Sam Pizzigati’s “Other View”- The Fiscal Cliff… of 1932
January 2, 2013
USA Today featured Sam Pizzigati’s op-ed from the LA Times, alongside the opinions of Matthew Rose (The Wall
Street Journal), John Cassidy (The New Yorker), and Paul Krugman (The New York Times), offering an alternative view to the fiscal cliff.“Is history simply repeating?”, asks Pizzigati. “If so, bring that repeat on, with the same final result. That 1932 fiscal crisis produced an unexpected, and stunning, watershed in U.S. history, the moment when America’s rich and powerful began to lose their lock-grip on the nation’s political pulse.”
To read more on the “Other View”, check out the entire roundup on the USA Today website. To read Pizzigati’s entire article, visit the LA Times website, and check out his new book The Rich Don’t Always Win.
Tags: fiscal cliff, la times, sam pizzigati, the rich don'd always win, usa today
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Martha Long- “like the fuse burning up and the dynamite going off”
January 2, 2013
The New York Journal of Books calls Martha Long’s Ma, He Sold me for a few Cigarettes “a difficult, painful,
and at times almost unbearable read. Yet this memoir should be widely read and discussed“. Her harrowing tale is noted for its pure honesty and its heartbreak, but maybe more importantly, its testament to one little girls determination to survive.“At almost 500 pages, this devastating memoir propels readers to the end by implicitly posing one burning question: How did Martha Long survive such unimaginable betrayal, injury, and suffering? The answer is like the fuse burning up and the dynamite going off: Despite the agony, survivors know at the deepest level within their souls that they were born to live out better destinies.”
To read the entire review, by Ethel Rohan, visit the New York Journal of Books.
Tags: Ma He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, Martha Long
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Kalle Lasn & Adbusters in the New York Times
January 2, 2013
Kalle Lasn and Adbusters were featured in a New York Times article on December 22- just before the holidays, and at the peak of the shopping season. For years, Adbusters and Lasn have been waging war on global consumption, and this year was dubbed “Buy Nothing Christmas”.
“‘As our planet gets warmer, as animals go extinct, as the humans get sicker, as our economies bail and our politicians grow ever more twisted,’ Americans just go shopping, Adbusters says on its Web site. Overconsumption is destroying us, yet shopping is ‘our solace, our sedative: consumerism is the opiate of the masses.’
“‘We’ve got to break the habit,’ Mr. Lasn said in a telephone interview. ‘It will be a shock, but we’ve got to shift to a new paradigm. Otherwise, I’m afraid will be facing a new Dark Age.’”
The article delves into Lasn’s history, his rise to becoming the iconic figure that sparked the Occupy movement last year, and his commitment to social and economical revolution- not to mention his love for memes.
Tags: Adbusters, Buy Nothing Christmas, Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars, new york times
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Kalle Lasn, says in new book Meme Wars: “If we don’t start fighting for a different kind of future, then we’re not going to have a future.”
December 14, 2012
Kalle Lasn has been getting loads of attention in the past year as the instigator of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he and his team at Adbusters branded, visualized, and pushed into the world, creating the spark that has since become a national movement and ideology.
Lasn has long been convinced that another way to shift away from our destructive economic climate is to change the way economics is taught in schools, to bring alternative ideas into traditional economics programs and allow students to innovate and breath fresh life into ways of thinking about the struggles facing the world economy.
In a detailed interview with Nicole Powers on Suicide Girls, Lasn talks about the impact he hopes his new book, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, will have on the way economics is taught and eventually the way that world economic policy is thought about.
Says Kalle Lasn, “In our brainstorming sessions here at Adbusters, the only way we could think of shifting the paradigm would be to use the power of students because students have a long history of challenging their leaders and being the original catalysts for revolutions and huge, big shifts that causes and societies go through…They know, young people today are basically inheriting a future that doesn’t compute.
Tags: Kalle Lasn, Meme Wars, Nicole Powers, Suicide Girls
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Q&A with Martha Long, author of “Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes”
December 13, 2012
Q. Who are your heroes?
A. My friend Brigid. She left behind the wild beauty of the west of Ireland with it’s desolate land and the roar of the Atlantic ocean. Its fields lay scattered with the ruins of old stone cottages, now long abandoned since the famine. The curse of Connaught never lifted. Few could eke out a living from that land.
With the wind at her back, Brigid, at seventeen, a simple country girl from Mayo, made the long exhausting journey to Dublin. Leaving the poverty of that city behind, she took the night mail boat across the Irish sea. The ship heaved and bucked, stuffed to the gills with immigrants from every part of the country. All hoping to make a better life for themselves, and the little ones still left at home with a mother trying to survive on a ‘Wing And A Prayer’.
Brigid arrived into an England fighting for it’s life. It was almost on it’s knees.
Tags: Ma He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, Martha Long
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“Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes”, a “haunting memoir” of 1950s Dublin by Martha Long is on sale now!
December 5, 2012
Counterpunch says “This is a searing account of childhood survival. No more haunting memoir has been published this year.”
Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review: “Bestselling memoirist Martha Long takes readers to 1950s Dublin, where it is nothing short of a miracle that she survived her childhood. Long chronicles her life from ages three to 11, letting the child she once was ‘tell the story in her own voice:’ a dynamic, colorful Irish dialect. Not for the faint of heart, Long’s story is a gritty, grueling, and heartbreaking testament to one girl’s unbreakable spirit.”
“Reading this startling testament to one child’s valiant attempts to live until the age of sixteen is a worthy reminder that we can do better as adults if we turn to embrace the children who are suffering, anywhere on earth…”—Alice Walker, from the forward
Tags: alice walker, counterpunch, Ma, Ma He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, Martha Long, publishers weekly
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The First Gaza War During the Second Arab Awakening Era
December 5, 2012
By Paola Caridi, author of Hamas: From Resistance to Government
November 20, 2012
It seemed a new chapter in the long, tragic, bloody story of the Gaza Wars. Israeli air strikes versus rockets originated from the Gaza Strip, after Obama’s (re)election and before another Israeli early election round. It seemed as if the clock turned back to December, 2008, to a well known sequence of events: an Israeli raid deep inside the Gaza Strip, a rocket barrage to the southern Israeli communities, targeted killings against Palestinian militants, and then the war. An ugly war.
It seemed again to be the same old story, but this time is different. This is the first Gaza War in the era of the Second Arab Awakening, as the strong message sent by the new Arab governments to Israel, the United States and Europe indicates. Ten among the most important Arab countries’ foreign ministers were at Rafah border, on November, 20th, to visit Gaza, pay respect to the dead and the injured, and recognize Hamas’ role in the region.
Tags: First Gaza War, hamas, Invisiblearabs, paola caridi
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The Graphic Canon gets reviewed in the New York Times
November 30, 2012
The New York Times Book Review writes a glowing review of Russ Kick’s The Graphic Canon, Vol 1 and 2, picking out favorites and highlighting some of the more surprising adaptations and unique interpretations.
My favorite line:
“What [editor Russ Kick] asks us to acknowledge with The Graphic Canon is this: Gulliver’s Travels, Wuthering Heights, Leaves of Grass — these works of literature do not reside just on the shelves of academia; they flourish in the eye of our imagination.”Read the entire review at The New York Times, and check out a selection below.
“Most fascinating are the adaptations of works that less obviously lend themselves to comic or visual treatment. The artist Ryan Dunlavey and the writer Fred Van Lente introduce us to the early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft with energetic oomph in a one-pager from their “Action Philosophers!” comic series. Volume 2 includes an excerpt from John Porcellino’s graphic novel based on the writings of Henry David Thoreau.
Tags: Fred Van Lente, Gulliver’s Travels, John Porcellino, Leaves of Grass, Megan Kelso, russ kick, Ryan Dunlavey, the graphic canon, the new york times, Wuthering Heights
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Sam Pizzigati argues in a Huffington Post op-ed that the middle class beat back the rich once and can do it again
November 30, 2012
Sam Pizzigati, a veteran labor journalist and the editor of Too Much, an online weekly on excess and inequality, has a new book that tells the story of how the middle class fought against the overwhelming power of the rich in the first half of the twentieth century-and won! The Rich Don’t Always Win offers inspiring ideas for today’s unbalanced society, here are a few “Plutocracy-Busting Ideas” that Pizzigati wrote about in the Huffington Post.
Two: Leverage the power of the public purse against excessive corporate executive pay. Congress can’t set direct limits on private corporate executive pay, yesterday’s progressives understood. But Congress could impose limits indirectly by denying federal government contracts and subsidies to corporations that lavished rewards on top executives.
In 1933, then-senator and later Supreme Court justice Hugo Black won congressional approval for legislation that denied federal air- and ocean-mail contracts to companies that paid their execs over $17,500, about $300,000 in today’s dollars.
Tags: huffington post, Hugo Black, sam pizzigati, The Rich Don't Always Win
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