Every time I come to the “Left Coast” and the Bay Area, I am more and more impressed by the survival and re-energizing of a progressive political culture. I joined thousands at the Green Fest, a trade show and meeting place of the environmentally concerned attended by tens of thousands and featuring speakers, product displays and a whole array of socially responsible businesses. It was massive.

www.greenfestivals.org/content/view/7/29/

NEW COLLEGE MEDIA STUDIES

It was the final stop of a rather impromptu media tour of the Bay Area, starting at New College’s Media degree program in the mission that offers a wide range of opportunities and options of media students. Coordinator MaryElllen Churchill allowed me to sit in on a class analyzing film and told me about the College’s recent collaboration with the Flashpoints Program of KPFA that broadcasts live from a new college facility. Students get hands on radio training. The College also recently bought and repainted the Roxie Theater which played by film this week. I met some enthusiastic and talented students.

Then, like an energizer bunny, I hopped across the Bay.

KPFA, FREE SPEECH RADIO

To promote that screening I was interviewed live by the very talented Kris Welch who does a daily noontime radio show call Living Room at KPFA, Pacifica’s flag ship free speech radio station. KPFA is a community building institution with its own building on Martin Luther King Way in Berkeley. Her program streams on the web at KPFA.org so you can hear it. Check it out.

My interview is on this show:

http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=17075

The Third Estate Country Review blog commented on my interview:

” Danny Schechter, who has a longer range view, was on KPFA Friday talking about how his film was crucified in the San Francisco Chronicle. We all missed that. We were in the car listening and when we got back, the paper had already been tossed out. We weren’t interested in reading it to fact check Schechter, we believed him. We agree with him that there are some films, such as his documentary In Debt We Trust, that too many financial institutions have an interest in dismissing lest people keep on….

http://thirdestatesundayreview.blogspot.com/index.html

I wrote to the Chronicle to contest some idiocies, and also proposed submitting an op-ed to an editor. No response yet.

YOUTH RADIO: MOST COOL

Around the corner from KPFA are the HQs of Youth Radio, an impressive operation that has won every radio award there is to win for unique programming and training of young people. My colleague Mariela showed me around. I did an interview there and also learned that they will soon have a building of their own too in Oakland. Check them out at youthradio.org.

ALTERNET

After radioizing, I lunched with Gregg Zachary a former Wall St Journal reporter, now writing widely and publishing his own web site with reports on Africa. He was doing an interview for Alternet, the popular website of independent and alternative news and views also based in San Francisco. The Atlantic Monthly said of his work: “Zachary is making a bid to become a serious public intellectual who can combine familiarity with scholarly literature with first-hand reporting.”

See alternet.org if you don’t know their indispensable news service.

CURRENT

Once back across the Bay Bridge, I visited the state of the art digital offices of Current TV, the Al Gore backed satellite and cable channel that targets young viewers. I learned about how they solicit user generated content and develop information for a new partnership with Yahoo. The facility is impressive, located across the street from the Baseball stadium in one of those newly developed business zones. It seems like its not doing that well given the closed restaurants and gallery next door.

See Current.tv

I didn’t get a chance to see my friends from LINK TV but did hear that they are now on Comcast cable in San Francisco. That’s a breakthrough. Can NY Be far behind?

NO ONE’S LISTENING

Finally, I finally got to meet the irrepressible radio-TV star to be Irene McGee of No One’s Listening whose podcasts entertain and inform with a focus on media literacy. We conspired to work more closely together. See her dynamic website:www.noone’s listening org

We did an interview at the Green Fest. She wrote to me later:

”I ran into bruce brugman from the guardian where I had dinner and he was wating for a table too and he said that you were great and that you had a movie coming out and that you’ve really managed to create a career and that you should be a role model for me… Hahahahahah… I said he already is and I interviewed him today AND I love danny schechter… hahahahahah”

Hahahahahah

There were also yuks when we dined at a restaurant called Scenes in the Mission that had great food but virtually no service. My old pal and media guru Marty Perlmutter, a new media visionary and former yippie, came across the Bay to join us in trying to get fed. Marty regaled us with stories of his house in Oakland which slid off a cliff thanks to the presence of an underground reservoir. Scary. Now wonder there is so much environmental concern here in Paradise.

IN DEBT WE TRUST

In Debt We Trust had a respectable opening at New College’s recently repainted Roxie Theater Friday night in San Francisco. Seems to have triggered a sense of alarm and positive response. The entertainment industry trade Variety did a snooty review, didn’t like me in the film, didn’t like the graphics (by a Disney animator), didn’t like the music by pros, didn’t like the way the film was made, BUT thought maybe younger people might. (Variety welcomed an op-ed from me two years ago chiding the entertainment industry for backing the war but then DIDN’T PRINT IT.) This cranky imperious review also sort of got it, and did spell my name right:

With things not going so well for them lately on other fronts, Republican politicos have taken to emphasizing a hale U.S. economy — though that is something few Americans feel in their own pocketbooks. Some reasons for those clashing perceptions are explored in vet documentarian Danny Schechter’s “In Debt We Trust,” which portrays a nation hobbled and preyed upon by credit card companies and other lenders. When this borrowed-money bubble bursts, he suggests, another Great Depression could arrive. Provocative …could prove a useful educational/political organizing tool…”

MORE ON DEBT FROM ALEX COCKBURN IN COUNTERPUNCH

”The problem is that the oversight and stability of the world credit system is no longer within the purview of familiar international institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of International Settlements.

Private traders are now installed at all the strategic nodes, gambling with stratospheric sums in such speculative pyramids as the credit derivative market which was almost nonexistent in 2001, yet which reached $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005. Warren Buffett, America’s most famous investor, has called credit derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

On the political hustings there hasn’t been a whisper about this, though the London Financial Times has been issuing frequent alarms, as have such well known figures here as Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. As the great American historian Gabriel Kolko remarked in _a detailed run-down on the crisis_ (http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko07262006.html) in CounterPunch at the end of July:

“Contradictions now wrack the world’s financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.”

Translation: Capitalism has its downsides, and right now we’re at the edge of the precipice.”