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The St. Louis Independent Media Center is a cooperatively managed, non-commercial website whose mission is to empower people and communities to tell the news and stories that are important to them, independent of large and small economic interests and governments. We believe that compliance is a virtue only when its intent is supported by legitimate logic and ethics. We report to incite action by the public with strong, task-taking language, photos and videos. Part of our editing criteria is that items posted on the website must not be weakly written, meekly written or undersupported.
Current Features
A description of events of the solidarity demonstration in the loop Saturday Night.
On Saturday December 20th, about 30-40 people gathered in the University City's Delmar Loop district, an area that is mostly a busy yuppie financial district but seems to be a melting pot for all walks of life, also the location of the most recent fatal shooting of a cop.
As people gathered, a small business owner saw masked people gathering about in the cold night and reminded us that we we're on his property and once we abandon the role of isolated atomized individuals then the property is no longer available for us to use.
Most St. Louisans drive to work, by themselves, every day. This ubiquitous ritual demands 38 minutes out of the average American's day, according to a June, 2007 US Census report. It's grossly ironic that the American capitalistic market economy—a model which reveres cold efficiency as a virtue of the highest order—accesses the lion's share of its workforce through such unproductive, wasteful means. And it's not only the nine-to-fivers who are affected by sprawl and the prevailing petro-culture: Across all demographic lines, we have come to think of the custom of so often traversing such distances as necessary and nearly inevitable. However, until we collectively recall the benefits of living in proximity to our frequented destinations and make cars obsolete, walking or biking everywhere will continue to be unrealistic. In the meantime, we need to rethink the model we currently support (with its soaring costs in time, money, and environmental hazard) and create alternatives that challenge the ethic of personal and private ownership of cars.
Surprisingly enough, the self-proclaimed "largest rental car company in North America," St. Louis-based Enterprise Rent-A-Car, may be introducing our city to one such solution: carsharing. As San Francisco-based nonprofit City CarShare outlines, the model "converts automobile use from a product to a service" allowing members 24-hour on-call access to a bank of cars, from small to large, without the hassles of car ownership. Formalized carsharing is a popular and growing trend around the country, and elsewhere in the world.
According to an informal community survey conducted by KDHX members this September, listeners and members of KDHX overwhelmingly favor bringing the award winning Democracy Now! back to its full hour broadcast five days a week on the radio station.
This response follows the decision by KDHX management to cut Democracy Now! airtime to a mere ten minute headlines broadcast Monday through Friday back in August (reported back on August 8 on the STL IMC newswire).
Many responding to the survey complained about cutting the news show 's broadcast time: "You can't get the full story on the world in just one hour, let alone 10 minutes," one person responded.
A record television audience of almost 70 million people viewed the vice-presidential debate last Thursday night at Washington University's Athletic Complex in St. Louis. But nearly a mile out of view of the complex lay an example of what corporations, the media, and the state have together tried to quell in increasingly forceful ways: public dissent.
Over one hundred workers, activists, students, veterans and families gathered in Northmoor park near campus to voice alternatives to the candidates' discussion of abstract policy issues. Activist groups Instead of War, Code Pink, and Veterans for Peace organized the protest to highlight the narrow scope of the debate, and to expose the carefully mediated lack of public access to discussions of public policy.
Become part of local, independent, radical media! An alternaive media collective is forming in St. Louis to reinvigorate the St. Louis Independent Media Center website and to continue to publish Confluence. St. Louis is in dire needs of a more radical media that confronts the sensationalism and fear-mongering awash in our news choices. We will not find this radicalism amongst the corporate media, so we must create our own options!
We want to announce two important meetings in the coming weeks:
Old STLIMC FeaturesOlder St. Louis IMC Features (May 2005 - Feb 2007) may be viewed here on the archive site.
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