AuthorsMichael Fox
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Michael Fox is a freelance journalist, translator, reporter and documentary film maker based in South America. He is a former staff reporter for Venezuelanlaysis, a radio correspondant for Free Speech Radio News, and his articles have been published with Yes Magazine, Earth Island Journal, NACLA and The Nation online.
Sílvia Leindecker is a Brazilian documentary film maker, a philosopher and independent photographer who has shot for the Spanish news agency EFE, Germany's Politik magazine, and numerous independent projects, advertisement and film productions.
Last year, Michael and Sílvia helped to co-found the internet Radio Venezuela en Vivo, which broadcasted live coverage from Venezuela's Constitutional Reform Referendum. Based in between Venezuela and Brazil, Michael and Sílvia have for many years been researching and covering the growth in the region's participatory democracy- cooperatives, Brazil's participatory budgeting and Venezuela's communal councils.
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Venezuela Speaks!: Voices From The Grassroots
Edited by Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox and JoJo Farrell
Published: November 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60486-108-2
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 320
Dimensions: 6 by 9
Subjects: Current Events, Political Science
$22.95
For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education and living standards have seen a commensurate rise. The international mainstream media has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial leader, President Hugo Chavez, who has routinely been in the headlines. But without the active participation of large and diverse sectors of society, Chavez’s moment on the scene would have ended long ago.
Venezuela Speaks!: Voices from the Grassroots is a collection of interviews with activists and participants from across Venezuela’s social movements. From community media to land reform; cooperatives to communal councils, from the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network, Venezuela Speaks! sheds light on the complex realities within the Bolivarian Revolution. These interviews offer a compelling oral history of Venezuela's democratic revolution, from the bottom up.
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“Venezuela Speaks! is a very important book in the growing literature of books on Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. Almost all of the books written on this topic so far take a "top-down" perspective on what is happening in contemporary Venezuela. This book, though, provides an unfiltered participant's perspective on Venezuela's incredibly diverse social movements and, in the process, dispels the notion that President Chavez is the only one who counts when trying to understand Venezuela.”
--Gregory Wilpert, author of Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chávez Government and editor of Venezuelanalysis.com
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Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas
Directed by Michael Fox and Silvia Leindecker
Released September 2008
UPC: 760137481799
DVD Format: NTSC
Language: English, Spanish and Portuguese with English and Spanish subtitles
Package: 7.5 by 5.5
Length: 104 Minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Subjects: Documentary, Current Events, Politics
$19.95
What is democracy? Freedom, equality, participation? Everyone has his or her own definition. Across the world, 120 countries now have at least the minimum trappings of democracy---the freedom to vote for all citizens. But for many, this is just the beginning not the end. Following decades of US-backed dictatorships, civil wars and devastating structural adjustment policies in the South, and corporate control, electoral corruption, and fraud in the North, representative politics in the Americas is in crisis. Citizens are now choosing to redefine democracy under their own terms: local, direct, and participatory.
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Revolution Within the Revolution in Venezuela By Lainie Cassell
Monthly Review Zine
January 26, 2010
Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots is the first book in the English language that has captured the challenges of bottom-up movements under President Chavez. In the book, co-authors Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and Jojo Farrell offer a much-needed history of revolutionary Venezuela and an analysis of current events, interwoven among interviews with some of Venezuela's most important leaders among the people.
Voices of Participatory Democracy in Venezuela:A Review of Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots
By Hans Bennett
Upside Down World
There are many different ways that the corporate media continues to misrepresent the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Many critics of this biased media coverage have directly challenged the demonization of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, but very few critics, if any, have exposed the media’s virtual erasure of the vibrant and growing participatory democracy in Venezuela. Alas, the new book entitled Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots(PM Press, 2010) offers a powerful correction to this misrepresentation by spotlighting a wide range of people and movements that are actively governing themselves with official governmental structures created since the 1998 election of President Chavez, and the growing non-governmental social movements that have existed for several decades.Venezuela Speaks embodies this non-hierarchical philosophy by presenting the voices of the people themselves in interviews from practically every sector of society, including community organizers, educators, journalists, cultural workers, farmers, women, students, and Indigenous & Afro-Venezuelans.
Grassroots Lessons in Democracy: An interview with Michael Fox By Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Freedom
Michael Fox is a Brazil-based independent journalist and co-producer of the new documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (PM Press). He is also the co-author of an upcoming book called Venezuela Speaks: Voices From the Grassroots, also available through PM Press and set to be released this fall. Throughout his research for this film and book, and as a radio and print reporter who has covered political and social issues across Latin America, Fox has come to know to hopes and struggles of the region’s social movements, and what US activists might learn from the experiences of these movements.
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Beyond Elections in the Americas: An Interview with Michael Fox
By Benjamin Dangl
Guerilla News Network
A new documentary looks at Latin America's most controversial democracies
The new documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (buy from PM Press) proves that democracy can and should be more than casting a ballot every four years. This empowering film gives hopeful and concrete examples from around the Americas of people taking back the reigns of power and governing their own communities. Beyond Elections is a road map for social change, drawing from communal councils in Venezuela and social movements in Bolivia to participatory budgeting in Brazil and worker cooperatives in Argentina. The film gracefully succeeds in demonstrating that these grassroots examples of people’s power can be applied anywhere. Particularly as activists in the US face the challenges of an Obama administration and an economic crisis, this timely documentary shows that the revolution can start today right in your own living room or neighborhood.
In this interview, Michael Fox, Co-Producer of Beyond Elections, talks about how the film was created, what its aims were and what the films impact has had among viewers in the US...
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Reviews
Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas
By Mathius Mack Gertz
reelgrok.com
What is democracy? Freedom, equality, participation? Everyone has his or her own definition. Across the world, 120 countries now have at least the minimum trappings of democracy-the freedom to vote for all citizens. But for many this is just the beginning, not the end. Following decades of US backed dictatorships, civil wars and devastating structural adjustment policies in the South, and corporate control, electoral corruption, and fraud in the North, representative politics in the Americas is in a crisis. Citizens are now choosing to redefine democracy under their own terms: local, direct and participatory...
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Video Pick
Yes! Magazine
Winter 2009
To the activists interviewed in Beyond Elections, democracy is more than mere voting: It is having a say in daily decisions that affect our lives. Members of cooperatives describe the power of participating in workplace decisions. Delegates to a constitutional assembly discuss reforming government to include historically disenfranchised poor people. And citizens tell how their communities have benefited from participatory budgeting.
