PegMedia.org

Our national award-winning TV program created and produced entirely by people with disabilities. Since Ablevision is scripted, shot and hosted by people with disabilities, each episode is itself a work of art! Our mission is to educate and empower our viewers through stories of inspiration and ability. Our crew produces the show from start to finish from scripting the episodes, to operating the camera, to hosting the show. We’ve won a number of national awards including the National Hometown Video Award for Best Access-Able Program and the Rika Welsh Community Impact Award by the Alliance for Community Media. We’re focused on expanding our national audience by building relationships with more public access affiliates.

The EMMY nominated Access Newsroom is a collaborative effort between the community public access station, channel 29 in San Francisco, CA and its producers and programmers to bring community based, community reported and produced, independent news and interviews from a grassroots viewpoint, unhindered, uncensored and unaltered.

Our mission is to bring the voices and issues of relevance from around the world and let those stories and opinions be heard in a full and forthright manner, giving voice to their own facts without a filter, and unencumbered by anyone or anything.

Rather than talk in 30 second sound bites, we give full expression to our stories as the segments range in length usually from 3 to 7 minutes long and each producer or programmer being responsible for the content and editing of their story.

We like to say we are a Uniquely Alternative Perspective, because in it's truest form, that's just what independent media is, and it is the essence of Access Newsroom.

Although it has a California tone to it, Newsroom deals with events of worldwide importance.

Get an inside look at the actor’s process with auditions, training and scene study with professional actor, writer, and director, Kevin Lasit. Massachusetts is growing into the next Hollywood East and many of Kevin’s acting students are finding success and having fun learning the trade of acting for film and television. Have you ever wanted to act for TV and film? Then this is the show for you. For more information about Kevin Lasit visit his website at, www.lasit.com

After World War II, civil war and insurrection during the fragile post-war period in Europe was averted by large-scale projects which employed large numbers of men and women in projects which rebuilt the war-torn infrastructure. Today Afghan society faces the same conditions. A report of the Royal United Services Institute in 2008 called hunger and starvation the greatest threat to Afghanistan, and as recently as 2008, unforgivably eight years into the occupation, people were eating grass in Bamyan Province to stave off hunger. Since that time, little has changed.

With Afghans having been abandoned once already by U.S. imperialists seeking to give the Russians "their own Vietnam" in the Eighties, this film shows that U.S. security interests are served not by a continuing military presence, nor by the arming of government forces, but by nation-building, which would cost a mere 5% of the cost of military operations, and save the U.S. taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. Afghanistan's mineral resource wealth should be nationalized until a strong resource extraction law is in place.

The focus is on giving Afghans the tools, wages, and technical assistance to rebuild the water and irrigation infrastructure with their own labor, a key to an economy which has always been based on agriculture and trade. The Pakistani-based Taliban which controls the opium trade pays $10 a day to fighters facing a chronic unemployment rate of 50 percent. The bungled U.S. reliance on American contractors for projects which do not meet priorities, and enrich the contractors, has led to an increase in the popularity of the Taliban.

The success of Afghans at ejecting foreign occupiers is legendary and a point of national pride. The tragedy is many Afghans looked forward to work and rebuilding their country in 2001, in toleration of a short and benign foreign presence. That presence has turned into a bloody occupation in which Afghan men disappear into secret prisons, and airborne drones fire into dwellings with civilians.

Filmed in Kabul in 2009 by a pair of independent filmmakers who traveled to interview unemployed Afghan men. See and hear them up close in the squares where they gather by the thousands looking for work, and struggle to feed their families.